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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  purdie | Jan 29, 2010 |  Some good ideas, nice steampunk feel but the blow by blow approach to fight scenes was hard to visualise - overdetailed action descriptions involving awkwardly precise movements and interrelations slow the reader's pace badly. The author tried to give a detailed picture of the spaces characters moved in and it often seemed more like a minute description of a film (scripts leave more room) than a book (I have little doubt someone could film it and I'd probably enjoy a film version far more). I didn't find the main female character convincing as a woman of her period - this might have been better if her social values seemed consistent, or to change convincingly. Embarrassment over visible ankles seemed a desperate attempt at historical authenticity which doesn't jibe with her remaining behaviour, unless she was in a continuing state of shock from her experiences. The narrator jumps I wasn't terribly keen on, as the chapter structure (/editors formatting?) didn't make these easy to track and the failure to consistently represent social mores of the time pained me and also trying way too hard to be erotic (forcing it too often and too hard - too in your face (and (and some sections seemed inspired by Eyes Wide Shut). I had to push myself to read it through, and I don't normally have trouble finishing fiction. Then I almost threw it off the train when I came to the non-ending. Basically, the book ends on a cliffhanger and if following books in the series do so too that it seems really unacceptable to me. I read it over a year ago but still build a head of steam every time I think about it. There are better steampunk books out there. Part of what annoyed me was that the author had something there, it just got overworked and overblown. I may read something else by them in future but it won't be this series, no matter how pretty the marketing ideas. Try it if you must but don't say you weren't warned. (  )1  findantonia | Jan 7, 2010 | From Publishers Weekly Debut novelist Dahlquist aims for a blockbuster with a mishmash of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Eyes Wide Shut that never quite comes together. Three months after 25-year-old Celeste Temple travels from "her island" (a Bermuda-like place) plantation home to Victorian London, fiancé Roger Bascombe breaks their engagement. Driven more by curiosity than desire, she follows him from his job at the foreign ministry to Harschmort House, where, with little prodding, she quickly finds herself in silk undergarments at a ritual involving masked guests and two-way mirrors. Making her escape, Miss Temple (as she's called throughout) kills a henchman. Ceremony organizers pursue her as she pursues their secrets. Poetry-quoting assassin Cardinal Chang and diplomat Dr. Abelard Svenson come to her aid. Chang tries to save a half-Chinese prostitute; Abelard tries to save a governess named Elöise; Miss Temple discovers she is not the woman she thought she was, nor Roger the man she hoped for. Meanwhile, through science and alchemy, evildoers capture erotic memories and personal will in blue crystals. Dahlquist introduces so many characters, props and plot twists, near-death experiences and narrow escapes that the novel has the feel of a frantic R-rated classic comic book—if comics were arch. (  )  camtb | Sep 22, 2009 | OK, I like steampunk-y anachronistic murder mysteries with a supernatural leaning as much as the next guy (actually, probably quite a bit more, much to my boyfriend's derision), but come ON! There is no metaphor in the title here - they are ACTUAL glass books and people ACTUALLY eat dreams. The rest is a blur of silly costume parties and masqued balls where SOMETHING SINISTER IS GOING ON, usually involving half-clad ladies in a narcotic daze being subjected to the exploitative slaverings of outwardly respectable gentlemen. If you found the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut to be profound and philosophical, perhaps you are of a mind that can find some deeper meaning here. If not, and if it all just seems pretentious, empty-headed nonsense that far overreaches itself, come sit by me. (  )1 jessicakiang | Sep 19, 2009 | An amazing book by any account. Long, complex, fantastic ideas etc. Just a bit to drawn out. The scope was nothing short of breathtaking, a whole victorian city created and imagined with aplomb. Great Characetres, paticularly liked Cardinal Chang. ( ) pgimmo | Sep 13, 2009 | 
 The Glass Books... is a piece of steampunk, a strand of Industrial Revolution sci-fi with a hardcore following in genre fiction and anime - as well as, it should be said, more than a whiff of Games Workshop about it. The classic texts are probably William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and, more recently, Alan Moore's immensely jolly League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, and this novel is nakedly indebted to both titles. Fans of Moore, particularly, will find themselves subconsciously ticking boxes as Dahlquist's narrative progresses: mysterious character who wears "smoked-glass spectacles" all the time - yes; sinister operations undertaken by chaps in diving-bell helmets and leather gauntlets - yes; airships - yes; lots of airships - yes. The plot goes something like this: a cabal of sinister aristos has discovered a substance that allows them to download human personalities and experiences into blue glass, a process that has the side-effect of making the subject entirely biddable to their demands. Ranged against them is a trio of accidental adventurers: a capable ingenue, a lovelorn mercenary and a strait-laced doctor, each of whom has his or her own reasons for wanting to topple the conspiracy.  Reading this book - and it is a page-turner - you become immersed, befogged, almost as if you had indeed been looking at one of the glass books. More than sex, what you're drugged by is fighting and pursuits: I've never seen violent physical action sustained over such a span in a novel. This intoxication is of a piece with the erotic thralldom the book projects, and it can become similarly cartoon-like: "The blow caught Starck squarely on the ear with a sickening, pumpkin-thwacking thud, dropping him like a stone."
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In the winter of 2004 I was selected for jury duty (at the very same time Martha Stewart went to trial in the next building over--we all had to walk past the fifteen media vans to get to our courthouse). Since the courts in Manhattan are near Chinatown, I like jury duty, as it means a few days of excellent lunches. Instead, New York was hit with a ferocious, sub-zero ice storm that went on for days, where it was impossible to wander in the way I had hoped, and so, with the grind of the trial itself, we jurors were marooned for close to 4 hours each day in the jury room. The second night of the trial, however, I had a strange dream where a friend of mine appeared in the exact garb of one of The Glass Books' three main characters, Doctor Svenson, and together we faced a mystery in a strange, dark, Victorian building involving prisoners in a creepy upstairs room without a door. While I very rarely remember my dreams, the next morning I found this one percolating in my head quite vividly. But then, for no reason I can recall, I took out a notebook, and began--instead of the Doctor, who I would get to almost off-handedly in another 100 pages or so--writing about a willful young woman from the West Indies whose fiancée has abandoned her without explanation, making it up as I went along. By the end of the trial I had the first chapter. I am by trade a playwright, and had not written prose fiction of any kind for nearly 20 years, but I found myself hooked on the story and the characters--perhaps out of my own desire to know what happened next--and so persisted, putting aside most everything else, writing for the most part in coffee shops and on the subway, until I finished the book almost exactly one year later. --Gordon Dahlquist
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:23:25 -0500)
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Have now finished it & won't be buying the promised sequel. It was an acceptable read & on the plus side it lulled me to sleep several nights; on the down side it was contrived & extremely drawn out - I haven't the patience to go through that again! (