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arbieroo

Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.

Currently reading

Station Zero
Philip Reeve
Progress: 220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Vess
Progress: 749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Robert Chandler
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Patrick O'Brian
Progress: 8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Marguerite de Navarre
Progress: 152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
John Masefield
Progress: 78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Progress: 4/50 pages
Selected Poems
U A Fanthorpe
Progress: 18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Mick Imlah, Robert Crawford
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Ursula K. Le Guin
Progress: 133/789 pages
The Metatemporal Detective - Michael Moorcock This collection of short fictions consists of pastiches of several genres woven into the framework of Moorcock's gargantuan Eternal Champion "series". They are competent enough except that the detective story elements are not well done, being too predictable. The other problem is that the whole Law vs. Chaos/Eternal Champion/Cosmic Balance/Multiverse thing is now so overdone as to be boring. Unless you haven't read much Moorcock, of course.

Some of the earlier Eternal Champion sagas contained more or less cryptic satires of Britain and Europe and the USA. Here we have blatant Nazi and IRA bashing. Easy targets. The former may be part of the homage to the pulp fiction era where cartoon Nazis featured as bad guys, in a similar way to Inglourious Basterds' homage to a certain era of WWII adventure movies.

I get the feeling that Moorcock has been able to turn out material like this in his sleep for two or three decades...