Eleanor & Park: Preferable to The Scarlet Letter

I can't remember how I heard about Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, but somehow I did. At the time I didn't know it was a Young Adult (YA) novel. Nothing about it suggested that it was a YA novel other than the fact that the main characters are teenagers.  I had picked it up on a whim and it wasn't in the YA section of the bookstore.

I only found out it was a YA novel when a "mom" who is "also a librarian" told me it was. At first I thought she was mistaken because she had never heard of Daniel Handler, nor his alter-ego, Lemony Snicket. What kind of librarian has never heard of Daniel Handler? (Answer: Librarian Moms Who Live In The Suburbs.) But then I looked it up and found out that not only was it a YA novel, but it was a smutty, evil, banned YA novel! In that case I had to read it!

YA novels and I never really got along. Here is an incomplete list of the YA novels I read between the ages of 12 and 17, including what I thought of the books at the time:

• Everything Ever Written By Judy Bloom: That was fun! But why did her menstrual pads need a belt?
• Ask Anybody by Constance C Greene: What does "Meet you at the laundromat, bring suds" mean? 
• I Was a 15-Year-Old Blimp by Patti Stren: So don't become bulimic? Got it! 
• After The Bomb by Gloria D. Miklowitz: I'm not sleeping for the next 10years, thankyouverymuch.
• Some random book with "Love" in the title: Don't have sex because the guy will cheat on you? Um...that doesn't sound quite right, but OK? Maybe not. This sounds fishy.
• Nancy Drew reboot books: Her friend the athlete sounds hot, but man these books suck.
• A bunch of survival books mostly centred around boys who seem to be having sex with hot chicks: Hey this book has a chapter titled "Post-Coitus"! This is much better! I wonder if there are more of these in the library...There are! Awesome!

YA novels were pretty boring, and they tended to be moralizing. I preferred my mom's Agatha Christie novels, and my dad's Isaac Asimov novels over most YA novels (with the notable exception of Foundation's Edge, which was the dullest book ever).

After a while, I also realized that YA novels were incredibly poorly-written. YA, trash, and science fiction/fantasy all suffer from the problems of excessive exposition, poor character development, and shoehorned endings. They aren't your best books.  This is probably why your teen will usually move from YA to trash, or YA to scifi/fantasy before reading something that's actually good.

Unless they never read anything actually good and instead contribute to the popularity of 50 Shades of Shit.

But I digress.

Eleanor&Park isn't that kind of YA novel. It's better written than most books you run into in the "regular" lit genre, and the plot is neither moralizing nor saccharine.  And yes, there is swearing because teenagers swear. I hated those YA novels (and Teen TV Shows) where teens didn't swear or talk to each other in ways that they'd never be caught dead talking to their parents. Like, really, your teens are going to talk like characters out of Leave It To Beaver, and yet learn Important Lessons about why you shouldn't drink? I don't think so. (Can I just take a moment to hate Degrassi Jr High? Thank you.)

The story of Eleanor&Park isn't anything that hasn't been covered on A Very Special Episode of Any Teen Show (I'm pretty sure some '80s sitcoms even covered this). Eleanor is a kinda chubby misfit from a bad family. She's new in town, and the local kids pick on her. Her stepfather is an abusive asshole who's kicked her out once before and now makes her life hell. She has no place where she feels safe. Fortunately, though, she meets Park, who's also kind of a misfit. He's half Korean. His father looks like Tom Selleck, but he doesn't. He does martial arts, but loves comics and post-punk rock.

Eleanor and Park fall in teen-love and Park defends Eleanor against the raging lunatic haters in the school, and, ultimately, against her raging lunatic stepfather.

Of course, all good things must come to an end and so does Eleanor and Park's relationship.

It's a really cute book. Some parents may get their knickers in a knot because the book describes Eleanor and Park's make-out sessions, but personally I'd be more upset if I caught my kid reading Ender's Game, A Game of Thrones, or anything by Piers Anthony.

Or Dune. No kid should ever read Dune.

Actually, no one should read Dune. Ugh.

The one thing that did annoy me a bit about Eleanor&Park was that each chapter alternates between Eleanor and Park's points-of-view, and Rainbow Rowell isn't skilled enough as a writer to pull that off. You can't really tell without reading the title who's point-of-view you're seeing. Eventually I just stopped paying attention to it and let it go. Had this book been as dead inside as The Help, it would have gotten me mad, but fortunately this book has soul. Rainbow Rowell can do emotion without being melodramatic about it.

