A while ago, Patrick recommended a book to me. The Life of Potemkin by Simon Montefiore. It's excellent. As I was reading, a line jumped out at me. I thought that if everyone saw this line, they would almost have to go out & read the book. Keep in mind, there is almost no context for this sentence in the book. It's just that good.
"Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey."
After lunch, I decided to swing by the Library & see what's new. I love just browsing the shelves and seeing what jumps out at me. So, the haul this time is:
Boys Will Be Boys, an insider tell all about the 90s Cowboys. Like any good Niners fan, I have a generous disdain for the Cowboys (although, I have been at it a little longer. Growing up, I was an Oilers fan..)
Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount's twisted manual of style, grammar (maybe he can explain semi-colons to me..) and vocabulary.
1960 JFK vs LBJ vs Nixon, I have been fascinated with this election since playing the excellent boardgame that simulates it. This looks like an interesting addition to the information available, and doesn't have the pro-Kennedy bias that 1960: Making of a President had.
Should be a good couple of weeks of reading!
Do you think that a book is more likely to be good if its Amazon review has more stars? Do you think that the presence or absence of critical reviews on Amazon is a meaningful indication of the book's quality?
It ain't necessarily so. Amazon's rating system is highly susceptible to mob rule — not the sort of mob rule that provides, collectively, useful information, but the sort of mob rule that suppresses disfavored reviews and reviewers. Amazon appears to be a somewhat passive and clueless participant in this process. Hence, you have a system in which a third-rate scribbler of bodice-rippers, faced with weak-tea provocation of a three-star review of her latest book, can tell her flying monkeys to "vote down this bitch, please", and they can have an impact on that reviewer's prominence on Amazon. Said author, one Deborah Anne MacGillivray, can gloat like this about the three-star reviewer:
Well, thanks to XXXXXX our PI , we now have her name, her husband’s
name, her chidrens’ names, her grannies and great grannies name. Her
address phone number and email
lol…quite interesting.
It's tempting for me, as a satirical blogger not particularly concerned with being thought a sexist, to attribute this to the mindset of the type of people who care deeply about romance novels. But prolonged exposure to the internet shows that such a conclusion would be not merely prejudiced but also inaccurate. The recent troubling experiences of Paula, an online friend and exceptionally thoughtful adoption blogger,show that any sort of dissent from the cherished views of a nutcase can result in creepy online stalking. What's notable about the case of the thin-skinned author MacGillivray is that Amazon seems to provide an easy medium to carry out such behavior, and seems indifferent or uncomprehending about how it is being used.
Remember that next time you glance to see how many stars a book got, and wonder how people get to be a "top reviewer" on Amazon
This weekend I encountered a number of parents of tween or young teenaged girls, and all of them had been dragged by their offspring to see Twilight. I haven't read the hyped books, and am not inclined to. It's not my sub-genre. Nor does i09's chilling account of a trip to see the movie encourage me.
I have to say, though, that I admire the marketing savvy of the authors and TV writers who have recognized how well the genre will sell with the tweened and teened poseferatu. After all, it's genre celebrating and romanticizing daytime sluggishness, poor posture, questionable fashion choices, the confusion between the morose and the profound, the confusion between unresponsiveness and mysteriousness, and bad dietary habits. How could the teens not get on board? They're the heroes. Teens are just vampires with moderately better dentition.
Perhaps I need to get rich by inventing a genre that celebrates the attributes of my age group. We need a group of exciting and/or heroic supernatural beings characterized by incipient baldness, generous girth, sarcasm, genial misanthropy, and a tendency to fall asleep watching TV by 9:45. The t-shirts will sell like crazy. XXL, please.
On a whim I picked up Dies the Fire, the first book in a post-apocalyptic series by S.M. Stirling. I wound up enjoying it quite a bit, enough that I took the kids to the bookstore and bought the next two in the series.
Stirling's series tells the tale of Oregon and Washington-area survivors of The Change, a mysterious event that stops all modern technology (including gunpowder and steam power) from working. As in most post-apocalypse narratives, the best and the worst in humanity emerge, and the good guys struggle to survive and build new communities while the bad guys lust for power. Stirling's Oregon is rather suspiciously well-populated with hobbyist bowyers and fletchers and Ren-Faire enthusiasts who are well equipped for combat at 14th-century tech levels, but he has a sense of humor about it, and carries the whole thing off quite well. It's not great literature — it's not even at the level of The Stand, a post-apocalypse classic — but it's a good pulp read for when you are in the mood for such a thing.
In my experience, the biggest division among readers isn't genre fiction lovers vs. different genre fiction lovers, or non-fiction vs. fiction fans. It's people who re-read vs. people who don't.
The Brainy Gamer and I heard the same NPR story yesterday, but he beat me to blogging about it.
Dateline: New York City, 1949. There's a great dispute between fans of two famous entertainment titans of the time. There's a riot, and 25 people die in a hail of police gunfire.
What could this be about? 19th century soccer hooligans? Favored music hall singers?
Nope.
Shakespearian actors.
More specifically, a dispute over Shakespearian acting styles.
Listen to this wonderful NPR interview with the author of a book about the incident, which illustrates a time before there was a gulf between high-brow and popular culture, and when Shakespeare was widely perceived as entertainment for the people.
Follow the link to Brainy Gamer (well worth bookmarking for anyone who is interested in intelligent analysis of gaming issues) and check out his links on the subject (which are at the end of the linked post). Fascinating stuff.
