Kraken

Kraken by China Mieville

This book is hard to fall in to.  The plot starts off very intriguing, but the language is so dense and enigmatic that you can't just flow into it and get swept away by the story.  It is definitely on purpose - the author is clearly going for some sort of hard boiled literary style, but I always find that just makes it harder to really get into the world of the book.  And the constant metaphors combined with the fast paced stylistic dialogue and extremely arcane (when not totally made up) vocabulary, served to make it very difficult for me to really get a picture in my head of what was happening.  Which is not particularly a criticism of the book: this book is very much about the language of the story and setting a particular tone, which I found hard to adapt to.  There is no exposition.  There is no explanation, and there is hardly any description of anything or anyone in the book, at least, of any sort that might be understood.  And example of "description" in this book:

"In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether."

Yes.  That is what the entire book is like.  The story itself is engaging - a preserved giant squid is stolen from a museum, throwing the main character Billy Harrow into an underworld of magic and religion and criminals that he never knew existed.  I just need it translated into everyday English where there are perceptible moments of description cluing me in to what the characters are actually doing and where they are. And to be honest, the last 150-200 pages or so, when the plot is finally coming to a head, does away with a lot of the thick, confusing text and just propels the story along in a way that is engaging and fun.  But, man, those first 300-350 pages are like fighting through a bramble.

And maybe you like that.  I know all of the reviews I've seen have been super positive (which is why I bought the book) and many compliment the writing style.  So I could be outing myself as pedantic and slow for wanting it to be written in plainer English.  it's all a matter of preference I guess.  I personally am a very fast reader and I prefer books that allow me to really fly through them, totally absorbed in the action and this book didn't allow me to do that.  If you are someone who really delights in the language of a book as well as the plot, then you will probably enjoy Kraken more than I did.