I’ve heard the name Poul Anderson here and there, and often in a positive light, yet I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from him, up until last week!
I was having a heck of a time looking at all the books he wrote, and how they were often out of order or intertwined, and I came up with an alternative solution:
A Short Story Sampler!
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!
One of the things I saw during my last library trip was a few Ian Fleming/James Bond novels! I didn't really have a preference, so of the three they had on the shelf, I picked Diamonds Are Forever. This is the fourth Bond book, published originally in 1956.
I'm not a big Bond fan, but I can't help but recognize the long history of popularity that the James Bond movies have had. I've seen a couple of them a long time ago, Goldeneye and Skyfall, I think, and bits and pieces of a few of the older ones (my dad likes them but also isn't a huge fan).
So I was curious what the books were like! Are they as action-packed as the movies? Are they solid novels or does the cinema help push them into the limelight?
When I did my reading and review of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors a while back, I kept finding critics who said it was too like Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Well, now I've read the first volume of New Arabian Nights, and I think the critics were really digging when they came up with that one. I'll explain why in a minute.
Well, I had a feeling that I wanted to read something a bit more light and fun this week, so I decided to take a look at My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I've covered Right Ho, Jeeves in the past after I bought a giant Wodehouse collection, and I was surprised to discover that Right Ho is actually the sixth book in the series!
My Man Jeeves is the first book, published in 1919, and collecting stories published from 1911 through 1917, and that's the source of a big surprise, at least for me!
Thanks to the YouTube channel Liminal Spaces for finding this incredible book! His video "Insane Mind-Bending Weird Fiction that Came Out 3 Years Before The King in Yellow" pointed me in the direction of this collection of short stories by Marcel Schwob.
Interestingly, the English translation, by Iain White from 1982, collects stories from four of Schwob's books, but omits many of them! In this post, I'm only considering stories from Schwob's Double Hearts and The King in the Golden Mask, and White actually translated less than half of them!
My first time trying to review a true crime book, let's see how this goes...
Zodiac is a 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, an artist and cartoonist who was a youngster working with the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1960s when the whole Zodiac murder thing happened. He wasn't part of the Chronicle's investigative team. He got obsessed with the case, and this is the partial story of his investigation into what we know and what he thinks he knows.
Graysmith wasn't just reading reports, either; he got personally involved with interviewing suspects, victims, and law enforcement. He has a number of his own theories.
This one was a doozy, but a good doozy. The Winter King is the first book in a trilogy that Bernard Cornwell calls "The Warlord Chronicles." It's a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but with extra attention paid to incorporating the scraps of historical data we have from back then, as well as a dark, gritty, and earthy interpretation that refuses to whitewash the characters or the setting.
It was a really, really good book.
I'm finally getting around to finishing the Skylark series! Even though Skylark of Valeron had a pretty definitive ending back in 1934, apparently lots of readers, including Frederik Pohl, wanted more Skylark, and in 1965, Doc Smith agreed. He serialized the new book, Skylark DuQuesne, in IF Worlds of Science Fiction and collected into a book in 1966.
It was Smith's last book before he passed away.
Like a lot of Smith's stuff, the book starts with a crazy revelation--the method Seaton and company used to keep DuQuesne and the bodiless intelligences out of trouble turns out to have a fatal flaw, and probably won't last very long. This kind of reframing or even retconning is a pretty common element in Smith's sequels, so it wasn't too jarring. In fact, the reason given and the logic behind it is subtle but surprisingly sound.
I felt like I had been neglecting science fiction, so I went hunting around last weekend. There's a book of some of the early Hugo-winning short fiction, and first up there was The Darfsteller, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Well, I went looking for alternate copies of that novella and everywhere I looked the covers recommended Miller's classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes loudly. I figured I'd check it out.
I've heard of it but I had never read it until a few days ago!
What I found was a very solid book, with excellent worldbuilding, and with very good tone, characters, ideas, and perspectives. But the "very good" elements each fell slightly short of excellence for a specific reason, but more on that below.
Machen is another one of those authors who was extremely influential on Lovecraft. He is best known for his weird fiction, and last weekend I read his book The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Lovecraft had some mixed feelings about this book, calling it "a work whose merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty [Robert Louis] Stevenson manner." Stevenson's book New Arabian Nights was apparently a model for Machen.
However, Lovecraft also said that this book contains "certain tales which perhaps represent the high-water mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver."
I found my way to this book through Nero Wolfe. In the paperback Bantam Crime Line edition of one of my favorite Wolfe books, The Doorbell Rang, the introduction was written by Stuart Kaminsky, who said that the end of The Doorbell Rang was his favorite ending to any novel until he read Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block, published in 1982.
That was pretty high praise to me, so I picked up a copy and read it several years ago. Yesterday, I read it again and here are my refreshed thoughts.
I didn't expect to review this book this week. I needed something to kill half an hour and I thought I'd give this book a look. The same friend who gave me that three-novel Alien omnibus gave me this book, too, and I hadn't opened it yet.
The funny thing is, despite the relatively bad first impression I got from the book, it did a few interesting things that are worth noticing! I kept turning pages, and ended up finishing the book pretty quickly.
I'm talking about Alien: The Cold Forge, by Alex White, published in 2018. The front cover says it's an "All New Story" and "An Original Novel," and aside from a couple of early-on member-berries (mentions of Van Leeuwen and Carter Burke), it's true.
It's been a while since I did a Feist book review, and part of the reason is that this book is probably one of the weakest books in his bibliography. Tear of the Gods is the third novel in the "Riftwar Legacy" saga, written long after the characters in it were dead and gone in Feist's normal writing.
This book was published in 2000, and it's based on the plot of the game Return to Krondor, which was not as critically acclaimed in the CRPG world as Betrayal. The plot is simpler and feels a lot more like a game, with lots of little bits of action, many small combat spells thrown around, side quests galore, and a clear progression of the enemies, almost as if the "player" is leveling up.
At the same time, it's a fun read with some valuable and unique elements that shouldn't be ignored.
