Remember I told you that I'd been downloading some really promising looking free e-books off the Internet?
Well, now I can report back to you that I've actually started reading them.
The Floating Island Of Madness made an ideal companion on the Intercity journey from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston - not least because it is a classic example of total sci-fi schlock and roll.
It recounts the exciting and vital tale of an American secret service agent who gets together with his counterparts from the British and French secret services to investigate the mysterious disappearances of a number of people in the vicinity of Constantinople (note that the book seems to be set in the present-day of the period at which it was written, the Thirties, yet the author still refers to the city as 'Constantinople').
As this is meant to be a premier slice of riproaring techno-adventure, writer Jason Kirby prefers to cut straight to the chase, so he doesn't bother wasting any of his valuable narrative time and energy with any poncey niceties of more mainstream literature, such as characterisation and motivation.
Instead, the three agents simply climb into a plane and zoom off in the direction of the Arabian Desert (er, how close is this to Istanbul 'not Constantinople', exactly? Will have to get round to looking it up, but can't imagine it being exactly next door or anything).
After flying around all day attempting to catch up with the elusive gliders that have apparently been spiriting people away from the city rooftops, at sunset they reluctantly decide to turn back and head for the airport.
However, this sensible plan fails to come to fruition - because their plane has now been caught by one of the mysterious tractor beams emanating from the floating island of madness.
Helpless, but not hopeless (if they were, then there would be no basis for a story), they are dragged miles and miles off-course, right up to the notorious island itself.
Despite the fact that this island is several acres in diameter and floats two thousand feet above the Arabian Desert, the mad scientist that runs the joint is convinced that nobody back down on the ground has the slightest idea what he's up to!
Yes, this place has been created by a classic barmy boffin.
Although he is named Fraser and looks more like Hercule Poirot than Albert Einstein, this delightful individual is indeed a classic example of the genre. With a mind the equal of someone like Stephen Hawking, he originally came to prominence via some fascinating discoveries connected with 'light'. What these were precisely we are never told, quite possibly because Jason Kirby himself knew five fifths of bugger-all about science, and doubted his target audience would care, either.
Anyway, Fraser then lost no time in going nuts, so he was promptly consigned to one of the best bins in the business.
Everybody thought that would be the last of him - until he very conveniently escaped.
The men in white coats wielding the massive butterfly nets failed to catch him, and he was thus registered as a missing person.
Of course, Fraser is one of those barking mad scientists who believe in giving full value for money. Therefore he indulges himself to the max explaining all his fiendish and unspeakably evil plans to his three prisoners in almost mind-boggling detail.
According to his own incredibly self-indulgent monologues, the floating island of madness owes its very existence to that world-beating combination of raving genius and what Ben Goldacre from The Guardian would call Seriously Bad Science.
Defying the very laws of physics, Fraser has invented an almost weightless new element called 'fleolite' (sic). This you can pour into moulds and let set like concrete. The entire island has been constructed from it, and the only reason it doesn't float right off the planet altogether and up into space is because there are enough people and vehicles living on it to weigh it down a bit.
Now, at this point the reader, very much like the three secret agents themselves, may be wondering just how Fraser managed to persuade all his many and varied personnel to come and work for him on such a ricketty, out-of-the-way structure.
Time to introduce technical innovation number two. Fraser's strange discoveries about light inevitably led him to develop the tractor beam - several centuries before the characters in Star Trek thought up the idea.
But that's not all this amazing boffin keeps up his sleeve ...
To ensure that his unwilling guests don't cause any more trouble once he's brought them there, he gets every last one of them injected as soon as possible with a secret serum that he developed on his day off.
This unlikely substance is what sends you mad. Your intellect keeps working as per normal, but all your emotions are permanently switched off.
Fraser went teapot quite naturally, but everybody else who works for him has been treated with this horrible drug (wonder how he persuaded the first one of them to take it, then? Now THAT would be an interesting story and a half ... ).
The three agents are next on the list for conversion - until they manage to trip Fraser's looney doctor assistant up, causing the contents of the syringe to spill out onto the floor. They then fill it back up again with harmless water.
