Random book recommendation
Sep. 7th, 2006 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleI've just started reading China Mieville's The Scar, and it's utterly brilliant. It's like all the grime and weird and fantastic immersive perverse worldbuilding stuff of Perdido Street Station, except with pirates. And the plot seems to start in a lot sooner. So far, I'm only about eight chapters in and already there's been inter-city intrigue, pirates, a monster, monster hunters, disgraced nuns, a secret project sure to go Horribly Wrong, and the liberation of the Remade. Very exciting. Also, very er... gritty. Which I like.
And which is a horrid contrast with the annotations. You see, there are many things in my life which I prefer to buy used, and books are certainly one of them. So I was pleased to pick up The Scar in trade paperback at the local Half-Price Books. And usually HPB is pretty good about checking the condition of the books, so I didn't really look that hard at it before buying it. As it turns out, the person who owned it before me was perhaps a thirteen-year-old girl, who didn't understand a lot of the big words, and so set to making notes about what they meant in sparkly purple and turquoise pen, mostly, but not always, in the margin. This would be okay (after all, it's not as if I've never made notes in a book), except that the notes she's made about the words and events in the text are almost completely incorrect. She seems to have chosen definitions to note based on which was the shortest, rather than which was most accurate in context, so that it's evident that in large blocks of the text, she's constructing sentences that don't make any damned sense. Also, next to gritty descriptions of the tortured scabby Remade prisoners who have had indignity upon indignity heaped upon them, there's happy bubbly sparkly handwriting. On the plus side, she seems to have given up somewhere around chapter five. I think it had something to do with looking up words she didn't understand in the sentence "Fuck off, Remade cunt!", but I can't be sure.
Also, I blame the book for some of the events in my dreams last night. Mieville seems to have a particular gift for sinking his weird hooks into my brain and not letting go.
And which is a horrid contrast with the annotations. You see, there are many things in my life which I prefer to buy used, and books are certainly one of them. So I was pleased to pick up The Scar in trade paperback at the local Half-Price Books. And usually HPB is pretty good about checking the condition of the books, so I didn't really look that hard at it before buying it. As it turns out, the person who owned it before me was perhaps a thirteen-year-old girl, who didn't understand a lot of the big words, and so set to making notes about what they meant in sparkly purple and turquoise pen, mostly, but not always, in the margin. This would be okay (after all, it's not as if I've never made notes in a book), except that the notes she's made about the words and events in the text are almost completely incorrect. She seems to have chosen definitions to note based on which was the shortest, rather than which was most accurate in context, so that it's evident that in large blocks of the text, she's constructing sentences that don't make any damned sense. Also, next to gritty descriptions of the tortured scabby Remade prisoners who have had indignity upon indignity heaped upon them, there's happy bubbly sparkly handwriting. On the plus side, she seems to have given up somewhere around chapter five. I think it had something to do with looking up words she didn't understand in the sentence "Fuck off, Remade cunt!", but I can't be sure.
Also, I blame the book for some of the events in my dreams last night. Mieville seems to have a particular gift for sinking his weird hooks into my brain and not letting go.
