Rui CarmoMost of my free time has been taken up with books and TV of late, and as usual I’ve jotted down a few notes in lieu of review and assembled a little tryptic of them:
| “Fragile Things”:ISBN:0755334140 | “The Prince”:ISBN:0743435567 | “High Justice”:ISBN:0671811045 |
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| I picked it up on a whim expecting it to be a good match for my recently downsized attention span, and it did not disappoint in that regard: “Gaiman”:Wikipedia:Neil_Gaiman writes engrossing short stories and puzzling poems which kick-started my right hemisphere during a few commutes. The final novella was a nice bonus, and if I were to find fault with the book I would merely point to the rather baroque epicurian tale that precedes it and to “Gaiman’s”:Wikipedia:Neil_Gaiman tendency to paint dreary and sinister backgrounds, something that he keeps in check in other material. | I pretty much devoured Pournelle’s “The Prince”:ISBN:0743435567 to great enjoyment. Having read “Falkenberg’s Legion”:ISBN:067172018X a good while back, I’d always wondered what else was out there in the same vein, and “The Prince”:ISBN:0743435567 bundles it all together in a neat, meaty package that takes a while to go through. Although the book (or, rather, series of books) shift progressively away from Falkenberg and requires suspending disbelief where it regards both significant portions of its alternate history and the (well justified, but still hard to accept) reliance on infantry, the result makes for great reading, and is only marred for being… short. 1200 pages isn’t enough, and you feel it ought to go on a while longer. | Still in a Pournelle mood, I read through “High Justice”:ISBN:0671811045 in a weekend to rather less enthusiasm. Most of the short stories included tie into the others somehow, but they failed to grab me somehow. Looking back, my expectations might have been set too high due to my having just finished “The Prince”:ISBN:0743435567, but the overall sensation of their failing to paint a coherent universe remained. |