Most of this page will be about books, and in particular about fiction, of which I probably read too much. But there's also a short section on photography. I'm not talking about the picture-taking I do, but about photography as art, and what I like about it. Click on the photo of the door on the right, to jump to that section (and to find out more about the photographer).
I read a lot of fiction. Here are a couple of types of fiction I particularly enjoy, with an example of two of each type. The cover images link to Amazon.
Jonathan Strange is a fantastic book, in more than one sense of the word. Clarke conjures up an England in the early 1800s in which magic is studied and practiced. That's my best stab at a one-sentence summary, and I don't currently have time to add more...
Another favorite genre of fiction is the campus novel. Some of my favorite campus novels are the work of David Lodge. Nice Work is a study in contrast between two worlds: academia and industry. Like many of Lodge's novels, it is set in Rummidge, a fictional English city. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
is, as its subtitle suggests, also a study in constrast, with one of the contrasting campuses being in Rummidge and the other in California. My favorite Lodge novel,
Souls & Bodies, is more of a Catholic novel than a campus novel, although we do first meet the main characters when they are students.
I used to read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I am currently getting back into doing so. This is made easier by the existence of web sites at which one can sample fiction in these genres for free. Many authors have their own web sites, at which they offer samples of their work. Then there are more general sites, such as SciFiction and infinity plus. There is a Free Speculative Fiction Online site, which does not itself host fiction, but instead provides links to sites that do, and indexes the links by author (and other criteria).
Here are some specific online stories:
I should add that I'm not trying to restrict my reading or anyone else's to free sites. I just think that they are a good way of sampling an author's work when considering a purchase, or of reading a single story from a book or magazine.
My favorite photographer is Charles Sheeler. This image of criss-crossed conveyor belts at a Ford plant is probably his best-known photo. It is currently (late 2004) part of a major exhibition of Sheeler's work in Detriot. Clicking
here
will take you to the front page of the site for the exhibition, which has a good sample of Sheeler's work. I hope that the Detriot Institute of Arts keeps the collection of images online after the exhibition closes.
Jill Gustafson is more local and more living than Sheeler. That is, she lives near Boston and shows up with her work at some of the arts events round here. Many of her pictures are taken round here. For example, the one on the right is of the Arnold Arboretum. Other are from further afield: the door at the top of this page is French; and one of my favorites is of
the great wall of China.
You can see more of her work at her web site,
A Thousand Words Photography.
Having put the two photos on the same page, it's clear that they have more in common than I thought: the black-and-whiteness (even of the color picture), the criss-crossing, the vertical lines... Hmm...
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