Got sick, read a book. Clockwork Angels review. Sort of.

I don’t get sick, so if I do, it’s a big deal. Now, I have a normally high pain threshold, but it seems when you throw in a bunch of random, irritating symptoms at once, like in a bad cold, I turn into a dramatic little girl. I guess when it comes to getting ill, I prefer the interval training method over the month-long low-grade symptoms a lot of people get. I literally feel like I’m dying for 2 days and feel fine thereafter. Usually.

I mean, normally I’d welcome an excuse to mainline Nyquil, but it gets a bit ridiculous when a good dose of ativan doesn’t even help you sleep.

The reason this is extra dumb is that in 4 days I’m going to be in Cuba. I know I’ve never left the continent and might not have any say in the matter, but I don’t know how great it is to enter a third-world country already diseased.

Anyway, the nice thing about having extra time but no motivation due to feeling like a bag of asses is that I finally finished reading Clockwork Angels. I find it hard to review books now that I’m on the other end of them.

All I can really do is write about it from the perspective of a Rush fan. I’m not sure if someone who had never heard of the band would be as into it as I was. The writing is great and the pacing perfect for what it is. Hardcore nerds seem to trash Kevin J. Anderson in the way people trash anyone who has a lot of commercial output, but obviously the man is a great writer and can crank out a smoothly-reading story easily. On the other hand, I’m not totally sure where the conflict really came from, or if there were sufficient amounts. I realize that in a “boy decides to leave home and have adventure for the sake of adventure” type story, there isn’t as much of an expectation of devious plot twists and cliffhangers and so on. For me, as a writer, whims are sketchy to use as motivation for the initial incident that gets a story moving. Now, that was part of the point of the book, so that’s not really a criticism. I actually liked the character of the Watchmaker and it would have been neat to focus more on that source of conflict than in painting  Owen’s kind-of-pointless journey in broad strokes.

Actually, The Watchmaker reminds me a lot of the antagonist in Blightcross. Just sayin’.

I think any of these issues I had with it are nullified by the statement at the beginning that the character’s stories “aren’t for everyone,” which we’re reminded of a few more times. So maybe the character or the writer or somebody is aware that adventure stories with no central conflict aren’t exactly everyone’s thing. And when I get a feeling that aspects I don’t like about something are at least intentional, they don’t bother me anymore.

At first I thought it was awesome how the text was peppered with bits of Rush lyrics. At some point it started to feel forced. But then again, I am a Rush freak. I literally listen to it every single day at some point. I doubt anyone else would notice. It was neat to constantly be hunting for obscure bits of lyrics in the story. Not just lyrics from the album, but ones from all their work.

Also this book came with illustrations, which were very cool.

So besides being an easy, good read, Clockwork Angels totally suceeds in blending a novel with a prog rock album. That was something I’ve wanted to do since as far back as I can remember, and it’s really cool to see someone, never mind the best band in the world and one of the most prolific SF/F authors out there, pull off.

I still feel like a bag of asses though. Bleh.