Out of Ideas

Good grief. Along with The Road, World War Z, Lost in a Good Book, and A Canticle for Leibowitz... my latest read, Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic, is the FIFTH apocalypse novel I've read (or tried to read) this year! Admittedly, I got what I deserved from The Road and World War Z, but I tripped over the rest of them on my way to a good fantasy or science fiction yarn. Have we really run out of ideas?

Furthermore, The Light Fantastic is the second apocalpyse novel I've read this year that is also a sequel. We saw how well that worked with Lost in a Good Book, now, didn't we? And this one should have been even worse, because its prequel, The Color of Magic, was one of the most disappointing reads for me recently.

But I had to return to the Discworld. It's enormously popular at my high school, so when I was looking for good books to read, the second Discworld novel inevitably appeared on my list. I had to at least try it.

Well, here's a bit of good news-- not only is The Light Fantastic a large improvement over its predecessor, it's also one of the funniest books I've read all year. I'd even deem it one of the better apocalypse novels this year-- for one thing, it's not focusing on the end of days for the whole time, and it has some interesting things to say on the subject.

I think this book is superior to The Color of Magic partly because it isn't trying to do so many things. Color introduced Rincewind, the hapless wizard, and Twoflower, an inexplicable tourist. It was a series of four short stories, introducing us (and Twoflower) to the Discworld. As such, the stories never felt like they had room to breathe. In this one, Terry Pratchett relaxes his guard and plays around with puns on wordplay, characters, and fantasy tropes.

Moreover, The Light Fantastic reminded me what a funny book is supposed to be like. I was laughing alound at several sections. The ending is also much more satisfying than recent reads.

It's Christmas, so I'm not thinking as well and I'm a little distracted, ready to dive into my other books. But know this: I was pleasantly surprised by the Discworld in The Light Fantastic. It's definitely a must-read.

Novels that could show up here soon, received on Christmas, are:
The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau)
Leviathan (Scott Westerfield)
Naughts and Crosses (Malorie Blackman)
Tales from Outer Suburbia (Shaun Tan)
Under the Dome (Stephen King)

and perhaps also Scat (Carl Hiaasen). My sister got that book, and I've admired that author's works for a while now.

Gone

When I made my qualifications of what makes a "Great Book" in my mind (to recap-- it must be both original and well-written), I had a hard time coming up with an example of a novel that had original ideas and themes but was staggeringly badly written. Michael Grant's Gone has fortunately provided me with a prime example.

I'm not sure where to start on this book. It has good intentions. Grant throws a whole bunch of strange and surreal things at the reader, creating a unique world, and ultimately ties them together with some satisfying anti-violence and growing up themes. It resonated with me, anyway, because I'm about to go on to the stage where I'm coping without parents.

But let me say a word on pulp fiction. I've just about beaten that horse to death here, but I want to mention one more kind of novel that gets my goat. It's the kind where every scene is artificially lengthened, to the point where, when you open the novel to any page, it's unrecognizable from another section. A good book has climaxes and lulls in both the writing AND the plot, and while Gone has a decently varied plot, it struggles to rise above one samey level of writing.

(I will give Grant credit for trying to emulate the colloquialisms of the modern American teenager. It just got monotonous after a while.)

On the plus side, I was all set to be upset about this book because it's the first in a series of SIX novels. Nobody is allowed to do that, I thought. Unless you're Tolkien, you need some sort of closure after the first book. Even Star Wars had a little bit of closure, though it let the villain get away in the end. But Gone really went for a Star Wars ending, leaving villains and world intact and ready for another installment, and letting the reader put down the series if he so chooses.

The plot of Gone (for those who have gotten this far) is that the kids of Perdido Beach suddenly find themselves without any companions over the age of fifteen. Bullies start to take over, kids develop powers, and animals mutate in a newly born civilization run amok. The plot has some decent twists and the characters are decently developed -- Grant switches points of view in a manner that is almost ADD (show us what the autistic kid's thinking next time, though). The novel starts to lose some focus because of this, because it's hard to follow the character that becomes the obvious protagonist halfway through - Sam Temple. Yes, I admire Grant's intentions to keep this as an ensemble cast in the first half of the book, but by the end this is really Sam's story, and the writing should reflect that.

This was a good exercise in making a novel. Hopefully the second one could be even better, because there's some good stuff here. But the overlong scenes, the relentless good-guys-walk-into-traps gimmick, and the way the writing style never seems to follow the way the story goes are definitely negatives that keep the book from becoming great. I'm probably a little bit spoiled because the last two books I read (Mimus and Point Blank) were so good, and granted that this book is written for an audience younger than I, but I think Michael Grant should push himself on the next few. Maybe then the Fallout Alley Youth Zone will become a classic.

A theory of novels

With all the useless pulp filling bookshelves these days, I think it's about time somebody knocked certain writers in the head and reminded them what writing novels is all about. I mean, certain ones have it down, but after spending an entire month writing a novel (or two weeks in which I typed out as much as I could per day to get the wordcount), I can tell you that there ARE people who don't know why people read -- or for that matter, why you should write.

Okay, maybe it's a little controlling of me to tell you why to write. But there is only one reason why I read, and that is to have fun. It is to hear an interesting story that draws me in. I do not read to learn about the author's political opinions. I do not generally read to learn about philosophy (I'm looking at you, Sophie's World). I do not read to understand why one kind of gun or spaceship is more powerful than another. (Star Wars novels, please reference the Ender's Game series for how to not suck.) I do not read because I am interested in looking at a textbook. That's why I have government class.

Okay, okay. There are exceptions. Yes, I read nonfiction. Into the Wild and Three Cups of Tea are exceptions to that. So is Walden, of which all the interesting parts are philosophy anyway. So I'm talking out of my butt a little bit for part of this. But as I look at the last four or five books I picked up, there is one and only one reason why I finished some and not others -- because the bad ones, for lack of story, were boring.

First, I began Raptor Red. Now, I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid -- the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs still ranks among the top television shows of all time for me -- and I really liked looking at encyclopedias, especially if they had dinosaurs in them. (And I loved The Magic School Bus. I was the textbook example of a nerd in the making.) So I would have expected to eat a book like this up. The problem is that the book was written by an archaeologist. While he has some interesting things to say, his story is too fabricated to be a historically accurate portrayal of dinosaur society, and too obsessed with the science to be a good story. I kept getting interrupted in the middle of the narrative to hear about the evolutionary process of the Llamasaur or the massive jaw capabilities of the Boringosaurus Rex. One mating scene took up an entire chapter. It is not worth it for me to crawl through a book to finish it. I am totally allowed to put down a book halfway through if it sucks. So I did.

