Ahira's Hangar

Recent reading Persepolis and Persepolis2 by Marjane Satrapi. The two books cover her life in Iran living through the Islamic revolution when she was around ten, leaving Iran when she was about 14 to study in Austria and she returned to live a few years back in Iran and her leaving the country to live in France around 1989. I enjoyed these alot, they're not as good Fun House by Alison Bechdel.

Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar. Covers the topics of the Beat authors (Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, Ginsberg, etc.) and the social milieu of the period. I liked it alot, too.

Earlier in the summer I started Tale of the Genji (also known as, Genji Monogatari), it's written around 1020 C.E. by Shibuku Murasaki, a lady of the Japanese Heian court. For your information this is one of the classics of world literature, holding a place similar to Illiad, Beowolf, etc, some scholars consider it the first novel ever. It has 54 chapters and very many pages.

I've always learned that the first novel was the epic of Gilgamesh. Or was that just the first fiction?

--A

I think that might be the first writtern work of mythology? Fiction to us, but religious to those who recorded it.

I thought the first novel was Don Quixote. Maybe that was the first *modern* novel.

Depending on the era, they could have also been contemporaries...

The older influencing the younger? (Where's Kins...? )

--A

Yeah, I cannot remember my Fertile Crescent/Egyptian timelines at the moment, and am too stressed and busy to go look it up.

I'm tackling Declare by Tim Powers. Not sure I can follow all the spy and double spy stuff, but enjoying it so far (100 pages in).

Is Gilgamesh written in verse or prose? Prose is a requirement for a novel, IIRC. It would predate TotG by about 3,000 - 4,000 yrs.

For your information, the uses the requirement of prose based narrative in its initial sentence. Further on the Wiki TotG is cited as an early example of what conforms possibly to the modern definition of novel. The Wiki discusses Gilgamesh, too.

Depends on your definition of verse? It was written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script. The translation doesn't read like verse to me, but here's a link: .

(On this note, I highly recommend Robert Silverberg's retelling of this in modern novel form, Gilgamesh The King. Very good.)

--A

I've been reading a pile of mystery books from the library. While the fantasy/science fiction selection there sucks, they do have a really good mystery area. Right now I am reading one featuring children's author Beatrix Potter as the sleuth, and it is unexpectedly charming.