Entry tags:

books, let's get literate! 2009

It took me a month and a half to get through this book. The beginning was slow going, but I'm done! Yes!

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch (incidental spoilers for The Lies of Locke Lamora): I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora for the most part. I didn't like the lack of female characters (forget strong, there were just so few that weren't pay-by-the-hour prostitutes), I didn't realize going in that Lynch loved to make his characters suffer, and some of the flashbacks, even though I found them interesting after the fact, appeared in places where I didn't want them. It's all about me!

Red Seas Under Red Skies isn't much different, except for the sudden deluge of awesome female characters. The beginning of the story takes place in Tal Verrar and opens two years after Locke and Jean have departed from Camorr. When the story opens Locke and Jean are losing badly at a game of cards and that piqued my interest—them losing? Oh, this book is all about losing. That could probably be the theme. The world building is really awesome in this book just like it was in the previous entry in the series: the city of Tal Verrar, the Sinspire, life on the ocean, pirate shanty-towns: they all make me want to visit. I'm easy; I wish I was as good at weaving together a world like this. The more I read about how the people are fitting into these ruins left behind by some unknown race the more I want to know about how they made the structures and why people can't reproduce them and where did they go? I hope Lynch explores this later; the first book and now this one have hints of the threads the story is going to follow, especially concerning the Bondsmagi, who I want to punch in the kidneys several times. There's been no hints he's actually going to pull his version of The History Channel out for me to watch. However, before we can have more answers we have to have more suffering and woe and kittens.

(I loved that Locke got attached to the kitten. YES!)

Boy, is there suffering. Even more than the first book, this story broke my heart. Not just how Locke and Jean were being played by the Bondsmagi or Stragos, but in how every time they would catch a break there would five steps backwards. Every positive had three negatives; that's life when you play the games Locke and Jean do, but Lynch accomplished what he sent out to do, which is take your heart out and throw it of a cliff to the chomping sea monsters below.

The book is divided in two parts. I had different expectations of this book going in, because I thought it was a book about life at sea. That's only half of it; Locke and Jean spend a good deal of time in Tal Verrar, playing games to win thousands of solari, and attempting to rob various people blind. At the same time, there are flashbacks to how they came to be playing their current games and how those games get ruined when they become political pawns. I became even more fond of Jean in the book, as Locke's hardheadedness and need to win started to grate on my nerves, which was quite possibly the point. The second part of the book is spent at sea. I didn't connect with the first part like I did the second: I think I was frustrated with how Lynch threaded the story. There was a lot of hinting and dropping in pieces to the puzzle, but they were only the edge pieces so there was no way to see the bigger picture. The dialogue is still awesome, though. I will be a slave to whatever author who can whip up dialogue like a batch of fresh, piping hot funnel cakes, sweet and tangled and ready for me to inhale. Lynch mixes his sea slang with his world building! I reveled in it.

"....Say you have a rope lying on the deck; after the third hour of the afternoon on Idler's Day it's a half-stroke babble-gibbet, and then at midnight on Throne's Day it becomes a rope again, unless it's raining."

"Unless it's raining, yes, in which case you take your clothes off and dance naked around the mizzenmast. Gods, yes. I swear, Je...Jerome, the next person who tells me something like, 'Squiggle-fuck the rightwise cock-swatter with a starboard jib' is going to get a knife in the throat."

Locke may be a douche-head sometimes in this book, but I love his mouth.

There's a scene in this second half of the book that scared the crap out of me and yet! I wanted to go back. I was fascinated and I shouldn't have been fascinated but Scott Lynch is a dirty tease and dangles these things in front of you like bright, orange carrots and before you know it you've grown ears and are wiggling your nose. Knowing my luck, this was a one-off bit of canon that we will never see again. Watch me cry my bitter tears, just as I felt like doing when I reached the last fifty pages of the book and Lynch decided to take a time out and punch me in the soul.

The next book, Republic of Thieves, has been moved back. We probably won't see it until 2010, but with the recent hate-on's for authors who don't finish on time and get the virtual version of a back-alley beat down, I say: take your time, Scott Lynch. Take your time.

(Seriously, that first link broke my heart for the author. My HEART. I blame the cartoon.

I also picked up Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. The picture-book is ten lines long; it's an interesting study in how children process anger (dude, who doesn't want to be the boss? Seriously.). I think it's interesting they're making a movie out of it; I think I am probably attached to the trailer more for the song in it, "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire. Trailers: good for discovering new music.

I also finished The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but I am thinking about it. Now I am going to go pick up The Knife of Never Letting Go and get lost for awhile.

PS: 102 books! SWEET.