Only the Shadow Knows

Shadowplay
Tad Williams
DAW

As I write this, I’m sitting at the gate in LHR waiting to board a flight. While I haven’t been travelling too much as of late, I am still managing to put in enough time at the airport to get some serious reading done. For this particular trip, I actually broke one of my cardinal rules of travel and brought along a ginormous 600+ pager. Yeah, yeah, -- not exactly a short haul friendly tome. On an overseas flight (where I can, ahem, check luggage), it makes the space argument a little less compelling, and frankly, this one was definitely worth the room in the carry on.

Shadowplay is Williams’ second book of the Shadowmarch trilogy. If you recall, I reviewed the first book for one of my initial entries for this blog (don’t go back and read it – WAY too long). While I really liked the opening effort, I think that the second instalment lived up to (and maybe even exceeded) the standards of the first. From the moment I picked it up, I didn’t really want to do anything but read. So what if I travelled a few thousand miles to go to the office this week? Work schmerk.

Book Two of the series picks up right where the last book left off. Unlike a lot of serialized fiction, Williams makes the assumption that the readers have been following along and very little time is wasted summarizing the plot. As for the content, it’s the usual fantasy fare -- anthropomorphic creatures, battles, magic and death. Really – what’s not to love? Three fellowship rings out of five.

Anything But

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Okay, so I've got to come clean. Deep breath ... I'm addicted to detective novels. There ... I said it and it hardly even hurt. Of course, I'm blaming it all on an evil, yet "well-intentioned" friend. Last summer when I was dying for a good book, Russ recommended Chandler's The Big Sleep. Unfortunately, the local bookstore didn't have it and I picked up The Lady in the Lake instead. I totally loved that novel, but believe it or not, this one was even better.

Like the other Marlowe book, The Big Sleep is set in and around Los Angeles in the late 30s. The cagey and unspeakably sexy hero, Philip Marlowe, has been hired by an aging oil tycoon to find out who has been blackmailing one of his wayward daughters. There are more twists in this plot than a mountain road has curves, and while I will admit to finding it a bit of a stretch at times, the writing was so engaging that I didn't really care. Chandler possesses a grim economy of words that is both disconcerting and delightful. His more than slightly misogynistic descriptions of women are especially wonderful and for those of you who are (un)lucky enough to have me as an IM contact, you might have noticed that you were treated to an entire week of politically incorrect Marlowisms.

Oh yeah ... if you haven't figured it out, the title of this week's entry relates to the title of the book. It was anything but a big sleep --in fact, I couldn't put it down. Four RedBulls out of five.

Someone's Gotta Do it ...

A Dirty Job

Christopher Moore

Harper Collins

Holy cow! It has been exactly a month since I last posted anything on this blog. Instead of providing a laundry list of excuses as to why I haven't been reading/writing, I'm just going to hang my head in shame and get on with today's entry.

A few years ago, I introduced a few of you to Lamb -- The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It was easily the funniest book that I had read in the last decade and it became the then equivalent of the D-E-S Book of the Year. Because I had enjoyed it so much, I was reluctant to read anything else by the author. Why muck with perfection? (C'mon, you had to expect at least one Jesus pun.) Quite recently, one of my good friends bought me a copy of A Dirty Job and I thought it would be churlish of me to leave it unread. Who wants to be a churl?

I can't believe I'm typing this, but A Dirty Job is almost as funny as Lamb. Set in present day San Francisco, the novel tells the story of Charlie Asher -- a slightly neurotic owner of a Bay area secondhand shop. At the beginning of the story, Asher's wife dies giving birth to their daughter Sophie. As Charlie struggles to cope with his grief and get used to the demands of a new baby, he learns that he has inherited some disturbing new responsibilities. You see, Charlie wakes up one day to realize that he's become Death -- or at least one's of death's minions (Charlie's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.) The chaos that ensues when Charlie tries to reject his new role is mordantly funny. A Dirty Job gets four scythes out of five.