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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 18, 2023 17:16:43 GMT -5
I will be on the lookout for it... If you have trouble finding it, message me; I can scan the pages from the book and send them over to you. Very kind of you. I'll let you know.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2023 5:07:32 GMT -5
A newspaper I picked up published a letter about Shakespeare’s books versus the plays. This is interesting (not saying I agree):
Anyone have a view?
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 19, 2023 6:15:16 GMT -5
A newspaper I picked up published a letter about Shakespeare’s books versus the plays. This is interesting (not saying I agree): Anyone have a view? I'd agree with this - even his comedies come off as rather dry when you just read them. Seeing them performed really underscores what outstanding pieces they are, and - I'd say - makes it easier to understand the archaic language. For example, I recall in high school when we were studying Shakespeare for English class, it really helped that the teacher had us watch filmed performances of MacBeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream (the latter was particularly memorable because a young Helen Mirren was playing Titania). Another example: in my senior year of college I saw a live performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Ashland, OR (during the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival) and found it absolutely fantastic. Before that, I tried to read the play and only got about a quarter of the way through the text before setting it aside...
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2023 8:08:07 GMT -5
As I've mentioned before, I am reading a lot of short fiction (short stories to novellas) this year, and have been sampling from several different collections (some by author and some by theme). One of those collections was of Howard Mythos stories-Robert E. Howard's The Mythos and Kindred Horrors edited by David Drake. I am as big a fan or Howard's horror stories as I am of his sword and sorcery stuff, and I find the themes of each informs the other quite a bit. This collection contained some banger short stories and a few short poems. The Black Stone The Fire of Ashurbanipal The Thing on the Roof Dig Me No Grave The Valley of the Worm The Shadow of the Beast Old Garfield's Heart People of the Dark Worms of the Earth Pigeons from Hell and the poems Arkham Silence Falls on Mecca's Walls An Open Window Most of these were a reread, as they are all in the Del Rey The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard collection, which is my favorite of the Del Rey collections, but it had been a while since I had read them, and I am trying to get to some of the other vintage Howard collections I own even if they contain stories I have previously read. This was one of the paperbacks released by Baen Books, who did a pretty good survey of Howard material while they had the publishing rights in the late 80s/early 90s. -M
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,140
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Post by Confessor on Apr 19, 2023 16:32:59 GMT -5
A newspaper I picked up published a letter about Shakespeare’s books versus the plays. This is interesting (not saying I agree): Anyone have a view? Surely this is just painfully obvious?
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 19, 2023 16:45:45 GMT -5
A newspaper I picked up published a letter about Shakespeare’s books versus the plays. This is interesting (not saying I agree): Anyone have a view? Surely this is just painfully obvious? Good choice of adverb there. Yes, to everyone but benighted high school teachers who assign students an act a night to read on their own and then give them a five-question quiz the next day to prove that they read the Spark Notes version.. I say this as a teacher who taught a separate Shakespeare class, sometimes two or three a year, for 22 of my 37 years in the classroom. There were still colleagues who regarded teaching Shakespeare as a chore and made it doubly so for their poor students and thought I was everything from a clown to a fraud for actually having kids get up on their feet and read and act the plays. I did this with other plays as well; the technique, aka, obvious method, isn't exclusive to Shakespeare. "Benighted" is probably too grand an adjective to describe teachers who won't put in the time, effort and enthusiasm to make literature come alive for their students. But don't get me started. Just thinking about this species of educator makes my BP rise and makes me start to shake a bit in anger, and I come across as all self-righteous and messianic and I don't mean to.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 19, 2023 17:00:59 GMT -5
I will cop to the fact that I hate reading plays. And screenplays. They just don't read right to me. Shakespeare is better than most but I have very little interest in delving in to them again.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 19, 2023 18:22:27 GMT -5
I will cop to the fact that I hate reading plays. And screenplays. They just don't read right to me. Shakespeare is better than most but I have very little interest in delving in to them again. So Shakespeare is down there with Superman as far as you’re concerned...
