Month: October 2014

Thursday Thoughts: Bookish Fandoms

Posted October 2, 2014 by in General / 2 Comments

This week’s prompt from Ok, Let’s Read is about bookish fandoms…

Do you have any experience with fandoms in the bookish world? What fandoms do you consider yourself to be a part of? Have you ever created something pertaining to your favorite books as a part of the fandom (i.e. artwork, music, fanfic, cosplay)? Can you share your creation with us?

I’m less into bookish fandoms than I am into stuff like the MCU, the Young Avengers comics, Captain Marvel, etc. I can’t think of any strictly bookish t-shirts I have, for example — I’ve got two Captain Marvel shirts, some Avengers and Captain America ones, etc, but it’s mostly comics and games. I do like getting involved in events, like The Dark is Rising readathon that happened last year, and I’d have loved to go to the recent anniversary celebration of The Fionavar Tapestry and so on.

If you count Arthuriana as one big fandom, well, I know all the Arthurian songs of Heather Dale off by heart, and have written a bunch of stories and poetry based on the Arthurian legends (usually taking them and skewing it, so I’ve written about Tristan and Isolde from Mark’s point of view, etc).

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Review – Life

Posted October 1, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Life: An Unauthorised Biography by Richard ForteyLife, Richard Fortey

This isn’t my favourite of Fortey’s books, possibly because I’ve read similar types of books by other writers before, so he isn’t bringing me a new subject I don’t expect to like in the same way as he was in his books about geology, or a key passion of his as in his book about trilobites (though trilobites have their place here, too, as you’d expect with Fortey). Still, I enjoy the way he writes and the way he draws together his themes, and this isn’t a bad book — it’s just that he and others have covered a lot of this ground before.

Actually, my favourite history-of-evolution type book is Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. (When Dawkins sticks to science, he’s great. When he decides to comment on twitter, rarely so.) That’s just a quirk of the way he organises it, though, while Fortey’s method is a little less organised, lingering on things of special interest to him. Which is fine, but didn’t work so well for me in this case. That, and he doesn’t deal with DNA as much as I’d like, because that’s my special interest and not his.

Nonetheless, Fortey knows his stuff and how to make it enjoyable, though I think I can understand people who complain about his writing style not being easy — I tend to take it slow and savour it, myself.

Rating: 3/5

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