Friday 7 June 2024

Meanwhile, In Other Reading

For each of us, Poul Anderson (or any other writer) exists in the context of (different) other reading.

For me, right now:

Anderson's Fire Time, Chapter IX; 

the Dune series seems to be falling off my reading list;

I reread Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy the way some people reread JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy;

I have read the first five of the twenty-five chapters in GK Chesterton's The Flying Inn but am not sure how much more I will read (the flying inn is like flying pickets - it does not fly);

appreciation of the visuals in Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat has led to rereading it several times in quick succession, an entirely different experience from prose-only fiction.

Next, we might consider an inn in Fire Time, another of Anderson's many inns.

5 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Well, I enjoyed a lot of what I read in Chesterton's works.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

But I am finding this one rambling and pointless.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

That can be a drag, I agree. Before Hemingway fictions tended to be leisurely, verbose, sprawling.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Chesterton was very perceptive but had odd lacunae.

For example, he praised Ford's "Model T" as a cheap car available to the masses... but then said it should be made in small workshops, not on assembly lines.

He seems to have completely missed the fact that it was cheap enough for ordinary people (including the assembly-line workers) to own precisely -because- it was made that way.

If it had been made by hand, only rich people could have afforded it.

Basically, he was economically illiterate.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

I agree, Chesterton was a great man in many ways and Anderson loved his writings. But he was, in some matters, just plain wrong, such as in economics.

The first cars, of course, were basically hand built, as they probably had to be, when the inventors and developers of cars were still figuring out how to make them work. Ford's genius was in working out ways to make automobiles affordable to vast numbers of people.

Ad astra! Sean