Kage Baker... finally

[cahn]

Raced through In the Garden of Iden. This is, I feel, mostly the fault of joyce, with a liberal helping of ase. Well, I did like it quite a lot, and I'll definitely be picking up the rest of the series. Mendoza is a lot of fun!

It spoke directly to a lot of things that make me happy. I like snark. I also like examining paradoxes of time travel, sometimes (though it didn't work for me in Time Traveler's Wife... mostly because there was less examination and more resignation, I suspect) (Heroes, though I love Hiro, is driving me crazy right now-- I'm mostly through season 1-- what with the traveling blithely through time without examining it at ALL). I really, really like HenryVIII/Mary/Elizabeth-an England. Really. I really like thoughtful examination of religion. (Obviously given my background I prefer positive thoughtful examination, but negative is okay too as long as it's thoughtful and nominally balanced, which I thought this was.)

What was up with Mendoza saying in the first chapter that the Company recruited people in the appropriate times so that they would be acclimatized to the time... and then proceeding to whine about not being acclimatized to the food, people, lack of showers, etc. the entire rest of the book? That kind of distracted me, especially since as far as I can tell she's supposed to be a reliable narrator. Also, the fact that she spoke in twentieth-century, like, slang, most of the time also distracted me, as I found it sort of unbelievable-- I'd expect her natural voice to be either sixteenth century, twenty-fourth century, or some more timeless "literary" voice in between (that is, I reckon literary writing style hasn't changed nearly as much in the last 200 years as colloquial speaking has).

I realized, too, that it took me so long to pick them up because this book is impossible to describe-- D was like, what are you reading? and I was all, "Time-traveling cyborgs!... No, wait! it's not like it sounds..."

Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

So, how evil would it be to skip the third book and come back to it later? I think the library has all the rest. Oh gosh, I hope this doesn't mean someone else is reading them in order and that I have to be bound by their schedule.

I must confess that I skimmed some of the Coyote sections to get to the juicy flashback bits, which I'm liking quite a bit better.

[joyce.livejournal.com]

Sorry, you need to read the third one in order. :) I'm a completist, but I'm not just saying that... you find out some stuff about Mendoza that becomes important later on, you meet someone who becomes Very Important later, and important things happen to Mendoza.