After reading more, it would be more accurate to say “errors in virtually every paragraph.” The editing and copyediting are pretty bad.
Having read some documents that fit this description myself, I feel your pain. I'm thinking of a placeholder name that one of my professors at CSU Long Beach used (he taught second-semester Freshman English): "Jeffrey Benderverben." And as I recall, he said in so many words that it was a name intended to suggest somebody who would inflict what you describe on defenseless readers.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm now past Apollo 17, Skylab, and the beginnings of the Shuttle. The next chapter is titled, “The Boldest Test Flight in History.” You can probably guess what it's about.
I'm now up to the beginning of the chapter on the Challenger Disaster. And it's a long one. Over the past chapter or so, there's been a lot of hindsight about leaky SRB o-rings.
I've started seeing stories I'm more familiar with in my Poe collection: I just finished The Murders in the Rue Morgue this afternoon. It's been an eye-opening experience so far. I grew up with the standard doom-and-gloom view of Poe's writing. Of course, I knew he wrote detective stories, but I've been pleasantly surprised finding out just how wide his literary range was.
I remember being introduced to his short stories in a high school English class. And found that, of the few I read, "The Pit and the Pendulum" was (and still is) my favorite, because for all the tortures the narrator endures, by those seeking to break him, there's a happy ending, when he finally gets rescued.
Haven't read any of his detective fiction; I'm only familiar with Dupin from Sherlock Holmes being so famously dismissive of him.
I was first introduced to Poe through his poetry in (I think) 8th grade. Then I read a book of his short stories and fell in love.
If anybody is ever in Baltimore, I highly recommend the Poe Museum (https://www.poeinbaltimore.org). They have a big festival in early October.
If anybody is ever in Baltimore, I highly recommend the Poe Museum (https://www.poeinbaltimore.org). They have a big festival in early October.
My first exposure to Poe was audio, not visual. My parents had an LP with several of his stories, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado. I have no idea when they got the album, nor when it was pressed. The closest thing I could find online to what I remembered was a two-disc LP. The second disc has stories by Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ambrose Bierce, but I don't remember ever hearing those. As near as I can remember, the album I heard was a single disc. Maybe it was a repress on an obscure label, but I couldn't find any sign of it online. The first time I read any of his work, IIRC, was in a Scholastic anthology.
I plotted out a Dupin story last year, but I was unhappy with it and set it aside. This prompted me to think about it again, and I think I may have had a better idea. I'll kick it around.
Sometimes I think Holmes' beef with Dupin was deeply personal, that Dupin was involved in some way with his French Vernet ancestors. That wasn't the Dupin idea I had been musing on, but now I am musing on it, too.
That sounds like a very interesting idea to explore. I know Alan Moore had an aged Dupin appear in the first series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so a head-to-head encounter between the consulting detectives would be possible.
Funny: it's been years since I last read A Study in Scarlet, but my understanding was always that Dupin was a fictional character in the Holmes milieu.
He was, you're not wrong. I'm treating Poe like Doyle, as the "literary agent" for the writer of the stories of their respective detectives, because it's fun (for me) to see where that might lead.
Boy, it's been a long time since I read any Poe. I may have read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket a couple of decades ago, and I've read a number of the short stories. I have no more useful comments to make on the subject, alas.
I've read Russell T Davies's book The Queerest of Folk and commented on it in the RTD discussion in TrekBBS's Doctor Who forum. Breezy, covers all the shows he's worked on, but not much depth.
Then I decided to read some Lovecraftian stuff that's probably been loaded on a few consecutive ereaders without being read yet. Cassandra Khaw's novellas Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet were part of Tor's run of Lovecraftian stuff for a more modern audience. The first was a good horror story set in London. The latter... well, writers trying to write about music sometimes get carried away in a rush of overwritten poetic prose, and that understates a lot of this one.
Then, with a less self-consciously literary approach, Graham MacNeill's Dark Waters trilogy, three books tying into the Arkham Horror universe. By now there are a few dozen novels, novellas, short stories, and comics tying into the Lovecraft-based Arkham Horror game, and the consistent descriptions of the city of Arkham and the recurring characters who appear in different media adds to the fun. This trilogy was better than okay, a little long, with a concluding action sequence that went by more quickly than I expected, but also some memorably weird set pieces. So, not bad for anyone not turned off by the idea of Lovecraft game tie-ins.
I've read Russell T Davies's book The Queerest of Folk and commented on it in the RTD discussion in TrekBBS's Doctor Who forum. Breezy, covers all the shows he's worked on, but not much depth.
Then I decided to read some Lovecraftian stuff that's probably been loaded on a few consecutive ereaders without being read yet. Cassandra Khaw's novellas Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet were part of Tor's run of Lovecraftian stuff for a more modern audience. The first was a good horror story set in London. The latter... well, writers trying to write about music sometimes get carried away in a rush of overwritten poetic prose, and that understates a lot of this one.
Then, with a less self-consciously literary approach, Graham MacNeill's Dark Waters trilogy, three books tying into the Arkham Horror universe. By now there are a few dozen novels, novellas, short stories, and comics tying into the Lovecraft-based Arkham Horror game, and the consistent descriptions of the city of Arkham and the recurring characters who appear in different media adds to the fun. This trilogy was better than okay, a little long, with a concluding action sequence that went by more quickly than I expected, but also some memorably weird set pieces. So, not bad for anyone not turned off by the idea of Lovecraft game tie-ins.
I am reminded of a comment I remember seeing in the distant past, where the commenter said he liked 28 Days Later right up until the last scene, where we see that survivors have left a large message spelled out in stones for passing aircraft to hopefully spot. The message is actually HELLO, but the commenter thought it said HELL, and said that this ruined the film for them.
People are derps.
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