Showing posts with label british. Show all posts
Showing posts with label british. Show all posts
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Classic of the Day: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Terry Pratchett is a well-established English fantasy writer whose most famous work is the Discworld series.  Neil Gaiman is a bit of a literary Renaissance Man whose dabbles in a little bit of everything, from children's picture books to dark comics to fiction, all of it with a bit of a grim, Tim Burton-esque quality.  The two don't really strike me as particularly similar, aside from both being English and therefore having the British dry humour, but they blend seamlessly here.

Good Omens was published way back in 1990, when both writers were on the ascendant (have either come down yet?).   The story of the approaching End Times, we learn that the Antichrist everyone is expecting was switched at birth and is in fact a regular 11-year-old boy.  Also involved are various parties trying to hasten or prevent the end of the world are the remaining Four Horsemen (Pestilence retired at the advent of antibiotics), an angel and a demon (not your modern kind with the sullen expressions and pining for love, but the real classic versions.  Bad people.)  The plot is a bit tough to nail down, but if you've read either author's work, it a bit like that.

There are different versions, one American and one British, with mostly minor differences, and you should note that this cover I have posted is just one of many.  Good for boys comfortable with complicated plots, the story has plenty of jokes and Terry Pratchett's trademark footnotes to lighten the mood.
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Classic of the Day: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This is the grandpappy of books for teen boys. I read this one when I was 12 or 13, and I'm not sure how I got my hands on it. Maybe it found me. I don't know. I do know that I loved it, and it opened a whole new world for me, and that it really kickstarted my adult reading and helped form my tastes from then on, from movies to TV, and obviously reading. The absurd humor, the off-point ramblings, the made up facts from the Guide to the memorable tag line "Don't Panic", it was perfect.

I imagine everyone has this in their collection already, but I can't stress how important it is often enough. Yes, decades have passed since it was published, and Douglas Adams himself is long dead, but the series lives on, as recently as 2009, when Eoin Colfer (ooh, a kids' book tie-in) wrote a surprisingly good 6th installment. If a boy who is transitioning from kids to YA/adult material tells you he loves funny books, and likes British authors, this should be the first stop.

I don't need to describe the plot here. I suspect everyone has read it already, and if not, you need to drop everything and give it a try.

The point I'm trying to make is that while I disdain "classics" in general as being too stodgy, too irrelevant to modern life, some are timeless. Teen boys will always read this. After all, the Guide is Wikipedia, and how modern is that?

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The Portable Door by Tom Holt

Paul Carpenter is a dull, boring, lazy guy looking for a regular job, and finds one at what seems to be the respectable London company of J.W. Wells and Co.  At the job interview he meets Sophie, a plain, boring young woman just like him competing for the same job.  They find to their surprise that they are both hired.  The big rule of the company?  Out of the building by 5:30 or else.  Of course, he doesn’t leave on time one day and are therefore assigned thankless tasks like sorting out the basement, and discovers that the company is for more sinister than it appears.  For one the company is owned by goblins.   For two, the basement contains Scarlett O’Hara’s birth certificate and life insurance for one Vlad Dracul.  Written in a very British style, this is very much like a real-world Terry Pratchett novel.   First of a trilogy.
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