Central Booking

Ok, so Santa finally got off his fat ass and delivered the books I asked for. I was going to read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid next, but it's over 700 pages long. Technically, that's a violation of the rules of the Lamest Contest Ever. I'll still probably read it, but I'm going to knock off something a little lighter first, since I'm already behind in my reading. So I've started reading The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie suggested by Joel Bezaire from Crummy Church Signs.

Yes, that's the Hugh Laurie, the guy who plays House on that TV show, what's it called... oh yeah, House. I've recently started watching that show, and I have to say it's one of the best shows on TV. I feel a special affinity for his character, because I'm sort of a misanthropic know-it-all myself. If only I actually did know it all, like House.

Who knew that Laurie was a writer too? And apparently a pretty damn good one. A quote from Entertainment Weekly in the front of the book describes it thusly:

British writer/actor Laurie's first novel has all the trademarks of an offbeat James Bond adventure...the mind-boggling intricacy of a Robert Ludlum plot, and, most gratifyingly, the irreverent attitude of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I'm on chapter 7 now, and to be honest the plot doesn't particularly impress me so far (it's reminiscent of Fletch), but Laurie's droll prose is hysterical. I've laughed out loud on probably every other page, and I'm a tough sell. A sampling:

"What do you know, please, about Alexander Woolf?" O'Neal leant forward with his forearms on the desk, and I caught a glimpse of a very gold watch. Much too gold to be gold.

"Which one?"

He frowned.

"What do you mean, 'which one?' How many Alexander Woolfs do you know?"

I moved my lips slightly, counting to myself.

"Five."

He sighed irritably. Come along, 4B, settle down.

"The Alexander Woolf to whom I am referring," he said, with that particular tone of sarcastic pedantry that every Englishman behind a desk slides into sooner or later, "has a house in Lyall Street, Belgravia."

"Lyall Street. Of course." I tutted to myself. "Six, then."

"I'm asking you, Mr. Lang, what do you know about him?"

"He has a house in Lyall Street, Belgravia," I said. "Is that any help?"

Brilliant. I want to grow up to write a book like this some day.

Next up is Dear Mrs LaRue - Letters from Obedience School by Mark Teague suggested by G from Simply Said.

What can I say about this book? It's 30 pages long, and most of it is pictures. It's about a witty and somewhat overly dramatic dog who feels he has been unjustly imprisoned in obedience school. Nice pics, nice story. I liked it, and so do the kids.

The next book to get checked off my list isn't really a book at all. It's an online novel written (and suggested) by a good friend of the Mattress Police, Vanessa V. Kilmer (aka "Nessa", aka "Goldennib"), who has several blogs, the main one being The Chrysalis Stage. Her novel is called Happenstance.

Nessa had to surmount an even greater handicap than adolescent naivete: She wrote her novel in 30 days, as part of National Novel Writing Month. I'm not going to lie and tell you that you can't tell it was written in a hurry, because you can. But I think I can honestly say that it's a more engaging story than the blockbuster bestseller (and now feature film!) Eragon.

It really wouldn't be fair to hold this novel to the same standards as the other books on my list. Nessa obviously wrote it as a lark, just to say that she had written a novel. And writing 50,000+ coherent words in a month is an accomplishment in itself. I'm sure she's well aware of the flaws of the novel (her Dorothy Parker quote at the top of the page indicates the level of reverence she attaches to her work).

The story takes place in a small Celtic community called Deepshade in northern Europe on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. The protagonist is a young woman named Alena, whose beloved husband has died and who must now find a husband within a year or face losing her position and considerable holdings within the village. Something like a Dark Ages version of The Bachelorette results, with the villagers summoning elegible bachelors from surrounding areas. Various adventures and amusing confrontations ensue.

Nessa obviously knows something about the historical basis of her setting; Despite her obviously hurried writing, Deepshade and its people are convincingly real. To contrast with Eragon again, I could tell that Nessa has thought out her world beyond the reaches of her narrative. Whereas the world of Eragon feels like a cardboard cutout, Alena's environment feels like a real place. There are occasional lapses into modern idioms and I wondered at some points if these barely civilized villages were really comprised of people as progressive in their viewpoints as Alena and her friends. Still, I bought the premise, I could visualize Deepshade, and I came to really like Alena as a character.

