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Post by berkley on Aug 26, 2014 1:12:22 GMT -5
I'm probably being a little harder on Parker and Spenser than they deserve - the 3 or 4 I read were a lot of fun in spite of the occasional irritating bits of the kind I mentioned above - the plots moved along nicely, and there were usually some good lines every few pages, which isn't easy to do. I'll likely go back to the series one of these days.
Right now, though, I'm more interested in the earlier history of American hard-boiled writing -just finished a big collection of Dashiell Hammett's short stories that I'd been reading off and on over the last year and a half or so, and will probably start a similar anthology of Chandler some time over the next few months. Oh, and some Carroll John Daly - never heard of this guy before I started reading up on the origins of American hard-boiled last year, but I've since read 2 short stories and 2 novels and found them hugely entertaining. If Hammett and Chandler were, I dunno, the Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury of hard-boiled, then Daly would probably be the EE Doc Smith.
I've also been reading some 19th-century detective fiction, or forerunners of what eventually turned into that genre - Poe's Auguste Dupin stories last year and the year before, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone a couple months ago, and at the current moment an English translation of Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq. And of course Sherlock Holmes is looming like a giant on the horizon, but it'll be a while before I get to that: Monsieur Lecoq was published in 1869, and I think the first Holmes book didn't come along until the 1880s. At my current rate of progress it'll take me a couple years before I make it that far.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2014 1:37:31 GMT -5
1887 for A Study in Scarlet...
Have you read any of Spillane's Mike Hammer stuff?
-M
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Post by berkley on Aug 26, 2014 2:33:53 GMT -5
No, but I've managed to find the first few Mike Hammers in cheap paperbacks, so that'll probably be my next hard-boiled after Chandler's short stories.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 26, 2014 11:02:57 GMT -5
1887 for A Study in Scarlet... Have you read any of Spillane's Mike Hammer stuff? -M I've read every Hammer novel that Spillane wrote. Don't go looking for Hammett or Chandler. I don't say that as a knock on Spillane. I love them. But they are quintessential popular entertainment and they make no literary pretensions whatsoever. If you have a problem with misogyny you probably should avoid them. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2014 23:01:20 GMT -5
Dipped back in to some more Poe this evening, reading Morella, including the poem Hymn within it. Poe is starting to explore more of the territory typically associated with him in this tale. I had read this loooong ago and had pretty much forgotten everything about it,, but I read the adaptation Corben did with Dark Horse a few short months ago, and once I got past Poe's intro and into the meat of the tale, I couldn't help but visualize the characters as Corben depicted them. Now I like Corben and all, and it speaks to the power of his visuals that they stuck with me, but I prefer to let my imagination do the creation of visuals in my mind's eye when reading prose, so it was actually kind of disconcerting.
-M
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Post by berkley on Sept 2, 2014 12:49:45 GMT -5
Berenice, Morella, Ligeia ... it's facinating how Poe kept coming back to this same basic story idea. It was obviously very important to him.
I love Corben but agree that his style isn't really suited to Poe. It's still interesting to see what he does with that material, but the imagery he comes up with has never taken over my imagination when I read or think of Poe myself.
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Post by Prince Hal on Sept 2, 2014 21:03:01 GMT -5
Berenice, Morella, Ligeia ... it's facinating how Poe kept coming back to this same basic story idea. It was obviously very important to him. I love Corben but agree that his style isn't really suited to Poe. It's still interesting to see what he does with that material, but the imagery he comes up with has never taken over my imagination when I read or think of Poe myself. Ingalls, yes. Wrightson, sure. Jack Davis, even. But Corben, no. |
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Post by zryson on Sept 5, 2014 5:59:40 GMT -5
There is a distinct thrill in reading a book. Pouring over the pages, and savoring the touch of the paper, the way the type is set. So I think its great that you enjoy reading and will be doing more of that!
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Post by Deleted on Nov 9, 2014 18:00:00 GMT -5
I had gotten bogged down in the big book of Poe and stalled for nearly 2 months, so I decided to change things up, and leaped ahead several decades, deciding to start up again in 1928.... (don't ask why 1928, I am not sure, it just caught my eye when I Was looking over my list of reading material by publication date).
Read 3 things from early 1928 this afternoon...
From January 1928 issue of Weird Tales, collected in the Shadow Kingdoms: The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard...
