(no subject)

[eldritchhobbit]

Happy early birthday to onegoat and roo2. May you both have terrific days and wonderful years to come!


In other news...

* A new interview with me is up today at Journey to the Sea: "Native America and Speculative Fiction: Interview with Amy H. Sturgis."

* Librivox.org has released new unabridged readings of interest to genre fans:
-- The Door through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley
-- Librivox's Short Science Fiction Collection #24 by C.M. Kornbluth, Harry Harrison, and Philip K. Dick, among others
-- Librivox's Short Ghost and Horror Collection #5 by Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Hope Hodgson, among others

* From Wired: "10 Sci-Fi Movies We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole."

* It's here! Hog's Head Conversations: Essays on Harry Potter is now available at Amazon. This collection includes my essay “When Harry Met Faërie: Rowling’s Hogwarts, Tolkien’s Fairy-Stories, and the Question of Readership,” as well as essays by Travis Prinzi, Colin Manlove, John Granger, and many more. A review and list of the contents is posted here.




"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly."
- C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children"

Comments

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I've never ever understood the disdain 'adults' have for things they consider childish: even the trend to having adult covers for books aimed initially at the children's market, while admirable for extending the adult readership of such books, is one that I tend to mock internally. Be proud of your reading tastes! Stand up for the excellence of juvenile fiction!!

Yes, yes, yes! I couldn't agree more. :)

Thank you SO much for the recommendation of Rejuvenile. I hadn't come across that title before, and it's obviously something I need to read, and soon! I appreciate it.

[gloriana.livejournal.com]

(and answering these all at once, since my isp was holding my mail hostage yesterday)

What might be most of interest is the way he's covering quite a few areas, not particularly books. I do wonder whether in the text he relates this at all to ideas on how creative play can inform and stimulate better work practices.

(I wonder partly because I hang around with far too many programmers, many of whom are still wedded to comics and wargaming and all the stuff we were supposed to leave behind as kids; and partly because my husband works for a Very Well Known computing firm, where play is taken so far that the whole decor is in primary colours and the cafeteria comes straight out of kindergarten, I swear.)

Perhaps this need to hang on to the play we used as children is an outcome of the fact that our work demands increasingly inventive, independent and lateral-thinking forms of intelligence. Or perhaps it's another of those side-effects of shifting the reproductive and aging periods of our life forward. If you get it, do give us the potted review :)