I want to end on a small note about what my school thought was appropriate teen reading. When I was 13, I had to read The Scarlet Letter for school. I'm sure you know what The Scarlet Letter is about, but in case you don't, here's a quick synopsis:

Hester Prynn is a Puritan living in Massachusetts in 16-something. She's married to some guy she's never met and who hasn't arrived from England yet. Hester gives birth to a baby who is, obviously, not her husband's. The father is the town reverend. Instead of coming clean, the asshole hides the fact that he's the kid's father. Sure he asks Hester to out him, but really dude's a giant coward. Meanwhile Hester's husband arrives, but nobody knows who he is. He proceeds to make everyone's life a living hell because he's that kind of asshole. Everyone goes about their miserable lives feeling guilty for prettymuch everything until they die. The book is a thick, joyless read, full of Piles of Evil. 

If I had to chose whether to let my thirteen year old read Eleanor&Park or The Scarlet Letter, I'd fucking choose Eleanor&Park any day of the week.  At least in Eleanor&Park neither Eleanor nor Park are cowards, and it's pretty damned clear that the assholes making everyone's life hell are the bad guys.

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler: If On An Afternoon A Reader

If on an afternoon a reader sits down outside to read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and the friend she was waiting for arrives and asks her if the book is any good, what should the reader answer? What did the reader answer?

The reader buried her head in the book and sobbed in exasperation, "I don't know!"

***

I wish I could tell you whether or not I liked If On a Winter's Night A Traveler.

At first it wasn't bad. I was on board with the whole idea that the main character, The Reader, started reading a book, but found that it was missing all but its first chapter because of a binding error. I was OK with the archaic descriptions of tearing apart the pages of the folios of a new book. I have never done this ever, and none of my parents' books -- many of which predated the publish date of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (IOAWNAT) -- seemed to have had their pages physically ripped apart, but maybe in Italy in 1978 books were still sold with their folios uncut.

And it didn't even irritate me at first that even though the book addressed the actual reader -- i.e. me -- in the second person as if it was telling my story, the main character was a sexist heterosexual male. I mean it's not as if Italo Calvino is unique in portraying women as secondary, undeveloped characters in the stories of men. He wrote the book in 1978, a year when everyone thought it was OK that Tony and his pals weren't arrested for rape and attempted rape, so what can you expect, really?

The entire book is the story of The Reader and his attempt to find the rest of the book he's started reading. Each time he thinks he has the rest of the book, it turns out to be the rest of another book. So he basically keeps reading bits and pieces of different books, never actually finishing any of them.

He's accompanied on his odyssey to get the rest of the book -- any of the books, really -- by Ludmilla. The Reader meets Ludmilla when they both go to the same bookstore to get the rest of the original book they were reading -- which is If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. They decide to read the book together.

At first Ludmilla keeps him at arm's length for reasons he can't glean. For some reason The Reader doesn't realize that he's a creepy guy at a bookstore who just asked her for her number. But hey, it was OK to harass women for their phone numbers in 1978. So we'll let that go.

Eventually, though, Ludmilla starts introducing The Reader to all kinds of scholars and whatnot to get to the bottom of all these books they're reading. It's like a real-life version of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole: you start at the list of Twilight characters and keep clicking on the links until you end up reading about fricative consonants.

I stopped reading around the time when it turns out Ludmilla is the Sultana that some author or agent or something wrote about in his letters about some manuscript, a manuscript Ludmilla may or may not have a copy of.

Now, just so you understand -- whomever you are -- I didn't stop reading the book because it was too confusing. I was able to follow just fine, thank you. I didn't mind the ride.

What pissed me off was that I wasn't sure if I did or did not like the book!

The problem was that each book excerpt was supposed to be a random passage from a book, but each random passage contained too much backstory to be a random passage. Each passage was like a book written by someone with a love for Exposition Fairies. It became tiresome after a bit.

So I was OK with the attempts by Ludmilla and The Reader to find the books, but I really didn't like reading the books these guys found. They were really crappy books.

