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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.   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 | I plodded painfully through this doorstop novel, it has taken me months and months but finally I have finished it. At times I couldn't bear to pick it up, I almost quit 50 pages from the end and then again, 20 pages to go. By the end I didn't care about the book at all merely persevered to see if it was worth it . And was it? . . . no, not really. There is a good story and an original setting here, but alas hidden somehere down beneath deep layers of description and endless details of what characters are saying, doing, eating, thinking, and then thinking about what someone else is saying, doing, eating, thinking. I have never encountered such exasperating attention to detail before: I recall almost two pages of dense description of a character eating some bread and wine; And another drawn out scene relating Miss Temple dressing and then using the chamber pot and then wiping herself. Irrelevant detail that ultimately slows down the action to the pace of a snail. Excruciating. (  ) bruceandceals | Sep 5, 2009 | The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is a promising fictional debut, but one that comes just shy of being able to keep its promises. It follows three interesting characters whose personal intrigues lead them to become entangled in a political intrigue involving the cult of an alchemist painter who has invented a process for removing a person's memories---thereby making that person into an empty shell and thus a subservient slave---and putting those memories into special blue glass books which allows "readers" to experience the memories contained therein first-hand. An interesting concept, with interesting characters...but not *too* interesting. The plot is a bit repetetive. The three protagonists go to the villains' headquarters independently, are captured, then escape. They meet up with each other, separate, each go back to the villains' headquarters, are captured...and so on. During each cycle, they all learn a bit more about what's going on, and then share their new piece of the puzzle with the others when they are reunited, but this pattern does grow a bit tedious by the end. Everything about this novel is "not quite." The super-advanced, quasi-mystical technology of the villains *almost* works (in terms of the reader's suspension of disbelief), but not quite. The characters are likeable, but not quite loveable. Their stories are readable, but not compelling. The author's prose style is more than competent, but not quite artistic or beautiful. Rather than slogging through the whole book, my advice is to just pick up the abridged version on CD from the library. Here's hoping that Gordon Dahlquist's second novel will be everything that this one could have been. ( )1 AshRyan | Jul 19, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:08 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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. (