Only two books read since my last posting, so I guess I'm doing better than usual. I picked up Chester Brown's Louis Riel from the library and read it in a single sitting. It's a biography in comic book form of the 19th century Canadian Louis Riel. Amusingly the writeup on the book on amazon says he's fictional, but unless lots of other people around the web (like the Canadian government) are wrong, he was real. Worth the quick read, especially for those of us completely clueless about Canadian history.

Rudy Rucker's As Above, So Below is a novel of Peter Bruegel's life. Having read a bunch of Rucker's SF, starting it I wasn't quite sure if it would be straight historical fiction, or if it would veer off in some odd direction. It didn't. My only real complaint would be that the reproductions of Bruegel's works that begin each chapter are in black and white. Fortunately it's not hard to find color ones online.

posted by Kristin Buxton at 1:31 PM