A room without books is like a body without a soul. – Marcus Tullius Cicero
Back in December I published “My Favorite Things”; Part One listed my favorite movies, and Part Two my favorite albums and musicians. In the comment thread for the first part, regular reader N/A requested a sequel listing my favorite books; I promised to provide one, but told him it would require a lot more thought. Well, here it is at last! As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a lifelong preference for short fiction; as a lass I often read short novels (especially in the summer), but I tended to eschew longer ones unless they came highly recommended or I was already fond of the author from reading shorter selections. This is because for me, a large part of the pleasure of a book is the mood it sets, and if that mood is disturbed I can’t enjoy it nearly as much. Short stories are quickly consumed, and even novellas or short novels can be read in one extended sitting. But with the exception of episodic novels (which are almost like series of connected stories), I have always tended to avoid very long books except at those junctures in my life when I knew I would be uninterrupted for long enough to finish them, even if it took a couple of days. When I started whoring the long-established preference for short fiction grew even stronger, because I knew that at any moment I might be interrupted by a phone call from a client and have to run off.
The main reason it took me so long to get around to doing this list is that I had to define the word “book”. For example, the volume in which I first read H.G. Wells was named Seven Science Fiction Novels; however, in 1967 there was a boxed paperback set of the same seven novels with the same group title. Is that one book or seven? Finally I decided that if I liked many or most of the books in a series, I would list them as one book even if I had never in fact seen such an omnibus edition; that broke my mental logjam and the rest was easy. I simply listed all the books I’ve read more than twice and would read again if I had the time, with a couple of exceptions I’ll explain. I excluded nonfiction because to me it would be comparing apples and oranges. The books are listed alphabetically by author; I have provided PDF copies of #1, 6, 8, 11, 12 and 13, but the others are not yet in the public domain (see notes on #6 and 9).
1) Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
Though this slim little book is indeed a fiction, it was written to explain the 4th dimension (not time, but rather the 4th physical dimension), and it does so brilliantly and entertainingly in only 54 pages. If you are interested in science fiction, physics or math to the slightest degree you owe it to yourself to read this book, which has the distinction of being the single title I have given as a small gift most often.
2) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury is among my favorite authors and this my favorite of his titles, just edging out Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dark Carnival. The Illustrated Man is a collection of 18 short stories of dark fantasy, horror and science fiction woven together by a frame story in which the narrator meets a tattooed stranger and discovers to his shock and fascination that during the night the “skin illustrations” move and tell the stories that comprise the collection. It’s been in print continuously since 1951, so you won’t have any problem finding a copy in any bookstore.
3) The Complete Mars Series of Edgar Rice Burroughs
I’ve written before of my love for Burroughs’ work, and the Mars series is my favorite. None of these novels is very long by modern standards; the first three, telling one story, would certainly appear as a single volume if first published today. And though those first three are the best of the series, the fifth, seventh and eight approach them in quality and sheer reading pleasure. They were among the first books I purchased with my own money, despite having read them before, and I’ve read the entire series at least three times since that purchase. They were my husband’s first introduction to Burroughs as well (I loaned him my set while we were dating), and well-known writers including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Carl Sagan have praised them as inspirational. Don’t bother with the failed blockbuster which distorts the story nearly into unrecognizability; just read the books. I wish this omnibus edition really existed, but I’m afraid the best you can do is a boxed set of all 11 or the 4-volume omnibus set I’ve linked here.
4) One Thousand and One Arabian Nights translated by Sir Richard Burton
I’m sure everyone knows at least a few of these tales, and most of you have read some retellings; that was certainly my only experience with them until the day early in 1997 when I discovered that the Jefferson Parish Library owned the entire Burton translation…all 16 volumes. I’ve only read the entire thing through once, but my husband bought me the Forgotten Books edition for Christmas of 2010 so I plan to read it again before too much longer. It’s an amazing work, full of magic, spectacle and wonder, and though the famous ones like Sinbad and Ali Baba are all there, there are many other adventures, fables, comedies, philosophical discourses, romance and even smut, and Burton translated every word plainly and literally, caring not if he offended the English sensibilities of his time.
5) Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun
I discovered this enchanting book, in which a young girl discovers a box full of magic that leads her and her best friend into a strange adventure every time they enter a new alley, when I was about 9; I remembered it so fondly that years later I borrowed it again as an adult librarian, then a few years ago bought a copy for myself. I cannot explain why I love it so, except perhaps that it reminds me of a time when summers were for exploring and I could still believe in magic if I tried hard enough.
6) The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll
This is a combined edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with annotations by Martin Gardner. Observant readers knew the Alice books would be on this list; I have used more quotes, pictures and references from them than from any other source except the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I first read Wonderland in second grade and Looking-Glass about two years later; if I had to pick a number one favorite on this list, this would be it. I’ve included PDFs of the original books, without the annotations which are still under copyright.
7) The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
by Will Cuppy
Probably the funniest thing I have ever read; it’s a series of comedic takes on historical figures from ancient Egypt to the 18th century. I keep it right next to 1066 and All That, another hilarious take on history.
8) The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This is another book observant readers knew would be here; I have loved the tales of the great detective since discovering an illustrated edition of all the short stories when I was 17. If you only know of Holmes from movies and television shows, you don’t know him at all; brew yourself a pot of tea, find a comfortable seat and dive into this collection of his adventures, as inimitably chronicled by his friend Dr. Watson. The game is afoot!
9) Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Another book I discovered in fourth grade, the year I began exploring libraries on my own. I’m supplying an online copy rather than a PDF because I could not find one which included the illustrations, and as Alice asked, “what is the use of a book without pictures?” – especially when those pictures, drawn by Kipling himself, are almost half the story. If you buy this one, mind you get an older (pre-1960s) edition; modern editions shamefully bowdlerize a few politically-incorrect words without any notification.
10) Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber
I discovered this book by accident because the edition in which I first read it was published during the ’60s gothic romance craze, and the cover made it look like one, thus attracting my attention when I was on my own gothic kick a decade later. To fully appreciate it you must remember it was written for a male audience in 1943, a time when women’s lives were largely a mystery to men: Leiber expertly builds on the paranoid premise that all women use witchcraft, but hide it from men. And here he thought he was writing fiction…
11) Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
The grand master of cosmic horror was known to a very limited audience in his lifetime, but most modern writers of true horror list him as an inspiration. Some modern readers find his complex sentences and baroque adjectives off-putting, but there is no other writer who can evoke the terror of cyclopean vistas of space and strange aeons of time haunted by alien gods of unspeakable loathsomeness as the Old Gentleman from Providence could.
12) The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe
Before Lovecraft there was of course Poe, the creator of the horror genre as we know it. I honestly don’t feel I need to say much about him, as I can’t imagine anyone who grew up in any Western country not having read him. But if you are from a land in which he isn’t known as well, or just missed out on him due to the unforgiveable negligence of teachers who should be walled up in a dank cellar for the omission, open up this PDF and start with “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Black Cat”.
13) The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This book was given to me by a nun when I was twelve; it’s a sort of fairy tale that can be read by children but is really for adults, and concerns a little boy who lives alone on an asteroid and sets out on a quest to discover the meaning of the strange feelings inspired in him by the arrival of a rose. You can read a religious or spiritual meaning into it if you like, or just take it as a parable of where we place and misplace our priorities, but if you’re unwilling to accept for the sake of a story that birds can migrate through space, it isn’t for you.
Tomorrow: My favorite authors.
One Year Ago Today
“Dr. Schrödinger and his Amazing Pussycat” will either be the strangest column of mine you’ve ever read, or it won’t. Or both simultaneously.
