Books This Long Time
I'm pretty much bound to have forgotten some.



W.E.B. Griffin, The Corps: VI-IX. See previous books entry. There's a huge jump from 1943 to 1950 between VIII and IX, which surprised me.

Sherwood Smith Crown Duel. Where was this book when I was a kid? I'd have loved it. I love it now, but now I could tell what was going to happen. It has everything -- a princess off having adventures and becoming a hero, a hero who at first appears to be a villain, though he didn't fool me for thirty seconds, characters, plot, world, and good writing. The first half is all dashing about having adventures and the second half is all politics and flirting with fans. I think it's all terrific and would recommend it to anyone who likes The Hero and the Crown. Well done satorias for writing it and sdn for bringing it back into print so I could buy it.

I was having a discussion with zorinth the other day about what makes books really absorbing and "grabby" such that one can't bear to put them down, as opposed to books that are interesting, but you could finish them next week. I'm no nearer to being able to define what it actually is, but Crown Duel certainly has it.

Ruth Rendell The Veiled One, The Tree of Hands. Two good but very different Rendells. She loads the deck in ToH, to get the reader to sympathise with the character doing bad things, but it works. As with all the Rendell, these were first re-reads, read when they originally came out and not since.

Anthony Trollope The Belton Estate. Absolutely vintage Trollope, on top of his form, given to me by lisajulie. There's a young woman prepared to starve to death rather than be beholden, and in a terrible state of unclarity as to which of two young men have caused her scales to turn pink. It's very funny and sll very delicately done.

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead, nth re-read. Zorinth took it to Britain to read, and I re-read it on the boat back from Ireland when I was full of cold and wanting something familiar. This is so familiar I practically have it memorized -- Zelazny at his best, wisecracking first person, fascinating SFnal universe, terrible puns.

William Manchester American Caesar, biography of Douglas MacArthur, my new hero. (At the bar in Eternicon, right now, MacArthur is explaining the use of airpower to Alexander the Great.) After reading Griffin, I was bursting to find out more about MacArthur. There was so much in this book, and so much of it so interesting and illuminating that I now want to read another biography. I'm not about to write an alternate history where he conquered the whole of Asia in the early fifties, but it's there for someone who wants it. Brilliant man. Brilliant book.

Gillian Bradshaw Render Unto Caesar. I think this may be her best book since The Beacon at Alexandria. It's about an Alexandrian banker who comes to Rome to recover a debt in the early years of the Principate, and it's all perfect.

William Tenn All Possible Worlds, nth re-read preparatory to panel at N4. This is a short story collection and it contains some of his Tenn's very best cleverest and funniest stories.

Cecil Woodham-Smith The Reason Why. Terrific book about the charge of the Light Brigade, with details and explainations and life-stories, well-written and fast paced. I read it on the train up to Lancaster and then gave it to carandol. Amazing detail you couldn't make up -- Lord Raglan, who grew up in the Napoleonic Wars, during the Crimean War when the British were allied wiht the French and had the French with them fighting the Russians, kept causing confusion by accidentally calling the enemy "the French", out of long habit.