More Books

[stoutfellow]

The last bits of my latest Amazon order just trickled in. (This order was unusually fragmented because several of the books were only available through Amazon Marketplace.) The tally:
Neil Gaiman, Worlds' End, book 8 of the Sandman series;
Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century;
Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror;
Robin McKinley, Sunshine;
Andrew M. Butler (ed.), Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature;
Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History;
Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan;
George Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic;
John Barnes, The Merchants of Souls, the third and last of the Thousand Cultures books;
Hans Bemmann, The Stone and the Flute;
Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman.

I'm particularly looking forward to reading Spence; the Taiping Rebellion isn't well-known in the West, but it was the bloodiest civil war in history (at least in absolute terms), and the memory probably is one contributing factor in the PRC's obsession with "splittism" and, in particular, its wariness about religious movements such as Falun Gong.

I also received the DVDs for season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7 wasn't very good; there were only a couple of very good episodes, and the overall arc was incoherent. However, I tend to be a completist, and this does complete the set.

I've already finished the Gaiman, which was pretty good - another collection of more-or-less unrelated stories, not advancing the overall arc. I didn't find it as compelling as some of the other volumes, though. Fables and Reflections remains my favorite of the series.

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Fortey's book is quite decent, I think. Not that deep, but a good and colorful introduction of geoscience.

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Shippey's is my favorite biography of Tolkien--probably because he goes at it from a (fellow) philologist's perspective.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Do you know if he's written anything else on JRRT? I have a vague memory, probably dating to the mid-'70s, of something that may have been his, but I no longer have the book.

[ase.livejournal.com]

The Road to Middle-Earth (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618257608/qid=1109018815/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-3605335-9402346), maybe? I read it; comments here (http://ase.livejournal.com/181502.html), toward the bottom. If you like Author of the Century you'll probably enjoy Road nearly as much.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I think that's the one, yes; at least, the title sounds very familiar. I think I did enjoy it, too, but it was almost thirty years ago...

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Road to Middle Earth is almost certainly it. He's also edited the The Oxford book of Science Fiction Stories and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories

At any rate, so claims the KCLS library catalog (http://catalog.kcls.org/search/ashippey/ashippey/1%2C6%2C10%2CB/exact&FF=ashippey+t+a&1%2C5%2C)