Skip to main content

Platypus Progressing: The Platypus Reads Part XXXIX


Summer reading rarely goes as planned, and that's the fun of it. Sure, there may be some things you have to read for work or school, but if you have any vacation time, or even if you're just on a day or weekend trip, there's always a place where a good book can be sneaked in. What book? Who cares, so long as it's good!

So, down the winding trails of this summer's reading.

In order to balance out the chunk of Heinlein I started out summer with, I picked up some GKC and CSL. Heretics and The Four Loves are both re-reads, but The Ball and the Cross and The Allegory of Love were both new. B+C was delightful, as Chesterton always is, and A of L was a real mental workout. I'm not a medievalist, but I've read a fair cross-section of the books Lewis is dealing with, and it was good to be able to start forging them into a coherent and linear picture of the development of the courtly love tradition.

After freshening my mind up, I plunged back into the world of 50s sci-fi with Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. That was a scattered and depressing book. Somehow I don't feel consoled by the idea that humanity will be destroyed in order to produce a hive-mind that seems very much less than human. Maybe that's Clark's point. Who knows. If I wanted pan-theistic metaphysics, I would have read Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus; both of whom I heartily enjoy. Anyhow, if his writing was spotty and his philosophy was third-rate, it was still fun to engage a coherent world picture in writing and that seems largely to have been the point; it's speculative fiction.

Keeping with the sci-fi theme, I moved on to Joss Weadon's Serenity: Volume 2. Not much to write home about, but it does feel just like the series. At a price of ten bucks from Amazon, it was worth it. Keep flying!

In the "unfinished" pile right now goes Reynolds' When Athens Met Jerusalem. It's a pretty good intro to Greek thought. I'll say more when my wife and I finish the work.

Meantime, enjoy the summer!
Labels:

Comments

Lemming said…
From what you say, Childhood's End seems like it has a similar ideological conclusion to what Asimov proposes at the end of the Foundation series. (Foundation and Earth) It's also interesting to note, that if you want to enjoy the story going on in books like that, it's generally a bad idea to simultaneously be reading something like Everlasting Man by Chesterton. (or pretty much anything by Chesterton) You may find yourself arguing with the book. (Foundation and Earth) Or, at least, I found I was.
9:46 AM
James said…
Thanks for the tip! I could hear G.K.C. in my head as I was reading it. Someday, I will have to pick up Asmov's Foundation books. They were popular when I was in high school, but somehow I missed the boat. =-(
12:51 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane: The Platypus Reads Part CCLII

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (Cont.): The Platypus Reads Part CCLI

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
16 comments
Read more