Reading Plans Gone Awry

I've become horribly distracted with my reading lately. I had been reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth, as well as Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies (research for my YA fantasy novel). And then the boyfriend (Big Chimp) and  I went to London for a day to see James Earl Jones in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and to patronize our favorite indie cinema, the Curzon. While we were wandering around Soho we went into a couple of those neat old secondhand book shops full of narrow creaking stairs and hidden basement nooks, and in one of those nooks I found a hardback copy of one of my favorite books ever: Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams.

I first discovered Tad Williams as a child when my mom and I read his amazing fantasy novel Tailchaser's Song. And then as a teenager I discovered the Otherland series and was completely blown away. It was such an epic adventure, so fast-paced and exciting and yet with such a unique and diverse set of characters. There are some books that when you read them you can actually feel your imagination expanding, and this is one of those books.

The novel takes place in the near future, when the Internet has become a series of almost endless virtual reality worlds, the realism of which is only limited by the quality of equipment one can afford. But something sinister is going on: a group called the Grail Brotherhood, composed of the richest and most corrupt people on earth, is using the Net to pursue their dreams of immortality, gravely injuring thousands of people in the process. And now an unlikely group of heroes -- including an African college professor, a "bushman" computer science student, and an American teenager with progeria -- are trapped in a never ending array of virtual reality worlds, fleeing from the Brotherhood while trying to find the answers that will both free them and cure those afflicted by the mysterious, VR-inflicted illness.

So that's why I haven't yet finished and reviewed the books in the Currently Reading column. I don't have any of the other books in the Otherland series (well, I do, but they're safely tucked away in my bookshelf in my old bedroom in California), so I'll get dutifully back to my reading list as soon as I'm finished with City of Golden Shadow.

Oh, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? It was amazing, of course.