TBR Challenge: Kraken

The Book: Kraken by China Mieville

The Particulars: Del Rey books, 2010, hardback, in print and available as an e-book.

Why was it in my TBR pile? I used to belong to the Science Fiction Book Club. Last June or July or August or so, the book turned up in my mailbox, and when I opened it, thinking it was something else, it looked intriguing enough that I kept it (and paid for it). It only took me a year to get around to reading it. ;)

The Review:  This was an interesting, but weird, book. It's about the end of the world, how it comes about because a preserved giant squid is stolen from a museum. Or does it? It's about belief, and magic, and things like that--how they feed off each other. About noticing things, and about trust and evil and--oh, all sorts of things. It's funny, and scary, and it took me a long while to read, because I could put it down--but I always had to pick it back up again. Very interesting book. A good read.

Yes, my TBR book for July was about a giant squid. A dead giant squid, causing the end of the world. A truly strange read--but oddly fitting for what apparently was July's theme: Fairy tales. Okay, I can't think of any fairy tales about giant squid, right offhand, but it sounds fairy-tale-ish.

So. There is my review. Yes, it's short, but Kraken is almost impossible to boil down to anything longer than a paragraph. You either have to re-tell the whole frickin' story, or you have to just... boil.

And now: DAY 13!!!! I wrote enough I can take tomorrow off if I need to--which I probably will, but might not, since the story is really starting to percolate in my head. We will see how it goes.

And I have counted up--so far, I have read 31 books this month. Have not put them all into GoodReads yet, but I'm working on it. Just so I can whittle the 600+ books on my TBR list down a bit.

Today was a lazy, reading day. I finished Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare, and also read A Lady's Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran and Red's Hot Honky Tonk Bar by Pamela Morsi. I liked them all, but really liked the last two a lot.