Read This: Asimov to Austen

I’ve had a couple of recent appearances at other websites. This morning, I’m back in Shelf Awareness, talking about Paul Malmont’s The Astounding, The Amazing, and the Unknown, which starts from a historically true premise—Robert A. Heinlein recruited Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work with him in a research laboratory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to help defeat the Axis—and works in L. Ron Hubbard’s (mis)adventures during the Second World War, legends surrounding the suppressed research of Nicola Tesla, and a few more surprise guest stars. As I point out in my review, the secret history Malmont lays out isn’t 100 percent accurate, but for the most part it is fun enough that you’re not going to want to sit around trying to poke holes in it anyway.

Before that, over at Heroes & Heartbreakers, I shared my thoughts on William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education, in which the English professor and literary critic reveals how his character was refined by the reading of Jane Austen’s six novels. Fortunately, it’s not Just about how Emma made him realize how self-absorbed he was; Deresiewicz really does love Austen’s stories for their own sake, and that love is probably the thing he’s most convncingly able to get across to readers. If you aren’t very familiar with Austen—which I’m still not, although I’m getting started—he’ll definitely give you a good idea what all the fuss is about.

Finally, inReads.com, the book-centric social networking site I’ve been advising, had its full public unveiling earlier this week, including the latest in the series of “Whatcha Reading?” videos I’ve been shooting. This time around, I spoke to Holly Black and Ellen Kushner after they’d finished a signing at Books of Wonder to celebrate the publication of Welcome to Bordertown, a new collection of stories set in the shared-world fantasy setting first explored in a set of Terri Windling-edited anthologies back in the mid-1980s.

24 June 2011 | read this |