“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh!”
Deathly Hallows cover released (a wrap around!).
Click here for a full image, and non-US covers.
Category: News/Misc. Page 241 of 242
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
Doing a little reading this morning while the boys do schoolwork and the Princess is hopping around on gymnastic equipment…read this paragraph from Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight. Just struck me as the kind of thing a writer should be able to do, should be great at. This is a paragraph that Dan Brown could never write. Me either. Which bugs me more than I can say.
I leaned against my door with my eyes closed, trying to think. I was scared. Not in that half-pleasant adrenaline-charged way, but quietly scared. Wait-on-the-results-of-medical-tests scared. It’s a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it.
Little bit of humor to create/maintain the tone, gives insight into the character, and you know exactly how the narrator feels–even if you haven’t felt that way yourself–and if you have felt that it resonates with you in such a way that you are in the moment.
In the 50th anniversary edition, Christianity Today published their take on the top 50 books in evangelicalism’s last 50 years (H/T Ref21). I’ve read a decent-sized chunk of those. I’ve got my fingers on the pulse of evangelicalism, I guess. Some of those titles are frightening. Simply frightening (and I’ve read some of those I call that!)
Does it matter? Does anyone care what a movement considers important? What a magazine considers important? Yes. Tim Challies outdid himself today with his post, By Our Books Shall We Be Known. Challies quotes, Jay Parini’s essay “Other People’s Books” (which I clearly need to find):
What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.
Other people’s books draw my attention, of course. They excite curiosity about their owners and the worlds they inhabit. But it’s finally my own books that matter, as they tell me about where I’ve been, and where I hope to go.
If that doesn’t describe my psyche, I don’t know what does. (other than a nasty coal mine…but that’s another post for another time)
The rest of the post is just as incisive. Other than the stuff about film, I like to think I’d have written the same thing–were I as talented as Challies, or took the time.
I liked Hugh Laurie’s The Gun Seller so much, thought I’d give a sample to encourage you to pick up the book. Also, just thought it was entertaining enough on it’s own to be worth the while. It definitely belongs in the, “if I ever got around to writing fiction again, this is what I’d want to sound like” file.
Don’t go to Casablanca expecting it to be like the film.
In fact, if you’re not too busy, and your schedule allows it, don’t go to Casablanca at all.
People often refer to Nigeria and its neighbouring coastal states as the armpit of Africa; which is unfair, because the people, culture, landscape, and beer of that part of the world are, in my experience, first rate. However, it is true that when you look at a map, through half-closed eyes, in a darkened room, in the middle of a game of What Does That Bit Of Coastline Remind You Of, you might find yourself saying yes, all right, Nigeria does have a vaguely armpitty kind of shape to it.
Bad luck Nigeria.
But if Nigeria is the armpit, Morocco is the shoulder. And if Morocco is the shoulder, Casablanca is a large, red, unsightly spot on that shoulder, of the kind that appears on the actual morning of the day that you and your intended have decided to head for the beach. The sort of spot that chafes painfully against your bra strap or braces, depending on your gender preference, and makes you promise that from no on you’re definitely going to eat more fresh vegetables.
Casablanca is fat, sprawling, and industrial; a city of concrete-dust and diesel fumes, where sunlight seems to bleach out colour, instead of pouring it in. It hasn’t a sight worth seeing, unless half-a-million poor people struggling to stay alive in a shanty-town warren of cardboard and corrugated iron is what makes you want to pack a bag and jump on a plane. As far as I know, it hasn’t even got a museum.
You may be getting the idea that I don’t like Casablanca. You may be feeling that I’m trying to talk you out of it, or make your mind up for you; but it really isn’t my place to do that. It’s just that, if you’re anything like me–and your entire life has been spent watching the door of whatever bar, café, pub, hotel, or dentist’s surgery you happen to be sitting in, in the hope that Ingrid Bergman will come wafting through in a cream frock, and look straight at you, and blush, and heave her bosom about the place in a way that says thank God, life does have some meaning after all–if any of that strikes a chord with you, then Casablanca is going to be a big [bleep] disappointment.
“A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized discourse. But it is permissible to criticize it on other and impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that a substantial proportion of this great spring flood of billions pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for that last shabby reason.”
–Nero Wolfe
I’ve long thought that the idea of reading The Chronicles of Narnia in chronological order is plain silly. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first, and needs to be read first. Prequels, like The Magician’s Nephew, demand a knowledge of the “quels” they’re “pre-” to. As I’ve been reading the series with my kids over the last few months (we step into The Last Battle today), I’ve become even more convinced that Lewis told them in the right order when he wrote them, not when he talked about it later.
John Miller over at National Review Online makes the case wonderfully. Mostly by quoting the two books vying for first read. He’s right, it’s Wardrobe all the way.
Lewis put the matter more succinctly in a letter toward the end of his life: “An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else.”
Lewis of course understood the meaning of Narnia. But a wise expert is not the same thing as a final authority — and on the question of which Narnia book should come first, Lewis was utterly wrong.