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The Beast in the Cave
My grandfather's grandfather, Charles Waters, founded the International Bible Reading Association. There's a monument to him in Camberwell Old Cemetery, just down the hill from the Horniman Museum and Gardens in South London. Obviously the 'fluence has skipped a generation. I was poking around on the web and found his obituary from the Adelaide ( Read more... ) -
Top 15 21st Century SF and Fantasy novels, according to Locus
These are taken from here. Bold if I've read SF(7) or Fantasy(5). I'm clearly not keeping up with my reading.
SF:
1 Scalzi, John : Old Man's War (2005)
2 Stephenson, Neal : Anathem (2008)
3 Bacigalupi, Paolo : The Windup Girl (2009)
4 Wilson, Robert Charles : Spin (2005)
5 Watts, Peter : Blindsight (2006)
6 Morgan, Richard : Altered Carbon (2002)7 ( Read more... ) -
Top 50 20th Century SF novels from Locus
As before, taken from thes ratings. Bold(47) if I've read them, italics(0) if I've only seen the film (or TV show). Turns out I'm bigger on SF.
1 Herbert, Frank : Dune (1965 ( Read more... ) -
Top 50 20th Century Fantasy novels from Locus
Obviously some recent films may have something to do with the ratings. Bold(35) if I've read them, italics(3) if I've only seen the film (or TV show).
1 Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Lord of the Rings (1955)
2 Martin, George R. R. : A Game of Thrones (1996)
3 Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Hobbit (1937)
4 Le Guin, Ursula K. : A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
( the rest ... ) -
T.F.G. Dexter and the Eastern Origins of British Culture and Religion
I picked up four books from the great Hurley Books in St Austell. I talked to the bookseller by phone which made me feel like a character in a 50s novel. The four books, or pamphlets really, around 60 pages each, were in published in the early 1930s in the New Knowledge Series. The series includes five books (as far as I can ascertain) and I have ( Read more... ) -
Parcel passed back
We took off a few too many layers and it was difficult to make it coherent. I wrote the start and the end and Simon did the middle. Can you spot the joins?
( Smoke ) -
Pass the parcel
More creative writing. This week were playing a variant of exquisite corpse. We're to write the start of something for someone else to continue and another to finish. We've also been looking at 'last-lap' stories which start as the bullet hits the brain, or the wave starts to break, or realisation to dawn, then backfiling, or maybe not, to finish ( Read more... ) -
It soon come
Creative writing has started up again. This week's homework was to write a piece in a style not one's own describing the journey to class, a nod to Queneau's Exercises de Style.
Mine was inspired by this.
( It soon come )
