11. Cell

By: Stephen King

I didn't post the cover picture here because I couldn't find the cover that's on my book online, and frankly the one with the Cellphone with all the blood seeping out is kind of gross. Not nightmare inducing gross, just i-don't-want-to-look-at-it-when-i-read-my-blog gross.

Although I was going to abstain from anymore King for a while, I found this in the airport on the way back from Japan, and there weren't too many english choices.

On to the story.

The not-quite-zombie story gets off to a good start. A pulse is sent out over cell phones, and when answered, the reciever of the call becomes, for all intents and purposes, a zombie. When things go-to-hell (or rather, when hell arrives here), its quick, unexplained, and everything turns on a dime. The idea that everything can change in a second is powerfully realized. Unfortunatly, it seems that King starts to back off the chaos at some point. The phone-crazies start to calm down and organize. However the idea of Zombies who are gaining intelligence and organizing just isn't as frightening as a total chaos of mindless hunger.

I've found that with some King books, I realize that I've read the "exciting climax" after I've passed it. Perhaps things don't seem to build up right, or it seems like more should be happening at that moment.

Overall? Not terrible, not great. There are better Stephen King books out there, and I'd take any number of zombie movies over Cell.

10. His Majesty's Dragon

By Naomi Novik


When I was loading up on books to bring back to China, I had picked up and put down His Magesty's Dragon twice. On the one hand, this trilogy looked like an interesting new twist on the dragon theme- it takes place during the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, I find that I have very little patience for mediocre fantasy/sci-fi novels. If I don't love them, I'll probably hate them (which is why, as geeky as I am, I've never read a Star Wars novel).

However, shortly after returning to China, I read that Peter Jackson was considering making The Termiere Trilogy his follow-up to Lord of the Rings. Later that week, I found it at the English Bookstore. So, I figured, if its good enough to be considered by Pete Jackson, its good enough for me to read.

Well.

It gets off to a great start. Laurence, the captain of a British ship, has just defeated a French ship in battle, boarded them, and taken their cargo. In the hold, his crew find a dragon egg. This event introduces us to a world in which England and France are fighting on two fronts- on the sea by ship and in the air, by dragon. The acquisition of this rare dragon egg changes the life of Laurence and the direction of the war.

Once the book gets underway, Novik has this annoying habit of resolving problems as soon as they arise. Its the strangest problem to encounter in a novel about war, dragons, or dragons in war. The dragon won't let itself be harnessed on page 6? They figure out how to woo it properly on page 7. Laurence is not accepted by his new aviator companions on page 28? He wins them over on page 29. Again, and again, its as if Novik doesn't like to see her characters endure the slightest inconvenience for any length of time. Perhaps she cares too much for her characters to see them in pain, or perhaps I read too much into it. Not sure. Either way, only the final battle creates a problematic situation that lasts for more

The final air battle, although only a few pages long, is as good a read as the beginning, and its only by virtue of those two sequences that I could envision a movie being made from this book. The visuals of seeing an all out war with people riding dragons, firing muskets and dropping bombs on each other would be quite a Hollywood sight. Unfortunately, I think they'd have to draw out the tension throughout the other 90% of the story.

9. Walter the Farting Dog

By: William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray

Illustrated by: Audrey Colman

Overall, there's not much to say about a book in which the plot is fully explored in the title alone.

Walter is a dog. He farts. He is a farting dog.

The artist does a great job populating Walter's world with peculiar looking people, and rich textural backgrounds.

We just received this book as a donation to our library. I'm so glad that our kids are exposed to stuff like this.

Don't read sarcasm into that last statement- I wish I had this kind of thing when I was a kid.

8. Mediated

How the Media Shapes the World and the Way You Live in It

by Thomas De Zengotita

Hey, if you like being talked down to as much as I do, you are going to love Mediated Its not just that Zengotita assumes that he knows everything about you, or that he belittles every choice you've made in your life, because he humbly admits he is in the same boat. No, what makes his book *really* stand out is the boldness of putting such an academic work forward that contains absolutely no research.

