Last night I dreamed I joined 'Inda Readers' on Facebook!

Now what do you suppose that means?  I started Inda yesterday after finishing C. J. Cherryh's Betrayer and Martin O'Brien's Jacquot and the Waterman.  After finally deciding, on p. 380-something of Deadhouse Gates truly means 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'  What a bunch of tripe.


Here is some stuff I wrote to a friend about that sad and sorry series: 


Erikson - you can skim, as none of it makes sense anyway. I've now read a lot of reviews and two things are fairly remarkable: 1)everyone says it's too jumbled to follow, has too many characters - who can remember 3 books later who is a character he spent a paragraph on in book 1? A couple said his magic systems are arbitrary (one called them deus ex machina) and contradict each other. And 2) NO ONE MENTIONS the APPALLING violence.

A few things that I found 'memorable' -

A god that giggles as he takes possession of a young girl and turns her into an assassin.

The endless battlefields with blood, body parts, skulls, and one that was the remains of people eaten by the huge hounds of hell? Hounds of something. Earth roiling to spit out thousands on thousands of dead. Apparently this fighting has been going on for eons.

A ritual for Hood (god of death) that involved a priest covering himself with the blood of murderers that was collected in amphora so that huge swarms of flies covered him, and then all flew away revealing - ta da! - nothing. The priest had disappeared.

A young girl being raped over and over.

And a battlefield with corpses of men who'd been gutted, their women raped and then strangled with their entrails and babies with crushed skulls or impaled on spears.

And this goes on and on and on and on. Bah.

One reviewer said, "This was written for a certain audience and it's not me."

Well said, well said.

The complexity is in the gazillions of people you have to keep track of and don't give a fig about. Intellectually complex? A reviewer of a later book complained about Erikson's 'preaching'. Maybe that's what they mean? Maybe there's some vague intellectual conceit behind all this? But in the end who cares?

One reviewer of The Crippled God said Huh? That's it? And seemingly this is a reviewer for some website or other who's been following the series.

Lovely quotes from Checkmate

I just finished listening to it again and am moved to write down these quotes:


"I shall send gems of lapis lazuli: I shall make her fields into vineyards, and the fruit of her love into orchards.  Philippa."


"When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
and she me caught in her arms, long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, 'Dear heart'..."


And then Jerott: "My beloved is unto me as a cluster of campfires in the vineyards of Engedi."  My beloved is dead.


And Lymond, at last, to Philippa, "Qedeshet, Mistress of all the Gods, Eye of Ra, who has none like her....Come and let us beget all kinds of living things."


And then, "I have begun to eat," said Francis Crawford.  "And I have begun to slake my thirst.  But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me forever."

I confess to indulging my addiction - am reading Checkmate again!

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However 'reading' is really 'listening'.  I finally got the tapes from Recorded Books.  Sure do wish they were available to buy!  Easily converted to digital.

Meanwhile, I finished a second listen to Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien.  Here's my review:

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've listened to it before. It's ok. Very male. A lot about sailing vessels. Not much about the sea. Seems historically accurate.


View all my reviews

AND the most exciting news is that I am making serious arrangements to go to Florida to visit Janny Wurts.  She's lured me down there with an offer to read Initiate's Trial, the next volume of The Wars of Light and Shadow, my other favorite series besides Dunnett!

Got my used hard cover volume of King Hereafter yesterday.  The paper cover isn't quite pristine, but the book itself is.

Started Magician: Master to read with the Fantasy Book Club Series club, and am continuing in Gardens of the Moon, which is not compelling, but I am enjoying it more than I expected.  There are people who are FANATIC about the Steven Erikson series, Malazan, Book of the Fallen.  Also being read by the series club.

Meanwhile, my knee is much better.  Do need to exercise to keep it that way.  I need to say that as a mantra! Har.  My natural resistance to exercise is a fierce thing.

My son-in-law's birthday is this weekend and we're taking him out to eat at some fancy Mexican restaurant at Blue Back Square.  Yum.

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