Tuesday 22 August 2006

olympos climbed

My reading is increasingly linked to my travel. Having spent quite a long time not getting anything read, the last month and the two trips it included have seen me through one and a half fairly thick tomes. The finished one was Dan Simmons' Olympos.

I read the first in this 2-parter, Ilium, last year, and enjoyed it a lot. The second, as any sequel in this genre (space opera? science fiction? hard to say), doesn't enjoy the first's opportunities for introducing the reader to the newness of the world (or in this case, worlds) in which the story takes place, but Olympos is fun despite that. It takes the story through interesting variations, and has some challenging views of god-ness and God-ness and its relation to creativity. Perhaps even more so than his Hyperion/Endymion books, Ilium and Olympos should really not be read separately. They are one story.

The second of the books I've been reading is, for curiosity's sake, Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, the second instalment in his Baroque Cycle. I'll give my thoughts when I finish it.

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