As part of my ongoing attempt to become more literate in classic science fiction I recently finished a couple of books by quirky legend Philip José Farmer: the seminal To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the odd but charming Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
TYSBG is the first in Farmer’s Riverworld books. In it, we follow [...]
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
I love lists and I’m clearly not the only one. A man who has earned a significant reputation for his understanding of intra- and intercultural intertextuality, Professor Umberto Eco, has even written a substantial book on humanity’s obsession with lists—in fact, he argues for the transcendence of list making.
I love lists because they are an [...]
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Thursday, January 22, 2009
John DeNardo of the insanely informative and up-to-date SF Signal has run with an entertaining meme that originated at the Guardian.
The gist of which involves a list of 124 works of science fiction and fantasy, which apparently must be read by all. I love book lists and I love checking them off. I have some [...]
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The Guardian’s Clive Sinclair has posted a great top-10 list of westerns.
Until last year, the western was a genre blind spot for me. I had never really considered the western. I was dimly aware of my grandfather having had a large collection of Louis L’Amour paperbacks, but I hadn’t read any. Last year though, I read [...]
There’s an entertaining meme going around that was promulgated by Idoaltor, which has to do with listing your favourite albums for every year you’ve been alive. It seems natural to me to apply this concept to books. So natural in fact that I’m sure it’s already been done somewhere in the postmodern stew that is [...]
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I’ve started and deleted this post three times now. Summer has finally descended on my hometown of Ottawa in the form of a miasma of heat and humidity that has resulted in what seems like forty days and forty nights of mist, drizzle, rain, hail, thunder and lightning. I feel like I’ve been startled awake [...]
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One of the three weirdly disparate books I’m reading right now is The Rest is Noise by the gifted music critic of The New Yorker, Alex Ross.
I’ve recently dipped a toe into the world of 20th Century classical music through a smattering of Philip Glass and a wonderful collection of works by the underrated (I’ll [...]
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Several months ago, the hyper-articulate and wise Ed recommended an excellent book to me by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin—a chilling portrait of the childhood of a fictional mass-murdering teenager.
In an insightful Guardian book club piece, John Mullan describes the titular Kevin as a “frustrated satirist”, which captures the spirit of black [...]
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Like many, I read George Orwell’s 1984 as a school assignment when I was a teenager—coincidentally, sometime around 1984. I remember being very impressed with the book. By high school I had a strong affinity for science fiction and instantly recognized 1984 as a classic within that genre; and something more as well, that I wouldn’t [...]
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Friday, February 29, 2008
In another “obviously still catching up with my RSS reader” item, here is a contagiously enthusiastic post on Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art by John Holbo of The Valve (via SFSignal.com).
Peake’s fame rests primarily (and justifiably) on his masterpiece: the Gormenghast trilogy. In Gormenghast, Peake created a fantasy-world unlike any other in literature. [...]
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