More easy reads for the middle of the night

High Lord by Trudi Canavan

I have reached the end of the Black Magician trilogy! Finally I have closure and Trudgy Caravan and I can go our separate ways! In this final instalment it turns out (rather disappointingly) that the High Lord is not in fact evil. He has been practising black magic but only because it was necessary to protect the kingdom from a bunch of evil, foreign magicians. Sonea choses to help him, but they are caught practising black magic and drummed out of the guild leaving the country undefended with evil magicians marching towards it...

Tithe by Holly Black

Now this was good fun! 16 year old Kaye Fierch was able to see fairies as a little girl. When her mother's latest relationship breaks down they move back to the town she grew up in. The fairies are still there but now they seem to be involved in very adult machinations...

Escardy Gap - Peter Crowther and James Lovegrove

Basically this book is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury rewritten in the style of Stephen King with added postmodern wankery of an author trying to write a horor novel as the wraparound story. The sad thing is that I read it from cover to cover, more fool me! Going to try to ebay it to buy stuff for Tiny Daughter...

The Eclipse of the Century by Jan Mark

When 20 year old student Keith Chapman is involved in a car crash he has a near death experience, but rather than seeing a vision of heaven and speaking to his dead relatives he sees a town square and hears a woman's voice telling him that they will meet again in Qantoum, under a black sun at the end of a thousand years. Keith does some research and discovers that Qantoum is a real place; a town which sprang up round an oasis on the silk road it has been conquered by Alexander the Great,the mongols and Russia but with the collapse of the Soviet Union it is now in a disputed territory on the boader of Tajikistan. He determins to visit to see whether it is anything like his vision. Years of fighting have left Qantoum a wreck without power and miles from any kind of authority. It has two distinct populations: the Sturyat, descendants of a tribe of nomads who settled there a thousand years ago and a motley collection of westerners living in and around the town museum. Feeling very pleased with his own political correctness, Keith moves in with the natives, but are they Sturyat as peaceful as they first appear? Why is everyone who crosses them "taken by the sand" and is there any truth to their bizzare assertion that their race comes from space and will be heading back there soon?

I really enjoyed this book; once again there was an upside to being hauled out of my lovely bed! My favourite character was the phlegmatic Russian Lt Kije. I can still see the image of him that built up in my head, sardonic, unshaven and with a filthy Russian cigarette on the go (the text never really describes him, this is just how I think he ought to look).

Mumming down

Well, my pregnancy ended on the 16th Feb and I am now the slightly shell-shocked co-owner of a tiny daughter.

I read the following books whilst pregnant but didn't manage to finish blog entries for them:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahunik

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Robin Ince's Bad Book Club

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennet

Day Watch by Sergei Lukyaneko

Perhaps I will get round to finishing some of these. Maybe when daughter is 18.

Anyway, what with the horrific lack of sleep it was 4 weeks after the birth before I could concentrate enough to read anything at all and I can only manage very easy books. That's right, I'm back on the Trudi Canavan, or Trudgy Caravan as my friend Jules calls her.

I've just finished "The Novice", the sequel to Magicians' Guild. In this book Sonea (the street urchin with magical powers) starts her training in magic. Unfortunately, the other novices don't want to share lessons with a guttersnipe and Sonea becomes the victim of endless magical bullying. When it becomes clear how strong a magician Sonea is, her training is taken over by the sinister High Lord which causes as many problems as it solves.

My main criticism is that Sonea's cheif tormentor amoung the novices, Regin, is not a fully realised character and just seems to be malice on legs. Despite this I can't wait to read the final book and find out what the High Lord of the magicians' guild is up to! 

Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

Just look at that correctly placed apostrophe! Surely we are in the hands of a master here? At least compared to reading "Shadowmancer"...

I've now graduated from children's books to blandly generic fantasy for young adults. Magicians' Guild takes place in a standard-issue Fantasyland city complete with guilds for magicians, theives and probably assassins. In this irony-free Ankh-Morpork lives Sonea, a streetwise teen from the slums who discovers she has magical powers. The titular (f'nar, f'nar! Titular!) guild of magicians must then track her down and persuade her to join them before she accidentally destroys the whole city.

The charm of Magicians' Guild is that despite being a long way from either imaginative or literature, it is never so badly-written that is gives you "the bump" and startles you awake wondering why you've been spending your time on such rubbish. Like all the best "dragon crack" it is very easy to start and very hard to stop. It also follows fantasy conventions exactly by being part of a trilogy. Bugger. Now I need two more books in order to find out whether the snooty magicians will ever really accept a commoner. And what about the Lord High Chief Magician bloke who is a thoroughly Bad Egg? I can see a trip to the Read and Return* bookshop in my future!

Let's hope I hurry up and have this baby before I end up regressing all the way back to Eddings and Gemmel.

*To my alarm, Exeter's read and return has a prodigious collection of erotica. While I am happy to purchase pre-loved books along the lines of "The House Plants of Gor" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Picks his Nose", I'm a bit chairy of second-hand porn!