On top of it all, each book excerpt was written in almost the same post-moderny baroque style as the rest of the book. Maybe I should blame that on the translator?

So yeah, I can't tell you whether or not I liked On A Winter's Night ATraveler because I liked the story, but not its stories. It was like existential angst in book form, but not in a good way.

Wired Love: Let's Chat

I've been in science in technology my whole life. As such, my dating life has been carried out online for a lot longer than eHarmony, Match.com and OKCupid have existed. I used to be up all night using Linux's talk and write with my boyfriend back before browsers had the capability to display background colours. (Yes, people, there was a time when all you got was grey. That was when you weren't using a text-based browser like Lynx. I'm old.)

Back in the day, no one I knew outside the Faculties of Science and Engineering flirted over the internet (or even the LAN, as the case may be). Hell, even as late as 1998, not many people I knew exchanged extensive emails and online chats with potential romantic partners. I mean, sure, there were chat rooms and whatnot, but the popular opinion was that they were populated with pedophiles and rapists rather than horny computer science majors trying to impress each other with their knowledge of obscure operating systems.

Anyways.

That said, I've never read a book where the protagonists met online, spent most of the book never meeting face-to-face, but yet fell in love -- that is until I read Wired Love.

Wired Love is about Nattie and Clem, two twentysomethings who meet and carry out an extensive courtship online, much to the annoyance of their coworkers and customers.

The catch, though, is that Wired Love was written in 1879 and the "online" in question is the telegraph line. Nattie and Clem fall in love using Morse code.

The book is told from Nattie's perspective. She's bored at her job in the telegraph office, and one day Clem, at another telegraph office, tries to outdo her by sending her a message so fast that she has a hard time transcribing it. Nattie gets pissed and indignant and tells him that he's an ass. Clem apologizes, and they strike up a conversation. The conversations follow the usual courtship patterns: questions, elusive answers, teases, irritations, apologies, etc. The thing with a telegraph line, though, is that everyone on the line can hear your messages. The other operators on the line start getting annoyed with Clem and Nattie's flirting and try to shut it down.

Nattie, meanwhile, tells her friends all about this, and they have a hard time understanding, much as my friends never understood when I told them about the chats I had with boyfriends online ("Couldn't you just call each other?" "OMG No! What would we talk about! Plus that's so forward! I'd be too scared!")

The novel is surprisingly modern for something written in 1879. Nattie and Clem's conversations could be used in any modern-day RomCom, if anyone ever cared to make a movie about a girl sitting infront of a computer typing messages to some guy and then telling her friends about it.

I really liked Wired Love. It was a cute, easy read. And unlike the piles of Edith Wharton books I've been reading, Wired Love has a happy ending, which was a refreshing change. (Did you really think it would have an unhappy ending?)

In case you want to read Wired Love, it's available free from Project Gutenberg.

The Sense of an Ending: An End That Can't Come Soon Enough

At least it was on sale.

When my mom was in college, she had been assigned An American Tragedy for a class, but was having a hard time finishing it. One of her profs had noticed that she had been dragging the book around for a rather long time and said to her, "Any book you can't finish in three weeks is not worth reading."

I was about to invoke my mom's An American Tragedy Rule and stop reading Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending 25 pages before the end. But I felt I needed to finish the book because Dame Stella Rimington, the chair of the Booker Prize judges the year The Sense of an Ending won, said that it was "subtly plotted" and "revealed new depths" each time you read it.

Usually the books I can't finish are craptastic pieces of trash like The Help and Rubyfruit Jungle. They're books that I feel I shouldn't waste my limited existence on. But The Sense of an Ending is a really well-written book -- and it won the Booker Prize! After reading the first few pages of the book, I became sad because I'd never write as well as Julian Barnes.

And yet...

And yet Julian Barnes has used his incredible talent to write a book whose protagonist, narrator, and almost sole character is the equivalent of the boring guy sitting next to you on a long bus ride, talking your ear off about some guy who's been dead since 1970.

I skimmed the last 25 pages because I couldn't take it anymore. It was the equivalent of putting on my headphones and missing parts of what The Boring Guy on the Bus said.

