I Hate Dead Authors
I like to read books. My favorite books are historical fiction, anything from pre-antiquity up to the 1980’s, my prerequisite being that the book is accurate. I like being able to not only entertain myself, but to acquire some new knowledge as well. Always multi-tasking! My standards are high, a thousand page book is a huge chunk of time to piss away on the literary equivalent of a generic sitcom, So a quality author is worth their weight in gold when I need to restock the “unread” section of my bookcase! So it’s an unhappy thing when you realize some of your favorite contemporary authors are dead. I hate dead authors!
I started reading James Clavell’s book with Shogun, and it wasn’t until Noble House that I realized he was now dead, and would be writing no more books. Dammit! Then onto Mario Puzo, another old favorite. I’d plow through Fortunate Pilgrim and through The Sicilian and by the time I make it to The Godfather and Omerta I realize that he too is no longer with us. No more Puzo books to add to my collection. Oh there was one posthumously compiled book about the Borgias, called “The Family,” and I would not recommend it. No, he’s dead. Another author fits into the ‘dead” category though I don’t know if he IS in fact dead. He might as well be, though… after Daniel Peters wrote “Incas” and “The Luck of Huemac” and “Tikal” he just dropped off the face of the Earth! Such good stuff, but alas, he is autore incognito.
So I was on the hunt for NEW books and NEW authors. Preferably young and healthy authors with an overactive pen. I found plenty of them to slake my thirst, and I thought I would share some of my favorites.
Bernard Cornwell: They don’t come much more prolific than this guy! 49 books written since 1981, and almost every one of them a page-turner. You might have heard of the Sharps’s series… Sharps’s Company, Sharps’s Revenge, Sharps’s Trafalgar, Sharpe’s Big Fluffy Puppy, Sharpe’s Never-Ending Stick of Bubble Gum, etc. His material spans 2 or 3 thousand years of history (more if you add in “Stonehenge, 2000 BC”), and it just might take me that long to finish reading all the books he’s written! I’ve gotten through twelve of them so far, only 37 more to go! I’d recommend starting off with his three-book “Holy Grail” series starting with “Archer’s Tale,” which explorers the early battles of the Hundred Years’ War.
Sharon Kay Penman: Another prolific Medieval history writer, who focuses all of her literary attention on the English Isles. Eleven books written since 1985, not as nutso pen-drunk as Cornwell but who the hell can match THAT madman title for title? My favorite titles of hers are the “Welsh Princes” books of Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning.
Colleen McCollough: Known predominantly as the author of The Thorn Birds, I was more interested in her “Masters of Rome” series. Seven (so far) books starting with the daunting “First Man in Rome” and progressing up to last year’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” A word of warning, these books are no small undertaking. Each one of them close to or above a thousand pages (not including the dozens of pages of support material - maps, glossaries, even a detailed exploration of classical Roman nomenclature), and packed solid with a great deal of minute detail. How minute? Her first big, thick, tiny-texted book starts in 100 BC, and her most recent ends around 27 BC. Yep, 73 years’ worth of Roman Republic/Empire trivium. Amazing stuff, but it can be tough to read. First of all, the way she writes varies from “war drama” to “Serious Academia” to “Cesarean Soap Opera.” She’s wordy, occasionally a little TOO wordy (and a little too soap operatic), and the subject matter can be quite the task for those unfamiliar with Ancient Rome. Case in point, how do you cope with 30 or 40 pivotal characters with names like “Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus” and “Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex” and “Publius Licinius Crassus Dives” and “Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus” (and some with as many as eight names strung together)? The names alone are a headache to keep apart, and are confusing… consider that there were a dozen different “Gaius Julius Caesars” in that short period of time, only one of which being the guy we refer to as “Julius Caesar” - and to make it even MORE confusing, not all the afforementioned Julii are even in the immediate family of one another! The books are challenging and rewarding, but if you’re easily confused I suggest you stick with Cornwell and Penman. I read the first two, am skipping over the third and have the fourth, “Caesar” in the “not-yet-read” section of my bookcase.
Jonathan Coe: I read two of his books recently, “The Rotters Club” (about life in Birmingham in the 1970’s) and the follow-up to that “The Closed Circle” and as soon as I run out of books I’m going to see what else he’s written. Great books, I definitely recommend Rotters Club as one of my top ten suggested books.
Jeffrey Deaver: I’ve read one of his books, “Garden of Beasts,” a story exploring pre-war intrigues around the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and will be going back for some more. It’s hard to do a Nazi book wrong, really - there’s no shortage of material that doesn’t require the slightest bit of exaggeration to make it an overly-exciting and emotional read, but I like the social exploration of life in pre-war Nazi Germany, he managed to find topics of discussion that haven’t already been beaten to death by 30 other authors and filmmakers.
Gary Jennings: I’m reading “Aztec” right now, I’m nearly halfway through and this book is just kicking my ass. By that i mean it’s difficult to stay away from reading my book when I need to be doing other things. I usually keep my reading time to two hours a night these days, and I have to say there have been a couple of drowsy, sleepless days at work this past month as a result of staying up to read “Just One More Chapter” (followed by another “Just One More”). He’s got four more “Aztec” books after this one, and a few other novels I want to check out (like “Spangle,” a chronicle of the lives of circus people).
Ken Follett: I’ve not read him yet, but he’s definitely on my immediate radar. I have “Jackdaws” and “World Without End” and “The Pillars of the Earth” on my wish list, but I have no idea when I’ll get to these, maybe after one more “Aztec” book. I think it’s safe to say that with all these authors in mind, it’ll be a good ten years before I need to start looking around for not-dead-yet authors!
Originally published at BlueSmoke Studio. You can comment here or there.