I spent the summer practically bookless, with only what I took with me when I ran away from my mother - the three-volume paperback of Lord of the Rings, of course, Ursula Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Volume 2, which I will defend against all comers as the best single author short story collection of all time, ever, and John Boyd’s The Last Starship from Earth, which I’d been re-reading at the time and which hadn’t stood up to re-reading as much as one might hope. I have read, though I didn’t bring it with me, Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, and the comparison between Anna bringing a new toy instead of the loved Pink Rabbit when they left the Third Reich has been uncomfortably with me whenever I’ve looked at the Boyd recently.
I apologize for the awful quality of the pictures. It would be fine if they would just stay a smaller size, but they’ve gone and blown up and I can’t figure out how to fix it.
Describing this exciting non-Hardy/Dickens/Trollope scifi:
There was a whole load of Poul Anderson I haven’t read. Stuffed on the top of the As there was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest, which looks as if it’s the sequel to “Weyr Search” which I read in an anthology. On the shelf below there was a John Brunner I haven’t read. Better than that, two John Brunners, no, three John Brunners I haven’t read. I felt my eyes start to swim.
How much do I love what a nerd Morwenna is? Anyway, I am pretty poorly read as far as the big scifi canon goes, so I’ve never heard of Poul Anderson or John Brunner.
Poul Anderson: Wikipedia informs me he has won something called the Gandalf Grand Master award, was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America, and one of the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism. (http://tinyurl.com/6a4tayg )
Dragonquest and Weyr Search: Another book I haven’t read, although friends have been telling me to read the Dragonriders of Pern series for approximately forever. Apparently there are dragons that talk?
John Brunner: Apparently he predicted the internet, and was wildly cynical. So far so cool. He also wrote a book called Stand on Zanzibar, which I think I’ve heard of, though I haven’t read it. http://tinyurl.com/4n8k7sz
The study was a complete surprised, because it’s full of books. From the rest of the house, I’d have expected neat old leatherbound editions of Dickens and Trollope and Hardy (Gramma loved Hardy), but instead the shelves are chockablock with paperbacks and masses of them are SF.
I feel a bit silly including this one because I feel like *everyone* knows these guys, but I do want to include everything. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy are very big and important canonical writers, and I have never managed to get through an entire book by any of them. But, uh, look at Hardy’s mustache! Anyway, wikipedia links are the captions of the photos.
They talked about boarding schools, which they all went to. I know all about them. Not for nothing have I read Greyfriars and Malory Towers and the complete works of Angela Brazil.
I did not know these references, so I had to look them up. Links below.
Greyfriars: a fictional school in a series by Frank Richards
http://tinyurl.com/4qtzlzo
Malory Towers: the fictional boarding school in a series of books by Enid Blyton
http://tinyurl.com/47kym8e
Angela Brazil: the author of girls’ school stories
http://tinyurl.com/4pbr72x
http://tinyurl.com/63wv73q
Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery
I’d never seen a picture of him, not one. In L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill, a girl whose parents were divorced recognised a picture of her father in the paper without knowing it. After reading that we’d looked at some pictures, but they never did anything for us.
