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First up, I have a brief correction. Two sources informed me that Abadazad:
The Dream Thief was not the last Abadazad novel. A third book was published in
the U.K. and is incredibly hard to find. Secondly, I didn't go entirely
without Star Trek. I cheated. I watched TV and read some comics off my DVD of
500 Star Trek comics.
This month comes highly recommended. Not by me necessarily, but everything I'm
reading this month was recommended to me by various people I know. Some of
these have been sitting around the house for years, others not quite that
long. Some of them I went out and grabbed even though I've got a zillion
books waiting in my box. Anyway . . .
- America: The Book - A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction by Jon Stewart
and friends: It is amazing how I can live some where all my life and realize
just how little about it I actually know. The book is listed as a humor book but
much like the television show that spawned it, it is highly informative and
insightful. It presents a simple message: America as it was meant to be. Then
after showing you this it goes ahead and crushes those dreams of truth and
justice into something other than a diamond (probably animal feces) by
presenting America as it is. The truth hurts. Jon Stewart and his team are a
national treasure because they make us laugh at our failures. The ability to
admit this country even has faults is vital to our very existence as a free
society. Often the court jester is the only one who can speak the truth. This
book was written back before anybody had even heard of our current
President. There are quite a few of Bush jokes. There are more jokes about
basic human behavior. You know what? It still holds up. Political wind
up toys may come and go but schadenfreude is forever The book is a very long
proof of an axiom that is often credited to Winston Churchill: 'Democracy is the
worst form of government, except for all the others.'
- Waking Up Screaming - Haunting Tales of Terror by H.P. Lovecraft: When it
comes to creating an atmosphere and consistent mythos, I have to give Lovecraft
an 'A'. I found one major fault with this collection of horror stories; that
was the sheer lack of blood curdling terror. Where is the politician who turns
his back on the plight of innocent people because helping them requires great
sacrifice and little in the way of raping a country of its natural resources?
Where is the ex-cop who was booted from the force for brutality that is now
getting paid $12 an hour by the school system to beat up high school kids all
day? Where is man's cruelty to his fellow man? The supernatural is not
frightening. What is frightening is the every day human terrors all around us
and our capacity to look the other way and claim it isn't our problem. That by
ignoring it and claiming we're not participating in it, that somehow it isn't our
fault. That even if it was, there is nothing we can really do to help so why
bother? Maybe that's just me. In this tome I found some really lame campfire
stories, some nice fantasy stories and two great novellas, all of which I had to
look past a heavy amount of racism against Blacks, Asians, Arabs, Jews as well
disparaging remarks against women, the inbred, southerners, the Germans, the
Irish and white males who aren't from New England. If you really look
at what Lovecraft wanted us to be frightened of, it is pretty ridiculous. It
all comes down to: be scared of frogs, jellyfish, dead people and malaria. If,
as Lovecraft himself said: 'The oldest and strongest emotion is fear, and the
oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown' it makes me wonder
just how much Lovecraft actually knew. First off, everyone on the planet has
one common mitochondrial ancestor so we're all inbred. There are no 'other
races'. There are just human beings. Secondly- if you have a large frog
and toad population you can be less worried about malaria. It's spread by
mosquitoes which the frogs and toads eat. Perhaps my problem is that I
am far too much of a rationalist for horror literature. Not to say I didn't
like the stories. Herbert West- Reanimator was almost Mary Shelly's
Frankenstein remade as a comedy, but not in that 'Putting on the Ritz' sort of
way. The Shadow Over Innsmouth had just enough mystery to keep me guessing
till almost the very end. The final inclusion 'The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward' was nice and brooding but just a tad too long. The rest of the stories
save for 'The Terrible Old Man' aren't worth mentioning. However, the
xenophobia aside, it is easy to see why the likes of Stephen King and Neil
Gaiman hold his work in such high regard.
