Tag: romance

#REVIEW: Voidwalker, by S.A. MacLean

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It’s nice to be surprised once in a while, although maybe this book shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve been losing steam with my Illumicrate book box subscriptions; I cancelled my quarterly horror box after the third book in a row that I already had, and upon reading the description of the book that turned out to be S.A. MacLean’s Voidwalker, I very nearly skipped it. To be clear, the way Illumicrate works is their boxes are semi-blind; they’ll give you a description and a theme but you’ll have to do a bit of detective work if you want to know the actual title of the book before it shows up on your doorstep. And as Illumicrate’s main subscription line has been leaning far too hard into romantasy lately for my tastes, and the brief description of Voidwalker I had felt pretty bog-standard for the genre, I was disinclined to pay for it at first. Then I learned that the author was the same person who had written the excellent The Phoenix Keeper and decided to go ahead and let it ride.

(I suddenly find myself wondering how MacLean managed to get featured in two Illumicrate boxes in less than a year; her agent may be owed a raise.)

The premise still isn’t the most original thing on the planet, even considering that romantasy is a genre ruled by the trope and its biggest fans seem to literally want a checklist of Things What Are Supposed to Happen that they can go through as they’re reading. The main character is a smuggler; there’s a turf war happening between two members of a vaguely-fascistic race of antlered and tailed humanoids who each rule a chunk of the world and, oh, also eat people; the turf war turns into a revolution, and one of the daeyari (those are the monsters; I’m picturing Nightcrawler with antlers, but not blue) turns out to be really sexy.

And … well. There’s an interesting mix of fantasy and science fiction going on here, the main character rides a Void Horse, which is a horse that is actually a lizard, possibly my favorite kind of horse; and there’s lots of hints at a wider world that I assume will pay off in future sequels. I’m being snarky, but I didn’t really expect much from Phoenix Keeper and loved it; I expected even less from Voidwalker and enjoyed it enough to write about it and recommend it. MacLean has a great grasp of character that serves this book quite well; the relationships between MC Fionamara and the other secondary characters in the book are what keeps the book interesting, and while Antal, the daeyari, initially comes off as the same Tall Dark and Scary broody big-dicked male character that I’ve read about in a thousand Sarah J. Maas books and more recently in Alchemised, he’s got enough unexpected twists to his personality that I ended up liking him by the end. And while I hate the phrase “slow burn,” MacLean takes her time with the romance angle of things, so by the time Fi and Antal start boning it feels earned and not inevitable.

Honestly, my biggest gripe is a deeply nerdy one, which is that S.A. MacLean doesn’t know the difference between antlers and horns. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until recently, but now that I do I’m going to notice every time the words are misused in books for the rest of my life. There are other differences, but antlers are shed, and horns are permanent, and what the daeyari have are horns, even though they look like what you’re probably picturing when you hear the word “antler.” This would have been less of a big deal was it not an actual plot point that daeyari horns grow throughout their entire immortal-unless-killed lives and so you can get an idea of how old one is by the number of points and bends in the horns. So they are definitely horns and not antlers.

And now you know. Even if you weren’t interested in the book, hopefully the random factoid made reading the post worth it.

Two quick book reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.

Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.

She’s in her seventies, by the way.

This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.

So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.

(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)

Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.

#REVIEW: The Bones Beneath My Skin, by TJ Klune

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

It’s well past time, I think, to declare TJ Klune one of my favorite authors. I have … eight books by him? Nine? Something like that, all of his adult novels, at least, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. In some ways, The Bones Beneath My Skin is one of his best books, up there with The House in the Cerulean Sea. It’s interestingly distinct from a lot of his other work, which usually has at least a little bit of the feel of a fairy tale about it, and one could make an argument that it’s his first science fiction novel. He calls it an “action movie” in the afterword, which I’m not completely convinced about but I see where it’s coming from.