Then I did it again, though I hadn't expected too. A Canticle for Leibowitz was billed to me by my mom as "a really good book". It's a science fiction novel about a post-apocalyptic future where odd religions are becoming more and more prevalent across the globe. That's already putting me on the edge, because I finished reading two other apocalyptic fiction novels this year, which I've already blogged about (World War Z and The Road). This was an interesting religious satire, I'll admit. It kept me just interested enough in the absurd situations of the last surviving documents of a civilization to keep me going. But then they killed off the main character a third of the way in, and switched to a new person. Good as a gimmick, and to get the story moving, but the novel (though well-written) was already a little impenetrable with its flowery prose, relating to too many religious details or made-up cults. I had to drop it because I completely lost sight of the story.

It is not entirely the author's fault for this. I picked up the novel at a bad time, when I was tired of apocalypse. And maybe other people would like it -- certainly, science-fiction buffs could get a high from it. But I put this down for the same reason I put down Isaac Asimov's Foundation -- there was nothing keeping me hooked. I had to work to read it.

On the other hand, there are books that know what FUN really is. Perhaps they had better editors, or maybe the writers were better. Whatever the case, I stayed with the next three books. Kingdom Keepers 2 I already talked about. That gets a free pass because it was a quick read and relatively fun. I'd be ambivalent on picking up another one, but if enough time passes before the next one, I might be interested in it.

Mimus, on the other hand, was a surprise. This was recommmended to me by a librarian a few years ago, and I finally picked it up. It's a story, originally in German, about a prince who is kidnapped and sent to be a jester's apprentice. I sometimes have problems getting through books written in other countries because of the lack of English colloquialisms to draw me in, but this one worked because it was set in medieval times, and the characters had a weird way of speaking anyway. I almost didn't finish this book because it was boringly predictable in the first few pages. Never walk into a lion's den if you're suspicious, guys. But once the jester sprang from the pages, I was hooked. Lilli Thal's book is full of wit, and is an interesting take on the medieval feudal system. Servants and kings are naturally separated, which is a jarring change from our equality-motivated society, but it ultimately works out. With the class-switching of the prince, I was genuinely interested in the rearranged points of view of members of the nobility or working class from a jester's very low perspective. But most importantly, I was invested in the story. Points of view aside, there was rarely a moment when the story was not pushed forward. The author never lost sight of the eventual destination.

And then there was Point Blank by Anthony Horowitz, sequel to the excellent Stormbreaker I read a few years back. Now, I'm not arguing that all books should be as superficial as these. There is good material in the Great Books, and they are complex and lyrical. Mimus was more complex than Point Blank. This is really a young adult's book -- but it was a very very good one. As kid superspy novelists go, Horowitz may be the pro. The book is "full of action", as reviewers say. It's also full of gadgets, full of criminals, full of dastardly plots and secret passageways, full of doppelgangers and stern MI6 bosses... in short, Horowitz takes all the good elements of a James Bond movie, eliminates the bad elements (such as they are), and puts it in a teen's perspective. The result is a stew that is as delicious the first time (Stomrbreaker) as it is the second time. I'm told the later books are as good as, or better than, the earlier ones. I have to say, this is the first sequel I've read this year that did not completely disappoint me. The total opposite -- I was thrilled from start to finish.

Like I said, maybe I'm wrong on this count. Maybe you can write about whatever you want. But I, as a reader, am only going to finish your book if you give me a reason to do so. And that reason can't be something I could find in a textbook or encyclopedia. You've got to draw me into your world, mister. Give it a shot -- I'm just as eager to find out about it as you are.

The Golden Compass: Retrospective

While I continue to read Mimus, I've been finishing up my college apps, and one of them requests that I critically analyze a book, movie, philosophical idea, ice cream flavor, etc. I chose the book (obviously), and decided to write about my favorite book of all time, The Golden Compass. Look: you have no idea how obsessed I was with this book and its two sequels. I ate them up in middle school, decided on and named my own daemon... it was pretty intense. (Her name is Clarissa, by the way, and she's generally a lynx.) Even now, I have two copies of the series on my shelf: one well-loved, battered series of paperback editions, with pages torn and bent at my favorite passages; and one new, glistening hardcover series, each autographed and signed by Philip Pullman himself. (I also own the two lovely companion books, which I'm saving to read because they might be the last His Dark Materials I'll ever get.) I'm reviewing these books without having read them recently (which is why this is a retrospective), so bear with me. This may be rough.

I'm really picky on this blog as to what I like. I'm actually usually looking for two things -- at least subconsciously. (Consciously, I just want to have a good time reading.) One is originality of ideas. A few books accomplish this, but are let down by my other criteria, because I also look for good writing. This category branches out into many separate categories: believable characters, gripping storytelling, unpredictable plot, interesting themes. The books that succeed in both originality and structure make my list of Great Books. (Among them, as I've previously noted, are The Eyre Affair, Ender's Game, and Fahrenheit 451.)

The Golden Compass is primarily prevalent in my mind because of one big idea: the daemon, the animal companion accompanying every human in the world of Lyra Belacqua. It's rather like everyone is a Disney protagonist with a constant helper, but it's bigger than that: the daemon is meant to be a physical manifestation of each person's soul, if you believe in that sort of thing. A lot of people had trouble with this idea because it eventually showed itself for what it was: an antithesis to the organized church. Pullman had a lot of problems with the Catholic Church and he didn't hesitate to note them in this book. Still, his political and religious ideas never got in the way of the gripping story, so it never really bugged me.

What is fantastic is that the brilliant idea of the daemon that Pullman had is supplemented by some of the most lyrical storytelling since Tolkien. (Indeed, both authors graduated from Oxford College in England.) Put it this way: I hate description, and every time description came up, I was as amazed as the characters who were describing it. The novel reads, as most good novels should, like a bedtime story, with one scene or montage flowing effortlessly into the next. Similarly, Pullman never comes out and tells you the details of the concepts of his world, like the daemon and the fighting polar bears. He lets such details flow naturally out of necessity of the story. Some of my favorite scenes involve a reveal of another crucial piece of information about Pullman's world, like when Lyra's daemon pulls away from her for the first time.

It's a bit hard to classify this book. It's a road story, but there's never a dull moment on it, for the characters are always meeting some new obstacle or having interesting interactions -- and the road's path is never really clearly defined, either -- so it's not as pedantic as, say, The Lord of the Rings (or, more appropriately, The Road). It's a fantasy novel, because the daemons are too strange to be believed, but it's also a science fiction yarn, with its parallel universes. It's a mystery; by the middle, it becomes a horror novel; and it is above all, only the first part. His Dark Materials continued with two sequels, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Both of those were interesting: they capitulated on the anti-established religion themes that were only barely present in the first novel; they introduced a couple of new protagonists and climaxed with a re-enactment of the Garden of Eden; they revealed even more about Pullman's strange multiverse. But they got almost too convoluted by establishing so many rules with the universe, and the second book lost focus somewhat by switching point of view to people other than the most interesting main character, Lyra. The Golden Compass is pure unbridled fun -- an adventure that grabs you from the first pages and doesn't let go until the final moments.

On another note, it's kind of cool how many concepts Pullman works in here that have been drastically overused before, but feel somewhat fresh and new here. Obviously there is a new layer to the animal companion gimmick; there are also witches, fighting polar bears, gypsies, Oxford University, and parallel universes. The themes are quite mature, dealing with free will versus the establishment. I was, overall, very drawn in by the whole thing, and you should definitely pick this book up if you get a chance.

Product Placement 2

There comes a time when I have to abandon a book. Such was unfortunately the case with A Canticle for Leibowitz. Don't get me wrong: it's an interesting religious satire set unusually in a post-apocalyptic scenario, but I've read so many post-apocawhatsit novels recently -- not to mention an unusually heavy helping of science fiction in general, for me -- that I just had to give in to my instinctual urges and run to the library to pick up some new books, to keep things fresh. It's possible I'll finish A Canticle for Leibowitz sometime in the near future, because it's divided helpfully into three sections and three time periods, and I only finished the first. Until then, know that Leibowitz (by Walter M. Miller, Jr.) is a smart book, and was in fact one of the first recipients of the Hugo Award. I anticipate that some truly interesting themes, which were beginning to surface, would have come to the fore.

In the meanwhile, I started reading down my stack of new books from the library. Three of them are sequels -- it's a way of getting myself back into series I've already started. This first book is a sequel, and isn't ashamed to admit it: its title is Kingdom Keepers 2: Disney at Dawn. To my knowledge, most authors would be averse to the idea of putting an arbitrary number after their book's title. But most authors are not writing about Disney World, the capital city of The Land of Product Placement. To his credit, Ridley Pearson mentions in his dedication that he was pressured by fans to write the novel, and I'm sure the park pushed it too, so this may not be entirely a creative choice on Pearson's part. (Then again, he did leave the ending to the first book open.)

Pearson's first story, Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark told the story of five teenage kids. They were selected to be filmed as new holographics hosts for the park. Some months later, the kids find themselves physically in the park after they fall asleep -- as their holographic (DHI) selves. An individual named Wayne has activated their forms to help save Walt Disney World from being taken over by rogue villains and Animatronics. The question of why these villains want to take over Walt Disney World, of all places, is still a little beyond me -- as is the identity of Wayne -- but whatever; it's Disney, so suspend your disbelief from the highest mountain peak and go with it.

In this book, the idea is not for the kids to get to sleep, so there's decidedly less DHI action this time. The Overtakers might have (and, as we eventually discover, did) create a second server for the DHI's that would keep them stuck in a sleeping form. So the book takes place mostly around dawn while the kids run around the park trying to apprehend villains and find the server. Although, "run around" is a definitively relative term. So much of this book takes place in chat rooms and over the internet that it's surprising the kids even left their bedrooms to save the world. Nintendo DS apparently got a hand in the product placement, because the kids use them constantly to keep track of each other. They do so with a new texting feature, and Pearson is careful to detail exactly how it works.

The featured park this time is the Animal Kingdom, which admittedly gives Pearson a lot less to work with. In the previous book, he could utilize various iconic rides, like Splash Mountain, Winnie the Pooh, and Small World. In this one, we could confuse the setting for a zoo, save for the final rollercoaster showdown, the recurring Disney villain, and the intricate park mechanisms the kids encounter often. It's these backstage park workings that are a draw for the book. Unfortunately, it's much less interesting to find out where the trainers go than it is to find out where the water drains from Splash Mountain.

Somewhere in the midst there are characters, but none of them really stood out for me. The villains are non-existent; Maleficent shows up maybe three times, and Chernabog once. I remembered by the end that Finn was the leader, and deduced that Philby and Willa had a budding romance (for some arbitrary reason), but that's about it. The mystical sisters' origins weren't explained to me, and were usually offscreen, so they weren' t interesting to me.

Nothing about this book is really unique, actually. It's a solid romp through a Disney park, but it doesn't have the same variety (such as it was) that the previous book did. Still, it's decent escapist fantasy, and while I may be setting my bar a bit low, I enjoyed the book. I don't have a strong urge to read the next one, unless it's set in Hollywood Studios (as is foreshadowed), which might prove more interesting than the Animal Kingdom. The product placement is really the worst part: it gets distracting to read the IM-flavored dialogue after two or three pages. I wish there was more action in this book, and less internet-surfing. That gets a bit too close to home for me.

A brief update

Hello,

As I warned, I'm falling a little behind in book-reading. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is pretty good so far, but I've been caught up in college applications, schoolwork, and National Novel Writing Month lately, so I haven't had much time to read. (Yes, National Novel Writing Month. It's quite an undertaking, and I'm very behind, but it's a really fun and interesting challenge: write 50,000 words in a month. I'll let you know if I finish.)

However, I just acquired a big stack of books from the library, so here's a preview of what might make it onto the blog in the next few months:

Kingdom Keepers II: Disney at Dawn (by Ridley Pearson)

Mimus (by Lilli Thal)

Gone (by Michael Grant)

Joker (by Brian Azzarello; art by Lee Bermejo)

Point Blank (by Anthony Horowitz)

The Light Fantastic (by Terry Pratchett)

13 Little Blue Envelopes (by Maureen Johnson)

A brief distraction

Pop culture or literature? That's the question I've been asking myself for the past couple of weeks. I've semi-returned to a favorite past-time of mine: reading comic books. This has been somewhat at the expense of my other reads, mostly because comics are short and fun to read, and I can slip one in between homework assignments. But with a reading blog, I knew that I wasn't going to get away with this. So I've been thinking about how to address this in a blog primarily about literature.

