I’ve been impressed with the writing of H.G. Wells thus far. War of the Worlds was as good as I’d hoped: as exciting as the Spielberg movie, but without the insufferable children and tedious family dynamics. The Time Machine, while a tad dry, was still well-written and enjoyable. The Island of Dr. Moreau was fairly straight forward, but was masterfully executed, prescient, and surprisingly humane relative to other books of its era (think Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, or some of Rudyard Kipling’s work). The Invisible Man completes […]
When the night has come
This, perhaps the most quintessential “Stephen King story” ever written, walks that delicate, liminal space between childhood and adolescence. Here lies the age when perfection exists unrecognized. When you have the friends you’ll always carry with you, regardless of later circumstance. This is the age when childhood has reached its apogee: immediately before the confusion of puberty and the discovery of girls. It is a time for unchecked vulgarity, false bravado and posturing, and the constant interplay and co-mingling of imagination and experience, where the […]
No man here lives a charmed life.
Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has […]
Every successful society is alike in that they die the slow death of excess and comfort.
Isaac Asimov was a ludicrously prolific author from the Golden Age of science fiction. He, along with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, has reached pantheonic levels of influence and esteem, and the Foundation series is perhaps his most cherished and well-read work. He ended up tying all his major works into a shared universe centered around this series, so it can be said that you can’t understand Asimov’s writing without first reading this book. And I thought it was okay. To be sure, there […]