Recently having decided to switch, at least for a while, from my previous habit of picking a random book to read, and instead reading them in roughly the order in which they got them, I have lately been picking up* books that I acquired way back in the halcyon days of 2015. The one I’m reading this week is The Branches of Time, by Luca Rossi.
I literally just started the book, with opens with a wedding which is being held, for some reason, outdoors in freezing temperatures during a snowstorm, and which quickly gets interrupted by much a nastier form of precipitation.
All of a sudden a mass of dark shapes darted through the snowflakes. The priest stopped in mid-sentence. Bashinoir watched him waver and then fall backwards, his forehead split open by a sharp shard of stone. A shower of razor-sharp pieces of rock hammered down over the guests.
This is what we might refer to as a “hard rain”, although not, of course, as hard as the “hard rain” from Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, in which the moon explodes for no apparent reason and eventually blankets the Earth in a shower of fragments that would definitely bust up Bashinoir’s wedding party, and then some.
One thing I’ve noticed since going back to the books I picked up in 2015 is that they seem to have a general lack of, uh, let’s say, quality writing. I can’t say that I have particularly great hopes for this one either, but according to the book description, it was voted to be top notch in various interestingly specific Goodreads categories.
I kind of have my doubts about some of those categories, but, okay, why not.
Meanwhile, editing continues on Father’s Books, which would definitely be voted to #1 in the Goodreads category “Books Set in the 1990s where One Character Drives a Convertible with Fuzzy Dice and Earwigs are Mentioned and Somebody Doesn’t Get to Ride in a Cop Car and Run the Siren and the Flashy Lights”.
Tony came into the lobby as Richard was looking in his wallet, making sure everything was still there. “Quit counting your filthy lucre and let’s go,” he said. “I’m parked in an ambulance zone.”
Richard looked up. “Art said he would drive me. He wanted to talk.”
“He had to leave in a hurry. Apparently something came up. But hey, if you’d rather wait for a ride in a cop car, that’s cool. Maybe they’ll let you run the siren and the flashy lights.”
*By “picking up” I of course mean “reading”; as I have all my unread books stored on my eReader, technically, I always pick them all up at the same time.
Viscosity 