The Kids’ thoughts on the Hobbit

We finished reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit this week – the first full-length book I’ve read to the kids.  It was a the obvious choice, as this was also the first book my Mom read to me.  It’s been a while since I’ve read that book and several things stand out after so many years.  Tolkien wrote in  long, descriptive, balanced sentences.  Very nice to read aloud.  The sense of place and history, the sheer amount of description is palpable in The Hobbit.  Of course this has become one of the prevailing themes of fantasy fiction, so no surprise there.  Finally, Bilbo is just a great character.  And now onto the girls’ thoughts as recorded be me with a few questions here and there…

One favorite part is when Bilbo went to talk to Smaug.  He saw the weak spot by getting Smaug to roll over by telling riddles.  Bilbo was pretty brave there.  I was afraid Bilbo might be found by Smaug, and he’d attack him and eat him.  I thought this was the scariest part.  Instead he just got a little burnt.

October Good for Lovecraft

Any month is a good month for the fiction of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, but October provides an added aura of foreboding.  Not that many of Lovecraft’s stories are particularly Halloweenish, and he was more apt to include ageless alien demi-gods in his fiction than ghosts or witches or the like, but there’s something about a gray stormy evening with a cold autumn wind blowing that makes passages of nameless horror especially tasty.  For this reason I’ve been re-reading at least one classic Lovecraft story each October the last few years.  (Having read virtually all of them the first time back in college.)

Books: Moving Pictures

…by the indomitable Terry Pratchett

In Moving Pictures, the denizens of Pratchett’s Discworld inadvertently find themselves awash in movie madness.  Yes, those scatterbrained alchemists have figured out how to transfer captured pictures (painted very quickly by captive demons in small camera-like boxes) to film.  They quickly find it necessary to move from the city of Ankh-Morpork to an arid outpost without much going for it but the everpresent sunshine (to avoid the wrath of the wizards at Unseen University).  That outpost’s name: Holy Wood.

Very soon people (and trolls and dwarves and talking animals) find themselves drawn to Holy Wood for unexplainable reasons.  It seems right.  They know they can make it.  And they want to be in the moving pictures. Among them are perennial student-wizard, Victor Tugelbend, a dude who can’t sing, can’t dance, but can handle a sword OK and looks great in front of the camera, Ginger, former milkmaid from the-little-town-you-never-heard-of, who looks great in an evening gown, and Gaspode the talking wonder-dog.  Soon Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork’s most celebrated salesman of sausages-0f-dubious-origin, arrives and proceeds to set himself up as the mogul.  A group of dwarves suddenly discover an overwhelming urge to sing the hi-ho-hi-ho song.  A troll changes his name to ‘Rock’ and whittles off bits of his nose to increase his appeal and versatility.  These folks literally find they have stars in their eyes.

Books: Shadow’s Edge

…by Brent Weeks

Shadow’s Edge is the second book in the Night Angel trilogy, which chronicles the struggles of Kylar Stern, assassin, Logan Gyre, aspirant-King, Vi, another assassin, and others against the sadistic Godking, Garoth.  The Godking’s forces successfully invaded Cenaria at the close of Book 1, Into the Shadows (see review), bringing a lot death (and presumed death), mayhem, and misunderstanding to the major characters.  Kylar’s mentor, master assassin (or ‘wetboy’ as Weeks has unfortunately designated killers with magical talents) Durzo Blint is gone, and Kylar soon swears off killing to pursue his childhood love, Elene.  This means leaving the city and fleeing in search of a more normal life.

Unbeknownst to Kylar, his best friend Logan is not dead but rather imprisoned in the Hole, which is the most brutal dungeon in the land, filled with the rapists and cannibals.  Logan has to survive down there without revealing his identity and completely losing his humanity.

When the Sa’kage (the city’s vast underworld crime syndicate) soon learn they can’t bargain with the brutal Godking, they begin to oppose him and help form the resistance.   For that they need Kylar, who has now absorbed an ancient magical forces called the ka’kari and has become nearly immortal, and they need an heir to the throne – Logan.  A fairly straightforward plot that still manages to get bogged down for nearly half the book.  Some of the subplots turn out to be far more interesting – at least until the book’s climax.

Books: The Beckham Experiment

…by Grant Wahl

What - you were expecting someone else's photo?

The Beckham Experiment: How the World’s Most Famous Athlete Tried to Conquer America has been lauded and praised by everyone from dead-spinner Will Leitch to that anti-soccer curmudgeon, Frank DeFord.  And why is that?  Because it’s American Sports Journalism at its finest?  Because it takes the high gloss sheen from David Beckham and his PR machine?  Because it’s a true Hollywood tale of haves and have-nots?  Yeah, no doubt…

The best thing for me is this is the first high profile book devoted to the strange and sometimes counter-intuitive world of Major League Soccer.  This is the world David Beckham brought himself and his handlers into.  The world of a niche sport trying to grasp its share of the fickle American sports attention span, in which soccer, the world’s most popular sport, is relegated to afterthought status on Sportscenter.  In MLS, you have a league set up in a single-entity fashion and backed by some of this country’s wealthiest businessmen.  This structure has so far protected the league and kept it afloat, even amidst contraction (two Florida teams lost several years ago) and unimpressive TV ratings.  Now MLS has been adding teams the past few seasons: Toronto, San Jose, Seattle, and next year Philadelphia.  Attendance-wise, the teams are solid, ranking up there with soccer leagues in places like the Netherlands, Sweden, and France.  But MLS’s single-entity structure isn’t like anyplace else.  The league (not teams) own the player contracts, which means, a team can’t just go out and buy talent like in Europe.  It’s a system meant to impose parity and fiscal responsibility on the teams – something Team Beckham never seemed to grasp.