At any rate, this book tells the story of Nate Cartwright, a reporter journalist (he never explains why he hates the word reporter so much, but damn, is he willing to be uppity about it) who in one fell swoop loses his family and his job at the Washington Post, and ends up at a family cabin deep in the woods in the middle of nowhere, where he is surprised to be greeted at gunpoint by a gut-shot, wounded Marine and a ten-year-old girl named Artemis Darth Vader. Shenanigans ensue. I don’t really want to spoil stuff all that much, to be honest, but it becomes quite clear really quickly that Artemis is not at all what she seems to be, and not just because she likes bacon more than any four normal people. (I burst out laughing when I randomly took the dust jacket off the book and discovered two pieces of bacon imprinted into the front cover. Bacon is a thing in this book.)

Klune’s strengths are on full display here– found family, great characters (Artemis is entirely unforgettable, although I can picture a reader she’s a bit much for) and a wry sense of humor. Artemis may be my favorite of all of his characters, although this book has some weaknesses, and it will be interesting to see whether the passage of a few months dulls the edges from the things I didn’t like about this book or brings them to the forefront. If I remember correctly I read Cerulean Sea similarly early in the year– February, maybe?– and it was still one of the best books I’d read that year when I got to The List. We shall see if history repeats itself.

But I want to talk about some of those weaknesses, because they’re interesting, so I’m going to put a little line here and then talk spoiler talk. Wander off now if you don’t want to see anything, but feel free to come back later.

This book was originally self-published, after Klune’s editor told him that it wasn’t great as a romance novel because there was “only one” sex scene. I contest the label of “romance novel” altogether; I don’t mind romance every now and again but while this book certainly has a romance subplot it is absolutely not part of that genre, but what I found interesting was that the book’s sole sex scene feels almost entirely out of place given the rest of the book. Maybe I’m off base here, but I feel like you can have a ten-year-old girl as a main character or a scene with explicit butt sex but maybe you shouldn’t have both. To be clear, the ten-year-old girl isn’t involved in the butt sex in any way, but still.

The book also pulls directly from the Comet Hale-Bopp/Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 1997, to the point where it’s set at the same time, has a comet with a different name making an appearance (but the comet’s name is still hyphenated!) and there’s a mass suicide that is identical to Hale-Bopp right down to the silk coverings over the dead people’s faces and them all dying barefoot in bed. The entire subplot ties in to a character who is important to Artemis, but when I realized that he was literally just rewriting Heaven’s Gate and changing a couple of minor details, it almost killed the book for me.

It’s kind of ironic for me to say this, given that I’ve defended him in the past for pulling inspiration from tragic real events, but (to briefly recap that post) the influence of the Sixties Scoop on Cerulean Sea is so reworked and altered that many readers don’t notice it until it’s pointed out. This is not that– he has lifted the entire mass suicide and stuck it in his book. My problem isn’t with taking inspiration from real-world events, here; it’s that he’s doing so sloppily. There is absolutely no way anyone could have been alive and aware of the world in 1997 and not recognize the parallels here; they’re that glaring. And it throws you into oh no he didn’t mode in what should be one of the climactic events of the book, and the whole thing could have been done so so so much better, even if the main guy in the cult needed to be in the book somehow.

But again, in six months, who knows if this will still bug me when I think about this book. If I just remember how awesome Artemis is, you can expect this to show up at the end of the year, and one way or another it’s absolutely still a hit for Klune. I just wish he’d reworked parts of it a bit more before Tor reissued it.

Three book reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

It’s entirely possible that you’re going to get a flurry of posts today; I have at least three in the hopper right now and that’s only not five because I’m planning on packing three book reviews into a single post here. One of them is a super late entry into my best books of the year post, which right now is coming tomorrow, I think. We’ll see. Anyway, off we go:

Standard disclaimers, I suppose, for whenever I review an author who I “know” online; Kara and I have been mutuals long enough that I couldn’t tell you where we met or how long ago it was, and we tend to find each other near-immediately any time a new site pops up. That said, I’m a big fan of their Reanimator Mysteries series, the third book of which came out in October and I read a couple of days ago. Kara’s books tend to be(*) queer Victorian paranormal romances, and this one concerns Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, an investigator for New York’s Paranormal Society who is, uh, dead. And resurrected by Oliver. And they’re lovers now. And they can’t get more than half a mile apart.

It’s kind of a delightful series, believe it or not. The first sentence of the third book mentions “freshly rinsed organs.” It’s that kind of book.

