I’ve always loved LOST for its intricate web of connections and coincidences that bind the protagonists together. In the early seasons of the show, few storytelling devices gave me as much pleasure as seeing a person from one protagonist’s history show up in the flashbacks of another character. The feeling that everything is connected lent an extra layer of strangeness to events on the island.
Recently I had my own LOST-related encounter with the uncanny: while searching for books about Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway who may have inspired Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, I found a 19th century Western by Ralph Connor called The Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks.* While, the Selkirks in question are the Canadian mountain range, and have nothing to do with the famous castaway, I nevertheless got a little chill seeing the name of LOST’s most famous ship juxtaposed with the name of a man who survived alone on an island for nearly five years. And if The Black Rock alone isn’t enough to give you goose pimples, consider the title to Ralph Connor’s first novel: The Sky Pilot.
*Lostpedia’s article on black rocks mentions Connor’s novel, but doesn’t draw the connection to Alexander Selkirk.
Published on March 29th, 2010 in Adventure Fiction, Television.
Tags: Daniel Defoe, Jules Verne, LOST, Ralph Connor
Last week I wrote about how the Oxford World’s Classics series translates to the kindle. This week, I took a look at the way in which their chief competitors in the world of paperbacks – Penguin Classics – have put together their own eBooks. As a sample text, I selected Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, with an introduction and explanatory notes by Adrian Poole.
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Published on March 22nd, 2010 in Adventure Fiction, Technology.
Tags: Kindle, Robert Louis Stevenson
I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding good electronic editions of the works of Jules Verne. Recently, I discovered that William Butcher’s translations of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras and Around the World in 80 Days were available through the kindle store. The books are part of the Oxford World’s Classics series, which, in addition to the text, provides readers with a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and supplementary materials. The last, in the case of Around the World, consist of a discussion of Verne’s sources, a very brief essay about the stage adaptation of the novel, and a compilation of contemporary reactions to the work.
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Published on March 15th, 2010 in Science Fiction, Technology.
Tags: Jules Verne, Kindle
Ever since I got my kindle, I’ve been reading a lot of 19th century and early 20th century jungle adventure fiction. That genre, because of its colonial setting and its two-fisted heroes, tends to showcase more of the period’s outdated attitudes on race and gender than other types of fiction. But sometimes the gap between the centuries shows forth in more unexpected ways. Consider this passage from H. Rider Haggard’s She:
In a very little while (for, as I expected, I got my fellowship) the boy became the favourite of the whole College—where, all orders and regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was continually in and out—a sort of chartered libertine, in whose favour all rules were relaxed. The offerings made at his shrine were simply without number, and I had serious difference of opinion with one old resident Fellow, now long dead, who was usually supposed to be the crustiest man in the University, and to abhor the sight of a child. And yet I discovered … that this unprincipled old man was in the habit of enticing the boy to his rooms and there feeding him upon unlimited quantities of brandy-balls, and making him promise to say nothing about it. Job told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, “at his age, too, when he might have been a grandfather if he had done what was right,” by which Job understood had got married, and thence arose the row.
But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around which memory still fondly hovers.
An old man entices a boy to his domicile with promises of candy? Sounds more like the next episode of Law and Order: SVU than a moment on which memory fondly hovers.
Published on January 26th, 2010 in Adventure Fiction.
Tags: Cheap Jokes on Old Books, H. Rider Haggard
Here is my own variation on Tolbert’s bowl of red. Not my favorite chili, mind you, but worth eating every once in a while to remind yourself of chili’s long and rich history.
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Published on January 12th, 2010 in Chili.
A hodgepodge of history, folklore and recipes, A Bowl of Red is less a cookbook than a paean to chili con carne. Frank X. Tolbert expresses his devotion to this dish in nearly religious tones, and parts of the book read like a Leviticus for chili-eaters, proscribing the correct ingredients and acceptable toppings for a bowl of red. A proper chili, in Tolbert’s view, will not include tomatoes or onions. Beans, if they must be served, should be offered on the side, never in the chili. Adding a bell pepper is an invitation to violence. As for toppings, Tolbert never mentions the minced onion, shredded cheese, or sour cream that restaurants often pile upon their chili. Saltines appear to be acceptable to him, but he does not encourage their use. Tolbert’s ideal bowl of red gets its color only from ancho peppers and is served unadorned: I imagine toppings would only interfere with the spiritual experience that he’s seeking.
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Published on January 12th, 2010 in Chili.
Hey, what’s a New Year’s Resolution, if you don’t fail to live up to it? I’m worn out from traveling this weekend, and won’t be posting my first Monday update until tomorrow. Whoops!
Published on January 12th, 2010 in Meta.
After I unwrapped my kindle on Christmas morning, I almost immediately began scouring Amazon’s website for deals. I soon discovered that many of the cheapest books on kindle are also the oldest. Since older books have fallen out of copyright, electronic publishers can offer such material to customers for a negligible fee, if not for free. If you’re a lover of classic fiction, the first foray into the kindle store feels a little like walking into the perfect library. That is, until you get to the Jules Verne section.
The kindle versions of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires highlight several problems with the way that the electronic texts of the classics are assembled and sold. Take a look at the first page of search results for Mysterious Island in the kindle store. You won’t find any sign of who translated the novel, and most of the time that information isn’t even on the merchandising page for a specific version. Adding to the confusion, Amazon sometimes borrows the product description and reviews from other editions of the same novel. You’ve got to download a sample to be sure of which version you’re reading, and that might involve comparing what’s on your kindle with the various translations available at Project Gutenberg. Many readers won’t care whose translation they’ve got, and I’ll admit that often I don’t. But with Verne, what English version you read apparently matters a great deal: certain 19th century translations of 20,000 Leagues and Mysterious Island remove passages that their translators felt criticized the British Empire; even the best English version of Journey to the Center of the Earth adds allusions that are not present in the French.
But the product page in the kindle store won’t give you this information, nor will it always tell you for certain whether the version you’re about to download has been abridged. I probably seem ungrateful: after all, these books cost almost nothing. Kindle is a fantastic technology for people who love books, but right now Amazon isn’t doing everything it can to cater to that audience. The service could be improved by providing the same level of detail in the descriptions of their electronic books as they do for their physical ones, and guaranteeing that those descriptions fit the product to which they’ve been attached.
Published on January 8th, 2010 in Science Fiction, Technology.
Tags: Jules Verne, Kindle
Welcome to the new Mummies to Mars, with less ambition but more content.
Updates every Monday.
Published on January 8th, 2010 in Meta.
