Summer Reading

The Poe Shadow
by Matthew Pearl

Release Date: May 23, 2006

"The strange circumstances surrounding the death of Edgar Allan Poe, intriguing to fans and scholars alike, provide the basis for this literary mystery." - Booklist

If you like riveting, rigorously-researched historical fiction as much as I do, you will froth at the mouth over this successor to The Dante Club (which I just finished and also highly recommend). Pearl's credentials just couldn't be more impressive: Bachelor's in English from Harvard, law degree from Yale, teaching positions at both Harvard and Emerson College. And yet his fiction is not egregiously erudite or burdened with unnecessary literary allusions; rather, he weaves a powerful tale out of the very real fabric of 19th-century historical fact with excruciating detail (his descriptions of the homes of Henry W. Longfellow, Oliver W. Holmes and James R. Lowell in The Dante Club come from firsthand observations at these authors' actual residences in Cambridge, Mass., the city Pearl himself calls home).

If you have always been fascinated and somewhat disturbed by the unusual events that cloud literary history's knowledge of Poe's death in 1849 (as I have), then you really shouldn't miss this book; it claims to be the definitive word on what is factually known about those mysterious days in early October 1849, and given the extensive research of Pearl's first novel, I am inclined to believe that claim.



The Fourth Bear
by Jasper Fforde

Release Date: August 3, 2006

"The Gingerbreadman—psychopath, sadist, genius, and killer—is on the loose. But it isn’t Jack Spratt’s case. He and Mary Mary have been demoted to Missing Persons following Jack’s poor judgment involving the poisoning of Mr. Bun the baker. Missing Persons looks like a boring assignment until a chance encounter leads them into the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta “Goldy” Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole. Last to see her alive? The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Andersen’s wood." - Book Description, Amazon.com

Although I would have to agree with the assertion made by Publisher's Weekly in their review of this second novel in Fforde's "Nursery Crime" series in that "it lacks the snap of the author's Thursday Next series," I must admit that I found The Big Over Easy to be a quite enjoyable read. The ease with which Fforde creates his tongue-in-cheek world of nursery rhyme characters, all of whom deal with very real and very human problems, never fails to impress those of us who long to write popular fiction ourselves someday. The inclusion of the character of Prometheus as the upstairs boarder in the Spratt household made for some of the best comedic philosophical dialogue I've read since Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile and was, in my opinion, a stroke of genius.



Three Days to Never
by Tim Powers

Release Date: August 1, 2006

"Powers (Declare) delivers another top-notch supernatural spy thriller. When Frank Marrity's grandmother dies unexpectedly during 1987's New Age Harmonic Convergence, his 12-year-old daughter, Daphne, steals a videotape from the old woman's Pasadena house that turns out to be a Chaplin film long believed lost. Before Daphne can finish watching the film, its powerful symbolism awakens a latent pyrokinetic ability in her that burns the tape. Frank later discovers letters that prove his grandmother was Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter. This comes to the attention of a special branch of the Mossad specializing in the Kabbalah as well as a shadowy Gnostic sect interested in a potential weapon discovered by Einstein that he didn't offer to FDR during WWII—a weapon more terrible in its way than the atomic bomb. In typical Powers fashion, his characters' spiritual need to undo past sins or mistakes propels the ingenious plot, which manages to be intricate without becoming convoluted, to its highly satisfying conclusion." - Publisher's Weekly

If you haven't yet discovered the joy of reading Tim Powers, you must run to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy of The Anubis Gates right this very minute. He is quite possibly the greatest living science fiction/fantasy writer (Philip K. Dick thought so), and though he has remained relatively obscure, it is in no way due to any lack of excellence in his work. Another meticulous researcher, Powers created a completely fictional 19th-century poet named William Ashbless who was so realistic, many readers believed him to be an actual contemporary of the likes of Byron and Coleridge! No other author I know could combine a maniacal mutant clown thief from the underworld of Victorian London, a shape-shifting reincarnated version of the Egyptian god Anubis, and Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the same novel and make it work.