Tuesday, July 08, 2008

a good read

As I've mentioned before, I read a lot of Baen books.  Partially this is due to my tastes in travel reading aligning nicely with their catalog, but mostly it's because I spend a lot of time reading on the road, and Jim Baen, Eric Flint and others at Baen were ahead of their time in pushing to release books as non-drm digital downloads.  They've also released tons of books as free downloads, so it's easy to sample new authors.  Now that I am Kindle-enabled, I'm reading even more books this way, and last night plowed through Eric Flint's The Rivers of War, an alternate history that begins during the war of 1812.  Good, fun read.  Doesn't eclipse my current high water mark for historical speculative fiction -- Dan Simmon's The Terror is in a class by itself -- but, like the Belisarius series Flint cowrote with David Drake, Rivers has a wonderful attention to detail, makes one glad to not be on a battlefield, has several laugh-out-loud moments, and was the perfect way to spend a few hours in a hotel far from home.

Posted by cory ondrejka at 16:59
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1 comment:

Ken said...

A suggestion in the historical speculative fiction category: Farthing, by Jo Walton. Outstanding, as is the second book Ha'Penny...and the next book is due out this fall.

Set in an alternate post-WWII Britain where the UK met and made peace with Hitler early in the war. The Germans control the Continent, the US is isolationist and mostly out of the picture, and the story is focused on Britain sliding into totalitarianism by degrees (boiling the frog, as it were).

Plus, the first one's a pretty good English country manor style murder mystery to boot!

July 9, 2008 at 7:48 AM

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