The conclusion I've drawn is that comics can be more closely equated with television or newspapers than with books, and for two different reasons. Comics are like television because of their constantly changing creators. Oh, sure, the creators will have limited runs, and often they'll be quite good. (Ellis and Deodato on the Thunderbolts, anyone?) But the point is that the characters, over the course of their decades-long lifetime, will have changing motivations with their new writers and different looks with their new artists. I get the feeling that things were more consistent back in the sixties -- from what I've read of Marvel's Spider-Man archives, changing writers didn't change Spidey's character dramatically. In this age of artistic license, though, Spider-Man will be wary of all things magic one month and make a deal with the devil the next. In the long run, this makes for better storytelling occasionally, but inconsistency overall. The most interesting stories are those with one set of creators -- Planet Hulk was excellent, Ellis's Thunderbolts sublime. But I don't think it's easy to stick with a series for very long now. As for me, I couldn't sustain a relationship with the Marvel Universe for more than two and a half years; the reboot of Spider-Man was the final straw. Coordinated the reboot might have been, but it was completely incongruous with what had come before, with all the characterization I had invested in. So I lost interest.

I'm beginning to think that I was looking for the wrong thing in comics. A congruous character is certainly a good thing -- and I'm appreciative of the early Marvel days where that was easier to do. But here's where comics begin to look like a newspaper -- much as I may be looking for an epic, years-long character piece, this is not literature, but pop culture. Pick up any comic and you can get a pretty good idea of the prevalent issues of the day. Take the Marvel universe. (I can't speak for DC.) A.I.M., a Marvel terrorist group, has grown more prevalent. The role of the government has become more and more oppressive - first regulating all superheroes, then being taken over by supervillains. I tried re-reading the epic "Civil War" storyline from a few years back, and found it hard to get through. The political storyline is very wordy, and light on the action. But back in 2006, it was very interesting -- I think because I was grappling with the idea of how much government regulation should be present myself. (This applies to comics of any other era. Captain America fought Hitler in the 40's; many Thor villains were Communists in the 60's.) Everything gets outdated: even "Watchmen" feels different now. But that's how comics are supposed to be. While good books give us a cohesive creative vision, comics offer a brief distraction from the now.

I have one more note here, to compare comics with pulp fiction, or I might get backlash because of how harshly I just criticized pulp fiction a month ago. (Well, I won't get backlash -- not on this blog, not enough people are reading yet -- but let's say I might.) What can I say? I like comics better. Partially it doesn't take as long to read a comic, so I can abandon it if I want, even mid-story (because a lot of stories are spread over many comics). Partially the visual aspect means if I don't like the story, at least I've got pretty pictures to look at. Partially it's more interesting to read about superpowers than anything else (come on, who didn't want to fly or turn invisible as a kid? I still do). And partially it's a relief to read about people with unequivocably good intentions in this day and age. In a world of ulterior motives, it's nice to know Spider-Man's primary goal is to keep the streets safe.

The care and the business of women

With all my talk of imaginative fiction and my modern book choices, it may come as a surprise to you that my next choice of literature was Aristophanes's Lysistrata. As background, I became obsessed last year with finding a really good list of essential literature. While the Great Books of the Western World list isn't modern or very diverse (there's no Asian or Latin American literature, for one thing), it's a good start, and it's full of philosophers and playwrights and mathematicians that I want to read up on. Aristophanes among them.

I've already read Aristophanes's The Clouds, which was a really good satire of philosophy and education in Greek culture. This book is no less insightful or amusing, though it's hurt somewhat by the 1950's translation. (I read a 1990's translation of The Clouds, in the Great Books' 2nd Edition.) The translator tries to get the feel of the piece by putting everything into the proper rhythm and rhyme scheme. It feels pretty good reading it, but I'm picking up a lot less information because of the obscure word choices, and a lack of footnotes on who some of these deities are.

Ahem. I can only criticize this so much because it's so interesting. (Focusing less on the language lets me focus more on the ideas, anyway.) I can see this as a pretty epic musical, though I don't know if this would be accompanied by music in the ancient days. In terms of actual content? Lysistrata is a quirky character with a unique idea about peace; the play is staged in one place, so it works well technically (unlike this play version of Narnia I'm reading, which has something like four elaborate scene changes); and the ending is classic Greek comedy. (Good raunchy bits, too, despite the abstinence.) Oh, might I mention one thing? Aristophanes has no qualms with changing history in fiction. I can't understand why modern storytellers have issues with this -- they always want to return the world to its status quo. What is fantasy for if not to change the world? Sorry, but kill historical accuracy: Valkyrie would have been so much better if they made a new ending.

On sequels

Somewhere, there's an alternate reality where I really enjoy The Underwood See. It completely lives up to the first two in the series (A Crack in the Line, Small Eternities), while tying up all loose ends and still managing to remain elegant. This is not that universe.

I had really high hopes going into The Underwood See, and that should have been my first warning sign. I've already established in this blog that sequels have a very hard time living up to their predecessors, because the original was so... original. The only reason I expected great things from The Underwood See is because the trilogy's first sequel, Small Eternities, was such a surprise. It was really hard to live up to A Crack in the Line, a brilliantly realistic and imaginative science-fiction novel about parallel universes, but live up it did, and Small Eternities was every bit as impressive and elegant as its predecessor.

Why, when an author has a formula that works, does he choose to walk away from it? All right, all right -- the out-there science-fiction nature of this trilogy (billed as three parts of one book -- in the biz we call it the Lord of the Rings strategy) required that someone explain everything by the end. But not to this degree, and not with this amount of extraneous information and dialogue. I mean, this book just drags on and on!

For the uninitiated, Michael Lawrence's Withern Rise Trilogy (sometimes called The Aldous Lexicon, and comprised of A Crack in the Line, Small Eternities, and The Underwood See) is about a teenager named Alaric, who stumbles into another reality one day to find a girl named Naia living his life -- but plus a mother. The idea behind the title is that Alaric's mother died months ago in a freak train accident, but in Naia's reality, she lived. The first book is about the two trying to figure out the nature of their realities; the second introduces more characters and another layer to the science (fiction). Both books have a lot of philosophical wheel-spinning and not much plot: this is very much a story about situation. Each book also has an ending that is as shocking as it is elegant.

I can't say, as I did with Jasper Fforde, that Michael Lawrence was running out of ideas for this book, because there are certainly plenty of new elements. Several new realities include one interesting overgrown forest (much in the vein of C.S. Lewis's first Narnia book), and much of the ending was clearly foreshadowed in other books. But there are just as many elements that are unnecessarily re-used: Aldous's character becomes tedious instead of mysterious, and the new primary Alaric is ripped from a gimmick from the first book that should have remained a gimmick.

The problem with this book really isn't the ideas, though. The series is just getting tired. One reason for this might be that there's actual plot in this one. It's subtle: there's the subplot in the forest, there's subplots of various characters all looking for each other -- but there is rarely a time when the characters have nothing to do, which was actually a plus in previous books when they characters could sit and think. This instead is replaced with petty details from history, and flowery description of locations.