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Books
. . . and it's only going to get taller. Case in point: some well-received books by a friend from my misspent youth, Michael Cisco, whose awesomely named website details his work, which exists at some dark and disturbing intersection of fantasy, horror, and gothic. His novel the Divinity Student got good reviews and won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. Fantasy Book Spot recently ran a good interview of him.
Michael's been a talented and imaginative writer for as long as I've known him, and I'm embarrassed I haven't gotten around to reading one of books before now — I've only read parts. Since he once joined us for dinner back when we had just one child, and stumbled away from that stunned and justifiably terrified of our spawn, maybe he'll cut me some slack. At the very least, he'll protect my Secret Identity.
I'm certain that he'd scoff at the notion of being accessible, and he's not, nor is it his aim to be. His writing, like that of one of my favorite writers James Ellroy (a comparison he may not care for) conveys meaning on multiple levels, some through the surface meaning of words and some through the unusual or even jarring arrangement thereof. If you like dabbling in unusual narrative styles, check him out.
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i09 has got a list of 10 good books that became bad movies. Since it's i09, they are all sci-fi.
The what's-the-worst-movie-from-a-book exercise is a common one, and I think it's often fundamentally misguided. Often people who liked the book don't like the movie because it doesn't cover the same things, or changes plot lines, or develops characters differently. Such critics seem to ignore the fact that books and movies are fundamentally different art forms, and it's unreasonable to expect them to deliver in the same way. Nobody gets mad because the Goldfinger song doesn't describe the entire plot of the movie. (It's tough to find a rhyme for "Oddjob" that doesn't sound forced.) Very few purists get upset that the opera Otello ditches the entire first act of Shakespeare's play. But for some reason people figure that a movie ought to scratch the same itch that the book scratched, or vice versa. That's silly.
Good movies inspired by books tend to be unapologetically different. L.A. Confidential is one of my favorite movies, yet its plot, characterization, and tone are vastly different than the book. (I think you'd have to take a lot of very hard drugs to make, or appreciate, a movie that was actually "faithful" to one of James Elroy's books). It rises or falls on its own merits as a work of art that is no more like a book than a painting is like a symphony. Same with the Lord of the Rings series.
Nevertheless, if pressed for the book/movie pair that generated the greatest gulf in enjoyment, I'd probably name The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bonfire was a classic and seminal 80s work, and though its topical and social references have not aged well, its insights into human nature have. But the movie . . . . the movie. It was unbearably bad, the worst sort of bad, the bad that is not quite bad enough to cross into funny-campy like Plan 9 From Outer Space or something.
What book/movie combo has the greatest enjoyment delta for you?
Via John Scalzi's del.icio.us feed, I see that scientists claim to have pinned down exactly when Odysseus got home — roughly noon on April 16, 1178 B.C.:
Now scientists have pinned down his return to April 16, 1178 B.C., close to noon local time, according to astronomical references in the epic poem that seem to pinpoint the total eclipse of the sun on the day that Odysseus supposedly returned on.
. . . .
The scientists then searched for potential dates that satisfied all these astronomical references close to the fall of Troy, which has over the centuries been estimated to have occurred between roughly 1250 to 1115 B.C. From these 135 years, they found just one date satisfied all the references — April 16, 1178 B.C., the same date as the proposed eclipse.
Penelope's suitors were all dead by 12:01.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
Via Prof. Bainbridge, I see that George R.R. Martin has posted an update on the development of the HBO adaption of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and specifically A Game of Thrones.
So far, the reports are good, and HBO seems to like what they're seeing… but no, there's no greenlight yet, A GAME OF THRONES remains a script in development, not a series in production.
The one hard bit of news is that HBO has reached agreement with the BBC for them to come in as a partner on the series… IF it goes ahead. That's very cool news, and I'm excited and pleased to have the BBC involved… but even so, we're still in the crossed fingers stage here, not the shooting-off-fireworks stage.
The BBC has done some of the greatest miniseries adaptations of books ever (I, Claudius being a notable example, the House of Cards trilogy is another), and I think it could make a fantastic partner for HBO. HBO, on the other hand, has made some real strides in series with complex characters and story arcs, and is comfortable with stories drenched with gore and sex, as SOIAF most certainly is. HBO is one of the few networks I could see running SOIAF without inserting Hollywood endings that would spoil the entire point of the series.
Sooner or later I'm going to have to do an epic "Cast the SOIAF series" post. Latest thought: James Caviezel as Ned.
No new updates on "A Dance With Dragons."
A few gaming odds and ends for Friday:
One of the great joys of parenthood is watching your kids learn to appreciate some of the same things you do. Recently I've been excited that Evan — now 7 — is really getting into reading. He's in first grade, and is starting to pass tests on books aimed at second and third graders. He's expressed an interest in Harry Potter, which is probably still beyond his reading ability but is in the imminent future.
S I've started thinking about great books that I loved as a young kid, and what I can share with him. i09 had a great piece yesterday about classic young adult science fiction, which took me back. It won't be long before he can appreciate some of the early Heinlein. (Though not the later stuff. I'm not raising some sort of neolibertarian pervert.)
Some others I'm looking forward to showing him soon:
The Phantom Tollbooth, a favorite.
The Master Key, an adventure story I loved as a kid.
The Great Brain series.
And so on.
Other ideas?
Those of us who enjoyed "Bloom County" in the 1980s might remember the series in which Opus was condemned and expelled from the community as a perpetrator of penguin lust.
Truth is stranger, and ultimately more pathetic, than comics.
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Mar 11, 2010 
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