Are you a fan of LibraryThing? Are you tired of keeping track of half a dozen little slips of paper with books you want to read?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, you might want to check out Facebook's Books iRead application. With Books iRead, not only can you build your library online, you can EASILY sort and organize your library around books you want to read, books you're currently reading, books you've read, books you own, and personal favorites. You can also recommend books to other friends on Facebook with one click, write online reviews, review lists of customized recommendations based on your favorites, and check out all your friends' favorites and reviews. Just brainstorming... you can even use iRead for finding read-alikes. For example, I put in M. John Harrison, and it recommended a similar writer of post-cyberpunk speculative fiction, China Mieville (both, as it happens, purveyors of what Martha Bayley at her recent Science Fiction Readers Advisory called The New Weird). How cool is that?
For those of you still hesitating to join Facebook, hesitate no more. The Books iRead application alone is worth the price of admission, a real must for bookophiles. Oh, and yeah, there IS no price of admission. Facebook is free.
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Heinlein: My Struggles with the (quote/unquote) Master
Or a thousand and one ways to offend....
Those blog-readers who occasionally glance at my side bar may notice that I appear to have been reading science fiction luminary Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for about two months. I have to admit I’ve been struggling with this book for a long time now, and not to be disrespectful to an acknowledged master in the SF genre or to his many devoted fans, I am inclined to bestow on it what noted SF writer and critic Thomas M. Disch might call a St. Bradbury.
The feast of St. Bradbury, Disch says, is when critics, readers, and reviewers gather up all the books they’ve been “unable, despite their best intentions and firmest resolves, to read all the way to the end,” and ceremoniously dispose of them. Disch puts it a bit more caustically, but like I said I don’t want to be disrespectful, since, despite what for me is a difficult roadblock on the Heinlein highway, I acknowledge there must be something good to account for Heinlein’s amassed critical and popular following.
So what’s my problem? Let’s just say that with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, considered by most critics and many readers to be Heinlein’s finest, the gender issue once again raises its ugly head. Not half a dozen pages can pass in this avowedly political novel, without the male characters’ lengthy verbal and visual ogling of the female characters, and the female characters then simpering, giggling, and cooing their appreciation of the men’s appreciation. And this is generally DURING any of said political and philosophical conversations, although fortunately not so much during the action sequences, comprised so far in my reading of political rallies meeting with government reprisal, strongly flavored by the novel’s 1960’s origins.
All of this “he looked her up and down, and whistled”—followed by four or five paragraphs of extraneous flirtation—wouldn’t be so bad if Heinlein didn’t seem so bent on generalizing about what women think (and, believe me, Heinlein has NO problem writing with paranormal authority on what women think) and how women are different–which so far in my reading mostly seems to involve a propensity for intuition and girlish gossip, occasional short-lived and inexplicable (yet adorable) flirtatious huffs, and an abiding love of compliments.
Now, don’t mistake me, Heinlein may be a product of his times, but he is no misogynist. To quote Disch once again, Heinlein is more than eager to grant women “equal wages and equal fun” and a certain naïve amount of mental acuity. To cite another of Heinlein’s well-loved novels, Stranger in a Strange Land presents a passel of female character, all of them nurses and secretaries, but at least he gives a few of them eidetic memories, plenty of smarts, and great job skills. Conveniently, as we are at length informed, they are also extremely attractive. But then, as Heinlein says in Moon, there are no ugly women.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the story of political dissent and government rebellion at a former penal colony on the moon; it is also the story of a computer achieving consciousness. Is the computer “Mike” really a Michelle? Heinlein’s characters must, of course, dicker about this, since they have crystal clear ideas about gender differences, even when talking about banks of electronic controls. For myself, I will continue to struggle with both the book and its ideas, at least until the traditional date set for the feast of St. Bradbury, August 22 (“the great man’s birthday,” as Disch reminds us), or until someone or something pushes me to read past my roadblocks. I am hoping with an idealistic postmodern gusto that our hero and heroine will finally realize that Mike/Michelle’s identity changes depending on his/her audience and that that in itself is an indication of the social constructs of gender reflected in the novel and its characters. Then, at last, I will be able to pitch my tent in Heinlein’s camp.
I am not holding out strong hopes for this eventuality. Still, if there are any readers out there who have read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and are up for debate, I am honestly open for discussion and ready to hear about the novel’s finer points, which I will then respectfully blog about to set the record straight. Push me to read a little faster. I am ready.
