Cleaning my office, packing, I came across an invitation to the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Lynn-Henley Building of the Birmingham Public Library (which, at the time, was the Birmingham Public Library). This is the same building I visited on Tuesday and spoke of in my first entry on Thursday, the reading room with the Ezra Winter murals. Anyway, so I found an invitation to the 70th anniversary, April 7th, 2002. The building was opened to the public in 1932. My Grandmother Ramey was 17 years old. The US President was Herbert Hoover. Amelia Earhart flew from the US to Ireland in 14 hours and 54 minutes. Anyway, here's a contemporary illustration of the library, the one from the invitation:



Also, there was a somewhat odd list on Yahoo today, "The Good, the Bad, and the Slimy: 20 Great Movie Creatures." Some of these truly are iconic movie creatures — Kong, Giger's Alien, Jabba the Hutt, Godzilla, Oz's flying monkeys, Harryhausen's skeletons, Gollum, and heck, maybe even the magnificently erotic Davey Jones. A couple may, in time, prove to be iconic — the "Pale Man" from Pan's Labyrinth and the creature from The Host. But the list, as a whole, shows too much of what paleontologists call "the pull of the recent." That is, it's top-loaded with creatures from very recent films. In a list of 20 films spanning 1933-2008, 75 years, fully 50% of the list is derived from films released in the last six years! Even admitting that advances in CGI and SFX make-up are giving us many marvelous new monsters these days, this is baloney. Where's Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's incarnation of Frankenstein's creature, Gort, or the "gill man" from the Black Lagoon? All of these are clearly more iconic, and far more deserving than some of those who made the list. The "ultra-cute baby Loch Ness monster" from The Water Horse? Not. Kraecher from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? Wrong. The gelflings from The Dark Crystal. Nope (though you might make a case for the Skeksis). Saphria from the godsawful Eragon? That's a joke, right? You want a dragon, then choose Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer or Maleficent's draconic incarnation from Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. Sheesh, people. Someone needs to look up the word "icon" in a dictionary and try again.

These things always seem like fun, until I actually start doing them, at which point they quickly turn tedious and dull. In this case, for example, I cannot recall the html for a strike-through, which is just lame, as I've known html since 1995. I blame the Bailey's. Anyway, behind the cut you will find fifty "most significant" science fiction/fantasy novels, spanning the period 1953—2002, as deemed so by no less august and learn'd organization as the Science Fiction Book Club. I'm supposed bold the ones I've read, italicize the ones I've started but never finished, underline the ones I own but never started, strike out the ones I hated, and put an asterisk beside the ones I love. Okay. Here we go:

( The List )

You will note that, sadly, there's a good deal of "classic" sf I've not read and likely never will.

I think there are some pretty glaring and horrendous omissions to this list. Just for starters:

Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Stand by Stephen King
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Wicked by Gregory Maguire

And that's just for starters, mind you. I could go on and on. I could.

Bedtime for nixars. If I head that way now, I might find sleep by 3 a.m. (CaST).