Sad literary news

Very sad to hear of the passing of Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Chrestomanci Series, Dogsbody, The Ogre Downstairs, and Howl's Moving Castle, among others.

Her rich, familiar characters and effortless world-building sold fantastic, reality-crossing plots. All were crafted with sophistication and her respect for an ostensibly young adult audience won her plenty of fans of all ages, including Neil Gaiman. I never knew, until today, that she studied under CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien at Oxford.

Wynne Jones was never hugely famous*, even after Howl's was made into a movie. When Annie found out I was a fan, it was like discovering we shared membership in a secret society. Along with John Bellairs, Diana Wynne Jones was a literary titan of my youth, and her work set the standard for so much of what I love in fiction today. With dead-tree bookstores and public libraries shutting down by the drove, one wonders how anyone will get their hands on these sorts of magical, secret authors in the future. But I'm confident that, as long as there are kids who read until they've run out of books, who'd rather stretch up to an author than be talked down to, someone will find these treasures, in whatever format, and share them with their friends.

* Even though she deserves to be; Annie points out that Harry Potter pales considerably next to Jones' far more satisfying Witch Week.

Victor who now?

I have never been a particularly patient reader of history; anything less than the most engaging narrative arc and I completely wilt. And of course, historians would probably argue I should be wary of getting drawn in by such compelling stories, keeping in mind their authors.

But I want to be knowledgeable about history. What I manage to consume and retain always fascinates me, and the human details often surprise me.

So I was quite pleased to find (via Language Log) this Languagehat notice of an upcoming text by one of their commenters called The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries. From the table of contents and the excerpts Languagehat presents, this seems like an ideal source for me to pick up the recent, fairly complicated, political history of Slovakia and its neighbors by relating it to a field I'm much better with.

Of course, it's a college textbook, so it runs about $175 on Amazon on sale, so I'll have to settle for the 60 page excerpt available online. And, bringing this to my attention has earned Languagehat an overdue place on my RSS subscriptions. (If you'd care to purchase a copy of the book for me, I'd be happy to award you your own place on that list as well!)