All quotes from Disch are from On SF (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Quote from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is from the Orb Edition (Tom Doherty Associates, 1997, copyright 1966), and appears on p. 71, among other pages.
Read more about Heinlein in the December 2007 Kitsap Sun: Heinlein: The Descent of a Sci-Fi Guru
Those blog-readers who occasionally glance at my side bar may notice that I appear to have been reading science fiction luminary Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for about two months. I have to admit I’ve been struggling with this book for a long time now, and not to be disrespectful to an acknowledged master in the SF genre or to his many devoted fans, I am inclined to bestow on it what noted SF writer and critic Thomas M. Disch might call a St. Bradbury.
The feast of St. Bradbury, Disch says, is when critics, readers, and reviewers gather up all the books they’ve been “unable, despite their best intentions and firmest resolves, to read all the way to the end,” and ceremoniously dispose of them. Disch puts it a bit more caustically, but like I said I don’t want to be disrespectful, since, despite what for me is a difficult roadblock on the Heinlein highway, I acknowledge there must be something good to account for Heinlein’s amassed critical and popular following.
So what’s my problem? Let’s just say that with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, considered by most critics and many readers to be Heinlein’s finest, the gender issue once again raises its ugly head. Not half a dozen pages can pass in this avowedly political novel, without the male characters’ lengthy verbal and visual ogling of the female characters, and the female characters then simpering, giggling, and cooing their appreciation of the men’s appreciation. And this is generally DURING any of said political and philosophical conversations, although fortunately not so much during the action sequences, comprised so far in my reading of political rallies meeting with government reprisal, strongly flavored by the novel’s 1960’s origins.
All of this “he looked her up and down, and whistled”—followed by four or five paragraphs of extraneous flirtation—wouldn’t be so bad if Heinlein didn’t seem so bent on generalizing about what women think (and, believe me, Heinlein has NO problem writing with paranormal authority on what women think) and how women are different–which so far in my reading mostly seems to involve a propensity for intuition and girlish gossip, occasional short-lived and inexplicable (yet adorable) flirtatious huffs, and an abiding love of compliments.
Now, don’t mistake me, Heinlein may be a product of his times, but he is no misogynist. To quote Disch once again, Heinlein is more than eager to grant women “equal wages and equal fun” and a certain naïve amount of mental acuity. To cite another of Heinlein’s well-loved novels, Stranger in a Strange Land presents a passel of female character, all of them nurses and secretaries, but at least he gives a few of them eidetic memories, plenty of smarts, and great job skills. Conveniently, as we are at length informed, they are also extremely attractive. But then, as Heinlein says in Moon, there are no ugly women.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the story of political dissent and government rebellion at a former penal colony on the moon; it is also the story of a computer achieving consciousness. Is the computer “Mike” really a Michelle? Heinlein’s characters must, of course, dicker about this, since they have crystal clear ideas about gender differences, even when talking about banks of electronic controls. For myself, I will continue to struggle with both the book and its ideas, at least until the traditional date set for the feast of St. Bradbury, August 22 (“the great man’s birthday,” as Disch reminds us), or until someone or something pushes me to read past my roadblocks. I am hoping with an idealistic postmodern gusto that our hero and heroine will finally realize that Mike/Michelle’s identity changes depending on his/her audience and that that in itself is an indication of the social constructs of gender reflected in the novel and its characters. Then, at last, I will be able to pitch my tent in Heinlein’s camp.
I am not holding out strong hopes for this eventuality. Still, if there are any readers out there who have read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and are up for debate, I am honestly open for discussion and ready to hear about the novel’s finer points, which I will then respectfully blog about to set the record straight. Push me to read a little faster. I am ready.
All quotes from Disch are from On SF (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Quote from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is from the Orb Edition (Tom Doherty Associates, 1997, copyright 1966), and appears on p. 71, among other pages.
