I’m done. And to steal a phrase from Nero Wolfe, all I have to say for the moment is, “Most satisfactory.”
Category: News/Misc. Page 228 of 229
Cracked this open for the first time last night, shortly after my shift started. At 6:25, when I had to take care of some end-of-shift chores, I had 100 pages left.
100 pages!!!
My kingdom for another 40 minutes!
Betcha can’t guess why we were there…
(Obviously, it was the large Magic Tree House display in the kids’ section that drew us)
(click on the image to see the strip in its full size)
We all have the ability to really freak ourselves out over nothing–a wrong number in the middle of the night, strange yet ultimately benign noises in the house, having to repeat routine blood tests, and so on.
Last night I’m reading a detective novel about a serial killer–I’d read it before, back when the Love of My Life was expecting Samwise and was too uncomfortable to sleep in our bed. Which worked out well this one evening. The depiction of the …evil, the insane (literally) depravity had set me on edge. I vividly remember, sitting on my bed not taking my eyes from the page, leaning forward as I read, as if that’d speed things along. It’s incredibly rare for a book to affect me like that, I wasn’t scared–but I was downright close. When I finally finished the book between 4 & 5 am (371 pages of tense prose and tiny type in one sitting), I went out to the living room, confused my wife by giving her a big hug and went to bed to catch a little sleep before work–purposely leaving all the lights on in the room.
So last night, I’m rereading the same book for the first time, and it’s starting to grip in in a similar way–but not as completely as before. About the time that the author really begins to reveal the nature of the killer–later described as “a creature beset by what Coleridge called ‘motiveless malignancy'”–I start remembering that night 8 years ago, details from the end of the book, and so on. This gives me a sort of detachment from the book. And as I realize this detachment’s existence, I feel a bit of relief.
And then, over my headphones comes the lighting strike of Kirk Hammett’s guitar, the staccato thunder of Lars Ulrich’s drums, and James Hetfield’s guttural vocals
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
Frak.
I put a finger in the book to hold my place, walked across the room…
and turned on another light.
“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh!”
Deathly Hallows cover released (a wrap around!).
Click here for a full image, and non-US covers.
from Sci Fi Wire:
J.K. Rowling announced on Dec. 21 the title of her upcoming seventh and final Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, according to her British publisher, Bloomsbury. The publication date has not been set, though it’s expected in 2007.
Deathly Hallows? uhhh. oookay. If you ask me, it doesn’t have the ring of and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone; …and the Chamber of Secrets; …and the Prisoner of Azkaban; or …and the Goblet of Fire.
Ah well…who cares what it’s called? It’s one step closer to being here!!
It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.
– Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Was playing around on Chabon’s website and read his essay, “Our Nabokov” I would give just about anything (short of my kids) to be able to write a sentence like this (much less like the writer he’s describing):
It’s a conundrum that for me approaches the absurd opacity of a Zen koan to try to imagine how English written by a Russian sounds to Russians reading in English, but to our ears, Nabokov’s English combines aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of shmaltz or soggy language.
This, btw, is probably the best description of what draws me to Nabokov,
“He has an amazing feeling for the syntactic tensility of an English sentence, the way an ironic aside or parenthesis can be tucked into a fold with devastating effect or a metaphor can be worked until it is as thin as gold leaf.”
I can distinctly remember telling my friends (engineering, educatation and architecture students) around the dorm’s dining room table about Lolita, and the joy and wonder I was experiencing. They all (without exception) reacted with horror and revulsion to the premise of the novel and couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. Maybe if I could’ve expressed myself like Chabon just did, they’d have not written me off as insane. At least not that day.
On Oct 23 in Chillicothe, Ohio, Archie Goodwin entered this world–no doubt with a smile for the pretty nurses–and the face of American literature was destined to change.
I’m raising a glass of milk in his honor.
Somewhere I have a long list of wonderful things that Archie has said, but (and I’ve quoted this before here) this is the only one at my fingertips. Am sure one or two of you could add some in the comments section. But I think this tells enough about the gumshoe that one can understand why he’s my favorite, and maybe even want to read some of him themselves.
I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I’d have to try it. — Archie Goodwin