Gear Shift

While adapting to a new daily schedule and the demands of a new job, I necessarily had to limit my ambition of being able to read 600-plus page tomes in a week.

So for now, the book I was planning to read; Kushiel's Legacy, with its relatively high page count and its daunting first person perspective, a perspective which I've never been fond of anyway, is off the table in order to make room for the shorter books which have already started stacking up again (and they're making the shelves creak ominously).

The TBR-shelf.
Stare in horror, or excitement
(depends on how you're inclined, really).

Anyway, I was looking for shorter books that were bound to be worth it. And looking at my shelves something quickly stood out.

Enter the Fantasy Masterworks; a series of books, by publisher Gollancz, collecting some of the greatest, sweeping, most ground-breaking and beautiful fantasy books ever written. including some less widely read fantasy novels that shouldn't have slipped through the cracks, but have and were/are in this series reissued in a new coat, award winners and books with quite a large influence on the fiction that came after it, genre or otherwise. Everything from Dunsany's beautiful fairy tales to Moorcock's multiverse, Robert E. Howard's sword and sorcery and George R.R. Martin's mississipi fever dream, the list goes on and on and all of it's quite good (I can only comment on the ones I've read, and sadly that's far less of them than I'd like. Except that Aegypt one, I didn't really get what this one was doing and that probably is my fault. But why issue only the first book in a quartet that needs to stand together to be understood anyway? Damnit gollancz!!!)

Either way, though I had recently purchased a pretty big haul of the new Fantasy Masterworks I kept looking guiltily at a book that had been eyeing me for several years now, and vice versa.
The Old Fantasy Masterworks edition of the Riddle Master of Hed, by Patricia A. Mckillip, now with a new cover in the new editions.

I've tried to read it several times over the years but there's some weird thing going on where I just can't bring myself to even read a single page. I loan the book out, or I just suddenly find my interests switched around and no matter what happens; in the end I always put it back on its shelf.

So now, trying to go for a compromise I looked at the Fantasy Masterworks list and found 2 more of her books between its titles. Reading the blurb of the one with the pretty cover I was quickly persuaded to give that one a go.

As is usual for the Masterworks; I did not regret it.

Next up; a review for Ombria in Shadow.