The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 156)

 

Back to Prince Edward Island.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Anne of the Island by L M Montgomery  A

This volume recounts Anne's four years in college. And though, like all the books in this series, it is episodic, however, there is much more of an overarching plot to this book than in Anne of Avonlea and I enjoyed it a lot more. 

L M Montgomery spends a lot of time describing the scenery, and while I can't really picture it, I can imagine being there even so. She is also a wonderful character writer; you get to know all of the major characters in her books. Each has their own personality that stands out on the page. They are observed lovingly, but not blindly, each has their strengths and flaws, and as a result, they come across as real people. And I enjoy the subtle wit and charm of her writing as well. It is easy to see how these books have lasted and been loved for more than a century. 

On a more practical level, they offer perhaps a slightly romanticized picture of life in the countryside at the turn of the last century. You get glimpses of the small details of life, and of the hardships. And of the society of the time. The fact that there seemed to be no shortage of widows and widowers, suggests how easy it was to die of something back then. Death was a commonplace experience for the  the young, and middle aged, as well as the old, who by today's standards, weren't all that old. 

I am going have to watch the two Anne of Green Gable shows again to see how they fit the various stories together. I can tell that they rearranged events, and perhaps characters as well. I don't recall the college years in the show, but that might well be due to my poor memory. I know that the next book in the series (below) covers her year(s) as a principle at a high school. And that during that period she had something of a romance with a wealthy man with a daughter, but I don't think that will be the case here, as the show ended with Anne and Gil finally together, as did this book. We'll see. And you'll see, once I add Anne of Windy Poplars below.

Anne of Windy Poplars  (AKA Anne of Windy Willows) by L M Montgomery  A-

This volume recounts the three years Anne was the high school principle at Summerside on Prince Edward Island. It was first published 28 years after Anne of Green Gables. A significant part of the book has Anne telling her story in letters to Gil Blythe, who is at medical school training to be a doctor. As with many of the Anne books, it is an episodic novel, with character studies at the core of the story. Indeed, it is the characters, both young and old, who are often spun out of their unique conversations that are the great appeal of this story to me.

Perhaps it is for the convenience of the story, but as I mentioned above, there are certainly a lot of widows about in these stories, and tales of deaths at any age, young, middle aged and old of natural causes. Perhaps a lesson the anti-vaccine people might want to take to heart. It is also interesting that unless you lived at home, or were married, you lived in boarding houses - a room and a meal provided. Even the principle of  the high school was apparently not paid  enough to have her own flat. Though that might also reflect society of the time, where even the middle class of the day employed a maid and a cook. With wood or coal burning furnaces and hot water heaters, and wood burning stoves, it would be hard to have a full time job, and then have to come home to get everything fired up to eat and live without employing a servant to do so. Anyway, an interesting glimpse into everyday life a hundred years ago.

What was also interesting was how the 1987 TV show adopted the books subsequent to Anne of Green Gables into the sequel mini-series. What they seemed to do was to consolidate a lot of characters, giving them storylines taken from different characters in the book, as well as eliminating many characters, and consolidating the time-line. This book covered three years, and I seem to remember it was only one in the TV series. 

One example of consolidated characters; in the TV show has a wealthy man with the semi-abandoned daughter what a love interest in the TV show. This child is a student of Anne. In the book this love interest plays out as Anne's collage boyfriend in Anne of the Island. However, there is a story about an abandoned daughter in Anne of Windy Poplars but the child is only eight years old and her father only appears at the end of the book. Both versions of the child had her living with the matriarch of the Pringles. However his matriarch character was also consolidated with another ancient widow in the book who kept her 40 year old daughter waiting on her hand and foot. In any event, there are elements in the books that recall the TV series, but are still quite different as well.

 I will have to watch this again this winter. But the long and short of it is that in these last three books, you get bits of pieces of the stories in one form or another that appeared in the TV show, with some new material.  However, you also miss a whole lot of what was in the books, as one might expect going from books to a TV show. Still, I am fond of both versions of Anne. I think the TV show did a very good job of building a charming cohesive story out of the episodic nature of the material they used, without betraying the true Anne of Green Gables.

