Ah, Beowulf, scourge of my senior-year Advanced English class. I remember you well, you “epic poem,” you. Supposedly about a hero slaying a monster, but so steeped you were in archaic verse, I could detect neither. However, if we had learned of you from the anthology THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BEOWULF: CHAMPION OF MIDDLE EARTH, I might have performed backflips. Maybe even while reading you twice.
Edited by Brian M. Thomsen (who offers up a brief history of Beowulf in his introduction), the book offers four new, standalone tales of the Conan precursor – a template for all literary superheroes to come – as well as reprinting John Earle’s 1892 prose translation. Seamus Heaney be damned – Earle’s text is accessible and even exciting, neither term I could ever place upon the work in its original verse form.
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Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
Quite some time ago I came to the conclusion that the one thing I wanted from any famous person’s autobiography was at least one moment where I got the sense that I could feasibly spend a second or two in a room with them. That’s not to say that I would expect it to be an interesting or particularly enlightening moment, but rather just one that briefly proved to me that this iconic personage was in fact a real, living breathing human being.
I remember that when I read Bob Dylan’s recent book, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, I despaired that no such moment would ever occur. Here was a book by a man so guarded and protective of his privacy that not only did he barely mention his family life, but he couldn’t even be bothered to tell us his wife’s name. All he was willing to give us was the side of him everyone already knew, and I thought the book suffered because of it. But then, near the book’s end, he included a brief unnecessary detail in one of his descriptions that gave me the moment I was looking for and proved that the world’s most loved and hated singer/songwriter was just as mortal as the rest of us.
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Now that November has come to a close (hell, didn’t it just open?), you know what we’re thankful for? That, for the second month in a row, more Internet searchers coming to BOOKGASM were looking for Evangeline Lilly nude shots than Charo nude shots. Next month, we’re hoping to see Charo drop off the list completely, and maybe people getting back to searching for actual books again. Like MARVEL ZOMBIES, making its first appearance on our incoming-search list. Glad to have you.
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You ever read a book and feel like you’re getting in on the ground floor? For me, that was the case with Sean Doolittle’s third book. You feel as though this guy has a lot more stories to tell, and you can’t wait for them. Take one part Leonard and a big chunk of Westlake, mix them up and you get THE CLEANUP.
Matthew Worth is a cop who pretty much shoots himself in the foot career-wise, when his wife runs off with another cop, one at whom Worth took a swing, with awful consequences: He’s stuck doing security detail at a supermarket during the night shift. While waiting for any potential robber to make an appearance, he becomes friendly with the workers, some of whom refer to him as “Supercop.” But he probably is closest to Gwen, a checkout girl he’s smitten with. But all is not right in Gwen’s world, and that’s what set’s the book in motion. Her boyfriend is a bit violent and his job is not what you would call legal: running drugs and cash payments to and from the Chicago mob a career choice.
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Right from the beginning of DAYS OF ALLISON, author Eric Shapiro makes his main character Louis come alive. The reader begins the journey with Louis – by all accounts an isolated loser – telling us by way of his internal dialogue, “My work and my books – that’s all I need.”
And that’s when I was hooked. Each of us has snippets in time when we feel like isolated losers, or at least I do. Louis’ mind continues to wander and explains, “If society ever relieves its inhabitants of the need to make money, then I’ll quite eagerly sign up to be a hermit, eating, sleeping, reading my life away.” I had a love- hate relationship with Louis within the first two pages – not an easy task for an author and Shapiro did it quickly.
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