For example, he talks about "Ridgewood Family Night", in which the town of Ridgewood New Jersey passed a law making one night a week "Family Night", in which local residents had to spend time with their families. Well, it wasn't so much a "law" actually, it was more of an 'initiative', and it was only for one night, to make a point. But that doesn't matter. What good are facts?

And its clear that De Zengotita has no interest in silly things like 'facts', where most authors would include some actual data, he boldly shows how little accuracy matters. For one small example, in this paragraph he's talking about a plaque he read:

The plaque said something like "To the memory of those who lost their lives in the Great Storm of 1908," or 1928, or whatever it was. An "8" figured into it, I recall.

Interestingly, he references the Unbearable Lightness of Being in a sort of flip and passing way in the context of his book, but never actually credits the book with being a philosophical precursor to many of his own ideas (with regard to the relative importance/unimportance of our lives).

Oh yeah, I the book was somewhat about how the media shapes our lives or something - i'm not sure, I guess I could open it again and check.

"Whatever".

7. Velocity

By Dean Koontz

I'm actually a few books behind now, so hopefully I'll get some posts up in the next week or so.

A freind loaned me "Velocity" after a talk we were having about pulp fiction and my recent Stephen King Binge. As you would expect from the title, its a fast paced book. Interestingly, it starts of leisurly and kind of witty, and after the main character discovers a disturbing note left for him on the car, it transforms the main character's life (and the book) into an unrelenting nightmare.

This is again one of those books that you don't want to give too much away. It begins with a note and a choice - Billy, a bartender, finds a note on his car that offers him a choice from a serial killer. If he goes to the police, he'll kill a young school teacher, if he doesn't go to the police, he'll kill an older woman active in philanthropy- his dilemas begin here, and his choices get harder.

Basically, the book is fun, and nothing more. It is the kind of book that fulfills its own prophesies- if there is a mention of a gun in one scene, you can expcet someone to get shot in the next. In that way, the outcome was relativly easy to predict, and although Koontz does manage to throw you off the trail occasionally, the scent never goes completely dead.

Overall score? A for a "sitting-on-the-john-book", and C- for "I feel smarter for having read this".

4-6 Vertigo: Fables

4. Fables 1: Legends in Exile

5. Fables 2: Animal Farm

6. Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall

By Bill Willingham

These three graphic novels include the first two in the "Fables" series, and the "Special Edition" graphic novel. As a begining series, Fables isn't bad, but its not great. Theres a little too much reliance on the clever references and so far, the characters remain shallow. Its as if Willingham is willing to give them a new life with new personality traits which are the result of living for a few hundred years, but they basically remain simplistic and two-dimensional. The murder-mystery plot of Fables 1 gets the story started, but isn't very engaging. The ironic thing is that the most interesting thing about the story are the veiled references to "The Advesary" - the mythical evil force that conquered the fantasy lands drove the Fable characters into the "real world". The few clues we get about this story are enough to continue on with the series.

Fables 2 picks up where the first left off, and is marginally better. The momentum of the series begins in this one when the non-human fables begin a rebellion against the humans who keep them tucked away on a farm. Again, the characters aren't very complex, - it would be more interesting, I think, to have seen these characters in a more human light- a difficult task though, to create a complex 'real' character out of an archetype from a kid's story.

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a different story. This is a beautifully illustrated series of short stories, each one with a different guest artist, including Jill Thomposon and Esao Andrews, who is one of my favorite illustrators. Willingham uses the Sheherezad template to tell the 'inbetween' stories of his fable characters (what happened to them between the fables we know and the comic series). Some of these stories are interesting and fun (like Snow White's Revenge story), some are creepy and uncomfortable (The Frog Prince's family meets an unpleasant end), and some are silly and fun.

The results of the collaboration between Willingham and all of these artists succeeds exactly where Flight 3 failed- the book is a compalation of stories from multiple talents, woven into a single theme. Granted, this book has the advantage of a single author's vision.