So my verdict is: Not half bad. There is a lot of filler. I mean a lot of filler. There is an almost completely unrelated story-within-the-story that goes on for like 3 chapters, and even the sub-story is padded with excruciating detail. It's also a little hard to follow at first, there are some awkwardly handled transitions in point of view, and the ending is rather abrupt. But Nessa obviously has some skill and some real feeling for her characters, locations, and their history. I think that if she removed the unnecessary filler (or replaced it with more relevant subplots) and and did some retooling of some of the prose, she'd have a pretty decent novel on her hands.

Way to go, Nessa!

Well, I did it. In an orgy of enthusiasm generated by my feverish desire for release from the smothering embrace of adolescent prose, I have finished Eragon. Man, am I glad I'm old enough to smoke.

To be honest, the sexual subtext never really went anywhere. I thought it was building up to something, but then it went all flaccid on me. The good news is that around page 300 the author finally breaks free from George Lucas' Jedi death grip and starts to tell a semi-interesting story. Paolini had the good sense to borrow the elements of his climax equally from Tolkien, Star Wars and the last of the Matrix movies, so that while originality remains beyond him, at least the narrative no longer felt like it was going to collapse from the weight of its own redundancy. Eragon remained utterly predictable throughout, of course. About 5 pages into meeting a particular character I turned to my 12 year old nephew (Everybody's 12 year old nephew has read Eragon) and said, "_____ is Eragon's brother, isn't he?" My nephew, who has read the sequel as well (in which this "secret" is evidently revealed), replied, "Yeah." Shocker!

The movie opens this Friday, and if I end up seeing it, no one will ever doubt my deep abiding love for my 12-year old nephew again. I have every reason to believe the movie will be absolutely godawful:

• It is based on a fairly lousy book.
• The previews look lousy.
• I have only been able to find two reviews for it, which means the filmmakers probably aren't releasing it to most critics to review. Always a vote of confidence.
• The two reviews I've found said that it sucked.
• It has Jeremy Irons in it, who didn't have the good sense to stay away from the Dungeons & Dragons movie either.

By the way, if you don't believe me about the derivative nature of the book, read this review or this review of the movie.

Here's a quote from the first review:

While I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of making a distinctive sword-and-sorcery fantasy film in the huge wake of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the fact is that Eragon doesn’t really try very hard. And so we get cut-rate versions of the Nazgul and the Orcs, with lots of sweeping helicopter shots of gorgeous mountain ranges, odd-sounding faux-Celtic names, and a poor farmboy whose uncle gets killed while the bad guys are looking for him, and who then seeks out the last member of an ancient order that was able to command magical forces. Oh, wait, that last part is Star Wars. And the boy shouts out one-word magical spells. Yeah, that’s Harry Potter. And he’s a dragon-rider… Anne McCaffrey, check… Well, at least Eragon is stealing from the best.

Upside: It's only an hour and 39 minutes long.

I've moved on to the next book on my list (I'm reading them in an order known only to me, so don't even try to guess which one is next). I'll post my first thoughts shortly.

I'm now on page 228 of Eragon, and the good news is that it hasn't gotten any worse. Luke and Obi-Wan have fended off the Sand People and made their way to the Mos Eisley spaceport. Obi-Wan has been schooling Luke in the mysterious ways of the Force, and Luke continues to mature and develop his abilities. It is clear that at some point Luke is going to have a difficult decision to make regarding whether to choose the Light or Dark side of the force. I'm on pins and needles.

So far my favorite line in the book is "I fear that we will all wake up one morning with our throats slashed." Man, do I wish I knew whether the author was joking when he wrote that line.

The main thing holding my interest at this point is the emerging sexual subtext.

Page 141:

"And I have outlived my youth; I'm not as strong as I used to be. Every time I reach for magic, it gets a little harder."
Eragon dropped his eyes, abashed. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," said Brom as he shifted his arm. "It happens to everyone."

