I just got a kindle for my birthday, and one of the things I'm most excited about is the availability of books that are hard to find -- among them, Lord Dunsany's short stories (all free!). So, to celebrate, I downloaded 4 of his books, and started with The Gods of Pegana.
It's less a collection of short stories than an outline for a mythology -- there's a theogony, a bunch of vignettes about human prophets, and an end-of-things. All in all, it wasn't really something I'd want to read more of, but I enjoyed the book. It probably helped that it's a relatively slim book at 104 pages, and none of the vignettes is more than a couple of pages long. It's also a sign of how much fantasy has changed -- I can't even imagine a book like this being published now.
Meanwhile, I listened to Stephen King's Needful Things on the iPod. It was a 3-for-2 deal, and I liked the other two very much, so I wasn't too upset that this book was only OK. The problem was that the antagonist is so powerful, that most of the novel is fairly predictable -- things are going to go in the worst possible way for everyone involved, that there isn't really a sense of suspense, just a cringing at what we know is coming.
Over the holiday, I finished reading Rankin's Naming of the Dead, the second-to-last Rebus novel. The mystery was no great shakes -- the ending was almost anti-climactic. But it was one of my favorite Rebus novels, anyway. It had such a feeling of place, and such a strong sense of what drives Rebus, that these things overcame the weakness of the central plot.
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