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Alex Sarll

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Alex is Currently Reading

Alex Sarll is currently reading

In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove

by Marcel Proust

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(page 308 of 634)
— 30 sept. 2025 16:20

30 mai 2023 08:49

Alex Sarll is currently reading

The Bathhouse At Midnight: An Historical Survey Of Magic And Divination In Russia

by W.F. Ryan

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(page 210 of 448)
— 13 oct. 2021 09:07

08 oct. 2019 08:47

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The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by Ann VanderMeer

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Alex Sarll said: " I don't normally put reviews on books I've not finished, but there are certain books where finishing isn't really the point – they're more for dipping into when the mood takes one, part of the furniture of a life. For some people the Bible would be t I don't normally put reviews on books I've not finished, but there are certain books where finishing isn't really the point – they're more for dipping into when the mood takes one, part of the furniture of a life. For some people the Bible would be the obvious candidate, but I'm talking more things like the Anatomy of Melancholy, or the mammoth anthologies the Vandermeers somehow find time to compile on a regular basis. The other one I own from them, The Weird, I've been reading bits and bobs of for nearly a decade now, without ever feeling I should add it on here, but the situation is rather different with this one because I got it as a Netgalley ARC, and it would feel a little rude to take that long before offering any feedback. So: the title is, in some ways, slightly misleading; this is not a collection of classic fantasy in the sense of being the genre's big hits. It's more a collection of the genre's godfathers, the things we now recognise retroactively as belonging to a genre which didn't exist as such when they were written. Or at least, not-belonging less there than they would anywhere else. These are fables, tall tales, stories which went where they would with no regard for whether the outcome was technically possible. Some are by big names in the field (Mary Shelley, Verne, Nesbit), though these are seldom the pieces for which they're remembered; others one might not immediately think of as fantasy per se, though they sure as Hell aren't realism either (Hoffman, the Brothers Grimm). And still others are from writers such as Nabokov or Zora Neale Hurston, people one seldom associates with genre work, but then that's part of the point of the terrain being less defined and delineated back then. Plenty of pieces, though sometimes revered in their own lands, have never appeared in English before. All the ones I've read thus far are intriguing, albeit sometimes dated. But even at its least directly affecting, it has still the charm of wandering around a little-frequented niche museum somewhere out of the way, which is very much my idea of fun. ...more "

17 août 2019 08:50 · see review

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Alex’s Quotes

“That was what I loved most about the capital; as terrifying and vast as it was, the opportunity for wonder existed. People could meet and part as in dreams.”
― Nina Antonia, The Prettiest Star

tags: london

4 likes

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

1999 likes

“Don't die with a bottle of champagne in your fridge.”
― Rufus Sewell

8 likes

“I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on,
The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,
The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily,
And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see
The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass;
And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

tags: dusk, evening, night, winter

254 likes

“Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...

-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark”
― M.R. James, A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories

tags: books, library, reading

45 likes

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