From The Boston Sunday Globe July 6, 2003
A READING LIFE
By James Sallis
Revisiting sci-fi'sneglected hero and others
Just as writing and rewriting are essentially separate acts, calling upon different faculties, switching brain hemispheres -- different pilots installed up there in the cockpit -- so, I suspect, are reading and rereading.
In an earlier column here I detailled my affection for George R. Stewart's "Earth Abides" and how that book has changed for me, grown ever deeper, as during these past 40 years, I've come back to it again and again. Other authors and books to which I regularly return include James Joyce's "Ulysses," Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman," all of Raymond Chandler, Thomas McGuane's "Panama," Patricia Highsmith, Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!," Kate Wilhelm, Boris Vian's "L'Ecume des Jours," Theordore Sturgeon's "More Than Human," and Julio Cortazar's short stories, "Candide."
Each time I go back to the well the water's different.
A READING LIFE
By James Sallis
Revisiting sci-fi'sneglected hero and others
Just as writing and rewriting are essentially separate acts, calling upon different faculties, switching brain hemispheres -- different pilots installed up there in the cockpit -- so, I suspect, are reading and rereading.
In an earlier column here I detailled my affection for George R. Stewart's "Earth Abides" and how that book has changed for me, grown ever deeper, as during these past 40 years, I've come back to it again and again. Other authors and books to which I regularly return include James Joyce's "Ulysses," Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman," all of Raymond Chandler, Thomas McGuane's "Panama," Patricia Highsmith, Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!," Kate Wilhelm, Boris Vian's "L'Ecume des Jours," Theordore Sturgeon's "More Than Human," and Julio Cortazar's short stories, "Candide."
Each time I go back to the well the water's different.