This is as far as I've got at the moment, but I'll be sure to keep you posted on subsequent developments (assuming the rest of the book lives up to this early promise. If not, then I probably won't be arsed and will just talk about something completely different instead).
Still, it's nice to know that the stock literary figure of the Mad Scientist was not only alive and well, but cooking on gas at such a relatively early date.
I'm sure someone somewhere must have bothered to study the phenomenon in relentless and bum-numbing detail, so I'm off now to look up their work and see what it says.
In the meantime, what continues to perplex me is the issue of who precisely would have read this stuff when it first came out. Presumably people who knew so little about real science and technology that they were easily overawed by Kirby's crap theorising and so took it on face value.
Yet in his classic study New Maps Of Hell, veteran sci-fi aficionado Kingsley Amis states quite clearly and unequivocally that many of the readers of the genre from the late Twenties on actually were trained in some sort of scientific or technological based discipline as part of their jobs or careers, so you'd reckon that they would have been able to recognise that Fraser's inventions were total and utter bollocks.
And back in the late nineteenth century, no less a writer than Jules Verne himself declared that there is no point in writing science fiction unless you make quite sure to get the science bit right.
Maybe it was easily over-impressed teenagers, then ...
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Wednesday 22 December 2010
Welcome to Shepperton Babylon
If you are a television researcher for one of those mammoth 'best of ... ' documentaries that they are always showing on BBC3, Channel 4 or Sky 3 in order to fill up the lonely hours for those sad viewers who were born too late to watch Why Don't You ... back in the late Seventies, you are convinced that there is only one joke in Carry On Columbus.
This occurs in the scene where Columbus is making a business presentation to Ferdinand and Isabella to try and attract funding for his trip.
A series of blokes wearing massive plaster jars on their heads parade in front of the monarchs, illustrating all the wondrous spices that the great explorer hopes to bring back from his voyage.
Of course, the rather camp one is introduced as: "And he's ginger."
"Ooooo - is he really?" queries the king in far too salacious a tone.
However, according to that great history of the British film industry Shepperton Babylon, there is a second joke hidden in the screenplay.
Once the trip is finally underway, a salt-bitten old seadog explains to a female passenger that it's too dangerous to go swimming in the sea because of the sharks.
"Oooooo - will they eat me whole?" she asks in delicious terror.
"No, I'm told they always spit that part out."
This occurs in the scene where Columbus is making a business presentation to Ferdinand and Isabella to try and attract funding for his trip.
A series of blokes wearing massive plaster jars on their heads parade in front of the monarchs, illustrating all the wondrous spices that the great explorer hopes to bring back from his voyage.
Of course, the rather camp one is introduced as: "And he's ginger."
"Ooooo - is he really?" queries the king in far too salacious a tone.
However, according to that great history of the British film industry Shepperton Babylon, there is a second joke hidden in the screenplay.
Once the trip is finally underway, a salt-bitten old seadog explains to a female passenger that it's too dangerous to go swimming in the sea because of the sharks.
"Oooooo - will they eat me whole?" she asks in delicious terror.
"No, I'm told they always spit that part out."
Monday 20 December 2010
Chocolat is life
Ever watched a film and hated it right from the very first frame?
Then you'll know exactly how I felt when I saw Chocolat on Saturday afternoon.
Now, it was the wrong time of the month, we had been practically snowed in by the blizzard from the night before and the radiators were barely functioning, so you might have thought a life-affirming chick-flick would be just the ticket.
First up, let me point out that I do understand that the novel the film is based on belongs to the magical realism genre, in which it is no surprise to anyone that chocolate being the food of the South American gods, it must obviously possess miraculous properties.
(So if I slowly and sensuously munch and swallow my way through a couple of bags of milk chocolate Vienna truffles from Thorntons, doing my best Nigella Lawson impression while licking the sugar sprinkles off my fingers in between each one, I get to enjoy a steamy, passionate affair with Alfred Molina - once the protagonist has shown him the error of his ways.)
Therefore, the heroine has to be the daughter of a South American fairy-spirit, rather than a normal, average, everyday lady from Amazonia who just happens to fall in love with the visiting pharmacist from France.
