Rex Stout

Stout is my favorite mystery writer. The best. Hands down. No hemming or hawing. I've read all the Nero Wolfe books multiple times, I've cooked from the Nero Wolfe cookbook, I've watched virtually every TV and movie adaptation. I just love them. One of the best things about them, and I wish more of today's authors could do this as well, is that it really doesn't matter where you start. Every one of them is a perfect introduction, and you don't have to have read some other one to figure out who's who and what's what.

The attraction, as with any great mystery series, is the characters. Of course there's Wolfe himself, all seventh of a ton of him, with Fritz and Theodore on the homefront, the legmen Saul, Fred and Orrie, the cigar chomping (but never smoking) Inspector Cramer, among others. But more than anything there is the magical voice of the narrator, Archie Goodwin. As Robert Hughes writes on CriminalElement.com:

"Archie Goodwin's deceptively airy tone often masks a serious treatment of subjects from treason and anti-Semitism to, of course, murder. It's Archie we want to read. It's Archie who describes Wolfe's eccentricities, his splendid repasts, his choleric outbursts, his obsessions with orchid-growing. Were these described in the third-person, we'd have an interesting, but perhaps somewhat two-dimensional character, an assemblage of tics. But from Archie's perspective, and through Stout’s prose, we have an unforgettable personage, a true original."

For the full story on the books, and the incredible career of their creator, go to Rex Stout: An American Wit and Propagandist.

Oh brave new world—Not!

One of the firm beliefs futurists share is that the electronic book will replace most printed books. Futurists are especially convinced that while collectors and fussy types will continue to deal with dead trees, the students of the future will be decidedly of the ebook persuasion. Electronic textbooks replacing paper textbooks will be the first big step of the revolution! Then again, according to researchers at the University of Washington, maybe not.

Brier Dudley of The Seattle Times reports:
"Seven months into the study, more than 60 percent of the students had stopped using their Kindle regularly for academic reading -- and these were computer science students, who are presumably more sympathetic to an electronic book. Although the device has note-taking capabilities, some students still tucked paper into the Kindle case to write notes and others would read near a computer that they could use for reference and other tasks that weren't easy on the device."

See the full story at Kindle so-so for students, UW study concludes

Citizen Kane 70 years later

If any film can be said to be great, Citizen Kane is it. I'm happy that I began watching it back in the 70s when everybody was a movie nut and there were revival houses everywhere and I could see it on the big screen where it belongs. I mean, it's okay on TV (especially, I guess, as TV screens get bigger), but it is such a movie movie that it should be seen in a movie house. Then again, the disk I own has commentary by both Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich, so there's a bright side to everything.

The story of Welles and Kane is famous, of course, how the wunderkind conquered theater and radio and headed out west to take Hollywood by storm, how a certain Mr. William Randolph Hearst was not particularly charmed by the perceived resemblance of Kane to his own character (and its reflection on his mistess), how Welles seemed to go on the road to ruin following the 1941 release of Kane, a genius unfulfilled or only partially fulfilled. D.B. Grady, in his Atlantic article "Citizen Kane' at 70: The Legacy of the Film and Its Director," does a great job of summing up Welles and his magnum opus.

But let's have Welles have the last word, as quoted by Grady:

"By coincidence, as related by Welles in his autobiography, he once found himself alone in an elevator with Hearst. It was the night of Citizen Kane's San Francisco premiere, and Welles invited him to the opening. 'He didn't answer. And as he was getting off at his floor, I said, 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.' "

Source: Culture: The Atlantic

SF awards

Do you ever get tired of all the movie awards and movie award shows that come at the turn of every year? This last time around I got the feeling that I spent more time watching who was wearing what winning whatever than I did actually watching any of the movies. By the time the Oscars came around, I barely made it through the march down the red carpet. Now it seems that Science Fiction is going the way of Hollywood, with Shirley Jackson Awards, Hugos, Philip K. Dick Awards and Arthur C. Clarke Awards to name just a few.

In his article on Omnivoracious, author Jeff VanderMeer discusses both the books and the awards themselves:

"In addition to representing different foci and constituencies, all of these awards have their quirks and foibles. The fairly new Jackson Awards does a good job of ignoring literary/genre boundaries and its novel nominees often constitute a Required Reading List for dark fantasy/horror...The Hugo Awards continue to lurch along as a kind-of SF combo of the People’s Choice Awards and the Oscars, albeit not as well-known. Although considered a readers’ award, the Hugo’s actually tend to be voted on by a combination of readers, industry professionals (writers, editors, publishers), and booksellers who buy memberships to the World SF Convention—and not very many of them at that."

Read the full story: Notes from the Current Silly Season: What's Your Favorite SF/Fantasy Award, And Why?

Source: Omnivoracious

Sharing books with troops overseas

Galley Cat posts a timely reminder that there are a number of ways of sharing books with American soldiers overseas. Link.

Don't look. Can't you name the top ten most popular professions for romance novel heroes?

WIlliam Faulkner's Oxford

The town of Oxford is still there, and is a lot the way Faulkner described it in his writing as the seat of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The author of this article takes a tour and reports back. '[Faulkner] told the Paris Review in 1956, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top." ' More...