by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 2006) I am growing more and more convinced that Bernard Cornwell is actually triplets. There's no way one man could write so many books so fast and still have them all be so good. Just a month or so back I finished SHARPE'S ESCAPE (HarperCollins, 2005, and just dandy, thank you), the latest installment in the long-running series about rifleman Richard Sharpe and the Napoleonic Wars, and now here comes THE PALE HORSEMAN, the second volume in the tale of Uhtred of Northumbia in the days of Alfred the Great. This one is the sequel to THE LAST KINGDOM and I am already eager for the next installment. Whether he's writing about Saxons in a shield wall or Redcoats firing off a musket volley, no one does battles better than Bernard Cornwell, and he captures the flavor(s) of the period(s) wonderfully as well. I note that Cornwell dedicates this one to another of my favorite authors. George MacDonald Fraser. Hey, maybe one day they will collaborate, and we'll get to see a very young Flashman meet up with a very old Sharpe...
Flashman on the March 
FLASHMAN ON THE MARCH by George MacDonald Fraser (HarperCollins, 2005) The release of a new Flashman book is always an occasion as far as I'm concerned, so when I spied George MacDonald Fraser's FLASHMAN ON THE MARCH on a bookshelf during my recent visit to England, I snatched it down, rushed back to my hotel, and commenced reading at once. Harry Flashman, as is well known, is the famous Victorian soldier, adventurer, and hero... and infamous bully, coward, cad, rake, and general n'eer do well. MacDonald's long series of "Flashman Papers" chronicles the 'true story' of his career. This time around it is the British invasion of Ethiopia in 1867-8, in which Harry played his usual crucial if little known role. Great fun, as always, and surprisingly good history. If you have never read a Flashman book... well, I don't know whether to pity you, or envy you because you have so much enjoyable reading ahead of you. This book isn't the one to start with, however. For that, you want FLASHMAN, the first volume in the series.
MEN OF TOMORROW by Gerard Jones (Basic Books, 2004) bears the subtitle "Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book." With a hook like that, how could an old funny book fan like me resist? I'm glad I didn't. Jones has written the definitive history of the comic book in America. The stars of the tale are Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the guys who created Superman and then lost him, but all the other giants of the field are here as well. (The stuff about Bob Kane, "creator of Batman," would be hilarous if it wasn't so tragic). Nor does he neglect the guys in the front office, who are usually just painted as the villains of the piece. A genuine work of scholarship and a wonderfully engrossing read, this makes a great companion piece to Michael Chabon's novel, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, set in the same mileau. Anyone who ever loved funny books or superheroes needs to read this book. WILDWOOD ROAD by Christopher Golden (Bantam, 2005). Some of my editor friends tell me that horror fiction is finally starting to make a comeback after the catastrophic boom and bust in the 1980s. If that's true, writers like Christopher Golden are a big part of the reason. I love a good scary story, but scares alone are not enough to carry a book; a good horror novel needs to be a good novel first, with a strong plot, interesting characters, and vivid and evocative writing. Golden delivers all of that in spades in WILDWOOD ROAD, the best ghost story I have read since... well, since the last time Stephen King wrote one. Wonderfully atmospheric and creepy. Check it out, while I go off in search of more of Golden's books. THE LAST KINGDOM by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 2004). THE LAST KINGDOM is the first book in another series by the prolific Bernard Cornwell, best known for creating Richard Sharpe. This one is set much earlier in English history, during the time of Alfred the Great, when the Saxon kingdoms of Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria were engulfed one after the other by the Danes. The hero isn Uhtred, the son of a Saxon earl orphaned by the war and raised among the Danes. A terrific read. Cornwell really makes history come alive, and no one writes better battle scenes. He has another winner on his hands. PIZZA: A SLICE OF HEAVEN by Ed Levine (Universe, February 2005). Now, this is my kind of Bible. Food writer Ed Levine's PIZZA: A SLICE OF HEAVEN is a wonderfully crusty, cheesy, saucy book about my favorite food. Why, it's pizza, of course (barbeque is a close second). Not the horrible stuff they sell at Domino's, Pizza Hut, or (shudder) Sbarro's, or the deep-dish casserole they call pizza in Chicago, and definitely not the abomination that is California pizza, whole wheat crusts, sprouts, and all. No, real pizza, thin-crust New York City pizza, pizza in the Neapolitan tradition, pizza the way god meant it to be, with just enough sauce and just enough good cheese, charred a little in a really hot coal-burning oven, pizza you can fold, pizza you can love, pizza to transport you to other realms. Levine knows his pizza, I am pleased to say. A Slice of Heaven will entertain you, enlighten you, and make you hungry. And if you are