This means that women characters come by their amazing knowledge and abilities purely through virtue of their genetic and spiritual inheritance, rather than through study, hard work and practice.
Despite the setting being a French village in the late Fifties, nobody who lived there seemed to have any true love or appreciation of food or drink, either sweet or savoury. This I find almost impossible to believe in the land that likes to pride itself on being the home of great cuisine.
Unlike the author of the original book Joanne Harris, I am not half-French. Therefore I don't have any relatives over there that I spent idyllic holidays with during my formative years (might have been more interesting and exotic for me if I had, but I haven't, so there you go). Perhaps it is true that all the inhabitants of obscure French villages out in the middle of nowhere are inhabited purely by the prim and repressed. Though coming from a small market town in the south of England, I would suspect not.
Anyway, despite constantly wandering from place to place with her nine-year old illegitimate daughter firmly in tow, Vienne always seems to have plenty of money with which to set up her incredibly chic new business and pay for their exquisitely well-designed new lodgings.
Where does she get all this dosh from?
(Well, if it's a magical realist book and film, then this bit must obviously be more of the magic. So not to worry! Just enjoy. Wish her bank would give me that sort of backing, though.)
The daughter Anouk was so bloody fey and twee that she seemed to have stepped straight out of a Petit Filous ad. This is another one of those fashions in child-rearing that I completely fail to comprehend. Okay, I can appreciate why so many British middle-class parents fear their kids ending up as manky little feral hoodies like the ones I ran into on the bus a few weeks back, or grating American airheads. But why the longing for Pippi Longstocking crossed with a French engineer from the Limousin's daughter, if the end result is something like Anouk?
Oh yes - and dogs only feel horny if they eat magical chocolates, not because their owners have never got round to asking the local vet to lop their goolies off.
If you are a shy bloke lacking in confidence (but looking like John Hurt), then you need your dog to provide you with an excuse to talk to the sweet little widow lady with hidden depths who has somehow never got round to finding a new lover to replace her husband (who was either killed in the trenches back in 1917 or by a bomb during an air raid in this year - it was never made clear precisely what).
Johnny Depp turned up eventually to ponce round in a brown leather jacket whilst playing the guitar and talking in an Irish accent - but he really looked as if he'd spent most of the time that the movie was shooting wondering what the hell he was doing there and trying to formulate a graceful excuse out of it.
The entire experience left me with a great hankering for a massive life-affirming mug of hot chocolate with plenty of cream on the top.
I got this longing fulfilled at Starbucks.
Still waiting for the affair with Alfred Molina, though.
Then you'll know exactly how I felt when I saw Chocolat on Saturday afternoon.
Now, it was the wrong time of the month, we had been practically snowed in by the blizzard from the night before and the radiators were barely functioning, so you might have thought a life-affirming chick-flick would be just the ticket.
First up, let me point out that I do understand that the novel the film is based on belongs to the magical realism genre, in which it is no surprise to anyone that chocolate being the food of the South American gods, it must obviously possess miraculous properties.
(So if I slowly and sensuously munch and swallow my way through a couple of bags of milk chocolate Vienna truffles from Thorntons, doing my best Nigella Lawson impression while licking the sugar sprinkles off my fingers in between each one, I get to enjoy a steamy, passionate affair with Alfred Molina - once the protagonist has shown him the error of his ways.)
Therefore, the heroine has to be the daughter of a South American fairy-spirit, rather than a normal, average, everyday lady from Amazonia who just happens to fall in love with the visiting pharmacist from France.
This means that women characters come by their amazing knowledge and abilities purely through virtue of their genetic and spiritual inheritance, rather than through study, hard work and practice.
Despite the setting being a French village in the late Fifties, nobody who lived there seemed to have any true love or appreciation of food or drink, either sweet or savoury. This I find almost impossible to believe in the land that likes to pride itself on being the home of great cuisine.
