Página inicialGruposDiscussãoMaisZeitgeist
Pesquise No Site
Este site usa cookies para fornecer nossos serviços, melhorar o desempenho, para análises e (se não estiver conectado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing, você reconhece que leu e entendeu nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade . Seu uso do site e dos serviços está sujeito a essas políticas e termos.

Resultados do Google Livros

Clique em uma foto para ir ao Google Livros

Carregando...

The Brightfount Diaries

de Brian Wilson Aldiss, Pearl Falconer (Ilustrador)

MembrosResenhasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
364676,356 (3.8)2
In a small provincial town, Peter lives with his long-suffering Aunt Anne and his eccentric Uncle Leo, and works in a bookshop called Brightfount's. He then moves into a bed-sit and composes these witty diaries.
Nenhum(a)
Carregando...

Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro.

Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.

» Veja também 2 menções

Exibindo 4 de 4
It has been a while since I read his “Trillion Year Spree”, but I would respectfully submit that Aldiss may very well have made his case for the essential nature of science fiction in making and moving on the modern world.

It is difficult to think of another genre so relevant, and at the same time (in its various forms) so popular and influential. I think he did much to point out the debt we owe the revolutionary authors like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and the hot-housing role of science-fiction short stories in incubating new (or reheated) ideas.

Brian Aldiss championed SF to the world outside, and occasionally gave those of us who were a little bit . . . insular . . . the ticking-off we deserved. He was part of the community in a good way, attending sf conventions, always approachable, and being the life and soul of the party but always producing books and criticism which challenged us. You could never quite predict what the next Aldiss novel would be, but you always knew there would be something to think about. He was a remarkable man. Even though he received an OBE and an honorary doctorate for "services to literature", I suspect he would have been much more successful in "critical" terms if he had jettisoned science fiction, and he would have been more successful in the sf world if he had buckled down to churn out identikit trilogies. "His work is still [in a sense] to be discovered." Yes, that's correct. It was wide, various, and deep. But those of us who discovered even a part of it are grateful to have done so.

Thank you, Brian.

Between Brian's own stories and his edited anthologies, (among others, e.g. Harlan Ellison, Phil Dick, Alfred Bester) new ways of processing the world were welcomed by me when I first discovered him back in the early '70s. The ground was also prepared for more left-field SF such as Iain M. Banks. Not that there are any second hand bookshops left around here anymore, (when they used to be a reliable way to browse and discover on a wet afternoon almost anywhere. Charity shops with a half-hearted shelf of TV related titles seem to have supplanted them), but I was able to get a Kindle copy of “The Brightfount Diaries”. I imagine that back when I first read it, such a thing might have seemed like science fiction. Having said that an ability to suspend critical judgement is key to the enjoyment of reading, I will also say that the books that remain with you are the ones that have greater psychological reality.

Ray Bradbury has faded, but James Blish grows stronger; Harlan Ellison was a flash-bang, and all we smell is stale cordite; The work of Phil Dick lingers like a bad dream; Philip Jose Farmer ages like H. G. Wells, but Asimov is unreadable now; David Brin is a low profile Arthur C. Clarke; Larry Niven wears bell bottoms, but may come into fashion again; Iain M. Banks big thinking feels as if it wasn't thought through, a half vision undone by plotting, half glimpsed.

And so it goes...

RIP Brian, your works made your mark on me and many others, and will continue to do so. Always an engaging writer. I notice I only seem to have “Last Orders” and “The Brightfount Diaries” on my shelf now. I think I must have liberated the other dozen or so. And good for them, they're meant to be read, not collect dust and tobacco film.

SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )
1 vote antao | Nov 9, 2017 |
Slight, Pooterish, but enjoyable to those interested in the book trade in England in the 1950s. ( )
  Lirmac | Sep 8, 2017 |
http://nhw.livejournal.com/710541.html

I knew of this, Brian Aldiss' first novel, from one of his autobiographies, but thought I would never get a chance to read it. However House of Stratus have reprinted it as part of their series of all Aldiss works - though it can't be doing awfully well as I picked it up for 99p somewhere (marked down from the original £6.99). It's a funny little book, stitched together from a series of newspaper columns, purporting to be the diary of an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in an unnamed English cathedral city. He has a range of more or less peculiar colleagues, an eccentric uncle and aunt, and very little luck with girls. The eccentric relatives seem awfully familiar from Aldiss' later work (though his subsequent protagonists had more success with the opposite sex). The most sympathetic of his colleagues is a science fiction fan; our hero is not (this is 1955). Engaging but mainly as a harbinger of things to come. ( )
  nwhyte | Sep 9, 2007 |
Exibindo 4 de 4
sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha

» Adicionar outros autores

Nome do autorFunçãoTipo de autorObra?Status
Aldiss, Brian WilsonAutorautor principaltodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Falconer, PearlIlustradorautor principaltodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Você deve entrar para editar os dados de Conhecimento Comum.
Para mais ajuda veja a página de ajuda do Conhecimento Compartilhado.
Título canônico
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Data da publicação original
Pessoas/Personagens
Lugares importantes
Eventos importantes
Filmes relacionados
Epígrafe
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For my dear ‘Polly’

You are the music while the music lasts
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Introduction

This is my pet book – the book with which I first dipped my toes into the chilly waters of publication.
Last week at ‘Hatchways’.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Publishers show a business-like alacrity to link books with films: would not a similar arrangement with Boots be easy to make? How fascinating to organize a ‘Read the Book – Taste the Drug’ campaign.
Retiring into background, last sentence of Gaspin’s I catch is: ‘The book trade isn’t what it was.’ Now where have I heard that before? The earliest papyrus ever dug up on the site of Ur bears the inscription, ‘The book trade isn’t what it was.’
Somewhere over our lowly heads, like thunder clouds over a plain, floats the World of Letters. Generally we are unconscious of it; then a few angry drops of rain cause us to look up, and there overhead, gods of the storm, ride the Great Names of literature and their attendant spirits, critics tragical-historical, analytical-tragical and historical-tragical-analytical. Shaken, we dodge behind the nearest best-seller.
Wonder nobody has written a book ballet – could be charming. Escape book whirls on to stage: orchestra plays a few bars. Enter Undersea Diving book to flood of music. These execute a pas de deux while others like them, appearing from both sides at once, almost fill the stage. Almost: for a thin line of little blue ballerinas, representing World Classics, gradually replaces the first group and is joined by a sprightly troupe of First Novels, who pirouette briefly and are gone. Stately rows of Memoirs glide on, followed closely by the slender, childish figures of some Modern Poets. All are swept away by bounding, leaping Best Seller.
The prima ballerina, the heroine, is a Ballet book dressed in white and edited by Arnold Haskell. The villain of the piece, a demon called Illiteracy, is black-clad with a twelve-inch screen over his face. Eventually he is defeated by the hero (Mr United Publishers), who takes the little Ballet book on his shoulder and floats off with her across the perilous Lake of Royalties to Circulation Castle.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
(Clique para mostrar. Atenção: Pode conter revelações sobre o enredo.)
Aviso de desambiguação
Editores da Publicação
Autores Resenhistas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Idioma original
CDD/MDS canônico
LCC Canônico

Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.

Wikipédia em inglês

Nenhum(a)

In a small provincial town, Peter lives with his long-suffering Aunt Anne and his eccentric Uncle Leo, and works in a bookshop called Brightfount's. He then moves into a bed-sit and composes these witty diaries.

Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas.

Descrição do livro
Resumo em haiku

Current Discussions

Nenhum(a)

Capas populares

Links rápidos

Avaliação

Média: (3.8)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3 3
3.5 2
4 3
4.5
5 2

É você?

Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing.

 

Sobre | Contato | LibraryThing.com | Privacidade/Termos | Ajuda/Perguntas Frequentes | Blog | Loja | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas Históricas | Os primeiros revisores | Conhecimento Comum | 203,214,799 livros! | Barra superior: Sempre visível