1001 Nights is a good read, even if you haven't read the rest of the Fables comcis (or if you only read the first two). The series itself gets off to a mediocre start. I will pick up the next few on my next trip back to the states - it looks like it has potential.

3. Flight 3

The original Flight is a pretty interesting story of innovation - and by that I mean how the actual graphic novel came about. A bunch of web comic artists who met online got together and decided to pool their collective talents to produce their own graphic novel. They used the popularity of their own sites as well as other linking sites to produce the book. Each artist contributed a short story which may or may not have had something to do with the word "flight". At least, it seems to me, that was part of the idea behind the original, but it doesn't seem to say anything about that on the website. Nor does it seem to have become a general theme of the series.

I really enjoyed reading Flight because of the idea of it- and some of the stories were actually pretty good. Flight 2 felt like a bit repetitive and less innovative. By the time we get to Flight 3 we know the deal, its not innovative anymore, and all we're looking for is good art and good stories. Hard to find in this one.

It seems to me that short stories are harder to write than full length ones. There is little time for character or plot development, and without just enough of both they tend to fall flat. The other problem i find is that new short fiction writers are too easily drawn to the Twilight Zone ending. Instead of creating a story that's memorable, they spend the entire plot working up to a memorable ending- which ends up not being that memorable at all. I guess I'm also sort of twist-ending-ed out.

Not all of the stories in Flight 3 relied on that device, but unfortunately, there were very few stories in here that were actually memorable. In fact, I haven't gotten up from my seat to get the book yet, and I'm having a hard time remembering which stories were worth reading.

Some of the stories had beautifully done artwork and some of the stories had intriguing ideas. unfortunately, only one or two of them had both. I was about to go into more specifics about the individual stories, but I think it would just be a better use of our time to sum the whole book up in one word: "meh".

2. The Regulators

By: "Richard Bachman" (read: Stephen King)

Ok, this is my last King book for a while.


The Regulators is the "companion novel" to Desperation, and as intriguing as that concept sounds (the original novels had covers that made a larger picture when you held them together, it really ends up being more of a gimmick than than anything else.

Its hard to discuss these books without giving away some minor spoilers, so *highlight* to read, or just skip to the next paragraph:

Both stories are about Tak - a kind of 'vampire of the soul', in Desperation, he invades the body of his victims and uses them to wreak havok on the small town which bares the same name as the book. However, he is unable to last long in any given body as they start to decompose. However, in The Regulators, Tak finds that he is able to survive in the body of an autistic boy who has his own supernatural powers.

The books can be read in either order as one is not a sequel to the other. Its more like one is an alternate reality to the other. This idea is *very slightly* touched upon in one of the books, and more dominant a theme in the Dark Tower series.

The problem though, is that there is not a great deal of innovative use of the "alternate reality" idea between these two books. Most of the similarities are superficial (some of the same characters appear, some characters re-appear with slightly different names).
Desperation was a fast paced engageing horror story right from the begining. The Regulators also starts off well, however it quickly becomes a gore-ified version of a twilight zone episode. And by "Twilight Zone", I'm not talking about the Rod Serling classics, I'm talking about the campy 80s remake.

The idea of alternate realities between 'companion novels' is intriguing to me, but not realized to any interesting conclusion in these books. They can easily be read alone and you wouldn't miss much.

I'd recommend Desperation, and if you're des.per.ate for more (hat tip to jarrett's sense of humor), then read on to The Regulators.

1. Desperation

By Stephen King

Like an abused spouse, I return to reading Stephen King as my first book in 2007, so quickly after being so let down by the conclusion of The Dark Tower series. However, Desperation has been on my list for a while. First of all, there are some interesting tie-ins to the DT series. Secondly, Desperation came out with a "companion novel", The Regulators by "Richard Bachman" (SK's alter ego). I'm not sure if that was just a little gimmick or something that will pan out as actually interesting when both are read together (stay tuned for a review of that book as well). Finally, I caught the first 20 minutes or so of the televisonification of the book, and it wasn't that bad at all. In fact, its a pretty good opening;

Soon after passing a road sign for the town of Desperation that has a dead cat hanging from it, Mary and Peter are pulled over by a local cop in the middle of nowhere. The cop finds some of Peter's sister's pot hidden in the trunk, and arrests the couple. Mary and Peter think they're in deep shit, but it turns out that this shit is much deeper and much shittier than it appears.

