Summer reading

Summer reading? Well, beyond the obligatory Russian short stories and textbooks of sociology and history...

I've been reading some old small Sci-Fi novels. So far:
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris. Second read-through, still brilliant.
Stanislaw Lem - Invincible. Not Lem's finest moment. Good concept, tho'.
Robert A. Heinlein - the Door into Summer. Pretty clever space-traveling story, well-written, but not overly fascinating. Written in 13 days and often named one of the top SF novels, interestingly enough.
Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves. Less interesting than I had been made to believe, the middle section "The Gods Themselves" is pretty fascinating, the end section "Contend in Vain" is pretty good and the beginning "against stupidity" is a nice opener. I just find it odd that this thematic "Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain" doesn't really return much at the end of the novel.

Allegorical stories, I'm totally into them again for a while.
Yann Martell - Life of Pi. Maybe not as brilliant as I had hoped, but it's a grand allegorical story with some fascinating themes and idea, and exactly the kind of ending you don't want to read, instinctively. I love it when authors do that.
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist. Have been meaning to read this for a while. Not bad, interesting ideas.

Cervantes - El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. I've been reading chapters of this between other books. It's a pretty long work, but it's also very easy to read, and very funny, which is surprising for a 400-year old novel.
 
Let's see...almost finished with Through the Looking Glass. I read Deathly Hallows recently. I've also been perusing my old American Lit anthology (good thick paper back from a few quarters ago).

Hm...I still need to utilize that damn local library one of these days.
 
I read this short story in High School. It was in a supplimental text book.
Spoiler alert
highlight to read.


The story features a state of the art smart house that goes through the motions of the day, waking people up, making breakfast, cleaning the house, and all that. But there wasn't any people in the house. Then a dog comes comes to the door and the house lets the dog in. Moments later the dog goes berserk and chases its tail til it falls over dead apparently from starvation which makes you wonder just how long has the people been gone.

I been trying to track this story down. I refuse to believe this beautiful piece of writing was just for a high school lesson.
Does anyone know of this story and who wrote it?
 
10mmCurator said:
I read this short story in High School. It was in a supplimental text book.
Spoiler alert
highlight to read.




I been trying to track this story down. I refuse to believe this beautiful piece of writing was just for a high school lesson.
Does anyone know of this story and who wrote it?
Click to expand...

I can't be sure but I think that is one of the stories out of Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles".
 
It is indeed. The title is "There Will Come Soft Rains," and there are actually two different versions: the one that appears in The Martian Chronicles is slightly different than the one written as a full-length standalone short story.

Incidentally, there exists a collection of graphic adaptations of some of Bradbury's short works called The Ray Bradbury Chronicles. It's a series in three volumes, and despite being out of print, it can still be found fairly easily in the secondhand internet marketplace. Volume 3 contains (among other gems) two different graphic adaptations of There Will Come Soft Rains, one of them an E.C. Comics classic by Wally Woods whose authentic retro-future imagery is well worth the price of admission.
 
Pirengle said:
Bradbury's classic in Russian, no less.
Click to expand...
[nods at my avatar]
I love that movie, clip or whatever; basically because I like russian animation, and I Youtube it every once a while. Never read the story, or any russian stories for that matters, though.
 
Zaron said:
I love that movie, clip or whatever; basically because I like russian animation, and I Youtube it every once a while. Never read the story, or any russian stories for that matters, though.
Click to expand...

Well, it was made by the Soviet Union studio Uzbekfilm in the mid 1980s. Reminds me a lot of Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou in the way that the viewer thinks he/she knows what will happen in the film's universe when the film's universe does not...and then it turns out the viewer doesn't quite know everything.

If you're looking for other things to watch in Russian, this is hilarious. Only saw it once at college, with home-made subtitles found on the Internet and corrected by some very nice international students. Fallout-y, in the way that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is Fallout-y.

As for Russian literature, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov are the way to go. (Granted, Nabokov doesn't write often about Russia, but everyone should read Lolita anyway.)

EDIT: Buñuel, not Salvador Dali
 
Pirengle said:
Reminds me a lot of Salvador Dali's Un chien andalou
Click to expand...

Just a point: Un perro andaluz (An andalusian dog / Un chien andalou) is a Luis Buñuel's movie, not Dali's... or not exactly. Both were close friends, used to share ideas, and belonged the same artistic movement, but the movie is Buñuel's.

And, although i'm andalusian, this is not the andalusian dog
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Finished Steven Brustds - Sethra Lavode
Christopher Brookmyers - All Fun and Games UNTIL Somebody Loses an EyE
Tom Holt - Earth, Air, Fire and Custard.
Butcher, Jim - [Dresden Files 09] - White Night (v2.2)
HTML: 
Oh one thing I suggest other Christopher Brookmyer's books, they are full of nice  British black humor, fun stuff. :clap: 

 [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/104-4799426-1348746?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Christopher%20Brookmyre]Link[/url]
 
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