No doubt you have all been waiting with bated breath for some book reviews, eh? Well, I haven’t much time but I will try and oblige. The two most enjoyable books I’ve read this year? Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan, and Declare, by Tim Powers (for which he won a World Fantasy world).

Julius Winsome is a short, sharp novel about love, loss, grief, and man’s cruelty to his fellow man. If this sounds boring, ponderous or pretentious, let me point out that Julius Winsome is also a novel about a man who, when his beloved dog is murdered, picks up a rifle and takes his own revenge. This may just be my favorite read of 2007.

Fantasy, sci-fi, speculative fiction - whatever you want to call it, I’ve read a lot of it. Throw in mystery private eyes, westerns, thrillers and the like, and what you’ve got is a whole lot of genre fiction. Unfortunately, a whole lot of it is also terrible junk. Tim Powers does not write junk. He does write genre, though it would be hard to pin him to one. Declare has elements of from historical fiction, spy novels, fantasy, horror, the occult and mythology.