Reading Roundup, October 2009

Whereas last October found me in Bradbury country, this time around I was busy finishing review books for the next Black Gate, and sneaking in a few anthologies and novels at the end of the month to serve as a change of pace.

As I mentioned last month, I have the pleasure of reviewing the two new Harold Lamb collections from Bison Books, the fifth and sixth books in a project by Lamb scholar and Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones. Last month I read Lamb’s ‘Crusader’ tales in Swords From the West. I began my October reading with its companion volume, Swords From the Desert, containing tales focused on Eastern protagonists. Another uniformly excellent collection, with all the breathless pace, master plotting, and authentic setting fans of Lamb’s adventure fiction have come to expect. Although around half the size of Swords From the West, the two books combined number something like 900 pages and, no matter how good something is, a change of pace is always welcome.

Ben Counter’s Daemon World wasn’t exactly a change of pace, but it was a fun, quick read set in the grim dystopia of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It was also the final book I had to read for my BG duties and, once it was finished, I more or less cut loose by grabbing several anthologies I’ve been wanting to have a look at. More on those in future installments, once I’ve completed them. I also read several of the fantastic Dark Horse Conan comic series from Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, in graphic novel form — these too I’ll be talking about in greater depth later.

I’m on the fence about continuing with Iain M. Bank’s Against A Dark Background, which I started back in the beginning of September and set aside in favor of BG review books. After 200 pages, I’m just not very interested in it — quite unusual as I usually eat Banks’ stuff up, with or without the ‘M.’ This one might fall into the ‘life’s too short’ category and be abandoned.

Needing a break from fantasy and adventure fiction in general, I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel that the literati have developed a stiffy for — giving it a Pulitzer no less. Well, it was a good book, no denying, and as much as I get occasionally irked by literary SF novels that are held aloof from the genre ghetto by virtue of what marketing category their authors fall into, I didn’t let it influence my enjoyment of the book. Very bleak, but with an underlying note of hope in the decency of humanity, The Road is a moving iteration of the post-apocalyptic tale and one I thoroughly recommend. And it’s a science fiction novel — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I finished the month with a quick read of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man — itself a novel that probably would have been billed as something else if its author hadn’t already been pegged as a genre giant. It’s a short, sharp meditation on religion and the psychology of religion, that tells the story of a man with a martyr complex and a fascination with Judaism and Christianity that goes back in time to witness the crucifixion. He falls in with John the Baptist, makes a pilgrimage to Nazareth and the home of Joseph and Mary in search of Jesus  . . . and things aren’t quite as our protagonist expected. An interesting book, and one I’d hate to spoil by revealing the engaging twist at its heart.

So, that was October. I hope to have some more reviews appear on this site before year’s end, so future months should start including a higher percentage of that sort of thing. But, for now, I’m relieved again to be reading whatever I feel like, and suspect I’ll go a bit wild reading an eclectic mix of stuff before I again settle down to read with purpose.