His writing never quite clicked for me, aside from his collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens. But a lot of folk I know adored and respected him, and I think his body of work will live on for some time.
(h/t +Les Jenkins)
Category: Books
Knowledge Is Power
At the risk of embarrassing +Kay Hill, I thought her freshman essay (by way of website) on knowledge, freedom, and tyranny, by way of Little Brother and 1984, was pretty darned cool.
4 of 5 stars to As You Wish by Cary Elwes
4 of 5 stars to As You Wish by Cary Elwes https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1203580645
4 of 5 stars to Orison by Daniel Swensen
4 of 5 stars to Orison by Daniel Swensen https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1203438741
Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy to become an HBO series? Hmmmm
An interesting idea, though as a series of stories and novellas early on, it's hard to see how this will work as a continuous TV series. Which is fine — a series of segments where the actors (and century) changes between would be okay with me.
I'm also hoping this will focus on the original trilogy and not the later novels that were added on.
Hrm. Another reason I might have to get HBO. Or have a looooong wait for disc sets.
(h/t +steph wanamaker)
Originally shared by +MOARGeek:
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy being adapted as HBO series
Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy to be adapted as an HBO TV series, written and produced by Jonathan Nolan.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy Being Adapted As HBO Series – MOARGeek
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy to be adapted as an HBO TV series, written and produced by Jonathan Nolan.
Altogether Ooky
De Knippling writes very clever and offbeat stuff, and I suspect her horror collection here will tickle your creepy bone, should you have one, most effectively.
She's also a friend of mine, so I'd love to see her get some Halloween-tide sales.
A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre – Kindle edition by DeAnna Knippling. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre – Kindle edition by DeAnna Knippling. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre.
Stage Review: "Lord of the Flies"
Went this afternoon to a matinee of Lord of the Flies at the Denver Performing Arts Center. +Kay Hill read the book as a summer assignment, so I thought this would be a good follow-up to that, esp. since I hadn't touched the story itself in (mumblety) decades.
The production of William Golding's novel, in the round at the Space Theater, was very good (adaption by Nigel Williams, directed by Anthony Powell). There were a few liberties taken, based on the setting on stage, working within the time limit involved, and having a cast that's more arguably high school (and beyond) than little kids, but the tale as presented was solid — and, per Golding's work, more than a bit depressing, arguing a state of nature much closer to Hobbes than Rousseau. It's fascinating watching the veneers of civilization peel away, one by one, from the shipwrecked public school students on an island, as some cling desperately to order and others dive headlong into savagery, the question of which are most delusional staying constantly up in the air.
The ensemble of actors are all good, though the variety of English accents were sometimes hard to follow from where we sat. The space was effectively used as well, with one block of seating turned into the hilltop, and the main space the beach below.
Good stuff.
Afterwards, of course, we went to this great new restaurant downtown, specializing in pork, cooked with skewers. Oh, and there's a dance floor …
And sometimes you just want to ride a horse
Words of wisdom from +Doyce Testerman on the paper-book vs e-book debate.
Originally shared by +Doyce Testerman:
The Future of the Book
or
"In which standards are always in steep decline, and things keep getting better."
I don't worry about the future of stories any more than I worry about the future of travel; people need stories the same way people need to go from Point A to Point B.
See, when it comes to travel, getting to point A to point B is usually the entire point, and if people argued non-stop that switching from horses to cars (or cars to trains, or trains to airplanes) was going to 'destroy travel', they'd been (rightly) seen as idiots.
Yes, switching to a car from a horse profoundly changes the "travel experience." Yes, I know it's just not the same for you without that 'horse smell'. Got it.
But you still got to Point B just fine?
And Point B is where you wanted to go? Yes?
Then shut up.
That's how the ebook versus paper debate strikes me: people debating the vehicle, when it's the thing inside that actually matters.
via +Mark Brueschke
When you could judge a book by its cover
At least in terms of how it would look on your shelf.
Back before slipcovers were introduced — let alone mass market paperbacks — hardcover books had actual cover illustrations. The ones reproduced here, a couple turns of the century ago, are truly lovely.
2 of 5 stars to Hannibal by Th…
2 of 5 stars to Hannibal by Theodore Ayrault Dodge https://t.co/P5LBoGfAEt
Life is too short, and Alan Moore is too long
I’ll still read long books. But given the direction Alan Moore’s writing has gone in the last 10-15 years, I probably won’t be reading this long book.
(h/t +Curt Thompson)
Originally shared by +The Verge:
That’s more than two Lord of the Rings
‘Watchmen’ writer Alan Moore has finished a 1 million word novel
Watchmen writer Alan Moore has completed work on the first draft of an epic novel that has now spiraled into an enormous story totaling over one million words. For context, that’s more than two L…
Some global results on that recent book meme
Yesterday, I blogged about ten meaningful / memorable / impactful books in my life (https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2014/09/09/tagged-for-ten-books.html), having been tagged for it by +DeAnna Knippling.
