RC 1 & 2

Date: 27 January 2009 22:22:36

Last year I really enjoyed reading Auntie Doris's posts detailing the books she was reading. Although I probably won't manage to keep tabs on it as well as she did, I'm going to have a go for a couple of months and see how it works out.

In case you were wondering, I won't be detailing all the books I read for essays, dissertation and New Testament Greek; maybe just the really interesting ones. These are novels and other books I read for fun, you know, in all that free time I have.

RC1 Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldon

This was actually read between Christmas and New Year. The book is a collection of 3 short stories (although for Diana short is a relative concept), 2 of which I had read before. The new one, Lord John and the Haunted Soldier is set in 18th century London and, like all the Lord John stories, involves investigation into sinister happenings among the military/civil service. Here the focus of the investigation is the outcome of a battle on the continent and in particular the malfunction of a gun. Lord John is up before a tribunal and things are never as simple as they seem.

I rather wallowed in this on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, taking advantage of Rusk being in his own room and so being able to read before sleeping. I have to confess that I don't now remember very much, except that it was as interesting and gripping as Diana Gabaldon's books usually are.

RC2 Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead

I blogged a while ago about my love for Arthurian stories. This is the first of a series I read when I was about 14 and I had been wanting to read again for a while. I picked up copies of the first and third books in a charity shop just before Christmas and now discover, looking on Amazon, that there are 5 books in the series. Hurrah! I only read the first 3.

Taliesin weaves 2 stories together: the fall of Atlantis and the waning power of Rome in mid-Wales. One thing I had completely overlooked at the time I first read them is how overtly Christian they are. The Christian theme only appears towards the end of the first book. It will be interesting to see how it pans out. Anyway, that aside, I really enjoyed reading it. The stories are very well placed together, with neither strand dominating. Each set of characters has a great world created around them. I have a particular soft spot for that part of Wales, so seeing it described so many hundred of years ago was lovely. I'm not sure the Atlantis that Lawhead creates is as lovely as Tolkien's Numinor (have I remembered that right?), but it was convincing.

Right, I can't blog RC3 until I finish reading it. Just a few more pages. Also I need to get my knitting together for tomorrow. I'm going on a quiet day so I should be able to finish a sock.