Oh, I started Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things today and it is fascinating. I have just read the first novel, A Study in Emerald, but it was fascinting. Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft-style together, oh, how somebody can write something like that? Fangirling, yeah, but he deserves it – I’m far too lazy to read long stories in English, but some authors still success to make me hooked, and Gaiman is one of them.
So, I’m going to make a quotation from his forewords, because it was beautiful one.
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas – abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.
