On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.  The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil.  We also quickly learn he believes himself to be set up.  I always find it to provide a very interesting tension when experiencing works of art that begin in the middle.  Most of the time, as happens with Eastern Standard Tribe, the current story is interrupted to tell how we got here.  Of course, this leaves the reader (or watcher in the case of a movie) playing the mental game of trying to figure out how we end up back at the beginning.  You know the main character can’t die (unless it’s a work in which resurrection is allowed - plus some other ways that writers can be tricky and mean) and you know that no matter where he ends up going, he’ll end up in the location at the beginning.  Regular books, as you know, leave you in the dark about where you’re headed.  Doctorow chooses to tell the story in the same manner of Momento, switching between the past and the present, rather than focusing on the past until we’re caught up.  This technique made it fun because even as you see how he ends up imprisoned, you are seeing his plans for getting out.

Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk to read or plugging my laptop in and reading wasn’t appealing. In fact, I almost bought the Barnes and Noble Nook to read Cory’s book, but I’m convinced there’s a pricedrop coming given the Kindle’s recent price drop. Finally, I took at trip Let me just say that I recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of science fiction. I will now get into my thoughts about the book - there will be SPOILERS!

I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over - this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a historical fiction with Cryptonomicon. And he deepens that with The Baroque Cycle. Recently I read Anathem, a more typical science fiction novel in that it ostensibly involves aliens instead of a future Earth. Yet the steady stream that unites all of these books as Stephenson titles is the constant exploration of technology and its effects on society. It doesn’t matter whether that takes place in the future, during World War 2, or on another planet.

Last week I finished the Discworld Series.  I started with a few books early in 2008.  From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series.  Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books.  So I read the first four or five books here and there.  Then in November Borders had a “buy two get the third one free” and my wife bought me the remaining 20-something books for my birthday and Christmas.  She also let me start reading in November.  I started reading them during my lunch breaks at work, on business trips and - when things were getting really interesting - at home.

I am now done with the entire story of the hobbits.  Overall, I have enjoyed the books more than the movie.  Here’s what I have to say about The Return of the King:

I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie.  I mean, the movie does a good job of showing the despair of the city Minis Tirith, but the book really shows it much better.  I found myself at times forgetting that I already knew the ending and that most of the characters would be fine.  Speaking of already knowing the story, I kept waiting for the part where Gollum tricks Frodo into thinking that The Fat Hobbit has eaten the bread.  It’s not in the books - they added that for the movie.

I finished up The Two Towers a week or so ago and I have to say that “Trudging” no longer describes my experience (for the most part). While I preferred the first movie to the first book, I mostly feel exactly the opposite about the second book/movie. The only annoying thing was that we didn’t get to Frodo and Samwise until page 208 of a 352 page book. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the movie goes back and forth a lot more instead of doing like the book and telling each person’s day and then backing up to tell the next person’s day (if the party has been separated).

A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings.  Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter.  I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system.  In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien seems to understand how much Tom annoys the crap out of people.

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

I’ve read time and again that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (which is actually not a trilogy, but one massive book published in 3 parts) has all kinds of allegorical content and contains a lot of stuff Peter Jackson had to leave out of the movies.  Well, they’re certainly right about Mr Jackson leaving material out of the movie.  I’m on page 160 (reading during my lunch breaks) and I’d have to say that roughly 90% of what I’ve read does not appear in any form in the movie.  I’m about a little less than halfway through the first book (in the size they’ve printed) and the main characters JUST got to The Prancing Pony.  I think this happens in the first 10 or so minutes in the movie.  And what a great idea to cut all that chaff was!