📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• 'By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.'
  "You believe me,' I said gratefully.
  'Of course I do,' and he held out his hand. 'I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.'

  an excerpt from The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan in 1915

• [an example of the commentary on the letters],
  
  Wreek & Co. evidently believe in "personal charm as a commercial asset," and by "personal charm" they appear to understand a fawning sycophancy directed to establish in the charmed one a sense of obligation which shall make it difficult for him to reject their proposal, question their price, or condemn their performance. To experience three hours boxed up in a motor with Mr. Schwarb's unflinching personal charm—sublimed, perhaps, with a touch of scent—will probably settle Spinove's hash, or, on the other hand, perhaps it will not. The needs of personal charm have, we may guess, led Mr. Schwarb to scheme to join Spinlove at lunch and pay for both; and, at a hint, it would probably find him ready to carry the architect upstairs on his back and put him to bed.

  an excerpt from The Honeywood File, written by H.B. Creswell in 1929

• Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
  
  Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• More on that archetype: the idea that a young man could go off to Africa or Australia or India, face physical and mental challenges, maybe make their fortune, is such a wild thing; this feels as foreign as any kind of historical setting as I can imagine. The kind of hero that we have here in 39 Steps, and likewise H. Rider Haggard's adventurers like Allan Quatermain, is never the young version - it's always the adult man, who has seen some struggle, and is now the competent, campaign-hardened, even-keeled hero. Gross colonialism aside, I really love these characters.
  
  I'm sure there's a lot of overlap here with the American Cowboy archetype, but I just aesthetically dislike Westerns so much that I mentally rule them out of this category.

  an note about The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan in 1915

• Despite my obvious enjoyment of the early-20th-century adventure novel, I have never read John Buchan. This is mostly because about a decade ago I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Prester John, the mythical priest-king of the east. One of Buchan's most famous novels is called Prester John, but it's a pulpy adventure set in Africa, and I was always frustrated when that book would clutter up my searches for much more obscure scholarly stuff.
  
  But! My recent read of Rogue Male, which I loved, turned me on here. The back of that book noted that Rogue Male's author Household owed a debt to books that came before like The Riddle of the Sands and The 39 Steps. So I picked it up!
  
  This is very fun; a page turner, a romp, and it's got an H Rider Haggard protagonist who did a bunch of manly stuff in the African colonies and is now applying his omnicapability to an adventure in England.

  an note about The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan in 1915

• The Helen Brown / Ellen Black story in particular is nightmarish, in that it combines a very specific mix of desire and frustration and guilt. Or maybe that's just my nightmares? There are great, surreal touches through these, and the way Aickman will sometimes show, sometimes tell, and sometimes elide is great. For example, there's a story where two women are picnicking near an abandoned church; the women each look inside the church, are incredibly disturbed by what they see, but WE never see inside, nor is it even a big plot point. Just part of the unsettling atmosphere.

  an note about Compulsory Games, written by Robert Aickman in 1980

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