I too am a fan of Sherlock Holmes, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Several recent novels I’d recommend:
“Daemon”, and the sequel, “Freedom”, by Richard Suarez. Probably the best books of the Decade.
“Tipping the Velvet” and “Fingersmith” by Jane Waters- Set in Victorian England. Yes, there are lesbian love stories in these books, especially velvet, but they don’t get in the way of a great plot, and very believable characters.
“Childhood’s End” and “Rendezvous with Rama” Bu Aurthur C. Clarke.
“The Monkey Wrench Gang” By Edward Abbey. Actually, anything Abbey wrote is worth reading.
“Sin in the Second City” – By Karen Abbot. It’s about the Everleigh club, in Chicago
“Gangs of New York, Jewel of the Prairie, The Barbary Coast”- And there was one about New Orleans that I can’t remember the title of, by Herbert Asbury
I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Clarke. Though I like many of his short stories and some of his novels, the fact that he can’t write a female character to save his old poof life always annoyed me. Had he simply avoided female characters (as he did in most of his early work) I would’ve been fine; 2001 co-creator Stanley Kubrick does much the same thing and he’s one of my favorite film directors. But later, Clarke felt compelled to do the Michelangelo thing of delineating male characters, sticking tits on them and calling the result “women”…and it annoys the hell out of me. There are some other “Clarkeisms” which grate on my nerves (like every alien race functioning on a geologic time scale), but that’s the worst.
Rendezvous with Rama, though, would have beat the odds to be in this essay today because it’s a wonderful book…but I made the mistake of reading the terrible sequels, which absolutely ruined it for me.
“the fact that he can’t write a female character to save his old poof life”
That’s just made my day.
Sadly I find Clarke’s style of writing just far too dry for my tastes.
Some of these I’ve never read, and some I read so long ago it’s almost as if I’ve never read them.
I really enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama. The sequels… yeah, but it’s nice to see us agreeing again. 😉 There was a conversation with a “caped eel” in one of the sequels, though, which stuck with me and has inspired me to create an alien with a similar life cycle. Rendezvous with Rama may or may not be headed for a movie theater near you.
I have read (but cannot confirm) that Conjure Wife was the inspiration for the television series Bewitched. Again, I don’t know if that is true, and I haven’t read it.
When I was a little kid, my sister and I would listen to a vinyl LP of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, of course, I can’t think of dear Alice without thinking of this.
As for the John Carter movie… You’ll like it better if you haven’t read the books. It’s actually a better movie than its box office numbers would indicate, and it would be a better movie and would have done better box office if they had remembered that something which has stayed popular for a hundred years doesn’t need a lot of updating or “improving.” Bottom line: if you’ve read the Tarzan books and still enjoy ANY of the Tarzan movies, you’ll be able to enjoy John Carter. Otherwise, meh.
Conjure Wife was probably one of the sources for Bewitched, but the most direct inspirations were Bell, Book and Candle and I Married a Witch.
Those do look like obvious inspirations.
Burrough’s Martian series as well as his Tarzan books were some of the first books I ever read.
“Conjure Wife” is an old favourite too. Must read that again soon. If you liked that one, you might like “Darker Than You Think” by Jack Williamson. It’s another man meets magical woman story.
Since you enjoy Fritz Leiber’s work, you should try his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series of short stories and novellas.
Have you ever tried Robert E Howard? His Conan books are really nothing like the films, and are mostly short stories. “Red Nails” is told largely from a female perspective.
Murray Leinster’s “The Wailing Asteroid” is an old favourite of mine, and not very long. It presents all kinds of interesting concepts told in a very down to earth kind of way, and lots of fun.
http://manybooks.net/titles/leinstermother05wailingasteroid.html
Leiber and Howard are both a bit too masculine for my tastes; I enjoy their horror offerings, but not so much their adventure fantasy or (in Leiber’s case) science fiction. Leiber also occasionally got into misogynistic moods which I find quite jarring.
