So last night I went to the library to pick up a book I had placed on hold, one that Henry at
Crooked Timber had
described as "a brooding, post-Mievillian fantasy set in a decaying city of uncertain extent and boundaries, with a keen ear for politics, character and language." Sounds like just my type of thing, and since it was
Crooked Timber (by way of Andrew) that introduced me to China Miéville in the first place, I took the recommendation to heart.
The point of his post was musing on how the "cover...suggest[ed] a generic quest fantasy of the more or less inept and badly plotted variety" and didn't do the book justice, but that in no way prepared me for what said cover would actually look like.
Bear in mind that I had to retrieve this from the hold shelf and then take it up and hand it to a real-life librarian to check it out. There were little kids there. I'm lucky they didn't call the police:
2 comments:
Can you tell me which aisle the scented candles are in?
Also, we're post-Mievillian now? I'm hardly even Mievillian yet! Dude needs to share some audiobooks so I can up-catch.
I keep imagining the artist's internal monologue: "now what's it missing...I've got the bare feet, the shimmering rainbow silk blouse, the gleaming golden dagger, the ponytail, the flying balloon ship...oh of course, a DOVE!"
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