Jay Winter on Paul Fussell.
Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.
The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).
"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).
I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning. It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day! Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.
Showing posts with label world-building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world-building. Show all posts
Sunday, June 03, 2012
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Postscript
I am 'homesick' for the worlds of these books by Doris Egan/Jane Emerson (planetary and interstellar science fiction built on a Pride and Prejudice chassis): I want to go back there...
(That said, I was in a ridiculously good mood today: first day back on campus! Clearly I am in the right line of work.)
(That said, I was in a ridiculously good mood today: first day back on campus! Clearly I am in the right line of work.)
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Transported
From Laura Miller, The Magician’s Book:
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? Once I began to confer with other people who had loved the Chronicles as children, I kept hearing stories, like my own, of countless, intoxicated rereadings. “I would read other books, of course,” wrote the novelist Neil Gaiman, “but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books.”NB for particular detail piece see discussion on p. 265 of C.S. Lewis on the modest detail in medieval literature (Friar John, in Chaucer’s Sumoner’s Tale, pausing to ‘droof awey the cat’ before sitting down on bench).
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Bat signals
The inner bat signal went off yesterday evening and my trashy-novel homing beacon was set to detect the trashiest novel I could get my hands on in the immediate vicinity....
(I have occasionally offended some poor author who has offered to send me his or her gruesome serial-killer thriller by saying something along the lines of "Yes, please, I love light reading!" - and I am marginally aware that nobody wants to think they have written a trashy novel - I should eschew the phrase....)
Anyway I have a 25% discount at the Columbia Bookstore, because that is where I order my course books (they bribe us that way!), and I went and got an absurd stack of stuff. The one I gulped down last night was this! I loved the Pern books when I was a kid, but they have considerably fallen off - this one was perhaps a bit better than some of the other recent ones?
Earlier in the week I had a better book, courtesy of M.'s killer crime-fiction collection (a secret resource of the Columbia English Department): John Harvey's Cold in Hand. I have occasionally found minor elements of this series annoying (but perhaps it is just because I do not like mustard, which is often an ingredient in the sandwiches the detective too regularly makes for himself as a kind of set piece or arabesque?), but Harvey is an excellent writer.
(Hmmmm - is this book part of a trend, though? I will refrain from saying more to avoid spoilers.)
On another note, I saw a very poor production of Hedda Gabler this afternoon, I am about to go for a short swim and I will then return home, eat a second dinner (the first one was post-matinee and really could be thought of as a late lunch) and find the next trashiest novel in the house!
(I have occasionally offended some poor author who has offered to send me his or her gruesome serial-killer thriller by saying something along the lines of "Yes, please, I love light reading!" - and I am marginally aware that nobody wants to think they have written a trashy novel - I should eschew the phrase....)
Anyway I have a 25% discount at the Columbia Bookstore, because that is where I order my course books (they bribe us that way!), and I went and got an absurd stack of stuff. The one I gulped down last night was this! I loved the Pern books when I was a kid, but they have considerably fallen off - this one was perhaps a bit better than some of the other recent ones?
Earlier in the week I had a better book, courtesy of M.'s killer crime-fiction collection (a secret resource of the Columbia English Department): John Harvey's Cold in Hand. I have occasionally found minor elements of this series annoying (but perhaps it is just because I do not like mustard, which is often an ingredient in the sandwiches the detective too regularly makes for himself as a kind of set piece or arabesque?), but Harvey is an excellent writer.
(Hmmmm - is this book part of a trend, though? I will refrain from saying more to avoid spoilers.)
On another note, I saw a very poor production of Hedda Gabler this afternoon, I am about to go for a short swim and I will then return home, eat a second dinner (the first one was post-matinee and really could be thought of as a late lunch) and find the next trashiest novel in the house!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Light rereading
It was my pleasure this week to reread what is surely one of the very best of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels, Thendara House.
I must have read it at least half a dozen times before, including several times in adulthood. I picked this copy up a few years ago; it's the original 1984 DAW paperback, surely the same edition I read it in as a young teenager; even at the time, I think it was clear to me the extent to which it is a novel about gender relations in the United States in the late 1970s!
I do rather love this book - I group it in memory with two others that I must have also read around age 12 or 13 (I am having a fit of nostalgia for those public-library wire carousels stuffed with fat mass-market paperbacks!), Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue and Zoe Fairbairns' chilling Benefits, a book I have not reread since I was a teenager but that haunted me much more than Margaret Atwood's better-known Handmaid's Tale.
In an alternate universe I am going to science-fiction conventions and writing feminist science fiction myself! Oh, I am so nostalgic for the magical world-building fantasies of the 1970s: the best of Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley really are pretty much unbeatable as far as light reading goes, though they have both published some books that are so much less good than their best ones that you have to wonder how much of a hand they even had in them. The thing that is distinctive about this kind of imagination is that the world-building combines so fruitfully, in these cases, with a strong interest in character and a feel for the traditional forms of narrative - they have the pleasures of a novel by George Eliot or Anthony Trollope, only in a quite wonderfully debased form!
Hmmm, there must be at least half a dozen Darkover novels that I have never read; my habits have biased me against obtaining them, they are just the sort of thing one cannot request through a university library. Might be I will purchase 'em from used booksellers on Amazon and get home in mid-January to find an amazing selection of little boxes of musty but magical books....
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