Welcome To the Cedar Grove

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business - a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set desitner, a journalist, a scientis and a dropout. And so is Aj - the waif, the mind reader, the prophet - when one day she finds a man who wants to stay hidden.

From the blurb of River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

See, just reading the blurb almost makes me want to go back and read the book, but really I did try and after 222 pages I can't take it any more.

I have a very hard time with the fact that it's written in the present rather than the narrative tense. I don't know why I find it so jarring, but I do. Secondly, the fact that there's little or no sustained narrative to help you get into the story, or to come to care about the characters is hard too. Each chapter deals with something concerning one of the characters and just when you start to get to grips with them as characters and get interested in the events, the chapter ends and it's time to advance to the next person's story - and not necessarily in strict rotation, so it somethings means you're waiting ages for the next 'episode.'

Even after over two hundred pages of getting to grips with words like aeis, (A.I's), lighthoeks, (??) and such I'm still no clearer what's going on except that there seem to be a bunch of rogue artificial intelligences going around killing people, there's some kind of alien phenomenon out in space somewhere that scientist are all excited about and some scientific genius is 'on the run' from everybody. Maybe I just missed the point somewhere along the way!

The only character I've even remotely come to 'care' about is 'the wife' who spends her life, it seems, building a rooftop garden as a place to entertain her husband's society friends, because her cop husband doesn't want to have kids. She should maybe just run off with the cricket-loving gardener and have them with him. Maybe she will in the end, but I can't be bothered to wait around and find out.

Can you tell I've lost patience with this book?

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten. The Prince of Nothing, book 1 - The Darkness That Comes Before R. Scott Bakker

...and one cannot write a book review for a book that one simply cannot get into. I've been trying to read this book since August 28th, when I finished Some Place To Be Flying, which I'm not sure I ever reviewed. I got a bit lax around then with the reviews... but still... after three months I'm still only on page 45, and finding any and every excuse to do something else other than read this book. I even read two others because I couldn't bring myself to open the covers of this one.

I'm sure it's a very well thought out story, and I feel so bad that I've given up on it, but I don't know whether it's the author's style, or what it is. I just can't get into the story and other than what's in the blurb, I couldn't even tell you what it's about. So I simply quote what seems to be the pertinent points of said blurb.

A score of centuries has passed since the First Apocalypse. The No-God has been vanquished and the thoughts of men have turned, inevitably, to more worldly concerns... After two thousand years, the No-God is returning. The Second Apocalypse is nigh. And one cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten...