Read This: The Life of Benjamin Franklin

I can’t actually say that I’ve finished J. A. Leo Lemay’s The Life of Benjamin Franklin. For one thing, only the first two volumes of the projected seven have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press yet, and I’ve only been able to dip into it in my spare time, so I’m still in the middle of the opening segment, Journalist: 1706-1730. But what I’ve read so far has been pretty amazing—no matter how cluttered you think the Franklin biography field is, or even if you’re not plugged into contemporary books on American history to care if there’s a Franklin glut, try to make time for these books on your reading schedule. (Realistically, though, you’d probably need a two-week vacation…but to me that would be a great vacation; your standards may vary.)

It’s a bit surprising to me that these two books (the second is Printer and Publisher: 1730-1747) haven’t gotten much review attention yet, especially considering that yesterday was the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth. I can’t say that’s an original observation on my part, since I only found out about the biography from Paul Collins’s Weekend Stubble blog, where he wondered, “That silence is the sound of critics quietly leafing through the volumes and taking notes for upcoming reviews…. right?” If so, they must still be busy scribbling, because so far the only paper to issue a review is the Washington Times, where even Franklin scholars acknowledge Lemay’s mastery (well, one scholar, anyway). That, and a Delaware paper mentioning last week that Franklin visited Delaware a couple of times, has been it so far. Meanwhile, Sidney Sheldon’s memoir got a full page in the New York Times Book Review. I mean, I know it takes a while to read 1,020 pages of smallish print, but heck, even I would’ve cleared out some room on my schedule if somebody had asked!

18 January 2006 | read this |

Read This: The Atrocity Archives

“Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War-era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H.P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret infomration to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.”

That’s from Charles Stross’s afterword to The Atrocity Archives, which collects two stories starring Bob Howard, a low-level programmer in a British intelligence agency dedicated to protecting the realm from the Nameless Ones on the other side of the universe. The fact that Bob’s a programmer allows Stross to work in all sorts of great project management humor into the stories along with the occult terrorism: Think The Ipcress File landing in The Dunwich Horror by way of Office Space, and you’ve got an approximation of where the book’s headed. Now, it might just be me, because I love any new twist on the Cthulhu Mythos , but I could barely put this book down over the weekend. (Although, strictly speaking, it’s not really Mythos, just trading on the milieu.) One caveat: If stories about the Nazi’s occult activities squick you out, you’re not going to like “The Atrocity Archive” at all, as its secret history goes into great (and explicit) detail about the Third Reich’s plans and activities, and the title is literal. But since you can read “The Concrete Jungle” online, why not give that a try? (And, yes, I’ve recommended that course of action before…)

9 January 2006 | read this |