Unlike the author of the original book Joanne Harris, I am not half-French. Therefore I don't have any relatives over there that I spent idyllic holidays with during my formative years (might have been more interesting and exotic for me if I had, but I haven't, so there you go). Perhaps it is true that all the inhabitants of obscure French villages out in the middle of nowhere are inhabited purely by the prim and repressed. Though coming from a small market town in the south of England, I would suspect not.
Anyway, despite constantly wandering from place to place with her nine-year old illegitimate daughter firmly in tow, Vienne always seems to have plenty of money with which to set up her incredibly chic new business and pay for their exquisitely well-designed new lodgings.
Where does she get all this dosh from?
(Well, if it's a magical realist book and film, then this bit must obviously be more of the magic. So not to worry! Just enjoy. Wish her bank would give me that sort of backing, though.)
The daughter Anouk was so bloody fey and twee that she seemed to have stepped straight out of a Petit Filous ad. This is another one of those fashions in child-rearing that I completely fail to comprehend. Okay, I can appreciate why so many British middle-class parents fear their kids ending up as manky little feral hoodies like the ones I ran into on the bus a few weeks back, or grating American airheads. But why the longing for Pippi Longstocking crossed with a French engineer from the Limousin's daughter, if the end result is something like Anouk?
Oh yes - and dogs only feel horny if they eat magical chocolates, not because their owners have never got round to asking the local vet to lop their goolies off.
If you are a shy bloke lacking in confidence (but looking like John Hurt), then you need your dog to provide you with an excuse to talk to the sweet little widow lady with hidden depths who has somehow never got round to finding a new lover to replace her husband (who was either killed in the trenches back in 1917 or by a bomb during an air raid in this year - it was never made clear precisely what).
Johnny Depp turned up eventually to ponce round in a brown leather jacket whilst playing the guitar and talking in an Irish accent - but he really looked as if he'd spent most of the time that the movie was shooting wondering what the hell he was doing there and trying to formulate a graceful excuse out of it.
The entire experience left me with a great hankering for a massive life-affirming mug of hot chocolate with plenty of cream on the top.
I got this longing fulfilled at Starbucks.
Still waiting for the affair with Alfred Molina, though.
Monday 13 December 2010
All human life is here
Hope the journey back home this evening is a quiet one.
Three weeks ago, (Monday 22 November 2010) it all kicked off on the bus back from Salford University to Piccadilly Gardens.
The driver suddenly stopped the bus in between stops so he could rush upstairs and remonstrate with two horrid little teenage scrotes sitting at the front upstairs. I'm still not sure what they were doing that he disapproved of so vehemently - but I suspect it was something like smoking a great bong, kicking the back of the seats or writing graffitti.
Anyway, he ordered them off - and the nasty little fuckers refused to go quietly.
One of them (the more dominant/aggressive one) fancied himself as something of a nutter.
He kept mouthing off about how "We ain't doone fookin' OWT!" while his weedy little mate agreed with everything he said.
Eventually, they grudgingly consented to remove themselves from the vehicle, but only because the self-appointed 'looney' had decided to announce to all and sundry (especially the driver) that he would 'bite yer FOOKIN' nose off'.
As the hydraulic doors hissed shut behind them, the midgety one encouraged him all the way.
Then the driver zoomed off down the road. He was so upset by the row that his driving had gone all souped-up and abrupt.
However, that was by no means the last we saw or heard of them.
They chased us all the way down the road to the next stop, where the driver was mad enough to open the door to them again!
They both piled on - and the mad one repeated his threat to bit the driver's 'fookin' nose off'.
Someone sitting towards the back suggested (very quietly) that the driver might like to think about phoning the police.
The driver, meanwhile, just sat and listened to the little fuckers rant on again.
Then he told them to leave.
They left, he shut the doors and started to drive off.
The looney git banged furiously on the side of the bus, then started running after it - and kept it up half-way to Piccadilly Gardens, until the driver managed to lose him in the massive traffic jam that had started to pile up in the rush-hour.
Sunday 5 December was an absolute classic as well.
During the mid-afternoon, I nipped into Sainsburys in Fallowfield to do some shopping.
As I was browsing round the newspaper and magazine section near the front of the store, a massive ding-dong broke out in the queue for the tobacco kiosk.