Books: Gaudeamus

…by John Barnes

In Gaudeamus, the reader gets a rare combination of authenticity and weirdness that combines science fiction, detective fiction, and a good dose of self-deprecating humor.  John Barnes uses the technique of casting himself as the 1st person narrator and his buddy Travis Bismarck as the protagonist.  This allows Travis, a private detective with a storyteller’s mentality, to pop in and expand upon his increasingly strange tale of secret government research and extraterrestrial game wardens.  Meanwhile, the author/narrator frees himself to tell character-revealing back stories, comment on society, and scoff at his buddy’s story while secretly hoping it’s all true.

You can cast it as metafiction or an ironic and over-the-top nod to creative non-fiction.  Barnes use of the p.o.v. shifts between himself and Travis illustrates the allure of different types of storytelling, and it stands up to inspection also.  In other words, Barnes could (and does seem to) claim that hey, this is all true – it’s what my friend told me, and here’s the back story from my perspective.  It’s the kind of narrative technique that would spark a lively debate at your college writers’ workshop – if, that is, they could be bothered with something that has sci-fi overtones.  I suspect Mr. Barnes would find this amusing.

Books: The Way of Shadows

…by Brent Weeks

Sometimes you just want some good old fashioned sword-hacking, shadow-stalking, mage-fire hurling type fantasy.  Plenty of action, high-school level romance, badass villains, and , familiar archetypes…  In The Way of Shadows (Book 1 in the Night Angel trilogy),  this is precisely what you get.

The novel starts with young Azoth, an orphaned street beggar, eavesdropping on the troubles of one Durzo Blint, the best and baddest magically enhanced assassin (weeks uses the term, ‘wetboy’ – a questionable choice) in all of Cenaria.  This scene leads to Azoth’s attempt to apprentice himself to Durzo as a way out of the gutter.  Azoth has enough challenges what with scraping enough pennies together to eat and pay his guild dues to a Fagin-like outfit, and he’s watching out for his friends Jarl and Doll Girl to boot.  To make matters worse, Azoth, like all orphan heroes, is inexplicably brave, and stands up for his friends in the face of the bigger older bullying Rat.  Rat responds by buggering Jarl and cutting Doll Girl (this book pulls few punches), and Azoth seeks out Durzo in an attempt to help his friends out of their predicament and take some vengeance.

Of course Durzo agrees to take on this new apprentice, but only if Azoth can prove himself by killing Rat.  Then it’s on.

Books: In the Eye of Heaven

…by David Keck

In the Eye of Heaven is high fantasy with a good dose of grit and grime.  Set in a mythical medieval Europeanish land, where the oaths of kings and dukes really do tie them to the land, the book recounts the tale of Durand of the Col, a young squire and second son set to inherit a small backwoods holding where he will serve as his father’s bannerman.  But then that holding’s true heir shows up after fifteen years missing, and Durand finds himself without prospects.  To make matters worse, he’s being stalked by an otherworldly power who seems insistent on offering advice and marking Durand for a different path.

You really can’t blame Durand for panicking and riding off without his sword.  He soon falls in with a wandering bard and embarks upon a plan to attach himself to some noble as a knight-in-arms and earn his keep with honor.  Of course it’s never quite that easy.

Books: The Skinner

…by Neal Asher

The Skinner is well-crafted intelligent adventure sci-fi.  It’s the second of Neal Asher’s books I’ve read, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.  It builds upon premises set forth in his first book, Gridlinked, which posits an intergalactic future with warp gates known as ‘Runcibles’, a vast confederation of humans called the Polity (which happens to be run by superintelligent AIs), and plenty of rogue cyborgs, weird alien races, and deadly planetary vistas thrown in for good measure.

Asher’s universe also imagines humanity as nearly immortal in a basic sense.  That is to say, through physical enhancement – cybernetic, genetic, memory transplant, etc. – the humans of these books can live is as long as they like.  Theoretically.  Assuming, of course, they don’t meet a particularly nasty and violent end, they can afford the upgrades, and they don’t become bored and choose death (either consciously or subconsciously).  This theme of immortality/longevity plays strongly throughout The Skinner. And in the brutal Darwinian ecosystem of the Planet Spatterjay, it provides a nice counterpoint.

Take, for example,  one of the main characters: the reification, Sable Keech.  Keech is a walking corpse, his body a mash-up of robotic parts and dead-but-constantly-replenished flesh.  His mind consists of half an organic brain and a computer with memory and personality uploads.  Not the most popular or socially acceptable version of immortality, but effective.  And Keech has a mission: find and kill the villains who not only killed him 700 years earlier, but were also responsible for war crimes rivaling those of  Hitler or Pol Pot.

Checking in with The Goon

A couple of years ago, I started reading Eric Powell’s The Goon, a noirish old timey zombie send-up featuring the hamfisted title character, his sidekick Frankie (“knife to the eye”), the Nameless Zombie Priest, and a memorable supporting cast of misfits.  I loved it.

Powell is one of those writer/artists with a firm grip of technique and  knowledge of comic book history.  You can see the influence of giants like Will Eisner and Jack Kirby without much effort.  You can also see the influence of more recent pros like Mike Mignola, Mike Oeming, and yes, Garth Ennis in his work.  The Goon has been with Dark Horse for several years now, usually published 4 to 5 times a year.  The book often includes smaller side side stories as well as a main feature that may or may not have anything to do with a longer narrative thread.  Following this recipe, Powell managed to build a devoted fan base and garner some awards (several Eisners included) over the past years.