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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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Sun, 24 Aug 2003

The Perils of Pauline

— SjG @ 4:13 pm

Charles Goddard, publication date obscure, read as an e-book reformatting of Project Gutenberg Text

I’d heard the title used metaphorically many times, but knew nothing beyond the reference. In all likelihood, the reference wasn’t to the book, but to the “cliff-hanger” movie serials made from the book starting around 1914, and known particularly for the image of the hero rescuing the heroine who had been abandoned, bound hand and foot, upon the tracks before a rapidly approaching train. This scene does not appear in the book, but fear not, the book is no more subtle.
In the world of Pauline, the extremely wealthy are pure and meritorious, the poor are dark, dishonest, and immoral. Motor cars, airplanes, submarines, purebred horses, and hot-air balloons are all tools for the amusement of the thrill-seeking elite, although the commoners who operate them often pay with their lives in order to propel the plot along. Thin as the plot may be, it’s enough to take our heroine to other exotic locales, where she and her handsome foster-brother/husband-to-be [!] vanquish still other niedermenschen, whether they be Sioux Indians who mistake her for a goddess, gypsies who wish to kill her, the denizens of Chinatown who would trap her in their opium dens, or sinister agents of un-named countries who would do her in just for the hell of it.

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Sat, 23 Aug 2003

Notre-Dame de Paris a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

— SjG @ 4:12 pm

Victor Hugo, originally published in 1831, e-book of uncertain origin.
Disney Lovers, Repent!
Hugo has a keen eye for the foibles of humanity, sparing neither nobility nor the emerging bourgeois class, skewering the Parisian rich and poor, thieves and mystics, church officials and students.
But Hugo’s greatest scorn, evidently, is for those who don’t appreciate good medieval architecture. The discussions of architecture and the story of the growth of Paris would make interesting books in and of themselves, and Hugo’s theory of the printed word’s ascendancy over that of architecture (as humanity’s means of communication) is thought provoking.

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