- Darkly Dreamer Dexter by Jeff Lindsay: I, like a lot of people, first
discovered Dexter through the hit TV series on Showtime. It got me interested
in reading the books. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the second season that the
first book was re-released. Even then it was nearly impossible to get in the DC
area. What I found was a story that was similar to, but not identical, to the
first season. The changes made a lot of difference. One of the elements I
really enjoyed was seeing much more of Dexter's thought processes. While the
subtext on the TV series was that Dexter was a little more human than we were
led to believe, it is an essential element to the first book. On the other
hand, the thing the TV series got right was fleshing out some of the other
characters a bit more. Vince and Angel only appear in a few chapters apiece
in the first book but play an extremely entertaining role on the TV series.
Rita, who is an extremely fleshed out character on TV, appears for only a
handful of paragraphs in the first book. The kids don't even get a speaking
part here. Which has its upsides and its down sides. The major difference is
in the ending- which I'm not going to spoil. Just to say that I'm looking
forward tp more.
- Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell: The two people who recommended this
book to me both said that they wished Sarah Vowell had been their history
teacher when they were in high school and college. If she had been- they might
have done a lot better in the course. I wouldn't want it. This book is
engaging. It drags you in. It taught me a lot about Abraham Lincoln and
William McKinley that I did not know. I learned that, unlike I had previously
believed, that James Garfield was not a fictional president who ate lasagna and
first appeared in newspapers in 1978. The fact that Vowell spent over fifty
pages on the man without even making a similar joke shows just how highbrow the
humor is. My hat's off to the superior intellect. As much as the
book pretends to be about Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, the real stars of the
book the are John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz. I learned
more about them then I ever thought I'd ever want to know. Now I surprised that
I want to know even more about them. There was also the strange tale of Robert
Todd Lincoln and his weird ties to all three assassinations. I was so dragged
into this book I didn't want the bus to reach the Metro station every
day. Yes, I read a history book for fun and I enjoyed every moment of it. Even
if it was hard not to imagine it being read by Violet Parr from The
Incredibles. So, why, if the book was such an entertaining, enlightening,
thought provoking and sarcastic read, why wouldn't I want to have had Sarah
Vowell as my history professor? I've always had a problem with smart, geeky,
sarcastic women and I've never been comfortable with the idea of being hot for
teacher.
- Nine Princes In Amber by Rober Zelazny: The first of this ten book epic
seems almost like three books in and of itself, in spite of being a mere 120
pages long. The first section, where Corwin is an amnesiac wondering around in
a world that we as readers are as much in the dark as he is- is by far the most
interesting. The second section, wherein in he regains his memory and goes
into almost unending fight scenes, is a nice transition from 70s noir into
medieval fantasy. Though as a reader, I felt a little cheated to have gone from
not knowing everything along with Corwin to him knowing everything again and he,
as a narrator, not revealing all he knew to the reader. It made much of that
section a little hard to swallow and a little dues ex machina. The end section
though- that tied it all up again and brought the book to a fairly good resolve
in a way that was still a fairly gripping cliffhanger. Alas, next month is
another themed month so it will be at least June my time (and July your time)
before I encounter these adventures again.
- Earth: The Book by Jon Stewart and Friends: It is amazing how I can live
some where all my life and realize just how little about it I actually knew. The
book is listed as a humor book but much like the television show that spawned
it, it is highly informative and those lines seem vaguely familiar. Almost as
if somebody was cutting and pasting from somewhere because he didn't finish the
book until 8:50 AM the day of his deadline. Here Stewart and his merry band
turn their wit and wisdom on the place where I suspect at least 3.5 of my 4.5
readers of my readers live. (I have my doubts about the state of Vermont being
native to Earth. You know who you are.) In format, the book is similar to
America: The Book only instead of writing a textbook for high school students,
it a textbook for aliens who are supposed to find it centuries from now. Think
Ford Prefect's entry in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm not sure if the
two words 'mostly harmless' appear next to each other at one point in the book
was intentional but I couldn't help but chuckle. I was laughing through out
the whole thing. My friend told me the audiobook was read by Sigourney
Weaver. It seems odd to me because the voice and tone it is written in is so
uniquely that of the most trusted name in American TV news. I can't wait for
six years from now- at which point Stewart and company will likely bring me
another pile of things to learn about.
Anyway- I no one reads my concluding paragraphs or the openers for that matter
so I would like to state for the record that Sarah Vowell is a better horror
writer than H.P. Lovecraft. There, I said it. I've made my peace with the
universe.
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