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.