Also, Lawrence has to do some backpedaling to reverse some effects of the previous book, having killed off a major character. He introduces many new versions of Alaric instead, but doesn't spend enough time developing any of them, and so Naia is much more interesting than Alaric. Since this Alaric should have gone through the events of book 1, it's surprising that he's not more interesting, but Lawrence simply doesn't spend much time with him. Fortunately, we've gotten used to the new Alaric enough by the end that I'm okay with the ultimate twinning outcome. (This was something I'd subconsciously hoped for since the beginning. It's not every day you get to speak with your alternate-reality mind twin. I always found the conflict between them an interesting dynamic, but couldn't wait for them to get to like each other.)

In the end, the reality-bending ideas are still present, but they're bogged down with too much exposition and description. The few parts that felt just as good as the previous books were those immediately after the storm, in merging two realities. The book feels a bit like my blog posts sometimes do: I plan them out, know all the points I'll make, but the end result is inferior to the way I heard it in my head. In Michael Lawrence's case, this book isn't as fleshed out as it could have been, and certainly not as elegant.

Still, all that said, anyone interested in imaginative fiction should pick up this series, or at least the first two books of it. I've spoiled a good deal of this one, but made an effort not to give away too much of the others because they're so good. And the exposition was kind of necessary for this one, so I'll give this book a little leeway.

Respect the classics, man

With these long breaks between posts, it's extremely apparent that I'm not as well-read as other, faster readers. I try to be constantly reading, but don't finish things quickly. So I hope, then, that my ambiguosity over Cormac McCarthy's The Road is somewhat understandable. Don't get me wrong -- I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but there are some aspects of it that make me uncertain.

Like, where do you draw the line between High Art and Elitism? The direction, style of writing, and eventual end of the book are unlike most I've read. Do I classify that as novel, or as pretentious?

I'll back up and look at the book for what it is. First, it is spectacular. I picked up this book when my English teacher recommended that our class not read it because it's so difficult to read. Needless to say, I considered this to be a challenge. The Road was one of my summer purchases, and here I am reading it now.

Think about what McCarthy has to live up to for a minute. This novel was published in 2006, and now in 2009, America is obsessed with the Apocalypse (as I mentioned in my last post). Not to mention that this is the second Apocalypse novel I've read this year, if you count World War Z. There's a huge canvas of books out there, and whatever McCarthy does, won't it just be another drop in the bucket?

Wrong. McCarthy's novel is nothing short of a masterpiece. By nearly eliminating the questions of why and how from the novel, McCarthy focuses on the journey instead of the destination. There is an uncertain goal, and it is eventually reached, but the characters are never entirely sure what that goal is. The focus is on the destroyed landscape, and on some interesting (though not unique) themes of survival. The interesting dynamic is the parent one -- the father blurs the lines between reality and falsehood, and it's clear by the end that the son does not appreciate it. Yet they have no one else to turn to, and the father's role really is important. If not for him, they would both have died early on.

There are four major things that separate this post-apocalypse novel from the rest. The first, as I've mentioned, is the lack of details of what happened to the planet. This is pretty interesting, as McCarthy leaves it mostly to our imaginations, though I found it irritating that McCarthy began to gives us details but didn't quite tell us what happened.

The second thing is the writing style. Oh, the writing style. There is little punctuation beyond periods and capital letters; run-on sentences and fragments abound; quotation marks are absent; and furthermore, the characters are never named. I've read that this is supposed to reflect the chaotic state of nature into which the people in the story are cast. I certainly see that.

The third thing is the constant progression to the point of monotony. Discovery of places means less as the man and boy plod along because they've seen it before. In any other writer's hands, this would bring monotony to the point of boredom, but McCarthy makes it work in the context of the story, even addressing it.

The last detail that makes this book different is the ending. Spoiler alert, because (as I said), this is a really good book and you should read it. For the rest of us: I found the ending severely lacking. If the man had not been running the whole time, he might have been rescued. (Then again, would he have let himself be rescued? He's bone-headed, sure, but aren't a lot of us?) The boy leaving the road was the worst thing for me. Sure, maybe he deserves to: maybe the last few scenes set up his divinity -- and that's interesting. But upon reaching the end, I realized that I'd wanted either both characters to die or one of them to continue on the road. The road is so much an entity unto itself that I never wanted to leave it. What else is there to live- or read- for?

That last thing made me wonder, at first, if I just didn't "get" it. And so did a lot of the sentence fragments and run-ons in the description, actually. How much of that is surrealism and how much is literary pretentiousness? But no matter. The book is marvelous in itself, and anyone interested in good literature should definitely read it.

(I apologize if this post is less coherent than most. I wanted to get this up because I'm now halfway through my next book. I guess there's hope for me learning to read faster!)

(Also, that blog title made more sense to me when I started this. You'll just have to take my word for it.)

Not summer, not reading, and... what's a Berkeleian anyway?

I've been strict about keeping this blog to reviews of my reading selections only, so far. But with the nullification of one of the words in the title ("Summer"), I suppose it was only a matter of time before another word was nullified: Reading. Because, you see, two different forms of media have caught my attention recently, and I thought it would be interesting to discuss them. So if you're conservative about this sort of thing, consider "Reading" in the context of this blog to be a synonym for "Culture", just as "Summer" is now a synonym for "Pleasure". Anyway, it's just an experiment for now while I finish The Road (which is excellent so far, thank you for asking). The basic spirit behind the blog will stay the same.

I should explain the name "Berkeleian" while I'm at it, though. Two years ago, I took a philosophy course at my high school, and we were assigned to read Sophie's World. The book culminated in a fourth-wall breaking sequence in which the author establishes a quirky book-within-a-book plot, centered around the philosophy of one George Berkeley. This philospher indicated that any knowledge of the world is to be obtained only through direct perception. It follows that we can only further our understanding of our personal perceptions, but will never know the true nature of the world, in an idealized state. (We could be a brain in a jar, or a character in a book, and our consciousness would not allow us to realize it.) I took to this idea immediately -- the idea of altered states of reality, and parallel universes, intrigues me greatly (though I'm staying as far away from drugs as possible). Hence, I've adopted the name as a student of his ideas.

Ahem. Now to the main event. It's been relatively easy for me to avoid discussing films this year. I've felt the cinematic selection to be more boring than ever, and with little time and budget, it's easier for me to rent from Netflix. Still, I've kept up with a few films, like District 9 and Ponyo (both good). Recently, I went to see Shane Ackerman's 9, and was surprised by how much I liked it. After some discussions, though, it's clear that this film has divided audiences -- either they love it, or they hate it. I liked it, so I'm going to defend myself here. I will try not to impose my beliefs too much, but will instead articulate what qualities 9 had that interested me personally.