The begining is indeed, the best part of the book - which isn't to say that the rest of the book is bad. The problem I find with horror books and movies in general is that they're more enjoyable before you really know what is going on. The mystery is the page turner, but then if it drags on to long it becomes tedious. Once the initial mystery/horror is revealed, King builds the tension in the way he does best: blood and guts.

The world that King creates around his Dark Tower universe is indeed intriguing, and there is a certain satisfaction in picking up on the little tie-ins that connect that world to the worlds of his other novels. Even though these novels are enjoyable on their own, the connections give a sense that each book is a piece of a puzzle.

2006, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Well folks, this is the one blog I utterly and miserably failed at updating this year. I blame this entirely on a large stretch of time at which the only book I read was:

Book 5: Learn Chinese

Which, if you haven't guessed from the title, was a Chinese language book. The grammar part was terrific, it wasn't a good vocabulary book, just had a few vocab pages stuck in for good measure. It came with two CDs that went WAY too fast. I only listened to them once. I found in the long run more success with the Pimsleur CDs, Chinese Pod podcast (until they started charging), and The Rosetta Stone software, which was by far the best.

After I got to China, I started reading again (on the plane over), but hadn't updated this blog in so long that I basically gave up on it. However, I'm feeling the need for closure on it now, so here are the books I've read in that time:

Book 6: Assassination Vacation
By Sarah Vowell

This is a cute little non-fiction book by the friendly kid-voiced NPR contributor, one of my favorite people to listen to on This American Life. I think I would have preferred to have listened to this book than read it because half of the enjoyment in her stories is the way she says things, but there are some really REALLY interesting and strange facts in this book, like the fact that the brother of John Wilkes' Booth actually saved Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln from a Train accident.

Book 7: Kafka on the Shore
By Haruki Murakami

Great book, very similar in style and theme to The Windup Bird Chronicles. It is quite apparent that Murakami has a thing for alternate worlds, incest, and missing cats.

Book 8: The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
By Stephen King

So I finally decided to read this series that I started when I was sixteen and still in high school (half of my life ago!). Back then, I got almost to the end of this book, and it had bored me into not finishing it, especially because in the preface, King said that the scope of his story was too large and he'd probably never finish it in his lifetime. Well, he finished it after all (in 2004), so I started reading it again (from the second book, the first one I re-listened to on audiobook download during my commute to Huntington at the beginning of the year).

This book wasn't as boring as I remember it, but it wasn't great either. In this book, Roland, the Gunslinger gets his posse together by stealing them from different worlds.

Book 9: The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
By Stephen King

Roland's Posse is almost complete, although he has to spend about 500 pages fixing something that he screwed up in the first book. Then there's some demon sex, and a kid gets kidnapped before the Gunslingin' gang can start on their quest proper. In the end, they get a ticket to ride a train. A bad, bad train.

Book 10: The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
By Stephen King

This book is basically a prequel to The Gunslinger, and was just a long way of explaining why Roland is the way he is, and give a little more background on the strange world they're traveling through. Meh.

Book 11: The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
By Stephen King

I didn't have much hope for this book since the blurb on the back made it sound like this was yet another 700 page diversion from the main quest (which is simply to reach the f*ing dark tower). It ended up being much better, and the series really picked up at this point. King starts bringing in this sort of postmodern twisting of reality as characters and things that you don't expect to ever show up in a book like this, suddenly do.

Book 12: The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
By Stephen King

This was a strange book because its much shorter than the others, and basically reads like the transition between the middle of the story and the end. Basically, Susannah has a baby, and the rest of the posse tries to keep the universe from exploding.

