Jo Walton is a World Fantasy Award winning author, and she hates fantasy. But she loves it. And hates it.
A nice commentary on the state of fantasy, thoughts which I share myself. Although I definitely couldn’t have covered as much ground reading-wise as herself, I certainly hope to find beautiful and original material when I can. Perhaps to expand the horizon a little bit; to include works that straddles the border of fantasy and (gasp!) literature. Chabon had no problems winning the Nebula and Hugo with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a piece of work that some would choke on their potatoes to defend as ‘literature’, and how dare I suggest it’s genre?
Maybe there are others out there, just as satisfying as the best fantasy has to offer.
Check out the link to the article on the Tor website.
ReadWriteWeb reported that Shelfari, a book cataloging website that we’ve discussed in our show before, has been acquired today by Amazon.
This is very interesting as I’m curious what Amazon will do for the site, considering that in my earlier review of the site on the show I mentioned that while Shelfari was an able performer, it lags behind Goodreads and LibraryThing. With Amazon’s technology trained on it, not to mention the potential traffic users of Amazon is going to generate for the site, it will be interesting to see if this will eventually trigger a mass migration of users from the aforementioned services.
LibraryThing ripped into Shelfari today in its site, maybe a nervous response to perhaps the inevitable threat to LT’s own turf. LT’s president has some points about how this deal affects LT, and has some concrete plans on dealing with it, so that is also worth a quick jaunt to check out what he said.
This has been going on for a while, but if you’ve not discovered this yet, then it’s better late than never. The omnipresent Google hosts a series of talks with authors called Authors@Google. From the Google:
The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Through the program, we invite authors to our Mountain View headquarters as well as our New York, Santa Monica, and Ann Arbor offices, where they treat Googlers to readings of everything from serious literature and political analysis to pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs; past participants have ranged from novelist Martin Amis and Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz to primatologist Jane Goodall and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton.
Apart from the ones already listed above, they also have Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Henry Kissinger, Greg Bear and many others.
Authors@Google is one of the categories for @GoogleTalks program, which also includes Candidates@Google (US presidential candidates), Women@Google and MarketingTalks@Google, among others.
Gem is a big fan, so I thought I’d share this. Thanks to Boingboing, I saw this piece about Richard Dawkins, most famously known as the author of works like The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, reading the hate mail he gets out loud.
He is a devout atheist, and makes his case in his bestseller The God Delusion. People who disagree with his views are pretty vocal and aren’t terribly shy, as it turns out. Not a very long clip. Check it out here.
This isn’t new, but it’s a fascinating read. NYTimes has an article called Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? that discusses the supposed pros and cons of reading materials online, versus reading physical books. A lot of emphasis is drawn on the comparative reading habits of the younger generation against that of the older generation.
One of the more interesting things that struck me is the apparent popularity amongst teens (in the States, at least) of fan-fiction works based on popular TV shows or movies. So I hopped over to one of the sites mentioned, fanfiction.net, and found a cornucopia of works written by fans, and available for free. The array of works on display was simply astounding (and baffling, I might add, as I don’t recognize most of the titles there). Fan fiction has never appealed to me, but I suppose I can see young people spending their time on worse things.
(Some might argue that the post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars novels are the most cohesive, organized, popular and lucrative fan fiction novels ever - I suppose I’d make an exception for Timothy Zahn and hisThrawn novels).
The article does a fair job in trying to weigh in views from both camps: web proponents, and literacy experts. Interesting read.
Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the Post-3 War era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female Robo sapien capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson’s lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her prose—as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever—and intelligence easily carry the book.
Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann’s novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of “new” German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure “every river, every mountain and every lake in his path.” Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt’s fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of Göttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon. Other luminaries appear throughout the novel, including a senile Immanuel Kant, Louis Daguerre and Thomas Jefferson. The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humor (curmudgeonly Gauss laments, for instance, how “every idiot would be able to… invent the most complete nonsense” about him 200 years hence), which keenly complements Kehlmann’s intelligent, if not especially deep, treatment of science, mathematics and reason at the end of the Enlightenment.
Saw this in Bibliobibuli, one of my favourite book blogs, and simply must put it here.
George Orwell (yes, the chap who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm) is blogging! The Orwell Prize, a prize set up for political writing, has decided to publish his dairy entries that he originally wrote back in 1938 on a daily basis. In a blog.
Check out the blog here, and the BBC’s Today feature.
Just found this by way of Guardian. John Sutherland brings our attention to a brand new TV series called Lost in Austen, in which a die-hard Jane Austen fan Amanda Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds a gateway that transports her to the world of Pride and Prejudice. To spice things up a little, Elizabeth Bennet (played by Gemma Arterton) travels the other way, and finds herself in our present reality.
I’ve no strong reactions to the creation of the series, and do think it is interesting. Not that this sort of idea is new or anything - Sherlock Holmes has gone through a lot more in terms of having their literary liberties dragged through the mill of ‘good ideas’. I seem to vaguely remember a series where Sherlock Holmes was cryogenically frozen and revived in our modern age (I say ‘modern age’ loosely, this was a long time ago).
Most interestingly though, is this series reminded me of a game book published not too long ago called, interestingly enough, Lost in Austen: Choose Your Own Adventure, by Emma Campbell Webster. In it, you (the reader) play a character in the world of Jane Austen’s England, and basically control the narrative by choosing from a set of predefined actions for the character as you read (go to my blog entry on Lost in Austen for more info on gamebooks, and the book itself).
In any event, it doesn’t seem like the show has too much in common with the book, but the spirit seems the same, which it allows die-hard Austen fans a chance to enter into Austen’s world.
Bookbabble Episode 14: Holy Good-Graphic-Novels, Batman! Recorded 23 July 2008 Babblers: Gem, Lars, Donny Synopsis:
Are graphic novels worth reading? The babblers discuss the popular medium that is more often maligned and misunderstood, and makes it understandable to all. Well, we tried, anyway. Lots of recommendations for first time readers, and for those who’d like to try something new. Also, Gem still doesn’t like what she sees on top of the book charts, and Wikipedia to be published?
Show Length: 53:40 mins
Recommendations from Scott Saavedra:
Midnight Sun Graphic Novel, Ben Towle
Zombies Calling, Faith Erin Hicks
Paris Collection, Andi Watson and Simon Gane
