Category: Books

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.

Today’s challenge – A book that makes you sad.

The first book that immediately popped into my head literally made me cry, and that almost never happens when I’m reading, no matter how heart-wrenching the content.  The book in question was <i>Challenger’s Hope</i>, which is the second book of David Feintuch’s Seafort saga — a space opera series which is, essentially, “Horatio Hornblower in Space.”  (So yeah, it was right up my alley.)

I was not expecting to be brought low by a rollicking space-navy adventure — but in the second book of the seven book series, (SPOILERS AHEAD, OBVIOUSLY — so stop reading if you care in the slightest), the main character’s wife miscarries, and is so grief-stricken that she kills herself.  She throws herself out of the airlock because, being on a ship, of course, they had a funeral for the child where they had jettisoned the body, and in her note she says she hears the baby crying, he’s cold so she’s going to bring him a blanket.

WRECKED ME.

Of course, this is because at the point I read this, I had a baby in the house, and I was doing that father-of-a-baby thing and CONSTANTLY checking on him.  So yeah, it hit me HARD.

So there ya go — scarred forever by Hornblower In Space, to the point where it leaps immediately to mind for this question.