Ever Your Faithful Servant

The last five consecutive posts on my blog have been reviews, and almost exclusively of books. There's nothing wring with this per se, but I've noticed that lately, reviews seem to be all I'm writing.

Occasionally, in the past, I would use my blog as a personal soapbox, to proclaim to the world my views on a particular subject or issue. While this is the main reason that most people write blogs in the first place, it seemed after a while to be a little... hollow, I guess? Like Lear roaring at the heavens as the storm carries on, heedless of his cries.

Now, I'm not saying that I want to give up on reviews. Far from it. They're a useful service that I can provide my readers, and they give me an excuse to write regularly. Practice makes perfect, after all. And lethargy makes losers, as the corollary goes.

But I don't want to bore my readers with predictability by posting the same thing every week. I want to spice it up, throw in a little variety. The question is: What sorts of things would my readers like to see me post more of? News stories? Funny videos? Cultural analysis? Literary theory? Ideas for new monsters? Psychology? Philosophy? Dirty limericks?

The choice is yours, dear readers. Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. Remember, you CAN leave comments anonymously, so you are NOT required to have a Blogger account of your own if you want to leave me a message.

I'm open to all suggestions. Please, tell me what I write that would spark your curiosity.

Movie Review: "How To Train Your Dragon" (2010)

At first, I was tempted to review this film as a cynical adult; that's not just my duty, since I'm writing this review (presumably) for other similarly-cynical adults, it's also really the only way I can approach films anymore. I can't go back to the innocent days of yore, when anything with a dragon in it was considered praiseworthy. But I feel that writing this film off simply because it doesn't try anything new in the story department would be giving it short shrift.

How To Train Your Dragon never really attempts anything revolutionary, doesn't throw the audience any curveballs, but what it does, it does well. The animation is top-notch, and numerous times during the flight segments I was struck by an intense desire to see it in either 3D or IMAX. Both, if possible. Alas, the movie is several months old now, and the moment has passed. So it goes.

The story follows Hiccup, a young teen with an American accent in a small island village of Scottish-speaking Viking warriors. For some reason, the difference in accent is never brought up; in fact, all the kids in the village have distinctly American speech patterns. Maybe you need to get a permit for your brogue, to show you can handle the responsibility?

Hiccup is a scrawny, skinny boy, which is a common feature of YA protagonists, but somewhat unusual in a blacksmith's apprentice. His father, Stoic the Vast (voiced, appropriately enough, by Gerard Butler, that bearded Scotsman of 300 fame) is the chief of their village, which is pillaged on a near-nightly basis by marauding dragons.

During one of these raids, Hiccup is trying out a net-launching apparatus of his own design, when he gets off a lucky shot and snags a Night Fury, a mysterious black-scaled subspecies of dragon with incredible speed and firepower. Naturally, no one believes that such a loser kid could catch a dragon that no one's ever seen and lived to tell the tale. So Hiccup sets off into the woods to find his rightful kill.

... Only he finds that, when the dragon is lying helpless before him, he can't bring himself to kill it. He sets it free, but it's been too badly injured by his net to leave the box canyon where it fell. Thus begins a tale of friendship, prejudice, war, personal growth, and teamwork.

The dragon, "Toothless", is an impressive feat of CGI. He's tough and weighty without being bulky, powerful without being scary, and a weird fusion of reptile, bird, and dog. Best of all, he remains a convincing animal throughout the film. By this, I mean that the animators and writers never lose sight of his animal nature; even though he's friendly, he's not all sunshine and roses.

It's a fun story. It's funny. It's touching. It's even a little bit romantic (if you like girls who like punching boys). I'd say that it's worth buying a copy for your kids. Even if you don't have kids, you might want to check it out. You might find that what appeared at first to be distasteful is actually a lot of fun.

Book Review: "The Illustrated Man," by Ray Bradbury (1951)

Overall, I have to say I'm a little disappointed in this book. Those of you who know me personally are probably aware that The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes rank among my all-time favorite books, so I felt very let down that the quality of this anthology was so spotty. I don't know what I was expecting, but the stories just don't seem to live up to the creepy grandeur of the aforementioned titles.

This is not to say that none of them do, or that the book isn't worth reading. The titular Illustrated Man is one of the most promising framing devices I've ever encountered; I sincerely wish I'd thought of him first. But the actual stories that play out upon his skin are... difficult to relate to. Part of it is the technological gap: Bradbury had no conception of the Internet, and his computers still use gears and punch-cards, even in the year 2155. Also, he has nothing but disdain for the common man and his interests, especially television, which seems more than a little hypocritical.

Another difficulty facing the modern reader approaching these stories is an affliction of fame: namely, that many of Bradbury's plot devices seem cliche to us, simply because his inventions became so popular after he invented them that to us, sixty years later, they appear so obvious and badly thought out that our initial reaction is to call him a thief, not realizing that he invented the damn thing. Though this does not really make it any easier on the modern readers to accept his plot twists as credible.

