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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
I would also recomend Brave New World. And I noticed that you've got War of the Worlds in your list; get The Island of Doctor Moreau (sp), I thought it was better than his more famous work.
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8/16/2007, 12:26 am
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
algy wrote:
I would also recomend Brave New World. And I noticed that you've got War of the Worlds in your list; get The Island of Doctor Moreau (sp), I thought it was better than his more famous work.
THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU is my favourite novel by Wells, closely followed by THE INVISIBLE MAN.
I really like the 1977 film adaptation of DR MOREAU, with Burt Lancaster and Michael York. Frankenheimer/Richard Stanley's early-1990s adaptation managed to explore the relevance of the novel to modern times, despite its failings in other areas (which were mostly the result of its troubled production history; it's an unjustly maligned movie).
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8/16/2007, 2:30 am
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
I've read the ISLAND OF DR MOREAU and also love it, as I do THE INVISIBLE MAN. I've got THE TIME MACHINE sitting on my bookshelf at home, but have not got round to reading it yet. I love the 1960 adaptation with Rod Taylor, but not so much (if at all) the 2002 remake with Guy Pearce.
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8/16/2007, 7:32 am
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
And not forgetting Life of Pi.
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8/16/2007, 4:11 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
Not read it. I know I should really, but it's another I haven't yet got around to.
The movie is currently in production and destined for a 2009 release.
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8/16/2007, 4:40 pm
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
Save me from movies of good books. His Dark Materials is out soon I think. I won't be able to leave it alone but I really want to.
'Should' read is something that haunts all who consider themselves readers, and I think that that's a shame. There's so much stuff out there it's just about impossible to be 'well read' anyway. Although Life of Pi really is worth tracking down.
Still trying to formulate a top ten. I Am Legend might have to figure somewhere.
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8/16/2007, 7:06 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
algy wrote:
'Should' read is something that haunts all who consider themselves readers, and I think that that's a shame. There's so much stuff out there it's just about impossible to be 'well read' anyway. Although Life of Pi really is worth tracking down.
When I tell people I'm a writer, they ask if I've read so-and-so book, assuming that because I'm a writer I will have. When I say no, I don't feel very 'well read'.
You're right, of course. I have a list of books that I should read, and want to read, but I'm so busy that the pile is growing quicker than I can read. It's almost impossible.
quote:
algy wrote:
Still trying to formulate a top ten. I Am Legend might have to figure somewhere.
I AM LEGEND is a great book that I forgot about when compiling my ten. It's a long time ago since I read it, and I'm gutted that Will Smith is the lead in the new movie - Independance Day with vamps. Oh dear.
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8/16/2007, 7:39 pm
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algy
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
I think *he* can pull it off but it depends on the objectives of the film. If they're looking for Indepedance Day vampires then we're buggered. If they're not... I have a litle faith in the Fresh Prince.
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8/16/2007, 9:39 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
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algy wrote:
I think *he* can pull it off but it depends on the objectives of the film. If they're looking for Indepedance Day vampires then we're buggered. If they're not... I have a litle faith in the Fresh Prince.
Okay, I think we're buggered. The director is Francis Lawrence, who's only feature film to date is 2005's CONSTANTINE... I'm not even going to say anything about that. His credits before that include... wait for it... BRITNEY SPEARS: GREATEST HITS VIDEO COMPILATION, 2004. Oh dear.
It gets worse. The writers, a tag-team comprising Mark Protosevich, whose only writing credits are THE CELL, 2005, and POSEIDON, 2006, and Akiva Goldsman, who's credits include: THE DA VINCI CODE, 2006, I, ROBOT, 2004, BATMAN FOREVER, 1995, and BATMAN AND ROBIN, 1997.
The producers come with experience in Harry Potter films, I, Robot, Stealth, Hitch etc, etc, etc...
All hope is lost. Me thinks Independance Day vamps are inevitable.
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8/16/2007, 10:36 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Ten favourite novels of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries
quote:
algy wrote:
'Should' read is something that haunts all who consider themselves readers, and I think that that's a shame. There's so much stuff out there it's just about impossible to be 'well read' anyway.
