Over the past two months Victoria and I have been discussing works of fiction for our His Take, Her Take project, which we hope to make a monthly affair. Victoria suggested the following guidelines:
1. A classic work, something that affected the course of literature. The most recent example she cited was Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice.
2. Preferably titles that have spawned a franchise, such as Frankenstein, Dracula, Tarzan, Conan, so that the modern reader has a readily accessible reference point, and so that the reviewers might contrast the original with current adaptations.
3. Finally, the original title should be accessible, not buried at the base of some litigious copyright war. Toward this end Victoria has recommended The Gutenberg Project. We have just finished our review of Conan: Queen of the Black Coast from that Australian based network. To quote my Left Coast partner, “Why go and spend your money on some derivative watered down version of the real old stuff when you can read the real old stuff that started it all.” I quite concur that mining as much of our selection from open domain classics available to our online readers online, for free, is a worthy guide.
The web address for Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast is below.
There is a Project Gutenberg Australia link on our network page.
Lately I have been reading a lot of books from gutenberg as well.
I request that if you have time try to reivew books from the humor section (PG wodehouse if you are up for the challenge). I tried writing a review on a book by PG wodehouse once but I gave up soon seeing that my writing was not half as funny as his.
I will be looking forward to more of your reviews. Thanks for doing this.
Thanks for the feedback Akshat.
I will look for a title by Wodehouse and try my hand at a review. You genius level fellows might have a hard time cranking out the humor, but for a knucklehead like me it should not be a problem.
Guttenberg is an ideal resource for Victoria and I since we live 3,000 miles apart, and hard copy book selections are increasingly limited at local retail outlets. We are also able to review a book, on Guttenberg, that we know our readers—even if they live in India—can access.
A request for you Akshat: You wrote an article on your blog about how you and your mother conserve water. Could you please contact me by e-mail [jameslafond.com@gmail.com] so that we could arrange publishing that article on this site? Some of my readers would be very interested.
Take care.