Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Additional 'Phantom' notes

Ted Bell is one of those authors who likes to name-drop other authors throughout his books. I usually take note of them and Wiki them and sometimes purchase their work. I hit pay-dirt on someone's mention (maybe it was Koontz) of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian author, whose book of short fictions has been a delight to read.

So, anywho, here are a couple names Bell dropped in the book I just finished:

P.G. Wodehouse. It figures Bell would cite fellow Englishmen.
From Wiki: Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934), wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg's music for the Gershwin – Romberg musical Rosalie (1928) and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. 
Wodehouse spent the last decades of his life in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1955, because of controversy that arose after he made five light-hearted broadcasts from Germany during World War II, after he had been interned by the Germans for a year. Speculation after the broadcasts led to unfounded allegations of collaboration and even treason, and some libraries banned his books. Although an MI5 investigation later cleared him of any such crimes, he never returned to England.
Ian McEwan's book Amsterdam.
From Wiki: McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love, which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed by Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), Solar (2010), and Sweet Tooth (2012). In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
And here a couple quotes from the book that I underlined for various reasons:
"One should always strive to be on the side of the angels and the big battalions." 
"The problem with having so many balls in the air is that you can be damn sure a couple of them belong to you."

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