Ah, Sailing to Sarantium. Good stuff. Starts slow, as I remember -- since it's effectively the first half of a thousand-page novel --, but gets riveting pretty quick. One of my favourite Kay novels.
I finished Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves, his novel about vampire familiars and the Rossettis in Victorian London. Good book. Fun. The central metaphor, of the vampires as muse-like forces which enable an artist to do great work while simultaneously damaging them, is neat and well-used but not belaboured. This is a brainy book, but not at the expense of creepy seance scenes and tense sequences in sewers and graveyards. A couple plot lines feel like they do not really go anywhere in the end, though Powers gets good mileage out of them for a while. I read it quickly and enjoyed it a lot, but for some reason it doesn't inspire full-on gibbering fandom in me. I don't think the characters quite got me; they're very well-built, technically, but only one or two really gripped. In fact that might describe the whole thing. Some individual moments have definitely stayed with me, though [such as a scene set inside a giant skull. Powers is very good at making this kind of stuff feel weird and magical, while also keeping it entirely grounded and making it feel like something that could happen.] Very good book.
I'm now puttering around the beginnings of three recent fantasies set in the "real world": Deborah Coates' Wide Open, James Tredwell's Advent, and Suzanne Johnson's urban fantasy Royal Street. None of them are quite grabbing me, but I think Wide Open might have the edge.
I hear the other two in the trilogy get even better so I'm really looking forward to those.
