Well, I didn’t expect to be here this week! I was getting ready to do a review of a few Poul Anderson stories, when I sat down and cracked open Casino Royale. Now, I was a little underwhelmed by Diamonds Are Forever a few weeks ago, and Casino Royale was one of a few suggestions I got from comments, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
But I was actually shocked by how good this book was.
This is one of those books that has been retold, adapted, and parodied so many times that I thought I knew what I was getting into, and was very, very wrong.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously by Mary Shelley in 1818. Her name wasn’t publicly attached to the book until a French edition was released in 1921. The version I read was an 1831 edition with an additional foreword by Shelley herself, which told about how, when, and why she originally came up with the idea.
I saw this at my local library and just had to give it a try. Robert E. Howard hasn’t steered me wrong yet, but honestly I wasn’t expecting too much—and I was pleasantly surprised to find my expectations were wrong.
This book contains seven El Borak stories, three with Kirby O’Donnell, and one with Steve Clarney. All of them are reasonably good, but the El Borak stories are the main course.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is Susanna Clarke’s first novel, published originally in 2004. It’s a long book, clocking in at over 1000 pages in the paperback edition I read, and it tells a story that ranges from late 1806 through 1807, including the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The book is about the restoration of English magic, but it’s not what you might think after I’ve mentioned the Napoleonic Wars and English magic in such close proximity. It’s also not what you would expect from a book whose title is just the names of two characters. Instead of a lively friendship or a bitter rivalry, we get something a bit more layered.
I found a copy of this one at my local library, and I’m always up for some new Pratchett. I’ve never read any of Neil Gaiman’s stuff, so this was a good introduction, too.
Apparently this book began as six pages of an incomplete short story that Gaiman sent to Pratchett in 1985, and it sat in a desk drawer for a year or so before Pratchett came up with a way to continue it. They worked together and the book was finally published in 1990!
It's odd. I of course know who Raymond Chandler was, and his famous hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe... I like mystery stories, but never once have I read one of his books, until this week.
But when I saw Marlowe's praise for Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever, I thought, why not check out one of his books?
It's funny--this book collects fourteen Poirot short stories that were published between 1923 and 1924, which was years after the first Poirot novel came out in 1920. Yet it feels like Christie was still developing Poirot as I read through these.
I wonder if a bunch of Poirot shorts spent a few years in Christie's desk before the success of the novels gave the magazines a better reason to publish them?
Another thing I learned while working on this review was that a lot of these early Poirot stories are actually in the public domain!
