honey and sting

I took 4 books with me to Sweden. Finished the first on the plane (the latest Laurell Hamilton... I know, I know... but, I came this far?). The second, another supernatural genre fic, was okay as airplane and need-to-get-sleepy-before-bed reading. The third, which I saved to savor at vacation's slower pace, was Really Good -- Time's Child, by Rebecca Ore. It's science fiction of a somewhat literary or post-modern cast (not so much as to make it difficult to read, just enough to make one aware of a heightened style such that the storytelling itself is an element of the story). It takes place in a future world a few centuries on, post population crash due to "the plagues", in which human culture is recovering in the form of city-states. Philadelphia has been gifted by an anonymous and distant future with a time machine, by which they are secretly retrieving people from the past to study them. Benedetta, a Lombardian artillery man's wife (who goes to war with him, and visits Leonardo da Vinci when they are at home) brings an unexpected intelligence and energy, immediately seeing through the time team's conconcted tale of purgatory and angels (the angel talking to her has a scab on his knuckle). Eventually she, a young Viking man named Ivar, and a 21st century computer troll named Jonas give "now time" society a good deal more than they were expecting. The novel is a meditation on the nature of the future and how we contruct it with our choices, even our thoughts. The characters are well delinated as mix of "type" and individual, both tied to their cultures and times of origin, and free to learn and choose.

I've liked all of Ore's novels, but perhaps this one the best. Go here http://www.galactium.com/books_TimesChild.html for some more reviews.

The last of the four books I took with me, Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain, is gorgeously written. Like Cold Mountain, language almost trumps everything else, but what language it is... an invitation to luxuriate in the sensual worlds evoked by words. This book, a fictional memoir of a man who was orphaned at 12 and sent out by his relatives to work an indentured service as a manager of an Indian trading post, meanders into all the nooks and crannies of memory. I'm not sure where it's going, and it will probably take a long while to get there. More later, sometime down the line. Ah, vacation reading...