Arctangential

I finished The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy last night. It really isn’t a very good book. I’m glad it was as cheap as it was.

I never expected it to really be a reference book — I mean, it’s only 250 pages and full of flashy illustrations and photographs. What I did expect was it to have a bunch of essays about different fantasy books, authors, movies, etc… Sort of like the excellent Science Fiction Encyclopedia that I still keep on my shelf. But this was not to be. It had a few introductory essays on fantasy as a genre and certain types of fantasy, but these were uniformly poorly written and mostly made up. As an example, here are his 8 types of fantasy: Fairy Tales, Arthuriana, Arabian Nights Tales, Chinoiserie, Lost-Race Fantasies, Humorous Fantasies, Sword & Sorcery and High Fantasy. So we have 3 types that are based on setting and idiom, two that are based on content, two that are possibly legitimate ways to split up stories, and one that applies to anything with humor in it. Great division.

After that we have the expected lists of sources — a section on movies, then on TV shows (!), one on authors and finally one about famous fantasy characters. Each item got between one sentence and 5 paragraphs of discussion, which ranged in content from vapid and uninteresting to snarky and uninteresting. It’s as if the author first made a lists of items he would discuss, and then tried to come up with things to say about them. He didn’t seem to bother removing items for which he didn’t have interesting information (or in some cases, any information — many of the authors had ‘?’ for their year of birth!) There were a few tidbits of interesting stuff in there, but mostly there was nothing in there that any casual fan of fantasy wouldn’t know about.

The book closed with a few miscellaneous essays about things like fantasy worlds and fantasy gaming. These were about as bad as the rest of the book — for example, the essay about Middle Earth was literally nothing more than a plot summary of The Lord of the Rings.

Now I’m reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. ’sgood.

I finished Louise Brooks yesterday morning. It was a very long and dense book, but I enjoyed it a lot.

The authors takes us through Brooks’ entire life, from her early life in rural Kansas with her overbearing mother through to her lonely death in Rochester at the age of 80. It’s very comprehensive and well-researched, and really does a great job telling her story. I was going to try to summarize it here, but Brooks was really far too complex to summarize in just a few paragraphs. When people see the book, the story they most remember is the one about how her acting career was ended when she refused to sleep with a producer — this is a true story, but it’s far from the whole truth. Brooks was hugely talented and very capricious — she was arguably one of the world’s best modern dancers by the time she was 18, and then decided to quit. She was a rising star in Hollywood and then decided, based on what was probably a misconstrued attempt at salary bargaining, to leave and go make films in Germany. The sex episode in question happened after she returned from Germany and a number of poorly-received films. She was already hesitant about getting back into film making after what she perceived as failures, and the idea of sleeping with someone whom she didn’t really like didn’t appeal to her at all. Those German films are now widely recognized to be among the best silent films ever made, but the simple fact is that Brooks was a perfectionist and when she perceived herself as having produced less than perfection, she more or less gave up.

I’d very much recommend this book.

Now I’m reading The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy which is pretty cool.