Vlad: The Last Confession

Vlad: The Last Confession (C.C. Humphreys, 2008) won't be released in the U.S. for another week or two, but I bought a copy in Canada last October at the Surrey International Writers Conference, where Humphreys was one of the presenters. If you're ever at a conference where he's speaking, do go to his workshops--he's an actor as well as a writer, and his presentations are always lively and engaging. He's also at least as much of a research junkie as I am, but with a better travel and weaponry budget. (Hopefully one day I'll be so lucky and get to regale my audiences with, say, a firsthand description of the walls around Badajoz or what it's like to fire a Baker rifle or wield a French infantry officer's sabre.)

Anyway, the book. It's a novel of Dracula, but not a vampire story. Instead we meet the historical Vlad Dracula, at least an interpretation thereof based on the scanty facts available. And it's a page-turning epic adventure, albeit occasionally a stomach-turning one as well. I think I was happier without knowing so much about how to go about impaling one's enemies, for example. But I recommend it for anyone who likes their historical fiction with a lot of war and danger or who craves unusual settings.

Favorite authors through time

Crossposted from Facebook, because it seemed to fit here, too.

Instructions: List your ten favorite authors when you were ten years old, and your fifteen favorite authors when you were fifteen years old. Star those who are on both lists. Then list ten authors you love whom you discovered after the age of 15! The final step: decide on your five favorite authors of all time.


MY 10 FAVORITE AUTHORS WHEN I WAS 10
(in no particular order)

CS Lewis*
Marguerite Henry
Walter Farley
Judy Blume*
Beverly Cleary
Donald F. Glut (wrote a novelization of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK that I read to *tatters* in 4th grade)
Katherine Paterson
Anna Sewell
Whoever wrote the Encyclopedia of the Horse that I had back then
Whoever wrote the Time-Life book on Early Man I used to get out of the library again and again.

After the first five, this was really tough. Mostly I just read my favorite books over and over again. And I was surprisingly into non-fiction, or at least pseudo-non-fiction, for a girl who would grow up to write fiction. My local library had a series of fictionalized biographies of the childhoods of early Americans that I loved--I especially remember the ones about George Washington, Robert E Lee, Douglas MacArthur, and Tecumseh, for some reason. I also read a lot of military history written for kids. There was a whole series on WWII.

It strikes me that I was a somewhat strange kid.

MY 15 FAVORITE AUTHORS WHEN I WAS 15
(also in no particular order)

CS Lewis*
Judy Blume*
Jean Auel
Belva Plain
Alexandra Ripley
Celeste de Blasis
Georgette Heyer
Clare Darcy
Candice Ransom
Charlotte Bronte
Anne Frank
Mary Francis Shura
Taylor Caldwell
John Jakes
Margaret Mitchell

Fifteen-year-old Susan sure loved her some family sagas...

TEN GREAT AUTHORS I DISCOVERED AFTER THE AGE OF 15

Jane Austen
Patrick O'Brian
Louisa May Alcott (I know! But I never read her as a child!)
LM Montgomery (see note on Alcott)
Bernard Cornwell
Dorothy Sayers
Jacqueline Carey
Lois McMaster Bujold
Lindsey Davis
Bill Bryson

MY FIVE FAVORITE AUTHORS OF ALL TIME

Jane Austen
CS Lewis
Dorothy Sayers
Patrick O'Brian
Bernard Cornwell

Wellington: Pillar of State

Wellington: Pillar of State (Elizabeth Longford, 1972) held my attention, but it also saddened me. It's about Wellington's life post-Waterloo, which I've paid less attention to, given that I became a Wellington fangirl via my interest in the Napoleonic Wars, and that it's Sir Arthur Wellesley the brilliant young general who shows up in my alternative history WIP, not Wellington the aging reactionary Tory politician. I'd describe Wellington as the last great 18th century Englishman, but he never quite got into synch with the post-1815 world despite living till 1852 and staying active politically right up until his death. And his politics frustrate me, 21st century American Democrat that I am--I want to jump in the nearest TARDIS, go back to 1820 or so, and shake some sense into the man, because, dang it, he was far too intelligent to have such rigid ideas!

