Oh, Goody!

It seems that quite a few of my favorite "light" novelists will be publishing new books soon.



Lindsey Davis has a novel about the English Civil War, as well as the 20th Falco novel on the way.



Deanna Raybourn is offering "The Dead Travel Fast", but it is unclear (to me, anyway) whether it will feature Lady Julia Grey and Nicholas Brisbane. I rather hope so; I quite like him, even if he occasionally becomes just a little too much like Sherlock Holmes. But maybe marriage has mellowed him (I prefer him unmellowed, however)



Speaking of Holmes, Laurie R. King's Mary Russell will be present in "The God of the Hive". Ms. King's last book, "The Language of Bees", was not one of her best, partly because it seemed truncated at an odd point, and "The God of the Hive" is largely considered by her fans to be its completion -- or so we hope. Ms. King seems to want to make Mary more independent of Holmes, but it is the interaction between the two that is the main attraction, in my opinion.



Amelia Peabody returns! Sensibly, the new novel will take place before the "Tomb of the Golden Bird", which saw Peabody and Emerson, in their late 60s [possibly, in Amelia's case, at 70, although her "editor" has claimed that Amelia fudged her age at some point] present at what was the end of an era in Egyptology, the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. This novel is supposed to take place during the period in 1910 when Ramses was excavating in Palestine. Living, as I do, in one of the places that features in the novel, I eagerly await it. I'm currently listening to all the series in audiobook form again (why are three of the novels only available in abridged form??) and am finding them delightful all over again. It's not just the way Elizabeth Peters writes, but the way Barbara Rosenblat "performs" them.



Diana Gabaldon has an Outlander-connected short story, called "A Leaf in the Wind of All Hallows", appearing soon in an anthology, a Lord John Grey short story in another anthology, and in the autumn will publish the Outlander graphic novel. None of these projects fills me with unalloyed enthusiasm; I really want to read the short stories but mildly resent having to buy fairly expensive books full of lots of other stories that do not (probably) interest me, and I have no interest in adult comic books, especially when the art work looks to me like typical "manga" type of illustration (albeit beautifully colored). But since the story line will expand on the text of the first book in the Outlander series, I'm probably going to have to buy it, just to see what twists DG has come up with.



By the way, I've recently listened to "The Whiskey Rebels" by David Liss, which was very well done -- he's an author I've come to enjoy quite a bit. I heartily recommend the audio version of Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day" as well. Generally speaking, I choose audiobooks which have quite a lot of dialogue and can benefit from a dramatic reading; books with long narrative sections seem to fare badly in audiobook form (despite repeated attempts, I could not get into A.S. Byatt's "The Possession", which has lots of "extracts" from works of the fictional author at the center of the novel, for just that reason) When buying books for Kindle, I tend to go for non-fiction (history, mostly), since I like books with lots of "meat" (the fatter, the better, IMO -- or, to be crass about it, more bangs for my bucks). For the time being, I've got both audiobooks I haven't yet listened to, and a few books to read on my Kindle...together with my iPod, I'm all right, Jack, for the nonce.