Breaking the Monotony.

[badstar]

I haven't read any Heinlein in quite a while and picked up Glory Road on Friday night and was finished with it Saturday night (would have been finished sooner if I didn't need to sleep, didn't stop to watch a couple of discs of Evangelion (chironcentaur decided that she wants to see it. More precisely, she wants to see The End Of Evangelion and has consented to sit through the series first, though is quickly regretting it and desperately wanting to kill every character it seems, except Kaji and Rei, whom she keeps yelling at to kick Asuka's ass. I think she dislikes the series even more than I did when I first watched it. I can't say that I'm absolutely loving it this time around, but after reading a good bit about it some time ago, and having seen it before and seen The End, it's a lot more interesting this time, and I'm catching stuff that I didn't catch before.

That doesn't change the fact that Asuka's an insufferable bitch with an earsplitting voice, Shinji is a spineless weenie (yeah, I guess his weenieness makes The End that much crazier but still), and yeah, I know it's a cartoon but oh my god, could they have made Misato act at least a tiny bit like an adult- and I don't mean all the beer drinking?)

So, anyway....Glory Road was extremely entertaining. I highly recommend. Go read it. I decided a while ago that I need to start reading some of a couple of my favorite authors again, which I hadn't in a while- specifically Jack Kerouac, Robert Heinlein and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. AND I've got a bunch of unfinished books kicking around.

I've decided to keep track of my reading of these authors just for fun...the lists, taken from wikipedia, aren't completely accurate but to get a general idea...

If it's bold, I've read it at least once.
If it's italic, I've read part of it.
If it has **, I have a copy but never started to read it.


Kerouac (Novels only.)

* Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
* Orpheus Emerged
* The Town and the City
* On the Road
* Visions of Cody
* Pic
* Book of Sketches
* Book of Dreams
* Doctor Sax
* Maggie Cassidy
* The Subterraneans
* Good Blonde & Others
* Tristessa
* Visions of Gerard
* Old Angel Midnight
* Desolation Angels
* The Dharma Bums
* Lonesome Traveler
* Big Sur
* Satori in Paris
* Vanity of Duluoz**

Heinlein (Novels.)

* For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs
* Beyond This Horizon
* Rocket Ship Galileo
* Space Cadet
* Red Planet
* Sixth Column (also published as The Day After Tomorrow)
* Farmer in the Sky,
* Between Planets
* The Puppet Masters
* The Rolling Stones aka Space Family Stone
* Starman Jones
* The Star Beast
* Tunnel in the Sky
* Variable Star
* Double Star
* Time for the Stars
* Citizen of the Galaxy
* The Door into Summer
* Have Space Suit—Will Travel**
* Methuselah's Children
* Starship Troopers
* Orphans of the Sky
* Stranger in a Strange Land
* Podkayne of Mars
* Glory Road
* Farnham's Freehold
* The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
* I Will Fear No Evil
* Time Enough for Love
* The Number of the Beast**
* Friday
* Job: A Comedy of Justice**
* The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
* To Sail Beyond the Sunset

("Future History" short fiction)

* "Life-Line", 1939
* "Misfit", 1939
* "The Roads Must Roll", 1940
* "Requiem", 1940
* ""If This Goes On—"", 1940
* "Coventry", 1940
* "Blowups Happen", 1940
* "Universe", 1941
* ""—We Also Walk Dogs"", 1941
* "Common Sense", 1941
* "Methuselah's Children", 1941 (lengthened and published as a novel, 1958)
* "Logic of Empire", 1941
* "Space Jockey", 1947
* ""It's Great to Be Back!"", 1947
* "The Green Hills of Earth", 1947
* "Ordeal in Space", 1948
* "The Long Watch", 1948
* "Gentlemen, Be Seated!", 1948
* "The Black Pits of Luna", 1948
* "Delilah and the Space Rigger", 1949
* "The Man Who Sold the Moon", 1951, Retro Hugo Award
* "The Menace From Earth", 1957
* "Searchlight", 1962


Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(Novels)

* In Evil Hour
* One Hundred Years of Solitude (Have read in both English & Spanish)
* The Autumn of the Patriarch
* Chronicle of a Death Foretold
* Love in the Time of Cholera**
* The General in His Labyrinth
* Of Love and Other Demons
* Memories of My Melancholy Whores

(Collections of short stories)

* No One Writes to the Colonel (I've finished reading the novella No One Writes To The Colonel, but not the rest of the stories in the book)
* Leaf Storm
* Innocent Erendira
* Strange Pilgrims
* Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (the Spanish Language publication of Strange Pilgrims) (Yes, I've read these two separately)

Then today, i was digging through some of my boxes and found a few books I've started reading a few times and never finished..so that's my plan readingwise for the next few days- to read those books.

So I have:

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams (no, not on the above list of course but needs to be read nonetheless.)
Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac

Haven't decided which I want to read first.

Somewhere in all those boxes, I have a couple of the partially-read short story collections by Marquez that I want to read.

Comments

[ranger-hotsauce.livejournal.com]

Feel free to skip "For Us, The Living". There was a reason it wasn't published during his lifetime. At best, it's interesting from a scholarly point of view as it shows the foundation for themes that found their way into other stories he wrote. Coincidentally, I watched a show last night on ABC called "Masters of Science Fiction" which featured an adaptation of Heinlein's "Jerry Was A Man."

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Huh, really? I've talked to several people who read it who said it was really good...what didn't you like about it?

[ranger-hotsauce.livejournal.com]

The plot, such as it is, is nothing more than a framework for Heinlein to hang a bunch of lecturing around. The characters weren't at all developed. I mean, the guy "dies" in a car accident in the 30s, and wakes up 200 years later, apparently in someone else's body, and the reaction of everyone to this is, "huh, that's strange."