The Riders of Babylon (poem)
Very evocative imagery is the highlight of this short poem. I can almost visualize someone like Barry Windsor-Smith or Estaban Maroto providing illustrations to accompany the text to this poem in the back pages of Savage Sword or some other Marvel mag. A quick overview of Babylonian civilization and the violent warlike toll that civilization took on its neighboring civilizations. The idea of the barbaric savagery of civilization that permeates a lot of Howard's writings is present here too.
From Weird Tales February 1928, collected in the The Shadow Kingdoms...
The Dream Snake
(short story)
A man recounts a reoccurring dream he has had since childhood of being hunted by a giant serpent he never sees, each time he wakes the snake gets closer, but he never has seen it. After relating the tale to his friends, they all retire for the evening and are awoken by their hosts screaming. He has died and there is not a mark on him, but his features hint that he may have been crushed to death by a giant constrictor...
A predictable twist tale that seems standard fare for Weird Tales. It is replete with some of the faults people point to in Howard's attitudes towards race and other cultures, but evokes a certain moody horror throughout that Howard also excels at.
Collected in the Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, originally published in Pall Mall Magazine, March 1928.
The Wind in the Portico by John Buchan (1st Baron of Tweedsmuir)
(short story)
A Cambridge Scholar and veteran of the war reminisces about a strange experience he had at the home of an amateur scholar while researching a Roman manuscript. The gentleman in question had unearthed some old Roman Britain artifacts, including an altar to a pagan god and become obsessed with it, but when he tried to escape his obsession, he was killed under mysterious circumstances tied to the altar and its votive deity.
The story seems to be cut form the same cloth as the line of weird stories leading to the work of the Lovecraft circle and other contemporaries. Ancient mystery, secrets best not explored and the cost of exploring those secrets, protagonist a scholar etc. etc. An interesting, but predictable story.
-M
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 10, 2014 11:08:22 GMT -5
I've almost finished "Shirley" by Charlotte Bronte. It's not what I thought it would be. It's not at all like Jane Eyre or The Professor. It's set in 1811 or 1812 and though it does have two women as main characters struggling to find satisfaction in a world that put almost intolerable limits on them, there's also a bit of an attempt at a social critique with regards to Industrialization and its effect on the working classes. "Shirley" has a huge cast of characters, many of whom are described in detail and then either never show up at all or are barely mentioned again.
It's Charlotte Bronte's least popular book, but it seems to have been more popular when it was first published. The Introduction says that before the book came out, Shirley was exclusively a man's name, but the popularity of the novel and the title character caused a lot of people to start naming their daughters Shirley. (And there's some dialogue on the part of the character named Shirley about why she was given a man's name and why it suits her. (She's not a lesbian. Not explicitly anyway. But some of the scenes and some of the dialogue with Shirley and the other main character Caroline are kind of suggestive to modern eyes. I'm sure that wasn't intentional. But then I don't know that much about Charlotte Bronte.)
I enjoyed the book, but it is very eccentric in style and structure, and I'm not surprised I've never run across anyone else who's read it, even among Bronte fans.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2014 17:15:16 GMT -5
Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft (short story)
originally written in 1926, but rejected by Farnsworth Wright for Weird Tales, it didn't see print until the March 1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery
collected in More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited and annotated by S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon
A poor writer finds lodging in a boarding house and befriends an eccentric fellow boarder, a doctor from Spain who requires his room be kept cold. Their friendship leads the writer to a grisly discovery.
Pretty typical macabre Lovecraft tale, though not tied to the Mythos. Won't call the ending predictable, but well foreshadowed.
