19th Century Kindle
Dear Readers
A few new and interesting literary efforts have come to my attention of late. I thought I might share them with you, lest you have missed them, along with my own thoughts on the topic.
When one is writing a novel set in Paris (as you do), one naturally feels drawn to reading books on this most wondrous city. This book though… this is the Paris of the imagination. I’ve always enjoyed Mr Mieville’s ouevre-hopping efforts, but this is something special. Surrealist dream creatures fight Nazi nightmares while an American magician-scientist heads for the city. It mixes real and fictional events and people seamlessly and could almost be Magic Surrealism.
I have to confess to being only a handful of pages into Mr Vandermeer’s latest wonderbook, but already I am entranced, intrigued and a tiny bit scared. I devoured the Southern Reach Trilogy, enamoured with its spooky, dislocated feel and so was pleased as punch to see this book arrive on the virtual shelves. All being well, I shall sit on the terrace this very evening and read this with relish.
From Skizz, and Halo Jones, through V for Vendetta and Watchmen, The Extraordinary Gentlemen and Unearthing, I feel like Mr Moore has always been part of my literary life. I believe, in the parlance of the young people, that Alan Moore does, indeed, know the score. So when he unleashed on the world a million-word behemoth I knew I should purchase it. I’m approaching this book in the same way a runner may approach a marathon. Little by little we shall get to the end. I am accordingly ten percent through (an amount of words that I would be perfectly pleased to call a novel) and relishing in the deep, rich stew of language that is being served.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
As yet unread, this sits and stares at me and demands I attend to it soon. I have long been an avid reader of tomes on human consciousness and, as this blog attests, have an interested in cephalopods. This book then is almost too perfect. In fact, I would pay good money for the cover alone.
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Well that is all I wished to share with you. Hopefully I may have brought you some new bibliographic delights. And whilst it shames me to do this, I would feel remiss if I didn’t remind you that our own literary effort is loose in the world. I hope you have a marvellous weekend with some excellent reading material.
The Benthic Times 