Yes, it's not quite the end of the month, but seeing how a particularly hectic week is coming up, I thought why not just spend a bit of time reflecting on the past few weeks now :). I mean, it's a pretty arbitrary self imposed thing, this end of month blogging thing. So it does rather lend itself to arbitrarily ignoring it.
(The thing I'm actually rather more reluctant to let go of is posting at least once a month :P. And yes, that's translated into mostly posting on the last day of the month, but oh well :D.)
So anyway, what's been happening? Weather's being weird for one thing. The temperature, in very un-November like fashion went up almost into double digits °C. Then practically overnight it plunged below zero to the point where the local lakes froze over. Regular service seemed to have resumed, including a little sprinkling of snow. But then the temperatures have shot up again, along with a couple of days of nagging persistent rain :/.
Through all of that though, we've managed to keep up with the weekly running. And yoga! Running and yoga is actually a pretty good combination. Particularly given that one of the main aims of the whole things to to maintain/improve mobility. At a couple of months, I'm starting to think it might be OK to start calling this a habit :).
And all the while the hours of daylight are dwindling. Although, I think I'm still riding the high of the Budapest trip, which has helped no end :). That was not quite a month ago, and the Christmas holidays are not quite a month away either :).
In the mean time, Asimov has definitely been a different pace compared to the stuff I'd been reading recently. Once I got over the old-worldyness of The Caves of Steel, it didn't take long to get through it. I mean, it's a pretty short book. It was a pretty similar story with The Naked Sun. A quick read, yet thought provoking.
Another thing I'd rather forgotten about the Robot novels is that they are essentially detective stories! Which I thought made things rather fun! Particularly because beyond the very vague framework of the stories, I remembered practically nothing :).
Partway through The Robots of Dawn I started thinking, maybe I should have left this for a little bit later on. You see, either because I knew it was written thirty odd years later or because it actually does have a noticeably different feel to it, it felt like a fair bit of a departure from the rather short and simple detective story. Which is not to say it's not a detective story :). Just a somewhat more convoluted one.
I obviously should have considered that before starting TRoD, as it is, there's very little sense in not finishing off the Robots with Robots and Empire and then tackle the Foundation series in publication order. Pretty certain of that.
But first, there's a book club book to read. And The Covenant of Water is rather a tome. Which is why we're reading it over two months instead of the usual one. I'm hoping it wont take me that long, but it's not a book I'm finding easy to read great stretches of in one go. Not because it's anything short of amazing! Just that there's a lot layered in.
I'll risk giving some things away, so proceed with care. Although I've only just gotten a few chapters into part two so far, so there may not be that much to give away. I have to say the Glasgow bit completely threw me! I mean, it was only one chapter, but up until then the tone in which I was reading the book was completely centred on Big Ammachi. Although I'm currently still struggling to see her as big.
I'm also curious as to how omniscient the voice actually is. I mean, it reads like third person omniscient, but things are not always what they seem. (I'm looking at you Steven Erikson!) The occasional matter of fact presentation of facts from the future does make me lean somewhat away from scepticism.
I'm reminded of a critic of Asimov's I came across, who said something to the effect that Asimov is so direct in his storytelling that there's not too much left to interpretation. Of course, that's not to say there's not a lot one could read in, that's the fun part of reading anything after all, one brings oneself in.. Anyway, Varghese's writing feels a little like that. And just in the same way, while things are put forward rather simply, that is not to say there is not a lot going on that is only revealed a little bit at a time.
Descriptions of death are almost detached. Which does nothing to absorb the shock.
I'm rather looking forward to finding out more. And also to taking my time over it :).