Anyway, this one dives into both Felipe and Oliver’s pasts, and the main mystery of the book concerns the nearby town of Aldorhaven and a sudden infestation of the risen dead. Aldorhaven is a “murder town,” a decidedly unofficial designation for a place where the number of unexplained deaths and weird paranormal happenings is way above the norm. The town, and the forest surrounding it, become characters of a sort in this book, which has more than a little of The Shadow over Innsmouth‘s DNA in it. It’s wonderfully creepy in a whole lot of ways and you should probably grab the whole series, which starts with The Reanimator’s Heart and The Reanimator’s Soul. Book IV comes out next year.

(*) Tend to be? Possibly “always are”? This is Kara’s 10th book and I haven’t read them all.

I’ve been putting off picking up Marcus Kliewer’s We Used To Live Here until it came out on paperback, but Barnes & Noble’s still-ongoing end-of-year hardback sale and a couple of Christmas gift cards pushed me over the edge. The premise of this one is that a young couple has bought an old crumbling house high up on a mountain, planning on renovating and possibly flipping it, and one night a family of five shows up on their doorstep while Eve, one of the homeowners, is at home alone. The father claims that he used to live in the house, and asks if he can have fifteen minutes to show his family around. Eve reluctantly agrees, and … well, it doesn’t go well. This is psychological horror and not the murder-and-torturefest that “it doesn’t go well” implies there, but Eve basically spends the rest of the book going slowly crazy. It’s intense.

This, I think, is the most your-mileage-may-vary of the three books, because how much you enjoy this book is going to depend on how willing you are to 1) scour the text for clues that may or may not be in there and 2) live with ambiguity about what exactly is going on. Eve ends up unable to trust her own perceptions and her own memories about literally anything, and this is the kind of book that has little interstitials throughout, clips from interviews or TV shows or message board posts that initially won’t make sense but will tie together eventually, and all of them end with Morse code. I deciphered one and got the word “and” and decided that I didn’t need to decipher the rest. Maybe you will! Maybe that whole idea kind of annoys you. I have no idea if the Morse code is important or not. I know I didn’t bother to check.

Anyway, for me, this book started off as a great slow-burn mindfuck but sort of collapsed under its own weight by the end. I four-starred it on Goodreads, but you’ll need some tolerance for gaslighting and unexplained events and a wildly unintentionally unreliable narrator. By the end of the book if Eve so much as mentioned the color of something I was flipping back to see if that thing was the same color the last time she mentioned it. I don’t mind some ambiguity in this kind of book but it went a little beyond my comfort zone. You will doubt everything by the time the book ends, but the atmosphere and the oppressive quality of Kliewer’s writing meant I more or less finished this book cover-to-cover in a single sitting. You decide if that sounds like your type of thing.

I meant to hold off until paperback on the Kliewer book and ended up grabbing a hardback; I have this one in paperback and I regret not buying it sooner. Alexis Henderson’s debut, The Year of the Witching, was an Honorable Mention for my best books of 2020 list, and House of Hunger is better than Witching. It’s a vampire book in all but name; there is, in fact, no explicit magic or supernatural powers mentioned anywhere(*) in the book, but Marion, the main character, flees a life as a scullery maid to take a position as a Bloodmaiden in the ambiguously defined “north.” Her job is to provide her blood when her obscenely wealthy patroness, the Countess Lisavet, requests it. In return for seven years of indentured service, she will receive a huge pension for the rest of her life upon her retirement.

And, yeah, Lisavet isn’t a vampire, and neither are any of the other rich people in the book– blood is extracted through needles or occasionally through bites, and even when Marion is bitten it’s made clear that Lisavet is wearing prosthetic sharp fangs in order to puncture her skin. But there’s a whole lot of blood-drinking going on, and the closest the book gets to actual magic is mentions of things like “blood lamps,” which might just be regular lamps inside a hollow globe so that the light is red but might also be powered by blood somehow? It’s unclear. One way or another, Lisavet in particular is a fascinating character, and her relationship with Marion is really well-written and interesting, and when things inevitably go to hell at the end the horror is real. This book isn’t related to The Year of the Witching, and Henderson’s third book just came out and is also a standalone, but I’d love to see more about this world. I’m genuinely not sure if this is actually going to show up on the list tomorrow, but it’s definitely in the running. Check it out.

