Since Andy mentioned he was looking for stuff we have been reading, I thought I'd breifly mention a couple of things that have passed through my fingers recently.
In the last few weeks I'd been really struggling to find anything worth reading. I was meandering through "First King of Shannara" by Terry Brooks, a truly awful novel. I cannot imagine how Terry Brooks has come to have such a huge fanbase when the novels he writes are as poor as this. The plot was predictable and sluggish, the characters paper-thin caricatures of Dungeons and Dragons proportions, the writing style was flat and unexciting. Altogether dreadful, and I was only reading it as I had nothing else small enough to fit in my pocket.
I then moved onto a book called Thraxas Under Siege, which interestingly combines a fantasy world with a film-noir private detective type. The film-noir effect is acheived by writing in present tense singular, which I found very off-putting at the beginning, but to which I gradually adapted myself. A strong comic vein ran throughout this novel, and the centre character was always more interested in getting a drink of the Abbot's Darkest Ale than in solving the mystery or fighting off the hordes of marauding orcs. The book ended on a cliffhanger, with Thraxas rushing towards the shore, hotly pursued by a dragon. All in all a very unusual book, but I loved the combination of detective genre with fantasy.
Continuing with the fantasy theme, I am reading a dark fantasy called Heathen, where a widow sets off to uncover the mystery surrounding her husbands death and insteead finds Satanists of witches or a gang of lunatics of some description. (I haven't got to that point in the book yet, and I'm not desperate to find out either.) The book is very depressing in its tone and tells you every little detail of the persons life, including what they have for breakfast each day.
I am also reading "Candide" by Voltaire, in a modern English translation. I am finding it quite gripping and I love the piercing satire with which Voltaire takes the established philosophies, constructed in ivory towers, and confronts them with the terrible realities of war and earthquake. One striking example is Jacques, the noble-hearted Anabaptist, too afraid of failure as a Christian, to ever let himself be baptised. Now, in the middle of a terrible storm at sea, he pulls a sailor back from certain death. When the next wave hits the ship, Jacques is thrown overboard and the sailor doesn't give him a second thought. Jacques drowns in the sea: a permanant and involuntary baptism. The whole incident is related starkly in about five lines, and the rest of the book is like it. The writing is prosaic and tongue in cheek, which contrasts most effectively with the terrible events told in page after page. I'm loving it, so far.
Finally I'm also reading the massive Calvin's Institutes (a couple of pages a week!) Its a very insightful look at the Bible, looking in depth at issues such as Who is God? What is the nature of man? Can the Bible be trusted? Are we free? What is the importance of Jesus Christ? I think the one main thing it says is that Christianity is most certainly not blind faith (regardless of how it is frequently portrayed in the media). It is rational, thoughtful, intelligent. It is not a faith which goes against reason, but a faith which leads on from reason.
On a more general note, the books which really stand out to me which I have read over the last year would be the Lucifer series by Neil Gaiman, Scar Night by Allen Campbell and the Children of the Serpent Gate trilogy by Sarah Ash. These are all very original and thought provoking and the last one especially would be wonderful as a high budget TV drama.
And a weblink to http://www.petting-zoo.org/TinyStories.html where I have found some inspiring stories for adaptation into short films.
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