2 + 3 + 1

I read a bit more fantasy than I intended. I wound up reading a whole trilogy - which actually turned out to be science fiction! So I read another fantasy to get 3 in.

1st I read "A Song For Quiet" by Cassandra Khaw, 2017, 112 pages - so, a novella. This is #2 in the "Persons Non Grata" series - I have bought #1 in the series because I liked the title, "Hammers On Bone". This is a fairly simple story of a black jazz musician in a Jim Crow type society fighting against some kind of mind-eating thing. Very much Lovecraft. The cheap supernatural detective from the 1st book makes another appearance. OK, I guess.

Next up, "The Last Days of New Paris", by China Miéville, 2016, 225 pages. This was billed as a novel, but presented more as a novella, as there were a couple of appendices that padded its slim 225 pages. I had read one of Miéville's novels probably over a decade ago - and, hah, I also about 3 years ago read a collection of his short stories, which I had forgotten about. He is a good writer. This story is about a Nazi-occupied Paris in which a mystical weapon causes images from surrealistic paintings to come to life - they are called "manifs", short for manifestations. Meanwhile, the Nazis recruit demons for the fight. An interesting read. There is an appendix listing the various manifs and the paintings they are based upon that cried out to be a web page where you could see the paintings rather than have them described. Maybe some fan will create it one day.

Then I read the 1st novel of the Shattered Seas trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, "Half A King". 2015, 386 pages. I read his "The First Law" trilogy in early 2016. Like the earlier trilogy, this is a page turner. Sword and sorcery, but mostly sword, lots of intrigue. I went on and blasted through books 2 and 3, "Half The World", 2015, 400 pages, and "Half a War", 2016, 384 pages. I stayed up til 4am finishing the 2nd one, I haven't done that for a while. Good characters, good plotting, good dialogue.

Once I realized this was actually post-apocalyptic science fiction rather than fantasy, studying the map of the Shattered Sea, I noticed it looked suspiciously like the Baltic Sea. Some shorelines are different and a lot of Finland is underwater, but still, see for yourself:

And in I think the second book, they take a journey via 2 rivers and a portage to the capital of the great southern kingdom, which sounded suspiciously like the routes the Vikings took to get to Constantinople via the Black and Caspian Seas. The Wikipedia article was titled "Trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks". I don't know that I'd heard of Varangians before - apparently the name the Vikings were called by the Greeks and the Rus. Here's the map from the Wikipedia page:

So a little history lesson to go with a very readable story.

Ha ha, here's a quote from the 1st book - can't seem to get away from economics.

The wealthier a man is, the more he craves wealth.

I noticed that the 6th book of the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone, "The Ruin Of Angels", 2017, 576 pages, was on my iPad but not in the unread shelf. So I decided to read it as my 3rd fantasy novel. It looks like I read the 1st 3 of these in late 2015, blogged here. It took me a while to realize that some of the characters were from the earlier books. Fantasy just doesn't seem to form that much of a lasting impression. Still, a fun read. I'm pretty sure I read books 4 and 5 but I can't find them in this blog??? It looks like I read them???

I was going to go back to economics, but some sci fi I preordered came in, so I guess that's what I'll be reading next.