(*) Heavily implied, maybe, but not until late in the book.

#REVIEW: Somewhere Beyond the Sea, by TJ Klune

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I have to say that I kind of needed this book. I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune’s first book in what we’re apparently calling the Cerulean Chronicles, and I’m really hoping that the fact that the series has a title now means we’re going to see more of it. My review of that first book has become one of my most inexplicably popular posts– my seventh most popular post in the history of the blog, in fact– and traffic for it tends to come in waves. It’ll have 40 hits over the course of a day and then trail off, and then a couple of weeks later it’ll have a hundred, and then it happens again. I don’t know why! I don’t get enough information about referrers from WordPress and if there’s something else I can use to look up where views are coming from, I don’t know how to use it. Feel free to enlighten me in comments, if you have a suggestion.

Anyway, Somewhere Beyond the Sea returns to the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and the magical children and their two caretakers, who continue to have one of the most adorable relationships in all of literature. This book lives in Arthur Parnassus’ head, though, instead of Linus Baker, the main character and POV of the first book. While the switch makes perfect sense in the context of the series, Arthur is a darker, angrier character than Linus, and some of the gentleness and charm of the first book is lost in the switch. This book also introduces a couple of actual villains, as DICOMY, the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, Linus’ employer from the first book, turns on the orphanage and in particular on one of the children who live there. There is another DICOMY inspector, this one very much cut from the “I pretend to be here to help the children and am absolutely not here to help the children” cloth that I was so pleased to see Linus was not in the first book.

The first book was about a family forming. This one is about threats to tear that family apart, although the addition of a new child to the orphanage adds another new perspective that isn’t as negative as the two representatives of DICOMY.

Ironically, while the book isn’t quite the cozy “big gay blanket” of the first book, I found that I related to Arthur more than I ever did to Linus, which wasn’t something I was expecting on the way in. Arthur has a traumatic past– that’s not the bit I relate to, mind you, as I can’t really make that claim– but he spends much of the book struggling with his temper, as he has the ability to simply make the threats to his family go away in the most violent and retributive manner possible and repeatedly chooses not to, as that’s not the person he wishes to be.

Let me just say that it is not difficult for me to relate to a character who is a father and an educator who occasionally struggles with preventing his rage at the injustice and unfairness of the world from affecting the way he lives in it. Not difficult at all. I lack the ability to set things on fire with my mind, however, so his struggle has a touch more immediate salience than mine might.

Most interestingly, I think with Arthur and particularly Arthur’s past, and the fact that this book does dwell on trauma in a way that Cerulean Sea did not, Klune is in some ways addressing the criticisms of his first book, which I won’t go into here, but you’re welcome to click on that link up there. It turns out that Arthur Parnassus ending up the Master at Marsyas Island was not an accident. I’ll leave it at that.

I can’t issue quite as strong a recommendation for this book as I did Cerulean Sea, but that was one of my favorite books of the year it came out and remains my favorite of Klune’s books, so that’s not saying a lot. This is still a comfortable #2 in his body of work, and you should give it a read.

#REVIEW: The Phoenix Keeper, by S.A. MacLean

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

It’s possible that by the time I go to sleep tonight I will have finished five books this weekend, and two of them I did not like very much. One of them may have been my fault, as it demanded a more careful reader than I’ve had the energy to be lately, and one, to my dismay, turned out to be something called extreme horror, which is code for “mentions things being crusted in pubic hair four times in the first fifty pages,” at which point I noped out.

We had an afternoon wedding in Indianapolis today, and I read S.A. MacLean’s The Phoenix Keeper cover-to-cover on the drive, closing the book with perhaps a minute of driving to go until we got home, and it was wonderful. Pay no attention to the tagline on the cover, which is referring to the phoenixes, not the people; dating is one of the many things on the main character’s mind, and she goes out with two people over the course of the book, but this is very much not a romantasy, a genre that I’m growing a trifle tired of at the moment. It’s a subplot and while it works out delightfully (there’s that word again) it’s very much not what the book is about. Also, the blurb appears on the back of my lovely Illumicrate edition of the book, and not on the front, which is nice.