unfortunate enough to live outside the "Pizza Belt," as I do, it will help get you through the dark days between pies. And now pardon me, I need to finish my novel so I can reward myself with a pie from that place he wrote about in Phoenix, Arizona... ONE WHO WALKED ALONE by Novalyne Price Ellis (Donald M Grant, 1986). Not many people went to see the film THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD when it was released a few years back, which is a shame. The movie is a gem; the sweet, sad, tragic tale of the last two years in the life of Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan and Solomon Kane, and one of the 'Three Musketeers' of WEIRD TALES), as told through the eyes of the young schoolteacher who briefly became his "best girl." It featured a wonderful performance by a then-unknown Renee Zellweger as Novalyne Price, and a magnificent portrayal of Howard by Vincent D'Onfrio. You don't have to know REH and his writing to appreciate the poignant love story at the heart of THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, but those who do will get even more from the movie. Check it out on DVD... and after you do, read the book it's based on. ONE WHO WALKED ALONE is Novalyne Price Ellis's memoir of her time with Howard, based on the journals she kept in the 1930s, when she and Bob were dating. Originally published in 1986, it has just been restored to print in a beautiful new hardcover edition. As a young woman, Miss Price dreamed of being a writer. She might have been a good one; her memoir brings REH to life as no biographer ever has, and also paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life in a small Texas town in the 1930s. The film was great; the book is even better. THE MYSTERIES by Lisa Tuttle (Spectra, March 2005). Lisa Tuttle never disappoints. Her latest novel, THE MYSTERIES, is a deft and daring blend of mystery and dark fantasy, about a private eye whose latest case leads him down the meanest street of all... the one to Faerie. Richly imagined and beautifully written, it lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned. DRAGON LADY: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE LAST EMPRESS OF CHINA by Sterling Seagrave (Vintage, 1993). History is written by the winners, and sometimes the losers can get a very bad press indeed. In western history, the most conspicuous example of that is King Richard III, a fine warrior and good king who was turned into a hunchback and a murderer by Shakespeare, Thomas More, and other Tudor apologists. In the Orient, you have Tzu Hsi, the last Dowager Empress of China. Older histories paint her in sinister colors, as a combination of Lucretia Borgia, Fu Manchu, and Cersei Lannister, but the truth was rather different. Sterling Seagrave tells the true tale of Tzu Hsi, her life, and the last days of the Manchu emperors in DRAGON LADY: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE LAST EMPRESS OF CHINA. This is history that reads like a novel; thoroughly engrossing. IRONFIRE, by David Ball (Delacorte Press, 2004). I love good historical fiction, for many of the same reasons that I love good fantasy. I am a huge fan of Thomas B. Costain, Maurice Druon, Nigel Tranter, Cecilia Holland, and a number of other splendid historical novelists whose works are now sadly out of print. All is not lost, however; there are some excellent contemporary writers picking up the torch, including Bernard Cornwell, Stephen Pressfield, and now David Ball, whose IRONFIRE is one of the best historicals that I've read in years. Billed as "A Novel of the Knights of Malta and the Last Battle of the Crusades," it is both an epic account of the Great Siege of Malta in the 16th century, and the story of Nico and Maria, brother and sister, a couple of Maltese peasant kids who are out playing one morning when they chance to stumble on some Moorish corsairs. Maria escapes them, but Nico is captured and enslaved, and their lives and fates are very different thereafter. Ball evokes the time and place wonderfully, and IRONFIRE moves at a headlong pace from start to finish and teems with colorful settings, memorable characters, advertures, escapes, battles, betrayals, and all that other good stuff. I will definitely be checking out David Ball's other books. Meanwhile, all those of you looking for something good to read as you wait for A FEAST FOR CROWS should hunt up a copy of IRONFIRE. A HISTORY OF VENICE, by John Julius Norwich (Vintage, 1989). There's not much that I like better than reading a good popular history of a place or time that I am not overly familiar with beforehand. John Julius Norwich's A HISTORY OF VENICE (Vintage, 1989) is all of that and more. Norwich, who also wrote a wonderful three-voume history of Byzantium, turns the thousand years of the Most Serene Republic into a rich, colorful, gorgeous pagaent of a book filled with incident and personality, thoroughly engrossing. Not to mention providing great grist for a fantasist's mill. You can't make this stuff up. SHUTTER ISLAND, by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow, 2003). Dennis Lehane became a household name with MYSTIC RIVER, a powerful but flawed novel that became a powerful but flawed (and overlong) film by Clint Eastwood, but as far as I'm concerned SHUTTER ISLAND is a better book. This one gripped me from page one. Lehane has a gift for evoking time and place, his writing is never less than vivid and evocative, and the plot here is taut and twisted, with a resolution that feels like a punch in the gut. The Grail Quest (3) - Heretic 
