I just bought two copies of Lars’ latest on the Nordskog Publishing page. Order your copies there too and take a look at those reader blurb to see some names we’ve seen here.
Next stop, a campaign to get West Oversea chosen for many city-wide reading programs throughout the country. (I’m kidding actually, but I wonder how something like that could be done.)
Richard Doster has a novel coming this June, Crossing the Lines, about a sports writer who explores the reasons southern culture can produce beautiful artwork and entertainment while also rejecting the black people around them. Segregation and oppression appears to have inspired great music and literature.
I watched the Mississippi pass, wondering what would matter in a thousand years. And who, when my great grandchildren ran the business, would have had the more profound effect on the world: W. A. Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery, or Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records? Who, fifty years from now, would have had the greater impact: Marvin Griffin, the governor of Georgia—a man who had power, influence, and more friends than a movie star? Or Martin Luther King, a Negro pastor who couldn’t get a seat in most of Atlanta’s restaurants?
B.B. King once played on street corners to pay his power bill. Howling Wolf had played in overalls and cut up shoes. I’d listened to Willie Kizart make a miracle through a cracked amplifier he couldn’t afford to fix. And I wondered, there on the east bank of the Mississippi, who’d done more to make the world better: them, or the Arkansas state legislator Jim Johnson?
Hold Tight is a mystery. It’s also a thriller and a family drama. It’s not at all like the kind of mystery/thriller I usually read, but it grabbed me almost painfully.
I read and reviewed one Coben novel a while back, and felt ambivalent about it. I decided to try another because I’d read an interesting thing about Coben. He’s made it a point to write his most recent books without using major obscenities. No “f” words. No “sh” words. I can’t find anything that says he has any particular religious devotion; he just seems to be concerned about raising the level of discourse. Which earned my respect, and prompted me to give him another try.
Hold Tight is about families in a suburban community—how they love each other and irritate each other, and (most importantly) mistrust each other and keep secrets. Continue reading Hold Tight, by Harlan Coben
The great J.R.R. Tolkien (may he live forever) has yet another work coming out this week, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. The Tolkien Library has an FAQ on the book, saying the legend will be released as Tolkien wrote it, not in a heavily edited version. This material was written before The Hobbit and after his translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” while the professor was teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Of note is the introduction, also written by Tolkien. “Introducing the work is one of Tolkien’s lectures on Norse literature, so you get to ‘hear’ the voice of the author as he would have spoken when introducing the legends to students.”
One U.K. newspaper reports The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun was already one of the country’s most pre-ordered titles back in February. The reviewer said, “As in all good sagas, there is a lot of betrayal, love, slaughter, and in the Norse tradition: dragons, dwarves, wolves, kings, queens, golden hoards and a lot of drinking.”
This is not a book review. It’s a rant about a book; a book you’ll never read because it’s written in Norwegian and is not (as far as I know) available in this country. (If you’re reading this in Europe—never mind. You don’t want to read it either.)
Several copies of this little paperback were sent, for some reason yet unclear, to our Viking group, and distributed, in spite of the fact that only a few of us could read them. I won’t give the title or author, because I don’t want to torpedo somebody who was kind enough to send free books. And I’m about to say some unkind things. Continue reading This is not a book review
If you follow our comments (each to his own taste) you’ll have noted an exchange following Phil’s “Questions” post, in which I talk about my personal emotional problem with shame. It’s an awkward sort of conversation, as I no doubt appear partly self-pitying and partly just perverse, responding to everything with a one-size-fits-all, “That makes me feel ashamed.” Although I can see how it might look as if I was playing a game, let me assure you that I’m dead serious. That’s what it’s like to have a shame problem. Whatever you think about anything, good or bad, helpful or worthless, shame is always there, in some different form. It’s a ubiquitous, protean enemy.
Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that that would make a great theme for a fantasy story. I could have a villain who was a shape-changer, who follows the hero wherever he goes, and confronts him again and again in different disguises.