I was teethed on Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Strangley, I was also watching (and reading) Brideshead Revisited at the same time. The two visions of life, one hypermasculine and wild and the other effete and aristocratic I both found appealing. But how to reconcile? Well, of course Rice-Burrough’s Tarzan did that, the Aristocrat wild man, brilliant. I also have a soft-spot for that crazy Christopher Lambert film “Greystoke”, which although it claimed to be true to the books, actually wasn’t. The racial and class supremacy thing in the Tarzan books would be completely unfilmable today of course (you know, young Tarzan simply taught himself to read from books because he was from superior breeding and all that).
I disagree with that reading; Tarzan’s cousin shared almost the same genes and wasn’t nearly his match, and the Waziri (basically Burroughs’ version of the Zulu) were superior to most Europeans. Tarzan excelled because he was a superior individual, not a member of a superior type. Furthermore, Burroughs consistently has an anti-racist message throughout both the Tarzan and Mars series; those who call him “racist” do so based on the premise that portraying ANY black people, even a tribe intended to be villainous, as evil and degraded is “racist”.
During World War I, Burroughs reacted as any Anglophile would and portrayed the Germans as thoroughly evil, but after the war was over he repented and introduced a noble German hero in the Pellucidar series. He made the same error in World War II with the Japanese. Neither of these is an example of true racism, but rather misguided patriotism and getting caught up in wartime propaganda.
Aha, now I’m challenged to pull out the passages that I think I remember (from 20 years ago). I’m pretty much in diasgreement with you here. He was afterall a man of his time. I seem to remember the narrator giving pretty much the racial theorists party line in scenes when Tarzan is looking down from the trees at the natives – but that is a big stretch of memory. I’m not working from the premise that depictions of blacks as villainous.In fact the depiction of a superior type of black race (Waziri) is still very much part of the racial theorists package. Remember I’m not an American, and so when I hear the word “racist” I’m not thinking automatically blacks and whites (there are very few people of African origin where I live). I’m thinking of the racial theories of the 19th Century, the perversions of Darwin which were commonplace.
Consider that the highest race on Burroughs’ Mars, the red men, are described as the end result of race mixing, that the race who uses eugenics (the green men) are hopeless savages,and that John Carter works to unite the various races of the planet. Not what I call a racist’s dream.
I’ve never read the Mars book and I didn’t say he was a racist, just that some of the passages in Tarzan follow racialist theory. A distinction between the man and the work.Now I’ve got to dig my old Tarzan books out of the attic!
But waitaminute! “Highest race”??That’s racialism again, right there. Regarding mixing, outbreeding is very much part of breeding.
You’re grasping at straws. The Martian nations are divided along racial lines, and the red are the most advanced and forward-looking.
This is the sort of stuff I remember:
“All he knew was the he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant”
Now I suppose you can read this from the point of view of the noble savage, or you can read it from the point of view of the innate genetical superiority of the British upper classes. The behaviour of the blacks in the book shows that this “hereditary instinct” doesn’t belong to them. Do we say it has been corrupted by their culture? But, they are described as primitive, as so presumably closer to nature.
It is very interesting to me that a book about a white baby who grows up to be far superior to all those around him, especially the blacks, with his ancestry repeatedly emphasised, can be read as anything other than about “good breeding” as they used to say. Everyone is free to read books as they wish of course, and contrary passages and examples could always be found, but I wonder if the word “racism” has become so highly charged that even to suggest that there is some element of it in an old book is somehow to condemn the book and the author – which I certainly do not. I loved the books.
Except that Tarzan is far superior to everybody, white or black or ape. That’s part of the pulp tradition which eventually led to the superhero genre; it’s nothing to do with racism. Sherlock Holmes is superior to everyone around him as well.
I remember reading Tarzan as a teenager, and sometimes thinking, “Wow, this guy is pretty forward for a white American in World War One days. If it had been up to him, those ‘WHITE ONLY’ signs would’ve come down a lot sooner.” What I was reading of Barsoom only emphasized this.
