Hat trick

[flemmings]

"To keep or to burn?
To burn: anything by Elizabeth Bear."

I'm beginning to see why. Starting with, Blood and Iron is part of the Promethean Cycle but it's not the same part as Hell and Earth or Ink and Steel. Which means 403 dense pages with neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe in them. Should I be reading Gloriana instead? Re-reading Armor of Light? Or just cut to the chase and revisiting Point of Dreams?

Or spend the weekend reading the damned book just to say I did. (The dragon is intriguing. The dragon is a female dragon even if not my kind of female dragon.)

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It's a meme that I think Ellen Kushner did the other day. You're in a cottage in winter and you can take two books, one to read and the other to burn. Someone said that opening quote. Other sensible people said the NY phone book.

There's a dragon, yes. You might not have the patience for the rest of it, which so far is Irish fae, Irish bogles, unseelie courts, Arthurian legends, secret societies of magi, and traditional English ballads. Set in America among Denny's and Macdonald's and the lions in front of the NY Public Library, and with what looks to be an Indian avatar representing the Unseelie. I'm intrigued at the ways this book is treading the same twee territory as, oh, Charles de Lint and Will Shetterley and you name it, but so far not being twee. Or not much.

(There are also werewolves that do a really interesting and probably totally unintended spin on Pratchett's in The Fifth Elephant, but you don't read Pratchett.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

She gets into an interesting question, which so far she's touched on lightly. If all-the-British-magic stuff is inherent in people and the people come to a new country and it gets established there (which is good de Lint and Huff and you name it 'elves and vampires and whatever in Toronto or Ottawa') then it's inherent in everybody. So a) what about the magic that was already here and how does that react to the new stuff? and b) what about those Pakistani immigrants, huh?

The hints of Ren fair 'me and my friends used to play in a coffee shop and music-is-magic' is something I could live without, but maybe that's because music isn't even a regular part of my life.