Page 149:

"Not bad for your first time," said Brom.
"Why does my hand do that? It's like a little lantern."
"No one's sure," Brom admitted. "The Riders always preferred to channel their power through whichever hand bore the gedwey ignasia. You can use the other palm, but it isn't as easy."

Page 163:

It was minutes before his heart stopped hammering and his breathing calmed. Once he had recovered, he exclaimed, That was incredible! How can you bear to land when you enjoy flying so much?
I must eat, she said with some amusement. But I am glad that you took pleasure in it.
Those are spare words for such an experience. I'm sorry I haven't flown with you more; I never thought it could be like that....
It is the way I am. We will fly together more often now?
Yes! Every chance we get.
Good, she replied in a contented tone.

Page 171:

The long days and strenuous work stripped Eragon's body of excess fat. His arms became corded, and his tanned skin rippled with lean muscles. Everything about me is turning hard, he thought dryly.

I'm not sure how much of this is intentional, but I'm definitely wondering where the author is going with it.

Things have been a little crazy lately, but I did steal away for a few hours over the past few days to get some reading done. I started with Eragon by Christopher Paolini, which was suggested by Kat from Kat's Random Thoughts. I started with this book for the simple reason that I already owned a copy.

I'm about 100 pages in, and my reactions are mixed. Apparently Paolini started writing this book when he was fifteen, which is frankly amazing. I never wrote anything this good when I was fifteen. On the other hand, to say that this book is the best novel by a fifteen-year-old that I've read is to damn it with the faintest of praise. Assuming that Paolini is not content to be thought of as a teenage prodigy, but rather aspires to be taken seriously as an author, I'm going to show him the respect accorded to any serious author by a serious reviewer by being brutally honest in my remarks.

Were it not for my contractual obligations vis-a-vis the lamest contest ever and the assurances by my wife that "it does get better," I never would have made it past page 50 of this book. The prose is hackneyed and tiresome. Paolini seems unaware that phrases like "for what seemed like hours" are both cliched and unhelpful for communicating anything to the reader. At one point a character speaks "in a language known only to him," which probably sounds ominous to a middle-schooler, but only made me laugh. His parents must be kicking themselves for paying for those lessons. Do we find out later in the book why no one else speaks this language? I'll bet not, because whereas a master like Tolkien could footnote his footnotes with every last detail of the events and individuals surrounding his narrative so that the reader gets a sense that he is viewing one small aspect of a great tapestry, Paolini is pretty clearly just throwing stuff together that sounds cool.

That's not to say that there is no context for the action outside the narrative. In fact, I feel right at home in the world of Analgesia or whatever it's called, because frankly I've been there before. The ingredients for Eragon are simple: Start with the quasi-medieval world of Middle Earth, populated with the standard denizens of humans, elves, dwarves and orcs -- I mean, "urgals". Add the Dragonriders from Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, complete with telepathic link between dragon and rider. All we need now is a story. Something simple and mythical, that a young boy could relate to. How about Star Wars? Yeah, we'll have a simple farmboy on the verge of manhood, living on the outskirts of a great empire, who was raised by his uncle because his parents -- who seem to have been involved in something a little more exotic than farming -- are both dead. This boy seems to be destined for something greater than the simple life of a farmer, a fact which is confirmed when he happens to come upon a mysterious item that narrowly avoided falling into the hands of the imperial minions. But who will guide the boy to his destiny? Hmm... How about a wise old man living nearby who turns out to be more than he seems? In fact, maybe he's the last remnant of an order of warriors sworn to defend the old regime. Perfect!

"Wait," you say. "How do you know that you-know-who is you-know-what if you've only read the first 100 pages?" Because, you see, at about page 60 I turned to my wife and said, "--- turns out to be the last of the Dragonriders, doesn't he?" And she said, "Yep." And I groaned and continued reading.

Did I mention that it's really good writing for a teenager? And I can't wait until Eragon leads a ragtag troop of Dragonriders into the heart of Mordor to blow up the Death Star.