One studenty-looking girl went up to another one - and slapped her round the face.
Then she kicked her viciously in the shins, pulled her hair and screamed: "You fucking slept with my boyfriend, you bitch!!!!!!!!!"
There followed a short, sharp blur of kicks, slaps, hair-tugs and outraged squeals.
No sign of a security guard, of course, so one of the other shoppers shouted out: "Oi, security! Fight!"
Silence reigned for a second.
Then a third studenty-looking girl emerged from the queue, went up to the first one - and screamed in her face: "That's my best friend you just attacked!!!!!!!!"
The first one stood her ground and replied: "Well, your best friend is a fucking slut - and you shouldn't encourage her, or you're just as bad!!!!!!!"
Still no sign of the security guards.
Finally the first girl ran off to the toilets, where it was rumoured she locked herself in and burst into tears.
Once more, peace reigned at the centre of the commercial universe in Fallowfield.
A couple of years ago, I saw a bloke try to walk out of there with a plasma-screen telly he hadn't paid for.
When the security guards confronted him, he made a run for it, one of them did a rugby tackle on him - and the other one caught the telly.
Whoever said real life was boring?
Three weeks ago, (Monday 22 November 2010) it all kicked off on the bus back from Salford University to Piccadilly Gardens.
The driver suddenly stopped the bus in between stops so he could rush upstairs and remonstrate with two horrid little teenage scrotes sitting at the front upstairs. I'm still not sure what they were doing that he disapproved of so vehemently - but I suspect it was something like smoking a great bong, kicking the back of the seats or writing graffitti.
Anyway, he ordered them off - and the nasty little fuckers refused to go quietly.
One of them (the more dominant/aggressive one) fancied himself as something of a nutter.
He kept mouthing off about how "We ain't doone fookin' OWT!" while his weedy little mate agreed with everything he said.
Eventually, they grudgingly consented to remove themselves from the vehicle, but only because the self-appointed 'looney' had decided to announce to all and sundry (especially the driver) that he would 'bite yer FOOKIN' nose off'.
As the hydraulic doors hissed shut behind them, the midgety one encouraged him all the way.
Then the driver zoomed off down the road. He was so upset by the row that his driving had gone all souped-up and abrupt.
However, that was by no means the last we saw or heard of them.
They chased us all the way down the road to the next stop, where the driver was mad enough to open the door to them again!
They both piled on - and the mad one repeated his threat to bit the driver's 'fookin' nose off'.
Someone sitting towards the back suggested (very quietly) that the driver might like to think about phoning the police.
The driver, meanwhile, just sat and listened to the little fuckers rant on again.
Then he told them to leave.
They left, he shut the doors and started to drive off.
The looney git banged furiously on the side of the bus, then started running after it - and kept it up half-way to Piccadilly Gardens, until the driver managed to lose him in the massive traffic jam that had started to pile up in the rush-hour.
Sunday 5 December was an absolute classic as well.
During the mid-afternoon, I nipped into Sainsburys in Fallowfield to do some shopping.
As I was browsing round the newspaper and magazine section near the front of the store, a massive ding-dong broke out in the queue for the tobacco kiosk.
One studenty-looking girl went up to another one - and slapped her round the face.
Then she kicked her viciously in the shins, pulled her hair and screamed: "You fucking slept with my boyfriend, you bitch!!!!!!!!!"
There followed a short, sharp blur of kicks, slaps, hair-tugs and outraged squeals.
No sign of a security guard, of course, so one of the other shoppers shouted out: "Oi, security! Fight!"
Silence reigned for a second.
Then a third studenty-looking girl emerged from the queue, went up to the first one - and screamed in her face: "That's my best friend you just attacked!!!!!!!!"
The first one stood her ground and replied: "Well, your best friend is a fucking slut - and you shouldn't encourage her, or you're just as bad!!!!!!!"
Still no sign of the security guards.
Finally the first girl ran off to the toilets, where it was rumoured she locked herself in and burst into tears.
Once more, peace reigned at the centre of the commercial universe in Fallowfield.
A couple of years ago, I saw a bloke try to walk out of there with a plasma-screen telly he hadn't paid for.