-M
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Post by berkley on Nov 12, 2014 23:49:22 GMT -5
I've almost finished "Shirley" by Charlotte Bronte. It's not what I thought it would be. It's not at all like Jane Eyre or The Professor. It's set in 1811 or 1812 and though it does have two women as main characters struggling to find satisfaction in a world that put almost intolerable limits on them, there's also a bit of an attempt at a social critique with regards to Industrialization and its effect on the working classes. "Shirley" has a huge cast of characters, many of whom are described in detail and then either never show up at all or are barely mentioned again. It's Charlotte Bronte's least popular book, but it seems to have been more popular when it was first published. The Introduction says that before the book came out, Shirley was exclusively a man's name, but the popularity of the novel and the title character caused a lot of people to start naming their daughters Shirley. (And there's some dialogue on the part of the character named Shirley about why she was given a man's name and why it suits her. (She's not a lesbian. Not explicitly anyway. But some of the scenes and some of the dialogue with Shirley and the other main character Caroline are kind of suggestive to modern eyes. I'm sure that wasn't intentional. But then I don't know that much about Charlotte Bronte.) I enjoyed the book, but it is very eccentric in style and structure, and I'm not surprised I've never run across anyone else who's read it, even among Bronte fans. I read Shirley last year or the year before when I was in the middle of a Brontës kick and thought it was an excellent book. The title character was fascinating, especially when you think she might have been at least partly modelled on the enigmatic Emily Brontë. I don't remember sensing any any lesbian subtext to the relationship between Shirley and Caroline. Same-sex friendships could be extremely intense in the Victorian era, I think exactly because homosexuality was so taboo that the very concept usually didn't even make itself felt on a conscious level. But if Caroline was partly based on Charlotte's close friend Ellen Nussey, her relationship with Shirley might partly reflect Ellen's with Charlotte as well as perhaps Charlotte's with Emily, reminding us that these characters probably are built on something more complex than a simple one-to-one correspondence with some real-life model. I haven't read any speculation that Emily was a lesbian, conscious or otherwise, but she was fiercely independent and I think would have found it difficult to enter into a romantic relationship with a man for that reason alone. I don't think she ever had any intimate friendships with anyone apart from her siblings, and she seemed to become more and more isolated even from them as she grew older. Such are my impressions, anyway - I haven't read a biography of her or anything like that. I believe I've already recommended Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë earlier in the thread. I think you'll find it extremely interesting after reading the novels.  |
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 6, 2014 15:48:20 GMT -5
I decided to tackle Shakespeare again and I'm almost done with Love's Labor's Lost. I guess it has its moments. I imagine it's a lot better if you see it performed. And the same volume of Shakespeare's Plays also has The Two Gentlemen of Verona, another that I haven't read, so I'll keep the volume and read that before I take it back to the library.
(This volume also has Comedy of Errors, the three Henry VI plays and Richard III, all of which I've read and enjoyed, and I was thinking of maybe keeping this for a few weeks and re-reading one or two of these.)
And after I read Two Gentleman of Verona, I'll only have five Shakespeare plays left! All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VIII and The Merry Wives of Windsor. I'm thinking of maybe stepping it up and finishing this project in 2015. I've been reading Shakespeare since the late 1970s (Romeo and Juliet was a class assignment in the seventh grade, and again when I was a freshman.)
I'm really looking forward to Merry Wives of Windsor. I hear it's very good.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 6, 2014 15:57:45 GMT -5
I read Shirley last year or the year before when I was in the middle of a Brontës kick and thought it was an excellent book. The title character was fascinating, especially when you think she might have been at least partly modelled on the enigmatic Emily Brontë. I don't remember sensing any any lesbian subtext to the relationship between Shirley and Caroline. Same-sex friendships could be extremely intense in the Victorian era, I think exactly because homosexuality was so taboo that the very concept usually didn't even make itself felt on a conscious level. But if Caroline was partly based on Charlotte's close friend Ellen Nussey, her relationship with Shirley might partly reflect Ellen's with Charlotte as well as perhaps Charlotte's with Emily, reminding us that these characters probably are built on something more complex than a simple one-to-one correspondence with some real-life model. I haven't read any speculation that Emily was a lesbian, conscious or otherwise, but she was fiercely independent and I think would have found it difficult to enter into a romantic relationship with a man for that reason alone. I don't think she ever had any intimate friendships with anyone apart from her siblings, and she seemed to become more and more isolated even from them as she grew older. Such are my impressions, anyway - I haven't read a biography of her or anything like that. I believe I've already recommended Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë earlier in the thread. I think you'll find it extremely interesting after reading the novels. Thanks for recommending The Life of Charlotte Bronte. My plan right now is to read Villette next year, and I'll be done with all the works of the Bronte sisters. I'll probably tack on Gaskell's book as something to read after that. It seems logical.
A few weeks ago, I saw Devotion, a 1946 movie with Olivia deHaviland as Charlotte and Ida Lupino as Emily. (And Sydney Greenstreet as William Thackeray!) If you like the excesses of old Hollywood, it was a charming little romp through the 1840s. The way they mostly ignored Anne, I doubt if Devotion is particularly accurate, but I enjoyed it.
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Post by berkley on Dec 6, 2014 18:57:10 GMT -5
I haven't watched it but there was a 1979 French movie called The Brontë Sisters directed by André Téchiné that starred three very famous French actresses as the three sisters (Marie France Pisier, Isabelle Adjani, and Isabelle Huppert). And looking that one up on wiki to make sure I had those details right, I see that there was also a 1973 tv miniseries called The Brontës of Haworth that sounds like it could be worth a look as well. |
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