Flat Reads
Jan. 10th, 2004 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desayunoencamaSo, last night I finished off the McDermid, which did pick up by the end but was still only middling. I think I maybe should've stopped while I was ahead, having only read BLUE GENES and BOOKED FOR MURDER, both of which I highly recommend. I've now read other entries in both series and find they don't live up to those two titles.
Yesterday I also read Ralf König's latest graphic novel to be translated into Spanish, COMO CONEJOS, and it, too, was disappointing. Very slight. He's best known for THE KILLER CONDOM, which didn't do much for me when I read it. I really liked the penultimate book in Spanish, CORAZONES CALIENTES, and I think the last of his before that which I enjoyed was LYSISTRATA (I've not seen the film version, which is reputed to be poorly done). But this one was just flat for me.
So I turned to Alan Gordon's AN ANTIC DISPOSITION. As I mentioned in my last post, I like the series. I'm not personally as fond of HAMLET so this entry was of less interest to me as a result. But worst of all, the entire book is told in a flash back. It is a Talking Heads novel, where absolutely nothing happens in real time. And then at the end, you find out that our hero was one of the characters in the other events, but... it's missing the sparkle that the earlier books in the series had. Oddly enough it got a starred PW review.
I still recommend the first four books in the series, though.
Today I'm halfway through Rita Mae Brown's HOTSPUR which is fine but, alas, has her talking animals again, which I wasn't expecting and wasn't in the mood for.
It's frustrating to hit so many books in a row that aren't grabbing me, the way the Robin Hobb trilogy last week did.
Although on Monday I read Lawrence Block's THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE, another entry in his Bernie Rhodenbarr series, which was a fun, quick read. These are quite predictable on the one hand--he is mid-burglary and discovers a body, gets caught, and has to discover the murderer to clear his name--but Block has such a wry sense of humor (and lots of word play and very fun banter between Bernie and his dyke best friend) that it's a delight to read them just for that; the murders are also usually intricate and their unveiling so layered with levels of corruption and entanglements, that one is kept guessing even though the general set up is always the same in each volume. There are also lots of literal laugh-out-loud moments, at least for me, some of which may be because of NYC descriptions that are so spot on.
Yesterday I also read Ralf König's latest graphic novel to be translated into Spanish, COMO CONEJOS, and it, too, was disappointing. Very slight. He's best known for THE KILLER CONDOM, which didn't do much for me when I read it. I really liked the penultimate book in Spanish, CORAZONES CALIENTES, and I think the last of his before that which I enjoyed was LYSISTRATA (I've not seen the film version, which is reputed to be poorly done). But this one was just flat for me.
So I turned to Alan Gordon's AN ANTIC DISPOSITION. As I mentioned in my last post, I like the series. I'm not personally as fond of HAMLET so this entry was of less interest to me as a result. But worst of all, the entire book is told in a flash back. It is a Talking Heads novel, where absolutely nothing happens in real time. And then at the end, you find out that our hero was one of the characters in the other events, but... it's missing the sparkle that the earlier books in the series had. Oddly enough it got a starred PW review.
I still recommend the first four books in the series, though.
Today I'm halfway through Rita Mae Brown's HOTSPUR which is fine but, alas, has her talking animals again, which I wasn't expecting and wasn't in the mood for.
It's frustrating to hit so many books in a row that aren't grabbing me, the way the Robin Hobb trilogy last week did.
Although on Monday I read Lawrence Block's THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE, another entry in his Bernie Rhodenbarr series, which was a fun, quick read. These are quite predictable on the one hand--he is mid-burglary and discovers a body, gets caught, and has to discover the murderer to clear his name--but Block has such a wry sense of humor (and lots of word play and very fun banter between Bernie and his dyke best friend) that it's a delight to read them just for that; the murders are also usually intricate and their unveiling so layered with levels of corruption and entanglements, that one is kept guessing even though the general set up is always the same in each volume. There are also lots of literal laugh-out-loud moments, at least for me, some of which may be because of NYC descriptions that are so spot on.