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 19, 2023 18:26:43 GMT -5
I will cop to the fact that I hate reading plays. And screenplays. They just don't read right to me. Shakespeare is better than most but I have very little interest in delving in to them again. So Shakespeare is down there with Superman as far as you’re concerned... Nope. Great playwright. Probably the greatest. I’m super happy to watch those plays. I just don’t want to read them.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 19, 2023 18:47:09 GMT -5
So Shakespeare is down there with Superman as far as you’re concerned... Nope. Great playwright. Probably the greatest. I’m super happy to watch those plays. I just don’t want to read them. Thank you. I’ve let go of my pearls and am up from my fainting couch.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 20, 2023 11:20:27 GMT -5
Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip KerrThe penultimate Bernie Gunther novel finds Bernie living under another assumed name in Munich and working in a hospital morgue. Bernie is recognized by a corrupt cop and through a series of misadventures ends up working as an insurance claims investigator for a major insurance company in Munich. Which is, of course, right up Bernie's alley. Well, except for his penchant for wanting to move beyond his own work and in to realms better left to the actual police. This is the time of the "New Europe" with the EEC being formed and an amnesia sweeping Germany and many other countries about the atrocities of just over a decade before. This is something that Bernie is not comfortable with even given the miraculous German economy under the Adenauer Government. In the course of his duties Bernie is assigned to investigate an insurance claim on lost ship in Greece. And, of course, this throws Bernie right in to the middle of the "Merten Affair," the fallout from the Axis occupation of Greece and the Holocaust in Greece, particularly in Thessaloniki. There's a lot happening in this one and a whole lot more bubbling under the surface. And Bernie...well he's still mostly the Bernie of old, though maybe a little less flippant. I liked this one a lot. Probably my favorite book in the series since the initial trilogy. I think it helps that I didn't know a lot about Greece during or after WWII, so it sent me down a lot of rabbit holes of extraneous research. It also helped that the story was, by and large, in a single time setting. While Kerr does a good job integrating flashbacks, it was nice to just hang out in 1957 and not also in the war. This was the last book published before Kerr's untimely death. And I do look forward to Metropolis and a much younger Bernie Gunther. But I'm really going to miss that world-weary worn knight. And it appeared that Kerr was setting up some interesting things at the end of this novel that will never come to fruition.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 21, 2023 8:15:30 GMT -5
The Fleet of the Springers (Perry Rhodan #22) by Kurt Mahr I haven't visited Perry and co for a while (I was missing vol. 21) but I decided I could probably figure it out. The Mutant Master seems to have been taken care of in the volume a missed, as here we have Cadet Tiff and friends on a training mission when they run into the Springers. The Springers seem to be the Perry version of Asimov's traders in the foundation series... people that broke off from the Archons to roam the Galaxy and control intergalactic commerce. They like a monoply though, so when the New Power starts trading, they come to investigate. Of course a small fleet of 30 ships is utterly overwhelmed by the Stardust and a couple new ships they perhaps our heroes built themselves. Tiff and his friends, through a series of events, end up escaping their ship and crash landing on Hoth (well, some sort of Ice Planet.. no Taun Tauns to be seen yet). They steal the shuttle that pursued them but use it to find a cave to hide in instead of getting back to the Stardust for...reasons. since the next story is 'Peril of the Ice Planet' I'm thinking they don't get picked up for... more reasons. The 'shock shorts' in this one are both passable, and the War of the Worlds sequel is not mercifully finished.. hopefully the next thing they do will be better
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 23, 2023 5:20:13 GMT -5
Earth’s Other ShadowRobert Silverberg, 1973 This is a collection of nine of Silverberg’s short SF stories (including one almost novella) that were mostly written/published from the early 1960s through 1971, except for one from 1957 (“Hidden Talent”). Silverberg is always a dependably solid writer who produces at the very least readable but quite often outstanding prose, and he has no problem handling a variety of SF concepts. My favorite here is the excellent novella “How It Was When the Past Went Away”, which describes the immediate aftermath of the deliberate contamination of San Francisco’s water supply in 2003 with a drug that causes severe forms of memory loss – everybody loses memories of their last few months, most lose memories of big swaths of their lives, and some lose specific memories of vital information; some people recover most of their memories, mostly children and women under 30, but most don’t. Another notable one I found notable is “To See the Invisible Man,” which is set in the early 22nd century, at a time when people deemed too emotionally callous are sentenced to punishment by being turned ‘invisible’, i.e., they get a mark on their forehead which means everyone else cannot even acknowledge their existence. It’s an intriguing concept – and some may recall that it was adapted into a segment for the revived Twilight Zone in the 1980s. To sum up, this is a great sampling of Silverberg’s work – warmly recommended.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 25, 2023 8:00:22 GMT -5
Lord Kelvin's Machine James Blaylock
I see now this was a library discard for a reason. Apparently it's part of a long series, of which there is no indication at all in the book, which is probably why I found it rather confusing and disjointed.
Knowing (and perhaps reading) previous books wouldn't make the prose less boring though, nor the plot less silly.
I mean, there's time travel, which I didn't even know about ahead of time, or I never would have started it.
The black and white steampunk pics are pretty sweet (along the same style as the cover), but definitely not much else to redeem the book.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2023 0:33:17 GMT -5
The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore-the first Drizzt novel published, but ultimately Book IV of the series A nostalgic reread for me, after seeing some recent interviews with R.A. Salvatore about the 35th anniversary of the first Drizzt Do'Urden novels, which I hadn't read since my days at university, I decided to give that initial novel a go and see how its aged for me. I enjoyed the experience. It's not "great" literature by any means, but it was a fun heroic adventure that was a quick read. I plan to at least reread the initial trilogy (now books 4-6 in the series after a prequel trilogy was done). It read like a D&D pulp adventure from the late 80s, which is exactly what it is. I stopped reading them because I got Drizzt fatigue by the early 90s, as every wannabe edgy D&D player was making Drizzt inspired PCs in every game group I knew, but that fatigue is long past and I don't play with folks like that anymore, so it's easier to just enjoy Drizzt for the fun character that he is. -M
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