Long Live Pere Ubu

There are far, far too many Pere Ubu albums I do not own.

I have recently been reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.  It's an imaginative book, certainly, and it's clear he put a lot of thought into it...  But it's not very good.  It's full of ideas, many of which are good and many of which are original and most often they're the same ones, but it suffers from a few issues.  The language is very uneven; the prose often seems unedited, with unnecessary phrases and analogies that obscure rather than clarifying, and the dialogue can't seem to decide if it wants to be anachronistic or not.  The pacing is terrible, more like reading the author's detailed notes rather than the novel that resulted from them.  But the cardinal sin is that, with all those good ideas, the only thing Lynch seems to be building out of them is a big jumble of good ideas.  Ideas are like paint; you can mix all the best and brightest ones together, and end up with nothing but grey, and that's what seems to have happened here.  Things are looking up a little about halfway through the book - there have been a couple of hints that the plot will be beginning soon - but at this point I'm finishing it because I paid for the damn paperback.