Apparently this meme's been floating around a bit, and Facebook did some analytics on the results, published a few days ago. Here are the top 20:
1. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
3. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
4. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
5. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
6. The Holy Bible
7. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
8. The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
9. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
10. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. 1984 – George Orwell
13. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
15. The Stand – Stephen King
16. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
17. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L'Engle
18. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
19. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
20. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
There are a surprisingly large number of "classics" on the list. Three of the ones I picked (Lord of the Rings, 1984, the Bible) showed up here.
It's also indicative of some of the data clustering issues FB had — in this case, despite supposedly aggregating series, they still listed out The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardobe and The Chronicles of Narnia separately.
There are some other fun analytics they've done, including proximity maps (people who liked X also tended to like Y) and connections between people doing the meme, as well as the full top 100 list (I'm vaguely pleased that none of them made me kick myself for forgetting that one). Good stuff.
Books that have stayed with us
by Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel. Favorite books are something friends like to share and discuss. A Facebook meme facilitates this very interaction. You may have seen one of your friends post something like “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, …
Tagged for Ten Books
Over on That Other Social Network (at http://goo.gl/ZLnEKC), +DeAnna Knippling tagged me for a meme to list "10 books that have stayed with me, changed my life, or were for other reasons memorable."
In no particular order …
1. The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) – For a book that took me three years of reading the first hundred pages before finally breaking out of the Shire and into the good stuff, I eventually dove in and didn't come up for air for another decade or more. I did maps. I did calendars. I did Quenya and Sindarin vocabulary lists. I stole shamelessly for my D&D campaigns. And to this day, all the flaws in Peter Jackson's epic action adaptations still melt before the sheer giddiness of seeing something that approximates Prof. Tolkien's fantastic world.
2. The Zero Stone (Norton) – Norton's "juveniles" were not only deeply human (so to speak), but also taught me a lot about slowly building a shared world just through terminology and props.
3. The Bible (Anthology) – I'm not noting it here because it saved my soul or something, but because it informed me about my faith, its roots and conflicts and inconsistencies and its content. The Bible is also a cultural touchstone — while you can't casually mention Balaam's Ass any more and have people know what you're talking about, a lot of our metaphors and references and literary imagery — as well as societal norms — derive from the Bible and its various translations. It should be required reading for everyone, not for its religious content but because of its effect on culture, history, and literature.
4. Mere Christianity (Lewis) – While I've fallen out of love with Lewis since discovering his apologetics once upon a time, there's still a lot worthwhile for Christians in his writings, including the idea that you can actually think about your faith, not just passively accept the stories.
5. 1984 (Orwell) – Made me very aware of totalitarianism and the importance of information, language, and thought control. That different aspects of it keep rising to the surface of the news, 65 years later, speaks to its strengths.
6. Operation: Chaos (Anderson) – My introduction to "urban fantasy" decades before anyone actually coined the phrase, as well as featuring a great husband and wife pair of protagonists. I still pull this out and read it every several years.
7. Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) – My intro to Shakespeare, wherein I learned to love what he did with the language, and with history, and I also learned the importance of a good sales pitch.
8. The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison) – Capers! Scams! Yeah, I'd grown up watching old "Mission: Impossible" reruns, but I had no idea that you could do that sort of thing in a science fiction novel, let alone with such a charming anti-hero as "Slipper Jim" DiGriz. Harrison sort of ran the franchise into the ground, but there was a joie de vivre in the protag here that I never forgot.
9. Searching for Rachel Wallace (Parker) – Wait, I could enjoy a genre besides SF and Fantasy? Inconceivable! Parker's Spenser was my entre into hard-bitten detective tales, the "tarnished white knight," bruiser and intellectual, who saves the innocent (or damn well tries), gets beat up a lot, and bears guilt for his perceived failings.
10. A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle) – This story is more "magical" than would normally be to my taste, but both the scenes on Earth and (even more) the scenes on Camazotz resonated with me when I first read it, and still do today.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
11. The Puppet Masters (Heinlein) – This, along with Methuselah's Children, came at a time when Heinlein was writing ripping and thought-provoking SF with just enough polemic to be interesting. That polemic, which tends to choke his later novels (as vastly entertaining as they are) taught me both some interesting social and political ideas, as well as some cautionary notes in my own writing.
12. The Caves of Steel (Asimov) – A mediocre mystery, a good "buddy flick" cop partners tale, but a fantastic and memorable setting in the domed City of New York.
13. Children of the Night (Lackey) – My intro to paranormal romance (though it wasn't called that then) as well as modern urban fantasy vampires and witches. My favorite of the three Diana Tregarde tales. They haven't aged well, but the influenced a lot of my reading (and some of my writing) thereafter.
I'm not going to specifically tag anyone for this, because I'm not that kind of guy. But I will say there are a number of my regular correspondents I'd be interested in hearing from.
