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threemonkeysI get stubborn when reading a book. It is rare for me to stop reading a book completely although I have become better at it over the years. In this context, the worst type of book is the fat volume that is just interesting enough to persevere with but not so fascinating that I get stuck in and read it in big chinks. Such books are easy to put down and hard to pick up, so they take ages to read. As a result I lose the rhythm and habit of reading and spend more time watching DVDs or reading my flist or whatever.
One such book is The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I hadn't intended to read it - Robinson has never given me a satisfactory reading experience. I still regard In Memory of Whiteness as one of the worst SF books ever and the first of the Mars books was so boring that I didn't read the others. But Rice & Salt kept getting good reviews and personal recommendations so my defences were broken down.
The thing is, there is a lot of good stuff in this book - a 1400 year (alternate) history told by a series of reincarnated characters in the Buddhist manner. The research and development effort for this history is remarkable - it sets out a detailed and plausible planetary history which might have arisen if the plague had completely wiped our Europe. The thing is, he forgot to make the characters and their stories interesting. The history was what kept me reading but to make a better book, some of it should have been left behind. If a writer does a whole bunch of research for a book, they become attached to it and cannot stand to leave it out even if it gets in the way of the story. I think this is a big part of what has happened here. The services of a good editor was probably required, but even then I'm not sure how all those flat characters could have been pumped up.
Comparison with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is inevitable given the similarities of intent and scale. The obvious difference is that Stephenson's characters were engaging enough to keep on pulling me through some poorly described (but interesting) historical stuff. I know many people struggled and gave up on Stephenson - some of them actually gave recommendations on Rice & Salt. Clearly tastes differ. However I do know that I will not be persuaded to read another Kim Stanley Robinson work. Life is too short.
One such book is The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I hadn't intended to read it - Robinson has never given me a satisfactory reading experience. I still regard In Memory of Whiteness as one of the worst SF books ever and the first of the Mars books was so boring that I didn't read the others. But Rice & Salt kept getting good reviews and personal recommendations so my defences were broken down.
The thing is, there is a lot of good stuff in this book - a 1400 year (alternate) history told by a series of reincarnated characters in the Buddhist manner. The research and development effort for this history is remarkable - it sets out a detailed and plausible planetary history which might have arisen if the plague had completely wiped our Europe. The thing is, he forgot to make the characters and their stories interesting. The history was what kept me reading but to make a better book, some of it should have been left behind. If a writer does a whole bunch of research for a book, they become attached to it and cannot stand to leave it out even if it gets in the way of the story. I think this is a big part of what has happened here. The services of a good editor was probably required, but even then I'm not sure how all those flat characters could have been pumped up.
Comparison with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is inevitable given the similarities of intent and scale. The obvious difference is that Stephenson's characters were engaging enough to keep on pulling me through some poorly described (but interesting) historical stuff. I know many people struggled and gave up on Stephenson - some of them actually gave recommendations on Rice & Salt. Clearly tastes differ. However I do know that I will not be persuaded to read another Kim Stanley Robinson work. Life is too short.