Stuff I've been reading

The Class of 1846, From West Point to Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, and their Brothers by John C. Waugh. 

I’m only about half-way through this one, but it’s been really entertaining so far.  It’s interesting to me to see how West Point has changed over the decades (centuries?) and also how it’s stayed the same.  I mean, much has changed, but I think the cadet experience—isolated, monastic, and interminably busy—is immutable.  On the other hand, Waugh has a hard-on for Jackson and especially McClellan, and I think McClellan in particular gets a bad rap.  And then, too, once he gets into the Civil War years, Waugh unaccountably develops a tendency to dwell on the bit players and minor actions.  For example, he spends three full chapters on the decision to shell Fort Sumter, even though the Class of ’48 barely plays a role there.  Still, I’m enjoying the book and recommend it to Civil War bluffs.

The Fall of Highwatch by Mark Sehestedt.

Forgotten Realms novels are and will probably remain my favorite vice.  This one is better than most in that it’s a successfully character-driven piece, and large swaths of it take place in the Feywild.  Still, like a lot of recent FR novels, the heroine is a complete neophyte adventurer, making this a kind of nascent hero’s journey.  Which is fine, but I like my heroes with a little more fight in them.

Secret Atlas by Michael Stackpole.

I picked this one up from the library because I’ve started listening to Stackpole’s radio show/podcast, The Dragon Page: Cover-to-Cover.  And for the first four-fifth of this novel, I really dug it.  But the end went completely off the rails, and when I started the next book in the series, Cartomancy, I thought it was totally unreadable.  I’ve enjoyed some of Stackpole’s Star Wars work, and I’ll probably read his novelization of the upcoming Conan movie, but I can’t in good conscience recommend the Secret Atlas series.  If J.J. Abrams did humanoid-invasion-fantasy, it would be Secret Atlas.  Ugh.

Emperor: The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden.

This is a very nice piece of historical fiction about Julius Caesar’s young adulthood, written by the author of the by now infamous Dangerous Book For Boys.  Kind of a Caesar-meets-Smallville thing. 

Iggulden’s writing is usually right on point, and it’s no different here, though I could wish he’d hewed a little closer to the actual history than he did.  Still, he has an entire Appendix dedicated to the differences in his novel and real history, so at least the changes he made came from conscious artistic license rather than ignorance.  And the book was fun.

Genghis: Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden.

I grabbed this one from the library at the same time I picked up the first of the Emperor books, but I didn’t like it nearly as well.  Which was a shame because Lords of the Bow was the second of Iggulden’s Genghis series, and I liked this first book in that series, Birth of an Empire, tremendously.  In fact, Birth was the one I read first of Iggulden’s books that I’ve read, and I liked so much that I thought I’d found a new favorite author.  But where Birth was filled with danger and intrigue, Bow gets bogged down in Genghis’s utter invincibility.  Don’t get me wrong; this wasn’t a bad book.  It just wasn’t as interesting—at least for me—as Gates of Rome was.

Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love by Chris Roberson (Writer) and Chrissie Zullo (Illustrator).

I loved Fables, but this isn’t Fables.  Yes, it’s based on the characters and creations from Tyrone Willingham’s now legendary series from DC’s Vertigo imprint, but this book is a strictly work-for-hire thing.  It’s more like merchandizing than real creative storytelling.  With that in mind, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I figured I’d give it a try.  Well, From Fabletown with Love is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: it’s Fables-meets-James-Bond.  Which wasn’t bad.  I ended up liking it more than I’d expected.

Star Wars: Legacy (Volume 10) - Extremes by John Ostrander (Writer) and Jan Duursema (Illustrator).

Star Wars: Legacy is great.  The first series (called Legacy) was fifty issues, and I liked nearly all of them.  A lot.  Moreover, Volume 2 (now called Legacy: War) has been equally good.  I’ve been digging it the most.  That said, Volume 10 (re-printing the last four issues of the Legacy series) wasn’t quite as good as Volume 9 had been, nor was it as good as the start of Legacy: War has been, and I was very disappointed.  I mean, it was okay, but Legacy, Volume 9 was just electric, and the first issues of the new series have also been electric, so it caught me off-guard that the actual ending of the actualLegacy series was such an anti-climax. 

Ah well.  Maybe part of the problem was that the big cliffhanger/reveal at the end was one I’d already been aware of, me being a regular reader of the new series and all.  Either way, I found Volume 10 to be one of the more “skippable” of the series, especially if you’re already reading Legacy: War.