One subgenre I’m not tired of yet, though, is the cozy fantasy, and … oh, man, this book is a hoodie and a warm blanket and maybe a sleeping cat in your lap to go with it. The titular character, Aila, is a 28-year old zookeeper with an anxiety disorder and maybe a touch of the ’tism to go with it,(*) and the entire book takes place at the zoo, with only a couple of brief interludes to her apartment and one (1) date at a restaurant. The problem driving the narrative is getting a second phoenix for her zoo so that she can have a breeding pair (the author explicitly references how zoos brought the California condor back to viability in a foreword, and the parallels are not subtle) and then how she manages to convince these complicated animals to accept each other and mate.

There are complications. There’s another zookeeper she doesn’t get along with. It’ll all be fine.

Turns out I like books set in zoos, and while I’m normally a stickler for worldbuilding, “this isn’t set on Earth, there are magical animals, fuckin’ roll with it” is more or less all the worldbuilding you’re gonna get, and it’s really all the book needs. I mean, there’s drama; there are poachers to worry about, and there’s the relationship stuff, but a big part of being cozy fantasy is relatively low stakes, and again, you know it’s all gonna work out fine and it does. I really enjoyed reading this, and I’ll definitely check out whatever S.A. MacLean comes up with next.

(Also: this book does queernormative societies quite well; Aila goes out with a guy, and then goes out with a girl, and it’s all good, and there’s a trans character and her transness is revealed in the most natural and easy and clean way I think I’ve ever seen in a book before. I’ve talked about this before, but trans side characters can be tricky, and there’s no Sekrit Penis moment in this book and the reveal, such as it is, comes in what felt like perfectly natural dialogue. Extra points for all of that.)

(*) I can imagine a reader who feels like Aila is kind of A Lot. I am not that reader.)

#REVIEW: The Honey Witch, by Sydney J. Shields

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This will be my second post in a row that is about a book but which I’m not calling a “review,” mostly because in the case of Sydney J. Shields’ The Honey Witch I’m not convinced I know how I feel about it yet. It is also the second book in a row where the thing about it that grabbed me was the title. I don’t know what a honey witch is, or at least I didn’t before I picked the book up, but for some reason I found the idea immediately intriguing– so intriguing, in fact, that I decided to overlook the fact that nearly everything else about it indicated that it was likely to be something I wasn’t necessarily going to enjoy. I mean, take a look at that pull quote. Those of you who have been here a while– have you ever heard me recommend a book with the phrase “sweet feast”? “Tender longing”? Okay, I’ve been reading a fair amount of romantasy lately, and I’m pretty sure if I went through my books in the last couple of years and counted up the ones with gay relationships in them versus the ones that were primarily hetero, the gay stack would be quite a bit taller. But everything about this just kinda feels like Not Me. I mean, this is the blurb:

The Honey Witch of Innisfree can never find true love. That is her curse to bear. But when a young woman who doesn’t believe in magic arrives on her island, sparks fly in this deliciously sweet debut novel of magic, hope, and love overcoming all.

(And see that “deliciously sweet” bit there again? All the pull quotes have honey- or tea-related puns in them and they’re excruciating.). But yeah. Honey Witch. The concept sold the book. Fuck it, I got it on sale for nine bucks. Who cares about nine bucks? I don’t care about nine bucks.

The first 80% was, indeed, sweet and whimsical and I might be starting to overuse this word lately but delightful and also, I dare say, cozy, another word that is maybe a sign of Not for Me sometimes. And it’s a fast read; 340 pages and I was reading about a hundred pages an hour while going through it.

And then after that first 80%, it gets really dark going into the ending, and I don’t want to spoil anything but I either loved this book or the ending ruined it, and as I’m sitting here I honestly can’t tell you which it is yet. I five-starred this and even put it on my shortlist for the end of the year, and it’s either going to end up at, like, number nine or something or it’s going to be a book that I quietly pull off the list in October. And it’s really going to depend on whether the first part of the book sticks with me more than the ending.

