At least once a week, and often more frequently, a box of books shows up here at the ranch. I am always as excited as a kid on Christmas, even when I know what’s in the box before I open it. Sometimes, though, I have no idea what’s in the box, and then I open it and I am blown… Read more →
Category: Books
Book-hunting in Melbourne
I have been meaning for a while to write about the fruits of my book-buying excursion while in Melbourne. In some ways it was a much less fruitful day than I had been hoping, partly because I was feeling a bit delicate on the day I did the rounds of the bookstores–it was my birthday, and I was feeling delicate… Read more →
Amazon.ca, British Books, What The Hell?
Ever since Amazon.ca opened, I’ve been in a kind of book-buyer’s bliss. The Canadian variant of Amazon has a broader selection than native Chapters, and typically has lower prices–all good stuff. Even better, though, Amazon.ca put me in a position to leverage my special status as a Canadian lover of books: we can get both American and British editions from… Read more →
Yay for Justine!
Congratulations to my online friend Justine, who just won the second annual Norton AwardDespite what is says (at least at the moment I’m writing this) at Wikipedia, this is the second year of the award. Holly Black won last year at the inaugural occasion. for her Magic Trilogy. This must be an especially satisfying win for her, since the shortlist… Read more →
Saturday night with the books
Man, am I in a bad mood right now. Maybe closing a bunch of book-related tabs will cheer me up. Let’s start with Justine Larbalestier‘s justified outrage about another recent YA book-banning. This kind of shit really pisses me off–thinking about it probably won’t help me get out of my pissy mood, actually. If I didn’t already have a copy… Read more →
The Fate of the Artist (and/or Writer)
I must share with you this anecdote that I ran across today at The Fate Of The Artist, blog of genius artist Eddie Campbell. (NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Campbell let me just say that his book The Fate Of The Artist, in my not-so-humble opinion the finest comic/graphic novel/whatever to be produced last year. How many… Read more →
An old wine softens old regrets
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been delighted to find a whole bunch of Santayana stuff at archive.org, including a poetry collection I was unfamiliar with. Well, while in Boston, I’ve been using stolen moments to work my way through that collection. I haven’t made much headway with the initial sections–there’s a two-part 80-pager there that will… Read more →
A pick me up
I’m back in Boston for week three of “Don’t-see-my-family-April”, and today work got me incredibly down. However, as it is (or, as midnight just clicked over, was) International Pixel-Stained Peasant Day, I have lots of free fun stuff to read and cheer me tonight. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you need to first see this, then read… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 3
So, our discussions of the proud and unrepentant brings us to my personal favourite: the Lucifer of George Santayana. Santayana‘s book-length poem/five-act play, Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, was one of his early works, and I think it’s fair to say is it’s pretty obscure. Santayana is well-known for his contributions to philosophy, perhaps most notably in the field of aesthetics,… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 2
Well, while my first thought is of Brust, when the urge hit me to seek out some Lucifer literature this weekend, I knew I wouldn’t be buying yet another copy of his novel. It would be tricky to justify given I alread own two copies. Instead, I turned to Milton himself. While it is certainly true that a little bit… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 1
So, if you say “proud and unrepentant figures of literature” what pops into your head? If you’re me (and I suspect a lot of other people) the answer is “Lucifer”. Unlike many people who would answer that way though, my first exposure to the idea of Lucifer as a sympathetic character didn’t come from Milton, it came from Brust. I… Read more →
That damn paper clip
“My theory was that [the readers] just thought they cared about the action; but really, although they didnt know it, they cared very little about the action. The things that they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that… Read more →
So It Goes
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different… Read more →
Rats In The Casino Of Life
I spent a fair bit of time this weekend, in scattered chunks, working my way through the essay Micheal Allen (a.k.a. the Grumpy Old Bookman) published back in February, Rats In The Slushpile. The piece, which is available as a free PDF, is described as: Book-world commentator Michael Allen has a reputation for revealing the painful truth about writing and… Read more →
Oh, and since I mentioned Pullman…
Kidman as Mrs. Coulter seems like good casting to me. And SAM ELLIOTT! I know it’s standard Hollywood, but Weitz claiming to be the writer in a promo piece that doesn’t ever mention Pullman seems kind of dirty to me. (Insert here standard rant about adaptations. Then the standard rant about how visuals from movies colonise your mind like a… Read more →