There are four more Anne books, cover her life until the age of 53. Plus some books about Avonlea, that she might make cameo appearances in. I think, however, that I will leave Anne still in her youth, and maybe read one of the Avonlea books. I have one on my ebook reader. But for now, it's time to move on, though were to, I have no idea. Stay tuned. Next week you'll know.

NOTE:

Wikipedia says that the original title was Anne of Windy Willows, but the US publisher thought it too close to Wind in the Willows, and there was some gory stuff that they wanted removed, so she did for the US version. My version, though a free Canadian ebook version used the American version.

It was also interesting how Anne is portraited on the book covers I searched for; she is often portraied  in the style of women of at the age of publication. I had a lot of covers, and so Annes, to choose from.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 155)

 

My last forelay into the War of the Roses period did not fare all that well. But never saying never, I'm back at it again with a new story set in England during that civil war. Along with that, I have also come across an unknown sequel to a very famous book. Does unknown mean "bad"? Find out below.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Black Arrow by Robert Lewis Stevenson  C 

This is indeed an old fashioned adventure story. It's young protagonist  Dick Sheldon, goes from one mostly disastrous adventure to the next from the beginning to the end of the story. Through his adventures and misadventures he does things that he comes to regret but grows up. 

I can only give this story an average, "C" grade for several reasons. First is the language. Stevenson tells the story using archaic language. Now when modern usages appear in fantasy or historical fiction they annoy me, but I found that the language Stevenson used to tell this story was just too authentic. It wasn't that I couldn't figure out what was going on, though in dialog it was sometimes very hard to follow. One of my chief joys in reading is the clever use of language, however, I found that the archaic language often needed to be deciphered. This made reading more work than pleasure.

The other factor that lowered my enjoyment of the story was that a lack of knowledge of the historical period. Knowledge of this age where alliances shifted with every triumph or disaster experienced by the two factions contending for the throne of England, and in this shifting landscape would have been helpful in knowing what exactly is going on. Not being up to speed on this period of history, I quickly lost track of who was for whom. Plus the pace of the story was pretty hectic and almost nothing turns out right until the very end. Which might not be a bad thing for many readers, but I guess I found it a little too fast paced.

To sum The Black Arrow up, I would say it was a classic adventure story, perhaps over-stuffed with adventure. And archaic language.

Catriona (AKA David Balfour) by Robert Lewis Stevenson  DNF 8%

This story starts right where RLS's Kidnapped ends. I read that story in 2023. I was looking back of my review of that book and I noted in my review that it had a very strange and abrupt ending. Indeed, I had to look up an online version to make certain that the book I was reading wasn't missing a page. Apparently it wasn't it was missing just a page, it was missing the last half of the rest of the story. Kidnapped earned only a "C" grade from me. I was still confused by the start of this story, and given my lukewarm impression of the first half of the story, and from what I read about what this story was about, I decided not to press on.

(I'll be honest; when I came across this book, for some reason, I had it in my mind that it was the sequel to Treasure Island, which is why I picked it up. If I had my wits about me, I likely wouldn't have bothered.)

Looking back over the RLS I have read, I don't think that RLS stories are exactly to my taste. At least in fiction. I liked his A Child's Garden of Verses though. I do have a very fragile 1906 copy of his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, and An Inland Voyage that maybe I should give a try.

Book Collecting

 

Book collecting, especially special limited edition fantasy books seems to be having its day these days, at least, on BookTube, and I believe on other social media as well. Buying or receiving gift books and then displaying them on your YouTube channel is a thing, a thing called "book hauls". Most of these books are regular books they find, but I gather they also feature these special limited editions as well, often receiving them for free, i.e. free publicity for the publishers.

In addition, indie authors with large social media followings on one platform or another have taken to offering their books as special editions on Kickstarter. Of course this only works if you have a large following, since most authors/media influencers can only turn as less than 5% of their followers or subscribers into customers. 

These limited edition books often feature all the bells and whistles of books; slip cases, color and B & W interior illustrations, fancy end papers, and have the outside edges of the pages "sprayed" with ink, often in patterns and even images. These books are very pricey, of course, I assume above $50USD, though I've not priced them myself. I guess true book lovers love pretty books. Or at least gaudy ones.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so when I say that I find these books are often over the top in their decorations, with gilded lettering, sometimes leather binding, and those sprayed edges they look, well let's say too dolled up, that's just my opinion. And that goes for the interior art that I've seen as well. In short, I find them just too much, if not ugly. But that's just me. 

