Rules for Readers: The Steel Bonnets

To recap: Rule #1 is

If you like what an author writes for money, seek out what he writes for love.

George MacDonald Fraser was well-known for his Flashman series of historical adventure novels. I read a couple, and enjoyed them, but didn't feel compelled to binge them all. Then a friend recommended his McAuslan stories, which I liked a lot, and I started picking up more of his non-Flashman books, like his WW2 memoir Quartered Safe Out Here. (More on these, maybe, in a later post.)

And this, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers:

Most Americans, even history buffs, know little about The Borders and their wars, except as the source of some fine ballads. Fraser addresses the history with easy, colorful narrative, with obvious love for the land and its people, and with love, too, of telling a good story.

Rules for Readers, and The Fall of Rome

I read a tip once, I can't remember where: if you're traveling somewhere new to you, and you go to a restaurant and order x, and they ask you "do you want the y with that" (or something similar), just say yes. You'll be getting it the way the locals like it. Maybe you'll like it too, and at the least, you'll learn something.

If I were trying to collect useful tips for readers, and it looks like I am, my Rule #1 would be:

If you like what an author writes for money, seek out what he writes for love.

Or, less pithily but more accurately, if you like reading what an author is best known for, try to find things he's written out of love for the subject, or curiosity, or just for the hell of it. It doesn't always work, but sometimes you strike gold.

Like this nugget, with its dry title and dull dust jacket:

I recognized the author's name -- RA Lafferty, an idiosyncratic, not to say loopy, science fiction writer of the 60s and 70s, now mostly forgotten, whom I liked a lot. So I bought it (for $2.95 according to the bookseller's price penciled on the flyleaf) and read it.