FnordChan said:
I'm around halfway through
Havana Bay, the fourth of Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko novels. Renko, the Soviet detective introduced in
Gorky Park in 1981, is now a post-Soviet detective who has come to Havana...well, for a variety of reasons, but the plot centers on a missing friend (of sorts) from the earlier novels. Renko finds himself investigating in a hostile environment (with much of Cuba happily taking any given opportunity to condemn the Russians for abandoning them after the fall of the Soviet Union) which is as entrancing as it is incomprehensible. As in previous novels, Smith does a wonderful job of capturing the feel of communism teetering on the edge of collapse, populating the environment with fascinating characters and writing his hero with even darker humor than usual. I'm digging the hell out of it.
Martin Cruz Smith is easily one of my favourite authors, and I coincidentally reread Havana Bay about a month ago after rereading Polar Star. It's a fantastic book, and to me at least just about the end of the excellent Renko series (the last one, Stalin's Ghost, is good but lacking in comparison to the 4 brilliant and 1 very good books that precede it). At this point to read a Renko novel you have to fudge the timelines a bit, and after the 90's setting of Cuba and Pripyat I'm not sure there's anything else to be done. Smith has to kind of keep him in statis or else get ever more vague with dates and eras, and neither solution works that well any more. Oh, and make sure you read "Rose" if you haven't already, it's definitely the non-Renko novel by MCS I most loved.
Keen said:
Absolutely dying to read this book, can't wait to find it. Not every day that one of your fav authors in a genre you don't normally love announces a plan to try a book in your absolute favourite genre as a change.
For me I've been all over lately. I recently finished:
Set in a fairly standard yet well realized fantasy world it's the story of a massive ship set to sail on a trading voyage to a neutral island. From the get go a number of conspiracies, plots and betrayals dog the ship and it's passengers, with most of them related to the simmering tensions between two large hostile empires.
For the first half of the book I felt it was excellent. Great characters, some real variety and depth to the fantasy/magic elements and a good plot. Sadly the last half felt very rushed, with some poor pacing and clear "first book" issues from the author like having major plot developments happen 'off screen' so to speak and have characters learn of them through brief conversation or increasingly routine deus ex machina meetings between imperiled allied characters. The last half of the book felt more like a good young adult novel than the gripping fantasy of the first half. Still worth checking out, as I said the story was quite good and the series is very promising for genre fans.
I'm also reading:
I more immediately enjoyed Vile Bodies, but as Decline and Fall is Waugh's first novel I figured I better stick with that one first. The setting, a public school in the 1920's, isn't as familiar to me as Vile Bodies or even a Wilde play but his dry satire is definitely fantastic. Can't believe I haven't read any of his books before.
It's... alright. Almost stopped reading it twice, but I'm limping on to the end now. I suspect once I'm done all memory of it will vanish, subsumed by the memory of hundreds of other fantasy books a lot like it of about the same quality I've forgotten over the years.
I recently read Joe Hill's "Heart Shaped Box". That was an excellent ghost story, tight and increasingly interesting. One of those books you read fast thinking "this would make a great movie" in the best sense.
