I've been reading the ultimately fairly annoying Perdido Street Station by China Mieville in the off minutes while I'm in Charlie's room and he's not yet sleeping or not yet crying or otherwise in need of someone there but not holding him. (Think Discworld meets steampunk, only terribly serious and full of the kind of stylistic and scene-setting flourishes that absolutely positively must impress the hell out of you.)
The book is set in yet another of those sprawling squalid imaginary urban somethingscapes that somehow manage to be so much more picturesque and yet less capable of holding interest than the real thing. And so as usual one of my complaints was that no description, however florid, of the miasma that drifts up from the sewers and beggars and gutters and rivers can really evoke anything but a mental notation: "Oh, yes, it's really stinky. Worse than the trail of a manhattan streetsweeping machine in august. Got it."
Makes a big difference when you're reading early in the morning with the blinds closed and a full diaper pail. Suddenly the evironment the author is describing seems almost real...
Posted by wallich at May 24, 2005 08:56 PM