Funk Babblings

Life and work have been crazy lately, and I haven't had the time to mention here some of the things I've wanted to. But this might be a good time to pull a brief one off the stack....

What happens when you assign high school juniors to read a 600+ page Neil Gaiman novel? That particular blog also demonstrates an amusing but fruitless proclivity I've occasionally noticed in myself -- upon being told that a person doesn't like a particular genre (in this case science fiction), suggesting examples of it for them to try.


By the way, I didn't discover Gaiman through a high school assignment. Instead it was through Douglas Adams. Way back in 1988 Gaiman, a journalist at the time, wrote a biography of Adams, which ended up leading me to lots of other authors for a while, such as Robert Sheckley and P.G. Wodehouse. About four or five years later I was informed that if I liked Adams I'd like this book Good Omens, co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (with whom I was not yet familiar). I loved that book, but it was a few more years before I read more from either author -- partly because I was totally unaware that Gaiman was busy getting famous in the comics world for Sandman. I think the next thing I read from him was his collection of short stories.