I did something that haven’t done in many, many years: I read a book from front-to-back, linearly, in less than a week. I spent the greatest part of my unexpected day off, today, finishing it, having just started it on Monday morning – today was Korean Memorial Day, but with a late night at work last night and work bearing down on me again for tomorrow, I had nothing planned.
Furthermore, it was a novel.
Mostly, these days, I read history or philosophy. It’s been a very long time since I finished a novel or any piece of fiction (except some short stories) in less than half a year. Inevitably, at any given moment, I have maybe a dozen books “in progress,” and the majority of them never get finished at all in any conventional sense, because I read them the way some people surf the internet, essentially at random.
So I felt a little bit surprised, myself, with how I compulsively sat and paged my way through this 500-page book, not once looking ahead, not once skimming past a slow-moving section. This behavior may have had more to do with my circumstances: I continue to be painfully sick, thus not feeling healthy enough to go out exploring much; and I continue to feel a grinding dissatisfaction with my life as-it-is (e.g. with work and studies) that pushes me into a more widely-ranging and totalizing escapism than I’ve been wont to practice so much in recent years, maybe.
You’re wondering, what was the book that I read? I’m not even sure I can strongly recommend it. Superficially, it’s been characterized by others as a “steampunk fantasy western” which is basically a way to say it’s several genres mishmashed together. It had moments when it reminded me of something almost like one of the Latin American magic realists’ alternate worlds, or maybe those Nabokovian parallel Earths of lesser-known works like Ada or Pale Fire, but minus the 
utterly unequalable virtuosity of that old Russian’s prose. It’s definitely not to the level of anything like those. Further, I agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I’m willing to forgive it.
There’s a lot going on politically and philosophically, and the protagonists are mostly unlikable – yet nevertheless ambivalently complicated, which I find makes a book more compelling and interesting in some strange way. I find myself wanting to see them self-destruct, or find some epiphanic solution to their problem, or save the world despite themselves. Then when they mostly fail I get to feel good about my ability to have judged them accurately.
That makes it sound terrible. It wasn’t. I liked it. I may even look for the sequel, allegedly recently released.
It was Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World.
