Tag: Mark

Massing books to good effect

Posted on by Brian Hall

There’s a fine new book-browsing and -recommendation site called Shepherd, currently in its beta phase. The idea behind the site is that authors are invited to pick any subject they want, then recommend five of their favorite books that deal with that subject. The subjects can be extremely specific, and they random-walk all over the map, which is what makes the site so much fun to browse—and so reminiscent of getting those out-of-the-blue but perfect book recommendations from friends. I contributed a list of titles about exploring the galaxy, and you can check it out here.

photo credit: Alfons Morales / Unsplash

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Posted on by Brian Hall

The first time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was five years old. It was 1965. I had been taken by my parents to the New York World’s Fair. I sat next to my mother in a plastic molded chair on a conveyor belt in GM’s Futurama and watched the City float by like a dream. Its projected date was 2024. It was everything I wanted, but I didn’t know why.

The second time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was ten years old. I must have chattered—I was always a chatterer—to my parents about my hazy five-year-old memories, because for Christmas that year they gave me The World of Tomorrow, by Kenneth K. Goldstein. This 1969 volume in McGraw-Hill’s “International Library” for young readers borrows heavily from GM’s Futurama installation for its photographs and illustrations.

Continue reading “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”

Lit Hub piece on science and art in The Stone Loves the World

Posted on by Brian Hall

I’ve written a piece for Literary Hub about what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” scientific knowledge vs. the literary arts—how my family turned them into a quiet but sustained battle, how I straddled them in my life and in my new novel, The Stone Loves the World. You can check it out here.

Bathing with thunder lizard

Posted on by Brian Hall

Back when I and my two siblings were small enough to share a bathtub, our parents bought each of us a dinosaur-shaped bar of soap. I got a Brontosaurus, my older brother got a Tyrannosaurus rex, and my younger sister got a Triceratops. There was probably nothing random about this. My parents considered my older brother aggressive, my younger sister defensive, and me placid. My visual memory of that slate-blue bar of soap is still vivid. As I used it (sparingly, to preserve it as long as I could) the pleasing round smoothness of the neck, tail and legs just kept getting rounder and smoother and more pleasing.

Had I already loved and identified with Brontosaurus? It wouldn’t surprise me if my attachment began right then, as I placidly accepted the designation my parents assigned me. But then again, loads of kids love Brontosaurus; way more than Diplodocus or Apatosaurus, who look basically the same. I assume it’s because the meaning of Brontosaurus, which books always mentioned—“Thunder Lizard”—is way cooler than “Deceptive Lizard” (Apatosaurus) or “Double-Beamed” (Diplodocus), which has something to do with the shape of the tail vertebrae, but really, who could care. Continue reading “Bathing with thunder lizard”

Driving Matchbox cars responsibly

Posted on by Brian Hall

In 1965, when I was six, my parents started giving me Matchbox cars. I would get two or three on each birthday and another two or three at Christmas. I began to save my fifteen-cent-a-week allowance for them. One car cost fifty cents at the Woolworth’s, a ten-minute walk from my house. For my eighth birthday I got an Official Matchbox Collector’s Case that could hold 48 cars. Two years later I got an Official Deluxe Collector’s Case that could hold 72 cars.

I did the usual things: I drove them down the lanes of the pine floor boards in my bedroom; I lifted and dropped a blanket on my bed to create humps and folds that became hills and hill roads; I combined them with an HO train set and HO scale model houses I’d built from kits, turning left and right on notional streets, crossing the tracks safely after the train went by. I never caused them to crash down the stairs, and I always put them away in the two cases when I was done. Continue reading “Driving Matchbox cars responsibly”