Roald Dahl’s classic work of children’s fiction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is neither very good nor very bad, unlike the ridiculous stereotypes of children presented to us by the author. The book is ‘classic’ in the both senses: old and made into a movie. (Two, actually, but the second does not improve the Gene …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“
The first novel featuring the adventurer, importer, sometime gun-runner Paul Harris is not as cohesive, nor as finished as the only other I’ve read in the series (You Want To Die, Johnny?), but it rollicks around Malaya and Sumatra quite successfully, kicking off the long-running series with gunshots, plane wrecks, and hot boat on boat …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: Suddenly, At Singapore“
Supplemental to Monday Book Report Just watched the 1935 film version of Hammett’s novel The Glass Key, which I mentioned in yesterday’s book report. I had never seen the short (just over 1-¼ hours) movie starring George Raft, and wanted to see how it compared with the 1942 remake featuring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. …
Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key is one of the ten best books of all time. At least in English, which is the only language I feel even the slightest competence for such judgment. (Being born and raised in Georgia, English is my second language, never having had a first.) I’d be hard-pressed to say what …
I have just finished reading book #375 since I started keeping count in 2015, and, as I have done when occasion suits and time permits, I here present a listing of the last 25 books I’ve read. Make of it what you will. (As usual, I do not include comics and graphic novel books in …
Just a short note to pay homage to a work of the hardest ‘hard’ science fiction I have read in many a moon. Mission of Gravity is that rarest of birds, a gripping adventure story on an almost impossible world, backed by meticulously calculated speculative science. The hero of the book, a wily trading captain …
“Some things are too terrible to be true,” sang Bob Dylan on the album he released September 11, 2001. Fiction was invented—in part—to resolve the paradox, to give emotional body to the merely true, to give life where the recitation of facts and history bathes its subject in a deadening radiation of memory and catalogue. …
Today I finished the 400th book since I began tracking my reading back in 2016. Of course, I generally do not count towards my ‘Books Read’ total those volumes belonging to the Comics & Graphic Novels category, so in my self-approved count, this book is #351. The slim staple-bound almost-a-pamphlet in question is Life on …
Continuing my ongoing listing of books most recently read, and continuing the practice just lately begun of presenting such listing in convenient (to me) twenty-five (25) book chunks, for reasons touched upon in the first such set (viewable here), I herewith present the most recent twenty-five (25) books read, #326 – #350 in my count …
The most noticeable thing about William Gibson’s future as seen in his 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome is just how relentlessly shiny it is. Just like the classics of 1930s Science Fiction he pretends to disdain, even the dark underbelly of his future is full of “Gee, whiz!” artifacts that take the observer’s breath …
