On My Son's Bookshelf

I didn't have to bring a book when I went to meet Honey Bunny.  Her daddy's library always has something I will enjoy.  I always let him choose.  He rarely steers me wrong.  

Ilium lived up to his over the top review as he handed me his well-read copy.  Mostly, he kept repeating you'll love it with the glint of recognition over our shared passions - those ancient Greeks and gods and goddesses whose stories we try our best to keep straight but the fact that they are pretty much all incestuously related to one another it's hard to tell where motherhood and sisterhood diverge.  

He did not lead me astray.

I was hooked by the end of the first page, a mashup of Homer's Iliad and Dan Simmons's interplanetary imagination, with paragraphs so dense that they took more than one reading to absorb.  I'm sure I missed many allusions, but I took great joy in the many I recognized.  The book can be enjoyed without a familiarity with the Trojan War and the Greek dramas, but the knowledge adds another layer entirely.

Actually reading it was another story entirely.

The print is small and the 700+ pages are bound together very tightly.  I was admonished not to break the spine of the book by its owner.  I respected his wish even though it made reading many sections a visual and digital nightmare.  My hands wanted to pull more so that my eyes could see all the words in the same beam of light.  Alas, that was not an option if the integrity of the spine was to be maintained.

But that's my only complaint.  The story starts at several nodes on the outer edge of a mystery which are gradually drawn into the center of a galaxy of sentient, organic, mechanic, nano-technologic, holographic, divine, and reconstituted beings.

Keeping it all straight became less of a challenge as I relaxed into the author's cadence, and began to trust the narrative. Like Homer reciting his tale to an audience without a scorecard to tell who the players are, Dan Simmons connects descriptors to his characters.  He repeats many of Homer's - the fleetfooted mankiller Achilles - and makes up his own - Daemon, pudgy seducer of women - and it's really helpful.

It was hard to grab long stretches of time when I was both awake and something other than the baby's inhales and exhales weren't capturing my attention.  I had a few hundred pages left when I packed to leave.  Big Cuter offered me the second and final volume of the series, warning me that Ilium ended in media res and I didn't want to be left dangling.  So, I accepted his offer and put this in my suitcase.

I finished Ilium and dove right into Olympos.  Or I tried to dive.  I was only able to dip a toenail or two into the story.  Maintaining the structural integrity of the binding required turning the entire book in order to finish reading a sentence.  Light did not penetrate the crevasse I was forced to create in order to preserve the pristine condition in which it was presented to me.  

I got to page 137 before I gave up.  It wasn't worth the effort.  My library system doesn't have access to a hard copy (with, presumably larger type and a binding that opens fully without cracking).  I'm considering following TBG's suggestion and downloading it on the Kindle App, or facing my aversion to audio books and listening to 900 pages of dense prose.

While I pondered my decision, I left fantasy/sci fi/historical fiction/the classics behind and escaped into the library's hardback, normal size font filled copy of Harlan Coben's I Will Find You.

It seemed like the easiest thing to do.