Maybe Julian Barnes knew exactly what he was doing when he made his protagonist, Tony, the literary equivalent of dry toast. It isn't so much that Tony is boring; it's that he's so boring that I honestly saw no reason to want to spend time with him and listen to his stupid story of woe. If I were to meet Tony at a party, I would make up a dumbass excuse like, "Oh! I think I see Becky by the punch and I must go talk to her about that 21 game next week" to get out of talking to him.

But A.D. Miller said that losing the Booker Prize to this book was like losing to Brazil in the World Cup.

Tony, the protagonist and World's Most Uninteresting Human Being Ever, is an old guy who is sad that he is getting old. He looks back wistfully on his youth, misremembering all kinds of things and not realizing what a mean sunovabitch he was to his friend Adrian when Adrian started dating Tony's ex-girlfriend, Veronica. The trigger for all this misremembering is that Veronica's mother has died and she's left Tony Adrian's diary. Tony -- who is about as deep as a drop or two of water on your kitchen counter -- doesn't really wonder why Veronica's mother would have Adrian's diary. Instead Tony starts thinking about how batshit insane Veronica was and misremembering their breakup, eventually just becoming obsessed with the whole thing.

Oh, and Tony starts thinking about memory. He starts thinking about how your memory of an event is different than what it was, and why you need other people to corroborate a memory, or even refute a memory as you get old. He sinks far into the depths of deepity, just like that Boring Guy in the Bus eventually does.

You know which book discusses the imperfections of memory, especially in terms of old romances, but does it better? High Fidelity, that's which book.

You know what the difference is between High Fidelity and The Sense of an Ending? High Fidelity has funny moments and doesn't take itself Seriously.

There is nothing funny about Tony or The Sense of an Ending. Nothing. There are no moments where you lightly chuckle to yourself. There are no jokes. There are no amusing moments of levity. It's all Very Serious.

Now, it's established that Julian Barnes is brilliant, so why the fuck did he write this book this way? Did he deliberately set out to write a book with The Boring Guy on the Bus as the protagonist? Did he want to tell The Boring Guy on the Bus's Boring Story to the masses? Is he making a point about people who are lonely and how they just go on and on and on without really making a point?

I don't know. I don't care.

Maybe I'm too dumb to understand the subtle nuance of the book, but I swear Veronica's version of this story would be way more interesting and enlightening.

A Game of Thrones Was Not Written For Me

It is, once again, the middle of my lunch break at work. As usual, I was reading A Game of Thrones while eating my lunch.

Right before my coworkers came in and distracted me, I read a passage that made it abundantly clear that George R.R. Martin is a horrible writer.

The mark of a good writer is that he (or she -- I'm just gonna use 'he' for brevity) can write clean prose that is still descriptive, while giving each character depth, feeling, and a voice. A character's thoughts, words, and actions need to ring true. They can't just be what the author thinks the character would do, think, or say based on how the author wants the story to unfold. Characters also should not act as mirrors for main characters by saying, thinking, and doing things that only reflect their opinion of the main character rather than something about themselves.

Good writers observe people and read a variety of books. They then sublimate this information into characters who don't act the way the author desires them to act, but in a way that a real person with the characteristics of the character, at the time the character was living would act.

This is why Pride&Prejudice rocks as a piece of literature. All the characters in the book act like real people. They're just as dumb, impetuous, narcissistic, selfish, and stubborn as real people. And while the mores of time during which P&P is set are alien to us now, the way the characters behave is not.

Now back to A Game of Thrones.

George R.R. Martin (GRRM) has written a character with no flaws in Eddard Stark. The man's fucking perfect. He takes care of his bastard son. He takes care of his kids. He is just. He is compassionate. He is fair. He is everything you want in a hero and so much fucking more. He is so fucking fantastic that all his wife wants to do is let him impregnate her.

To wit:

[Eddard Stark] looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the youth she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fifteen long years gone. Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could fill his seed within her. She preyaed it would quicken there. [...] She was not too old. She could give him another son.

 I'll give you a moment to finish your "Ewwwwww!"

All good? Great. Moving on.

Stark's wife is sitting in bed after he's apparently pounded her like nobody's business and what is she thinking? "My husband still looks hot. I'm not old yet. I hope I get preggers again. That way I'll prove to him that I'm worthy. Plus he's so awesome that I just totes want to be preggers by him!"

What does that tell us about these two people? It tells us that Stark is FUCKING ACES! YEAH!

