April 19, 2007
Irving on Vonnegut Jr.
Tom White sent me this link to an Entertainment Weekly reflection on Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who passed away this week. It's a heartwarming bit from one of America's greatest gifts from Vonnegut (Irving studied under Kurt from 1965-7).
Posted by Steven at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
New Series: Books That Rocked My World
Each week I'll highlight a book I've read, recently or a long time ago, that "rocked my world". Each of these books gave me a new paradigm on the Universe, and altered my perception of it immensely.
They won't be in any particular order, but I'll try to keep the variety up. Most will be scientific texts written for a popular audience, but some will be very rich with ideas and dense with complexity. I have a copy of each of these text in my personal library, and I re-read them every so often to refresh my memory of the concepts and/or worldviews they project.
Needless to say, I recommend them for reading!
%Share and %Enjoy.
Posted by Steven at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2005
Terry Pratchett Tears JK Rowling a New One
The Beeb is offering a story about the frustration that Terry Pratchett feels over how J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter is taking all the oxygen out of the room for other fantasy writers.
He also expressed surprise at Rowling's comments that she only realised Harry Potter was fantasy after the first book was published."I'm not the world's greatest expert," he wrote.
"But I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?"
I've met Terry, and he's not a hot-head nor a crank, so there must be something to this.
Posted by Steven at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2005
Excerpt from John Irving's New Novel
The Globe and Mail is posting excerpts from novels this summer. Here is an excerpt from John Irving's latest novel Until I Find You.
Posted by Steven at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2005
John Irving's Next Novel
CNN published an article about John Irving's newest novel, Until I Find You.
John Irving says his new novel is a melancholy story of an actor whose mother is a tattoo artist from Edinburgh and whose father abandoned them as a child -- a family story that has some echoes in his own life.Irving never knew his own father, a pilot in Asia in World War II who divorced his mother when Irving was two.
The 63-year-old writer, best known for "The World According to Garp," said he only recently realized he has been inventing his father throughout his life and work.
At a reading in New York this week of the early chapters of "Until I Find You," due out in July, Irving said it had taken years and a lot of pain, both physical and mental, to get him to the point where he could address the issue.
The new book is the story of actor Jack Burns from his early years at a girl's boarding school -- it is not clear why -- to his adventures in Hollywood. Jack's mother is a tattoo artist who was abandoned by his father, a tattoo addict and organist she met in church.
"I recognized there were emotional and psychological similarities between myself and Jack Burns," Irving said, explaining his initial decision to write the book as a first-person narrative. Just over a year ago, he handed in the completed work at a mammoth 345,000 words, only to realize it was "too dark" and didn't work in the first person.
"I knew I had to rewrite almost every sentence of it," he said, describing a year of working eight or nine hours a day, seven days a week, battling chronic tendinitis and other aches and pains as he worked in longhand and on an old typewriter.
"I tried taking some marvelous antidepressants, but I couldn't remember the names of the characters in my book," he said at the Monday night book reading.
The final version is 30,000 words shorter, but still his longest novel.
This goes a long way to explaining some of the inspiration for the character Garp, and his mysterious father.
Posted by Steven at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)