I am very proud to announce that my wife, Elise, won third prize in the recent Pike County Arts Council Literary Contest with a story about an adventure she had when she was teaching English in Namibia. Competition was stiff and other winners in various categories included Brian Biggs of Summit, Judy Holmes, and the daughter of our neighbors across the street (I can't remember her name). Tonight the first place winners in each category read their compositions aloud to the audiance at the award ceremony. Elise came away from it with a monetary prize of five dollars (seed money for a budding literary carreer) and the pride of having participated and won.
Today I've started on Sea-Wolf by Jack London. Already a fascinating adventure tale. I chose this particular novel because it didn't appear to be about dogs or snow. Although I really liked Call of tthe Wild, the 'snowy dog story' has become what London is remembered for and I wanted to see more of London. This story, Sea-Wolf, has also been called his best novel by the likes of Ben Bova.
I also purchased A Life in a Year; The American Infantryman in Vietnam by James R. Ebert. This is not typically something that I would read - and that's why I got it - to stretch myself a little bit. This book also has another thing going for it. Many books like this appear to be about superhuman special forces elite deadly ninja covert ops type manly men. Those books look to me a lot like pulp crapola like The Destroyer and Mack Bolan. This particular book appears to be about common, everyday regular guys that had to endure the war in the role of the grunt.
I'm letting Librivox read Omnilingual by H.Beam Piper to me. and my current bathtub book is Mortimer Adler's Six Great Ideas.
Other authors I want to read sometime soon include:
- Joseph Conrad
- Stephen Crane
Speaking of love-hate relationships, there is a type of book that I both love and hate, and that is the pseudo-historical novel. This is a novel which is set in history and contains sufficient historical accuracy to create versimilitude but then some of the details that are presented as historical are totally invented. I love this kind of book, but when this effect is done well it is very disorienting. There are several modern masters of this sub-genere, including:
- Umberto Eco - i.e. Name of the Rose
- Michael Crichton - i.e. Eaters of the Dead
- Dan Brown - i.e. DaVinci Code
- Harry Turtledove - anything he writes. Turtledove is THE master of alternate history.
The Hugo Award Winning Novel...
Wow, what can I say? I either have a love-hate relationship with this book, or a hate-love relationship. I stand by my earlier post. It is masterful science fiction masterfully written, but tedious to read in places and, coming into the final chapter NOTHING HAD HAPPENED. Simmons took the entire novel to introduce the core of characters, all but one of whom are destined to die, and then in the last page of the book sets them on the last day of their pilgrimage singing "We're off to see the wizard."
So, what is it that makes a tedious book in which nothing happens masterful? Good question. But it is. In ways his society that he mostly hints at developing is as politically rich as Frank Herbert's Dune. His characters are all multi-faceted and surprising. And even though it is tedious in places it is the kind of tedious that I still couldn't put down.
I had a similar type of love-hate-hate-love relationship with Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. That book actually made me so mad in places that I threw it away then went later and dug it out of the garbage because I had to keep reading. It is also masterful fiction masterfully written.
So, will I be reading Simmons' Fall of Hyperion? Probably not immediately but sometime soon.
Ok, I've read a couple of interesting stories by H. Beam Piper in the last few days. Both are available on Gutenberg. The first, titled 'The Answer,' is about some post-holocaust brainiacs who invent and test an antimatter bomb. Without dropping any spoilers, it is an interesting twist on the old storyline of who would be the aggressor in a nuclear war between the Soviets and the U.S.A. The second story, titled 'He Walked Around the Horses,' is a lovely twist on the true story of an English diplomat who allegedly disappeared from sight in front of several witnesses during th Napoleanic War, never to be seen again.
Piper was an interesting man, but unfortunately, perhaps the most interesting thing about him was that he ended his life with a pistol after spreading dropcloths and writing a suicide note in which he stated that he was sorry that he couldn't clean all the mess up. Piper wrote a wonderful, delightful novel called 'Little Fuzzy,' (also available at Gutenberg) which was probably his masterpiece. Ace reprinted it in the early 1980's, which was the edition that I read as a kid. The world of Little Fuzzy was picked up by at least two different authors later on, and influenced several others.
If you haven't read Little Fuzzy and you like first-contact sci-fi, you've done yourself a disservice. By all means, read Little Fuzzy and while you're at it, check out some of his short stories at Gutenberg.
No, I haven't given up on the self-education of Pat and consigned myself to remaining dumb for the rest of my days. I've been too over-busy to read much lately. I'm still working (slowly) on Hyperion and have listened to several audiobooks of Lamour's Sackett stories since last I wrote. I've skimmed thru the rest of Pharsalia several times and I suppose that i've gotten from it all I'm going to for right now - so I'll pick something fresh to pick back up on. I'm stil working on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity but am several weeks behind my Sunday School Class. I recon that will take up most of my reading time this weekend.
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