As for the japes about Google as a destroyer of print media rather than a supporter, Mr. Kramer said, “Everything we say about Google, the nice thing is that they have to search something.”
The Times obviously understood this remark, or they wouldn't have printed it, but I don't. Can someone paraphrase?
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crowleycrow- John Crowley
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This is good, if you feel that the New York Times (and other media sources) are in the content business, because people searching (on Google) for content that these media sources provide can drive clicks/views/people to their font of creative material.
This is bad, if you feel that the New York Times (and other media sources) are not in the content business, and are instead in the advertising business, just like Google. Because, if they're trying to compete with Google... well, that probably won't end well for them.
And the real reason for my comment - I just finished reading Little, Big over the weekend! I started reading in Ottawa visiting my mother-in-law and finished at home in Boston. (I think certain places where I was reading made an impression on what I was reading - or the reverse). I really enjoyed the entire book and experience. I thought Auberon's first description of Barbarossa (picture of Barbarossa on throne and Auberon's entire reason for writing was to explain that state) was a metaphor for the novel - or that idea just stuck in my mind.
I need to decide what to read next - any reading lists you might point me to?
I came to Little, Big originally from A Great Work of Time (recommended on a random internet forum I came across) from there I went to Engine Summer, The Deep and The Beast. I liked all of these - probably the Beast a bit less. At the time I was looking for sci fi and fantasy that was not series based and something that did not feel formulaic. (on side note, I plan to come back to your other work)
Reading your work and others in between has improved my literary confidence - I realize I don’t need a book that plays like a movie and might actually prefer those that don’t! Rather than reading like it is a contest and skipping parts I do not grasp, I now feel determined to understand or at least attempt to understand each sentence ( though this seems more efficient with my crutch - the kindle w/dictionary :) )
(I write this to let you know you are appreciated! I hope derailing your topic does not annoy too much.)
p.s. I agree with the comment below - emphasis on 'something' would have made a difference.
Paul Park’s series of four novels, which can be called collectively A Princess of Roumania for its opening volume, isn’t obscure to certain readers – it was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and its author is well known in the SF/fantasy realm of fiction, where unfortunately but perhaps understandably large numbers of readers never venture. Critics and authors like Ursula LeGuin, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Dirda in praising Park bring in the name of Philip Pullman for comparison, but Park’s work, though it has similarities large and small to His Dark Materials, is in certain ways a much more interesting work. Pullman’s imagination is tremendous, and his purposes gripping, but his series is often powered by the standard devices of adventure fiction. There is not a thing standard in Park’s series – even though it tells of the perilous journey of a girl from home and safety toward the recovery of her inheritance. For one thing, the safe familiar place Marina Popescu begins in – the Berkshires of Massachusetts – is revealed to be in fact imaginary, the creation of powerful mages to hide her in. (Since long before Narnia, children have been traveling from commonplace homes to unreal other lands; this is the first I know of to hold that the homeplace is the one that’s unreal.) It’s a tribute to Park’s deep working that we can’t assume Miranda will succeed in her quest. In the subsequent volumes – The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World – Park creates an astonishingly detailed and convincing alternate Europe, where the Romania of our experience, and its dreary history in this century, is the great kingdom of Roumania, and the family Ceausescu, squalid dictators in our world, are an ambitious aristocratic clan led by a Baroness who climbed up from the theater, an enchantress in every sense, unstoppably evil while being never less than apallingly – and appealingly – human. Park’s mature and detailed portrait of the manners, hierarchies and crosscurrents of a complex society resemble those in a Tolstoy novel, but one infused with a magical science – journeys to the land of the dead, entrapped homunculi forced to speak the truth, the souls of the dying becoming momentarily visible as small beasts or birds. Not for a page of this alternate vision do we forget the Europe of our own world in the last century; the darkness of Park’s is a different darkness, but it is recognizable. Terrifying, magisterial, and written with great sureness, there really is nothing I know of like this series. It deserves a readership beyond the bounds of the fantasy realm.
And lo, now it isn't.