Read more about Heinlein in the December 2007 Kitsap Sun: Heinlein: The Descent of a Sci-Fi Guru
Friday, January 25, 2008
Here Be Dragons, or Be Careful What You Drink
Plus Musings on Twitter and the Language of Birds
There is an old Norse legend, perhaps best known through Wagner’s opera Siegfried, that he who drinks the blood of dragons will be gifted with the ability to understand the language of birds. In that legend, Sigurd (or Siegfried) slays the dragon Fafnir and then either bathes in and takes a celebratory chug-a-lug of his enemy’s blood or just accidently gets some blood in his mouth, depending on what folkloric version you favor. Either way, Sigurd doesn’t learn any pithy lessons about being careful what you put in your mouth, because he mostly gets a lot of helpful oracular advice from his feathered friends.
That said and Niebelung legends aside, perhaps my favorite representation of the dragon’s blood legend appears in Newbery Honor author Nancy Farmer’s wonderful blend of historical fiction and myth-inspired adventure, The Sea of Trolls, in which young Saxon Jack and his Viking captors encounter dragons, trolls, giant spiders, and more, when they embark on a series of adventures rooted in Norse legend. In Farmer’s representation, Viking berserker-initiate Jill becomes infected with dragon’s blood and discovers it’s a bit more of a mixed blessing than the story of Sigurd suggests. She learns that while the avian population might chirp up some good gossip, such as whether your enemies are massing over the next hill, mostly they just do a lot of what my dad used to call nattering and gromishing. That is to say, they talk a lot about very little.
So where am I headed with this? Well, Farmer’s musings on dragon’s blood and the language of birds provide as good a metaphor as any for the infamous social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter, currently under exploration for its value in the world of libraries.
While I see a certain potential value in Twitter as an up-to-the minute communication tool for far-flung and “virtual” work teams (virtual, that is, in the sense of teams working together in an online or virtual environment such as email, blogging, or twittering), Twitter can also represent a time and productivity drain for workplaces and a hotbed for missing and missed communications if not used properly or if too heavily or inappropriately relied upon as a communication tool. Still, keeping that concern in mind, there can be some big pluses for team Twittering. Just by way of example, while I was logged onto Twitter for krl2pt0 purposes I observed KRL Training Coordinator Bob Christensen’s of-the-moment update that he had posted new materials on the krl2pt0 site. Hmmm. Imagine if I were working on a time-sensitive project and looking for input from teammates. The entire work team could be instantly directed to Bob’s input and ideas even as he produced them. So… In a nutshell, Twitter strikes me as best designed for time-sensitive virtual team projects and committees. As far as the social aspect of Twitter goes, look no further than the metaphor of the birds to see what I think and whether I will use it that way.
Here Be Some Real Dragons: Bitterwood, by James
Maxey
On a dragon-related note, I recently finished an outstanding new entry in the dragon/fantasy/science fiction genre, Bitterwood, by genre newcomer James Maxey. Read my brief review here. Call me a sucker for well-crafted words, but I am a big fan of the dragons of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, who are both fascinated by and distracted by a little well-honed argument—well, at least in the Aristophanic sense.* Maxey’s articulate, sometimes contemplative, and often rhetorically-driven dragons—particularly the ultra-evil “murder god” Blasphet—fit the bill perfectly. Then again, if you're like my husband and you prefer your dragons to stick with pillaging and carnage, Maxey offers a healthy portion of that, too. Maxey's slow unfolding of remnants of misunderstood and forgotten technology in a post-apocalyptic future landscape will also attract fans of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun, even as they remind us of the Arthur C. Clarke maxim that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Starred review in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.)
*In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes posits a Socratic School where young Greek youths learn rhetoric to argue the Wrong Argument and defeat the Right Argument. His characters attend this school to learn to argue their debts away, and comic mayhem ensues. My Point? Dragons, like Aristophanes' students in Clouds, are known to value argument for the sake of argument and as a means to justify questionable (often monetary) ends.
There is an old Norse legend, perhaps best known through Wagner’s opera Siegfried, that he who drinks the blood of dragons will be gifted with the ability to understand the language of birds. In that legend, Sigurd (or Siegfried) slays the dragon Fafnir and then either bathes in and takes a celebratory chug-a-lug of his enemy’s blood or just accidently gets some blood in his mouth, depending on what folkloric version you favor. Either way, Sigurd doesn’t learn any pithy lessons about being careful what you put in your mouth, because he mostly gets a lot of helpful oracular advice from his feathered friends.
