I suppose I'm blogging this a few months late but nevertheless it's blogworthy: one of my favourite novels has been (very kindly) released as a free eBook download. Marvellous.
It's available at Suvudu Free Book Library.
I'll sign off with a short extract from the prologue, a part of the book that always comes to mind when I think of it, the first sentence of which, after a thousand readings, I can pretty much recite from memory:
"Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first few tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river's edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark."
Enjoy.
This is the only ebook I own (on the iPhone) - I've found it's all every male genre fan needs when their good lady is shopping!
ReplyDeleteNow that's an idea, something to do other than twiddle my thumbs when I'm sitting in the Bloke Chair at GAP/H&M encumbered by a thousand bags that aren't even mine! A pity I can't overlay the text onto glasses/contacts as a HUD because that way as long I remember to periodically remark "Yes, that looks lovely", or "Nah, you're right" I won't even have to interrupt reading!
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty good book to get free. He's like the steampunk Dickens, so I suppose it's appropriate that all my other ebooks seem to be things like Bleak House.
ReplyDeleteWhat did you think of 'The City and The City'?
Wasn't overly enamored tbh. Characterisation was weak and even slightly hackneyed. A lot of it seemed to ride on the two cities premise which was interesting and novel but not enough to make up for the book's shortcomings. I gave it a shot, am glad I did, but prefer the Bas Lag novels and hope that Mieville writes something a little more like that again in future.
ReplyDeleteI liked it at first, enjoyed the influences of Kafka and Paul Auster, but it seemed to run out of steam by the end. The plot was a little basic to carry it. I think it might make a good film, as long as they don't cast Tom Hanks.
ReplyDeleteThat last is an idea that could go even worse if he attempted it in his The Terminal accent. Cinematic adaptation is an interesting idea - reckon it might be a challenging one to film, wondering exactly how the special effects dept might try to display "crosshatched cities", let alone how it could generally be presented in a way that the average viewer would 'get'. For some reason I'm getting visions of 'A Scanner Darkly' - a world of weird rotoscoped wiggly lines and moments of blurring and refocussing...
ReplyDeleteI think that the fact that Mieville's my favourite Fantasy author, and indeed one of my favourite authors full stop, meant that I viewed TC&TC from quite a skewed viewpoint, on hand giving it leeway simply because of who its author was and on the other being critical simply because it wasn't the kind of novel that made him a favourite author in the first place. I gave it a chance and really did try to enjoy it - think it just never had a chance of hitting me in the same way Perdido did in my late teens, and that book's cast a very long shadow.