Ez’s Comments (group member since Jul 29, 2013)

Ez’s comments from the Literally Geeky group.

Scariest book, erm, not fiction.

I had a wee, slight Jack the Ripper obsession when I was a kid, and as a means of encouraging my entirely healthy fascination with the macabre my parents picked up a second hand casebook that argued that Montague Druitt was the killer, with bonus genuine crime scene photos!

... It kind of hit home that the women were real, that a maniac butchered them, and that Michael Caine wasn't Inspector Abberline.

Northern Lights is the first in a trilogy, so, it suffers a very little from not answering all the 'Big Questions' by the end. That said, unlike some first books in a sequence it is capable of standing alone... mostly because you've forgotten about the big questions due to armoured polar bears.

It's a shame the film didn't have the guts to stick more faithfully to the source material.

I saw a clip of the Maze Runner yesterday, and my reaction to the teen dystopian uprising was "But teens are stupid."

Sorry teenage self, but you were.

As a teenager you think you know it all: you've got such tremendous optimism and faith in your abilities, and as a teen it makes perfect sense that fellow teens are dramatically changing the social order, because Lord knows no one else is doing it!

Problem is those exams, and puberty and trying to get people to treat you like an adult (when the majority of adults spent the rest of their lives trying to make regressing to childhood socially acceptable). My generation grew up being told we were supposed to stop rainforest deforestation. Then McDonald's came to the UK and we all started collecting happy meal toys, and as we hit our teenage years we discovered ourselves to be impotent. Able to do little everything except cause unreasonable fear in the old.

Teenagers have all the passion, but few of the skills. As we get older we acquire more skills (though admittedly possibly not the right sort for guerilla warfare); we grow wiser; we also grow more comfortable, or tired, or broken.

Some YA novels possibly don't speak to the grumpy sods here because it's top late for us. We've looked behind the curtain, and seen the man there. We know he's old and tired, that his back aches and he groans when he has to get up. We know he's doing a juice cleanse, under duress - though he doesn't have any real faith that anything ever drop three inches off his waist.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls!

PS: The rainforest aren't looking too good either.

Interesting Guardian article presenting the other side of the story: Trigger warnings don’t hinder freedom of expression: they expand it

http://gu.com/p/4bj2v?CMP=Share_Andro...

I agree: Trigger Warnings exist with good intentions: trigger warnings probably make great paving slabs. Especially since they seem to have been appropriated by a litigation-happy culture where an individual's private experience outweighs objectivity.

Admittedly I say this from a comfy chair. Ive not suffered trauma that repels me from certain words, subjects or books (full disclosure, the word Thatcher does makes me twitch). I'm glib, but I'm not without compassion, nor am I without empathy. Some books,some subjects are tough, even when you don't have a personal connection.

However,a safe space is neutral, it's non-judgemental, it's a place for discussion, mutual respect and tolerance. It's not... It's not a domicile, but on the plus side nor is it a boxing ring where someone punches you in the face for the hell of it.

In his 1979 coda to Farenheight 451, good ol' Ray Bradbury said "There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches".

And good intentions.

Banned books week is coming up in September, and as usual we'll be celebrating with a banned books month here at the LG Volcano Lair of Doom. I'm just getting a head start... Sort of...

Typically we think of books being censored because their text contains a progressive challenge, but the rise of trigger warnings has created an situation where students (predominantly in the US) are self-insulating against distressing books because they are emotionally challenging. We're not talking hate speech here, but rather classic works of literature, books like The Great Gatsby.

It's a different side to book banning - a softer approach, one that places an emphasis on the fragility of an individual's emotional state, and a premium on the rising movement of the right not to be offended. I'll make a distinction here between being offended and harassed; everyone has the right not to be harassed, but policing offence is quite another matter.

Enough waffling. I found the following article in the Atlantic, rather interesting. I'll leave it here for your perusal : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

I've always thought of YA as a marketing tool for publishers reaching out to a difficult demographic. Little kids get books bought and read to them, older teens have litrichoor to study in school, and in the middle there's a group with purchasing power who punch above their weight when it comes to disposal able income. They influence films, games, and in the last fifteen years best-sellers.

That sounds pretty negative, but honestly I'm just bitter that I have to spend all my money on new guttering. When I was a teen, aeons ago, Pratchett was marketed hard at me, because at that point fantasy was just for kids.

With a few exceptions, I don't think there was the same impetus for books featuring teen protagonists though (apart from the superb Adrian Mole), but, that wouldn't have been a bad thing. Someone relatable, with issues that concerned me. That respect and representation is not a bad thing. Homeland is a great current example of an inspirational teen protagonist making a difference. This despite the criticised is romance angle, but even then there's positive message - practise safe sex, be yourself.

