Thursday, June 28, 2007

Books You Should Be Reading Number 25 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville


‘Conductors on other routes, if they’re real unlucky, sometimes get attacked by giraffes.’
The girls stared at each other.
‘You’re the second person to say that,’ Deeba said.
‘I’ve seen giraffes,’ Zanna said.
‘They’re not so scary...’ Deeba said.
‘Ha!’ The whole bus looked up at Jones’s laugh. ‘They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves. Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course.
‘There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots.’

...

Un Lun Dun is also worth reading because it contains the simile: “It laughed again, with a noise like a sack of dead animals being dragged across coal and broken glass.”, which is so good it’s going into my lessons about similes (replacing Douglas Adams’ contribution of “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”)

4 comments:

Matthew R. X. Dentith said...

The Adams reference is much cleverer and, more importantly, funny without any context whatsoever.

Apathy Jack said...

Yeah, but it's just not as cool.

Matthew R. X. Dentith said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Matthew R. X. Dentith said...

You tell lies, and as it's not for god your lies are bad.

Also; emo!

Did ye get me e-mail?