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Wow, you want to reread HP 1 - 6 in two weeks? I´ll only reread the last one. Maybe then I´ll understand what JKR´s intention for those McGuffin Horcruxes are.
Recently, I´ve read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It´s a very enjoyable and quick read. The protagonist (and narrator) is a teenager with Asperger syndrome, who tries to follow in the footsteps of his hero Sherlock Holmes by investigating the murder of the neighbour´s dog, thereby uncovering a very disturbing secret with a huge emotional fallout.
Also, I´ve finally finished Gene Wolfe´s translation* of The book of the new sun, which took me quite some time. The narrator (unreliable because he has some episodes of madness) is Severian, a former executioner/torturer with a perfect memory. He´s travelling Earth ("Urth") in the far future, where the sun is dying and religion is fixated of the coming of the new sun. The people on Urth have been left behind on this barren planet and have fallen back into a medieval society, sometimes getting technical handouts from (occasionally alien) space travellers. The book is like a road movie, and the prose is very dense. A lot of the first half of the book (~ 1.000 pages) holds mysteries that only get revealed at the very end. That and lots of puns and themes pretty much require a second reading (and GW admits that this is his intention, it´s supposed to increase the reader´s enjoyment). There is also a sequel, but I don´t know if I´ll bother anytime soon.
* GW has "only" translated this text, which somehow made its way to him from millions of years in the distant future, so even though many words sound very alien, they are all based on the languages of the past and present.
Right now, I´m reading Steph Swainston´s sequel to The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time. Again set in a fantasy world, where medieval people fight alongside immortals against huge and deadly insects, the main protagonist is an immortal junkie, who can fly and whose overdosed trips take him to a parallel fantasy world (whose setting reminds me a lot of the WoW desert town Gadgetzan, btw). This time, they take a trip to a long forgotten archipelago, meeting a people, who have left the main continent many hundreds of years ago, and seem to be some kind of idealised anarchist commune. While they´re away, a former immortal starts a rebellion against the emperor (who has the power to give and take eternal life). So far, it´s an enjoyable read. I like the book mainly for the unusual setting and unpredictable plot. I find it hard to relate to the narrator though; he´s vain, narcissistic and doesn´t give the impression of being hundreds of years old. |
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