Feeds:Monday
BOOKS! What wonderful things. Lauren has grand plans for some cardboard bookshelves, to be followed by a carboard couch. Or rather, a cardboard dais upon which floorcouch will rest, being then floorcouch no longer. This may not work.
But books! When I went to the homelands for Christmas, I had a plan to unearth and subsequently re-read a couple series I enjoyed in my youth, but which I felt that either my then-adolescent mind had not, at the time, been fully adapted to understanding or at the very least to remembering with any clarity. Specifically, to re-read a series of books all ending in "-ware" by some dude named Rudy Rucker that a friend of mine had been raving about, and to then progress to CS. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy -less well-know, less child-friendly, but just as symbolically heavy-handed as the Narnia series- and then, if time allowed, such works of Tolkien as do not read like historical or religious texts. This was the plan, though the discovery of my own volumes of both of the latter (and the discovery that, hey, Drew has some pretty fun games for that there X-Box) allowed me to extend the re-reading plan into my triumphant return to Chicago. The latter two were also reversed, so that I actually read The Hobbit while still in the old basement, finished Return of the King during my recent nearly-weeklong bout of unhealth, and only got around to breezing through Out of the Silent Planet tonight. Somewhere in there I also gulped down Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three to double-check that it is appropriate both in age-level and in ethical content for my young cousin; it will likely be some time before I can give her McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, the favorite book of my youth, but my eagerness to share delightful works of fantasy will not be denied.
But Silent Planet! Even more delightful (and so much shorter) than I remembered. A delightfully light tale, actually, though as I recall the series gets quite a bit more burdensome as the series progresses. It is also so very British! The villains say a lot of things like "White Man's Burden" and so forth, you just don't see that these days, and the generally tendency to be embarrassed about minor things while in the midst of trauma, and the embarassment of how innappropriate such a reaction is when there are much larger things at stake, I kind of adore it. But mostly I just cock my head and think to myself, "How very curious!" where I curious I mean hilariously foreign. But concerns of allegory and nationality aside, it really is a fun piece of science fantasy - for such it is. A long way from hard science fiction, though Lewis takes the occaision stab at explaining this or that. But how is there gravity on the tiny spaceship? Never addressed. This bothers me.
Enough rambling! I suppose I will move on to Perilandra and so on. And then? Well, I also found I own the latter three books of the Ender series by Card. I guess I'll have to pay my library fines and check out the first volume before I get cracking on those. And then more Alexander? Who knows.
Also I was sick this week, I may have mentioned. That sucked.
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