The Grey King by Susan Cooper. I felt the story wasn't any great shakes, but the descriptions of the Welsh countryside made me want to go there to visit. The big revelation about Bran was also unexpected.

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. The first chapter felt a bit slow and the second chapter was too exposition heavy (I think it was a mistake having a chapter all about the triffids' backstory before they're even established as menace. After that, the book was thoroughly enjoyable and kept me glued to its pages, insomuch that I read 220 pages in a single day, just to make sure that Bill found Josella. Great book overall.

Breaking into the books Telstarman sent me, I debated whether to begin with The Manitou or Gone to Texas. I have opted for the Josey Wales book.

Also starting a book by Easy Rawlins creator Walter Mosley. It's a new detective for him, Leonid McGill, in a book called The Long Fall.

Are you reading the whole series? Those were treasures of my childhood that held up surprisingly amazingly last time I revisited.

Currently Thief of Time. On deck is Aztec by Gary Jennings.

Yes, I am. I read the first three in Portuguese in 2011 and the fourth one in English. I just need to acquire the last one and finish that. My sixth grade teacher once read us Book 2 and I decided to revisit my childhood glory.

I started reading José Saramago's Blindness last night. Keiichi reviewed the film a couple of years back and was disappointed with it. I would like to observe that in the book, none of the characters have names, just descriptions.

The premise is that a guy mysteriously goes blind and then starts spreading it to others. One of the first victims is a doctor, who's able to inform his colleagues fast enough that the government is able to step in and quarantine the victims, placing them in an empty mental institution. So far, there are only six people in the institution, but I think the story will veer into Lord of the Flies territory once more people show up.

The oddest thing about the book is Saramago's writing style. The only punctuation he uses are periods and commas. There are no hypens, dashes, quotation marks, question marks, exclamation points, semicolons, colons, etc. He often changes POV in the same paragraph. Heck, he even has will have an entire dialogue confined to a single sentence, separating what each character says with commas. Is there some rule that established authors are allowed to screw around with the language in ways that aspiring authors are explicity told not to?

I loved the Dark is Rising books as a kid, I really should revisit. Shame the only film adaptation was such an epic monkeywrench.

Yeah, I got up and cursed the film when Will revealed himself to be the last sign (which I assume the writers got from the whole "Harry Potter is the last horcrux" bit).

The GF and I drove back from vacation yesterday and popped in a recording of Stephen King reading his short story L.T.'s Theory of Pets. A short story, yes, but a real joy to hear. King is a very vibrant reader and his northeastern twang suits the story nicely. The tale itself is a comical story of a disintegrating marriage that turns extremely dark as it will in King's work. The phrasing in it was a blast. I'm so relieved I don't have to feign appreciation for his work. (She's a longtime as am I.)

The Sherlockian - A dual narrative about a novice Sherlock aficionado trying to find a lost 3 month volume of Arthur Conan Doyle's personal journal and the story of that 3-month stretch with Conan Doyle. It was two great seeds of two great stories, but the dual narrative ends up giving them both the short shrift. The mystery regarding where the diary is pales in comparison to Doyle's fun story (his closest confidante during the period is Bram Stroker and it's great seeing them play off each other). An interesting experiment that comes up a little short but still entertained.

The Gods of Mars - I've only read the Foreward and the first two chapters, but I love how Burroughs simply doesn't monkeywrench around here: It only takes a couple of pages before we the readers are thrust into a two chapter-long battle between Carter, Tars Tarkas, the White Apes, and an army of vampiric plant men.

Burroughs simply does not screw around. Of the forst three books, though, this one actually approaches something of a philosophical text. It's not terribly deep, but it goes a little deeper than your ankle.

I always admired Robert E. Howard for just abruptly throwing the reader right into the eye of action with little or nothing in the way of foreplay or backstory. Maybe he learned that technique largely from Burroughs, who I'd say was a definite influence (along with a long list of other influences).

Yeah, Conan was never really into foreplay.

I finished Gods of Mars just now. I think the fact that practically every chapter ends on a cliffhanger makes the book impossible to put down. This one was quite long, but man, what a ride. It's a bit repetitive in structure, but I guess that's Burroughs for you. It's a shame that the John Carter film didn't do well enough in the States to warrant a sequel (unless fate is kind to us), because they could easily build a film on him returning to Barsoom and discovering that Dejah Thoris has been kidnapped by the First Born, thus allowing us the spectacle of the four-way air battle above the Thern city.

I just read some early pulp novels by John W. Campbell Jr. -- the so-called "Arcot, Morey, and Wade" series. They're swashbuckling stories of stupendous super-science. Literarily, crude in the extreme... written for a teenage audience by a college-age dork. Even compared to other work by Campbell this is pretty bad. A lot of the plot is just second-rate ripping-offing of Doc Smith's Skylark series, compounded with extreme level-up-itis, in which every superduper goshwow accomplishment has to be effortlessly topped by an even bigger one, until the heroes are flying along at a galactic diameter per second and expending energy at the rate of a dozen suns.

What strikes me now, in contrast to how I perceived such stuff when I was younger, is how they're much closer to Victorian than to modern. The "science" is not all that different from what you'd find in Jules Verne, except that it's aware of some vague notions of general relativity and atomic particles. And the he-man adventure attitude isn't much different... in fact, it's worse than anything Victorian, because these stories contain no female characters at all. At no time do any of the protagonists ever speak to, or even meet, any woman! The only time anything female has any contact at all with the plot is toward the end, when an evil alien mentions how he got information by torturing a woman of his own species.

And yet... for all their crappiness, these things were apparently influential. They contain what is probably the very first time somebody described a "space warp" as a method of faster than light travel, and a scrutiny of dates reveals that the Doc Smith ripoffery went in both directions.