I'm off to Greece for a week at the end of the month and am looking forward to getting some reading done. Here's what will be taking up my luggage allowance:
The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula K. Le Guin
I fell in love with the world of Earthsea earlier this year after reading the first entry in the quartet, A Wizard of Earthsea. I picked up A Wizard of Earthsea as a standalone paperback, but have since acquired it bundled as part of this quartet. Published in the 60s, the setting of Earthsea is an archipelago of hundreds of islands, populated by disparate peoples, wizards and dragons and surrounded by seas and oceans. It's beautifully written, poetic, patient and engaging.
The first Earthsea novel, A Wizard of Earthsea was released in 1968 and chronicles the journey of wizard Ged, through his years as an apprentice and across the archipelago to conquer a demon from his past. It's full of brilliant fantasy, including one of the best dragon scenes I've ever read. The strength of the novel is in the way in which Earthsea is brought to life, ideas are explored in enough detail to fire the reader's imagination, but are never dwelt on longer than necessary.
I've not yet decided whether I'll re-read A Wizard of Earthsea before starting on the other 3 books in the quartet. They are The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) and Tehanu (1990). A further novel is also available, The Other Wind was published in 2001.
Goro Miyazaki directed a Studio Ghibli animation based on the Earthsea cycle in 2006. It's a film I enjoyed, but is flawed and a little dry. I can understand how some have compared badly to the novels. I'm looking forward to watching the film again once I've worked my way through the novels so I can make my own mind up.
Dune by Frank Herbert
I read Dune for the first time when I was a teenager exploring a growing interest in science fiction. I was probably just about the right age to appreciate Frank Herbert's space opera as it is. My reading tastes and understanding of Dune's place within popular fiction have matured and I'm looking forward to discovering it again with some different perspectives.
There's a lot about my original reading of Dune. Sandworms, Spice, Still Suits and Paul Atreides journey seem very vivid in my memory, but I know there's a lot more political intrigue and depth of characters to sink my teeth in to this time round.
Dune often comes up in discussion amongst myself and my group of
friends. I'm interested in reading to consider why Dune, while certainly
popular, isn't a mega franchise lime Star Wars or Lord of the Rings,
despite the cult appeal. There are a lot of interesting stories being the franchise's only successful transition to feature film so far. The one that sticks in my mind is how Salvador Dali demanded to be paid $100,000 an hour to appear as The Emperor in a 1970's adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky that would also star Orson Welles.
Well the Jodorowsky version never got made, David Lynch eventually succeeded, casting Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in 1984. his version is a bit long and a bit of a mess, failing to capture much of the spirit of the original story, despite Lynch's obvious talents as a director. It has a place in film history as a curiosity. One of the great directors and one of the great novels, but not a great film. A TV mini-series aired by the SyFy channel in 2000 was critically successful, but Hollywood has struggled to get another blockbuster scale adaptation off the ground. There is now nothing in the works since Paramount dropped a project in 2011.
All being well, I'll look forward to continuing the series of novels in the next few months. I've read a couple of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's prequel novels, but never tried any of Herbert Sr's own sequels. Dune Messiah is the second in the series and was published four years after the original. Who knows, maybe it'll be time to pick up David Lynch's film adaptation one more time.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
I've become increasingly aware of On the Road in the past year. It's been mentioned a lot in conversation, in other books I've read and on TV. It finally cemented itself as a book I should probably read after an extract of it was included in a section in Cory Doctorow's brilliant Little Brother. It seemed clear from the extract that a lot of what I enjoyed in Little Brother was also present in On the Road, particularly that of youth finding its place in the world, of growing up in times in which freedom is infringed due to exterior pressures - the Cold War and the War on Terror.
On the Road was published in 1951, Kerouac's 2nd novel. Fascinatingly, Kerouac produced the final draft of the novel on one continuous 120ft roll of tracing paper, which he had painstakingly cut and taped together. This became known as The Scroll and I'm very interested to see how this helped Kerouac's stream of conciousness to flow to the type writer, without the need to stop at any point to load new paper. The Scroll has been available to view at museum's on occasion. It was on display at the British Library in the latter half of 2012.
No comments :
Post a Comment