quick read

Foundation (5.1) & Trilogy

As I rarely discard a book, it should thus come as no surprise that I have overflowing shelves of novels I’ve once read, enjoyed, savoured and then swore up-and-down-back-and-forth that I was going to re-read someday. Alas, it is someday. I’m spending whole of 2016 revisiting my book collection, digging back into books I read once, but that I haven’t read (or listened to) in at least four years. So, we’re about to find out what was worth reading… twice.

I thought I would do something a little different for my fifth book of the year. I picked up my copy of the Issac Asimov classic Foundation and started to read, only to (re)discover that the book is quite short and quite a fast read. In fact, I read the first quarter of the the first book of the Foundation trilogy on the train home.

So, I figured, why not read the whole trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, & Second Foundation, or at least the original trilogy, those core three novels compiled in the 1950s. The “trilogy” has since been supplemented with a small collection of at least four additional novels, but we’ll save those for another year.

Foundation, for those who haven’t heard of this classic science fiction work, is the story of the end of the Galactic Empire, ten thousand years in the future. The collapse is predicted and a scientist leads the charge to establish a “foundation” at the edge of the universe in an effort to stave off a predicted thirty-thousand years of darkness by preserving some few fragments of human knowledge — and manipulate the course of history in the process.

It’s pulp, but it’s classic pulp science fiction and worth yet another read.

The Princess Bride (2.2) Inconceivably Miraculous

As I rarely discard a book, it should thus come as no surprise that I have overflowing shelves of novels I’ve once read, enjoyed, savoured and then swore up-and-down-back-and-forth that I was going to re-read someday. Alas, it is someday. I’m spending whole of 2016 revisiting my book collection, digging back into books I read once, but that I haven’t read (or listened to) in at least four years. So, we’re about to find out what was worth reading… twice.

It helps when you’ve seen a film adaptation of a book so many times that when you re-read the book it takes about a quarter of the normal brainpower to actually focus on said book. Such was the case with my re-read of The Princess Bride by William Goldman, which I completed in a short forty-eight hours.

So, we re-watched the movie again this morning, Claire and I, because it was refreshed in my mind (and minus twenty eight degrees outside!) and an otherwise idle Saturday morning.

Worth a Second Read?

Yes. Oh, so much yes, and not just because it was a quick visit back to a fun and familiar story.

There were bits that had strayed from the literal interpretation of the book into the film, but having quickly read through the novel I can see that the spirit of both remains intact between the merger. This was so much the case that reading dialogue in the novel I virtually always could hear it in my head in the voice of the various actors who played those characters (especially true for Max and Valerie, I will add.) Which only goes to further prove my point… if only to myself.

I don’t think I can really add much to the cultural snowball that this book as become, other than to simply say that having just re-read the book and re-watched the film adaptation of the same, if you have never participated in the story that is The Princess Bride, you should watch it, read it, watch it again, and perhaps begin to understand that this classic tale of true love and high adventure is more nuanced than it first appears, and it is worth a few hours of your time, and I’m glad I re-read it.