Looks like "Good Omens" on BBC Radio
I dearly love this book. It's absurd, it's profound, it's sacrilegious, it's deeply moral … and it's a damned good read. I hope the BBC Radio adaptation is lengthy enough to do justice to the book. (Which I've read aloud to the family on car trips, so I feel like I have a personal stake in any audio adaptation …)
BBC – Radio 4 to make first ever dramatisation of Good Omens – Media centre
It’s the end of the world – just not quite how we might be expecting it – but then this is Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s version of Armageddon.
"Lord of the Flies" (A Modern Interpretation)
I recall reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies in high school, and its attendant discussion of the inherency of human violence, the Hobbesian "state of nature," and arguments of nature vs. nurture.
+Kay Hill's summary, after having read it: "Boys are stupid."
Which she then decided to translate into a haiku:
Many stupid boys
Violence consumes the island
Fly Lord is creepy
This has been the "Kay's Notes" edition of Lord of the Flies
4 of 5 stars to Wool Omnibus E…
4 of 5 stars to Wool Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey https://t.co/rQIVfYwUZg
"A Wrinkle in Time" to arrive via Disney (again)
So, yeah, Disney, and certainly the ABC TV movie that Disney was involved in was … disappointing (http://goo.gl/TeT71C). But I think there's a lot of potential here here if it's being treated seriously as a major motion picture.
A Wrinkle in Time is a fabulous book (not just literally), and I'm excited to see it getting a big-screen, big-budget treatment.
I do hope that it won't be a musical, though.
That Which Survives
What becomes "classic literature" (or "classic art" or "classical music")? That which survives the test of time — which sometimes is an imperfect filter (stuff disappears, falls out of favor, then gets rediscovered — sometimes — later on).
Shakespeare wrote some great stuff — but he also wrote stuff that mass entertainment, the "hit motion pictures" of the day. A lot of modern adoration for him as a "classic" playwright and his works as some of the greatest literature in the English language would have been subject to a lot of laughter and disbelief in Elizabethan times (and scoffing from a lot of other playwrights and critics of the era).
So who knows? This may be a lot more believable than you think — though I suspect that Disney will still be holding tightly to the copyrights a thousand years hence …
Reshared post from +Isaac Sher
“Welcome back to Masterpiece Theatre 3000. I am your host, Hologram-Simulacra Thomas Hiddleston. Today, we will be watching Arturo Branagh’s critically acclaimed reinterpretation of IRON MAN 3, as performed by the Royal Marvel Company. Arturo Branagh is, of course, the descendant of one of the great contributors to the Canon, director to the original THOR, Kenneth Branagh, and has devoted his life to the analysis and creative manipulation of these timeless classics.”
“Arturo’s specific alteration to ‘The Extremis Play’, as some colloquially refer to it, is the translocation of the setting and characters to the mythical land of Faerie, where the Iron Man technology becomes a heightened metaphor for the integration of accepted knowledge and careless innovation, an allegory heightened further by the Fey’s well-known weakness against Cold Iron, making the Iron Man suit a two-edged sword that gives Lord Stark tremendous personal power in battle, but at the cost of intense physical pain, illness, and fear from those who surround him who fear the touch of deadly iron.”
“Of special note is the presentation of the Extremis itself, changed here to be an eldritch formula and curse rather than technological advancement. Branagh has said in public discussions that he considers the Extremis as a metaphor for the perils of limitless greed so evident in the plutocrats of the early 21st century, an inner fire that appears to give great power but in truth, consumes painfully from within, which then in turn resonates with Lord Stark’s Iron Man technology-as-metaphor as noted previously. But now, let us begin.”
Lord of the Rings, Chinese editions
Wow. These are, in fact, gorgeous covers. They're beautiful in their own right and in being very evocative of the story in each edition.
Never thought of Saruman as lounging about as he gazed into the Palantir, but it's an awesome image.
Reshared post from +Alex Grossman
Gorgeous covers, thanks for sharing +Tor.com
These Chinese Lord of the Rings Book Covers Are Breathtaking | Tor.com
These Chinese covers for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, by Jian Guo, are gorgeous.
You must remember this, a niche is still a niche
As time goes by …
Interesting (if a bit opinionated) article on the rise and (claimed) fall of the "right-wing book market" — whose pundits were pleased as punch to see publishers set up specialty imprints and the like for them when things were heating up a decade ago, but are now complaining that they are being marginalized and stuck in a "conservative ghetto" with other folk who have jumped on the bandwagon and glutted the market.
It's a cautionary tale for any sort of entrepreneur. There's some early value to being identifiable as the best garlic-guac-burger maker in town with a big sign that says "HOME OF THE GARLIC-GUAC-BURGER" — but what happens when a bunch of other garlic-guac-burger joints open — or when people get tired of garlic-guac-burgers and want to try tandoori-banana-brats? Then that big sign isn't getting you business, it's driving it away.
The Right-Wing Book Market is Dying a Free-Market Death
The free market is a cruel beast, which is something the book publishing industry has been made acutely aware of in the past decade or two. But now, even in one arena where that industry …