Four String Chef
Cook
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2012
- Messages
- 82
Picking up Tao Te Ching again. I've needed some inspiration this past week. The teachings haven't let me down yet so I'ma crack this open once again.
The free version if Arabian Nights for the kindle. The witer's/witers' idea of a hero is every bit as strange to me as the greeks. I mean, Sindbad stole from corpses. Many of the heros are a bit shady or incredibly foolish.
A lot of the stories don't have heros, which is kind of cool. They seem to be about average people who have extrodinary things happen to them. What's interesting is that in most mythology, if an average person has something extrodinary happen to him, he becomes a hero of some sort. In these stories though, the average person just remains an average person.
It's also strange to me how disposable the women in the story are, even though not all of the women are treated as second class citzens and some are powerful sorceresses, or great thinkers, or noteworthy in some other manner. I mean, women are second class, disposable and property in a lot of mythology. The difference in these stories is that in general, women aren't second class or owned, just disposable. It's an odd juxtaposition. I mean, it fits with the over-arching story of a king who kills his bride every morning after a single night of marriage and the bride who is trying to stop the practice. It's still just really diffrent.
I'm also not sure how great this compilation of the stories is. It states that it cut out the poetry and lengthy philosiphizing and other "uninteresting" bits, and put in just the stories. I find at times the narrative jumps abruptly and I wonder how much of that is because things were cut out.
taxlady said:I'm reading 7th Annual Edition, The Year's Best S-F, published in 1963. I love old SF. It is usually dated, but enjoyable. This is surprisingly, mostly not that dated.
One of my favorite collections of SF is an anthology of Hugo award wining SF from the 60's. Isaac Asimov rights a little blurb introducing each story. The entire thing is a great read.
I would get every one of these if I could. The Hugo Winners - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PrincessFiona60 said:Here is the list for the Hugo Winners and Nominees for Best Novel:
Hugo Award for Best Novel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Right, so I was born in 1978, so it would seem logical that I wouldn't recognize the names of a lot of the authors from the mid 80's on and be more familiar with authors from the 90's onward. I'm sort of backward though. From the beginning of the list through 1986 there were very few authors listed whose works were completely unknown to me. I've read at least a short story or two by most of them, although I haven't read many of the works actually listed. From '86 - '93 I recognized about half the authors. After that I recognized the ones that have a more mainstream pressence (JK Roweling, Neil Geiman, George RR Martin) or were mentioned previously in the list (Greg Bear) or I recognized one or two novels that I was like, "Oh, that's who wrote that," but I haven't heard of most of them. So from a litterary perspective I'm stuck in the past from before I was born and not the part that was worth an award... I'm weird Marcy.
I think I started reading SF when I was 7 or 8. I learned very quickly that there was a picture of a rocket on the spine of SF books at the library.LOL! I took a copy of the list and I have most of the winners and nominees.
I love SF, have since I was 5...that was in 1965....I read many of these BEFORE they hit the Hugo list.