I don't know about that; it depends how you spend your time. It's harder for young people to be well-read, because they've got all sorts of other media vying for their attention, from the Internet to mobile telephones (which, with most adolescents, seem to be permanently in hand) and video games. The problem is that no-one seems willing to teach kids how to distinguish between texts that are worthy of their interest and those which are trite nonsense: the delivery of English literature in schools has lost its way, becoming too entrenched in a relativist approach, which is fine for anybody studying above, say, the second year of an undergraduate degree, but young people need to be taught how to evaluate texts--otherwise you end up with a society that sits on its bum watching BIG BROTHER all day, all the while convinced that the show is a worthwhile exercise. Kids need to be taught how to sort out the wheat from the chaff, and at the moment that's not happening, thanks to poor staffing at schools (I've heard horror stories about some schools giving places to people who are qualified in one subject and, to fill their hours, being asked to teach another; English literature is the subject that suffers from this the most, because nowadays school managers are often essentially glorified bookkeepers, and they see the subject as an 'easy touch', not understanding the complexities involved in it.)
It's slightly harder now to be 'well read' than it was, say, ten years ago; similarly, it's harder now to be well-versed in the canon of great cinema. Aside from the weaknesses in the delivery of English literature to secondary school students, the reason is that there is a surplus of choice due to snowballing trends in the publication of pop literature and film production.
To focus on film for a minute, with each year the number of movies produced increases, and now more films are produced each year than were produced between around 1895 and 1915. In 1960 or 1970, with a lot of devotion and with access to the prints it may have been possible to watch just about every movie that had ever been produced.
Ten years ago, when I studied for my first degree, it was relatively easy to get access to the canon of universally-acclaimed movies, thanks to heavy rotation in the television schedules (usually in the afternoons or at nights). Now, thanks in large part to the digital boom (there are huge amounts of films shot on the cheap, with digital cameras) and facilitated by new and more direct channels of distribution and marketing (principally, the Internerd), there is such a sheer volume of material that the canon of great films has been pushed away from the television schedules in favour of the new 'fad', whatever that may be.
People interested in film now have to actively seek out those films within the canon, usually discovering that they have to import them on DVD from America or France. (When was the last time an Orson Welles movie or a film by John Ford was shown on mainstream television?)
I often have this conversation with my officemate Laurie, and we've both noticed that over the past five years, there has been a massive leap downwards in terms of students' experience of important movies or literature: they spend so much time catching up with the new releases that they don't have time to catch up with the classics, and they find it hard to judge one from t'other. If you ask a student what was the last Welles movie they watched, or even what was the last movie they watched that was made before, say, 1970, they will invariably find it hard to give you an answer. And not only that, over the past five years the students that have enrolled on the courses tend to be less critical and more likely to say 'I don't like such-and-such' or 'I like such-and-such', confusing an opinion about something with a reasoned critical analysis of it that is supported by research. (This is evident both in class discussions and in students' essays; whereas when I started teaching HE, seven years ago, this was quite a rare occurence, over the past year or two probably around half of the essays I'm given to mark suffer from this particular problem. And once the habit has set in, it's difficult to turn these students around, making the job five times as hard as it should be.)
(There are all sorts of other problems too--the worst of which is the fact that a lot of HE students surprisingly enrol on degree courses and then expect to be spoonfed, like they would be at GCSE level; I've talked about this with my PhD supervisor at Hull, and he says that they're experiencing the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree than in Grimsby. But this is leading us into another topic: the failings of the modern education system. I don't want to go there, but suffice to say a lot has changed during the past ten years, and very few of those changes have been for the better.)
Anyway, having waffled for a bit, to go back to a point I was making in a previous paragraph: when there's such a sheer volume of material, very little of it is of a particularly good quality. Honestly, leaving aside maybe ten authors who have been writing for fifteen years or more (James Ellroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Walter Mosley Jr), most of the current batch of factory-line produced literature is really pitiful: it rarely transcends the middlebrow, and very often it seems to be produced on a factory line like no other era of literature before it. The biggest growing areas are still the 'chick-lit' or, now, the 'chick-crime' (e.g. your Patricia Cornwells, etc) genres and the middlebrow novel, which usually isn't much better--it strives for a social conscience, but ends up simply being about the trials and tribulations of being a young middle-class professional. Steinbeck it ain't.
However, the last new author to produce something interesting was, for me, Chuck Palahniuk, and his first novel was published almost ten years ago. Before Palahniuk, it was Richard Price. However, thinking back to the 1980s there were comparatively heaps of 'new voices' that were worth listening to.
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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8/16/2007, 11:19 pm
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