That said and Niebelung legends aside, perhaps my favorite representation of the dragon’s blood legend appears in Newbery Honor author Nancy Farmer’s wonderful blend of historical fiction and myth-inspired adventure, The Sea of Trolls, in which young Saxon Jack and his Viking captors encounter dragons, trolls, giant spiders, and more, when they embark on a series of adventures rooted in Norse legend. In Farmer’s representation, Viking berserker-initiate Jill becomes infected with dragon’s blood and discovers it’s a bit more of a mixed blessing than the story of Sigurd suggests. She learns that while the avian population might chirp up some good gossip, such as whether your enemies are massing over the next hill, mostly they just do a lot of what my dad used to call nattering and gromishing. That is to say, they talk a lot about very little.
So where am I headed with this? Well, Farmer’s musings on dragon’s blood and the language of birds provide as good a metaphor as any for the infamous social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter, currently under exploration for its value in the world of libraries.
While I see a certain potential value in Twitter as an up-to-the minute communication tool for far-flung and “virtual” work teams (virtual, that is, in the sense of teams working together in an online or virtual environment such as email, blogging, or twittering), Twitter can also represent a time and productivity drain for workplaces and a hotbed for missing and missed communications if not used properly or if too heavily or inappropriately relied upon as a communication tool. Still, keeping that concern in mind, there can be some big pluses for team Twittering. Just by way of example, while I was logged onto Twitter for krl2pt0 purposes I observed KRL Training Coordinator Bob Christensen’s of-the-moment update that he had posted new materials on the krl2pt0 site. Hmmm. Imagine if I were working on a time-sensitive project and looking for input from teammates. The entire work team could be instantly directed to Bob’s input and ideas even as he produced them. So… In a nutshell, Twitter strikes me as best designed for time-sensitive virtual team projects and committees. As far as the social aspect of Twitter goes, look no further than the metaphor of the birds to see what I think and whether I will use it that way.
Here Be Some Real Dragons: Bitterwood, by James
MaxeyOn a dragon-related note, I recently finished an outstanding new entry in the dragon/fantasy/science fiction genre, Bitterwood, by genre newcomer James Maxey. Read my brief review here. Call me a sucker for well-crafted words, but I am a big fan of the dragons of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, who are both fascinated by and distracted by a little well-honed argument—well, at least in the Aristophanic sense.* Maxey’s articulate, sometimes contemplative, and often rhetorically-driven dragons—particularly the ultra-evil “murder god” Blasphet—fit the bill perfectly. Then again, if you're like my husband and you prefer your dragons to stick with pillaging and carnage, Maxey offers a healthy portion of that, too. Maxey's slow unfolding of remnants of misunderstood and forgotten technology in a post-apocalyptic future landscape will also attract fans of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun, even as they remind us of the Arthur C. Clarke maxim that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Starred review in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.)
*In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes posits a Socratic School where young Greek youths learn rhetoric to argue the Wrong Argument and defeat the Right Argument. His characters attend this school to learn to argue their debts away, and comic mayhem ensues. My Point? Dragons, like Aristophanes' students in Clouds, are known to value argument for the sake of argument and as a means to justify questionable (often monetary) ends.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Invasion of the Podcasters
For those of us who grew up with stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the word “podcast” has an ominous tone. I mean, think about it for a second. Roll the words slowly and majestically off your tongue. Podcast. Pod people. Now ask yourself who’s making all those podcasts out there. Kind of gives you a Twilight Zone feeling doesn’t it? And I’m just talking about the word. I haven’t even gotten to the content or purpose of podcasting yet. Scary, huh?
Heh, heh. Just kidding. That was kind of mean of me, wasn’t it?
In this day and age, with more and more adults returning to school or engaging in new training programs—whether to advance in their professions or just for the sense of purpose and accomplishment that learning gives—it’s important that educators find ways to accommodate the working adult’s busy schedule in the classroom environment. Podcasts strike me as one viable classroom or lecture alternative (probably best used in conjunction with other learning tools, such as asynchronous classroom forums and assignment blogs) in that they allow individuals to learn at home at the hours most convenient to their schedules—even, potentially, while doing other household chores. Podcasts also help engage different types of learners in an otherwise primarily visual online classroom environment.
Podcasts come in many forms, and—as with audiobooks, if I may say so—much depends on the narrator. Some podcasts, such as PLCMC's 7 1/2 habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners are essentially PowerPoints, with a narrator reading along with and occasionally embellishing on a series of slides. Personally, in the absence of a really engaging presenter, I find this type of podcast rather unappealing, as my tendency is to just read the slides, and then click next while the narrator is still limping placidly forward like a disinterested cow with no collie to herd it towards the barn.
