So, I need some book recommendations from the Thinking Persons (and those unfortunate souls who stumble across this post).
My niece begins the latter part of nursing school Real Soon Now. Does anyone (yes, I'm definitely looking at you, Erica) have any ideas of things she simply must read. What I'm really looking for is something along the lines of Scott Turow's "classic"One L, detailing the first year of law school, or the less well-known Snapshots from Hell by Peter Robinson.
Not that she'll have any time to read them. If nothing else, I'd like to get a feel for what she might experience.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
An Under-appreciated Classic
I love to find a new novel or author to get lost in. However, I'm also a big fan of revisiting old favorites (I have a few fiction books that have been read at least 10 times). While I love the zany characters and completely illogical plot of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HGttG) series, I personally prefer the two Dirk Gently novels written by Douglas Adams.
My preference for Dirk (Svlad) Gently and his holistic detective agency may be due to the fact that I read them before picking up HGttG. I spent part of today trying to figure out why Adams' written works are always so entertaining to me and yet the film version was so horrendous. It all boils down to descriptions. The action and dialogue in Adams' works is hilarious but the true genius lies in his descriptions of objects, actions and surroundings. For example, Adams' describes the way in which Vogon ships fly in the following manner:
"The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
Now I ask you, how could you visually demonstrate a ship hanging in the sky exactly in the way a brick doesn't? How could you pass that joke on to the audience? Adams' skill at using simile and metaphor to provide descriptions is so pervasive and effective that most of the humor of situation is found within the background and not with the primary action. Film is just an atrocious tool to use in trying to tell such a story. How can you convey:
"Airports are ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not."
You can instantly picture this airport; but, it is impossible to visually present an actual airport with the same level of impact.
Douglas Adams' death at the age of 49 in 2001 is one of the very few celebrity deaths that I really did feel the loss on a personal level. The realization that there would be no more works coming from his fetid . . . er, fertile mind for me to lose myself in caused a true sense of mourning. If you've never had the pleasure (seriously, how could you read this blog and not have experienced Adams) or are looking to revisit a classic in absurdist humor try The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, my personal favorite.
When I read Neil Gaimon's American Gods last year, I was always expecting a brief cameo by Toe Rag, Miss Schechter, or the incomparable . . . er, incorrigible Dirk himself. Definitely a must read.
My preference for Dirk (Svlad) Gently and his holistic detective agency may be due to the fact that I read them before picking up HGttG. I spent part of today trying to figure out why Adams' written works are always so entertaining to me and yet the film version was so horrendous. It all boils down to descriptions. The action and dialogue in Adams' works is hilarious but the true genius lies in his descriptions of objects, actions and surroundings. For example, Adams' describes the way in which Vogon ships fly in the following manner:
"The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
Now I ask you, how could you visually demonstrate a ship hanging in the sky exactly in the way a brick doesn't? How could you pass that joke on to the audience? Adams' skill at using simile and metaphor to provide descriptions is so pervasive and effective that most of the humor of situation is found within the background and not with the primary action. Film is just an atrocious tool to use in trying to tell such a story. How can you convey:
"Airports are ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not."
You can instantly picture this airport; but, it is impossible to visually present an actual airport with the same level of impact.
Douglas Adams' death at the age of 49 in 2001 is one of the very few celebrity deaths that I really did feel the loss on a personal level. The realization that there would be no more works coming from his fetid . . . er, fertile mind for me to lose myself in caused a true sense of mourning. If you've never had the pleasure (seriously, how could you read this blog and not have experienced Adams) or are looking to revisit a classic in absurdist humor try The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, my personal favorite.
When I read Neil Gaimon's American Gods last year, I was always expecting a brief cameo by Toe Rag, Miss Schechter, or the incomparable . . . er, incorrigible Dirk himself. Definitely a must read.
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