Ahem.

We learn that Stark still looks young, even though he's old. We learn that he can still bring his wife...wait...I was going to say "bring his wife to orgasm", but that's not clear. All we know is that his wife has genital bruising. Let's be generous and say that he can still satisfy his wife (who may have never actually had a good lover, for all we know). Finally, we know that he's such a great guy that his wife hopes that she's not too old for him and can still carry another kid -- a son, specifically.

What do we learn about Stark's wife? We learn that she is a figment of someone's imagination because no woman in the history of humanity has ever thunk these things after sex. Ever.

I could believe that she thought her husband was pretty hot. I could believe that she thought that her 'nads were achy. But that's where it ends. I doubt she'd be thinking, "I hope I'm not too old" or "I hope I get preggers". I'd be more inclined to think that she'd be thinking that that was a pretty good romp, and that she would really like a nice bath and maybe a nap. And why the fuck isn't her husband coming to bed to cuddle?

*sigh*

I'm not renewing the loan on this book. I'm done.

 

Foundation's Edzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

In 1986 my homeroom teacher was Ms Michaelson. She was a severe, skinny woman who thought that being entirely unreasonable instilled discipline.

The class was English and Ms Michaelson insisted that we arrive 10 minutes early for class. For the first five pre-class minutes, we wrote in our journals; the next five minutes were spent reading a book of our choice.

A reasonable alternative to NyQuil

I really disliked Ms Michaelson. For one thing, if you were late for the pre-class, she'd send you for a late slip. This was insane. You'd end up arguing with some minor administrator -- or worse yet, secretary -- who would send you back without a late slip (because you weren't late). But by the time you'd get back to class, you would be late, and so you'd be sent down for a late slip again. For another, she was one of those people who told you that only boring people get bored. That is so not true. You know who gets bored? Smart people who are trapped listening to idiots all day and don't have a decent book with them, that's who!

I have no idea why I decided to bring Foundation's Edge as my book of choice. My parents' house is lousy with books. Books literally fall on your head when you open closets. I think I had originally brought Agatha Christie's A Cat Among The Pigeons, but that took me about a week to read. My guess is that I wanted something more challenging and that's why I picked up Foundation's Edge. But I was a teenager, so who the fuck knows what I was thinking.

Anyways, I did not like the book. I thought it was dull as all get-out until the last few chapters when something actually happened. 

And so the book remained at my parents' house, in the basement.

Until this past Christmas.

You know what happens when it's Christmas, you have nothing to do, you're sick, and you're at your parents' house? You make bad decisions. Decisions like reading Foundation's Edge again to see if it's as dull as you remember it.

Spoiler: it is.

A good 90% of the book is blahblahblah. And by this I mean that 90% of the book is taken up by exposition fairies. Exposition fairies take over every single character for most of the book. And they go on and on and on. Paragraphs of dialogue take up entire half pages! Who the fuck cares how the fucking spaceship works? I don't. I care about where you're going and why. Who the fuck cares about how you calculated the fucking coordinates of the dumbass planet? I don't. Maybe someone does. Maybe some überfanboy somewhere is keeping track of all the tech and making sure it makes sense. But that fanboy is not me.

I was too busy skipping over pages and pages of this blahblahblah to get to some part -- any part -- where someone talked to someone about something not tech. I swear there should be a Bechdel Test for science fiction. I'm calling it the Snad Test:

1. There must be at least two "regular" characters
2. Who have a conversation
3. That is not about tech

Sweet Cheesus on a Cheesestick! I think I had to wait til the before last chapter or something for a climax and dénouement to happen. And when it did, it was totally antclimactic. 

Do you want a synopsis? Here's a synopsis:

Eons (millennia?) after the Seldon Plan, some guy named Golan Trevize decides that the Seldon Plan is going too well and that obviously the Second Foundation -- which was full of "scholars" with mind control abilities yaddayaddayadda -- had not been destroyed back in that other book (Second Foundation? Foundation and Empire? I don't know; I didn't read it.) and was still controlling their minds. So he gets booted off his planet and sent off to find these Second Foundation guys for reasons that are totally bizarre. Meanwhile, back on the farm, some guy from the Second Foundation gets attacked by a bunch of ruffians, and his Second Foundation buddies also send him off to do something because of Extra Tasty Contrivance. Oh, and Golan's bestie, whose name escapes me, is sent off to follow Golan because of Super Chocolatey Contrivance. Golan correctly guesses that his bestie is a Second Foundation operative, but that really doesn't matter. In the end, they all end up in the same place -- a planet called Gaia -- that is sentient or something. A whole lot of deus ex machina dust is sprinkled by the mind-control entity that is Gaia so that the entire implausible storyline makes sense. 