The real issue is for me; they're books printed not to be read, but to be displayed on the shelf and admired. In a way, they are sort of like those libraries of books rich people buy to fill their bookshelves, but never intend to read. They're decor. And this is especially true because most of the buyers of these books already have at least one copy of the book. But then, what can you say? They're collectors... And well, collectors are collectors...

Now, of course, rare and desirable books can get very pricey indeed. And who knows what book will become rare and desirable decades from now. By producing only a limited number of books, often 1,000 or less, these books by definition are going to be rare. The question is that ,in the coming decades, will they be desirable? There seems to be a stigma attached to things that are deliberately made to be "collectable", and I wonder if these books will escape that stigma in time. Plus, who knows how popular the authors will be in the future? That certainly has a bearing on how desirable these books will be.

But here I am again, being negative. But hey, I'm an old man. Cut me some slack. However, as with audiobooks, I'm just speaking for myself. You do you, and if you love special editions of the books you love, I think that's great. I'm quite sure most of these book collectors are buying the books out of love, not as an investment. At least I hope not.

And I can't toss more stones than that. Because, yes, I used to collect books as well, until some 25 years ago, when I realized that I would have to someday move all of them. Now, if you have ever had to move books, you'll know just how heavy they get and just how fast they do. It doesn't take a big box of books to get heavy. I know, I moved them. Thus I stopped collecting books and started reading library books. Mostly. Since the turn of the century I may have acquired, maybe 50 books? A few more in recent years than before. For example, the seven Brother Cadfael omnibus books that I have now, I didn't own when I took the photo of my bookshelves above. But for the most part I have been, and still am, content to read library books.

Now if you study my book shelves you will see that I collected a variety of books, in a variety of subjects, types and conditions. I have some first printings, a lot of trade paperbacks for the  60's, and a lot of second hand books from the first half of the last century. What you won't find is special editions.

I'm too cheap. 

And when I buy books, I buy them, to read them (and treasure them). 

There are all sorts of book collectors who collect all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons. And that's great. So even if I shake my head at all these fancy special editions, well, if it funds authors who need funding, and brings joy to readers, it's all good. 

Read on. And buy on! If you're rich.

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 154)

 

It has been a rough couple of weeks, reading-wise. But you have to expect some rocks and briars once you leave your familiar cow path and strike out for unexplored books. I can take the rough with the smooth. Besides, I usually have more fun writing about books I don't like than the books I do like, so I'm not complaining.

Still, it would be nice to read a good book again. I downloaded several possible candidates, and today's books, since this is a double-header review, are the books I chose to begin with. I have to believe the first one is a reread. I'm almost certain this was one of the bedtime book I read to my kids when they were young, but I have no clear memory of doing so. However, what I can say is that the TV series is perhaps my favorite TV show of all time. So what can go wrong?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery  A

As it turned out, nothing. In fact, the book was far better than I expected it to be. As I said in the lede, the 1985 TV version of Anne of Green Gables, including the sequel may well be my favorite TV show of all time. (I don't count the third entry, "Continuing Story' as "canon", at least for me.) I know they have made a new version a few years ago, but Megan Follows is, and will always be, Anne Shirley. I have the complete collection on DVDs, and will have to watch it again on some cold rainy day.

Do I need to outline the story? Mathew, a very shy sixty-year-old bachelor and his spinster sister, Marilla, live on a farm on Prince Edward Island Canada decide to send for an orphan boy to help around the farm. There is a mix up, and they end up with the 11 year old Anne Shirley, a very sweet young girl with a vivid imagination and much given to talking. She brings a new life to the old folks with her various escapades. The story is lush evocation of nature and life in a small community at the turn of the last century. If you haven't read the book, do so. It is free on Gutenberg. And/or watch the 1985 version of the book and its sequel. I don't recommend the the third series with Anne all grown up, set during WW l.

Spoilers ahead!

