Absolutely outstanding. I hadn't re-read this book for at least twenty years. Somehow it had gotten pigeonholed in my memory as a bit boring and dull.
But it's anything but dull or boring! Classic and funny science fiction stories using the classic bar-story format. Over and over I found myself coming across phrases and ideas which I'd incorporated into my personal lexicon, only to forget where they'd come from. "Oh, so this is where I first read that!" I kept saying.
It's a pity that Clarke wrote so few of these stories. They're wonderful.
"Prince Caspian" - stop C.S. Lewis before he novelizes again! I couldn't resist doing this riff, inspired by my previous complaint about The Lord of the Rings. It's posted over at GoodReads. Who is this "C.S. Lewis" hack, and who did he sleep with to get the novelization contract for the brilliant Prince Caspian movie? ( Read more... ) Maybe Lewis (or whatever his real name is) has compromising photos of key Hollywood producers. Or maybe he's just related to someone big. Either way, someone has to do something to stop him before he screws up another valuable novelization. Millions of dollars are at stake!
First, a note: the re-ordering of the Narnia series by the publisher should be ignored. It is utterly misguided, spoils some of the charm of the series, and makes no internal sense. Prince Caspian was the second Narnia book that C.S. Lewis wrote, not the fourth.
However, in reading the series to my son I chose to read Prince Caspianthird - immediately after The Magician's Nephew. Which itself came after the true first book in the series, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
In many ways, this is the dullest book of the series. It lacks a true villain, unlike the White Witch or Queen Jadis; the only villains are the Telmarine nobility, and Lewis didn't make them particularly strong or interesting characters. There isn't even a hint of balance or tension. The villains have no way to overpower or overthrow Aslan. Once he shows up, the struggle and story are effectively over.
There are some lines which are remarkable for their unintended humor. The one that has really stuck with my son was "And the feasts on the poop and the musicians." Since the next book in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, takes places mostly on board a ship with a poop deck, that line is being constantly quoted back to me every time the word "poop" comes up in the text (which is often) - invariably preceded and followed by a torrent of uncontrollable giggles. Coprophagy and cannibalism!
I must also admit that I found it difficult to read the line "...the Maenads who whirled her round in a merry dance and helped her take off some of the unnecessary and uncomfortable clothes she was wearing" while keeping a straight face. Lewis describes Bacchus and the Maenads as slightly naughty English madcaps and jackanapes, which is simply ridiculous to anyone who knows anything of Greek mythology. And of course Lewis' mixture of Greek and Christian mythology which so offended Tolkien is rather jarring, to put it mildly.
While still an excellent book, Prince Caspian is definitely the weakest and least interesting book of the Narnia series. Fortunately it's followed by one of the best books in the series.
One last note: although the movie that was made of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was relatively faithful to the book, the same can't be said of the movie of Prince Caspian. That movie is violently at odds with the book, so much so that my son complained often about the differences between the two (he much preferred the book, thank goodness). I'd urge anyone who loves the Narnia books to avoid the movie like the plague, but if you must let your children see it, be sure to read the book to them first. The filmmakers simply lifted the characters, the title, and a few plot elements from the book and then made a film that stole equally from Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings movies, and some sort of tawdry Spanish love story. Caspian is a child, not a hot-blooded teenage hunk bursting with passion, and the attraction between Susan and Caspian in the movie is simply wrong.
First, about the numbering: This book should NOT be read first in the Narnia series. It was actually the sixth of the seven Narnia books that Lewis wrote. The remarkably clueless publishers renumbered the series recently, placing The Magician's Nephew first, but that simply ruins what is otherwise a lovely surprise: the origin of the Wardrobe from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. And from the internal text, it's clear that TL,TW,&TW should be read first. It's in that book that Lewis introduces Aslan, after all.
However, rather than read the series in strict publication order, I chose to read The Magician's Nephew to my son, Sebastian, as the second book in the series. That enhances the surprise at the end, and answered some questions that he'd been asking as we read TL,TW,&TW while they were still fresh in his mind.
The connection of this book to the Pevensies, the four children from TL,TW,&TW, is comparatively tenuous compared to all the other books in the series (except for The Horse and His Boy, which is the only book in the series to have no connection with them at all). However, the link to the Wardrobe that is revealed at the end was more than enough to interest and delight my son.
We follow two English children, Digory and Polly, through some very memorable world-crossing adventures that end up bringing them into the origin of Narnia. Lewis had a gift for imagery, and his Wood Between the Worlds is particularly strong and memorable - as is dead, accursed Charn.
This turned out to be one of Sebastian's favorite books in the series so far, in large part due to the comical but frightening character of Uncle Andrew, the Magician of the book. Sebastian connected with the characters and the story right away, more easily than he did with TL,TW,&TW.
