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    You mean that's all there is to it?!

RIP - Frederik Pohl

   Passing away at the ripe old age of 93  (b. 11/26/19) - (d. 09/02/13), Frederik Pohl's Science-Fiction works were published from 1937 thru 2011. This isn't just a great sci-fi writer, folks; this is one of the genre's Founding Fathers.

    Go in peace, Frederik.  I can't help but think you've already been reborn on a planet three-quarters of the way across the galaxy.

RIP - Iain Banks

    Iain Banks (aka Iain M. Banks) passed away on 09 June, after a short battle against gall-bladder cancer, and at the all-too-early age of 59.  He was a top-tier contemporary Science Fiction writer.

    I've read two of his books - The Player of Games and Against A Dark Background, and two more of his books are on my TBR shelf.  His world-building was fantastic and there was a flair to his writing.  He will be missed.

Happy 191st Birthday, Fyodor Dostoevsky

    I read The Idiot earlier this year.  It is an absolute masterpiece, and that's not even reading it in its native tongue.  He suffered through poor health, 4 years of exile & hard labor in Siberia (for revolutionary activities), and a lifelong gambling addiction.  Yet he is unparalleled in the literary world.  Born 191 years ago today (we're ignoring the Gregorian calendar), they don't make writers like this anymore.

An Ode to Jerome

    Said Jerome K. Jerome to Ford Madox Ford,

    "There's something, old boy, that I've always abhorred:

    When people address me and call me 'Jerome',

    Are they being standoffish, or too much at home?

   (William Cole, via Michael Quinlan)

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens!

    Born exactly 200 years ago today.  I can't say that I've read a lot of his stuff, other than David Copperfield, which I trudged through in English class in high school.  But there's no arguing that he's one of the greatest authors of all time.

    And a major influence on the English language as well.  Here are a few of words that he either invented personally, or "saved" from the linguistic dustbin : butter-fingers, sawbones, messiness, spiflication, whizz-bang, seediness, unpromisingly, flummox, kibosh, devil-may-care, angry-eyed, hunger-worn, proud-stomached, fancy-dressed, coffee-imbibing, ginger-beery, copying-clerk, crossing-sweeper, tousled, boredom, rampage, casualty ward, allotment garden, footlights, fingerless, fairy story, messiness, natural-looking, squashed, tintack, spectacularly,confusingly, and last-but-not-least, dustbin.

    So Happy 200th Birthday, Mr. Dickens, sir!  I think I'll pick up one of your works the next time I'm at the used-book store.

RIP - J.D. Salinger

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b. : 01 January 1919

d. : 27 January 2010

. Well, bummer. People worth remembering are passing away faster than I'm doing RIP posts.