Book 13: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
By Stephen King

Not a very creative name is it? Not a very creative book either. The first half of the book is pretty good actually, very exciting, very tragic, and everything comes together at last. Then he has to get on to writing the ending, because roland had to reach the tower at some point, otherwise it would have been a very poorly named series indeed. I won't write any real spoilers, but this is what happens when he gets there: King basically admits in the end that he didn't really have an ending in mind for the series and the one that he chastises you for reading is pretty lame. I'm not kidding. He actually TELLS you not to read it, and tries to shame you for turning the page to the final chapter. I've read some stinkin' endings in books before, and it doesn't always ruin the book, but I've never had an author make me feel bad for reading it. The fact that he tries to shift the responsibility for the bad ending onto the reader is really the reason that this is the worst ending that was ever written.

Well, i've just started

Book 14: Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
By Haruki Murakami

to get the bad taste of the end of Dark Tower out of my mind. Even though Murakami's endings haven't yet been as interesting as the mysteries that lead there, at least he has enough respect for his readers to own them.

I didn't quite make it to my own dark tower (50 books), but I didn't really expect to. I do feel quite accomplished for steamrollin' through the 4000+ pages of the Dark Tower though. The journey was fun despite the ending.

Kinda like this blog. Thanks for reading.

2006 is over.
Print is Dead.
Long Live Print!

4. Naked Pictures of Famous People

So I overheard someone talking about a new book by Jon Stewart, so the next time I was in the bookstore, I found "Naked Pictures of Famous People" (the quotes change everything in that sentence). Anyway, to make a long story short, the people I overheard must have been talking about "America: A Citizen's Guide", because NPOFP was written in 1999.

Naked Pictures is a collection of short comedic essays, and is pretty hit and miss. One essay is a formula for hosting an awards show, and with the knowledge of his Oscar performance this year, ends up being pretty funny. For example:

HOST:
General greetings and a query as to the audience's well-being. Affirmation of audience's well being. Statement of own well-being. Survey of surroundings. Improvised analogy comparing surroundings to different surroundings. Sarcastic jab at expected length of proceedings.

Pause for laughter.

HOST:
Confusion about actions of government officials. Statement of proposed personal action if given opportunity to govern.

Use. Repeat for Oscars. Repeat for Daily Show. Repeat. Repeat. And yet he makes it seem like new each night. You've got to respect that. Yet in many respects, the book is not nearly as entertaining as his performance on television (I was going to say "or film", but well, it is better than that).

Another good essay is on "The New Judaism", in which he suggests ways to get the kids to keep the faith:

Old Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs?
Adult: To remind us of the pain our ancestors felt while enslaved in Egypt.

New Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat hot fudge Sundays?
Adult: To remind us that being Jewish is like having your birthday everyday!! Plus they're delicious!

There are some duds, in one essay he poses as Vincent Van Gogh on an AOL chatroom, but there's nothing terribly funny, and doesn't really go anywhere.


The praise on the book cover compares Jon Stewart's book to Woody Allen's Without Feathers and Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes. I Haven't read "Cruel Shoes", but it has quite a reputation, and Feathers probably defined the genre of the short-absurd-comic-compilation. While it was a fun read, it didn't quite live up to those standards.

3. A Man Without A Country

By: Kurt Vonnegut

First of all, a passage that I thought the readers of this blog would appreciate:

Here is a lesson in creative writing.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

MWAC is full of all kids of clever thoughts, insight about the state of the world, and other pure morsels of vonnegoodness. While he does an excellent job of exposing the politics of the day through its own absurdity, it feels like there's nothing entirely new here. Perhaps though, this is no fault of Vonnegut's. This administration and GOP rule is such a joke that there is no amount of absurdity that we haven't already seen. They echo the sort of sentiment that is expressed daily on liberal blogs and on Air America radio. To me, Vonnegut was a master of weaving an absurd fantastical story and having it being such an accurate reflection of what the world was really like.

