A friend has loaned me his copy of Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. I have wanted to read this for a long time and I will let everyone know my thoughts in a couple of weeks.

Other new releases in paperback that are on my read list are----

Shakespeare & Co. : Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story.
Stanley Wells.   $14.95 Vintage.  Release date March 18th 2008

Shakespeare the Thinker.  A.D. Nuttall.  Yale University Press.  April 2008.

I am reading two books by Geraldine Brooks.   People of the Book her new hardcover and March: A Novel (a civil war novel) written in 2005.  I have almost finished re-reading Little Women, with a new appreciation I must add, and then I will finish reading March.  I think I read Little Women in the 1960s, so the re-read has been a long time coming.  I realized as I was plowing into the second chapter of March, that I needed to re-read Alcott.  It has been a delight.  But I will save my comments on both novels for later.

I am also re-reading Darlene Marshall’s fabulous Florida romance Pirate’s Price. I will be reviewing it here very soon.  This weekend I am co-hosting our family reunion at Cedar Key Florida, so Darlene’s book is the perfect accent.   Well Okay, it’s the wrong coast, but west coast saw grass and east coast saw grass isn’t all that different. 

I have also worked my way through the Random House fall 2008 catalogs and will post my list of favorites.  I can’t wait to start on the university presses.  I focus on the paperback releases because that is where my interest is strongest and because publishers do a rotten job of announcing paperback releases.  Till later.
--August

Books I’m eager to see in paperback

(A provisional list)

There are many books I choose to purchase in paperback, this list contains books I am interested in buying.  I have read some of them in hardcover and galley proofs, but most I haven’t, so I will report back on them with mini-reviews, eventually. 

I haven’t found a good forthcoming paperback book-list on the web.   I either don’t know where to look, or else there isn’t one.  This posting will help me with my recommendations.  I am forever losing my book lists, so this will keep them in a handy place.  (Well it’s a start anyway.)

I am working on a Trade Hardcover list and University Press list and will post them when I’ve got enough titles gathered together. 

 March and April 2008 Forthcoming Books

Fiction

The Religion: A Novel  (Book 1. Tannhauser Trilogy) by Tim Willocks.  $7.99.

The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel.  by Michael Gruber.  $14.95

Secret of Lost Things.   By Sheridan Hay.  $14.95

The Emancipator’s Wife. by Barbara Hambly.  $7.50.

Genghis: Birth of an Empire.  by Conn Iggulden.   $6.99

Saturnalia: A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery. (vol 18) by Lindsey Davis.  $7.99.  April

 Non Fiction

Canon:  A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.  Natalie Angier.  $15.95

Madame Bovary’s Ovaries.   By David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash.  $7.50

Austen’s Era

I have finally gotten deep enough into my Jane Austen language-jag to understand her subtle uses of rank and manners as a way of showing character, or lack there of, in her novels.   I knew I needed a stronger literary background to understand her early 19^th century usages.  It’s been a long slog just to get through the front door on this.

In my twenties I went on an 18^th century reading jag, and read many of Jane Austen’s influences.  Richardson is the only one I have ignored, because Clarissa is just too daunting--though I eventually plan to have at it.  I’m continually putting that brick on my I’ll-read-it-next-decade list.

I am watching the complete Jane Austen on PBS, and then reading the novels I haven’t yet read.  I am also finding David M. Shapard’s The Annotated Pride and Prejudice an excellent guide, and very helpful.  The format with the notes on the page opposite the text is such a sane approach, I hope others emulate it. 

I am going to resume my reading of the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series which needs the same knowledge base as Austen’s novels except you must add the Napolenic-War naval minutia into the mix.  Horatio Hornblower was a lot easier to read, but O’Brian is well worth the study.

The social history of their era is particularly well documented, a modern author who plans to tread there much do an insane amount of research.  And I want to be in the position to appreciate all that work. 

My tastes are usually for a more florid style then Austen’s.  Generally, I do not like romance novels because I get annoyed when authors get the history wrong.  I share Jane Austen’s concern for getting the language and conversation correct.  Thought I find the upper class world her characters inhabit, very off putting.   It is hard to say exactly why.   I mean it is fiction after all.

Maybe it is because I suspect that her ‘world of exclusively’ is what many enthusiasts like about her writing--the ‘rank and privilege’ thing.

Or perhaps, considering my temperament, I know I would have been among the downstairs crowd slaving in the kitchen.   Or worse, even if I had been born to the Manor I couldn’t have ‘cut it’ in Austen’s glittering circle.   At best I would have been one of the laughed at old maids, inhabiting a closed-off room (if I was lucky).

Certainly Austen’s moral center was in the right place, she celebrated natural manners over hypocritical or snobbish ones.  So I can’t fault her envisioning.  Nor do I necessarily expect her to be a social critic (in the mode of the second half of the 19^th century), though she was a superb one. (To be continued)