The author, Thomas Wheeler, is a screenwriter by trade, and boy does it show. A trivial example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes a ship to America in order to meet with H.P. Lovecraft. The chapter starting on his arrival is headed, yes in all caps, “TWO WEEKS LATER”. Now, this is something you have to do in a movie, where there’s no really good way to explain the scene shift unless you’re using a narrator. Same for the hero looking through the notebooks of a dead magician, and finding the kind of mysterious expository scribblings that, in a movie  are there to show the viewer what’s going on. In a book it’s ridiculous and reminds you that, yes, somebody is probably tilting this thing to be made into a movie.

Add in wooden dialogue, a frankly embarrassing portrayal of the lone female protagonist as a lonely sexpot, and a leaden Evil Conspiracy Opposed By A Good Conspiracy, and you’ll understand why I quit halfway through.

Ōoku takes place in an alternate-history Japan where a plague that affects only men has wiped out a large chunk of the male population, so that the ratio of females to males is something like 4:1. Partly out of sheer numbers and partly to protect men (for example, from injury or accidental death) most jobs are done by women, including holding political position. The actual Ōoku of the title is the shogun’s harem, the shogun, of course, being a woman; and in a world where most women will never marry and have children by paying men to impregnate them, a harem is perhaps the ultimate “conspicuous consumption” and expression of the shogun’s power.

Really one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while.

Naturally we all made like he was a piñata, but in retrospect, perhaps I was too hasty.  I woke up at about 2 a.m. today to discover that I have totally jacked my neck and my left arm from the shoulder to the elbow*, so with the help of a lot of ibuprofen I can manage to do things that don’t require me to raise my arms or carry anything over a couple of pounds in my left hand. In other words, I’m in fine shape to sit propped up in bed with a laptop and type. This means I am actually getting a little writing done, when the painkillers are working.

So, suffering = Art. When do I get my six-figure advance?

*No, I have no idea how I did this. No, it didn’t keep the kitten from purring directly into my ear like a buzzsaw and demanding to be petted. At two in the morning.

Miéville, darn him and his talent, has written a police procedural, set in a city that lies alongside another city. Beszel and Ul Qoma are interlinked in places, sometimes even overlap, but they are separate nations – calls between them are mentioned as “international calls” – and the separation is enforced by Breach. Crossing over, or even perceiving, the “topolganger” city next door invites terrible punishment, and the citizens of both cities have developed an entire, almost subconscious culture of mannerisms, dress, colors and styles to tip the other off to “unsee” or “unhear” what is going on next door.

And he does this while hitting on many of the familiar tropes of police procedurals: a body found in a park, a police inspector pushing an investigation past mysterious and sudden bureacratic resistance, traveling to another country to team up with his foreign counterpart, and even a (rather pulse-pounding, actually) chase scene – which are all different, and fresh, because of the way they intersect with the separate doppelcities.

Highly recommended.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.