So, I'm reading
The Best and the Brightest right now and finding it really hard going. Something about all of David Halberstam's terse, declarative sentences makes me feel distanced from the book, and so I'm taking it a chapter at a time. And to give myself a break last night, I turned to Naomi Novik's
His Majesty's Dragon, which I downloaded onto my Kindle because they were offering it for free, like the gateway drug it is. And I cannot put the damn thing down; I read two thirds of it in two hours on a night when I promised myself I was going to sleep early. Could someone please write a revisionist history of Vietnam that involves dragons? I would read that in a
heartbeat. (Although, too soon? Probably.)
I'm going to have more to say about the mashup of medievalism, Regency manners and the Napoleonic wars as soon as I finish this first book in the series, but I'm very entertained so far. If the hipsters and nerds who are picking up
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters get wind of this, it's all over. I do not understand how
Julia Quinn,
Patrick O'Brian, and
Anne McCaffrey have not gotten together at a bar somewhere and figured out how to make themselves an
empire.
