Relentless Inquiry

I have a new appreciation of a decently-ended book. They seem to be rather rare, alas.

Being sick makes me go through books like llamas through cottoncandy. (You haven't been to a county fair recently, have you? The 4-H'ers and homespinners are all out there with their llamas.) Several of the more recent fiction books I've read have either stumbled or downright face-planted in the home stretch.

Kage Baker's latest Company novel 'the Life of the World to Come': eh, ok, I finally got into it after glancing and passing it by a few times, but I don't like the way she's handling foreshadowing the Silence and the Sleepers. The next one better be good.

A random from the library, N Lee Wood's 'Master of None'. The cover blurbs touted it up and down as 'intricate world-building heir to LeGuin blah blah ginger'. It had some nice moments. Then all of a sudden we ended up on some bizarre road race, or maybe obstacle course, or maybe treasure hunt, to rush to the finish line. Huh? Weirdly plausible character-building scenes got strung like beads on hayrope, and the whole thing was just casually knotted off into a flash-forward chunk of completely improbable macrame. Eh?

Sharon Shinn, eg pulp for the fantiquarian's soul (and I aren't even are one), has another really nice fantasy story with a decently woven world-tapestry, 'Mystic and Rider'. Fluff candy, but friendly fluff candy, and setting up with lots of mysterious loose ends for a sequel or two. This was the stumble– done fairly well, but you can see the jumping from rock to rock over the ending stream. Still well-crafted, not at all like the body-surf into the mud of Wood's novel. Baker, well, her style is so blipvert vignette anyway that she can do that kind of ending and not have it be any more jarring then the rest of the books. Time travel is no excuse, hmpf.

Re-read the entire Jean Auel “Earth's Children” series. Now *that's* fluff. They go pretty fast, though, when one fast-forwards past a) sex scenes, b) repetitive maunderings about paleogeology c) even more repetitive maunderings about paleoecology. My flavor of escapism on this series is taming the critters and all the random herb lore. /me geek, what is.

Oh, and I've learned more useful non-dry stuff from 'Living the 7 Habits' stories than from the few dozen pages I've gotten into 'First Things First'. Dude. Don't put the 'friendly lines of text that you can read a few pages of at meals' format cover on stuff with 9 point crufty uberserif'd fonts and tons of diagrams: most of them about 2 points too fine, so that one struggles to SEE the diagram against the paper, bah.