Three Books

So, I hadn't had a chance to get into a bookstore for a while, and held off ordering from Amazon, that great big bookstore in the sky (or perhaps the ether), since we were away for a brief visit to Rockford / Lake Geneva / & Milwaukee and having books come while we're having mail held is inviting trouble. Once we were back I did a little catching up:

THE ALABASTER HAND by A. N. L. Munby 

--Read twice before, finding it enjoyable but derivative; this time I thought better of it. After all, if you're going to imitate somebody it might as well be the best (in this case, the ghost stories of M. R. James). Plus the book was written under difficult circumstances (in a prisoner-of-war camp). Jared Lobdell was interested in this book but never articulated why.

BLOOD & THUNDER: THE LIFE AND ART ODF ROBERT E. HOWARD by Mark Finn

--a well-researched new (-ish) biography of R.E.H., creator of Conan. Meant to be a corrective of the de Camp biography and its many shortcomings.

THE MAJOR AND THE MISSIONARY: THE LETTERS OF WARREN HAMILTON LEWIS AND BLANCH BIGGS ed. Diana Pavlac Glyer

--the back-and-forth correspondence between C. S. Lewis's brother and said a missionary living and working in New Guinea: pen friends who never met. I heard this one read out as a play-for-voices at a Mythcon years ago and enjoyed it then; I expect to enjoy it again now that it's available in book form.

There's a fourth book, by Barfield, but that has not yet arrived.

--John R.

--current reading: Finn's Howard.