The Book: Kraken by China Mieville
The Particulars: Del Rey books, 2010, hardback, in print and available as an e-book.
Why was it in my TBR pile? I used to belong to the Science Fiction Book Club. Last June or July or August or so, the book turned up in my mailbox, and when I opened it, thinking it was something else, it looked intriguing enough that I kept it (and paid for it). It only took me a year to get around to reading it. 😉
The Review: This was an interesting, but weird, book. It’s about the end of the world, how it comes about because a preserved giant squid is stolen from a museum. Or does it? It’s about belief, and magic, and things like that–how they feed off each other. About noticing things, and about trust and evil and–oh, all sorts of things. It’s funny, and scary, and it took me a long while to read, because I could put it down–but I always had to pick it back up again. Very interesting book. A good read.
Yes, my TBR book for July was about a giant squid. A dead giant squid, causing the end of the world. A truly strange read–but oddly fitting for what apparently was July’s theme: Fairy tales. Okay, I can’t think of any fairy tales about giant squid, right offhand, but it sounds fairy-tale-ish.
So. There is my review. Yes, it’s short, but Kraken is almost impossible to boil down to anything longer than a paragraph. You either have to re-tell the whole frickin’ story, or you have to just… boil.
And now: DAY 13!!!! I wrote enough I can take tomorrow off if I need to–which I probably will, but might not, since the story is really starting to percolate in my head. We will see how it goes.
And I have counted up–so far, I have read 31 books this month. Have not put them all into GoodReads yet, but I’m working on it. Just so I can whittle the 600+ books on my TBR list down a bit.
Today was a lazy, reading day. I finished Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare, and also read A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran and Red’s Hot Honky Tonk Bar by Pamela Morsi. I liked them all, but really liked the last two a lot.