Then I’d read something in another Tarzan book, or in the exact same book, which seemed to indicate that, in Burroughs’ universe at least, white people are just innately a little bit better than everybody else. Not that there weren’t stupid white folks and smart black folks and such, but in general he seemed to think that whites had a greater potential intelligence, however badly some whites failed to attain such potential. And then he’d have something in there which made it clear that while some individuals, through upbringing or personal hard work, were superior, races are basically all the same. Then we’d get another bit of stereotyped innate ignorance on the part of some black folks.
More than once, I sighed and asked the printed pages in front of me, “So can you make up your mind, Burroughs? Is the white man superior or isn’t he?”
I’m sure you’ve read all these, but I thought I’d throw out a few of my favorites:
“Watership Down” by Richard Adams, which I loved as a kid and loved more as an adult; “Paradise Lost” by Milton and “Moby Dick” by Melville, which are as magnificent as their reputations; “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Niven and Pournelle — possibly the best sci-fi novel written; “Stranger in a Strange Land”, which made the first incisions in the prudish shell I had ensconced myself in as a teen.
I love Watership Down; it’s definitely in my top 100. So are The Mote in God’s Eye and Stranger in a Strange Land (though the latter falls behind The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), as you’ll see in tomorrow’s column. One of the reasons this column took months to appear was getting the list down to a manageable number!
Have you ever read anything by Jacqueline Carey? I think she does a much better job of addressing the themes brought up in Stranger in a Strange Land (which is still a good book), and without making me have to pause while I swallow the casual derogatory comments about women throughout most of the book by reminding myself that the book was written in the 60’s.
One of my peculiarities is that I read very little fiction written after I was born, and almost nothing written after I got out of high school; anything later really has to somehow capture my imagination. And that’s not even including all the nonfiction!
I’m one of those male nerds who have read all of Jack Vance twice. It was a thrill to see an anthology of tribute stories by other writers about The Dying Earth published recently. So I’m not alone in a lonely Universe, others get Vance too!
And Jose-Farmer’s Riverword and World of Tiers stories. Ah, happy memories.
Err..RiverWORLD that should have been.
I also enjoyed the sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye, The Gripping Hand. Given that the original was not really set up for a sequel and that 30 years passed in the interim, I thought they did a remarkable job.
Also, Heinlein said he considered Mote to be the best alien contact novel ever written.
There’s a third “Motie” novel, “Outies” by J.R. (Jennifer) Pournelle. Haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment on the quality.
I can’t for the life of me remember which SF book it was, but a “first contact” scenario sticks in my mind.
A Terran spaceship accidentally bumps into an alien one during an exploration mission. The first thing that both crews do is to destroy all data on board, especially the navigation systems, for fear that the “aliens” could capture such information and follow it back to the home world. This leaves both ship stuck in a Mexican stand-off and unable to go anywhere for fear of being followed by the other. They dare not attack for fear of starting a war they might not be able to win, and they can’t communicate.
It was a really interesting predicament. I wish I could remember the outcome.
On most days, I would probably agree with you on Mistress vs. Stranger. It just meant a lot to me personally as it opened my mind dramatically.
Watership is the most personal, though. It’s one of the few books to bring tears to my eyes. When my wife, then girlfriend, bought me a first printing hardback edition for my birthday, I knew she was a keeper. 🙂
My husband gave me a copy of Bradbury’s Dark Carnival (a limited-edition reprint, still mighty pricey) for Christmas of 2005. So I know how you feel. 😉
Re: Watership Down: I have actually told bureaucrats to “silflay hraka” when I didn’t want them to really know what I was saying. 😀
Yes, hard to believe – but you FORGOT your all-time favorite sci-fi series … GOR!
