Reading: The Atrocity Archives
Apr. 23rd, 2016 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI bought this years ago, as someone in the book club I used to belong to had chosen it as the book for discussion. And then I never read it, as I never read most of the book club books (that's why I left, in the end). But I was talking to someone at work the other day and they recommended the Laundry books, so I thought I'd give it a go.
I can see it's a good book. Plotty, clever, sympathetic hero. It reminded me a bit of Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant books, except with spy stories and horror rather than police procedurals and fantasy. But, while I'm very familiar with the kind of fantasy and folklore Aaronovitch is riffing off, I've never read Lovecraft and don't particularly want to, and I'm not a computer geek and only did maths as far as GCSE. So while I thought the book was clever, I also felt that I was missing at least half the references and an awfully long way from being the target audience, particularly for the first of the two stories in the book. The second story, 'The Concrete Jungle', was more accessible, but I was rather narked at the way that it turned out that the two female bosses were the ones working against the hero and his male bosses. So I probably won't read any of the others in the series.
I can see it's a good book. Plotty, clever, sympathetic hero. It reminded me a bit of Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant books, except with spy stories and horror rather than police procedurals and fantasy. But, while I'm very familiar with the kind of fantasy and folklore Aaronovitch is riffing off, I've never read Lovecraft and don't particularly want to, and I'm not a computer geek and only did maths as far as GCSE. So while I thought the book was clever, I also felt that I was missing at least half the references and an awfully long way from being the target audience, particularly for the first of the two stories in the book. The second story, 'The Concrete Jungle', was more accessible, but I was rather narked at the way that it turned out that the two female bosses were the ones working against the hero and his male bosses. So I probably won't read any of the others in the series.