When the security guards confronted him, he made a run for it, one of them did a rugby tackle on him - and the other one caught the telly.
Whoever said real life was boring?
Saturday 11 December 2010
Putting the blame on Mame
Right, I have now watched 'Gilda', a piece that many, many critics constantly cite as a classic example of film noir.
And I have to admit that my honest response to that is 'Eh?'
The reason for this is that it turns out in the end that Gilda herself is NOT the nasty, lying, devious, selfish, lustful, hypocritical femme fatale she's been making herself out to be for most of the story.
She is in fact a nice, respectable, honest, worthy, all-American girl who has just been putting on this act in order to pull the fellow that she was in love with all along.
Never mind the fact that she married her first husband because she needed security in the form of his money.
Forget about the fact that she lost no time in scoping out a possible third husband when she thought she'd managed to get shot of the second one.
And it was fine her conducting a rather rabid flirtation (to say the least) with the second husband whilst the first one was still in the frame - because he was a tough-minded all-American guy and the hero of the story.
I can only presume that this completely schizophrenic set of 'conventional' moral standards must have been imposed on the film either by the studio moguls desperate to preserve Rita Hayworth's pristine image (and thus keep box office takings healthily up), or the Hays Production Code was still in full swing at this point.
All I can say is what a complete and utter disappointment the ending turned out to be.
At least I didn't waste any money on buying or hiring out this DVD, let alone going to see it at the cinema.
And I have to admit that my honest response to that is 'Eh?'
The reason for this is that it turns out in the end that Gilda herself is NOT the nasty, lying, devious, selfish, lustful, hypocritical femme fatale she's been making herself out to be for most of the story.
She is in fact a nice, respectable, honest, worthy, all-American girl who has just been putting on this act in order to pull the fellow that she was in love with all along.
Never mind the fact that she married her first husband because she needed security in the form of his money.
Forget about the fact that she lost no time in scoping out a possible third husband when she thought she'd managed to get shot of the second one.
And it was fine her conducting a rather rabid flirtation (to say the least) with the second husband whilst the first one was still in the frame - because he was a tough-minded all-American guy and the hero of the story.
I can only presume that this completely schizophrenic set of 'conventional' moral standards must have been imposed on the film either by the studio moguls desperate to preserve Rita Hayworth's pristine image (and thus keep box office takings healthily up), or the Hays Production Code was still in full swing at this point.
All I can say is what a complete and utter disappointment the ending turned out to be.
At least I didn't waste any money on buying or hiring out this DVD, let alone going to see it at the cinema.
Friday 3 December 2010
If you all love pulp fiction, clap your hands
That's pulp fiction as in the literary genre, rather than the film of that title (which I must confess I STILL haven't got round to watching just yet - though I DO know that it was famous for Uma Thurman's black bob haircut, Uma Thurman's funky gothic nail varnish and saving John Travolta's career from the dustbin otherwise known as 'Battlefield Earth'. Oh, and nuclear briefcases and long conversations about cheeseburgers. See, I may be an intellectual - but you can't accuse me of neglecting my cultural references!).
As a life-long bookworm possesed of formidable stamina and endurance, there is nothing, but NOTHING, I like more than a guaranteed source of exciting and vital schlocky literature.
And if it's free, so much the better.
That is why the many sites on the Internet that aim to distribute free e-books to the masses are to be applauded.
If you want fine pickings without the danger of navigating the copyright minefield, then it's advisable to stick to works that are now firmly in the public domain.
Try taking a good browse through:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.openlibrary.org/
http://www.archive.org/
when you have a spare moment or three and your persistence will be rewarded with a fistful of (unjustly?) forgotten gems.
http://www.manybooks.net/
includes an extensive pulp fiction section, which they seem to be running in collaboration with Project Gutenberg.
Just yesterday, I downloaded myself copies of the following deathless tomes:
Initiative Psychic Energy - by Warren Hilton
'Being the Sixth of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business Efficiency' [yeah - RIGHT. But if by some unlikely chance any of the suggestions in the book do actually work, that's a cool £17.99 I've managed to save myself]
The Floating Island Of Madness - by Jason Kirby
'Far above the Arabian Desert, three Secret Service men find an aerial island whose inhabitants are —madmen.' [I defy you NOT to love a book with a logline like this!]
