Dr Simon Reads...

Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N: John Bellairs This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See  the first part of this series  for more information. This time around, I have reached the works of: John Bellairs Bellairs was a Michigan-born author who lived from 1939 to 1991 when he died of cardiovascular disease. Most of his work, a lot published posthumously, is young adult fiction based on a collection of young anatagonists, Anthony Monday and Johnny Dixon who get involved in various supernatural goings-on. Judging by the adverts tacked onto the end of my Kindle edition of Face in the Frost, these have recently been rebranded, presumably to tap into the Harry Potter/Artemis Fowl/Skulduggery Pleasant/Percy Jackson etc. market; and also of note ...

Concluding Thoughts Welcome to the penultimate instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology. For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP And now: The End Over the past year I’ve posted chapter by chapter summaries and discussions of the King James Version of the Bible on pretty much a daily basis. As mentioned in the introductory post, I chose the KJV in part because I knew that a lot of common idioms came from there, and also because, having read the New English Version of the NT, I find the language in the modern versions rather flat and uninteresting. That meant that at times I encountered sections that were all but impenetrable, but then that’s a risk I knew going in. Besides, the website I was using had verse-by-ver...