Bradbury's (or rather, 1950s America's) racism and sexism also forms a significant hurdle. In "The Other Foot," Bradbury imagines a post-nuclear earth reaching out to black colonists on Mars (who left 20 years previous to the story, to escape the Jim Crow laws). The black colonists are initially angry, and ready to treat the white colonists as poorly as they were treated on Earth, but thanks to the efforts of one peace-loving black woman, they learn to let go of their anger and let bygones be bygones. (Sounds like a nice story, until you realize that it's about white folk getting completely off the hook for their past atrocities, and getting to live as equals on a planet terraformed entirely by the effort of black people. Hmmmm...)

Another big offender was "Marionettes, Inc.", in which two men order some extremely expensive android copies of themselves to fool their wives so they can go to Mexico for a month. One does it because he can't stand his wife, the other because she's smothering him with love. Couldn't they just, I don't know, be adults and talk openly with their wives about their feelings?!

It's not all bad news, though, and I'd like to end on a good note:

Despite my endless whining and nitpicking, The Illustrated Man is worth a read, if you're a fan of either Ray Bradbury or classic science fiction. The first and last stories ("The Veldt" and "The Rocket Man") alone are worth the price of admission, and even the stories that I wasn't crazy about ("The Long Rain", "The Man", "To No Particular Night or Morning") gave me some very interesting food for thought. "The City" is extremely creepy, and contains some very disturbing visuals of bodily dismemberment; "The Highway" is simultaneously quite beautiful and quite sad; "Zero Hour" ends with a very creepy visual that almost makes up for the blindingly obvious plot-twist.

Like I said at the beginning, it's an OK book, a little careworn, but still serviceable for the most part. Take it with a grain of salt and you'll be fine.

Book Review: "Slaughterhouse-Five," by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

The last time I read this book, I think I was about twelve years old. My Dad wanted be to read it before I was old enough to actually fight in a war. I'm very grateful that he challenged me with this book when I was so young. I was amazed at how much of it had stuck with me through the years, and how deeply it had affected my conscience, morality, and worldview. I still remember most of the plot points, which is quite a feat, considering how convoluted the timeline of this book is.


The main character, Billy Pilgrim, an American P.O.W. in World War II, who has become "unstuck in time... [with] no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next." Billy is captured by Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden, Germany, just in time to witness firsthand the two-day firebombing of "the Florence of the Elbe" by Allied planes. Roughly 135,000 human beings were killed in this attack. The vast majority were civilians, taking refuge there because both sides knew that Dresden held no strategic value whatsoever. For comparison, the bombing of Hiroshima killed 71,379 human beings.


By necessity, the book is highly convoluted, and swings unexpectedly from beginning to end to middle and back again, yet it somehow maintains a feeling of cohesion despite this. Or perhaps because of it. Vonnegut gives away the ending of Billy's life (though be doesn't die until many years after the war) and many of the important plot points early in the first chapters, so no event in the book can truly be said to come as a shock. It reads like a Greek tragedy; the reader feels a dread anticipation, knowing the terrible things that are about to occur, wishing to warn the characters of their impending doom, but finds themselves totally unable to affect the outcome.

That feeling of helpless resignation, tinged with a kindhearted remembrance of better days, is essentially the message of Vonnegut's work, which is heavily influenced by the time he spent as a P.O.W. in World War II. (Vonnegut makes no secret of the resemblance between his life and the life of his main character. Fiction bleeds into biography as Vonnegut makes several minor appearances as a fellow P.O.W. to Billy Pilgrim.)

To this day, I am still deeply distrustful of men (and it is always men) who talk about the necessity of war, the importance of striking first, the need to "fight them over there" before we "fight them over here." In the end, there may be a few, a scant tiny few who actually know the cost of war and want it anyway. Let them fight. Most human beings have no desire at all to be killed or have their families killed for any reason, and are more than content to let other, wrongheaded people go about their wrongheaded lives, as long as they are left in peace.



But we don't always have that option. Terrible accidents are bound to occur even in peacetime. Friends move away, family members age, lovers die. All we can do is remain conscious of the fact that the past is always there, and in a very real sense, they are always alive, always laughing in the past, forever "trapped in the amber of this moment."

Book Review: "Dead Until Dark," by Charlaine Harris (2001)

You've probably heard about True Blood by now, even if you don't have HBO. Or cable. Even if you don't watch TV at all, you've probably heard about it from someone. I haven't watched it myself, but I may have to, now that I've started reading the books that the show's based on.




Dead Until Dark is the first of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, a.k.a. The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, retroactively known as the True Blood Series, after the debut of the HBO miniseries in 2008. The books follow the life and loves of one Sookie Stackhouse, a cocktail waitress in the small rural town of Bon Temps, Louisiana.

The book begins roughly two years after vampires have "come out of the coffin" and revealed themselves to the world at large. Thanks to a synthetic blood-substitute developed by Japanese scientists, vampires no longer need to feed off humans, and have decided to reveal themselves en masse.

Now, let's get one thing out of the way: yes, Sookie is a telepath. While this seems like it would make for a very boring mystery novel, Sookie's "disability" is handled very well, and never feels like a cheap way to conjure up a hard-to-find clue. In fact, instead of feeling like a contrived power-up, it comes across as a legitimate difficulty for Sookie in her daily life. It sometimes makes it difficult for her to keep a job, and it's nearly impossible for her to have sex with any man. Any human man, that is...

