Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Back from the xmas parties

Happy New Year and all that jazz. I'm not feeling very well at this moment - strongly getting sick with flu and so tired I'm afraid I'll die any minute -, but I'll have to start working tomorrow. Maybe I'll start with reading something I didn't have enough time to finish during the holidays. This Christmas wasn't very good for reading. I barely managed Mika Waltari's late 1920's novella Fine Van Brooklyn (which was pretty good, it almost takes a turn after which it would've been a nice Lovecraftian horror story) and started Waltari's The Egyptian. (Which I think seems to be a bit overrated - it's wildly overwritten and pointlessly rhetorical in scenes that would play better with understatement. But more on that later, and also on Waltari.)

Oh, I also read J. Pekka Mäkelä's Nedut which is a new Finnish science fiction novel. It has a nice premise (Neanderthals come back from outer space to the modern day world), but writing is wooden and characters are overwritten. I very much marvelled the fact that Mäkelä's novel has had so much praise from the Finnish critics.

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