, by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 2004). Thanks to the BBC televison series starring Sean Bean, the world knows Bernard Cornwell best as the author of the Sharpe books, the series of smashing historical adventures chronicling the life and times of Richard Sharpe, a rough and tumble British rifleman who rises to high rank in Wellington's army during the Napoleonic Wars. Sharpe's great, mind you, but Cornwell has worked some other periods as well. His Arthurian series was damned good, and so is "The Grail Quest," his latest, a medieval trilogy about Thomas of Hookton, who's sort of Sharpe with a longbow. Thomas is a bastard bowman fighting at Crecy in the Hundred Years War, looking for loot, women, and the Holy Grail, and trying to revenge himself on the man who killed his father. Though HERETIC concludes the "grail" arc that began in HARLEQUIN and VAGABOND, I hope that Cornwell gives us more books about Thomas and his descendents. Lots of battles yet to fight in the Hundred Years War, after all...
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, by Michael Chabon (Picador, 2001). Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, but don't let that discourage you. This is a wonderful book. A "literary" novel from the mainstream, yes, but steeped in fantasy and full of magic. It's the story of two boys who come of age during the Depression and the dark days of World War II, and of the Escapist, the comic book hero they create. Chabon evokes the period wonderfully. His prose is luminous, his characters human and textured and deeply sympathetic, his story haunting. This is a book about friendship and love and dreams, about Houdini and the Nazis and the Golem of Prague, about funny books and heroism, about escape. The best book I've read this year. Don't miss it. POMPEII, by Robert Harris (Random House, 2003). The last big book about Pompeii was by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known for penning Snoopy's immortal line, "it was a dark and stormy night." It's about time that someone returned to the great explosion of Vesuvius, and Robert Harris has done just that. POMPEII is a splendid historical page-turner, with (naturally) a real bang-up ending. The story is told from the viewpoint of a Roman aquarius trying to get his broken aqueduct flowing again, but my favorite character was Pliny the Elder, who stole every scene that he appeared in. Well worth a read, for those who like historicals. THE HOOK, by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press, 2000). Donald Westlake is a wonder. He's an astonishingly profilic writer, and seems to have out three or four new books every time I turn around. He also has an incredible range. His books about Dortmunder and his bungling burgular friends are frequently hilarious, but he can turn around and write as grim and hard-edged a crime novel as anyone could want, as witness his "Richard Stark" books. He's also written SF and fantasy, and some comic stuff about the writing life that is all too true. Writers writing about writers can be a bad idea, but Westlake does it wonderfully in A LIKELY STORY, and again here in THE HOOK, a grim psychological drama about two old friends who chance to meet at the New York Public Library. Both are writers, but one can't sell his novels any more and is fast running short of money, and the other is in the midst of the divorce from hell, and blocked as a result. When they try to solve each others' problems, mayhem and madness ensue. Westlake always writes page-turners, but this one packs a nasty punch that will leave you bleeding. A SENSE OF WONDER: A LIFE IN COMIC FANDOM, by Bill Schelly (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2001). SF fandom goes back to the 1930s, but comics fandom, its bastard stepchild, largely began in the 1960s. JFK was in the White House and I was in high school when my first "Dear Stan and Jack" missive was published in the letter column of THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Soon after, strange little magazines printed in faded purple ink began to show up in my mail box. That was my introduction to the wonderful world of comicdom, then in its infancy. Before long, I was writing for those fanzines myself; turning out prose epics (I couldn't draw, so I couldn't do comic strips) about the White Raider, Manta Ray, Dr. Weird, and Garizan, the Mechanical Warrior. I never met Bill Schelly (we were both high school kids, him in Pittsburgh and me in Bayonne, New Jersey), nor even corresponded with him .. but I certainly knew his name, and we had many acquaintances (and fanzines) in common. Comics fandom in the 60s was like a small town, where everyone knew everyone else... and reading Schelly's fond, funny, and nostalgic memoir about this lost subculture was like going home again. If you ever sent off a sticky quarter or turned your fingers purple cranking a ditto, this is a book for you. GOLDEN FOOL by Robin Hobb (Bantam Spectra, 2003). I'm a big Robin Hobb fan, as I've confessed before. I think she's doing some of the best stuff in contemporary fantasy... and I'm bloody envious of how fast she writes. GOLDEN FOOL is the second volume in her current "Tawny