(urth) Jeff VanderMeer

[Robert Thornton]

I am in mid-Finch and right now I agree with Jordan for somewhat different reasons. As I read Finch, Ambergris seems pretty dreary and doesn't fascinate me as it did in the other books.

Rob

On May 14, 2010, at 8:24 PM, Jordon Flato wrote:

> Huh...I found it to be the most compelling of the three.  I found FINCH to be the most underwhelming, mostly because if felt like a well written China Meiville story:  nice and pretty but with not as much, what, soul? to it?
> 
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:12 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I know this isn't the place for Vandermeer discussion...but for those interested, I'd have to say that _Shriek_ is the least successful of Vandermeer's three Ambergris novels. The premise is a blast (a missing brother has left behind a book, found by his sister, who decides to write an afterward to it explaining their lives...but the sister is now missing and the brother has found the book and is now commenting on her afterward by inserting notes as she tells it). But the execution becomes bogged down a bit halfway through once we basically know the whole story. And the character examination to me became a bit repetitive rather than illuminating at the same point.
> 
> The book that introduces the city of Ambergris, _City of Saints and Madmen_, though would I think be plenty interesting to Wolfe (and Crowley) fans for its variety of styles/mysteries/histories/wonders.
> 
> 
> From: Mike Myers <mimyerspdt at yahoo.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Wed, May 12, 2010 7:49:25 AM
> Subject: Re: (urth) Jeff VanderMeer
> 
> Shriek is a great book, one of my all time favorites. 
> 
> --- On Tue, 5/11/10, JBarach at aol.com <JBarach at aol.com> wrote:
> 
> From: JBarach at aol.com <JBarach at aol.com>
> Subject: (urth) Jeff VanderMeer
> To: urth at lists.urth.net
> Date: Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 3:32 PM
> 
> URTHers --
>  
> I glanced at a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's recent novel, Shriek -- An Afterword, and discovered that it has a blurb by Gene Wolfe:
>  
> "Here is a desert island book, a tale you can lose yourself in for days, a novel of character in which the setting -- the magnificently gritty city-state named Ambergris -- proves as the light fails to be the finest character of all."
>  
> http://www.amazon.com/Shriek-Afterword-Jeff-VanderMeer/dp/0765314665
>  
> I wish someone were keeping track of all the books Wolfe has blurbed....
>  
> John
>  
>  
> 
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