Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling).

Private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott continue to juggle their professional activities and private lives, while really wondering (each independently) if they're ready to risk their friendship for a more romantic relationship. Plenty of colourful characters; some you like, some you love to hate. 

It's clear to me: I like the Cormoran Strike series way more than I ever liked the overrated Harry Potter. This is one series I'll probably read all the way through.

I'd been in a prose slump while I was reading lots of comics, but I finally managed to finish a novel, revisiting on eof the first Conan books I read as a kid...



Conan the Liberator by de Camp & Carter. The series of 6 pastiches that this is from were my first encounter with Conan in prose. This is de Camp and Carter's account of how Conan came to take the throne of Aquilonia. I had read the adaptation of this is Savage Sword of Conan earlier this year, so I was able to kind of read this one on cruise control, helping me get out of the prose slump (we'll see if I can use that to create some momentum into the next book). It's not a bad story, but the appearance of a tribe of satyrs in Aquilonia can be a bit off-putting. While there are often supernatural aspects to Howard's Conan tales, this one doesn't jibe with me as an element Howard would have used, at least not in the kind of cutesy way de Campa and Carter presented them.

-M

White Jazz by James Ellroy

I finished this one five days ago and I'm still trying to sort out how I feel.  Ellroy is a special writer and his work took steps forward with each book in the L.A. Quartet.  The Big Nowhere was a step forward artistically from The Black Dahlia.  L.A. Confidential was a big step up from the earlier two.  And this is another step forward....but is it a step too far?  This is definitely the most literary work of the four and the most I've personally read from Ellroy.  The plot is byzantine.  It makes the craziest plot that Raymond Chandler came up with look concise.  

Dave Klein is an LAPD lieutenant in the vice unit.  He's also a mob enforcer.  After he tosses a federal witness out a hotel window at the behest of Sam Giancana, he's assigned to investigate a bizarre burglary at the home of an LAPD sanctioned drug dealer.  That case begins to obsess Klein as he deals with pressures from Chief of Detectives Ed Exley, the dangerous Captain Dudley Smith and a federal probe of LAPD corruption that has Klein in its cross-hairs.  As he did with the Sleepy Lagoon murder in The Big Nowhere, Ellroy adds in a bit of semi-obscure L.A. history with the Battle of Chavez Ravine.  

Ultimately this is a great read.  But it's not an easy read.  Ellroy is a controversial writer and his work is not for the faint of heart.  That remains the case here.  It's also written in a more literary manner than Ellroy's previous novels.  And, again, the plot is convoluted to the Nth degree.  But it's worth the work.  It's the capper to a great sequence of novels.  And reading the four shows the evolution and growth of a truly excellent writer.  

I'm hoping to read the 2 novels in the recently released City of the Dead book as a start. We'll see what else I get to.

-M

Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves.




As something of an armchair Egyptologist, I have long been fascinated by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten. The farther of Tutankhamun, he is one of the most controversial and hotly debated figures in Egyptian history.

Along with this great wife, the beautiful Nefertiti, Akhenaten rejected the conventional pantheon of Egyptian gods and instead imposed the worship of a single deity – the sun – on the populace. In doing so, he eradicated religious traditions that had lasted for thousands of years and diminished the role of the powerful priests in Egyptian court life, much to their annoyance. He also drastically changed the style of Egyptian art to incorporate a hitherto unheard-of freedom of expression, resulting in iconography that is characterised by strange, elongated faces and thin, paunchy bodies. He even moved Egypt's capital from Thebes to the new city of Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna). In short, he shook-up ancient Egyptian society like no one else.

Nicholas Reeves paints a vivid portrait of the heretic pharaoh as an eccentric and tyrannical king, who cynically used monotheism to reassert Pharaonic authority. Unsurprisingly, this provoked civil unrest among the ordinary people of Egypt, which Akhenaten cruelly quelled with his army. The book also paints a rather uncomfortable picture of a lusty ruler, with a wide range of sexual predilections that were catered for by his harem of sex slaves. Reeves also proposes that Akhenaten likely took some of his daughters as wives or lovers in his attempts to father a male heir.

As for Queen Nefertiti, Reeves suggests that rather than mysteriously disappearing from the historical record, she simply changed her name to Neferneferuaten, and, after Akhenaten's death, may have attempted to seize the throne by conspiring to marry a Hittite prince. He addresses the mystery of her missing mummy too, as well as speculating on the identity of the body in Tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings – which may well be Akhenaten's, though that is still hotly debated among Egyptologists.

Reeves also details the shift back towards traditional Egyptian polytheism following Akhenaten's death, with successive rulers waging a propaganda war against his memory by dismantling his monuments, destroying his statues, and excluding his name from lists of Egyptian rulers. As a result, Akhenaten was all but lost to history until the late 19th-century discovery of his buried capital at Amarna.

Overall, Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet is very readable, for the most part, though I found some of the chapters about the Egyptian priests a little dry. But there are plenty of black & white photos and illustrations to break up and enliven the prose. I've read two of Reeves' earlier books – one on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, and one on the history of the Valley of the Kings – and they were both similarly enjoyable. This is a must read if you're interested in this heretic king and the power politics within the royal court of ancient Egypt.

It’s Superman!
Tom De Haven, 2005

Well, I guess I’m going to buck the general trend of the mostly rave, or at least very positive, reviews I’ve seen for this book. This is a very literary approach to Superman; it’s set in the mid- to late 1930s, and there is very little in the way of superheroics. It’s more focused on character studies, so you get into the minds of a young Clark Kent (from his late teens to early twenties), Lois Lane (ditto) and New York alderman Alexander ‘Lex’ Luthor – but also of numerous other characters, to the point that Clark himself is basically a secondary character in most of the book. De Haven has a particular interest in the Depression Era, so the book spends a lot of time fleshing out that setting. While I could appreciate what De Haven was trying to do here, and I’ll readily acknowledge that it is a mostly well-written book with many evocative descriptions – I particularly liked the way it started, as young Clark very accidentally stops the armed robbery of the Smallville movie theater’s cash register – I found it very short on story (despite the 450 pages in the edition I read). It’s mainly just lengthy build-up, with parallel narratives following Clark and a photographer named Willi Berg (a New York tabloid photographer who’s a fugitive from the law because he was accused of a crime he didn’t commit) tooling around the country and taking odd jobs (including Clark briefly working as a movie stuntman in Hollywood), young Lois Lane getting her start as a newspaper reporter and Luthor plotting to eventually take over the city and possibly the world. Things don’t come together until about the last quarter of the book, when the plot finally thickens. But ultimately I just found it all a bit dry and, frankly, boring.
And another thing that kind of annoyed me – although it has nothing to do with De Haven or the book itself – is one of the newspaper review blurbs which asserts that this “(...) is not the first Superman prose novel ... but it’s the first great one (...)” Obviously written by someone who’s never read either of Maggin’s books, which blow this one out of the water as far as I’m concerned.