Man" trilogy. It picks up right where FOOL'S ERRAND left off and never looks back. This one also brings some Bingtown Traders to the Six Duchies, tying Hobb's two previous trilogies (the "Assassin" and "Liveship" series) together in some interesting ways. As ever, it's a page turner, well crafted and full of vivid writing and finely-drawn characters. I'm already looking forward to the next one. ALL OUR YESTERDAYS by Robert B. Parker. Mystery novelist Robert B. Parker is best known for his "Spenser" series. Parker's prose is always crisp and clean, and his dialogue is first rate. The early Spenser books were just terrific. The later ones, though... well, they are still page-turners, but somewhere along the way Spenser and Hawk became caricatures of themselves. They turned into Batman and Superman, invincible heroes who dispatch the feeble bad guys with such consummate ease that all the tension went out of the books. ALL OUR YESTERDAYS is not a Spenser novel. It's a stand-alone, a story of three generations in an Irish-American cop family that takes us from Dublin to Boston, with plenty of murder, sex, corruption, and betrayal along the way. The vivid prose and crackling good dialogue is still there, but these characters have a lot more depth to them than Spenser and Hawk. When he wants to be, Parker is still as good as anyone in the game. David Gilmour's THE LONG RECESSIONAL is a new biography of Rudyard Kipling, the great poet and storyteller of the British Empire and the Raj. Kipling has become so identified with British imperialism of the Victorian Era that many people seem to think he died with Queen Victoria, when he actually lived to see (and deplore) Hitler's rise in Germany. I've always loved Kipling's work. THE JUNGLE BOOKS and JUST SO STORIES remain masterpieces, and his best poetry can still make me shiver, despite the fact that the political views that inspired much of it has dated badly, to say the least. Gilmour does not flinch from that at all, but neither does he allow hindsight to blind him to the magnitude of Kipling's genius. He presents the man fully and frankly, and frequently in his own words, quoting freely from RK's correspondence. This well-told, balanced biography will be of interest to anyone who has read the works of Rudyard Kipling. And if you haven't... well, what are you waiting for? He was the greatest storyteller of his time. LOSING NELSON by Barry Unsworth (available from Penguin in the UK) is a study in obsession which manages to be thoroughly engrossing despite the fact that the lead character spends most of time writing a book and hardly leaves his house until the final chapters. In many ways Unsworth's novel reminded me of Robert Coover's classic THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP. -- with Horatio Nelson taking the place of baseball. There's a lot here about Nelson and his times as well, and some very vivid writing which suggests that Unsworth could have written a hell of a Salty Sea Novel if he'd cared to. THE SONG OF TROY by Colleen McCullough. McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series of historicals have long been a guilty pleasure of mine. The books are sometimes strangely structured, and the writing seldom more workmanlike... but they are so well researched, and bring late Republican Rome to life so vividly, that I find myself gulping them down despite their flaws. Here McCullough gives us a retelling of the Trojan War and the events of THE ILIAD, reworking mythology into history... and very successfully, I think. She also cuts back and forth deftly between a large cast of varied viewpoint characters, each with his or her own perspectives on the goings-on. Fantasy fans should enjoy this one, I'd think. FOOL'S ERRAND by Robin Hobb. I am a big fan of Robin Hobb. Her Farseer trilogy was wonderful, and the Liveship series that followed was even better. In her new book Hobb returns to the Six Duchies and Fitz, the bastard Farseer who was the hero of her first series. The novel takes awhile to get going, it must be admitted; for the first hundred and fifty pages, Fitz just sits around his cottage drinking tea and turning away various visitors and old friends, all intent on embroiling him in the world again. Once he finally, reluctantly, saddles his horse to return to Buckkeep, however, the action picks up rapidly. By the time I reached the last page I was ready for the next one. More, please. Soon, please. TIME AND CHANCE by Sharon Kay Penman. Sharon Kay Penman is the strongest historical novelist working the medieval period at present, a worthy heir to two of my all-time favorites, Thomas B. Costain and Nigel Tranter. Her TIME AND CHANCE (not to be confused with the Alan Brennert novel and the autobiography of L. Sprague de Camp, both of which share the same title and both of which are well worth a read as well) is the long-awaited second volume of Penman's trilogy about the early Plantagenets. The first volume, WHEN CHRIST AND HIS SAINTS SLEPT, focused on the war between Stephen and the Empress Maude for the English throne. This one picks up with Maude's son Henry Fitz Empress on the throne, and tells the tale of his tumultuous relationships with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Thomas Becket. As usual, SKP brings history vividly to life. Alexander Vol 1.: Child of a Dream v. 1 (Alexander Trilogy) 
by Valerio Massimo Manfredi.