Still, despite disagreeing with him, I don't admire him any less. I wish more people on both sides of my country's politics had his rock-solid integrity and willingness to put the public good as he perceived it ahead of ambition. And while I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first volume of Longford's biography (Wellington: The Years of the Sword), because there's just no way in the WORLD I'm going to find 19th century Parliamentary minutia as interesting as the Peninsular War and Waterloo, she made the human interest so strong and lively that I managed to soldier through all the Whig and Tory wrangling.

Kitchen Confidential

I'm sick again. Or perhaps I should say still. This round may be a mild case of pneumonia; I'll be staying home from work and seeing the doctor tomorrow. So I've again been spending a lot of the time lounging on the couch or in bed with a book. Currently I'm re-reading Sense & Sensibility and working my way through the second volume of Elizabeth Longford's Wellington biography, but over the weekend I read Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain, the 2007 updated edition).

Bourdain is as close to a universal crush object as I've found--I think because he's a real-life reformed but not exactly repentant rake, AND he could pamper you by cooking amazing meals. And it doesn't hurt that he's tall, dark, and handsome. Don't get me wrong, I'm a happily married woman, but Bourdain makes a nice Secret Celebrity Boyfriend. And Kitchen Confidential is a fun memoir of his wild youth and eventual success, with musings about food, cooking, and life. If you like No Reservations, you'll enjoy this book.

The Country Gentleman

Whenever I'm in a thrift store or used bookstore, I look for traditional Regency romances, the older the better. One of my recent finds was The Country Gentleman (Dinah Dean, 1986), a pastoral tale of English village life in 1807--with some soldiers, including a brief cameo by the future Duke of Wellington, smugglers, and a spy, just to spice things up a little. Dean really, really knows her stuff, whether it's bell-ringing or details of relatively obscure campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, and I enjoyed the rich, three-dimensional world she created. As a history geek, it's always a pleasure to find a writer who shares some of my obsessions and introduces me to a few of her own. That said, the romance takes a back seat to the period piece aspects of the story. I didn't mind, but many readers might.

Quarrel With the King

I'm still not all the way over my cold, but Thursday I went back to work and resumed my normal life. I also took a break from quick, fun novels and read Quarrel With the King (Adam Nicolson, 2008). It took me outside my usual narrow area of English history, focusing on a noble family's course between rising to royal favor in the 1520's and taking the parliamentarian side of the English Civil War in the 1640's.

It's a tough book to categorize. It includes intellectual history, history of art, vignettes of the lives of the Pembroke family's tenants, etc., but its overarching theme is the slow end of England's medieval ways, where there was hierarchy but also a degree of mutuality, in the face of the encroachment of the modern, more authoritarian state.

It's an artfully written book, and it gave me a better sense of the sweep of the times--how the seeds of the English Civil War were planted all the way back under the Tudors, and how the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries influenced "my" era of the late 18th and early 19th.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon

Still home sick, still enough energy to read but not do much else. So last night and this afternoon, with some Nyquil-induced sleep between, I read The Sharing Knife: Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2009), the final volume in a four-book fantasy series about the cross-cultural romance between a woman from ordinary, non-magical stock (farmers) and a Lakewalker man (possessed of certain magical powers useful in fighting the evils of their world).

It's an excellent conclusion to the series, but the key word is conclusion. If you want to read these books, you really need to go back to the beginning and start with Beguilement. Bujold has gradually raised the stakes and the scale of the story all along from what started out as mostly the romance of the principals, and the way she wraps it up feels right. Fawn and Dag haven't solved their world's problems, but they've planted the seeds for greater cooperation between their peoples. There's satisfying closure, but with plenty of loose ends should Bujold choose to revisit this world.