Skip to main content

Steampunk Day Something: Finishing Books

I finished Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan the other night, and it was excellent. The major characters were given just enough time to develop on their own before they met up with each other and we started to see them through each others' eyes. I finally got used to people walking around the inside of a flying whale. I finally also got used to thinking of metallic legs rather than wheels/those-treaded-conveyer-things on a tanker as being a good thing. I also got used to the characters, the tone, the general world of it all, so that when I set it down upon its final page and picked up Boneshaker by Cherie Priest a few moments later, it came as a wee bit of a shock. There's the difference, you see, between YA lit and adult lit. I don't know what it is exactly, because they're both beautifully written books (and beautifully designed, too - Keith Thompson's phenomenal illustrations in Leviathan vie with Boneshaker's incredible graphic design and formatting). But whatever paves the path between the two sections of the library, that is what lies between these two novels. I set down Leviathan feeling like a daring, clever adventurer. I picked up Boneshaker and felt like a grown-up. (In the best possible way. But still.)

I am still making my way through the latter. For Westerfeld fans - or newcomers - just know that you'll have to read this one with the sequel waiting in the wings. Because this is no stand-alone introduction to the series. It's a proper launching pad. And I'm so very excited to continue with it - once I've gotten a hold of a copy of the second one, of course.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?
8 comments
Read more
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
6 comments
Read more
Rounding out my year of dwelling in the Athens of the North, as Edinburgh was called during the Enlightenment, I have experienced the shortest night of my memory. Around eleven o'clock last night, I closed the curtains to a sky streaked with the dark blue of a finally setting sun. I fully intended to drop off to sleep immediately after, but as I usually do, found myself still putting around after two in the morning. Between the curtains, which I had not closed as well as I should have, I noticed something unusual. There was unnaturally natural light streaming through. I opened them wide only to find the sky streaked with the same blue they had been filled with but three hours before. Had there been any night at all? If so, I had closed my curtains to it, only to find morning rising just as sleep found me - morning in the middle of the night. Long live Scotland.
5 comments
Read more