I have been reading, still, but I've been blocking on writing for some reason. The first of the recent crop was Vikas Swarup's Q&A. It's a story of a poor Indian waiter who manages to win a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" style game show. Most of the story is an explanation of how he managed to win by explaining where he learned the answers to each of the questions in a series of flashbacks. I can't say it was a bad book, but it was lacking in a certain necessary something that a good reviewer would be able to articulate. It certainly didn't sugarcoat the brutality of poor India, but there was nonetheless an inappropriate dreamy naïeté about it. It was fairy-tale-ish in a vaguely "Forest Gump" sort of way that no doubt charmed some readers, but to me blunted its impact.
Under the name Iain M. Banks, he writes science fiction (including the excellent "Culture" novels). Under plain old Iain Banks, he writes more literary fiction, including the creepy and excellent The Wasp Factory. I read one of his newer books, The Business. Like Q&A, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good. It's again a simple story, that of a contemporary career woman at a bit of a crossroads in an ancient, secret merchantile business dating back to the Roman Empire. In that, it has much in common with Charles Stross's The Family Trade. Banks shows off some of his wit, and generally does a good job as a writer. It's as a plotter of stories that he falters. What happens over the course of the book just isn't very interesting.
That is not a comment that one could reasonably make about Felaheen, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's conclusion to his "Arabesk" trilogy, following Pashazade and Effendi. Again, we rejoin ZeeZee/Ashraf in an alternate future North Africa. For the first time, the story leaves Alexandria. Where the other two stories followed Ashraf uncovering the histories of others, in this final volume he discovers where he himself came from, mysteries that were hinted at but not elaborated on in the earlier books. Again, the story is interesting, the world fascinating, and the writing as excellent as before. Now that I've finished the trilogy, I can give it a strong endorsement.
Fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods will find themselves at home with his more recent Anansi Boys. Fat Charlie's always had things a little rough in his life, with an unpleasant job, a future mother-in-law-from-hell, and a painfully embarassing father. Things get worse when he meets the brother he never knew he had and learns his father was actually an incarnation of the African god Anansi. It's a good enough story, entertaining in many ways. It's not great, though, for reasons that I am again unable to articulate well. It's too breezy, in a lot of ways, which was probably intentional, but in my mind makes it less than the weightier American Gods.
The final book on my recent reading list is Judas Unchained, Peter F. Hamilton's sequel to his Pandora Star. Ignore the goofy titles and the silly cover art: these two books are great science fiction. Sure, Hamilton cheats by adding faster-than-light travel and force fields and other elements "hard SF" writers shun, but it doesn't matter. He manages to stitch together the disparate stories of many players in mankind's discovery of and war against a strange and alien enemy. In lesser hands (*cough* Robert Jordan *cough*), so many viewpoints would be confusing and annoying, but Hamilton is equal to it. His world is imaginative and interesting; he's clearly put a lot of thought into what things would be like in such a setting. That's not to say the books are without flaws, of which I'll mention a few. First, he has a bit of the horny teenaged boy in him. It's not overwhelming, but it's a little much. Another is his use of phrases like "he instructed his e-butler 1 to tell the car's drive array to take him home," instead of simply saying "he told the car to take him home." Once you've established that the character has such a software agent and cars drive themselves, skip the techno-babble. It would be like saying "he used his feet to walk up the stairs," or "he extended his arm, opened his hand, grasped the glass, and retraced his arm to bring the water to his mouth, where he ingested the liquid." Finally, I found the climax to be, well, anti-climactic. The story fizzled out a little towards the end. These flaws are minor, however. The books are excellent, though, and quite a deal, as Hamilton splits 1600+ pages of story over just 2 volumes where he could have easily turned out 5. I highly recommend reading them.