So, I apparently misinformed you - Swallowing Darkness is not, in fact, the last Merry Gentry novel. I should have known, really... Hamilton knows a cash cow when she sees one, and she's hardly going to abandon this if she won't let poor Anita Blake rest in peace. So. Divine Misdemeanors, this coming October. I'd like to tell you I won't be reading it, as it's a lurid young adult fantasy novel, but let's be honest. I'm going to devour it in three hours and then tell you how awful it is, while secretly loving every adjective-filled page.


I just finished Kushiel's Mercy, the sixth (and I think final) book in Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series, and I was blown away. I always thought Imriel was a more interesting character than Phedre, and this...this makes Phedre's third story look TAME. Carey rips her world to pieces and slowly puts it back together, in a way that is continually surprising and ultimately satsifying. Definitely a must for those fans of the series.

Also recently I read the novel Kartography, by Kamila Shamsie. This novel is beautiful, complicated, frustrating.... My initial impression was that I liked it quite a bit. On reflection, I can say with some confidence that the overall impression the book leaves you with is one of beauty. It's a lovely book, interweaving the stories of a family during 1971 West Pakistan, during the conflict with East Pakistan that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh, and Karachi in the 1990s (in West Pakistan). Shamsie creates two intertwining families that weave in and out of each other as the parents try to deal with their choices in 1971 and the children try to understand why it affectes them now.

While Raheen and Karim, the offspring in question, are interesting to observe, the real meat of the story is in the events of 1971, when their parents engaged in what they call "the finace swap" - Raheen's father and Karim's mother were originally engaged to each other, while Raheen's mother and Karim's father were engaged, and then in the unraveling you come to understand why they swapped. This was the story that caught my attention, and I could have used more time devoted to it - not that events were lacking, but...the modern day stuff just wasn't as hanging-by-a-thread fascinating.

Raheen is a frustrating narrator because of how much she doubts herself and the people around her, how stubborn she is, how obtuse....Raheen is a very, very realistic narrator, and even though there were times I didn't like her necessarily, I always cared about her.

It's a bleeding heart novel, and most assuredly a romance, but neither of those are bad things. I recommend it, purely for the knot it offers the reader to untangle.

Chapter Seven: The Chess Machine

At the moment I am quite absorbed in Midnight's Children, a fast and loose and wildly fascinating novel by the much-lauded Salman Rushdie; I won't urge you to read it, as the Booker award committee already has in plenty. But just to repeat, I'm enjoying it quite a bit - Rushdie manages to achieve that delicate quality in a very stream-of-consciousness narrative which manages to bring the reader along instead of rushing past them. His fluid story-telling weaves in and out of itself, braiding one story after another and yet still managing to retain its essential core around Saleem Sinai, the appealingly self-conscious narrator. So far, I love it. And that's all I'll say about it for now.

Today I thought I'd take a dig into the annals of my reading history and tell you about a charming and gothic steampunk novel that a very good friend recommended to me, called The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr.



The Chess Machine is a finely crafted historical fiction piece based around the mysterious Mechanical Turk, an automaton presented in the court of Empress Maria Theresia by the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Lohr uses this historical event as a spring board, weaving a deeply complex and intriguing explanation for the real-life Turk, who defeated every opponent that sat down across from it.

The richness of the historical background comes into play for every aspect of the novel. The political intrigue of the Viennese court, the greed and desire for recognition of the nobels and courtiers, and the influence of pride and arrogance are hypnotic. Lohr skillfully hangs on to the allure of possibility; the scent of steampunk hangs around the pages, giving the streets of Austria and Hungary an appealing weight of gaslights and fog, but he never veers completely into fantasy. Nothing Lohr presents in his tale is impossible; it retains that slight disbelief necessary to make a story seem totally real.

Where Lohr occasionally trips up are pure details of editing. The Chess Machine is the first novel from the German writer, and there are places within the piece that drag slightly due to over-description or sloppy narration. But these moments are few and flighty, and don't detract from the enjoyment of the work. It is surprising that Lohr does not get weighed down by over-meditation on ethical or moral dilemmas, preferring to hint at their import and leaving the reader to contemplate them rather than letting his brass-and-gears fairy tale get bogged down.