There’s nothing like a vacation, even a vacation that’s only four days long.  In amongst many wonderful visits with family, Jim and I were good and lazy over the long weekend, reading (both of us) and playing guitar (Jim) and watching a corny movie (Knocked Up) and even cleaning the house (the cats thanked us for that).

With no book group meetings in the next two weeks, I chose a couple of books that I wanted to read, rather than had to read (even though I do have ultimate choosing authority over those book group books, there’s still a sense of them being an assignment – weird how that works).  First up was Starcross by Philip Reeve, the sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, Larklight.  Surprisingly, I didn’t like Starcross nearly as well as I did the first book.  This puzzled me, since I’ve been looking forward to it, and I’m wondering whether one problem was simply my mood when I read the book.  But that’s too simple an explanation.  The trouble with Starcross, in my opinion, is that it’s just Larklight, Round Two; where Larklight was innovative and fresh, Starcross is just a repeat with a slightly different plot line.  I don’t really know what Reeve could have done to make the sequel as interesting as the first book, since the charm of Larklight lies in its unusual conceit of Victorian-era England having dominion over most of space due to the discovery of chemical wedding that propels spacecraft in the nineteenth century. 

And I wonder whether Starcross will find an audience at my library.  When I enthusiastically presented Larklight to one of my book groups last spring, they absolutely hated it.  Hated it.  I loved it, the kids despised it.  If they despised the original model, chances are they won’t even bother taking the newly published sequel out of the library.  I’m going to keep tabs on the circulation numbers for this pair of books, and see how often they get checked out. 

Tomorrow I’ll write about the other book I read over the weekend, Duchessina by Carolyn Meyer, a piece of historical fiction about Catherine de’ Medici.