(At this point, I’m changing the title to my standard “Review” template, because screw it, this is a review. “I loved it up until the ending and I’m not sure about the ending” is a review. #myblogmyrules)

(And it occurs to me that, while this feels pretty standalone and as far as I know is not intended to be part of a series, but if a sequel were to come out, I’d pick it up, mostly because I like the characters so much. That, in and of itself, may seal the “review” part of the review.)

On cultural memory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading6 Comments

Interesting discovery earlier this week: I do a trivia question for my kids every week, right? Usually something connected to history, but not always. It’s completely optional and not for a grade; the people who get it right get a piece of candy on Friday and that’s really it. Just a little fun thing.

This month’s questions have all been about women, since it’s Women’s History Month, and this week’s was Who is the highest-selling woman author in the world? I was pretty certain I knew the answer, but I needed to double-check it before posting the question, because if I was wrong and it turned out to be She Who Shall Not Be Named, I was going to have to come up with a different question.

And I found a list— not perfect, Wikipedia admits– of the top-selling authors of all time. And it’s shocking, because of the number of authors on it that I have never heard of. Now, granted, people have been writing books for a long time, and I can’t read or know about all of them, but given how much of my life I have dedicated to reading and books, even given that several of them aren’t close to being in my genre, the fact that I haven’t ever heard of half of the top ten– half!— frankly blows my mind. Here’s the list:

  1. William Shakespeare. And, okay, yeah. I feel like there’s an argument to be made that Shakespeare doesn’t belong on the same list as the rest of these people, since he was a playwright and not a novelist or actual prose author, but I’m not going to make that argument right now. At any rate, I’ve heard of and read Shakespeare.
  2. Agatha Christie, meaning that my guess about the best-selling woman author was correct. Somewhere between two and four billion books sold. I have read three of them.
  3. Barbara Cartland, who I have never heard of in my entire life despite the fact that she has written seven hundred and twenty-three books and sold a billion copies of those books. I don’t read romance, granted! But how the hell have I never heard of her??
  4. Danielle Steel. Wouldn’t have guessed that she was this big-time, but okay. I haven’t read anything by her but at least I’m familiar with her.
  5. Harold Robbins. No idea. 23 books, American, around 750 million sales. Never heard of him.
  6. Georges Simenon. I’ll cut myself a bit of slack because he wrote in French and is Belgian, but there are 700 million copies of his 570 books out there and I’ve never seen one in translation? Fucking seriously? HOW??
  7. She Who Shall Not Be Named. Whatever.
  8. Enid Blyton. I think that maybe if you’d asked me who Enid Blyton was before I saw this list I might have been able to say she was an author. Maybe. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to provide more detail than that, and I’m willing to toss her on the “never heard of” pile.
  9. Sidney Sheldon. Between 370 and 600 million books sold. A suspense author, so his(?) books are probably much more aligned to my tastes. No clue.
  10. Eiichiro Oda. I’ll call him a .5, because I’ve never heard his name, but he’s the One Piece guy and I’ve heard of One Piece.

I have also never heard of #11, Gilbert Patten, #13, Akira Toriyama, but see Oda because it’s a similar situation, or #15, a Spaniard named Corin Tellado who supposedly has written four thousand books. Weirdly, after that, you have to roll through a couple dozen before I hit someone I’m unfamiliar with, and there are no American or English authors on the rest of the list who I’ve never heard of.

(Also, I just went and checked dates, and there are only three in the top 10 whose lives didn’t overlap with mine: Shakespeare, of course; Blyton, who died in 1964, and, ironically, Christie, who died six months before I was born. These are not nineteenth-century authors or anything, with the obvious exception of Shakespeare. They are all relatively modern.)

How the hell do you sell a billion books and you leave so small (or so specific) a cultural footprint that I, a person who has been reading constantly for his entire life, have never heard of you? I know I’m edging toward– if not trampling on– the idea that Nothing I Haven’t Heard Of Is Important, which I don’t believe, but books are kind of my thing, and the notion that I don’t know half of the top 10 writers who ever lived is weird, right? And not weird in a “something is wrong with me” type of way, but in a “something’s going on here” sort of way? Is romance that sequestered from every other genre of writing that this is normal?

I dunno. How many of these ten authors have you heard of? Is there anybody reading this who knows all ten of them?