You're probably thinking to yourself: Vampires? Mind-reading? Twoo wuv? Where have I heard this before? But before you hit the "Back" button on your browser, you should know that Dead Until Dark hit shelves four years before Twilight did. That's right, Twilight is the ripoff, not True Blood.

Anyway, the book itself is really good. It has just the right mix of sex, danger, mystery, humor, and the supernatural. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the story, and more than a little interested in the "romantic interludes". By which I mean sex, sex, and lots more sex. At times, the text can be a little, shall we say, blush-inducing, but never graphic. Harris' sex scenes are always veiled with polite Southern modesty, which prevents the story from degenerating into pornographic wish-fulfillment. The characters are likable and imperfect, with foibles and shortcomings that keep their interactions honest and human. Harris does an excellent job of delving into vampiric psychology, and how the curse of immortality might weigh heavily on one's sanity and morality.

The most refreshing part of the book by far is the subversion of one of the most pervasive tropes in all supernatural fiction: The Masquerade. Gone are the frantic rushes to destroy evidence of vampires' existence, gone too is the need for cloak-and-dagger secrecy, because everyone already knows that vampires are real. They're over it. They've got pride rallies, for gosh sakes!

I also really liked the way Harris depicts the reaction of average Americans to the sudden appearance of the undead in their midst. First, of course, there was shock, followed closely by disbelief. Then a wave of curiosity, followed by revulsion for some, and fascination for others. Finally, the dust began to settle, and the vast majority of American citizens began to see vampires as neither freaks nor sex-objects, but as potential sources of revenue.

And isn't that really just another expression of the American Dream?

Book Review: City of Thieves, by David Benioff (2008)

Brianna loaned me this book back in... oh, late summer, I'd guess. Early fall? I'd told her I would read it, and I liked the blurb, but I wasn't really committed. Then, sometime in November, I actually read the first chapter, and was hooked. The first sentence is one of the best opening lines I've ever read:

"My grandfather, the knife-fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen."

Unfortunately, I was too deeply engaged in NaNoWriMo to stop and read it, but I resolved to start it the moment I finished my first draft.

City of Thieves is the real-life story of David Benioff's grandfather Lev, and how he survived the brutal siege of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. Arrested for looting a dead Nazi's corpse, the young Lev Abramovich Beniov is thrown in jail with a handsome, insufferably cheerful deserter named Kolya. The punishment for their crimes (as it was for all crimes at that period), was summary execution. But instead of being shot and dumped on the ice of the River Neva, the two men are given a chance to save their lives: if they can find one dozen eggs for Colonel Grechko's daughter's wedding cake, and deliver them to him in four days, they go free. If not, well, he took their ration cards, so good luck getting anything to eat in the next few months.

I'd like to give you a little perspective on the complete insanity of such an order: Leningrad had been under siege for months. People were burning railroad ties, and breathing the toxic fumes they released, because being poisoned was still better than freezing to death. People were shelling out a hundred rubles for a cup of dirt from the floor of a bombed-out sugar factory. Pigeons were the only meat available, because all the dogs and cats had already been eaten. As Lev so artfully puts it, "By January the rumors had become plain fact. No one but the best connected could feed a pet, so the pets fed us."

In a city suffering this level of deprivation, Col. Grechko wants them to find not two or three eggs, but twelve!

It's an incredible book. I've never read another book that so artfully mixes comedy and tragedy, frequently in the same breath. At times, I wasn't sure if I was laughing or crying for the two bewildered young men. Lev often comments about the strange beauty of war, even in the midst of its terrible destructive power. There's something oddly poetic about tracer bullets streaking across the night sky. Lev is a deeply sympathetic young man, and Kolya is at once the funniest and most infuriating character I've encountered in a long, long time. He always knows how to make a bad situation worse, and still manages to come away smelling like roses.

This book reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, with its emphasis on the absurd unreality of warfare. Everything seems so pointless, so hopeless, it's a minor miracle that they even keep moving, when the future is so assuredly grim. But it's kind of inspiring to see how they survived such brutality and danger. It makes me grateful for what I've got, even when the economy's so bad.

After all, it could be worse: you could be living in Russia.

Paperback Writer

There's no use beating around the bush. I've decided to put my novel on hold for a few months.

It's not that I doubt my ability to finish typing it up by the end of January, as I vowed to do in my New Year's Resolutions (though we're more than a third of the way through the month already, and there's little chance that I'll get it done in time.) No, the reason is that I've re-evaluated my needs versus my desires, and decided that I need to devote myself to finding a serious, post-graduation job more than I need to finish my book. The job search is time-sensitive; my book is not.

I'd always intended to keep up the job search and type up the novel, as parallel endeavors. But the time has come to do the grown-up thing, and admit that I'm not Superman. I simply don't have the time or mental agility to do both jobs effectively. I need to pick one, and work on it 'till it's done. Then I'll take up the other, and finish that one, too. But I need to do them one-at-a-time. That's the only way I can do justice to both of them.

I'll pick up the pen (well, keyboard, anyway) after I've found a serious job. I'll let you know when that is.