Today is a very, very sad day for all science fiction geeks. One of the biggest paragons of the written science fiction word was struck down by the passage of time sometime today. Arthur C. Clarke passed away this morning due to breathing difficulties. He was ninety years old.

For those who haven’t heard of him, Arthur C. Clarke was a genius who influenced plenty of creative and scientific minds throughout the course of his life. One of his greatest scientific contributions, for example, was the concept that geostationary satellites could be used as a telecommunications device - orbits of these said satellites are named after him because of this.

A bigger - and decidedly more important - impact by Clarke was to the millions of fans he had acquired during his lifetime. For most people - myself included - it probably started with “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was the first Clarke book I ever read - it was the first sci-fi book I ever loved, for that matter - and I haven’t stopped since.

Kudos to you, Sir Arthur. Your contributions and your legend shall never die.

As a writer, I make it a point that I read and read and read some more , because the only way any self-respecting writer would improve in his craft is to amass as much experience and information as he can, which, of course, is a rather difficult endeavor (given the restrictions of time and money, among other viable resources).

There’s also the question of knowing what to read. Which is an important question, because while everything readable is always a valuable resource depending on the person, not all books are actually conducive for writerly inspiration. You could spend hours and hours going through books like The Name of the Rose or Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and you wouldn’t come up with anything inspiring. Those are two awesome books, don’t get me wrong, but they’re both two rather difficult books - and when books get difficult, they tend to render you useless for the next couple of days (at least, in my experience).

Just recently, I came across, through sheer serendipity, a list of books given by Donald Barthelme to his students when the writer was still teaching. The list is an eighty-strong bum rush of novels and the occasional short story collection, all rumored to be of varying levels of awesome and guaranteed somewhat to be anything but boring. In his article, Kevin Moffett exudes that each and every one of the books he found within the list were guaranteed to intrigue and to entrap the reader within its world, and I’d have to agree; I’ve read several of the books within the list (not enough, apparently, but sufficient to keep me happy as of now), and I have to say that the ones I’ve read are life-changing pieces of absolute brilliance.

Take, for example, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. This is, I think, THE prime example of magic-realism in the known world. It rendered me incapable of coherent, happy thoughts for a month due to the breadth and width of its powerful imagery and convoluted cast of the most indescribably tragic characters I have ever seen.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities takes the magic of the former book, condenses it, makes go to bed with a little bit of history, then tosses that same history out the back door because it cramped the magic’s style. Really, there is no other way to describe this book, since the entire thing is made up of various snippets of story that illuminates the period of time Marco Polo spent with Kublai Khan.

Some of the other books that I’ve read (or will be reading) in his list are; A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; V by Thomas Pynchon; and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. For a full list of the books, you can visit Kevin Moffett’s article here; you can find photographs of a much-stained and ratty-looking list, which for some reason, is very, very stimulating.

Happy birthday to Hangyodon! Here’s to another year of making people enjoy themselves through the art of laughter!

The story follows the internal turmoil undergone by Spanish professional biker Pepe Benengeli while he competes in the Vuelta a España bicycle road race. While the race isn’t something of a challenge to Pepe himself - since he spent his childhood within the vicinity of Andalusia, and biking was a hobby he and his brother both had as kids - there’s the pressure of performing as a back-up cyclist rather than the team’s premier competitor keeping him in check and subsequently, getting to his nerves.

To add to his troubles is his family. The last time he was in Andalusia was years ago, before he left the region due to a falling out with his elder brother. It just so happens that the day of the race was also the day of his brother’s marriage - to Pepe’s former girlfriend. And the worst part was that a part of the race’s route went past an old pub that used to be one of Pepe’s old haunts, and was the venue of the wedding’s reception.

The movie is a masterpiece. There is no other way to put it. Just by watching, you can see the sights and hear the sounds of Andalusia. You can feel yourself getting more and more immersed in the strong cultural heritage of provincial Spain. Heck, you can almost taste the pickled nasu, or eggplants that was supposed to be the region’s specialty. The level of realism in both the art and the overall feel throughout the movie is almost unbelievable, while the bits of exaggeration at the tail-end during the race’s climax is forgivable if only because of the fact that there was no other way the film should have ended.

And yes, you have to see the entire film to understand why that is.