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Thu, 25 Sep 2003

A Princess of Mars

— SjG @ 4:18 pm

Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912, read as an eText from the Project Gutenberg collection.

A rippin’ good example of early science fiction with a few original ideas and plenty of fantastical adventures.

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Fri, 12 Sep 2003

The Heritage of the Desert

— SjG @ 4:15 pm

Zane Grey, 1910, read as an eText from the Project Gutenberg collection.

Zane Grey books are painted in great, broad, colorful strokes. There’s not a lot of ambiguity about the nature of the characters, and there’s rarely much doubt about how things will turn out in the end. Grey’s West is the same West that we go to see in the movies; a Moral Universe with strict rules that differentiate the good from the bad, a place where well-defined roles and behaviors are understood by all.
What makes Grey’s books such good reading, though, is not particularly the plots or the characters, unless you consider the West itself to be a character. It’s Grey’s obvious love of the land, and his painterly descriptions of the terrain and the weather that make the experience of reading his stories so pleasurable.

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Fri, 5 Sep 2003

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

— SjG @ 4:14 pm

Harriet Beecher Stowe, originally published as a serial in 1850, published as a book 1852, read as an e-book reformatting of Project Gutenberg text.

My first surprise was to learn that Uncle Tom was intended as a hero, a true example of a noble Christian. Having only heard his name used as a term of contempt, I expected to find him set up as a contemptible character by Stowe. I was also surprised to find, in a book published a mere ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation, how little the author assumed the reader knew about the institution of slavery.
The importance of this book and its effect on American history is well known; I think it’s also interesting as documenting that history. It obviously is crafted as a work of Abolitionist propaganda (which is not necessarily to suggest inaccuracy), and the perspective it gives on everything ranging from gender roles and religious life in America in the mid-Nineteenth Century to the establishment of Liberia are all fascinating.

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