I'll be doing a lot of this (see picture above) in the immediate future, so it looks as though blog posts will be scarce as ever. Just so y'all know, I plan on revamping this entire website (as well as its impoverished brethren) over the summer and filling it up with new material.
Check back for updates every week or so, but don't expect a wealth of new information. That'll come later!
Nate's summer reading list:
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Aldous Huxley)
The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien) (haven't read this one yet!)
My Name is Aram (William Saroyan)
Rudyard Kipling (and lots of him!)
George MacDonald (excited about him, too!)
Charles Williams (the most brilliant Inkling of them all?)
G.K. Chesterton (the Father Brown stories)
10 comments:
Love your new glamor shots here and on Facebook -- been working out?
You'll notice my right bicep has minor swelling toward the middle. That ain't cancer.
I'm also rather pleased with the hairiness of my forearms, but that's not as noticeable in this shot.
yeah babes, lookin good.
so, when are we watching a movie together?
Also, I have some poetry to discuss with you.
Nice reading list, Nate. The Hobbit is still my favorite Tolkien (along with his excellent short story, "Leaf by Nigel"). I'm sadly lacking in Kipling experience, though I hope to delve into a few stories from Plain Tales from the Hills soon (a collection greatly loved by Borges). Have you read much Williams? He's such a bizzare writer. So much of his stuff is wonderful and unique, but there's a portion of just about every novel that seems impenetrable (I can understand why Tolkien had such a tough time with Williams' writing). I need to read more MacDonald as well--have had a copy of The Portent sitting on my shelf for years, unread.
If you've never cracked them open before, you're going to adore the Father Brown Mysteries. I want to hear what you think when you're finished so I can live vicariously - I'm buried under quite a pile of books on the Late Period of Egypt and the influence of Egyptian mystery cults in Britain in Roman times. Good stuff, but not quite as entertaining. :)
I'm so unfamiliar with Tolkien that I spell his name wrong practically every time. Living in a post-Peter Jackson society, that's inexcusable! Trying to read the Rings trilogy when I was nine years old was like sitting down to read The Bible. I only made it through the first book. Maybe this summer I'll finish the job. But Hobbit comes first.
Linds, I'll be sure to let you know about those Father Brown stories. My mom must have read the entire collection about four or five times; I've always been curious about them. There's this wonderful little Alec Guinness movie called Father Brown (in England it's known as The Detective) that's just about the best film adaptation of Chesterton we've got. I already love this character!
BTW, this stuff about the Egyptian cults sounds fascinating. Any kind of East-West crossover interests me, actually. When you gather enough research to sustain a feature film, let me know!
Love the Father Brown stuff, but my favorite Chesterton story collection (and it's not like I've read exhastively through his many, many stories) is Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables.
Whoa, that article has your name on it! I'll have to read it when I'm not at work. Dig!
Oh, and the only Chaz Williams book I've read is War in Heaven. That one's considered "accessible," right?
Funny, I was thinking how War in Heaven is the one novel I don't remember having much trouble with--but I read it maybe 7 or 8 years ago, and the memory is a little foggy on it. I've read just 4 of the 7 novels, and each really is worth reading, in its own way.
I read All Hallows twice, and it may be my favorite--only its last several chapters are very difficult to make heads or tails of. The characters are wonderful, plus you have the fact that it's a ghost story + a homunculus/golem story (pretty unusual). You probably know, but Descent into Hell is a ghost story as well, and that's the one I read most recently. The other one I've read is Place of the Lion.
The wry observation made by some readers that the best Williams novel is actually C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength... well, that thought has a fair amount of substance behind it.
I think The Place of the Lion's syncretism of Platonic forms and medieval angelology rivals the ingenuity of CSL's fusion of classical mythology and angelology in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. In the end though, I think CW's synthesis is the more original.
Perhaps most shrewd of Williams however is that he leaves gaps in his hierarchy, because evocation is a greater catalyst of the imagination than comprehensive description. Where Dante would have been encyclopaedic, Williams leaves us wanting more.
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