Blog posts -- 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1996
Shorter Lost Finale Review
Posted by James on May 24, 2010Flash-sideways resolve into a shoddy Ubik rip-off. Final season is marvellous, in the absence of about 75% of what came before! (My full review will be up on Strange Horizons soon. In the meantime, some critical roundup is here).
Ouch
Posted by James on May 21, 2010Adam Roberts has been reading the Wheel of Time series, all in a row, a project which has apparently driven him to madness and out-of-control literary-theory name-dropping by volume 9:
What is ‘cleansed’ in this interminable text is narrative itself: drama, plot, narrative interest. This, of course, is why the book is called ‘Winter’s Heart’; not because the wotworld is in the grip of a profound winter—although it is—and not in allusion to Rand’s supposedly ‘wintry’ heart—although some play is made of this idea. But no, actually the evident allusion is to Barthe’s Le Degré zéro de l'écriture. This is Jordan's attempt at a Barthean masterpiece, written in a weird yet ideologically freighted ‘blank’ style that is achieved not by neoclassical restraint but on the contrary by hurling great quantities (we might say, by a blizzard) of chaff at the reader
Evidently, the series is not for him. Back when he looked at volume 8, Roberts tried to figure out what the series might provide to its readers.
Awful Library Books
Posted by James on January 15, 2010The librarians who run the blog Awful Library Books were recently on Jimmy Kimmel.