There ya go. 

Only read this book if you're suffering from insomnia and you find NyQuil distasteful.

Dear Friend, I Just Read The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Dear Friend,

I just finished reading a book called "The Perks of Being aWallflower". It is about a boy who is 15 in 1992, but it was written by an adult man in 1999. The book is written in the form of letters from the boy to a friend. The boy's name is Charlie. I don't know what his friend's name is. I don't even know if the friend really exists because we never see any replies to Charlie's letters. I think the letters may be a writing exercise, but I'm not sure.

The boy is very sad. He tells you he's sad a lot, and it seems like everything that happens makes him sad. The boy doesn't have many emotions, come to think of it. He only tells you when he's sad. He never uses other words to describe how he feels, like "distraught" or "devastated". When he does use fancy words, he puts them in quotation marks. I guess he wants to show that he doesn't really know what those words mean because he only read them in a book or heard them in English class. There was no internet in 1992 where he could have looked them up. Dictionaries also were not invented yet.

Beside being sad, Charlie has a very exciting life and has some very good friends. His friends are Patrick, Sam, who is a girl, and Mary Elizabeth. Patrick is gay and he is dating the quarterback of the football team. They have had sex. Charlie is in love with Sam, but she is dating Craig. Mary Elizabeth really likes Charlie, but Charlie doesn't like Mary Elizabeth as much. They all participate in the Rocky Horror Picture Show floor show, which is unusual for teenagers in 1992.

Charlie has listened to Nirvana's new album and he even put a song from it on a mix tape that he gives Patrick. Patrick tells him that the mix tape is very sad. That's how you know that there is something wrong with Charlie. Charlie also tells you that there's something wrong with him because he is not "normal". Charlie writes everything in a very "monotonic" voice. This may be because the grownup who wrote the book thinks that this is the way teenage boys write.

This book reminded me a lot of Go Ask Alice, which was also written by a grownup pretending to be a teenager. In Go Ask Alice, the author pretends that the teenager is writing in a diary. The author does not do a good job, though, and you can tell that the teenager isn't a real teenager. The author who wrote The Perks of Being a Wallflower (his name is Stephen Chbosky) also does not do a very good job at writing like a teenager. The author puts in too many details in some cases, and not enough in others. Sometimes it sounds like you are reading a regular book and not letters. This would have been OK if the book did not feel "like an afterschool special". Too many bad things happen to Charlie for it to be believable, I think.

I am also not sure if Charlie is autistic. Charlie has very deep insight into many things, but can't figure out the people around him. Charlie does not get excited about anything, not even sex!

Charlie has an aunt that died. She was very nice to him. Charlie feels guilty about her death because she died in a car crash getting his Christmas present. Then Charlie finds out something very sad about his aunt. This is very important.  I can't tell you more about this because that would ruin the ending.

I do not think I really liked this book. I think The Catcher in the Rye was better. The Catcher in the Rye was also written by an adult about a teenager who is not normal. That teenager, Holden Caulfield, is telling his story. It is a good book and Holden Caulfield seems like more of a real teenager, even though he lived a long time ago when there wasn't even any TV.

That is all for now. I think Stephen Chbosky thought he was very clever.

Bye for now
Snad

Rewriting A Game of Thrones

In music and painting, it's typical to reproduce existing works. Sometimes musicians and artists just reproduce the work to gain skills ("I can finally play Stairway!"), and sometimes they don't reproduce the work so much as they reinterpret it ("I'm re-doing Stairway as a Gregorian Chant. It isn't really much of a stretch.").

But there's no such tradition in writing. In writing, if you try to rewrite anything, it's considered plagiarism.  (Though I do know of one guy, Chris Eaton, who did a remake -- a cover, if you will -- of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. The book's called The Grammar Architect and it's not bad.)

