Thomas Sundell's A Bloodline of Kings follows Phillip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great from birth through his famous son's birth. An interesting side note, the very first thing you see when you open the book is an inverted map of Ancient Greece with Macedon at the top and the islands at the bottom. This is done "...to illustrate the point of view of the Makedones. Their world centers on the Aegean Sea and the strongest cultural influence is from the heartlands of the Hellenes". Part of what I loved about this is the fact that most of us are very aware, at least in a broad sense, of the story of Alexander the Great, but this is coming from a different perspective, and even the maps in the end pages prepare you for this.
Phillip (spelled Phillipos throughout the novel), is shown from birth through his childhood as an incredibly smart young man raised as support for the rightful king of Macedonia. The fourth child in his family, Phillip seems destined to be forever used as a pawn in his older siblings plans for rule. In many ways similar to Robert Grave's I, Claudius, the royal family of Macedon is seen as filled with potential conspirators, rulers, spies and others all bent on the crown, and it is only through Phillip's ability to navigate his world that he ends up in a position to rule.
The novel is told in present tense and switches often from character to character (including all of Phillip's siblings, wives, and many other friends and foes). Considering he is often viewed as the precursor to the greatness of his son, it is fascinating to see the story of just how fractured Macedonia was when he came into power and the shape he moved it into before the birth of his son.
A fascinating read, and one I hope someday will be followed by a sequel.
The Disaster Artist, James Franco's 2017 retelling of the making of The Room is a really fascinating look at the lure of Hollywood, Celebrity, and film making in general.
The Room is a 2003 cult film that has been referred to as Garbage, The Citizen Kane of Bad Films, and Trash Cinema. As an owner of the film myself, I'll say it is bizarrely watchable, nonsensical and the cinematic equivalent of an ear-worm. Once you've seen it, the movie just sticks with you and the more you try to explain its appeal to others the crazier you seem.
Based on the book The Disaster Artist: My Life inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, the film follows the friendship of the two leads of The Room, Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, from meeting in an acting class through their experiences trying to find work in Hollywood and finally through the creation and production of this truly strange film.
The very first thing I've got to say about the film itself is just how blown away I was by James Franco's performance; his Tommy goes beyond a one note parody of Wiseau's accent; Franco's Tommy is an incredibly interesting portrait of a man who is famously unwilling to share personal information about himself. Yes there are a number of laughs at Tommy's expense, but the character is more than a simple impression, showing a deep loneliness and strong sense of loyalty to the young man who has reached out to him in friendship.
As with other comedic films about filmmakers, Ed Wood (1994), Bowfinger (1999), etc., The Disaster Artist takes a gleeful look at how the industry can run versus how it does, and then exactly how it interacts with a man who completely ignores every piece of advice offered to him and simply makes exactly the film he wants to make.
Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties begins with with a strange sleeping sickness occurring across the globe, women are falling asleep and not waking up, in fact, if disturbed in any way they get murderous and then immediately fall back asleep. With no end in sight society begins to shift, falling apart in some places and pulling together in others.
Much of the novel takes places in one small town affected by the sleeping epidemic, and the nearby women's prison. Following law enforcement we begin on night one and therefore a large part of the early chapters follow women attempting to not fall asleep.
The novel builds at a really nice pace and even the crazy things that occur later in the book (this is co-written by Stephen King after all), feel like they come from a logical (sometimes deranged logic) position.
A thrilling story that merges fairy tales with pulse pounding thrills - well worth a look.
M.N.J. Butler's 1995 novel The Fox was almost the one that killed my current streak of one historical novel set in Ancient Greece that I've been doing for the last two years. Following the list found here, I've been slowly but surly working my way from the mythic age, through the Trojan War, Persian War, Peloponnesian war and am now just getting into the age of Alexander the Great.
The Fox follows a spartan soldier called Leotychides who was raised as royalty, through his entire Spartan upbringing, and cleverly sets it against the fall of the Spartan Empire. Similar in many ways to John Gardiner's The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), which is itself set in the beginning of the Golden Age of Sparta and narrated by a philosopher asking where it all went wrong, The Fox shows how a society built on one principle, an elite warrior class who ignore everything else, could not easily stand against the Athenians over any length of time once a shared enemy no longer existed.
The novel was a really fun dip into an area of history I'm becoming quite fond of, and thanks to the power of Inter-Library Loans (wherein one library borrows a book from another) I was able to read this long out-of-print book and continue on with a winning streak that will take me through Alexander the Great's life next year and the fallout after his demise (sorry for the 2300-year spoiler)
A great read!
Andy Weir's 2017 follow up to The Martian, Artemis follows the story of a young woman, Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara who works as a porter on the lunar city of Artemis.
As with The Martian, much of the novel comes down to timing and problem solving, but unlike his first work, a clear man vs. nature story, Weir has created an entire society with Artemis, working to outline its economy, class structure and characters ranging from the porter/smuggler protagonist through to city leaders, technical staff, the police and others.
The story moves along quickly and with a great sense of tension as Jazz takes a simple job that quickly becomes complicated and then moves straight into some truly dangerous and exciting territory.
A really fun read and well worth the look.
Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo focuses on Nikeratos, an actor of some repute living in Syracuse in the aftermath of the reign of the tyrant Dionysius.
The book does a remarkable job of following a society in which a young man (Dionysius II) has been placed in control entirely in conflict with the fact that he is not a leader, doesn't care for his people and wishes to spend all his time at his hobbies.
The novel focuses largely on the lives of actors in the era and seeing the story of a young man's professional career against the backdrop of great change in the world (Alexander the Great's father Phillip of Macedon makes an appearance in the framing chapters of the story).
A remarkable read and one that has me looking forward to the remaining three Renault novel's I'll be reading next year as I finish my read through this list.
Although I have spent the last month switching from game to game in the Five Nights at Freddy's series, in my off time I've been enjoying a number of books from all sorts of genres, including todays little voyage to Ancient Greece in L. Sprague de Camp's 1965 novel The Arrows of Hercules.
The novel focuses on an engineer named Zopyros who creates early siege weapons for Dionysius of Syracuse. The story is full of all sorts of derring do, and from my own experience in fantasy fiction felt an awful lot like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, including the four random fellows of different backgrounds and temperaments who decide to team up for no reason and seek their fortunes.
A lot of the fun of the novel for me was in the way that de Camp relates Zopyros's work to our modern tech-focused world - wherein he has been hired by someone to do a job no one has ever done before and instead of simply spending his time working on his concepts, he ends up spending an awful lot of it dealing with professional rivals and coworkers hellbent on undermining his efforts.
The novel was a lot of fun and following Manfredi's Tyrant, which focused on Dionysius himself, this was a great way to get a man-on-the-ground feel for how one city state dealt with the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war.
