Well, now, I suppose I really ought to read this: The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 by, yes, Gordon Sellar.
Category: REVIEWS
The Miéville List
I’m posting the Miéville List — the fifty-book list that I am planning to slowly work my way through over the next couple of years — mostly to note that some of these books are going to be pretty damned hard to get my hands on in Korea, seeing that they’re either out of print and the kind of thing you mostly only find in used book stores. Yes, this is a kind of appeal to the kindness of strangers, but not a loud one. After all, with the degree of traveling I’ve been doing, in some ways I have …
Lunar New Year List, Adieu
Last year I did my readings so as to ensure that I would read 50 books within the span of a single Lunar New Year, a kind of interesting challenge for the first time, pushing myself to read more and in a certain way. Of course, I found that the fact I was doing a Lunar New Year list affected how I was reading. Not all of my choices were affected by this, of course — if I’d been maniacal about it, I wouldn’t have joined the Ezra Pound Reading Group at the Uni, because reading Pound is slow and …
Scalzi’s SF Film List
If you are a regular reader of blogs, you might have encountered the Scalzi SF films list at places like Ethel the Frog, Byzantium’s Shores, or Pharyngula (or at Scalzi’s own site, of course). The meme as it is online now is to bold the ones you’ve seen. So here goes: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! Akira Alien Aliens Alphaville Back to the Future Blade Runner Brazil Bride of Frankenstein Brother From Another Planet A Clockwork Orange Close Encounters of the Third Kind Contact The Damned Destination Moon The Day The Earth Stood Still Delicatessen Escape …
Rome not quite right, he says
In this fascinating Times Online piece, one historian says that HBO’s Rome, while good entertainment, has vastly simplified the sexuality of ancient Rome. It’s a fascinating read, especially where he claims that, in fact, HBO’s The Sopranos is much closer to ancient Rome.
Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read (according to China Miéville)
Instead of the Lunar New Year Readathon I did last year, I’m considering trying to work my way through China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read over at Fantastic Metropolis. Some of those books will be difficult-to-get, but I just got a credit card approved, so it might be possible to order them, used, if I really want to make my way through the whole list. (Meaning, the books I haven’t read, which is the majority of Miéville’s selections.)
Indigo Children? Hogwash!
Nabbed from a somewhat skeptical (and rightfully so) discussion on the Stephenbaxter mailing list, is this link to an article about so-called “Indigo Children”. Jake’s mother is a teacher at this Baytown-area school, and worries that he may be ostracized by his peers if word ever gets out about his special gifts. “He questions everything because he wants to know,” she says as her son draws a picture of a lollipop tree. “The questions he asks are not even age-appropriate.” These children tend to know things without ever being taught or told. Jake’s companion Jan “can use a compound bow …
мастер-и-маргарита
Apparently there has been a TV miniseries made by one Vladimir Bortko from this Bulgakov novel, The Master and Margarita, a novel that was banned in the Soviet Union and went about as illicit samizdat (underground publicaton). According to Wikipedia, the 2005 production (released only last December!) was widely succesful on Russian Television, and is considered to be closest to the book. While I have not yet read the book — I have intended to for years, but never gotten a chance — I am intensely curious, and there are clips circulating, but unfortunately I see nothing with subtitles for …
SF and (Bits of) the Postmodern
The contents of this post were originally written as part of my post on Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, but I felt that they deserved to be developed into a separate, individual post, which is why this is here. Conjure Wife and my understanding of how one could read that text critically brought to my mind a comment I wrote on an essay my friend Myoung Jae was working on lately, which touched upon the subject of postmodernist literary techniques, and the notion that it was through these techniques that a writer can express best the claims and values and criticisms …
For Those On the Road A Lot
For those of you forced to be on the road, especially driving, who wish they could spend the time reading, you might find useful the wonderful site of Librivox. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. It’s a very cool project. I am enjoying it and planning to download a novel …