I don't like that. I think that a good way to practice writing is to take something miserably bad -- something like, say, A Game of Thrones -- and rewrite it so that it's almost palatable.

I'm not an awesome writer, but I think that I can make at least one passage from that first Game of Thrones book less awful. I mean, seriously, this book reeks. The author, George R.R. Martin (you need those initials if you want to be a fantasy writer, right J.R.R. Tolkien?), shoves so many unneeded words, including superfluous adverbs and obnoxious turns of phrases, into his writing that I have to assume that the book is a big giant fuck you to Strunk&White, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

That is if George R.R, Martin's heard of them.

You may be wondering (if you exist) why the hell I'm reading A Game of Thrones to begin with. Well, as you may or may not know, I work at a technology company. All my coworkers have read A Game of Thrones and they're all big fans of the show. I just started watching the show and I am not a big fan. I decided that maybe -- just maybe -- the books would be better. So I checked the first book in the series out of the library (I'm not making the mistake I made with The Help and Peyton Place ever again). 

Within the first few pages I realized that this was not going to go well. When you roll your eyes five times within the first ePage of your eBook, you know that this is not going to go well. When you spot the second mention that the blood was "like summer wine" on the snow, you know you're deep into 50 Shades of Shit territory.

I read a passage to one of my fanboy coworkers and asked him, very seriously, if he thought George R.R. Martin could shove any extra words into the sentence, and my coworker answered, "Obviously it's bad if you insist on reading the words!"

*sigh*

This brings me to right now. I was reading the book over lunch and thought, "I could rewrite this. I could rewrite this with fewer stupid words and keep the intent. I'm sure I could."

So for your reading pleasure -- or not, I'm doing this cold in the few remaining minutes of my lunch hour -- is a rewrite of a passage from Book 1 of A Game of Thrones.

The passage:

Viserys had been a boy of eight when they fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their mother's womb.

Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told her the stories. The midnight flight to Drangonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship's black sails.  Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King's Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper's dogs, the lords Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dorne pleading for mercy as Rhaegar's heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room while the Kingslayer opened Father's throat with a golden sword.

She had been born on Dragonstone nine months after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness apart.

The rewrite:

Viserys was eight when he and his pregnant mother had fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies. Viserys had told Dany the story of the battle so often that she almost felt that she had been there herself. She saw the sack of King's Lading by the invading armies of the Usurper, led by Lord Lannister and Lord Stark -- the men her brother called "the Usurper's dogs". She saw Princess Elia of Dorne plead for her child's life after he was taken from her. She saw the blood filled waters of the Trident, and her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper there. He would die in vain trying to protect Princess Elia. She saw the Kingslayer slash her father's throat with his gold sword as the dragon head trophies watched from the walls.

Finally, Dany saw their departure in the dead of night. She saw the moonlight shimmer on the ship's sails, and she saw Dragonstone in the distance. It was on Dragonstone that she was born nine months later.

There ya go. That took me 10 minutes and I haven't made any revisions to it (I haven't even given it a once over). I have no idea how good or bad that is, but it can't be that much fucking worse than the original.

Feel free to comment on how I missed the point of A Game of Thrones and how the fake medieval language is part of the book. (Just like how Gwyneth Paltrow's fake Brit accent is part of Shakespeare in Love?)

The End of Eternity: Starring Cary Grant and a Young Ingenue

My well-loved ancient copy.

In case it isn't obvious by my profile, I work at a technology company. My coworkers are, for the most part, nerdy men who only read science fiction and fantasy, if they read fiction at all.

I have no idea who you are reading this, but it is entirely possible that you aren't familiar with computer scientists and engineers. Computer scientists and engineers do not believe fiction is worth reading because it doesn't teach you anything the way non-fiction does. And by "non-fiction", they mean books like AntiPatterns, rather than books like Let's Pretend This Never Happened.

They will read science fiction and fantasy, though, because it's "entertaining". They don't care about stuff like character development, worldview, or empathy. They've said as much to me when I've argued that fiction is worth reading because it allows you to put yourself in another person's mind and experience life from a different point of view.

I don't particularly dig science fiction myself, though I've read quite a bit of it. My coworkers quizzed me one day about what I had and had not read, presumably to decide whether or not my opinion on the subject should be taken seriously (this is how it is with computer scientists and engineers, and most science-y people in general). Unsurprisingly, they had never heard of my two favourite science fiction novels: The Gods Themselves and The End of Eternity. 