I read, like all 30 or so of those books between ages 19-24 – what a male fantasy that series was – heavily DAMNED by the neofeminists for its objectification of women. 🙂
Very naughty stuff and, it came in handy eventually. I had a girlfriend named “Cat” (short for “Catherine”) who had a rape fantasy and asked me to indulge. I couldn’t do it – even in play (I’m sorry, I just can’t hurt girls 🙁 ). Anyway, Cat recovered quickly and found some middle ground I could walk on by asking me … “If I were a slave, would you buy me?” …
Hell yeah! And it impressed the living shit out of Cat. I never told her I was simply stealing all that “master” stuff from John Norman and Gor! LOL
The Gor series doesn’t “objectify” women; it just severely misunderstands our psychology, though no more so than your average neofeminist tract.
Well, it’s been almost 30 years since I read the series. I’m going “away” for a month in June though – so I think I will reread the first three books just to see if my perspective on them has changed. 😀
Never read “Gor”. Some vague understanding that whole world is based on Masters and female slaves. Though. What is the idea of female psychology that it puts forward? I’ve always been put off by the weird cover art.
Basically it’s an exaggerated version of female submissiveness and attraction to dominant men, but that’s not the real problem; the huge fallacy is that many or most women would choose sexual satisfaction over having children. Some certainly would, but they’re a minority (and obviously have to be for the species to survive). As for the cover art, do you mean Boris Vallejo pictures like these? I think they’re pretty hot.
Ahhh…sorry, that’s what in this part of the world would be called “Bogan” art. :p
Here’s my more considered comments. In those images, the men are weirdly short and stocky, like male gymnasts. The artist has taken some bodybuilder and put on a head with a 70’s hairsprayed haircut. The skin of the man is far too smooth – the whole effect is like something out of gay pornography. These “heroic” figures look as incapable of action as bodybuilders. You can almost see the androgen induced gynecomastia (in fact in the guard on the first image you reference you actually can). Neal Adams however, well his Tarzan is a Tarzan you can believe in, dynamic rather than in pose or repose, rough hewn edges, and an actual facial expression. Adams uses chiaroscuro well, but Vallejo either colours the whole scene in hazy colours, beige, or a in mix of black and some other colour. The whole effect is like one of those wall hangings of a sunset – lurid. The girls are hot of course, but any hint of lordosis in any style of painting is hot – it’s a simple stimulus. V.S. Ramachandran discusses the exaggeration of the female triple flexion in art http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture3.shtml , but I haven’t seen this done with lordosis (it is probably just too primal). Enough I ramble.
I personally prefer Frazetta over Vallejo, whose work I find a little too slick, like a portrait that has been photoshopped to death. Having said that, I love the work of both artists. No matter what criticisms are thrown at their style, they created really “hot” images that irresistibly caught the average person’s eye. Hence the countless magazine and album covers that have used or borrowed from their work.
As for Gor, sexy slaves aside, I always found the main male character curiously lacking in the hyper-masculinity you would expect in sword and sorcery novels. Even Barbara Hambly’s “Sun Wolf” character was harder.
And look again at Neal Adam’s cover art for Tarzan. No hint of a posed bodybuilder (except the Son of Tarzan one where he is lifting up some beastie)…they are works by a talented artist with a profound knowledge of structural and functional anatomy, able to turn an idea into a dynamic image.
For some reason, the image of Tarzan that sticks in my mind is this one –
http://xxx.freeimage.us/image.php?id=8F6C_4F9A2651&jpg
No idea who the artist was.
I love Frazetta; when the new house is finished I plan to get a framed copy of Egyptian Queen for the wall:
Curious that Sherlock Holmes remains so popular when his contemporaries are forgotten. Who remembers Dr John Thorndyke? Now he was a lawyer, physician etc, he could solve all mysteries and was never wrong. But he’s also uni-dimensional and really too clever; Sherlock isn’t always right, he can be fallible, and you can imagine him as a real person in a way that others aren’t. It’s curious too that Conan Doyle tried to kill Sherlock off, but had to back down under the weight of public pressure. Yet Conan Doyle didn’t want to be remembered for Sherlock, he wanted to be thought of as the author of more serious historical fiction like The White Company, Micah Clark and Ivanhoe. Indeed, he seems to have felt that writing more Sherlock stories was prostituting himself (sorry, Maggie).