It takes a certain amount of hubris for any novelist to tackle the life of Alexander the Great, knowing that his efforts will inevitably be compared to
Mary Renault's classic and enduring treatment of the same materials, but that is just what the Italian historian, archeologist, and jouralist Valerio Massimo Manfredi has done.
CHILD OF A DREAM is the first volume in his own Alexander trilogy, which has been a bestseller in Italy and around the world, and now appears in this English translation, couresty of Iain Halliday. Manfredi's Alexander is much different from Mary Renault's, but still well worth knowing. He tells an engrossing story, and the translation is very crisp and readable. If it fails to match the power and the poetry of Renault's, well... very little does. I am looking forward to finishing his trilogy. WRITING FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. Okay, I'm prejudiced on this one. Lisa Tuttle lives in England, which is far too far away, but she remains one of my oldest and dearest friends. She and I wrote WINDHAVEN together, back in the dawn of days when both of us were hungry young SF writers scrabbling for every sale. And if all that wasn't enough, Lisa has also dedicated this book to me (he said, blushing modestly). All that being said, I still think WRITING FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION is an excellent "how to" book for any aspiring writer. Lisa has drawn on her own triumphs and trials, and she fills the book with good solid advice. And above and beyond the practical considerations, the book is also fun to read, full of anecdotes and insights from Lisa's own career. The tale of how she and I came to write WINDHAVEN together is also here, complete with extensive embarassing quotations from our correspondence in the early 70s. Gods, but we were young... A million years ago, when I was a kid in grade school who dreamed of telling stories, I found L. Sprague de Camp's SCIENCE FICTION HANDBOOK in the Bayonne Public Library. De Camp's "how to" book inspired me so much that I would take it out every few months and read it all over again. Lisa Tuttle's WRITING FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION should prove similarly inspirational to a new generation of dreamers. J.R.R.TOLKIEN, AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY. Shippey, one of the world's leading Tolkien scholars, makes an eloquent and persuasive case for JRRT as the most significant author of the 20th century, and demolishes many of the criticisms leveled against LOTR by critics reluctant to admit a fantasist to the pantheon. A very readable book, this will give you a new appreciation of the depth and artistry of what JRRT accomplished... and Shippey's comparison of Tolkien and Joyce is certain to prvoke howls of outrage from the literati. I get emails all the time from readers who want to know if I can recommend a good fantasy for them to read while they are (sigh) waiting for the next Ice and Fire book. There are lot of excellent fantasies out there, in point of fact. One of them is THE BONE DOLL'S TWIN by Lynn Flewelling. Engrossing, well written, tough minded, and peopled by characters you can believe in, this one kept me turning pages happily. I'm looking forward to her next. READINGS is a treat for booklovers, a collection of Michael Dirda's columns from the pages of the WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD. Funny, anecdotal, and insightful, and pure delight for us lost souls bitten by the book collecting bug. This reminds me of another favorite author, humorist Calvin Trillin. Dirda does for books what Trillin did for food in ALICE, LET'S EAT and THIRD HELPINGS. Another, somewhat older, fantasy novel that's worth a look is THE GRAND ELLIPSE by Paula Volsky, which recently lost the World Fantasy Award. Never mind, the competition was tough... the book remains a wonderful picaresque romp, a fantasy version of AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS by way of THE GREAT RACE, with more than a little flavor of Jack Vance thrown in for seasoning. Quite the fun read. |
