See my more detailed review on Amazon.

Though, I am not a member of the reading group (I am living in Germany), I am always reading the reviews of Johannes.

I’ve read “The Historian” in November/December, too. And I was surprised that it was the book of the months here.

What to say about? I liked it.

I liked the writing style and the suggestion that all what happened was real. Especially the historian way of looking for documents as like a historian would do research, the descriptions of the libraries and localities, the vivid atmosphere, the curiosity of the Historian (to whom this term may apply in this book – in fact, it would apply to anyone of the main characters),…

Okay, I am a Historian myself. And therefore I am not very sure – but very curious – how this book was received by non-Historians. Was it boring, or was it interesting and with a lot of suspense?

But in my eyes it was a great choice (though, it was very long to read within one month only *g*).

All best,
Kaineus.

While we’re at it, the name of the Vodyanoi is also borrowed from myth: “In Slavic mythology, vodyanoy is a male water spirit.”

But the book also has a problem: It is marketed as a novel which in my eyes it is not. You can tell that this is a collection of short stories rather early on. This is not in and of itself a problem, but as the book goes on it lacks a little bit the depth that you would expect of a novel. But a lot worse is the ending: The different stories hint every now and then at a hidden agenda of the Kéthani or some other kind of twist at the end. But there is no twist, no real explanation, nothing. Just a rather unsatisfying end. Unsatisfying especially because most of these hints occur in stories that were written rather late or even especially for the book in one case, when Eric Brown could have known that he didn’t intend to develop this into anything.

All in all this damages my view of the book a bit. But nevertheless it is extremely well written and contains so many fascinating ideas that it is still recommendable.

I also wrote a longer review on my German website.

Instead we follow a realistic if boring character around, who manages not to be present when all the exciting stuff happens, and have to even read through the totally insignificant backstory of another nameless character. Nameless because later in the book, the story of the main character has been censored by the government and all names have been replaced by [BLANK] — it’s hard to imagine how annoying that actually is. This goes to the extent of reading through pages of a screen play that this totally insignificant character wrote years before the snow. That was actually the point when the author completely lost me, and the rest of the book was rather painful to read.

All this is particularly sad as the premise of the book is so great and could have been such a good novel. :-/

Although I have to say I’m not sure that I have a better idea. I guess, we can’t come up with a shortlist full of christmas related books, can we?!

Birthday party: I’d say self-catering. I can certainly bring something, probably even something vegetarian.