And then I realized, with a shock, that I’d already written that story. My new book (which, in case you’ve forgotten, is called West Oversea) features a villain who’s a shape-changer. He follows Erling Skjalgsson wherever he goes, even in a voyage to North America, and confronts him again and again in a variety of disguises.
I wrote an allegory on my own condition, and didn’t even realize it.
I’ll figure out a way to feel ashamed of that, too….
Andrew Klavan, hereinafter to be known as The Hated Competition (THC), because he has treacherously and spitefully arranged for his new book to come out at about the same time as my new book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea), nevertheless has some things to say worth reading in the second half of his interview with John Nolte over at Big Hollywood. In response to a question about how much easier leftists have it in the entertainment world, he replies:
Yes, it is easier for them that way. But it’s harder for them too because they’re talking absolute nonsense and we’re telling the simple truth: that liberty is a great good and worth defending, that right is right and wrong is wrong and moral relativity is merely a form of cowardice, that the individual is more important than the state, that our rights come from our Creator. See, they can attack us, try to silence us, maybe crush us-but they can’t beat us because we’re right and they’re wrong. The truth is not so coincidentally a lot like Jesus, dude. You mock it, you torture it, you kill it-and yet there it stands. I try not to worry about what they “allow,” or what they say is permissable. I try to hitch my wagon to the truth and hold on.
But enough of THC. You want to know the latest news about my book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea).
I got a .pdf of what is apparently the final cover tonight. It looks to me as if, after all the sturm und drang, the artist pretty much got everything he wanted. Which is a lesson to us all, I guess.
The book is called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea. I’ll post the art as soon as I’m cleared to do so.
Andrew Klavan’s new Young Adult novel, The Last Thing I Remember, will be released by Thomas Nelson on April 28, according to this interview (Part 1) over at Big Hollywood.
This naturally raises an interesting dilemma for you, the discerning but budget-savvy consumer.
Because my novel, West Oversea, is scheduled for release this month, too. (Or in May anyway. June at the latest.)
So where do you spend your hard-earned book-buying dollar?
I’ll make it easy for you. Buy my book. For the following comprehensive, compelling reasons.
1) Andrew Klavan is already famous. I’m still behind Thorstein Veblen in the list of famous people who grew up in Kenyon, Minnesota. And I’m getting old.
2) Klavan is bald. I have a handsome, thick head of healthy gray hair. The implications should be obvious.
3) Klavan’s book will come out in paperback eventually. Mine will be paperback from the git-go.
I rest my case.
Megan Cox Gurdon writes about eco-propoganda drowning our children.
Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it’s almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long. They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man’s highest virtue. They get it in peppy “go green” messages online, on television and in magazines. And increasingly, the eco-message is seeping into the pages of novels that don’t, on their face, necessarily seem to be about environmentalism at all. . . .
Thus we have the spectacle of a 12-year-old becoming distraught when her father orders seared tuna at a restaurant (this happened to a friend of mine), on account of over-fishing, or a 6-year-old (son of an acquaintance) panicking at the prospect of even a yogurt container going into the trash: “But I can use it as a toy!”
Oh my soul. For balance sake, I know a child who asked to have a pink pocket knife to go with her pink rifle, so that when she shoots a deer (or whatever animal) she can clean it. She’s a good, little reader too, so no snarking at her. (HT: Loren Eaton)
I said a while back that Andrew Klavan had brought the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level in his Bishop/Weiss trilogy, by turning the mystery story into an epic of redemption (or words to that effect).
I have similar praise for Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther mysteries. But Kerr transposes the melody to a minor key. His sad, gritty stories achieve the level of cosmic tragedy.
As you may remember from my review of A Quiet Flame, Bernie Gunther is a private investigator (who could have been separated at birth from Philip Marlowe) in Berlin during the 1930s. He constantly attempts to do the same sort of things Marlowe does, but history keeps interfering. Berlin Noir is a one-volume compilation of the first three stories about him. Continue reading Berlin Noir, by Philip Kerr