I picked up a copy of Mark Helprin's new collection of short stories, The Pacific, at my favorite independent bookseller today. Despite my attempt to seriously curtail my book purchasing rate, Helprin gets the automatic free pass to a hardcover edition.
While flipping through the first pages I realized that Winter's Tale is the only one of his books (either novels or short story collections) which I've not finished. I guess it's probably time to give that 'un another try.
I finally finished Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem today, after creeping through it for more than a month. Contrary to most books that I read in this drip-drop fashion, I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's just that non-fiction rarely grabs hold of you and takes you whizzing along in the way that great stories tend to do, so it takes longer to read & digest.
In any event, part of what makes this book so great is that it was written in 1988 and thus has a very dated perspective on its topic, which changes very rapidly. I'd like to follow it up (after a suitable interlude) with Friedman's 2002 work, Latitudes and Attitudes. But even that isn't really up to date, since it's pre-Iraq. I guess if I want his current opinion I should read his Times Op-Ed pieces (which I do). Speaking of which, I find David Brooks's editorials to be particularly insightful.
Anyway, I'm glad to have picked up a little history and insight into the nature of the problems we face today in that region as they existed 20 years ago. And now I need a new book to read. Something fun, perhaps.
 | I finished reading this for the 4th time this morning and the story still keeps me up late at night, turning pages. I've read probably 25 books by Bernard Cornwell, mostly from the Sharpe Series, and the Warlord Trilogy (of which The Winter King is the first installment) is far and away his best work. |
Cornwell's style is one of assiduous historical accuracy, and the Sharpe books are worth reading just for their portrait of life in the early 19th century. The difference in his Arthur books is that there is so little written record of the time (~500 AD). Cornwell dilligently researches these books as usual, but in the end there are much wider gaps which need to be filled by the storyteller. This forces him to put his story first and history second.
Happily, the author agrees with me.
