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About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

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e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2002-05-29

I’ve fallen in love. Well, not with a person but more of a place. Pandora’s Books. They’re the greatest, ranking even far above that Ali guy. The reason is many of course. That they have books I want to buy is one of them. Another reason is that they had some books I wanted, books I ordered and books I now own. Good books.

• James P. Blaylock: Elfin Ship
  
• James P. Blaylock: Disappearing Dwarf
  
• James P. Blaylock: Night Relics
  
• James P. Blaylock: Paper Grail
  
• Ray Bradbury: Green Shadows, White Whale
  
• John M. Ford: Growing up Weightless
  
• John M. Ford: Scholars of Night
  
• John M. Ford: Web of Angels
  
• Nick O’Donahoe: Too Too Solid Flesh
  
• Tim Powers: Dinner at Deviant’s Palace
  
• Tim Powers: On Stranger Tides
  
• Christopher Priest: An Infinite Summer
  

I’m happy. Happy, happy, happy. Even though I’ve only read one of them — the Bradbury one — I’m fairly sure each and every one of the others are equally good.

This is going to feel awkward, as none of them is by a female author. Female postcolonial authors are most important of all, according to the current Eng.Lit-class. Two lectures of authors from Africa, and then two minutes that basically consisted only of namedropping Poe, Hemmingway, Faulkner and their ilk. Sure, the title of the class was American and postcolonial literature, but what about America?

It is as if you’d give a speech about the important literary figures in England and then brushed over Shakespeare, Jane Austen by casually mentioning their names out of context and then continue to talk about the oh so important Jack Greasemonkey, a cockney who wrote poems during the industrial revolution, never to be published until his poor relatives fifty years after his death finds these poems while after his death going through their loot.

She allegedly even used the phrase “she’s important because she was a woman” which doesn’t mesh at all with my high and apparently lofty opinion of important works. (To make a long story short, it’s not about the gender but the way you use the words, the character and the story. Everything else is irrelevant.) I say “allegedly” because I wasn’t there, but it seems very likely to be something she would say.