2007 Book Log #29: Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson

I have to admit to feeling ambivalent about Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain. This is another of my "picked up on a whim" books, in this case because I was in the mood to read a vaguely-SFish novel about what happens when global warming wreaks hardcore havoc on the planet. Sort of like The Day After Tomorrow, only in prose form, and presumably with a stronger story since it's after all written by a Hugo-award-winning author.

There are quite a few beefs raised about this book on its Amazon reviews, and to one degree or another I agree with all of them. It is a problem IMHO when the first 350 or so pages of a book are pretty much character development and setup, and only the last 25 or so pages show you actual plot. Couple this with the fact that the book's politics come across to me as way too heavy-handed, and that it spends way, way too much time in didactic lecture mode, and more often than not I found myself going 'For fuck's sake, get to the story already!'

Don't get me wrong. I'm someone who actually supports the idea that global warming is indeed a serious problem, so in general principle I agree with the book's overall politics. Problem is, with all the time it spends in lecture mode, that gets really boring really fast. Especially if you're already on board with the assertions it's trying to make, and especially if you have at least a basic level of clue about the science it's trying to describe. Very, very much a "preaching to the choir" situation here, not to mention way, way much Tell and not enough Show. I cut the book at least a little slack with the knowledge that this is actually Book One of a trilogy, and therefore not to be taken as a whole story. But even with that leniency, I found the time spent actually getting to the plot to be quite frustrating.

That said, I will grant that at least some of the character development parts were actually interesting, when things actually happened in between the long rambling paragraphs about how the various characters' minds worked. The characters got interesting enough, and the actual final pages set up an interesting enough situation, that I am rather curious about what happens next and am still considering whether I want to go get Book Two, Fifty Degrees Below.

But I have to think about it. Two and a half stars for some occasional interesting character development, but minus points for way too much lecture mode.

2007 Book Log #30: Hangman's Holiday, by Dorothy L. Sayers

And for a hard change of pace from the previous book, I jumped over to Dorothy L. Sayers' Hangman's Holiday, an old short story collection featuring several shorter pieces about the redoubtable Lord Peter Wimsey as well as her lesser-known amateur sleuth, Montague Egg.

I continue to like Sayers' novels better than her short pieces, and I definitely prefer novels when it comes to mysteries in general; with short pieces it often seems like you have only enough time for the crime and then the immediate solution. Sayers definitely gets around that in several of the pieces in this collection, though. I particularly liked "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey", in which the victim of the crime underwent a plight to which I was particularly sympathetic, and the last two standalone pieces, "The Man Who Knew How" and "The Fountain Plays", both of which had clever twist endings.

This is a bit of a hard to find book--I only scarfed it because someone had sold a used copy to the University Bookstore. Sayers' novels are way easier to find. But give this a read if you can find it. Three stars.