I was browsing through a book at Cody's at lunchtime that would be of interest to many Buffistas, though Betsy, Jilli, JZ, DXM, Ginger and Micole come particularly to mind.

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana by Jess Nevins.

It's huge and covers tons of Victorian popular genre fiction, mostly by character (a curious way to go, but then you get to look up Clarimonde and Dyson and Usher, Roderick, and Black Bess).

Nevin does a god job of linking up all the little tributaries and trends that run into the big rivers of the popular characters which survive to our time. How and when the Byronic hero informs the vampire, for example.

Much like the literature of that time, it has a very gothy bent with lots of stuff on Machen and Gautier as well as the usual suspects (Poe, Doyle, Verne, Wells et al).

Jess Nevins is very cool. And compulsive.

Jess Nevins is very cool. And compulsive.

Yeah, I've referred to his annotations for Alan Moore frequently.

Oh, the LoEG notes were priceless. I kept wishing he'd do the same for Planetary, since I'm sure I miss half the references.

I love that book!

I'm with Strega (or even more so) -- I found the narrator so profoundly unlikeable by the end, and the entire sensibility of the book so... cold, I think, that I won't be reading any more Carroll. It's not that it's badly written, it's just rather alien to me, and discomforting. Which is not to say I didn't find it interesting -- but I also thought the ending kind of fell apart, as well.

It's not a book I regret reading, but I have no desire to read any more of that type.

So, anyone read The Rule of Four? Amazon's been recommending it to me, and it sounds like something I'd like, but it's only got 2.5 stars out of 1023 reviews.

From my initial skim of the reviews, it appears that the negatives are along the lines of "not as fluffy as The Da Vinci Code, and the author uses big words."

I read and enjoyed it, Raq. Thought it was far more fun and far less annoying than The Davinci Code. One or two things that kept throwing me out of the story (the weather, which frequently matters to the plot, was absolutely and completely wrong for NJ for that time of year), but other than that, fun and interesting read.

I second the fun read on The Rule of Four. Not a masterpiece, but at least as good as anything Dan Brown has written.

...and it's ordered. Thanks you two! Having read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Foucault's Pendulum lo these many years ago, I wasn't at all impressed with Mr. Brown.

The fact that most of the negative reviews had really bad grammar and spelling spoke volumes, I think.

I also thought that the MacGuffin used in Rule of Four was far more interesting than the one in The DaVinci Code, and I found myself wishing that it could be true. I don't think I'd ever seen that particular idea used before.