Merry Christmas everyone!
I hope you had a good one & managed to stay safe, my friends.
As promised last week, I will be reviewing some of the many books I have had the pleasure of reading this year.
In the fiction section is a selection of the books I have been trying to get around to owning for many years. Thanks to the wonders of on-line book sellers & retailers, I obtained copies of the first seven Thieves' World books by, amongst others, Robert Asprin. These are a little different as they were released from the end of the 1970's into the early 1980's & were one of the first shared world series of books. Shared world books are where an author invents a world & invites other writers to create their own stories of that world; basically an anthology of short stories with a common theme. The Thieves' World series is a very good example & very enjoyable; I thoroughly recommend these if you like fantasy/science-fiction.
Another series of books I managed to acquire copies of are the twelve Andrew Lang Fairy Books, all with their own colour title (The Blue Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy book & so on).
These are really old (early twentieth century). Lang collected as many folk-tales, fables & fairy stories as he could & released them in this series of books. Be warned though, these are not Disneyfied versions - they are the original mud and thunder versions, but still child-friendly. A fascinating piece of oral history & story-telling. I am still working my way through the twelve volumes, but there are some unforgettable gems within.
Moving right up to date, George RR Martin's Fire & Blood is a prehistory of sorts of Westeros & the Games of Thrones world. More of an 'imagined-history' textbook than a novel, but enjoyable none-the-less, especially if you are a fan of the HBO TV series. And if you like dragons & sorcery, you'll find your appetite sated. I understand that more histories are planned, so I will be looking out for those.
My final fiction selections of all the books I have consumed this year are (surprise, surprise) another fantasy/science-fiction (you are probably detecting a theme of my literary tastes here), & another 'imagined-history', this one of the life of Thomas Cromwell.
First, Lyonesse by Jack Vance could also be considered a 'imagined-history', this one of the British Isles in the days before the Pendragons.
If you know the legends of Pendragon, Uther, Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, the Grail Quest, Camelot & the Knights of the Round Table, then you will be familiar with the chivalrous swords & sorcery style they encompass. Lyonesse is the prehistory of these times, where fairies & other fey-folk still inhabit the land, incursions from the peoples of Scandinavia are frequent, & life is brutal, harsh & fairly short for most inhabitants of the British Isles.
The theme and style of the three books (Lyonesse/The Green Pearl/Madouc) remind me of The Count of Monte Cristo, a book I return to every few years as I love the work of Dumas, and particularly The Count; in my eyes the ultimate tale of the futility of revenge.
Acclaimed as a masterwork of high fantasy, in my opinion Lyonesse is the masterwork, rivalling Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur; I cannot recommend this series, or Vance's Dying Earth novels enough.
Finally, another 'imagined-history', the Thomas Cromwell trilogy of novels by Hilary Mantel; Wolf Hall, Bring up the bodies, & The mirror and the light. Already a two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for the first two volumes, Mantel is, at the time of writing this, in the running for a hat-trick. I am currently three-quarters of the way through the final volume and watching the BBC serial Wolf Hall that condensed the first two into a single tale. Very enjoyable, especially if you like the machinations, plotting and power struggles of the English court during Henry the Eighth's reign. Oh, and there are enough queens of England to sate the appetite of the most fervent Royalist.
Non-fiction now, & a brief run through some of the many books on writing I have enjoyed & been educated by in 2020.
The books of Natalie Goldberg are illuminating as well as instructional; many of the books on the craft of writing are very similar in content, but I found Goldberg's perception of the life of a writer refreshing.
Stan Nicholls has an excellent book on the writers of 'the fantastic'; those writers who deal in fantasy, wonder, the unusual, science-fiction, & any topics that could be covered by the epithet 'fantastic'. Wordsmiths of wonder is an illuminating & fascinating read that can be dipped into at will, selecting any one of a large number of published writers.
Amongst the more instructional books I have read this year are three of note; Percy Lubbock's The Craft of fiction, Colin Bulman's The art and the craft, & Roland Barthes' Mythologies, a book I bought after watching an intriguing documentary on semiotics & semantics during the November lockdown. All very entertaining & enlightening.
Finally we come to an excellent book that has opened up the writing world for me. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is the most enlightening book on being a writer I have read so far - & I have read a lot of these books. Lamott has made sense of the many facets of being a writer in a way I have not encountered before. From the voices in the head, to the anxieties & anguish of the craft & the struggle to actually write at all, she has cast light on areas of the craft in a way I have not seen approached by any other writer yet. She makes the trauma of being a writer seem much more normal, and lessens the fear we all have that we aren't good enough (trust me - all writer's suffer a lack of confidence in their own work!). I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to write, whether for fun or to become published. An exceptional book.
That's it for this week, my friends. Enjoy the New Year celebrations and stay safe!
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