League of Extraordinary Books

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02). Dining on Stones by a Iain Sinclair (2004)
"Everything that had happened to them... had been refracted through Norton’s fiction, his voice. The unplaceable accent. The half-truths. The bending and warping of a simple event, a walk."

Boy when you finish a Sinclair book you certainly know you've been in a fight... wait maybe that isn't how your supposed to feel while reading :P ?
Some prior material that might help with this one includes 'Heart of Darkness', 'Nostromo' and the film 'Performance'. They won't help entirely though as there are innumerable film, book and art reference in this one, more than usual i felt. I would also recommend the art of Max Beckmann but looking at the that actually seemed to make the references to it make less sense :lol .

All of Sinclair's books tend to be about an author trying to write a book, the search for narrative presented as the narrative itself. The books end up somewhere between 'Lost in La Mancha' and 'Adaptation'.
I actually made it to the 2/3 point with a decent grasp on things everything after that is pretty spotty. I think you might need to be an artist of somesort or have a degree in art/literature criticism to get a lot of that final 1/3.

The plot such as there is involves i think 3 different author avatars all of them trying to write versions of the same story or at least involving some of the same characters. Bits of gangster plots, documentary, doppelgangers and recovered notes and photos from a 19th century doomed trip to the amazon.

There are certainly elements of enjoyment but too messy, too long and too much Art for my rudimentary taste. [2/5]



01). Doctor Omega by Arnould Galopin (1906)
Another book in the vain of 'The First Men in the Moon', which of course was famously sued for plagiarism by the author of 'A Plunge Into Space' but nobody cares about that because the latter is terrible.. and also derivative of 'Across the Zodiac' anyway.

This one has all the dryness of a victorian novel but with the scientific interest and all the pulp of later sci-fi without any of the excitement. Its slock, nonsense, drivvel. It also takes elements of 'From the Earth to the Moon', 20,000 Leagues, 'The Master of the World' and 'Gulliver's Travels'.

Its not all bad, the aliens are more like 1950s martians than you might expect, it also might be losing a little in translation but i doubt it.
Any attempts to equate Dr.Omega with Dr.Who are spurious, although i wouldn't be surprised if both characters received some influence from Moriarty of the Holmes stories.
Some small elements of scifi interest but barely worth the reading effort. [2/5]