In the UK, BBCTV have run a couple of series of Sherlock set in today’s world, written by the authors of Dr Who — which might explain why the Tardis seems to make an appearance in one episode. These new stories take plot lines from the originals; where they use the plot lines, the stories are wonderful, but their own additions are not so successful; clever, but they don’t always gel. In “A Scandal in Belgravia” the first third follows the original; the remainder is not only new material but got the author tarred and feathered in a big way by the feminist sistahs. But for those who have seen it, you’ll understand why “Belgravia” is my favourite episode…:-)
The fact that Holmes does seem like a real person is, I think, the reason for his continued popularity. I’m a purist when it comes to many of my favorites, though, and I especially despise “updating” of characters and stories, which I consider flagrant pandering to cultural chauvinism. Ironically, Doyle’s historical novels which he considered more “important” are the reason he’s not in my top ten favorite authors (see tomorrow’s column).
KorHomme
I’m really enjoying the Sherlock series and have to agree with you on Belgravia. I always thought the best screen adaptation was Jeremy Bret’s version for Grenada TV.
Maggie, you don’t like the White Company? I mean what’s wrong with poorly written ridiculously jingoistic tripe? On a more serious note, if you like Magic in the Alley you should enjoy Knee Deep In Thunder by Sheila Moon. I wasn’t too crazy about the sequels but loved the first book. I’m in general agreement on not liking updating of original sources, my one big exception being the version of Richard III starring Ian McKellen. Let’s face it, if Shakespeare had known about Nazis, he’d of made Richard III a Nazi.
KHorn: I didn’t like Jeremy Brett that much. His Holmes seemed to be too posh for my taste. Somehow, I imagine Holmes in black and white, so I preferred the old Basil Rathbone series.
Maggie: I take your point. I didn’t like “Young Sherlock Holmes” nor do I like those with Robert Downey Jnr. The beeb’s Sherlock is not an updating, though, rather it’s a re-imagining of how he would have been today. Psychologically complex, verging on autism — or at least socially and emphatically incompetent — he’s something else; and you do need to know the stories and the quotes well to get the best of it. If it once was a “three pipe problem”, now Sherlock struggles with his addictions and has a “three patch problem”. And the cops do bust his place for drugs, and he has to shut Watson up. And as for Ms Adler…
Certainly can understand how Jeremy was not to everyone’s liking. As for the current Sherlock, he self identified in the first episode when a crime scene tech who doesn’t like him calls him a psychopath, Sherlock responds, “No, I’m a high functioning sociopath, get your definitions right.”
The dialogue is pretty sharp in Sherlock; just before this exchange, Sherlock is interrogating John’s phone (it was a watch in the original), and gets it almost right, bar the significant final detail. And then there is the interaction between him and Sally Donovan, and with Anderson. You might think that the reference to Sally’s knees is a bit porny.
Yes, the whole scene getting to the lady in pink crime scene is great dialogue. I also lilke the bit at the end of that episode with Mycroft. “Please try and not start a war before I get home. You know what it does to the traffic.”
I definitely agree about Jeremy Brett, as you’ll see when I eventually do “My Favorite TV Series”. 🙂
Doh! Not Ivanhoe, sorry.
I read that the character of Sherlock Holmes was based on a contemporary of the Crown Pathologist for Scotland, Sir Sydney Alfred Smith.
In his autobiography, entitled “Mostly Murder” he describes a fellow forensics expert witness (alas, I forget this man’s name) as being Conan Doyle’s inspiration for the world famous detective.
It was one of Conan Doyle’s teachers at medical school, a Dr. Bell.
