Book Blog
April 1, 2012
The poor Palm. The Palm is a splayed formation of land under a two-mooned sky, overrun twenty years ago by TWO empires, the Ygrath from the west, the Barbarior from the east. Since that invasion, the land huddles like Czechoslovakia beneath Germany and Russia. Worse, so bitter was the fighting in the west and so angered was the Ygrathian ruler with his son’s death in that campaign that he destroyed the two cities of the primary state which had stood against him, toppling its towers, grinding the survivors under heavy taxation, and even magically striking the original name of the […]
March 25, 2012
Short story this time – the magnificent tale of a planter who refuses, against man and nature and the very gods, to abandon his scientifically-run plantation to a sweeping wave of ants. Written by Carl Stephenson for Esquire in 1938, it carries all sorts of themes across its short length. We have the white man’s burden (that is, the blunt Leiningen boosting, rallying, even threatening his squealing fearful natives to hold the line against this formicidaen army). We have the application of science to solve all problems, from the initial success of the the orderly, modern plantation to its defense […]
March 18, 2012
History of the Persian Empire, by A.T. Olsmtead, came out in 1948. It’s quite a monster – 524 pages – and must have been the epic of that time. Anything you wanted to know (at least in 1948) is in this book. My point in picking this up was to reacquaint myself with the Persians before having to speak about them at book functions. After all, its been twelve years since I did my heavy-lifting research for Early ReTyrement and, no, I don’t remember everything I’d read or known or discovered, not that long ago. It’s interesting though – he […]
March 11, 2012
Every now and then, while wading through a stiff read (in this case, Olmstead’s 524 page History of the Persian Empire), I have to take a break. In this case, I fell into something I got out of a used bookstore, Bill Baldwn’s The Helmsman from 1985. So the universe apparently is a very class-conscious place, with the nobles on the top, and Carescrian ore-miners (such as our hero, Wilf Brim) on the bottom. Evidently recent legislation has opened up the academy to guttertrash such as Wilf and he’s made it through with a sub-Luitenancy, ready to report to his […]
March 4, 2012
So why do I like Piece of Cake, outside of the fact that it’s a World War Two flying story? Well, as a writer, I love the book because it does two things I respect any book in doing. These are… 1) It takes a perception of our world (here, the nobility of “the few”) and skews it. 2) Characters get killed. It turns out that Hornet Squadron is made up of infallible, bungling, selfish, vain, and stupid humans. The squadron CO taxis into a slit trench the first day of the war and breaks his neck while trying to […]
February 19, 2012
It was back in sixty-nine. I was a youngling then, eleven years old, not even shaving. We were stationed in Cubi Point, the Philippines, beastly hot, nothing to do (especially if one hadn’t hit puberty yet). And in the base library, I found this book, d’ya see? Flashman. Odd, but it had a strapping big bloke with a sword on the cover – not swinging it, rot the luck, but just standing all satisfied before a seated Indian girl. I was at the age where not much made sense – I’d read Ensign Flandery the year before and while I […]
February 12, 2012
The sad thing is, this epic tale of a group of rabbits driven into epic flight towards the high, dry hill (“Watership Down”) could probably not make it in today’s market. It’s too naturalistic, too paced in its telling, for modern audiences (trust me, how many times have I seen people pick up Early ReTyrement, flick-thumb its 357 pages and frown (“I gotta read all this?)). So a journey that lasts a lot longer, filled with descriptions of lazy English nature, would have a far harder sell these days. Animal Farm was once rejected because “Americans don’t like animal stories”. […]
January 23, 2012
I’m in the middle of Arabian Nights right now, a long slow slog (though there are gems of wisdom scattered throughout). While trying to get Early ReTyrement seated at a local bookstore, I ended up picking up a couple of used novels, including this old 1988 western by Doyle Trent. I’m not going to review Winchester Law as much as I’m going to review the lost passion of Western writing. I read through the yarn and found long periods where nothing happened. Bill Williams staked out his land. He bought wire. He strung it up. He worried about where the […]
January 15, 2012
What would you do if the earth broke apart under your feet, the sky turned black and the mountains fell upon the multitudes around you? Well, if you were a writer, you’d write about it! I mentioned the exibit of John Martin’s paintings HERE, all the biblical end-of-the-world, fire-and-brimstone you could cram into your eyeballs. While there, I picked up Pandemonium / Stories of the Apocalypse, a little set of end-of-the-word short stories marketed to go along with Martin’s display. Now, I’ve read EOTW stories before. Last year while in a down mood, I got two anthologies, one on the […]
November 27, 2011
I picked up Restoration because it looked like interesting scifi, and had a cool cover with an English steam engine on it. It was only when I got home that I realized I got played in the airport bookstore way, that this was the second part to The World House. I only figured this out once I started reading and had no idea who all these characters were, and what they were talking about. It’s sure not clear on the cover. Anyway, read something else and started The World House once it came. Read the set back to back. It’s […]