Other podcasts are more like audiobooks or audiojournals, if you will, and these I find much more engaging, as I can cook dinner, clean house, and do dishes while listening. (Ah, multi-tasking is my friend.) Having been charged to find a podcast that interests me, I searched the internet until I found Escape Pod, “The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine” for readers and writers of science fiction. Who knew there was such a thing? Now I can listen to reviews, preview the writing of hot new authors, and even download “podiobooks” to enjoy on my afternoon walk. Will the wonders never cease?
Heh, heh. Just kidding. That was kind of mean of me, wasn’t it?
In this day and age, with more and more adults returning to school or engaging in new training programs—whether to advance in their professions or just for the sense of purpose and accomplishment that learning gives—it’s important that educators find ways to accommodate the working adult’s busy schedule in the classroom environment. Podcasts strike me as one viable classroom or lecture alternative (probably best used in conjunction with other learning tools, such as asynchronous classroom forums and assignment blogs) in that they allow individuals to learn at home at the hours most convenient to their schedules—even, potentially, while doing other household chores. Podcasts also help engage different types of learners in an otherwise primarily visual online classroom environment.
Podcasts come in many forms, and—as with audiobooks, if I may say so—much depends on the narrator. Some podcasts, such as PLCMC's 7 1/2 habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners are essentially PowerPoints, with a narrator reading along with and occasionally embellishing on a series of slides. Personally, in the absence of a really engaging presenter, I find this type of podcast rather unappealing, as my tendency is to just read the slides, and then click next while the narrator is still limping placidly forward like a disinterested cow with no collie to herd it towards the barn.
Other podcasts are more like audiobooks or audiojournals, if you will, and these I find much more engaging, as I can cook dinner, clean house, and do dishes while listening. (Ah, multi-tasking is my friend.) Having been charged to find a podcast that interests me, I searched the internet until I found Escape Pod, “The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine” for readers and writers of science fiction. Who knew there was such a thing? Now I can listen to reviews, preview the writing of hot new authors, and even download “podiobooks” to enjoy on my afternoon walk. Will the wonders never cease?
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Let's Get Digital, Digital
I am here to report that I need never leave my home office again. That’s right, people, I did my homework and then some. I set up an account and subscribed to a dozen or so RSS feeds. (See below.) I listened to a podcast. I downloaded an audiobook from the library catalog. (More on those in my next post.) I even did 200 or so updates and countless system restarts so that I could install the latest version of Windows Media Player, which actually allows me to watch Netflix movies right here at my desk. Am I rockin’ or what?
Incidentally, several of these feats (particularly the Windows Media Player) were achieved with no small level of frustration and with really big bucketsful—we’re talking aircraft carriers of truckloads of buckets—of patience. At one point, my husband took over the installation just to relieve me of the sheer monotony of update, reboot, install—each iteration of which was followed by a message stating “before you can install XYZ, you must first yada yada yada.” (I regret to say strong language may have been used during this exercise.) Anyway, when all was said and done, my husband strongly encouraged me to actually WATCH a movie. So I did. At my desk. Alone. (Maybe my husband wanted to see our frustration and patience pay off, or maybe he wanted to spare himself being subjected to another obscure Zombie flick like the last one I picked out. Who can say? Either way, I am ready for the day—should it come—when the library has downloadable video.)
At this point, I must take a time out to say that E. M. Forster was surprisingly prescient. I’m not talking about Howard's End or A Passage to India here, but another of Forster's lesser-known works called “The Machine Stops,” which details a future where people live in isolation connected to other people only through technology. A strong opponant of H. G. Wells' style of speculative fiction, Forster intended “The Machine Stops” to serve as an "anti-Wellsian" piece. Ironically, it stands as a rather fascinating counterpoint to Wells' own dystopian visions in The Time Machine and other works. Read Forster's story along with Wells' A Story of the Days to Come for a fascinating and quick glimpse of two ironic and terrifying futures.
