Author: Don

The most-shoplifted author in Britain

Pratchett and friends

I’m not sure which writer whose books I have the largest number of on my shelves. It might be Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe or R.A. Lafferty. Or it might be Terry Pratchett. Pratchet, long one of my favorite writers, died today.

There are various notices and such here, here, here, here and here.

The Pratchett shelf

Post script: It turns out that the quote from Death in the upper picture is one of Neil Gaiman’s contributions to Good Omens.

Yesterday in literary history

A note on Nathaniel Hawthorne from Flannery O’Connor:

… Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good Morning Mr. G., how is your Oversoul this morning?”

O’Connor may be the greatest Catholic writer of fiction of the 20th century, but the book of hers I most enjoy is a collection of her letters, The Habit of Being.

Further reading

Someone at Ricochet requested “Fantasy Reading Suggestions.” The recommendations thus far have been disappointing. In the 103 comments I perused, Gene Wolfe, in my opinion the best living writer in English, is mentioned only once, his name misspelled. Others whom I consider essential have not been mentioned at all. For what it’s worth, here is some fantasy that has been overlooked so far there.

Gene Wolfe: Soldier of the Mist, at the very least, and The Sorcerer’s House. Read Wolfe carefully; every word counts, and nothing is as simple as it may at first seem. (Incidentally, Josh W. is working his way through The Book of the New Sun, one chapter at a time. It should keep him busy for several years. The most recent installment is here.)

Diana Wynne Jones: Pretty much everything she ever wrote is worth reading, so I’ll just name a few favorites. Howl’s Moving Castle (vastly better than the movie); Dogsbody; The Homeward Bounders; Fire and Hemlock; The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost and The Pedant and the Shuffly. (Bellairs also wrote St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, which isn’t fantasy but is very funny, particularly if you are a Catholic who survived the silly years after Vatican II.)

Lord Dunsany: Any collection of his short stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien: He wrote more than just the novels Peter Jackson trashed. Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle are all worth tracking down.

Tim Powers: I have yet to read a disappointing book by Powers. The Anubis Gates is particularly recommended to English majors, and Declare to those who wonder why the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did.

C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces. The only fiction by Lewis I’ve ever re-read.

Charles Williams: Descent into Hell. Williams was one of the other Inklings, and his influence is perceptible in Tim Powers’ writing.

Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman. Is it about a bicycle?

R.A. Lafferty: Anything and everything you can find. Much of his output is nominally science fiction, but it’s SF unlike any other and I don’t hesitate to call him a great fantasist.

G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday.

… and probably much else I’ll think of later.

Linkety-link

Some nonsense to pass the time while I wait for the plumber to replace the water heater so I can take a shower for the first time since Friday:

Everyone is linking to this, and so am I: I love the sound of a good fisking in the morning.

Fifty shades of something:

31. Ethereal Eggshell: Applied properly, this creates the absolutely vital impression that you do not sweat, menstruate, consume, or digest food.
32. Invisibility Indigo: Have you given birth to a child while not being a duchess? Are you over thirty in a town that is not New York or Los Angeles? Hush, you are a ghost. Ghosts are pretty when they are invisible.
…
42. Shame Scarlet: One of our favorite DIY looks! You can assemble it out of almost anything: fat deposits, acne scars, stretch marks, skin irregularities, makeup purchases, food preferences, and, our personal recommendation, failure to meet expectations compounded by the fact that you weren’t supposed to try.

I recently posted a little “spot the girl” quiz. Here’s another, more challenging one.

Spot the girl

No, I don’t know which one she is, either.

Top Ten Unreleased Gaelic Whisky Names:

9 – Laphroaig Tigh-Eiridinn Loisgeach

Burning Hopsital – Intended for one of their special Feis Isle bottlings. But the producers felt that given their already pretty complicated distillery name the customers might be overchallenged by the pronunciation.

Tolkien, corrected:

Tolkien’s original translation is justly famous and beloved. He treeherds an unwieldy ancient text into lyrical modern English and captures the vast scope and romance of the epic.

It is also deeply flawed.

Tolkien refers to Quendi people as “elves,” a common term in his time, but considered highly offensive today. And while Tolkien was a great scholar of the Quenya and Sindarin languages, his command of Late Vulgar Adûni was rudimentary at best, and his translation of the Red Book suffers for it.

Peter Jackson to film the Silmarillion, in 72 parts.

Sylvain Chomet, the creator of The Triplets of Belleville (recommended), tells the story of La Vieille Dame et Les Pigeons.

An evening with Richard Thompson:

Beware the millicent

A visit to the poetry corner: Lewis Carroll meets Anthony Burgess, as translated by John-Lewis Lookingglass.

The Rasoodocky

Twas dobby and the chellovecks—
That’s Pete, George, Dim, and me, the boss—
Did sit and drink some vellocet
When came this great goloss

“Beware the millicent, my droog!
His nozh to skrik, his hands that skvat!
Beware the staja godman well,
who vreds boys in their spat!”

I took my shlaga in my hand,
And said “Come malchiks, ookadeet!”
Then viddied I old Billy Boy
This did I gavoreet:

“Ho, ho! If it’s not stinking Bill,
I thought I nuked the smell of cal!
Come take it in the yarbles now,
You eunuch jelly thou!”

Bill dropped the young devotchka down
That they had stripped nagoy
He spat and flashed his britva out
And crarked “Let’s get ‘em, boys!”

One, two! Plesk, shive!
My brothers, ‘twas a glorious drat
They creeched and horned and dropped their knives
And ittied skorry back

Twas dobby, grand, and horrorshow
We droogs retired, fagged and fashed
I raised my glass of honeygold,
“A toast! To our next crast!”

Like curious thoughts

Apropos of nothing in particular, Lord Dunsany.

IN ZACCARATH

“Come,” said the King in sacred Zaccarath, “and let our prophets prophesy before us.”

A far-seen jewel of light was the holy palace, a wonder to the nomads on the plains.

There was the King with all his underlords, and the lesser kings that did him vassalage, and there were all his queens with all their jewels upon them.

Who shall tell of the splendour in which they sat; of the thousand lights and the answering emeralds; of the dangerous beauty of that hoard of queens, or the flash of their laden necks?

There was a necklace there of rose-pink pearls beyond the art of the dreamer to imagine. Who shall tell of the amethyst chandeliers, where torches, soaked in rare Bhyrinian oils, burned and gave off a scent of blethany?

(This herb marvellous, which, growing near the summit of Mount Zaumnos, scents all the Zaumnian range, and is smelt far out on the Kepuscran plains, and even, when the wind is from the mountains, in the streets of the city of Ognoth. At night it closes its petals and is heard to breathe, and its breath is a swift poison. This it does even by day if the snows are disturbed about it. No plant of this has ever been captured alive by a hunter.)

Enough to say that when the dawn came up it appeared by contrast pallid and unlovely and stripped bare of all its glory, so that it hid itself with rolling clouds.

“Come,” said the King, “let our prophets prophesy.”

Continue reading “Like curious thoughts”

Fifty shades of puce

Did machines write Fifty Shades of Crap Grey? Perhaps.

For those who missed it, here’s Dave Barry’s review of the book.

… Why was this book so incredibly popular? When so many women get so emotionally involved in a badly written, comically unrealistic porno yarn, what does this tell us? That women are basically insane? Yes.

(Via Dustbury and Robbo.)

A further depressing note: I spotted some “Fifty Shades” etc. wine this morning. Um, no thanks. (I was tempted to pick up a bottle of “Bourgeois Pig” on a different shelf for the sake of the label.)