I’ve read a few articles here and there of Stephen Fry’s, but this is the first of his actual books, fiction or non-fiction, that I’ve read. Even so, I knew I was going to love it going in, as I’m already a huge fan of his. I’ve spent countless hours watching his comedy, documentaries, and interviews, and I can easily spend an evening listening to him give his opinions on any topic. He uses language in a way that can elevate fart jokes to fine art.

This is his autobiography, covering the first twenty years of his life – from childhood to his acceptance into Cambridge. He strolls through his memories, stopping now and then for a lively rant or informative digression. He’s very open in this, shockingly so at times, and it stayed interesting all the way through. The majority of the book covers fairly typical events, as this was before his life in entertainment – schoolyard trouble and embarrassment, angst over his father, experimenting and discovering his sexuality in his teens, and other such experiences an ordinary kid will have growing up. He manages to recall his childhood with a clarity, an enthusiasm, and an intellect that makes it seem a little more than ordinary.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

I say these were ordinary experiences, but some, such as attending a boarding school, aren’t ordinary to me, so those events are fun to read about in their own right. Half of my enjoyment of the Harry Potter series was just the idea of going off to a boarding school every year as a kid, so in a way this is like reading about Hogwarts, only with less magic and more gay sex.

At the end of his teenage years, he really begins to struggle. After a failed suicide attempt, a long string of credit card fraud, and months without contact with his family, he found himself in jail. After his release and a change of heart, he just manages to get into the entrance exams for Cambridge and secures his acceptance.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

I really enjoyed this, I’m looking forward to reading about the next chunk of his life in The Fry Chronicles, which is sitting on my shelf now. I’m still considering picking up the audio book, though. He’s too good a narrator to pass up.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

– [Nobelprize.org]

I expected to read a lot during the holidays. I was visiting my hometown, where I only really keep in touch with one friend, and I figured I’d be able to blast through quite a few books during my downtime, considering all of my time would be down. Unfortunately, I become obsessed with achieving Steam holiday objectives and barely read at all.

I did get through a couple of books, though, and A Christmas Carol was one of them. I grew up watching the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol nearly every year with my dad. It’s the longest running of the few Christmas traditions we’ve had over the years. As a kid, my dad used to cancel Christmas at least once every year, one season we got up to six cancellations, and for a five-year stint we were forced to watch John Wayne movies every Christmas afternoon, but A Christmas Carol is really the only tradition to last into adulthood.

As part of the Audible Signature Classics, a series of audiobook productions on Audible in which famous actors lend their voices to the narration of classic literature, Tim Curry presents Dickens’ holiday novella. How could you go wrong there? Curry has one of the greatest voices, so his narration was obviously top-notch. It really enhanced the reading, I thought.

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

I read half of Great Expectations when I was younger, and have been meaning to give it another try since. I remember reading that Dickens’ work was published in serial monthly installments that were required to be of a certain length, and as a result I spent my time identifying what I felt were extraneous descriptions rather than just enjoying it. A Christmas Carol is probably a much better introduction to Dickens anyway. It’s a short, familiar story that offers a quick taste of his interesting characters, hilarious wit, and loving use of the language. Reading this got me a little excited to move on to some of his longer works.

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Hope everyone had a great holiday!

Firstly, I didn’t think the movie as was quite as bad as everyone made it out to be, but I can see where they’re coming from if they had read the book first. While it feels similar in atmosphere, it does differ in ways that reek somewhat of Hollywood tampering, and it ends up completely disregarding a fairly key point to the story.

Robert Neville is a lone and immune survivor of a disease that turns people to vampires. His life is a tedious cycle of keeping the vampires at bay during the night and hunting them during the day. At first he knows very little of what’s going on and relies on his knowledge of vampire folklore to stay alive. As he tries to find a cure for the disease, he gradually separates fact from legend.

While this keeps up my running theme of novels featuring the desperately lonely, it’s also another book that likely inspired 28 Days Later, as the vampires aren’t supernatural but victims of a disease. It’s a horror book that turns science fiction, as Neville gradually finds explanations for all of the vampire qualities we know and love. For example, the so-called vampires in the book still recoil when faced with a cross, but only those who were Christians in life. Atheists and those of other beliefs weren’t bothered by the crosses. This is because the crosses themselves are not physically damaging to them; it’s a psychological response to leftover religious superstition.

I wanted to discuss the ending, so the following is spoilerific. It’s a very short novel, so you should probably just go and read it.

As the novel progresses, we discover that there exists both live and undead vampires. The live vampires are infected but cognitive, while the undead vampires are merely kept alive by the disease and survive solely to feed.

In the movie, one percent of people in the world are immune from the disease, but in the book it’s only Robert Neville, as far as we’re told. At one point he meets a girl wandering a field who he believes to be another survivor, but she turns out to be one of the live vampires. She was sent to spy on Neville in order to understand him and eventually kill him.

The live vampires have learned to cope with the disease and are trying to rebuild a society, but they’re absolutely terrified of Neville. He stalks them during the day, killing their families, not knowing that the live vampires are humane and not just bloodthirsty monsters. They come out of their comas in the evening not knowing who will be dead among them. He’s the last of the old human race, and now that society has changed, he’s become the monster. That’s why he has become legend, which is something that failed to make sense with the changes in the film.

Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.