(no subject)
Saturday, September 10th, 2011 08:44 pmAm in one of my 'let's clear the shelves of those books I bought fifteen years ago' moods. To which end, last night or rather, in the early hours of the morning, I finished Tanith Lee's Reigning Cats and Dogs, set in a sort of steampunk sorta A/U sorta 19th century sorta London. You can tell I haven't read much steampunk because for all I know that's pure by the numbers for the genre. Whatever, I liked it, at least as far as the steampunk details went: flying bicycle dirigibles and advertisements projected on clouds and so on.
The emotional action however is Tanith Lee being Tanith Lee. I bet she does this sort of thing in her sleep by now, which is the the downside of being prolific. It gave me the usual Lee oogey hangover, helped some by that insomnia-caused 2 am reading, and also by being read in tandem with Hard-boiled Wonderland. Now that one is genuinely weird.
(I still want to throttle Birnbaum for thinking that the past tense of lay is lay. It is not. 'I lay the book on the table and went to get a beer.' Argh. OTOH while giving both the Japanese name for a food and its English translation is a little clumsy, I'm glad he did it, because I'd have no idea what a 'tofu puff' was if he hadn't preceded it with karaage.)
The emotional action however is Tanith Lee being Tanith Lee. I bet she does this sort of thing in her sleep by now, which is the the downside of being prolific. It gave me the usual Lee oogey hangover, helped some by that insomnia-caused 2 am reading, and also by being read in tandem with Hard-boiled Wonderland. Now that one is genuinely weird.
(I still want to throttle Birnbaum for thinking that the past tense of lay is lay. It is not. 'I lay the book on the table and went to get a beer.' Argh. OTOH while giving both the Japanese name for a food and its English translation is a little clumsy, I'm glad he did it, because I'd have no idea what a 'tofu puff' was if he hadn't preceded it with karaage.)