And she's back
Aug. 2nd, 2005 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pbrayBack from my quick trip to San Diego for my cousin's wedding where a great time was had by all. Her new husband seems like a great guy and so do his friends, which is always a good sign.
Flights were on time, but completely sold out, which led to the usual passenger adventures with too much carry-on luggage and too little overhead storage. Red-eye back was pretty much as I expected-- no sleep due to surrounding chatter and a broken seat that didn't recline. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for my days in marketing, back in the early 90s, when taking the red-eye from California meant plenty of empty seats so you could almost always claim a whole row for yourself to stretch out and sleep.
Reading: Finished THE BURIED PYRAMID by Jane Lindskold and was disappointed. Most of the book was written in the style of a Victorian era mystery (a la Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series). Enjoyable, despite the characters' tendency to long passages of exposition masquerading as dialogue. Then, with less than one-quarter of the book to go, suddenly there is FANTASY! The entire tone of the book changes as they meet the God Ra, journey on his boat using both physical prowess and their hitherto unexpected talent for magic to battle demons and monsters. Then the characters finally come face to face with Neferankhotep, the owner of the tomb whom they had been investigating. Neferankhotep and his associates judge each of the explorers, but then allows them to invalidate that judgment by performing a task that is supposed to be heroic but comes off more as a minor errand.
The fantasy section was completely disconnected from the first three quarters of the book. It felt tacked on, and didn't satisfy me as either a mystery reader or a fantasy reader. I've really liked the other books of hers that I've read, but this one just didn't work for me.
Started reading SMOKE AND SHADOWS by Tanya Huff, and picked up Michelle Sagara's CAST IN SHADOW to add to my TBR stack.
Flights were on time, but completely sold out, which led to the usual passenger adventures with too much carry-on luggage and too little overhead storage. Red-eye back was pretty much as I expected-- no sleep due to surrounding chatter and a broken seat that didn't recline. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for my days in marketing, back in the early 90s, when taking the red-eye from California meant plenty of empty seats so you could almost always claim a whole row for yourself to stretch out and sleep.
Reading: Finished THE BURIED PYRAMID by Jane Lindskold and was disappointed. Most of the book was written in the style of a Victorian era mystery (a la Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series). Enjoyable, despite the characters' tendency to long passages of exposition masquerading as dialogue. Then, with less than one-quarter of the book to go, suddenly there is FANTASY! The entire tone of the book changes as they meet the God Ra, journey on his boat using both physical prowess and their hitherto unexpected talent for magic to battle demons and monsters. Then the characters finally come face to face with Neferankhotep, the owner of the tomb whom they had been investigating. Neferankhotep and his associates judge each of the explorers, but then allows them to invalidate that judgment by performing a task that is supposed to be heroic but comes off more as a minor errand.
The fantasy section was completely disconnected from the first three quarters of the book. It felt tacked on, and didn't satisfy me as either a mystery reader or a fantasy reader. I've really liked the other books of hers that I've read, but this one just didn't work for me.
Started reading SMOKE AND SHADOWS by Tanya Huff, and picked up Michelle Sagara's CAST IN SHADOW to add to my TBR stack.
