Reading in April 2009

[suciul]

I almost finished In the Courts of the Sun by B. D'Amato and it's one of those books that defies an easy description.

Maya end of calendar coming up 12/21/12, "The Game" that predicts the future, of course if you could play it like the original Maya with 9 stones, so you could see what's the "biggie" for that date, time travel of a sort, MesoAmerica cca 600+ which is as vivid and weird as any secondary world fantasy world or far future alien one that I've read, a gonzo narrator...

It reminds me somewhat of Gone Away World but without the florid prose.

Anyway with about 100 pages remaining and if it delivers at the end, this one will be a top 5 genre sf novels for 09 and probably the most surprising superb one.

[vortexreader]

At the moment I'm reading an advance copy of a book by a new Australian author, H.M. Brown, called Red Queen. It's set in a post-viral pandemic world. Two brothers are living in an isolated shack, away from surviving populations, waiting out the pandemic. A woman arrives in their world and...well, that's all I'm saying.

It's well written and quite impressive for a first novel. Out in Australia in August, I believe.

[suciul]

After I finished the superb In The Courts of the Sun - which as I found out in the mind blowing finale is just part 1 of the trilogy Sacrifice Game - I tried to read This is not a Game by WJW - big mistake

After Courts of the Sun and its extraordinary world building and gonzo narrator, Not a Game read like *Not a Novel* and I fast plowed through it to see if it has anything of interest to me; sadly and despite that I usually like a lot WJW novels, this one was unreadable and boring - artificial, could not connect with the characters or the setting, seemed just a "game" so to speak, not "real"

Edit later:

A while ago I would have shrugged and said, well, near-future thrillers are not for me, but after the very good Daemon and the superb, brilliant In the Courts of the Sun, this one was such a massive let down that it really disappointed me a lot