Ha! It's so silly it belongs between the covers of a bestseller.
Alex Irvine's novel
One King, One Soldier,
which is an addled romp through 1950s America, 1890s Abyssinia, the crackpot significance of baseball, and the hooey parts of Arthurian legend, is blurbed on the front cover by someone who insists that "If you loved The DaVinci Code, you'll love this book!!"
I met Irvine recently, and asked him what kind of crack the reviewer was smoking (because it's both a wrong comparison, and not exactly a compliment). He thought that the reviewer just completely didn't get the book, but wanted to be friendly, so he blurbed in as exuberant and pointlessly commercial a fashion as possible, and some shmuck in the marketing department fell for it whole hog.
We both laughed over it, because if you pick up
One King, One Soldier
looking for a page-turner beach read, you're going to be deeply confused and probably annoyed if you ever figure out the joke is on you.
It's a good book. A mind-bending book, because I got about 150 pages into it before I was really sure it was a joke, but a good one. Lots of strange resonances and connections, and a lot of cheerful nonsense.
Irvine described it to me as riffing inside-out on the Grail legend, turning it into "a quest for renunciation".
In stores now!
There was a thing on NPR this morning with a British woman who's written a book, it seemed, about a magician who was helping the British army in the 1800's. It's fantasy. Has anyone heard of such a book. I was late catching the program and didn't hear the name and thought I might check it out.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,
I'll bet.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I'll bet.
t searches Amazon
Good Lord, that looks fascinating.
t runs off to library website
Well, I was about to Xpost, too...
It sounded interesting to me, based on the NYT Magazine articles of several weeks ago, and I'm not much of a fantasy reader.
Sweet Mary, there are 340 holds on that thing!
It's been well-promoted. Two feature articles in the
New York Times.
Neil Gaiman has endorsed it. And so on.
