Books

My latest read was Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh, the final book in the Ibis trilogy. I discovered it here. (You really should go read that. It's a much better review than mine will be.)

The Ibis trilogy is set in the first half of the 19th century in India and China and is about people involved in and affected by the opium trade. It's a fascinating, rich, epic story and I highly recommend it. Since the author is Indian you might imagine that the British are the bad guys in this story and, on the whole, they are but on an individual level it's well balanced. The characters on all sides are realistic and well developed and the story highly complex and, though it's serious overall, there is subtle humor throughout.

The first two books in the trilogy, which must be read in order, are Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke.

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I am ready to get back to science fiction for a while. I have started Neal Asher's Hilldiggers and have two more new Neal Asher books waiting: Dark Intelligence and War Factory. On the other hand, after reading this article, The Many Bad Moms of Charles Dickens I was suddenly possessed by a desire to read Bleak House immediately. I'll go ahead and download it but my history of trying to read two books at the same time is not good. I always end up neglecting one or the other. In fact, I have a couple of books on my Kindle that I never got around to finishing for this reason.

So... lots of reading to be done and there's also sewing and my house desperately needs cleaning but I'll try to not neglect this blog quite as much as I have been recently.