I was surprised to discover just how closely that TV show followed the book. There were minor changes. For example, Anne was reciting The Lady of Shalott in the TV version, but the book has them reenacting Tennyson's Lancelot and Elaine, which I gather is the same story, but not the ballad. In the book, Mathew dies in the doorway of the house after reading that the bank where they have all their money has failed, with both Anne and Marilla present, instead of the field with Anne alone. Various incidents in the book take place in other places in the TV show, but I recognized all of them from the TV show.

Anne of Avonlea by L M Montgomery   B+

This book continues the story of Anne from the point where Anne of Green Gables left off. Both of these stories are episodic in nature. However, in the first book there was much more of an over-arching plot, that of Anne fitting into her new life with Marilla and Mathew and life in Avonlea that served to tie all the episodes together. That strong over-arching plot is missing in this book, making it more of a series of episodes and character studies rather than being driven by a unified plot.

This story recounts Anne's two years as a teacher in the Avonlea school she graduated from just a year prior. We get to meet and know half a dozen new characters and their backstories. Anne still gets into trouble, but is now much more grown up. 

While there are a couple if incidents I recognized from either the original TV show, or its sequel, much of this book is new material to me. For example, in this book Marilla takes in twin 6 year old orphans on a temporary basis, the children of a third cousin, whose uncle is supposed to come and pick them up in the following summer. This never happened in the TV show.

I consider these books historical fiction, though they were written as contemporary fiction. While they no doubt idealize certain aspects of the  contemporary life of the time, they also highlight certain aspects that might be easily overlooked by today's writer setting a story in that period, or if not overlooked, over emphasized. One such aspect is the commonplaceness of death in these stories. People of all ages die in these stories. No doubt some for the convenience of the plot, but the fact that not only infants and old people in their 50's - 70's die, but middle aged people get sick and die is taken as a matter of course. Sad, but that's life. Or that you had today's high school seniors working as teachers in one room school houses with one year of special training - until, of course they got married, and then they would be fired... Things like this could be found with research, and are, but too often these commonplace facts of life that seem strange to us now, get emphasized in contemporary historical fiction because their unfamiliarity, distorting ever-so-slightly the times they present.

I have the next two books Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars, downloaded. They seem to be the sources of the the Sequel series, with Anne as a young woman in college and as a teacher at a private school. We'll have to see how soon I get around to them.

The Saturday Morning Post (153)

 

This issue we have a rather weird book. For a change of pace. What the hell?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Dirk Gentry's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams  C

I've gone on record as saying that I don't like silly stories. And given that attitude, I probably should've given this book a miss. I read his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, and found them, OK, but not hilarious, as some readers do. So I wasn't going into this book unprepared. Even so, it was a disappointment.

I did, however, stick with it to the end. I think the reason was that though the story itself is chaotic and silly, the writing is clever. If it had been a silly story with silly humor, I would've DNFed it rather quickly. But as someone who really appreciated the clever use of the English language, I put up with the nonsense story because I enjoyed the use of language. But, as you can see, not really all that much.

The story itself is, very disjointed and entirely unbelievable. It is mostly just a series of often seemingly unrelated episodes highlighting Adam's humor in various locales and with various characters, all loosely strung together into some resemblance of a plot, the importance of which is entirely unimportant. From the title, I had been under the impression that it would feature an unconventional detective solving special crime(s). Now, to some extent this is true, but it is a fairly minor element, and no believable way, indeed, understandable fashion. At least unless, perhaps, if you make a deep study of the story elements, which I am not inclined to do. Truthfully, I had to google the Wikipedia entry of this story just to figure out how it ended. And I'm still sure how they derive their interpretation. I'm not even convinced that what they claim is in the story, is actually in it. 

I suppose I could outline the plot, but really, what's the point? Why try to impose order on chaos? You may want to read it if you enjoy the Monty Python style humor. The alleged plot is just a scaffolding to hold it up this exercise in humor. There is a second Dirk Gentry novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and the third one completed by another writer after Adams' death, neither of which I will be reading. Once is enough.

