The Books at My Bedside: What I've Been Reading As of Late

For @riverflows contest which you can find at this link here of posting three books I'm reading for the opportunity to win a couple SBD.

As it happens I am presently reading four books. Actually, technically, you could say I'm reading fourteen.

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I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photographs. I only had my phone to use.

This is my current read: The Red Knight, from The Traitor's Son Cycle by Miles Cameron. As you can see, it's been borrowed from the Redford Library - where I live - via the Library Network. I've been reading this every night before I head to bed. I'm a big fan of fantasy - as my reviews of The Long Price Quartet, The Blade Itself, and The Year of Our War may indicate - and I began reading this upon the recommendation of Best Fantasy Books.

So far, I'm five chapters in, on page 144 and I feel a little as though it's just finally beginning to pick up. Cameron has spent a long time setting up his pieces, bouncing between various viewpoints - the Red Knight himself, who has not yet been named; a golden bear, which is part of "the Wild"; and a blacksmith's apprentice.

It's a pretty cool world he's got. It appears to be set in medieval times in our own world with many a difference: our main story thus far seems to be set in Alba, which (to me) is a clear derivation of Albion, aka Britain. A character has just been introduced in Chapter 5 called de Vrailly. He's a thoroughly unpleasant person. He comes from "the East," which goes under the "rule of war" rather than Alba's "rule of law:" strength comes first.

The East, I can only assume, means France - in which case we have a far different idea of West and East than before - but the "rule of war" philosophy makes me think more towards Russia. Perhaps some strange French Russia? Oh well. I've been a little iffy these first four chapters but chapter five really brought me deeper in.

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This omnibus includes:

• A Study in Scarlet
• The Sign of Four
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes
• The Hound of the Baskervilles
• The Valley of Fear
• His Last Vow
• The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes

In short, it is - technically - not one book but nine!

I've been reading these as I rather enjoyed the BBC Sherlock series' and I felt it would be interesting to go back and read the original material. I've had this omnibus for a while and I'm just now trying to really give it a good read. I'm something of an aspiring writer and one of the things I'd like to one day do is write some pastiches of Holmes stories.

Good pastiches, too, which is why I'm so interested in reading all of the Holmes stories. In time I hopefully will also acquire and read the Solar Pons stories, which were August Derleth's pastiches.

I haven't gotten very far yet, since it's much more a side read to my ongoing journey through fantasy.

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This is even more a sideread. I've been at it for well over half a year and I am not yet halfway through even the first book. My copy of this book is in the form of three trade paperbacks in a slipcase. Am I enjoying it? I'm not quite sure yet. I'm more confused and interested by it. The paragraphs here are dense, and long, and wordy.

How to describe it? Ummm... here, take the blurb:

Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Jerusalem is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

In the epic novel Jerusalem, Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them.

Employing a kaleidoscope of literary forms and styles that ranges from brutal social realism to extravagant children’s fantasy, from the modern stage drama to the extremes of science fiction, Jerusalem’s dizzyingly rich cast of characters includes the living, the dead, the celestial, and the infernal in an intricately woven tapestry that presents a vision of an absolute and timeless human reality in all of its exquisite, comical, and heartbreaking splendor.

In these pages lurk demons from the second-century Book of Tobit and angels with golden blood who reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Vagrants, prostitutes, and ghosts rub shoulders with Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s tragic daughter Lucia, and Buffalo Bill, among many others. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath toward the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth, poverty, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.

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And this one is The Faery Reel, which I started on so recently I don't yet have a bookmark for it. My interest in this came firstly in my slowly developing interest in faerie folklore and secondly because - back to that aspiring writer thing - there's a fantasy anthology called Oath and Iron that I would like to submit to.

And I hope that in The Faery Reel I will find inspiration and stuff on folklore to research - and, indeed, just the preface and essay in it have given me much to look up. I haven't even began reading any of the stories inside of it yet.

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And there's the pile.

Enjoy, @riverflows!