Here are my comments on RSS feeds: I set up a bloglines account, and added several accounts. The process was clunky, the bloglines page cluttered and hard to read (or so I felt), and I quickly realized I was never going to want to go there. I then added an RSS feed button
on my tool bar. I click on the button when I am on a site I want to subscribe to, and, voila, with one additional click it adds the site to my RSS feeds. To access my feeds, I click on favorites and the RSS icon appears with a list of my subscriptions. Neat.
Incidentally, several of these feats (particularly the Windows Media Player) were achieved with no small level of frustration and with really big bucketsful—we’re talking aircraft carriers of truckloads of buckets—of patience. At one point, my husband took over the installation just to relieve me of the sheer monotony of update, reboot, install—each iteration of which was followed by a message stating “before you can install XYZ, you must first yada yada yada.” (I regret to say strong language may have been used during this exercise.) Anyway, when all was said and done, my husband strongly encouraged me to actually WATCH a movie. So I did. At my desk. Alone. (Maybe my husband wanted to see our frustration and patience pay off, or maybe he wanted to spare himself being subjected to another obscure Zombie flick like the last one I picked out. Who can say? Either way, I am ready for the day—should it come—when the library has downloadable video.)
At this point, I must take a time out to say that E. M. Forster was surprisingly prescient. I’m not talking about Howard's End or A Passage to India here, but another of Forster's lesser-known works called “The Machine Stops,” which details a future where people live in isolation connected to other people only through technology. A strong opponant of H. G. Wells' style of speculative fiction, Forster intended “The Machine Stops” to serve as an "anti-Wellsian" piece. Ironically, it stands as a rather fascinating counterpoint to Wells' own dystopian visions in The Time Machine and other works. Read Forster's story along with Wells' A Story of the Days to Come for a fascinating and quick glimpse of two ironic and terrifying futures.
Here are my comments on RSS feeds: I set up a bloglines account, and added several accounts. The process was clunky, the bloglines page cluttered and hard to read (or so I felt), and I quickly realized I was never going to want to go there. I then added an RSS feed button
on my tool bar. I click on the button when I am on a site I want to subscribe to, and, voila, with one additional click it adds the site to my RSS feeds. To access my feeds, I click on favorites and the RSS icon appears with a list of my subscriptions. Neat.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Mmmmm deee-licious
.jpg)
Titillate your tastebuds with reading... and social bookmarking? Good food and good books shared with good friends—those things form a big part of my life. This week, besides sharing a few good books, I want to share a delicious new way to learn, grow, and share one's interests, whatever they may be. You guessed it, I'm talking about del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a Web-based social bookmarking site that makes it easy for users to move from site to site while always returning with one click to his or her list of favorites. Not only that, del.icio.us provides new opportunities for readers (or Web surfers) to network with other readers (and surfers) with similar interests.
For example, fans of C. S. Lewis might wish to tag Lewis’s unofficial Web site Into the Wardrobe. Once you’ve tagged the site, you will not only find that 172 other people have tagged the site, you will be able to view other sites those 172 people have tagged that may also be of interest to you. [Disclaimer: naturally, you don’t know those people or how reputable or appropriate for your purposes their favorites may be. You should still always be diligent in checking the reliability of any source, especially any internet source, before singing its praises.]
Now, speaking of C.S. Lewis and all things delicious... Lewis once said that if you wanted to interest children in reading, you should write about things that interest children—things like, for example, food. Perhaps that's why we find so much eating in the world of Narnia—from sumptuous afternoon teas with fauns to fresh fish feasts with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver to turkish delight with, well, let's just say someone who proves in one gesture why children should never accept candy from strangers.
Lewis also offered some pretty delectable fare for the grown-up palate with his classic Garden of Eden allegory, Perelandra, set on the watery world of Venus. Written in the 1940s, the science may be dated, but the story is timeless—and you'll never forget Lewis' description of the Perelandran gourds, that are neither sharp nor sweet, neither savory nor voluptuous.
In any case, if you want to create a world to delight your readers, one where they may immerse themselves as one of the natives, there is no better way than though the cuisine. Here are just a few of my favorite visual and literary feasts that touch on the power of sharing a meal, a recipe, or a culinary custom:
Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
Neveryona, by Samuel R. Delany
Babette’s Feast (movie)
Please share your literary feasts with me, and if you find good sources for more, don’t forget to tag them and then share your tags with me!
More of a dinner-and-a-movie type? Don't forget to check out 000h How I Loved That Movie for plenty of film, food, and fun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
.jpg)
