Another thing that happened while I was underwater at work was the release of Will Shetterly‘s new book The Gospel Of The Knife.
It looks like this:
(I hope that the cover catches some of the many Dan Brown readers, exposing them to some good writing and also making Will a ton of money.)
The book is a sequel to Dogland. I don’t know if I’ve talked about Dogland here before, but my capsule summary is that I think it’s the best thing Will had written to that point, and that it was my pick for “best book of the year” in the year it came out. At the time I didn’t realize quite how much autobiographical stuff was in there, but that is probably part of the magic of the book–slipping the fantastic elements into the real works better when there is a definite verisimilitude about “the real”.
Naturally I was excited to read this, after my reaction to the previous book. Not to mention that while I was working insanely and waiting for a chance to read the book I kept seeing great reviews for the book–for instance go see Cory wax poetic about both Dogland and Gospel.
I am pleased to report that when I finally got a chance to read the book, I quite enjoyed it. I will say that it took me longer to “get into” than the previous book–I think primarily due to a particular narrative choice that Will made in writing the book–but that it wasn’t very far into the book when that became transparent and I was taken along by the story.
There was a second reason though that I was anticipating the release of this book, beyond the pure desire to read it. Well, actually a second and third, but I’m only going to talk about the second.
This is a photo of the dedication page of the novel:
It should be pretty obvious why I was happy about that.
That bit is in every copy, of course, but this bit is just in mine:
While I heartily encourage everyone to go buy copies of both Dogland and The Gospel Of The Knife, you can actually read them for free online, since Will has released CC versions.
If you do buy, follow the instructions here to annotate it to the “author’s preferred text”. If you read it online, the change has already been made.
If you want to hear what Will sounds like (and also hear his lovely wife discussing Territory, her new book, which I am just as excited to read), you can check out the podcast interview with them at The Dragon Page.
