Wednesday, October 21, 2015

This week's reading

I just finished, the other day, a totally fun book!  I like all sorts of history, have been a history buff since I was a kid.  One period I'm totally bonkers about is the 1920s and 1930s.  I also love stories, when they are well done, wherein historical figures are plunked down into fictional situations.

I just read Cosa Nosferatu:  Capone.  Ness.  Cthulhu.

You read that right.  Al Capone the gangster, Eliot Ness the prohibition agent -- and Cthulhu.

Well, the Ancient One himself only has a cameo appearance.  Mainly what we see are a couple of vampires, a bunch of Yig'goltha, and a few shoggoths.  But the mix of the world of prohibition and organized crime with the world of the Old Gods works.  It works because the author, E. J. Priz, did his homework.  All throughout the book, little historical facts about Eliot Ness and Al Capone are woven into the narrative, seamlessly.  And Priz also did his homework on the Cthulhu mythos; he knows his Lovecraft.

I told my daughter about this one, and she ordered a copy for herself.  She then turned me on to another book, Peter David's Artful.  This one does not involve historical characters, but literary ones.  Peter David says we should not bother with whiny little Oliver Twist, who spends a great deal of his time in the Dickens classic being weepy.  Look instead at the Artful Dodger, the young lieutenant to that weasly coach of juvenile delinquents, Fagin.

Fagin's a vampire.

The book shows the Artful Dodger's life after the events of Dickens's Oliver Twist.  I have only read the first chapter so far, and it had me laughing myself silly.  I know I'm going to enjoy this one.

And for my work, I'm reading The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, by Ben Kafka.  He discusses what he sees as the birth of the modern bureaucratic state, and the nature and demands of paperwork.  This is a more general book than I read last week, Kathryn Burns's Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru.  Not sure where this one is going to lead me, as regards the work I'm doing on translating colonial Spanish notarial documents, but we shall see.


No comments:

Post a Comment