Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Saturday
We didn't know Ozzy was a "Taipei personality"!
(Via Jane)TAIPEI (Reuters) - After 14 failed attempts at joining the United Nations using media campaigns and presidential appeals, Taiwan is turning to a local goth-style rock band backed by Ozzy Osbourne in its quest for membership to the world body....The band, named ChthoniC, will travel to at least 80 cities in four countries by the end of the year, supported in part by the Taiwan government, which is providing pro-U.N. literature and a slogan-painted truck.
Also....missed this Lloyd Alexander obit in the NYT.....reminded to look after reading this new one in the Guardian....Chronicles of Prydain vs. Chronicles of Narnia — who would win???
Labels: Lloyd Alexander, Taiwan, Who would win???
posted by Ed Park @ 10:07 AM
7 Comments:
Prydain in a walk.
I hadn't heard that Lloyd Alexander had died. I must have read the Prydain Chronicles and the Westmark trilogy half a dozen times as a kid. The only books that even came close to captivating me as much as a kid were Over Sea, Under Stone (for some reason the only one of the Dark Is Rising sequence I read until years later) and Watership Down.
Not to give away which side I come down on, but did Narnia ever have a Sierra game based on it? I thought not. If you have Windows and are feeling particularly down about Alexander, you can download it here...
Hmm, I was very sad when LA died recently, made me think of course about childhood reading, but I'd have to say that though I loved the Prydain books when I was a kid (and perhaps my favorite Alexander book of all is "The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian"), I don't think they stand up to adult rereading nearly as well Susan Cooper's.
(I read the Narnia books again and again from a pretty young age, so they're deep in my psyche in a way even those others aren't. Watership Down, of course, too, I pathologically reread countless times! That whole thing about the rabbits who make art and die in traps is so CRAZY, isn't it?!?)
I still remember bits of lapine vocab — "Silflay hraka u embleer ra"...also bits of Dune vocab...New string: BOOKS WITH GLOSSARIES.
(Oddly I could never get into Cooper, indeed have THE GREY KING here thinking I will read it one of these days....I cast my vote for Prydain, I think...!)
JD, the current issue of Locus has a remembrance of LA by Garth Nix....
Idalia, what is "Sierra"?
Everyone should read Levi's great post on LA, over at his blog!
Sierra was a video game company, one of the first to make games for computers - didn't you ever play King's Quest? Actually I hardly did as a kid - we had an uncle who had this thing "a computer" and they had King's Quest and we used to get these tantalizing snatches of it. Black Cauldron, though, we played the very minute we had a computer of our own.
If you're more pornographically-minded you might have tried Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry. Black Cauldron was the same, except instead of seducing ladies you were running from witches and trying to gain access to the castle...
I don't think we can bring Susan Cooper into this though. Then it becomes more like a "who would obviously win????"
Levi — I need backup here!!
I feel like I can't fully weigh in on the Alexander vs. Cooper debate, because the only Susan Cooper I read as a kid was Over Sea, Under Stone. As I mentioned above, it was one of my favorite books . . . and, sorry Idalia, but when I read the other volumes of The Dark Is Rising as an adult, they weren't as good as I'd hoped.
Whereas what was so gripping about Over Sea, Under Stone, even when I read it as an adult, was the way the mythical elements and the reality of present-day life were so deeply intertwined, with the other books I felt that the mythical quests became a bit too removed from the reality of the kids' lives, robbing the books of some of the drama that the first one had. That's not to say they weren't good--the whole time I was reading them I was wishing I'd read them when I was young.
And maybe my criticism is unfair--it's possible that I'd have the same reaction to the Prydain books as an adult as well. I haven't reread them, though now that I've pulled them off the shelf to write about Lloyd Alexander . . .
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