A quick summary: 9 takes place in a post-apocalyptic future (of all things), in which a war between humans and machines have reduced the Earth to a barren wasteland. (Or at least, one part of the Earth; we never see much beyond one main city.) With this film, we've come to another in a long, long line of post-apocalyptic films. Here are some more: WALL-E, Terminator Salvation, 2012, The Road. Then there's the new Nostradamus Effect series on the History Channel that tests the validity of various doomsday predictions, and there's the Half-Life 2 game I'm currently playing. Clearly, there's an obsession here. I did not have high hopes for 9 because it did not market itself as anything other than another dystopian future movie. The opening scene, in which our doll protagonist 9 discovers the nature of his surroudings, is not inspired or original. Once 9 moves out into the world, though, the film gets more interesting. We meet other characters and beasts. Little details of the world pop out at us - as well they should, considering the detail of the animation at this miniscule level. The world becomes surreal and visionary all at once. It's invigorating.

So, then, here is what I liked about it. The characters are varied and likeable. The ballet-like, quieter scenes work so much more. I think that may partly be because the characters can talk, but choose not to in their exploration of the world. The storytelling -- which is not the same thing as the (some say predictable) plot -- is inspired. I was drawn into this story. Surreal details move from background images to important plot points. Oh, and the vision is amazing. Character and set design look great, especially the little burlap protagonists. Sure, the movie has its faults -- overly dramatic changes in character, action-scene direction that made my head spin. And it's uneven: the previous world is not emphasized as much as, say, WALL-E, and the means by which the humans die is unoriginal. We've seen it in Terminator, I Robot, and others. But I was willing to overlook this because I'd found a movie that did storytelling in a way that I really liked. It's rare that I find a story that tries, and succeeds, to be unpredictable and good. With this and Coraline under its belt, Focus Features is really doing well with animation this year.

My other short note is on the new hosts for At the Movies. I may be the only person I know who watches this show, but I was saddened to hear that Ben and Ben would be departing it. I liked their discussions and agreed with a lot of their points. The new hosts have more experience with newspaper reviews than TV, probably because ABC wanted the show to have more credibility. My viewing experience was that they had more sustained, intelligent commentary on the films, but their discussion was somewhat lacking. They didn't seem like they wanted to disagree with each other -- but that's precisely what movie discussion is! Everyone's going to see something different in a movie, and it's impossible to fight that. I'll give the hosts a few weeks to find their footing in what is obviously an unfamiliar setting for both. And I'll grant that the show still gives you that little pleasure when you discover the name of a really good indie film you'd never heard of before. (This week it was Big Fan. By the way, their reviews of 9 were middling and good, respectively.)

I'm hoping that someone's actually reading this -- if not, fine, I'm mostly writing for myself -- but I invite you to discuss the things I've read, seen, listened to, etc., on this blog. I think this post was pretty successful, so I'll maybe be adding in reviews of video games and music albums. Still, I'll keep the focus mostly on books and story. That's most of what I have time for, anyway.

Blogging: Make it a Hobbit

It just occurred to me that it's September already. Soon I'm going to have to shut down this blog because it won't be the summer anymore. Well, okay, probably I won't. I want to have a place where I can keep talking about books so my friends who don't want to hear me rant don't have to -- but in all likelihood, I won't post that much during the year because I read (on average) one book every one-two months during the year. Not counting school literature.

So, okay, what haven't I talked about? For some reason, I look back and realize that I haven't reviewed Flatland. Which is surprising, because it's the best book I've read all summer. So I'll go ahead and mention it while I still can. If you don't know the premise of Flatland, it follows a two-dimensional shape as he describes his two-dimensional world. He later encounters a one-dimensional world, and then is taken to the dizzying realms of Space (occupying three dimensions). It's Jules Vernian in scope, and some of its postulates are accurate enough to be mathematical theorems, though they're qualitative instead of quantitative. For instance, the two-dimensional shape (I think it's a Pentagon) observes that, from space, he can see the insides of his fellow 2D beings. From the plane, he can see the "insides" (or, exteriors) of one-dimensional lines. It's quite thought-provoking... at least, once we get into the second half. The first half is a little boring and certainly overly long, but its made up for by the fact that it sets up a brilliant second half.

There's a couple of others that I've read and (nearly) finished since I last posted. (I've been involved in a production of Children of Eden at my local community center, and been on several trips, so I haven't had time to blog.) A couple of weeks ago, I finished J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. A little background: my mom read it to me when I was a kid, and I recently tried to read The Lord of the Rings in a summer month. Big mistake. I ended up dropping the series midway through the final book. I really do love the series, though, for its eloquence of prose and its pretty excellent (though slow, in LOTR) storytelling. So I vowed to restart the whole Tolkien universe a while back, and when I found a version of The Hobbit that I liked this summer, I bought it and set about reading it.

So, how is it? Agonizingly slow, at points. But bear in mind that this is an epic journey across a huge wilderness of a land. So I'll give Tolkien room for that. In other news, it has top-notch storytelling -- better than I remembered from LOTR. Every chapter feels like a fresh and original episode of the story. My complaints are few: Smaug being killed away from the dwarves is a bit anticlimactic, though it ultimately works (and I remember loving it on the first go-round); and the final battle is written in a very confused manner. I think Tolkien got better at this later, but I'm not sure, and my mom at least was slowed down by the battles in Lord of the Rings.

There's a surprising amount of characterization given to the dwarves, as well as to the lands; Gandalf is an extremely interesting character, even this early on. But back to what I said about originality: I noticed, as I went through the book, that a lot of locales and elements are re-used in Lord of the Rings. For example: the battle with a giant spider; a stint where everyone's lost in Moria; Hobbiton, even. The land only has a hundred years or so to change between books. I don't think it'll actually be too much of a problem, because Tolkien makes an effort to change it.

There's one more book I've been reading for school, as I mentioned, and that's Three Cups of Tea. It details Greg Mortensen and his one-man mission to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it, and so far it's really good, if a little slow and peppered with grammar errors. The author is pretty good at making the story interesting to read about (of course, this is pretty unique, so it's interesting already). While I can't really keep most of the characters straight, it doesn't matter too much, and the really important ones are emphasized enough that I figure out who they are; anyway, the most interesting thing to read about is Greg Mortensen's efforts. And this is unique-- I really think he might have made a difference in the region. I'm going to research where the Central Asia Institute is right now, but not until I finish the book.

If this is my last summer post -- which it looks like it will be -- then I hope anyone reading has a wonderful school year, and I'll be back periodically to report on my yearly reading. Next year, it starts again! I ended up only reading a few of the books on my list, but the ones I did read were generally pretty good, so I think this summer was a success.

