Why, you ask, is Hawthorne ranked among the greatest of American writers? Because he finds room in his prose for quotes like this: “Where is it, then?” asked Hilda. “I never peeped into it.” “Wait, and it will open for you,” replied her friend. “The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit [...]
I was surprised to learn this week that Umberto Eco has a new novel out. That’s wonderful news, to be sure. I also came across this interesting interview with the man himself. This tidbit amused me: His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing [...]
This evening, I finished reading Shusaku Endo’s novel Scandal. (I very much enjoy Endo’s writing; his excellent novel Silence is fairly well-known, and The Samurai would rank as one of my top five favorite novels.) I’m still trying to process exactly what Scandal “means;” feel free to read along as I mull over the novel. [...]
I’ve got a problem. A book-related problem. A year or so ago, I started reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I made it a good ways through, and was enjoying it. And then the unthinkable happened: I got distracted, and put the book back on the shelf… for about 12 months. Now, I’d like to finish the [...]
Very interesting essay on the re-creation of Spiderman for an Indian audience. (Via Instapundit.)
I finished reading China Mieville’s The Scar today. The Scar (hereafter TS) is a semi-sequel to Perdido Street Station, which I discussed a while ago–it shares none of PSS’ characters and takes place in a different part of the same world, but does have a few ties to the events of PSS. I want to [...]
…and while I’m tossing out these short posts (hey, that Perdido Street Station post tired me out), you really ought to check out this interview with Neal Stephenson over at Slashdot. Even if you aren’t that interested in Stephenson, scroll down to question #4. Neal Stephenson is pretty much the coolest guy ever.
I recently finished reading China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, and here are some of my thoughts on the book. I won’t talk much about the book’s technical merits, but rather its thematic elements as I understood them. By way of introduction for those who aren’t familiar with it, PSS falls somewhere in that nebulous category [...]
One of the smallest but most interesting literary genres I’ve read is what you might call the “nostalgic male childhood fantasy.” These are novels about, well, being a boy, and they chronicle with heartbreaking nostalgia the inevitable but painful process of growing up (a process they usually define more by the loss of wonder than [...]
I recently sat down to read the graphic novel/manga Ghost in the Shell. I’d seen (and enjoyed) the movie version some time ago and was looking forward both to revisiting the interesting setting and learning a bit more about the story and characters. I was not disappointed; the graphic novel–actually a compilation of several sequential [...]
