I’m doing a lot of reading and rereading right now. I never read only one book at a time.
So here are some, to share with you.
I’m having a Poul Anderson binge right now. Time Patrol is a series of short stories, about a bunch of people employed to fix things in history. Mostly, they live and work in a particular era, maybe even their own, helping other agents, but the main character of most of these stories, Manse Everard, is an Unattached agent, which gives the author the excuse to have him travel in time and fix things in different eras. He learns languages and backgrounds under sleep tuition before he travels. I remember reading some of these stories when I was at university, but that was a very long time ago and I only remember two or three.
I’m rereading his novel A Midsummer Tempest, in which the hero is Prince Rupert of the Rhine, nephew of Charles I, a real person, but living in a universe in which everything Shakespeare wrote was true, and he is known as the Great Historian. There were clocks in Ancient Rome, so technology is ahead of ours. There are trains in the time of Charles I, and an Industrial Revolution already. It’s all connected with the Puritans, who are winning the war. Rupert is given the job, by Oberon and Titania, of finding and bringing back Prospero’s book and staff, which he threw away at the end of The Tempest. There is an inn between universes, the Old Unicorn, where he meets characters from Poul Anderson’s other books. I’m tempted, when I have finished this reread, to pick up those books again. One is Operation Chaos, also set in a different universe, in which World War II is fought against the Saracen Caliphate - who fly on flying carpets. The other one is Three Hearts And Three Lions, in which the hero discovers he is one of Charlemagne’s paladins, left as a baby in our world, and the war he is fighting there becomes the war against the Nazis here.
I am also reading, yet again, the books by L.Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Incomplete Enchanter, The Castle Of Iron and The Wall Of Serpents. They are classics, no doubt about it. The hero of the series is Harold Shea, a psychologist at an institute. He and his friend Reed Chalmers, an older staff member at the same university, work out a way to use mathematical formulae to travel between universes. They are all based on mythology or classic fiction, such as The Faerie Queen and The Kalevala. Harold tries to visit the world of Irish mythology on his first trip, but a mistake in the formula lands him instead in the world of Norse mythology, and, worse still, it’s just before Ragnarok. He can’t use any of the technology he brings with him, even matches, but finds he can do magic while there. After this, he is more careful and knows what is possible, when he and Reed visit the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, where he meets and falls in love with Belphebe, an archer girl who lives in the forest. I’m currently reading the third book in the series, The Wall Of Serpents, in which they go to the world of the poem Kalevala, the national epic of Finland. I think Tolkien was inspired by it and used some ideas from it.
Just started a reread of People Of The Book, by Geraldine Brooks. In it, an Australian woman who is a restorer, is given the task of working on the Sarajevo Haggadah. This book is real, by the way, a mediaeval book created to be read on Passover. But it’s a novel. Each bit she works on is a story in itself, such as a picture in which the artist paints herself along with the family who owned the Haggadah. There is a wine stain - who put it there? And so on. There is a fictionalised version of a true story when a Muslim librarian saved it from the Nazis.
It reminded me a bit of James A. Michener’s The Source, set at an archaeological dig at a fictional town in Israel, which had a story about each of the objects the archaeologists find. So I have started a reread of that too.
Any book you are currently reading or rereading? And are you, like me, unable to read one book at a time?
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