Still working on Pharsalia, Hyperion, and some other stuff. Pharsalia is slow going because it is both old poetry and unfamiliar history and geography. I'm getting something out of it but i'm not ready to write about it yet.
Hyperion is an amazing book masterfully written. It is basically Canterbury Tales in space, told from the points of view of several pilgrims on a journey that only one is expected to survive. each of the stories is almost novella length and each gets tedious in the middle (especially the poet's tale) but it is the kind of tedius that you still can't stop reading. And then in the end of each tale there is a twist that reveals part of the connection of that pilgrim to the main tale and makes you invest emotionally in that pilgrim. So, basically everyone is the main character in which the reader is invested and who the author cannot rightly kill off - but you know all but one has to die by the conditions of the pilgrimage. Aargh!
I also read a really cool short by Zane Grey, Tappan's Burro, that has changed how I think about the western genere. Until now, for my whole life, 'western' has been synonymous with Louis Lamour. Lamour is western and the west is lamour and there is no other - simply because I'd read no other. Well, Grey was a dentist who basically lived as a kept man off his wife's inheritence in order to pursue his ambition as a writer. The story I read was wholly different from Lamour. Different language. Different archetypal characters. Really cool.
You know who else I'm going to have to go back to is Jack London...
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