The one drawback is that the illustrations in this particular edition are rather dull and literal. I much preferred the simpler and more imaginative illustrations from the editions that I read when I was young. They had an almost art deco style that reminded me of Tolkien's illustrations for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
For the record: I object to the renumbering that the idiotic publishers have inflicted on this series. It is simply and obviously wrong to anyone with the ability to actually read and comprehend the English language. I therefore refuse to acknowledge it. And so, I began reading the series to my son starting with this book, rather than The Magician's Nephew as recommended.
I first encountered The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in fifth grade. As I recall my teacher, Mrs. Gage (at Hillspoint Elementary School) read it to us aloud, a chapter or so every day. I ended up reading the whole series, of course, and loved it.
So it was just a matter of time before I started reading the series to my son. He's seven and a half, and it seemed the right time to start. He'd been asking to watch the movie, and I knew that I didn't want him to see it before reading the book.
Sebastian loved the book. It read well. I found the religious elements to be a bit more flagrant and extreme than I remembered, but they didn't ruin the book. All in all, it was an enjoyable, fun read that is definitely one of our new favorites.
(We watched the movie afterwards, and while there were some notable differences between the book and the movie, they weren't too awful.)
I picked this one up along with a bunch of others for ten cents each at the permanent booksale on the Boothbay Harbor Public Library porch.
It was okay. A bit reminiscent of all the other thriller/potboilers that inevitably litter the best-seller lists. But The Brotherhood of the Rose wasn't particularly intelligent or well-written. It wasn't painfully stupid either; just a tolerable thriller, a bit predictable, rather shallow, and not particularly memorable or well-written. A tolerable way to kill an hour or two on a commute, but I won't bother to read it again.
For the record, The DaVinci Code is rather similar to The Brotherhood of the Rose; they're both rather simplistic, somewhat insulting to the intelligence of the reader, and awkwardly-written. It you're looking for a superior potboiler of the same general type, try Marathon Man.
Away, back So I was completely offline between Tuesday morning and Sunday night. Not only did I not have net access, I didn't even have access to a television; my parents don't get a strong enough signal in Maine to receive the new digital broadcasts, so they've gone from having six channels to none.
Apart from Sarah Palin resigning for some reason and the Washington Post having some sort of sleazy scandal with lobbyists, what else did I miss?
“It's really late and I was just just about to go to bed when I have my idea that I thought it was pretty interesting and I also thought I better get it down sometime or another before I forgot it. Well basically I don't know. I get to freeze it in a fancy way because we don't have much point. My thought was this US desperately want the world but US must desperately needs to find savings in a sense. Well find need to find savings of trillions of dollars. Well huge amounts of money. Well it counts. You know medical science seems to agree pretty unanimously that there are all sorts of health problems associated with obesity and the statistics are quite clear that the Americans as a as a nation are incredibly obese. We maybe we maybe the fattest nation in the world. I'm not entirely sure but it wouldn't surprise me. The cost of all those medical complications arising from obesity. Shortened life span, diabetes. I believe cancer certainly heart disease. I mean you name it. The cost is I would imagine absolutely tremendous. I mean it's just a huge cost associated with all the obesity and what's interesting about it is it is treatable. That is the obesity the cause. So if you were for to say put a trillion dollars which you know isn't that much maybe in some senses but if we will put a trillion dollars into addressing obesity of the population. Put a large chunk of it into methods that we know are effective in treating it now and also put maybe you know a large chunk of it into research for more effective means and also for methods for new sort of medical treatments but also for new maybe ways to sort of make the treatment that we know work. Work better or be easier to use or be more effective. If all that was put in to obesity treatment I wonder how long it would be before we would start seeing benefit. Imagine not too long and I wonder how much that projected benefit might be. I never heard anybody actually suggested this but it just seems to me like it was a really neat idea. Anyway. Bye.”
Sure. And have her get a full body enhancement while you're at it. Anything about her you don't like? Have a doctor carve her up to match your fantasies!
Seriously, you can get a new girlfriend. And you'd be much better off with one who likes you for YOU, and doesn't want you to get part of yourself cut off. This is just one demand; what's next?
Say you do it. And down the road, she dumps you. What then?
I really wouldn't think twice about this; I'd leave her. Let her go find a circumsized boyfriend, since that's what she wants. But if there's any justice in the universe, he'll be a real jerk.
Find a better girl!
I've noticed that those who are in favor of circumcision are always those who have nothing to lose by it: women (some, not all, and they're usually American women), and men who were circumcised at birth and therefore do not remember ever having a foreskin.