Oh, and I should point out that as I type, my Cthulhu bubblehead is sitting on my desk. Given this week’s political discussion, remember Cthulhu in 2012. Why settle for the lesser evil.
http://foo.ca/wp/chick-tract-satire/who-will-be-eaten-first/
Silly boy, you don’t even have to leave this site for that! (click to enlarge)
Heh heh. I’m not exactly shocked to see that you beat me to it. OK, I’ll try another, and another after that.
Both .pdf files. Here’s one of them in Japanese (which I can’t read, BTW, but maybe some day).
I liked learning about Flatland in math class alot more than I liked reading it.
Damn, that reminds me, I’ve got a collection of Cthulu stories in my collection somewhere…
Have you read anything by Neil Gaiman and China Mieville?
The only Gaiman I’ve read is the Sandman series, which we bought in collected form about five years ago after my husband became interested in reading them via a referral in Playboy. I had previously read a few issues at the urging of a cousin, so I knew they were good.
Sandman is something I never got round to reading. Will try when I get the time/money.
Jury is still out on this, but Gaiman is one of those writers that is really good when he focuses on a single idea/story and short story. For this reason I would advise you to stay away from American Gods . AG was good, but in places it really lagged because Gaiman tried to write something huge and ended up faltering.
Smoke and Mirrors (short stories) are fantastic in places as well as Neverwhere, which is a brilliant novel. I heard Anasai boys is supposed to be good as well.
I must also recommend Terry Prachett’s “Discworld” books. What wicked clever satires they are.
Frank and Olivia got the first eight (I think) for my husband last Christmas, so I’ll definitely be reading them eventually. 🙂
Damn straight!
I don’t think he’s going to be long for this world though 🙁
I love your list. If you liked Lieber’s “Conjure Wife,” you might try Katherine Kurtz’s “Lammas Night.” Most of Kurtz is so formula, but this one of her earliest novels, before she got in a rut. It is a bit beyond your parameters (published 1987 if I remember correctly), but I think you might still enjoy it.
That is some funny stuff, the above link to Who Will Be Eaten First. I was about to start on HP Lovecraft’s ‘Dunwich Horror’ tonight, had done some Google Image searches beforehand, and looked up some geological info on the lost port of Dunwich in England… one thing led to another and was linked to this site. All roads taken seem to be via search engines, these days.
I like your literary selections. Bradbury’s books were one of the earliest books I can remember when starting out on in my youth, i.e. Something Wicked, Illustrated Man, and so on. Although I had only started reading Lovecraft’s stories just a few nights ago – I have links to all of his works on the Project Gutenberg (Australian) site and that will keep me busy for a long time. Speaking of Ray Bradbury, check out Rachel Bloom’s tribute film to Ray on Youtube 😀 Other than that, I’d suggest maybe some Asimov i.e. the Foundation Trilogy as possible reads – I think they had been trying to make a film out of it recently.
My regards for this fine site and interesting blogs. I am not familiar with this site, but definitely looks like interesting reads.
There’s talk of a movie based on Asimov’s The End of Eternity. I’m leery, and I don’t mean Timothy. TEoE could make an awesome movie, but it would just be so easy to fark it up.
Thanks for the heads-up. The last I had heard was Ronald Emmerich was supposedly the one for the Foundation Trilogy, and a lot of people were particularly upset with that as they would not want to see especially that one farked up. But I think I last read that about almost two years ago, and have not checked in on that since. Regardless, it would take a nearly perfect director/producer to pull that one off adequately… I suppose that would be true of many of Asimov’s stories… but then, Hollywood did reasonably well with Will Smith in “I, Robot,” so who knows?
I, Robot, GGGRRR!!!!
Well, that’s Hollywood for you. In the name of Asimov, we get killer robots.
Thought of you — it’s like thinking of diamonds on velvet — and decided to drop this brief note.
Thank you for the list.–