Imaginative Fiction

A summer or two ago, I read The Eyre Affair. and it quickly sailed to the top of my "List of Favorite Books". This list is not to be taken lightly. It consists of (but is not limited to) the following:

The Golden Compass

Fahrenheit 451

Ender's Game

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Eyre Affair

You could head these under "Science Fiction / Fantasy", but I'm determined not to do so because I'm not putting books like Star Wars in here for a good reason. I prefer to head these books under the category of "Imaginative Fiction" -- books that completely blew me away with their worlds, their prose, and their stories. Books that repeat things I've already seen, and in an inferior way (see: The Giver), won't make it onto this list.

There's a reason The Eyre Affair is so damn good. The book, written by Jasper Fforde, takes place in an alternate 1985, where the Crimean War (of all wars) is still going on, and Great Britain is run by 32 variations of police -- "Special Operations". Thursday Next is a member of SpecOps-27, the Literary Detectives (LiteraTecs). That's all the backstory I'll give, and it's most of what I can give, because the story takes so many swerves and dives that it's a bit hard to keep track of what's what. Still, the book is surreal, witty, and (most importantly) one of the best tributes to the world of literature I've seen.

I walked into Lost in a Good Book hoping for a similar experience. (I mean, if Rowling could do it, why not Fforde?) First impressions were good -- Fforde throws us into the novel without much prose to explain backstory, which actually works for the scene; we only know as much as we need to about new characters. I'm sad to say that the book goes downhill from there. What we are treated to is essentially a reminder -- a "who's-who" and "what's-what" of the first book. For example, Thursday's uncle Mycroft (the genius behind the device from the first novel that let people jump into books) shows up for half a chapter and then exits the book. New characters are variations on the old ones. In fact, both of the villains are directly related to the last book's villains by blood, which turns the book into a kind of complicated revenge novel. The first book had varied characters with completely different motivations, but this one makes it all as same-y as the goo that threatens to destroy the Earth.

Oh, I forgot. There's also a plot to destroy the world. That annoyed me. As soon as there's a chance of the world's end where only one or two people are able to stop it, warning bells go off in my brain. Come on, it's about the most cliched plot ever. The first book, I think, had the idea to put all the stakes of the story around a famed work of literature instead. That was far more clever. Here, it feels like Fforde ran out of ideas. Heck, I feel like I'm running out of ideas, writing this. There's just not much to say about the book. It's the first one, without the charm, wit, or surreality. Subplots are recycled elements from the first book (such as the chapter with the undead). I went back to look, and even the most important subplot, the one with Cardenio (a lost Shakespeare play), is based on an offhand comment in the first pages of The Eyre Affair! One new device is interesting -- the entroposcope that alerts Next to a change in levels of entropy -- and while it certainly gets enough 'screentime', it's not enough to fix the book's inherent problems.

This book feels like a sequel -- nothing more or less. The writers of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy said in an interview that they'd used all their ideas for the first movie, and didn't know where to begin for the second and third. Like them, Fforde seems to be writing this book for sequel's sake -- or just to expand Next's world. While the book ties up the loose strand of how people can go in and out of books without a Prose Portal, I have no desire to read more, despite the several loose ends that are left at the end of this one. Fforde leaves us, basically, with a "To Be Continued" sign, and while I'd dearly love to see Next interact with past version of herself in First Among Sequels, I think this series has already lived past its prime, which is why I'm putting it to rest.

On pulp fiction

Just a quick post as to why I haven't posted recently, and why it'll be a while before I have another book to review.

While I've been reading Flatland, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and (in honor of the 6th Potter movie release) Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, I've had sitting in the back of my mind Michael Crichton's State of Fear. It's a thriller I'm required to read for school, and I guess it's anti-global warming; I didn't really get too far. I've been trying to read a few chapters at a time while distracting myself with better books such as the ones mentioned above, but it's become apparent to me recently that even J.K. Rowling can't cover up the mess that is Crichton's novel. For one thing, it's very hard to keep track of all the various characters and corporations while reading another book, although I don't think I could keep track even if I was only reading Crichton. For another, Crichton's portrayal of women frankly disgusts me -- cardboard cut-outs whose only purpose is to be a sex symbol (or more than a symbol) and/or spout off terribly flat pro-environmentalist beliefs in order to push Crichton's anti-global warming agenda. Then there's the issue of pacing -- 85 pages in and I'm still not sure who the main character is, or what the main action is going to be. This is a hell of a lot worse than anything Dan Brown could dish up.

Maybe I'll read the Sparknotes later, but I doubt I'll pick it up again. I had a couple of other books that I had waiting in the wings after Crichton, but I couldn't decide what to read next: Three Cups of Tea (also required) or The Lightning Thief (recommended by my sister, and sitting on my shelf). Trying to read both didn't work for the aforementioned one-book-at-a-time reason. So I turned to a completely different book, one I purchased at the beginning of the summer: Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, the sequel to The Eyre Affair.

Thank heavens for that, because the book is a godsend. I'm not that far into it, but already it works tremendously well as a direct sequel. It catapulted me right back into the fantastical world I'd left in The Eyre Affair, without too much exposition (a la J.K. Rowling), and with the same amount of wit and charm. In short: I'm very excited for it.

Spiderwick

Since my last post, I've finished Flatland and The Spiderwick Chronicles (all 5 of the original series). I'm going to talk about the latter now.

My sister read and loved this series a few years back, and we recently rented the movie. Haven't seen it yet, but I wanted to read the books before the movie, so I set to work. I finished the entire series in under 24 hours. Each book is short, so that the whole thing reads like one story.

I've tried to read the series before and never got past the first book. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because I haven't had time to read it -- but on the other hand, these are very short books. Halfway through the fourth book, the reason why became shockingly clear: these books -- while somewhat original, and certainly fun with all their illustrations -- are devastatingly boring. I did a lot of skimming on my read of them. Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (the authors) fill the story with meaningless description. Maybe you need to be a kid to like it, but I'm surprised any kid could get through the slog presented to them. I'm sure one reason they could was because of the fantastical illustrations that pepper nearly every page. It's a really interesting idea to have faeries in your own backyard, as part of the wildlife; and while I'm sure it's been done before, this seems to be a really appealing way to present it to kids.

