Okay, so for my first choice, I read Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, and honestly, I have to say that I was a little disappointed. Here's part of the description from the book jacket: "At the heart of this vibrant saga is an old slave ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its purpose to fight in China's vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts."I usually enjoy historical fiction and I love to read fiction written by non-American writers (I like many American writers too. I don't mean it like that. I just like to immerse myself in stories written by people from different parts of the world.) But although the descriptions of Indian culture in the 1830's were often fascinating, the story didn't ever really get moving; almost the entire book is devoted to getting the various characters onto the boat.. The ship doesn't leave India until page 364 of 468. We learn about opium processing, and the cleanliness rituals of rajas; there are British characters so we get a peak into early colonial society among the sahibs and memsahibs;one of the charaters is the daughter of a French botanist so there are descriptions of the local flora, and on and on. It's nearly all back story.
Part of the problem was with me. When I bought Sea of Poppies, I didn't realize that it is the first in a series and so my expectations were off. I was looking forward to a shipboard adventure type novel which this resoundingly is not. I'm not taking all the blame, though. Hell, Tolkein gets Frodo and company all the way to Rivendell, sets up the fellowship of the ring and sends the heroes to Mordor all in the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He doesn't spend the whole book describing the various cultures and practices of the hobbits, elves, humans, and dwarves. And listen, just so you know, I'm not a reader who requires action at every turn. I am quite happy with a leisurely stroll through a particular life or setting. I loved Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine which takes place entirely during a man's escalator ride back to the office after buying shoelaces. Nevertheless, Sea of Poppies was a disappointment. It felt more like the first episode of a miniseries than a novel. Each chapter was divided into short sections catching the reader up on the doings of the large cast of characters--a couple pages about the raja, a couple about the runaway widow and so on. A necessary device perhaps, given all the explanation of the circumstance and surroundings of each but as a result, the characters never felt full-bodied and real to me. They were, to a lesser or greater extent, more like models of various types.
And yet, even with all my complaining, I kept reading and I did enjoy the world Ghosh created. And you should also know that when I went to Amazon to see what other readers thought, the vast majority loved the book--so my opinion seems to be an outlier. Will I read the next volume of the trilogy? Sadly, although I will try to resist, I find myself wanting to know what will happen to all of those characters. I just no longer trust that the author is going to tell me. Although I'd like to believe that the next book will begin to bring together all the elements that have been set in motion, I'd bet that in reality, Ghosh will continue to add new characters and describe new facets of this period until I want to throw the book across the room. (You can see that I have been burned by this in the past. Alas, I can no longer go forward with an author with an open heart.) So let's say this--if I do pick up the next volume, it will be at the library, not the bookstore.
