I bet you thought I would forget about my Reader, return to paper books (and I admit, I do have Iain M. Banks’ “Matter” winging its way to me in dead tree form). But I swear to you, the Reader is my constant companion. Tucked away in my purse are about twenty books, some bought, some free, and whenever I have a few quiet moments to read, out it comes.
I do wish it dealt better with PDFs.
I just now, a couple of minutes ago, finished China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. Said station is a meeting of the railway lines that snake their way through New Crubuzon, with the towering Spike looming above. New Crubuzon is a melange of cultures, both human and xen — nonhumans — the insectile khepri, the froglike vodyanoi, the avian garuda — a conflagration of steam and magic at the joining of two rivers on the world of Bas-Lag.
Portly renegade scientist Isaac Grimnebulin happily tinkers away at his research into the mysterious crisis energy that underlies and ties together both the natural and supernatural and is also madly in love with a khepri sculptor named Lin. Khepri look like human women with a scarab beetle for a head. Khepri think human women look like khepri with ape heads. It’s all a matter of perspective, some of their friends are more accepting than others.
When an exiled garuda whose wings have been cut off walks into Isaac’s laboratory wishing to fly again, both Isaac, Lin, and all of New Crubuzon are plunged into a nightmare of soul-eating moths, extra dimensional spiders, demonic bureaucrats, Remade freedom fighters, sentient floor cleaners and a thousand other things, crammed into paragraphs and held there by Miéville’s prose.
It’s a heck of a read, and it took me awhile to get drawn in. But these last couple of weeks, I’ve read nothing else. Don’t read Perdido Street Station for happy endings — you won’t find any. Read it for a glimpse of an alien world that will sear itself into your brain, and a story you haven’t ever read before.
One of my all time favourites. I’d highly recommend The Scar next. Iron Council is quite good too, but not quite as strong, I thought.
Next on my list is the Banks book, but I imagine more Mieville will make its way to my Reader soon… I liked PSS, but felt the first half of the book spent too much time setting up the world and all the characters before it shifted into high gear. Now that that’s out of the way, maybe the future books will be able to get to the action earlier.