The books of MacDonald Harris

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Philip Pullman writes about the books of MacDonald Harris.

MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney (1921-1993), a naval veteran and distinguished professor of literature.

Philip Pullman says

I’m astonished, really, that such a clever and interesting writer should have vanished so completely: I’ve spoken of him to several well-read people, and none of them has heard of him. Perhaps he lacked some vital ingredient, that mysterious mana that brings commercial and critical success to many writers nowhere near as good. Perhaps it was just that he was too interested in too many kinds of life, and didn’t stick to one sort of book. Perhaps he never quite managed a single undeniable masterpiece, whose gravitational field would have pulled his other work into prominence. Besides, none of his novels has been filmed.Buy him while you can, is my advice. Here is a full list of his novels:

Private Demons (1961); Mortal Leap (1964); Trepleff (1968); Bull Fire (1973); The Balloonist (1976); Yukiko (1977); Pandora’s Galley (1979); The Treasure of Sainte Foy (1980); Herma (1981); Screenplay (1982); Tenth (1984); The Little People (1986); Glowstone (1987); Hemingway’s Suitcase (1990); Glad Rags (1991); A Portrait of My Desire (1993).

If you Google his name, you’ll find a short and interesting website about his life and work.

Book review: Wuthering Heights

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Elizabeth Baines reviews Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It’s a book that she read as a teen and then as an adult.

Norm writes:

Elizabeth Baines is a prize-winning radio playwright and the author of numerous short stories as well as two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. More recently she has become an occasional actor, and has written for the theatre, producing her own stage plays, ‘Drinks with Natalie’ and the award-winning ‘O’Leary’s Daughters’.

Elizabeth Baines on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Which book has been most important to me? Well, how would I choose? Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, both of which, aged eleven, I bought from Woolworth’s with my saved-up pocket money and which most certainly coloured my emotional landscape and increased my (already formed) determination to write? Or George Orwell’s essays, which, when I was at university, hit me right in the eyes with a clean fresh blast of political air and ensured that in future I would be aware of the politics of whatever I wrote? But wait – wasn’t I once asked this question before, and didn’t I answer unhesitatingly, ‘Wuthering Heights‘, because this novel, with its striking structure – a narrative within a narrative, yet containing other narratives, a layering of voices and perspectives – has probably had the greatest impact on my own writing

Read on

Greg Laden’s Congo Memoirs

Greg Laden has written an account of some of his adventures while doing field work in Africa in the 1980s. You can find them at The Congo  Memoirs.

Update: link corrected

Books!

I keep finding more books in the impromptu bookstore. I bought two books by The Amazing Randi and got them signed.

Jane Austen’s blighted romance

New evidence suggests that Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, interfered with Jane’s chances for a happy marriage.

Random Thought: Jorge Luis Borges on writing

From the Wikipedia article on Jorge Luis Borges:

Borges’s cosmopolitanism allowed him to free himself from the trap of local color. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as “La muerte y la brújula”, were Argentine without pandering to his readers. In his essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición”, Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Koran was proof enough that it was an Arabian work. He suggested that only someone trying to write an “Arab” work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos (both of which he also did).

Music: Dar Williams’ “February”

“And February was so long that it lasted into March…”

Lyrics here: February

It has been very cold the last few days, so it seemed like we were still back in February.

Lynne Murray’s book blog

I stumbled upon this book blog while looking for something else: Lynne Murray’s “30 Years Ago Today: I had an orange notebook.” Here’s part of her article about “Motherhood: humor, sadness, artistry, magic & grace“:

Shirley Jackson is arguably a better writer than my favorite domestic goddess essayist, Betty MacDonald who wrote: The Egg and I, The Plague and I, Onions in the Stew, Anybody Can Do Anything, and um, a bunch of children’s books…

MacDonald was more of a comic genius. (She created the unforgettable Ma and Pa Kettle, based on farming neighbors in Washington state.)

Jackson and MacDonald both address what someone has called “the visceral shock of motherhood” and the disillusionment of the drudgery of family life from a woman’s point of view. I lent out my copy of The Egg and I, so I can’t quote you the passage where McDonald describes the shock of her swift descent from bride to wife. She made it funny, but you could see why her first marriage ended in divorce as she detailed her transition between being a sought-after bride to living with a husband who considered her a “bad sport” or inept because she didn’t share his knack for and joy in the drudgery of farm life. I remember reading it at 12 or so, and thinking, hmmm . . . men, marriage, maybe there’s something there that the romantic stories don’t mention.

STC Toronto judging is done

The STC Toronto judging team descended on Front Runner, whose offices hosted the judging day, on January 10th. Each team of three judges had two or, rarely, three entries to judge.

The entries could be for technical publications (in one of many catergories) or the parallel online tech pubs competition. And each entry was judged by three judges.  We all had a chance to evaluate the entries in advance, using detailed guides that instructed us to consider each aspect of an entry and assign a score to that aspect. So the judging day was mostly for discussing the entries and selecting a concensus score for each aspect.

It took several hours but finally all the scores were harmonized among the teams of judges for each entry. On mA good job well done.

Currently reading

Started:

• The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh by C. J. Cherryh
• The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, stories selected by Ellen Datlow
• The Heart of Valor by Tanya  Huff – third in a series about a sergeant in warfare

Finished:

• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. Finished. It really is like Heinlein without the lectures.