Month: February 2018

Today’s challenge — a book you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving.

This is a hard one, because generally, if I don’t think I would like it, I don’t bother reading it in the first place. I don’t have time to waste on stuff that I’m not interested in.

This one was a while back, though — a book that I tried twice before to read, purely on the raves of friends. Each time, I read a bit, didn’t find it particularly compelling, and stopped. In particular, the first book’s obvious beginnings as “fantasy War of the Roses”, Starks and Lannisters standing in for York and Lancaster, pulled me right out of the narrative. It was too heavy-handed and obvious.

Then my friend Theron said — “you’ll love it.” I told him that I’d tried to get into it and couldn’t. He said “Do me a favor — just keep reading until at least page 85.”

So I did. Page 85 was the page where Bran gets thrown from the tower of Winterfell.

I ended up reading the whole thing.

Really loved it too — at least the first three books. I gave up after the fourth. By the fourth, it seemed obvious to me that Martin wasn’t being constrained by his editor any longer, and he really needed to be. What was touted as a trilogy was now exponentially growing, and I grew bored with it. I’m not sure I’m going to ever bother reading the rest (if Martin even finishes them). I’m getting a resolution via the TV series, and that’s enough closure for me.

Today’s challenge — Most overrated book.

Jeez — SO many to choose from. But I’m going to go with one that sets me apart from Geek Orthodoxy: a book that is lauded in geek circles, and popular enough in the mainstream view to have had a film made of it: THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir.

I started reading the book because of the raves, and gave up on it about 1/3 of the way in, because the main character’s “voice” in narration annoyed the ever-living fuck out of me. It struck me as just too Joss-Whedon-ish-ly self-consciously “clever.” You know– the sort of way that “smartest-guy-in-the-room” geeks always imagine themselves talking, but seldom ever do?

It read, to me, like a marginally-well-plotted self-published novel, which, in fact, is what it began as before being picked up by a traditional house, and then turned into a movie. I honestly do NOT get the love for this book. It serves, mostly, as my reminder that not every geek-lauded thing is for EVERY geek, which is always good to keep in mind. A chacun son goût, and all that.

Today’s challenge: A book that makes you laugh.

The first one that immediately popped to mind was this one, although it was followed quickly thereafter by Douglas Adams’ HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE books. I’m going with Gaiman & Prachett because I actually encountered Adams’ stuff as a TV show before I ever read the books, so I still tend to think of them that way.

Speaking of television, Neil Gaiman is currently in South Africa, filming the forthcoming adaptation of Good Omens for Television, where David Tennant and Michael Sheen are starring as Crowley & Aziraphale. I have high hopes.

But for me, this is, first and foremost, a book. A book that made me burst out loud laughing with the following paragraph:

“It wasn’t a dark and stormy night.

It should have been, but that’s the weather for you. For every mad scientist who’s had a convienient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor racks up the overtime.

But don’t let the fog (with rain later, temperatures dropping to around forty-five degrees) give anyone a false sense of security. Just because it’s a mild night doesn’t mean that dark forces aren’t abroad. They’re abroad all the time. They’re everywhere.

They always are. That’s the whole point.

Two of them lurked in a ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing, both of them Olympic-grade lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded “Born to Lurk,” these two would have been on the album cover. They had been lurking in the fog for over an hour now, but they had been pacing themselves and could lurk for the rest of the night if necessary, with still enough sullen menace left for a final burst of lurking around dawn.

Finally, after another twenty minutes, one of them said: “Bugger this for a lark. He should have been here hours ago.”

The speaker’s name was Hastur. He was a Duke of Hell.”

Yeah. With that, I knew I was in good hands.