After a hiatus in which I read several other books, I'm back on Terry Pratchett's "Raising Steam."
My initial look at the book was pretty grim. It still feels as if the book were written in Plato's cave, but it's growing on me. I really try to give books a fair shake; there are only a few I've given up on (notably John Crowley's "Little, Big" and Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" novels (and I'm not sure I've given up on the latter, but it certainly has fallen to the bottom of my "to read" pile).
I picked "Raising Steam" back off the pile after finishing Catherine Gilbert Murdock's "The Book of Boy," which I thoroughly enjoyed. I decided after reading that excellent book that I wanted to get back to Pratchett's last book, and I'm glad I did.
The gauze is starting to come off the characters. There's a lot of gauze there yet, but they're starting to come through, and Pratchett -- like Dickens -- is to be read for the characters, because the characters make the story.
I know Alzheimers is an ugly disease; my mother-in-law passed away from Alzheimers complications earlier this year. It was hard to watch her personality deteriorate and fade, so watching it in "Raising Steam" brings back some pretty hard memories of our family's last few months with her. So I guess I have a little extra baggage coming into this novel.
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