And this one, read from that volume, definitely gave me a sense of achievement, if only because of the weight of the book itself!
And this one, read from that volume, definitely gave me a sense of achievement, if only because of the weight of the book itself!
I have only recently begun to read he classics, and I read my first Dickens (Hard Times) about six years ago, so I always had an image of his books as something leather-bound and significant, that had to be carried around by a couple of servants. Of course, that is not always the case, and most of the Dickens I have read has been in cheap paperback editions (reading Dickens on a Kindle will get you visited by the ghost of Uriah Heep).
But to really do him justice, I wanted to buy a fitting volume, and I found one (cheap) at B&N. A five volume doorstop that is much too big to read comfortably unless you put it on a table. It is the kind of thing that the local blacksmith would use if he lost his anvil, and a fitting single-finger salute to people throwing away books to go digital. It includes Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, of which I hadn't read the last two.
I would like to say that reading A Christmas Carol in this thing brought a whole new dimension to the tale, but the truth is that the story itself was so good that you could read it anywhere and enjoy its points (I assume that I am the only one here who is just now reading it for the first time). One can see why it was, along with Coca Cola, instrumental in increasing the importance of Christmas.
Anyway, if you like impractical books that look the part, and that annoy the hell out of the USPS, I recommend this one - and you can toss out five completely inappropriate paperbacks...
I had absolutely forgotten what a great book it is. Beyond the Martians themselves, and the "knowledge" that has since been overturned by science, it is an extremely entertaining adventure book. Following the main character and his brother through the events is both fun and chilling - mainly because of the way panicked people are shown to react under extreme circumstances, which reminds me of how mobs still act today, more than a hundred years later.
One thing that did strike me is how vulnerable the martians would have been had they timed their invasion a few years further up the line. The limits of Wells' imagination were tested in showing that the enemy was overwhelming, but... if some of them would be hurt, even killed by ground-based artillery of the time, I think even WWI weaponry would have stopped it cold. Tomahawk missiles would have ended the invasion ten minutes after it was confirmed to be hostile...
Even with this caveat, I would heartily recommend a rereading, if only to get the bad taste of the movie out of your mouth.
The Five Continent Reading on Second Life will, as its name suggests, be an event in which five writers representing speculative fiction from different continents read their work. The writers in question are:
Some of these writers I already know from being online, others I will meet at the event, so I-m really looking forward to it.
Dates and places: May 5th at Thorsten Küper’s and Kirsten Riehl’s steampunk location Kafé Kruemelkram in Second Life.
It's impossible to praise too highly the effort that the organizing team put into this. Everything went perfectly, the panels ran almost exactly on time, and the venue was pleasant and ideally suited for both the type and scale of the event. I particularly want to thank Cristopher Kastensmidt (
But even without panels, I will definitely be back next year. The people - and this is something that happens to me every time I go to Brazil - were simply marvelous. Everyone went out of their way to talk to me, and to make me feel at home, and they succeeded to the point in which I could forget that I was the visitor, and just relax and chat. I was especially happy to realize that everyone around me seemed to have a vast appreciation for the history of the genre... which meant that I could learn as I enjoyed myself. Brilliant.
In addition to all of this, I got to see how Brazilians view Brazilian literature within the international pantheon, which was also educational in the extreme. Seen from Argentina, Brazil looks like a self-contained Colossus, and watching the discussion from the inside is amazing.
So, an experience that I am extremely eager to repeat, and we are already planning on putting together a Mercosur delegation for Worldcon in 2013...
This one is the first Odisseia de Literatura Fantástica, and I seem to be the only international author on the roster. Si if you happen to be in Porto Alegre this weekend look me up. We can grab a beer and you can get yourself a signed copy of Virtuoso!
See you there, or possibly not!
As followers of this blog know, I've been a subscriber to Easton Press' Masterpieces of Science Fiction Series. Sadly, this one has been discontinued, and I am no longer receiving my monthly book. I say sadly because, although I had already read a number of the books I received (albeit, obviously, in editions nowhere near as beautiful as the EP ones), there are a number of books I never, ever would have purchased had they not been in this series (The Dispossessed and The Snow Queen being the two that jump to mind).
Another book that would have slipped through my net is Clifford D. Simak's City. This one is a compendium of stories that give us a future timeline based on the premise that the city, as a unit of human habitation, is inherently obsolete, and will disappear... Where he goes from there is both amazing and logical, and makes me happy that I read this one - and reminds me of what I will be missing. Fortunately, I still have about a year's worth of these books still in my TBR pile, and I've also signed up for the Horror Classics collection. I know I can get most of this stuff for free online... but I happen to like books as physical objects, so I'll get them while I can!
Flying to Brazil tomorrow for a convention (I'll give details on tomorrow's post), so bloggage may be intermittent for a few days...
My Borges binge, at least the reading portion of it, came to a close with a book called El hacedor, a collection of short-shorts and poems that is not among my favorite Borgesian work - I feel that he works best in a slightly longer prose, or in essays, where his erudition can be used to make a lasting point, as opposed to simply creating a mood which doesn't stick in one's memory much more than a few hours.
So, having little to say about the book itself, I find myself musing how Borges has been linked with the beginnings of literary postmodernism. Now, as someone who is enormously happy that postmodernism seems to be dead (and looking forward to whatever replaces it, which could never be worse), I was surprised by this. How could a rationalist of Borges' extreme conviction, and a strong conservative as well, be accused of such a thing? The answer is simply that he was imaginative, and his education allowed him to identify the borders and transcend them... and in many cases, the postmodernists are perfectly correct in claiming him for their own. Sigh.
Anyway, this space will be Borges-free for a while, but I will definitely be looking for some more interesting philosophical texts to peruse every once in a while (although I will probably dedicate myself to older tracts, as modern philosophy seems to have disappeared up a deep, dark cavity thanks to both deconstruction and the related agenda-specific nonsense). So we'll have a lot of genre stuff here in the coming days.