Monday, December 14, 2015

What is David Drake reading?

Featured at Writers Read: David Drake, author of Air and Darkness.

His entry begins:
I'm reading Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, a 1942 memoir (in Skinner's first-person voice) of the European trip the two young ladies took twenty years earlier when they were just out of Bryn Mawr. The decision to read it was a sentimental one for me.

One of my classics teachers at Iowa had done the same thing with a friend at what must have been the same time. I recall with pleasure her stories of being guided through the ruins of Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans, who had discovered the site. For an undergraduate who had never traveled, it was as different a time as Samuel Johnson's London would have been.

In addition to those memories from my youth...[read on]
About Air and Darkness, from the publisher:
Air and Darkness, an intriguing and fantastic adventure, is both an independent novel and the gripping conclusion of the Books of the Elements, a four-volume set of fantasies set in Carce, an analog of ancient Rome by David Drake. Here the stakes are raised from the previous novels in an ultimate conflict between the forces of logic and reason and the forces of magic and the supernatural. During the extraordinary time in which this story is set, the supernatural is dominant. The story is an immensely complex journey of adventure through real and magical places.

Corylus, a soldier, emerges as one of the most compelling heroic figures in contemporary fantasy. Battling magicians, spirits, gods, and forces from supernatural realities, Corylus and his companions from the family of the nobleman Saxa-especially Saxa's impressive wife Hedia, and his friend (and Saxa's son) Varus-must face constant deadly and soul-destroying dangers, climaxing in a final battle not between good and evil but in defense of logic and reality.
Visit David Drake's website.

Writers Read: David Drake.

--Marshal Zeringue