Let's talk about the story itself. The main character is Jared, twin to Simon, sibling of older sister Mallory. The three Grace children supposedly contact the authors and ask them to publish a book they've found (Arthur Spiderwick's Guide to the Fantastical World Around You), and subsequently tell them their tale, found within these five volumes. Along their journey, they meet everything from a troll under a bridge to an ogre in a palace of trash to a dragon doing battle with a griffin. Since the story is split into five parts, the authors have to create a new situation with each book. The first is undoubtedly the most fun, in which they encounter a brownie (or boggart) in their house. Actually, though, most of the rest are repetitive hostage situations with goblins, ogres, dwarves, or elves. Scattered within are some information sessions with members of the Spiderwick family, since the famed Guide is often not with them for some reason.

For a kid's story, too, this series is very centered around despair. Jared (whose point of view we see most often) is often angry, as if an "animal" is eating him from inside. He has an uncontrollable temper, and in the final two books realizes that he is against unwinnable odds. Needless to say, it takes some supreme luck to get him and his family out of tricky situations, which just goes to show you that those with good intentions will be protected by an omnipresent deity. Gee, that's a helpful message. For a theme this big (and with other heavy storylines such as a well-written, nasty divorce), the authors needed a hugely satisfying ending, which they completely failed to deliver. The end is abrupt and lucky, and they then spend too much time on epilogue. An epilogue which, by the way, is also unrealistic. Spoilers: the Guide, promised to the elves for their help, is returned to the Grace children because they'd "proved their worth" by destroying the antagonist. I don't see how they did that; they were lucky. I also don't see how publishing the Guide is "protecting" it.

They never explained why the kids could waltz right into the trash palace at the end, either. (Well, I guess that can be explained by the troll's need to brag. Still, it's a bit weak.)

All in all, this series made me thirst for the Lord of the Rings again. The whole thing had a feel of great mythology behind it, but unless I know that mythology, that's not going to help the massive heaps of description that fluff up a largely insubstantial series. I admire the authors for doing something different, but it's actually not that different. There are lots of stories about fantastical worlds in kids' backyards out there. Far better ones, too.

I'm just looking forward to the Guide. (My sister has that too, luckily, so I don't have to go looking for it.) This is obviously the centerpiece of the whole series. At the beginning of each book is a letter from the Grace children asking the authors to publish the Guide. I understand there was a long delay between the publication of the final book and the publication of the Guide. The delay had better be worth it, because I'm aching for mythology, and DeTerlizzi and Black have so far not met my expectations. Certainly not enough to warrant my going to look for the sequel series.

EDIT: I've actually just thought of a more interesting version of the first book in the series. The Boggart, by Susan Cooper, is a highly entertaining read about a boggart inhabiting an old mansion, clashing with the family that comes to live there (including a computer genius, who proves himself as more than a match for the boggart). Susan Cooper is also the author of the lackluster Dark is Rising series and the excellent Shakespeare time-travel story King of Shadows.

Scream and Run Away: A horror retrospective.

The title for this week is from a Lemony Snicket song. His books, and the album containing this song, are absolutely hilarious.

I'm not sure whether I'll do regular reviews. At present, I've read three books and started one more, but I feel like writing a comparison, so that's what I'm going to do.

The two books I'm going to compare are World War Z and The Graveyard Book. The latter I've started, the former I've just finished. In a decent bookstore, you'd probably find both of them in the horror section. (Then again, maybe not. The Graveyard Book is more of a children's or teen book, and World War Z is rather sci-fi. But let's look at a hypothetical, ideal bookstore, with no age boundaries.)

It's interesting to compare these two, along with 'Salem's Lot, in terms of effectiveness. I still haven't finished 'Salem's Lot, which (for the uninitiated) is a Stephen King novel about vampires. I liked the book at the beginning because it introduced a varied set of characters in order to create a pretty layered society, which I expected King to then smash apart with his vampire, sledgehammer-style. Once the killings got going, though, I found the book to be long and tedious. Partly this may have been because the choice of deaths was uninspired -- the least interesting characters went first. Partly this may have been because the vampires in question were riddled with all your basic cliches -- compounded by the fact that King intended to stick to the vampire's roots to make the book more interesting. (It didn't work in Superman Returns, and it didn't work here either.) But I think the real reason the book didn't work was because it approached fear from entirely the wrong direction. There are few light moments in the book, and the human characters feel one, unambiguous shade of fear towards the vampires, and King expects us to do the same. For any writers out there, noobs or otherwise, let me say this: this is boring. Horror is a very layered feeling. Disgust, curiosity, xenophobia, and uncompromising terror are all different aspects of it. Neil Gaiman gets it right; more on that in a minute.

Horror is a very misleading term. My parents, and some of my friends, are always talking about how horror movies are the blood-and-guts type: "Saw", "Hostel", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Exorcist". (By the way, ever wonder why it's called "The Exorcist" and not "The Exorcism"? Me, too. I need to see that movie to find out why.) Anyway. That's all well and good, but what about films like The Blair Witch Project, or Poltergeist, or even Jaws? Those movies are made to scare you out of fear of the unknown, be it that thing hiding in the dark, the clown draped over your bedroom chair, or the shark in the water. Hell, throw Ghostbusters in there, that's got a little horror. My point is that there are many different aspects of horror. Blood and guts is not the only part of it. Horror is a feeling, and we can all experience it in different ways.

Lest you think this is too much about stuff that I'm not reading this summer, let me link this very smoothly to World War Z. I wish Max Brooks had learned about layering horror before he'd written this book. I started out reading it going, "Oh, zombies! Hooray!" but once the novelty wore off, it got dull and pointless. Okay, here are some dead things killing five people in different ways. So? The interesting part became how the world survived the infestation, but even that was riddled with cliches: the USA is the first to advance aggressively, after having massively screwed up on the battlefront; people start eating each other for food; political exploits, etc. etc. Every step, I could have guessed. Yet it became an entertaining read after a time because, well, it was written so well, and maybe because it was so varied. I need to think about it for a bit, why I got back into it, but about halfway through the book something clicked and I tore through it with gusto.

And this was completely different from my experience upon opening The Graveyard Book. See, here's what I've been leading up to: how Neil Gaiman treats horror. Short version: it's not all horror. Oh, sure, there are huge elements of it: unnatural otherworldy beings, a murder, and enough ghosts to cool several walk-in refrigerators. But it's treated like a pretty natural tale set in completely unnatural circumstances. The horror is THERE: I was scared out of my skin by a couple of the beings in the first chapters, but the whole feel of the book is much more invigorating and interesting.

I guess this post has rambled on long enough, and possibly most of you have stopped reading by this point, but my whole point is that horror is varied, and that's the only way to write it. Now if only we could have more Graveyard books and fewer zombie flicks.

P.S. I do need to get ahold of The Zombie Survival Guide. I've grown a little addicted to Max Brooks' work.