Overall? a great read, but not all that unique and not nearly as interesting as his fiction.

My favorite passage though, was where he explains that all the hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and what-have-you, are all the earth's immune system trying to heal itself by getting rid of us.

Right on, KV! Write on KV!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

By: Haruki Murakami

I read this book last year, but enjoyed it and felt like writing about it, even though it doesn't count towards my 2006 fifty.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a strange postmodern Alice-in-wonderland type journey mixed with sexual angst and generation x passivity in a Japanese Setting. It begins when Okada's cat Noboru Wataya goes missing and his wife asks him to go find it. Okada has time to look since he quit his job at a law firm and has no motivation to find a new one.

This seemingly insignificant incident, is of course, the inciting incident that draws Okada behind the scenes of a story that begins in World War Two and has ramifications in the modern political world. All of this is connected by a supernatural dream-like world and the strange characters that move between these worlds.

Murakami pulls off an incredible feat- an epic with a passive gen-x-er at its center. More than that, he walks that fine line in creating a supernatural world without giving in too deeply to the fantasy. He shows you just enough of this world to intrigue his audience, but not enough to give any answers - much like a dream. There is something very 'twin peaks' about his world; a world in which the real and tangible are touched and influenced by the 'other', but this 'other' is too different to understand. Like 'Twin Peaks', if we understood this world any better, it wouldn't be as interesting.

2. An Artist of the Floating World

By Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist Of the Floating World paints an interesting portrait of post-war Japan as seen through the eyes of the aging Masuji Ono. It reads much like an early Ozu movie - the pacing is slow and deliberate, and it wanders through Ono's life, interweaving with thoughts and memories. Similarly as well, there is little conflict. Ono has tension with his daughters and he internally questions his past, but there are no crisises to overcome, all the battles have already been fought.

In his youth, Ono is the proto-typical rebel artist, aiming to achieve a new level in his work. The "floating world" refers to night-life Japan, clouded by drink and other pleasures of the night. Ono, like his colleagues, paints images inspired by this life. However, when his attention is turned to the suffering of the poor, his paintings come to support the Nationalist movement in their support of a stronger Japan.

Ono's reflections on his life often come through interactions with his daughters who are embarrassed of his past, and his grandson who has taken to emulating cowboys instead of Samurai. The book never dwells on these little moments, perhaps that is what makes them stand out so clearly. Similarly, the backdrop of a city which lies partially in ruins is only casually referred to by Ono.

There are great discussions on this book on the meaning of art, and its relationship with the world. Its particularly interesting to read, in Ono's rather passive voice, about his attachment to nationalism; its something that you rarely get 'the artist' perspective on, as most 'rebel artists' are portrayed as fighting against a totalitarian government.

1. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I figured that while Kim and I were in Prague this year, it would be appropriate to read something with a little local color. Seeing as Milan Kundera was of Czech origin (and having read and loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being), I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Good choice, because it included a lot of interesting personal reactions to much of the politics of Czechoslovakia during the communist period.

Like Unbearable Lightness, TBOLAF isn't so much a straightforward story, but a philosophy that wanders through different ideas like a path in the woods, meeting different characters and joining diffrerent events as it goes. In fact, where lightness wanders, Laughter and Forgetting even gets lost a few times. Not always in a bad way - it just strays from the path, looks around at another part of the forest, and then stumbles upon the path again.

The story follows a bunch of different characters in different stories. Kundera claims that some of them are real and some are made up. Likewise, it is obvious that the story goes back and fourth in an inconstant pattern between real and fiction as well. The characters and plots in the story have little or nothing to do with each other (with the exception of the author's presence who knew or wrote them into existence).

Many of the themes in lightness are repeated here. In many ways this book feels almost as if its a 'study' for lightness - sort of like sketches of an idea versus the finished painting. In a way, the sketches have their own beauty and capture an immediacy that is lost in the final painting, but it also doesn't reach the level of "complete-ness" (for lack of a better word).