Two quickie book reviews, and a dream:

1. River of the Brokenhearted by David Adams Richard.

The Bad: Far too many characters are difficult to keep track of, so you have to draw a chart or page back "Cassie, who's Cassie again?" (Someone should draw a family tree of this novel and post it on the internet!), confusing narration where the narrator is a descendent of the characters, so you sometimes have him saying "My father" and sometimes "Miles", difficult to keep track the timeline. Also, very dark and hopeless.

The Good: Quite a saga, plot continues at a good pace throughout, it's a world you can fall into and be happy in for a while, fascinating characters, understated narration, somehow made me a wee bit happy despite being dark and hopeless.

2. Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

The Bad: Run-on sentences, meandering plot with pointless detours (an ape? why?), feels like it's a semi-autobiographical novel in which the author thought all these things were Very Important, but didn't manage to convey to me why they were important. Also, it's about 50 years old and written in a non-specific present, so to my 21st century sensibilities it feels like a historical novel with none of the historical details that make a historical novel fun.

The Good: Very witty (although it would probably be wittier if I knew the distinction between various branches of the Church of England).

3. A dream: I dreamed I was given a bottle of wine that was closed with a sword. You opened the bottle by pulling out the sword (and it was like pulling the sword from the stone, so it was a special procedure). Then I had this spare sword lying around, so I decided to use it as a doorknob, but that didn't work too well. Also, the wine was green, like Mountain Dew. The cool thing is, today I went to the LCBO, and I saw a bottle of wine the same shape as the one in my dream, and the bottle was green so it made the white wine inside look like Mountain Dew. No sword though.