the year of our war
Normally when I’m engrossed in non-fiction literature for the current course I’m taking at the Big U, I can’t really read novels. It becomes too much, so I usually take the route to relax with comics—this would explain the sudden boom in things I’ve bought in this form (Battle Pope, Kabuki, Bastard Samurai, Parliament of Justice, Dark Days, Aria, Promethea—you should read them all). But today I skipped over the huge tome of Neal Stepenson’s the Confusion and dived into the far slimmer the Year of Our War by Steph Swainston. It was a good choice after a fashion.
I soon had to put it far away from me, as otherwise I wouldn’t have had time to do the thing for the course tomorrow. The first page felt like… I don’t know. But it’s good. Really good. I understand why China Miéville raved about it before. And I can’t read it now, instead I have to sit here and write about second language learning—while interesting, it doesn’t come close to the prose of ms Swainston.