Thoughts on Audiobooks

Audiobooks are popular. They're the fastest growing segment in books sales. A lot of people consume audiobooks. I use the neutral term "consume" deliberately. Personally, I don't consider listening to someone read a book  to be "reading" as book. Stretching the word reading to cover listening is a bridge too far for me. However, I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to do so, i.e. whatever. (Or is it 6-7 these days?)

I think there are several important differences between reading with one's eyes and with one's ears that make it a truly different experience.

Now, I'm not an audiobook "reader" for several reasons that I will touch on later. So I have only a very limited exposer to the medium, and what I know about it is mostly second hand. Still I think I can say a few things about audiobooks.

The first thing that strikes me is that just listening to an audiobook, and doing nothing else, seems rare for many audiobook fans. I gather that one of the great benefits of audiobooks is that you don't have to sit down and read the story. You can be multitasking. You can listen to audiobooks while driving, doing chores, grocery shopping, and perhaps even working. You can do it anywhere. This is a plus for busy people, and I think partly explains the popularity of audiobooks. 

Contrast this with reading print books, paper or electronic, where you have to be paying most of your attention to the words. You can have music on in the background, but most of your focus is on the story, not on whatever else you are doing, because you can't be doing much else.

Comprehension aside, I think this difference is significant in that the act of reading in the case of text is primary, and sedentary, while audiobooks are often a secondary experience while doing something else. There seems to be a deliberate ranking of importance. If you don't have the time to sit down and read, you can add "reading" to whatever you are doing while listening to an audiobook. The other activity is the primary activity, with reading just adding value to it. 

Audiobook fans will often cite the narrator as an essential element to their enjoyment of the story. Indeed, it is sometimes the entire reason for picking up the audiobook.  It seems that the more creative reading the narrator can bring to the story, the more voices he or she can do, is one of audiobooks' great draws. Indeed, there are some audiobooks now that have a cast of readers to voice the different characters. Being familiar with the old radio shows you used to see offered on cassette tapes, this sounds familiar. I wonder how they work? In radio, the actors were working from a radio script, but in audiobooks, the voice actors are reading, I presume, from the book, with all the bookish things still intact; from descriptive passages to dialog tags. That would seem, well, awkward to me.

And then there is the fact that most people read faster than the narrator can read out loud.  As a result, many audiobook fans listen to their books at 1.2X to 2X times the natural speed of the narration. Apparently they don't mind listening to Alvin the Chipmunk narrating their books for them. I wonder if they speed through all the great narrators and ensemble casts as well?

As I said above, I'm not a fan of audiobooks for several reasons.

For me, what I enjoy is sitting down in my easy chair and reading a book. I might have music on in the background, but I hardly notice it, and probably don't need it. I guess I have too much time on my hands and so, I have no reason to resort to audiobooks.

I find audiobooks too slow, too tedious, and not being a fan of Alvin as a narrator. I find it is just easier to do it myself.

And then we come to the voice of the narrator. I have a "voice" in my head as I read the book. A very familiar voice. With audiobooks you must accept another voice, and it may not match the voice in your head. I recently sampled the audiobook version of the Emma M Lion books, and while I can't say that I had any particular voice in my head for Emma - I just have one voice - I knew what I was hearing was just wrong. The voice acter, selected out of a hundred candidates by the author, sounded too old and too posh for Emma, the daughter of an Irishman and raised in a cottage. I would've expected a much lighter voice for a twenty year old and with an Irish lilt to it. Perhaps you get used to it, but well... The reality is that any voice acter will likely sound different than you reading voice, and will take getting used to. If you can.

And while I've not heard any of the best narrators audiobook fans rave about, I have to admit that I find the whole idea of creating different voices for different characters to be inherently silly. The whole idea sounds to me like a parlor trick for a kid's birthday party. You just know it's someone distorting their voice, not a real character speaking - a gimmick, a lie. Plus, I think it's entirely unnecessary. I don't think I give characters any distinct "sound" in my imagination. As with Emma M Lion, their individual speech in my head is created by the way the author writes their dialog and thoughts. Nothing more seems to be needed. And I suspect that this is true for those "full cast" audiobooks as well. 

