I'll write a full review of one or both, but I thought I'd make a few general comments about the two. One interesting thing that jumped out at me was the way both George Eliot (pseudonym for Mary Ann Cross) and Stephen Crane wrote dialog. Both used very colloquial speech, with phonetic spelling to give a convincing verbal tone. It reminded me a bit of the interesting way Ray Bradbury used italics to verbalize certain words, stressing them in such a way that you couldn't help but hear the character's voice. Part of what made Bradbury's method so powerful was the off-beat words he would choose to italicize...I'm sure if I were a musician I could give a convincing musical analogy...
I have a sci-fi anthology that I may read next called Spectrum 3. I've read so many science fiction short stories that it's beginning to get hard to get ahold of anthologies that don't have duplicate stories. I'm quite sure the first story in this one is new though - it's called Killdozer (by Theodore Sturgeon). With a name like that I picture some movie on the USA channel at 3 AM, so I wonder if it's a comedy/satire, because Sturgeon was a fine writer, too good for the tripe I'm picturing. ;)
I just watched The Count of Monte Cristo on DVD. It was good, but I wonder if I should have read the novel first. Of course, I already knew the plot even before the movie... One of the DVD extras was an interview with the screenwriter, and he went through the ways that he didn't stay faithful to the original story. It reminded me of another DVD I'd watched recently, High Crimes, which had an interview with the writer of the book the movie was taken from. The writer (I don't remember his name) stressed that fidelity to the book is not important. The two works are separate because of the different constraints of their media, which is an excellent point, but hard to accept when a good story gets butchered. (which was not the case of The Count of Monte Cristo by the way)
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