I finished Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow a few weeks ago.
I was not nearly as impressed with Shadow as I was with his previous effort, The Dante Club. As I told many throughout the read — and it was a longer than usual read — Pearl's switch to first-person narrative is incredibly jarring. If the protagonist was more interesting (and far less self-suffering), then the result would've been better. As it is, I just wanted the silly bastard to skip his own experiences and get to the point. He rarely did. All the same, I've been looking for Pearl's new edition of Poe's Dupin mysteries. His publisher pulled the same brilliant trick with The Dante Club by releasing Pearl's own translation of Dante's Inferno simultaneously. I bought that one. I want this one. Oh, skillful marketing, how you do torment me.
Next on the shelf is a book I've had for months. I started it in the spring, but was distracted (quite justifiably) by the affairs of Drama Club. So it is time to return to Jeff Shaara's To The Last Man, a fictional account of frontline life in World War I. Our visit to the UK started my mind along this investigative trail, as it was around the time of their Poppy Appeal. We've nothing like that here, sadly. So after my fight-home read of Ben Elton's light-minded, if well-intentioned, The First Casualty, I started looking for quality accounts, factual and fictional. Shaara's name came up repeatedly.
We'll see.