And then there is the fact that with audiobooks, unless you listen to them as you read the words, you are missing all the visual clues that text on the page gives the reader when looking at it. Audiobooks present the story as one big block of words. Yes, there are pauses and stops to break it up. Emotions can be put into words, that may help define the text - though they may not match how you would read the words yourself. (I noticed that as well in those Emma M Lion audiobook samples.) Nevertheless, I know from my own books in audiobook form, that it's sometime hard to decipher where one speaker finishes and the next one begins, so that it can often be, at least briefly, unclear who is say what without a dialog tag. Plus, dialog tags sound awkward when spoken out loud. All this is no problem on the page, what with all the visual clues in the way the sentences are set out and with the use of visible punctuation. Plus, what are your eyes doing while listening to an audiobook? Close them and risk falling asleep, keep them open an risk distractions. Little wonder audiobooks are often an axillary activity.

And for me, there is one last consideration. Given how easily I blank out music - I can't seem to concentrate on a tune for more than a minute, unless I know the words and am following along - I have to wonder how engaging an audiobook would need to be to hold my attention. And how quickly I'd loose concentration and interest in the too slow narration?

Obviously my concerns about audiobooks are not shared by a lot of readers. And I have no issues with people who like reading that way. Especially as a publisher. Audiobooks now account for up to half of my sales. 

But what about you? Do you read audiobooks?

The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (No. 152)

In this week's second post, we have a historical fiction book by one of the more popular living historical fiction authors. He's written several series, one concerning Rome, another about Genghis Khan, plus a fantasy series. None of those, however, is what I picked up. So what did I opt for?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

War of the Roses - Stormbird by Conn Iggulden  DNF 57%

This is a contemporary written historical fiction book that reflects the seemingly bog standard contemporary style of writing fiction. Instead of telling just one story - how boring - authors these days, especially in fantasy, like to tell four, five, or more stories in every book, using multiple points of views. That's the case here. I counted five point of view characters used by the author just o tell the opening stages of the English civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster. 

We get the point of view of a fictional spymaster/fixer. We get young Margaret of Anjou, the 14 year old bride of the King of England's story. Plus we have a retired English archer turned farmer in Marine, France's experiences. And that of various Dukes. And for some unknown reason, the story of some random fellows murdering a magistrate. I have no idea what they are doing in this story, since the episodes seemed to have no relationship to the larger story. Indeed, I ended up skipping those episodes after that first one. That wasn't the story I picked up the book to read. 

Multiple point of view books are simply not my cup of tea, but if you like them or don't mind them, you can skip the rest of the review, and give the book a try if historical fiction appeals to you. Iggulden is a good writer, with interesting characters, assuming that you don't mind them coming and going all the time. 

My problem with stories like this is that I need a character to travel alongside through the story. If I don't have one I'm not drawn into the story. That is the case here. While it may be that an author weaves all these stories in in order to create a multi-faceted epic, I question the necessity of doing so. Do you really need them if you have an epic story to tell? I'm left wondering how boring the story would've been, had not all these random characters been tossed in to have more things happening. 

I also get the sense that by slicing, dicing, and sprinkling in all these viewpoint characters throughout the story, the author doesn't have to tell a complete story for each of theses characters. He just brings them for random dramatic parts, without the need to write a coherent story for each character. All the mundane parts of their lives can ignored, hidden behind all the other point of view interludes. I think that's cheating.

My other complaint about this book is that, after doing a little Wikipedia research myself, it seems that Iggulden is playing rather fast and loose with history. No doubt there are several interpretations of the historical events of the period for him to choose from. Still, in this book he has the truce between England and France that had England giving up two provinces to French set to last 20 years, whereas it seems it was only 23 months in real life. It also seems that he compressed timelines, perhaps for dramatic effect; historical battles may've been  pushed up 3 or 4 years - though he is careful not to state the years, or the intervals between episodes. Yes, it is fiction, after all. But then again, it's historical fiction, not fantasy....

As I said above, my problem is with its structure, not the writing. Any character I could care about appeared only occasionally and not often enough for me to keep forcing myself to continue on reading all the other parts.

The book has just under a 4 star rating on Goodreads, but the spread is pretty even between 5 and 3, with 4 being the most popular, so I take it that this book is considered good, but not great. I won't be returning to this author. Too modern.