This week's reading

Also started the Gene Wolfe collection Latro in the Mist, which collects Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete, both from the 80s. I'm a huge fan of Wolfe's New Sun and Knight-Wizard novels, so I was excited to run across these books, which translate the writings of a Roman mercenary in ancient Greece who loses his short-term memory every night and must continuously re-read and update his diary scrolls in order to have any sense of what is happening to and around him. You'd think that this device would get old quickly, but Wolfe pulls it off like no-one else could. Sometimes when you read Wolfe you get confused, because he leaves things out of the narrative, making it hard to understand how the story gets from point A to point B, and he often refers to things that happened in the story's chronology but weren't actually written about, but I've found that you can trust him to eventually give you enough pieces of the puzzle to eventually discover how everything fits together. That's part of the fun of reading him. He's the Mamet of the sci-fi/fantasy world.