I'm currently reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and loving it. He does a wonderful job of building a different universe with its own rules and physics and expectations, and doing it solidly enough that it's very real and compelling.
Oh, I should check this out. There was a story by him in the McSweeney's collection of Astonishing Tales or whatever, and I really liked it. This is the real reason I like reading short story compiliations -- finding new authors!
Also, I just read Paladin of Souls over the weekend, and DAMN. The girl on the bus next to me noticed I was reading it, and wanted to talk Bujold, but I just needed to finish the damn book.
Has anyone ever been so bugged by a book's typeface that they can't read it?
On two occasions I've requested books from my library that they only had in large print. I ended up skimming both books because the font annoyed me so much, not for its largeness per se (it looks like TNR14, which is a nice readable font in doublespaced manuscript format), but because there weren't enough words on each line, nor enough space between the lines for so large a font size. It threw off my reading rhythm. Mind you, I'm glad large print exists, but I don't like it for my own use. I may in 40 years or so.
Another one of my library books is printed in a strange font with the tiniest serifs I've ever seen. It's also a bit larger than I'm used to, causing the same problem as the large print books where the size of the type seems out of proportion to the spaces between the lines. And I don't know if I can bring myself to read it, even though that feels like the stupidest reason ever for bailing on a book! But I don't want to constantly think about the font and the way my eyeballs track across the page while I'm reading, either.
For this past month's book club book, I nabbed a large print edition of the book by mistake. (We were reading
Motherless Brooklyn
.) For me, it (the large print) became part of the overall experience of reading of the book.
I've gotten that, Susan.
One thing that really bugs me is that I just cannot read long italic passages. I'm not sure what it is, but it's like, when I'm reading something in a normal font, I can sight-read and know the word just by looking at it, but when it's in italics, or in any kind of script font, that all breaks down and I have to actually look at the letters and sound the words out, and it annoys me and gives me a headache. There have been several books lately that switch between, say, current action and a journal from the past by using italics for the journal part, and I've found that I generally just give up after about a page of the italics.
Italics don't bother me, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who notices things like that.
I hate italics longer than 3/4 of a page too. (Am I being too generous. I usually can stand it for that long - even with bad eyes; beyond that headaches start.)
Calli, I think The Viscount of Adrilankha was actually a single book that was broken into a trilogy for publication.
Mind, you, it would have been chapbook sized if Brust could drop the damn stylized Mojo-Jojoesque passages wherein it takes six paragraphs for someone to express a sentence's worth of information.
Ya know, that style annoyed me a lot more before, in the recent ones, he had sections without it. It was suddenly a lot more of a cultural note than an overwhelming affectation (though no doubt he thinks it's cute).
Even if (like me) you think
Perdido St Station
is less a novel than the greatest piece of D&D scenario design in history, and that Mieville has read the Robert Asprin
Sanctuary
books once too often, it's worth a look. And the (sort of) sequel
The Scar
is one of the best fantasy novels I've read in years. I didn't get on with George RR Martin. If I want to read about murderous incestuous nobles without any redeeming features struggling for power, I'll read
I Claudius
or
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
- they have jokes!