The Moving Picture Girls Under The Palms - by Laura Lee Hope
(aka Lost In The Wilds Of Florida)
'How they went to the land of palms, played many parts in dramas before the camera; were lost, and aided other who were also lost.' [Or this.]
The Man Whom The Trees Loved - by Algernon Blackwood
'An exquisitely wrought and truly imaginative conception.' [er, like WHAT, precisely? I suppose you have to download the book and read it in order to find out. Though if it lives up to the promise of the title ... ]
Three Weeks - by Elinor Glyn
'The world has felt upon its hot lips the perfumed kisses of the beautiful heroine of "Three Weeks." The brilliant flame that was her life has blazed a path into every corner of the globe. It is a world-renowned novel of consuming emotion that has made the name of its author, Elinor Glyn, the most discussed of all writers of modern fiction.'
[Yes, THAT Elinor Glyn. The one alleged to get up to no good on tiger skins on a regular basis.]
What a brilliant haul!
And they've got tons more, including some works by H P Lovecraft, E Doctorow Smith, Sax Rohmer and Clark Ashton Smith (Southern fried chicken, coffee milkshakes and overwrought sagas of astronauts getting their eyeballs sucked out by giant centipedes roaming round the craters on Mars - oh happy teenage Saturdays etc).
I'm off to see what's lurking in the corners of their banned books section ...
As a life-long bookworm possesed of formidable stamina and endurance, there is nothing, but NOTHING, I like more than a guaranteed source of exciting and vital schlocky literature.
And if it's free, so much the better.
That is why the many sites on the Internet that aim to distribute free e-books to the masses are to be applauded.
If you want fine pickings without the danger of navigating the copyright minefield, then it's advisable to stick to works that are now firmly in the public domain.
Try taking a good browse through:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.openlibrary.org/
http://www.archive.org/
when you have a spare moment or three and your persistence will be rewarded with a fistful of (unjustly?) forgotten gems.
http://www.manybooks.net/
includes an extensive pulp fiction section, which they seem to be running in collaboration with Project Gutenberg.
Just yesterday, I downloaded myself copies of the following deathless tomes:
Initiative Psychic Energy - by Warren Hilton
'Being the Sixth of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business Efficiency' [yeah - RIGHT. But if by some unlikely chance any of the suggestions in the book do actually work, that's a cool £17.99 I've managed to save myself]
The Floating Island Of Madness - by Jason Kirby
'Far above the Arabian Desert, three Secret Service men find an aerial island whose inhabitants are —madmen.' [I defy you NOT to love a book with a logline like this!]
The Moving Picture Girls Under The Palms - by Laura Lee Hope
(aka Lost In The Wilds Of Florida)
'How they went to the land of palms, played many parts in dramas before the camera; were lost, and aided other who were also lost.' [Or this.]
The Man Whom The Trees Loved - by Algernon Blackwood
'An exquisitely wrought and truly imaginative conception.' [er, like WHAT, precisely? I suppose you have to download the book and read it in order to find out. Though if it lives up to the promise of the title ... ]
Three Weeks - by Elinor Glyn
'The world has felt upon its hot lips the perfumed kisses of the beautiful heroine of "Three Weeks." The brilliant flame that was her life has blazed a path into every corner of the globe. It is a world-renowned novel of consuming emotion that has made the name of its author, Elinor Glyn, the most discussed of all writers of modern fiction.'
[Yes, THAT Elinor Glyn. The one alleged to get up to no good on tiger skins on a regular basis.]
What a brilliant haul!
And they've got tons more, including some works by H P Lovecraft, E Doctorow Smith, Sax Rohmer and Clark Ashton Smith (Southern fried chicken, coffee milkshakes and overwrought sagas of astronauts getting their eyeballs sucked out by giant centipedes roaming round the craters on Mars - oh happy teenage Saturdays etc).
I'm off to see what's lurking in the corners of their banned books section ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)