Maybe there is a formula at work for most of these books, I don't have enough experience to judge, but what genre fiction doesn't have a formula behind - regardless of age of target audience? Crime novels adhere to strong tropes, romances have their happy ever afters, you can't move for clichés in fantasy!

I was going to say my YA experience is more or less confined to the books we've read in Literary Geeky. Thinking about it, it's not. Judy Blume, Ursula LeGuin, Dianne Wynn Jones, Sue Townsend - they've all written stories applicable and relevant to teen interests: they're good authors with interesting things to say, and their work can speak to everyone, but they're not confined by tropes or churning out formulaic stories.

Seriously, if you haven't read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, boy, you're living a joyless life.

Just another quick tout of the Rogues anthology (not that I have shares in it). Yes, I've mentioned it before, but not only does it include Gaiman writing about Neverwhere, GRRM, Rothfuss, Lynch, and Flynn but it includes a contemporary, dry witted story by Cherie Priest.

Is Steelheart the Tin Man's older, meaner brother?

.... I bet Jane Austen wishes she'd written Colin Firth coming out of that pond.

I second Cherie Priest, I enjoyed her Four And Twenty Blackbirds.

I'm suggesting some classic cheesy fantasy, with a serious side of fromage. Raymond E Feist's The Magician.

Let's talk adaptations, whether big or small screen.

There are some cracking story adaptations around lately. Episode one of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell did not disappoint, Outlander is ....


Perfection.

While across the pond a fair few people seem to be getting excited for small screen version of Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Meanwhile, over in Game of Thrones land, controversy struck, or so I sort of hear; I have a fierce wall of MUTE up to block any news about this series (I AM WAITING FOR THE BOOK), but still, stuff gets through, and though I'm limited in context, nevertheless, much eyerolling ensued this morning. I'm judgey like that.

To the Point!

The point is this: books that are now films or TV series, or books that you'd love to see filmed? What do you recommend, and what would you heroically fling your body in front of to shield unwitting eyes from?

I read mostly non-fiction, but I'll have a crack at any genre if the fancy takes me, well, except sci-fi. I don't have a space beef with any sci-fi books but if I'm going to read about space then I prefer it to be non-fiction.

Any recommendations for short story collections?

I'm fond of:

Mc Sweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Hats off, that is a good title.

Includes luminaries like Steven King, David Glen Gould, Mr Neil Gaiman, Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard and Nick Hornby.

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories (includes the inspiration for Rashomon) and a lot of lovely word play.


And Saki. Oh Saki. With your Killer Mongoose gods you are really spoiling us.

Hillary Mantel with her Thomas Cromwell Trilogy -two books in so far and Wolf Hall has just been televised to much acclaim. Definitely on parr (Tudor joke... that admittedly doesn't work because Cromwell was dead by the time old Henry married Catherine 2) with Graves' book.

Speaking of medieval England: how about Phillipa Gregory's The White Queen, and the Other Bolyen Girl. The Tudors inspire as many books as the Romans.

Hild is on my to-read list; it's all about the future Abbess (and Saint) of Whitby.

Meanwhile on the ... trashier, pulpier, swashbuckling,time travelling side of town Flashman, Sharpe, Outlander use historical events and facts as a backdrop to larger than life stories. When visiting the V&A I was charmed to see the Tiger-Eating-a-Redcoat organ featured in 'Sharpe versus a Hard Bastard'(official name Sharpe's Tiger).




I've just bought In the Company of Liars, about a ragtag group of misfits trying to outrun the plague only to have strange and terrible deaths. Seems part Doctor Terror's House of Horror part Canterbury Tales. We'll see how historically accurate that is...

Thoughts, comments etc, etc... this is the place.

I am so excited about that. Anything with Eddie Marsden is going to be tiptop!

Roman book recommendations?

I'd recommend Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilisation - it's non-fiction, set a long time after the reign of Claudius. It presents a compelling alternative view to the traditional decadent, disease and Visigoth riddled collapse.

Also, Suetonius' Twelve Caesars, and the fun and filthy Satyricon commonly ascribed to Petronius.

One thing we didn't get to talk about tonight was everyone's thoughts on an actual manned mission to Mars.

Me? I'm super-keen. The advances made on the back of the lunar program were incredible, and yeah, it costs a lot (estimated costs are around $400 billion for the whole program), but a NASA or inter-agency mission would be an inspiring achievement.

Mars One though, urgh, what a load of old flubgubbins.

Claudius lifts the veil on the backstabbing, front stabbing, and the fabulous skullduggery involved in being part of the first family of Rome.