Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/20

Since I review books, I get mail -- that's how it works. But since I can't review everything, some of that mail would be left unmentioned. I didn't like that idea, so, instead, I post a "Reviewing the Mail" round-up every Monday morning, to at least mention the books that came in the mail the previous week.

I haven't read these yet, but that doesn't mean I won't, or that I don't want to -- and this will also be more timely than those (often very much later) reviews.

So, this week I saw:

Steven Erikson's newest novel -- and the eighth in his massive "Malazan Book of the Fallen" epic fantasy series -- is Toll the Hounds. This book marks an important point in the publishing history of the series; US publication (which started off five years behind the UK) has finally caught up. (The UK edition was out in July; this US edition is September -- that's the same season for most publishers, and counts as essentially simultaneous when compared with five years later.) I'm both very impressed by and hugely enjoying this series; it's one of the few things I was regularly reading at the old job that I'm keeping up with on my own time. (I reviewed the previous book in the series, Reaper's Gale, about a month ago; reviews and other things about earlier books in the series are linked from that post.) Tor has published Toll the Hounds in both trade paperback and hardcover (the latter mostly for libraries and rabid collectors), on September 16th. I do recommend the series; I don't recommend starting here.

That's all well and good, you say, but do you have a manga about a lawyer based on a videogame? As a matter of fact, I do -- and you can probably guess what it's called. There's a book in front of me that seems to have the ungainly title of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Official Casebook: Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files, and the stories (eleven of them) are each credited to a different manga-ka, from Tamako Yamaguchi to Seventh Gear to Naruzo to DIAGO. The whole thing was translated and adapted by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley -- I have a sneaking suspicion that those two are related somehow -- and will be published by Del Rey Manga on September 23rd (tomorrow, in other words). I haven't played the game -- the list of things I haven't done is huge, I know -- but I'm sure reading a manga is just like playing that game.

Shifting gears wildly again, here's Starfist: Wings of Hell, the thirteenth in the military SF series by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. It's coming from Del Rey on December 30th -- one of the very last books to be published this year, if there's anyone out there who collects such things -- in hardcover. I don't have much to say about this series, only that I'm flabbergasted to realize that it's made it up to book 13 while my attention was elsewhere.

Vertical continues to mine the backlist of Japan's godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka -- and it's a massive backlist, so they could be at it for decades -- with the launch of his Black Jack series in the US. The first volume -- of the projected seventeen it'll take to reprint the whole series as it exists in Japan -- is coming September 23rd, and another one will be coming every other month for the next three years. Black Jack is a medical drama Tezuka-style, which means that the hero is an enigmatic, mysterious scarred figure who swoops in and out of the stories, performing medical miracles gruffly, and never letting outsiders learn his true secrets. Vertical says that Black Jack is Tezuka's most popular series for adults in Japan, so I'm looking forward to this -- Tezuka is energetic and odd, with a compellingly clean line and unexpected characterizations.

Speaking of series that keep going forever, I also have here a novel entitled Paul of Dune, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Herbert and Anderson, apparently willing to chronicle every stray second in the Dune universe (and with a fanbase that's as equally eager to read ever more Dunebooks), have shoehorned this novel, the first of a trilogy, in between Dune and Dune Messiah. The next two books will be Jessica of Dune and Irulan of Dune -- and look for more novels to follow, one each year, as long as people keep buying them. This one was published September 16th.

Last this week is the new "Merry Gentry" novel from Laurell K. Hamilton, Swallowing Darkness. (She knows what we all think of when we read that title, right? Oh, and as long as I'm asking rhetorical questions, does anyone else think of this as the "Elfin Lays" series? Credit to Josepha Sherman for that one.) Speaking of impertinent questions about titles, I don't think I've ever mentioned in public that the first few books in this series -- A Kiss of Shadows, A Caress of Twilight, Seduced by Moonlight, and A Stroke of Midnight -- had such an obvious continuity that I was really hoping that book five would be Fucked Until Dawn. Sadly, it wasn't to be. But the series has run on a few books since then, and Merry has gotten herself pregnant -- with twins, each of which has three different fathers, if I believe what I've read on the Internet -- which might mean that this book has somewhat less sex than the previous ones. Anyway, this series is what it is -- and that's a hugely bestselling and popular sequence by one of the biggest names of modern fantasy -- and the new one will be available in hardcover on November 4th.