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Adventures in Bookland: Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

16 August 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

The title story is an enjoyable romp through the sexual politics of 19th-century America, when marriages were contracted and, like most business relationships, as liable to fail as to succeed (no different to today, but for different reasons). For some reason, other readers seem determined to impose early 21st-century ideas upon it. It’s worth remembering that, in two hundred year’s time, our own fondest notions will be seen to be as outmoded as Van Winkle’s attitudes are in this story. So, if you can leave the 21st century behind, try this slim volume of tales. If you can’t stick, with what you know.

Adventures in Bookland: The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz

16 August 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


Dean Koontz, the hardest working man in publishing, is back on top form with this novel, the first in a new series, featuring Jane Hawk, rogue FBI agent. Dean Koontz is also about the most wildly variable bestselling writer working today, his work ranging from the brilliant to the awful, but this one is right at the top end of his range. It’s back to the techno thrillers of mid-term Koontz, with a solid dose of big government paranoia, and a dialling back of the tendency to preach that marred much of his more recent work. So if you like fast-paced thrillers that wind through the plot points faster than a Golden Retriever gobbles dinner, this one is for you.

Don’t Give Up

16 August 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Acceptance Notes, Things You Never Knew, Writers, Writing

 

What’s the difference between an amateur writer and a professional writer?

The professional didn’t give up.

To emphasise the point here’s my publication history by decade:
 
1980s – one short story published
1990s – one short story published
2000s – two stories published (and a few articles in magazines)
2010s – about 40 short stories published, 11 books and I’ve lost count of the number of magazine features
 
So don’t give up and keep getting better.

via GIPHY

Adventures in Bookland: The Stolen White Elephant by Mark Twain

12 August 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

It turns out, from reading ‘The Stolen White Elephant’, the first story in this collection, that the detective story had barely been invented before it was being mocked. Reading the omniscient hero of the story unfailingly direct his detectives in all the wrong directions, I immediately assumed that Twain was sending up Sherlock Holmes, only to discover that the story was written five years before Sherlock first appeared in print. So Twain, it seems, had established all the main tropes of satirising detective fiction before detective fiction had even acquired its most iconic character! If that is not the ultimate feat of literary detection, I don’t know what is!

Apart from that, the stories illustrate how tastes change over the years. The last story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Talaveras County, was the story that made Twain’s name but reading it now, while it’s easy to appreciate the facility with which Twain reproduces the dialect of the place, the story itself appears a simply shaggy frog story, scarce deserving its reputation as the quintessential Twain story.

Adventures in Bookland: Seeing Angels by Emma Heathcote-James

10 August 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

Do angels exist? Before attempting an answer to that, perhaps we need to ask what angels are in the first place. The name itself derives from the Greek word for ‘messenger’. In the Biblical context, an angel was God’s messenger. But for many in the contemporary world, they have taken on a different meaning. I remember talking to one lady who did not believe in God but did believe in angels and in life after death. Emma Heathcote-James makes no attempt to answer either question – indeed, she says explicitly that she’s not interested in answering the question, which I find rather astonishing. Rather she is interested in recording people’s experiences of angels and did so by advertising, in Britain, for people to contact her with their stories (leading to some questionable contacts when some people misunderstood her advert to mean that they might meet an ‘angel’). Britain being, by some measures, a highly secular society, I was interested to see how many responses she received: it turns out, many Britons believe they have met, in some manner or other, an angel.

The great virtue of this book is that it allows people to tell their stories in their own words. The angels they meet come in all sorts of forms, some of which didn’t seem particularly angelic to me, but if that was how the person explained the experience then it was included in the study. The most moving section was the one recounting the experiences of people working with the dying: in particular, one nurse working in a hospice regularly saw the dead coming to meet the dying, and bringing great comfort with them.

The book makes no attempt to convince the sceptical, nor to reinforce the belief of the credulous. It simply recounts what people have experienced and, as such, is invaluable in showing the wide range of those experiences.

Conrad Monk – What it’s all about

21 July 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Conrad Monk, Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army

Conrad is a monk, but he has become a monk through trickery and against his will. So, it is fair to say that his heart isn’t really in it.

Conrad is also clever, charming, entirely self-serving, self-absorbed and almost completely without scruple — but in Anglo-Saxon England, when the Danish invaders come calling, those are very helpful attributes to have.

And so it comes to pass that Conrad finds himself constantly dodging death by various means, some reasonable, some… less so. His tricks include selling his brother monks into slavery, witnessing the death of a king, juggling his loyalties between his own people and the Danes, robbing corpses and impersonating a bishop.

By his side throughout is the gentle and honourable Brother Odo, a man so naturally and completely good that even animals sense it. He is no match of wits for the cunning Conrad but can he, perhaps, at least encourage the wayward monk to behave a little better?

Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army takes the reader on a hugely entertaining and highly informative trip through the Anglo-Saxon world, in the company of a persuasive and likeable — if frequently despicable — tour guide. It is a story that combines painstakingly accurate depictions of history with a fast-moving and often hilarious plot, and as such is bound to appeal to lovers of history, historical fiction and character-driven fiction alike.

Net Galley has advance copies of Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army available here.

Adventures in Bookland: The Infinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin

20 July 2018
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

Back in the now dim and distant days of the 1970s, I used to haunt the shelves of the local newsagents, searching for the newest batch of Marvel Comics to be slipped in between copies of the more common British comics such The Beano and The Dandy. It’s probably hard to believe now, in these days of instant availability, but it was really difficult then to find these comics. Among the many local newsagents – there were a lot more them then – only a few ever sold Marvel comics and even with these, it was a hit and miss affair, with copies of my favourite titles appearing some months and then nothing the next: which was particularly agonising if I was teetering on the edge of the usual comic-book cliff hanger. I started with the obvious ones: Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the Mighty Thor. But then, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had a passing moment of brain madness and introduced the Silver Surfer. I was hooked (for on the written page, I was a complete fan of science fiction, so this blending of comics and SF was perfect for me). But while Lee and Kirby launched comics into space, it was Jim Starlin who made them cosmic. I clearly remember this cover:

Starlin reimagined Warlock, making him a cosmic messiah/schizophrenic, and wrote mind-bending stories about the nature of reality. Just up my star chart! So it was great to revisit Adam Warlock, in a set of stories that I had never read, to find him and his creator as brilliantly imaginative as ever. But what I think I particularly appreciated on this reading was the artwork. I’d forgotten how good it was: there’s something particularly appealing about the cosmic characters with which Starlin populates the story. Completely bonkers – in this version, Thanos murders half the Universe because he wants Death (a superbly disdainful beauty) to love him – but great fun.