The Goldfish Chronicles

Just a note that one of my favourite authors died last week: Hugh Cook 9/8/56 - 8/11/08, in case anyone else was a fan. He’s somewhat unknown in the US, but his books used to fill the shelves back home at WHSmith when I were a lad, and until he took ill with a relapse a year back, his blog was my favourite spot on the net. He brought sanity into an insane world.

I also noticed the other day that another author whom I like (David Gemmell) had died a few years previously. Publishing lead times are such that books keep getting published and you don’t notice such things - his last full book isn’t out in paperback yet and his wife will be finishing the unfinished book (or has already).

That event (or 2 year later noticing of such an event) led me to realize the basic difference between my book collection and my fathers. I used to think that I was into a different genre than he, or some other classification or codification to explain the difference. Now I think it’s just that his authors were dead while mine were alive. Now that’s increasingly changing and I find I’m digging into the ‘classics’ more to finish the education (as such) started in his bookshelf.

I got ‘We‘ the other day for my birthday, so will be reading that soon. Right now I’m reading the Watchmen graphic novel which rather bizarrely is in Time’s 100 books since 1923 (presumably that’s the year 0 in copyright law).

Hmmm… I like that idea. A new epoch determined as the retromodified moment by the giant copyright holding entities. It’s now 85 AMM (after-micky-mouse…. though that was 1928 so bah).

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.