Weekly Book Recommendations (September 20)

It's been a while since I've had the bandwidth for the blog stuff, but here's a catch up on the books front

My Brother's Keeper by Tim Powers: Powers returns to his classic poets series - previously seen with Lord Byron and William Ashbless in Anubis Gates, Christina Rossetti in Hide Me Among the Graves, and Byron, Keats, and Shelley in Stress of her Regard - focusing on the Bronte family. When I tell people I'm reading a book about the Bronte family it makes it sound escholarly and me erudite. When I add "Fighting Werewolves!" it makes it sound awesome and me like a huge nerd. This is not peak Powers, but aside from Anubis Gates I've never been as sold on these secret history books compared to his others. Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers: I was split on including this but felt I enjoyed it enough at the end to merit a recommendation. Sayers style is... odd. There's a density to the text that requires more work than, say, Christie, and she is so rooted in the class mores of the British interwar period that it felt even more class conscious than Christie (which I did not expect) and emphasized how much the past was another country; it felt at times in this (and in the one I'm currently reading) that it's a SF/F Novel where there is world building being done that has to be absorbed and applied to make sense of the puzzle being presented. The biggest issue is that so many of the characters, even the admirable ones, were just mean spirited towards some of the others for reasons that mostly make sense in the UK class sense. Still, it was a solid, fair, nested mystery with a good resolution. 

The Complete Flash Gordon Library volumes 1 and 2 - On the Planet Mongo and The Tyrant of Mongo: If you can get past, like, the first few panels of the series include some really jarring racial caricatures from the 1930's before our heroes get to Mongo this is really good. It's never free from the yellow peril tropes but the artwork is as good as Hal Foster's on Prince Valiant (the highest compliment I can give for a comic strip) and stories rollick along. Ming is a great, smart, long term villain where Flash develops a plan and Ming see through it and blocks it, rather than having him be a buffoon who is perpetually outwitted by the hero where you can't tell why they're still in power. Does it rely on too many formula beats that suffer when there isn't a week of time between each strip? Yes. Every place they visit has a beautiful princess who falls for Flash and does things that make Dale jealous; they never get anywhere without crashing their ship, Flash is reduced to near death about 6 times in these two volumes. Still, it is solid storytelling in the pulp vein. You could do worse than emulating it in your pulp heroes campaign.