It seems to me that some of those pro-circumcision men are basically trying to convince themselves that they didn't lose anything of value. That's why they so often insist that "it's just a little piece of skin, it's no big deal". But that's simply not true; there are blood vessels, tissue, and many nerve endings in the foreskin.
All men are born with it. Unlike the appendix, it does not run a risk of killing you (and yet we don't remove the appendix preemptively), nor does it pose a meaningful hazard to your health. I've heard the arguments about cleanliness, but by the same logic your mouth can be disgusting, dirty, and dangerous to your health if it's not cleaned regularly. Does anyone advocate surgically removing the mouths of infants?
Current Location:Home Current Mood: cranky Tags:askville
Private Sixteen of my last twenty posts are private, viewable only by me. I've discovered that I write far more, and far more freely, when I know that nobody but me (and maybe someday Sebastian) will read what I write. That's quite interesting and unexpected.
The down-side is of course that nobody can read or comment on those posts, but that's a relatively rare occurrance anyway.
I'm actually very surprised at how much more I'm writing now. I even started a new poem this morning! I considered making the whole journal private, but that seems excessive. I'll just play it by ear and see if I can work out some sort of balance between private and non-private posts, I guess. 75% private is probably a little excessive.
It would be interesting to generate some numbers showing the ratio of private, friends-only, filtered, and public posts in a journal. I wonder if there's an online tool that can do that? Or I could just add it all up by hand. But that would be tedious.
Politics Okay. Per request, I will never make an unfiltered political post here again. I'll also go back and filter some of the more recent unfiltered political posts.
I'll post an announcement now and again about the existence of the political filter, however, if that's all right.
PPS - Okay, I've filtered about ten recent posts. My apologies to the few who had commented on them, but who aren't on the politics filter; sometimes there are no good choices, I guess.
There are still some humorous political posts left. I can remove them if anyone wants me to; let me know. I'll filter any future posts of that sort. This means that for those not on that filter, I'll be posting much less often.
Technical difficulties, please stand by None of the phones here at work are working. Anyone who calls me can hear me talking, but I only hear silence. Same thing if I dial out: silence. This is affecting the whole floor.
Thanks to new Massachusetts requirements I can only send certain types of data via special secure email, instead of uploading them as I used to do. I secure-emailed a data file last night for a top-priority rush...and when I got in this morning, I had a message saying that the recipient wasn't able to open the email or download the attachment. Now what?
Mr. Doughboy We went to Mr. Doughboy today. It was weird. Shabby and run-down, but it was also very much like stepping through a portal into the 1950s. We had fun!
Teri and Sebastian liked the food. I thought it was only okay. There was a really cool little train, but it was broken and looked like it will never be fixed. Sebastian rode on a go-kart and loved it. Of course it wasn't his first time, but it had been at least six months since his last time.
He begged for another ride, but we told him we'd come back some time soon. It's really remarkably close to us; less than a twenty-minute drive from our house. I never dreamed there was a go-kart place so near!
I got a moderate sunburn while there, incidentally. My head is all red and hot-feeling.
Sebastian's belt I'm going to try to get to sleep relatively early tonight - I desperately need the rest. But I wanted to note that Sebastian took the test for his blue belt in karate tonight, and passed.
During the test an annoying woman was walking all over the place, talking loudly to the owner and on the phone about buying some nunchuks. Sebastian ignored her well. We were very proud of him.
Not long after Sam, our old cat, died, I was sitting in front of the computer and looking at photos of him. Sebastian came in the room and watched me; he was just under three years old. As I kept clicking through the pictures, he put his hand on my arm to stop me.
"Wait a minute, Daddy," he said, sounding very determined as he pointed to a picture of Sam on the monitor, "I'm going to go in there and get Sammy back."
Current Location:Home Current Mood: indescribable Tags:cats, sebastian
A little OS joke Over on Askville (where else?) I gave someone advice about Linux. But I typoed. And the typo was such that I couldn't resist following up: "It depends on the specific hardware and on what version of Linus you want to install."
As everyone knows, the Great Pumpkin version of Linus uses far more system resources than the security-blanket and armchair-theologian versions. :D
I've noticed a problem viewing old posts using tags. For example, I have a tag for posts about my son (http://bobquasit.livejournal.com/tag/sebastian). These date back to 2003. But when I'm viewing them and try to go back ("Previous 20 entries") past http://bobquasit.livejournal.com/?skip=380&tag=sebastian (which is March 2005), I end up at a single entry for March 2, 2005 - and there is no "Previous 20 entries" link.
The same thing happens when I just try to view old posts in aggregate, rather than individually. It's impossible to "skip" more than 380 posts. Is this how it should be?
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