Authors I am enjoying

I understand that you guys don't have my taste for fiction, but I felt I should mention a few authors who have a decent number of books that I am working my way through.

I have started on the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian. The first is Master And Commander, and there are 20 in the series, so it will keep me occupied for a while. These historical sea novels are generally regarded as the best ever, and I see no reason to disagree. As a teenager, I loved C.S. Forester's Hornblower stories, but I think O'Brian's are looking even better.

Andrew Mayne has several series going, with two or three recurrent heroes. Not talking great literature here, but the books are smoothly entertaining and fast reads, and not the usual sort of police procedural or private eye stuff. The heroes are scientists and/or maybe police or FBI, with plots that are off-beat enough to be entertaining without falling into silliness. Try The Naturalist or Angel Killer for a sample.

On the silly side, we have Simon R. Green. His output seems to be aimed strictly at what sells (bibliography), but the reason his books do so well is because they are vastly entertaining.

Occasionally, I still reread some old favorites. All of the Nero Wolfe books reside on my shelf. So do many of the Anita Blake stories.

When I was about 15 I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Alexandria Quartet and The Diary of Anaïs Nin and Tropic of Cancer / Tropic of Capricorn and Nightwood and The Penal Colony and The Door Into Summer and The Time Machine and Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies and Naked Lunch and Journey to the Center of the Earth and Gog and Catch-22 and Dhalgren and Flowers for Algernon and A Wrinkle in Time and many others...

Each of these novels (Nin's diaries were heavily fictionalized) had a major impact on me, to the point where I still remember them fondly some 55 years later.

Then school and life and work got in the way, and I stopped reading fiction, mostly. In my thirties I started buying all "the classics" to read in my spare time, but then I never had any and ended up selling them all again a couple decades later.

Now, when I try to read novels, I am mostly unable to sustain the attention long enough to place myself in another reality.

An old friend of mine, a voracious reader all his life and a bookseller for most of it, has just finished a 169,000 word meditation on 66 novels by Jules Verne which is due to be published shortly. I admire his dedication. I have none of it.

I admire fiction, and the readers who enjoy it. I cannot count myself among the latter anymore.

When I was growing up, there weren't a whole lot of books in the house, and I was a regular at the library. But we had one small set of book shelves with a fairly esoteric mixture of books that my mother had somehow collected over the years. These didn't interest me until I started reading science fiction, and remembered that a set of H.G. Wells filled most of one shelf. So I dived into The War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The First Men In The Moon, because I had seen those movies. That, of course, led me to try a few others. I remember The War In The Air made a big impression, but I don't recall which other Wells books I tried.

Another shelf had a couple of big books that I would have considered intimidating before reading the Wells books. They were 100 True Stories Of The Great War and 100 True Stories Stranger Than Fiction. The war stories were often horrific, but also sometimes amazing. One scene that really stuck in my mind was a fighter pilot whose plane featured a machine gun with a drum magazine on top, mounted on the front edge of the cockpit so the pilot could reach up and pull the trigger. When the gun jammed, he stood up, holding the joystick between his knees, so that he could use both hands to wrestle with the magazine which was stuck (and he needed to remove it). Then when he slipped, the plane flipped over, so that it was flying along upside down, and the pilot was dangling outside the plane, hanging on to the magazine which he had been trying to get loose, and now fervently wished would stay stuck. I can't remember how he managed to get back into the cockpit, right side up. But he did live to tell the tale.

There were some other good books too: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, probably others I have forgotten.

I find that remembering these books that I read nearly 60 years ago, I don't really recall the whole book, just certain scenes that made an extra-strong impression. The gentle tournament at Ashby (Ivanhoe) got extra credit because Ashby De La Zouch is a town not that far from where I grew up.