Nothing like the Sun
I've been making a point of re-reading books recently. Whenever I do videogame work, we're always talking about "replay value," how to make the same experience entertaining the second or third time around. My instincts are the same with books. When I was a kid, I'd read a book I liked four or five times at least, partly because they were fun, and partly because there was always a niggling sensation that I was still missing something, there was a little more juice to squeeze out of it.
I always think about that writing, and try to hide extra layers in the story, jokes under the jokes, puns you can read differently if you know what's coming. With that in mind, I'm rereading Anthony Burgess' "Nothing Like the Sun," which is great fun. It's brimful with lines like, "he deems himself to be above the supererogatory fripperosities of poetlings." That could be a grad student exercising his tuition, or Roald Dahl's BFG describing the occupants of a bellyflopper. I love it.
It also drew my attention to this line from Edmond Spenser's Epithalamion:
But this rereading is taking its toll on my old books. This picture is the back corner of my copy of "Nothing Like the Sun." Sad to see a book falling apart, but I gotta say I kind of love how much it looks like erosion revealing the strata of ancient eras in a canyon
I always think about that writing, and try to hide extra layers in the story, jokes under the jokes, puns you can read differently if you know what's coming. With that in mind, I'm rereading Anthony Burgess' "Nothing Like the Sun," which is great fun. It's brimful with lines like, "he deems himself to be above the supererogatory fripperosities of poetlings." That could be a grad student exercising his tuition, or Roald Dahl's BFG describing the occupants of a bellyflopper. I love it.
It also drew my attention to this line from Edmond Spenser's Epithalamion:
"Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not,
Fray us with things that be not:"
Fray us with things that be not:"
If the man wasn't four hundred years dead he could probably sue me for stealing material for the Clemency Pogue books.
But this rereading is taking its toll on my old books. This picture is the back corner of my copy of "Nothing Like the Sun." Sad to see a book falling apart, but I gotta say I kind of love how much it looks like erosion revealing the strata of ancient eras in a canyon
