24-hour Read-a-thon: T+8.5
Books finished: 2
Pages read: 582
Time spent reading: 5 hours, 15 minutes
I did manage to get some reading done at work. When I first started The Flying Carpet (I'm now about a third through), I really loved it, with the same desperate love I feel for Arthur C. Clarke's writing. Everything I love about prose writing, Clarke and Halliburton do. And that writing is so full of hope and promise and faith that there is nothing humans can't accomplish, with time and the proper tools. It's tremendously inspiring but also bittersweet. I wonder if Halliburton and Clarke would still feel the way they did then. Sometimes I think we've let them down.
The quality of the writing is perhaps highlighted because it's coming right after The City of Ember, which seemed pretty...fanfictiony, for lack of a better word...in comparison.
When I opened the cover I found "Clarksburg Library Collection" written across the title page in gangly, ornamental letters. That was a poignant discovery for me. My father, who lived in Clarksburg for the four years preceding his death, loved Halliburton--and in fact I'm reading this book because it was on a list he left me of works he thought were worth knowing about.
Something that's turned me off of this book, though, is the racist language. This isn't unexpected for a book written in 1932 about travel in Africa, but that makes it no less unsettling--and at times it gets pretty graphic.
Pages read: 582
Time spent reading: 5 hours, 15 minutes
I did manage to get some reading done at work. When I first started The Flying Carpet (I'm now about a third through), I really loved it, with the same desperate love I feel for Arthur C. Clarke's writing. Everything I love about prose writing, Clarke and Halliburton do. And that writing is so full of hope and promise and faith that there is nothing humans can't accomplish, with time and the proper tools. It's tremendously inspiring but also bittersweet. I wonder if Halliburton and Clarke would still feel the way they did then. Sometimes I think we've let them down.
The quality of the writing is perhaps highlighted because it's coming right after The City of Ember, which seemed pretty...fanfictiony, for lack of a better word...in comparison.
When I opened the cover I found "Clarksburg Library Collection" written across the title page in gangly, ornamental letters. That was a poignant discovery for me. My father, who lived in Clarksburg for the four years preceding his death, loved Halliburton--and in fact I'm reading this book because it was on a list he left me of works he thought were worth knowing about.
Something that's turned me off of this book, though, is the racist language. This isn't unexpected for a book written in 1932 about travel in Africa, but that makes it no less unsettling--and at times it gets pretty graphic.