the other book review

As all of you can see in the side­bar, I’m cur­rently read­ing Ten sorry tales by Mick Jack­son. Actu­ally it is a re-read. The first time I read it, I saw the book in the store and just had to have it because of the cover. (In one of my other posts I talked about that ‘strange’ habit.) I per­suaded my boyfriend to give me that book for Christ­mas and he did, the dear. I am really grate­ful, because I was so impressed by the ten short sto­ries then, that I’m now using them, amongst other work and authors, for my PhD the­sis about ani­ma­tion and humor (in films as well as books).
I think these short sto­ries are very near to ani­ma­tion — to an ani­mated film. In his writ­ing you surely see the influ­ences of him being a film maker. Through his writ­ing it is easy to get a pic­ture of what he wants us (read­ers) to see. His style is short and com­pact and every sen­tence is there for a rea­son. A lot of things Jack­son leaves open for us to inter­pret and fan­ta­size about, by leav­ing some infor­ma­tion in the dark. For exam­ple the time things hap­pen in. Is it past, present or future? Another thing is the char­ac­ters; they are 1-dimensional, they have one par­tic­u­lar qual­ity on which is zoomed in. The rest is for us to fill in. I’m cur­rently busy with describ­ing the dif­fer­ent meth­ods Jack­son uses in his style to make the sto­ries ani­mated and humor­ous. Very inter­est­ing!
But enough about my ‘pro­fes­sional’ deal­ings with this book. It is just a great read.