Science fiction often suffers from the same ailments as your garden variety trash: a focus on events (or technology) rather than character development; an over-reliance on exposition fairies to provide backstory (or explain the tech); and a feeling that the ending was pre-determined and everything was shoehorned into the story.

The End of Eternity is by no means perfect. I mean the ending -- the destruction of Eternity -- was obviously the main goal of the novel, and all the loose ends got wrapped up with a heaping serving of deus ex machina, but at least the exposition fairies didn't get into the way too much.

The other nice thing about The End of Eternity is that even though it was published in 1955, it still somehow managed to be somewhat sexually progressive and -- almost -- feminist.

Granted, according to The End of Eternity we all have to wait til the 482nd century for humans to be as sexually liberated as your average Montrealer circa 1995, but that's still pretty impressive given most science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s assumed that women would be housewives for ever and ever and ever.

The basic plot of The End of Eternity is that there are these people -- all guys, natch -- living outside of time, who are in charge of making small changes to the world to prevent wars and famine and all kinds of other things. The thing is that all the changes they make result in space travel never being developed and humanity dying off instead of Spreading to the Stars. This is, apparently, a Bad Thing. Because it was the 1950s and the assumption was that human existence had to go on forever because...um...because Humans are The Best!

All these small changes also result in people, places and families being radically changed, or even sometimes getting eliminated from reality altogether.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "but according to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, the realities where the changes were not made still exist!"

Thing is that Hugh Everett didn't postulate the many-worlds interpretation until 1957, two years after the publication of The End of Eternity. So it's interesting to see read a book that was written prior to that interpretation. Nowadays the many-worlds interpretation would be taken for granted, and probably our hero would "travel" to the other universe to be with the woman he loved, or some such nonsense.

Oh, right, that brings me to our hero, Andrew Harlan. Actually, he's less of a hero and more of a dupe. He's manipulated by prettymuch everyone for their own purposes. He goes along with all the duplicity because he wants to save the woman he loves, Noÿs Lambent, from a reality change that he has to make -- a change that will erase her from her reality's timeline.  He devises a plan to take her out of her reality and hide her in Eternity -- the place where the guys dissociated from time live -- until he can figure out a way for them to be together.

In the end, he decides that Eternity has to be destroyed. And at that moment every loose end ever is wrapped up by an Exposition Fairy who also sprinkles some deus ex machina powder all over the place.

So. I tried to convince my coworkers to read this book, but before I could explain why, they had started quizzing me about whether I liked The Lord of The Rings (I didn't).

But this is my blog and I can try convincing you: You should read this book. It's a bit over-explainy at times, but you can totally just skip over those parts; they're boring and they don't advance the plot. Plus once you skip over those parts you end up with a pretty decent story about a guy who doesn't like his job, finds some happiness in a girl, and decides to buck the system for love only to discover that he's been a pawn in a game.

The book is a product of its time and feels like an old black and white movie starring Cary Grant and some young ingenue. But unlike my coworkers, I like old movies starring Cary Grant and a young ingenue, and so do many other people.

Peyton Place: Burn In Hell

This was such a bad idea.

I thought reading trash would be easy. I thought I'd go through a book per week and not have to think too hard. I thought they would rest my weary mind.

But no.

Which stinks more?

Instead they made my head hurt something fierce.

Stupid Peyton Place! Stupid, stupid Peyton Place! And stupid me for trying to read Peyton Place.

I couldn't finish it. Look, I tried. I got two chapters into Book 3 and then I gave up. I'm amazed I got that far. I should have just quit when the author smashed me with metaphor fists.

I'm not going to waste energy writing something witty and interesting about this book. The author didn't bother writing anything interesting or witty, so why should I?

So here, in no particular order, and in point form, is why this book sucked ass:

• The book is about events, not people. There is no character development. There is no depth. There is no motivation. There are only clichés, like the wise old doctor and the neighbourhood lushes.
• For reasons unbeknownst to me, the high school principal date rapes his girlfriend to seduce her. She eventually marries him because he's a good guy and great in bed, even though she shudders when they pass where he fucking raped her. This was where I disengaged completely because the author definitely didn't think there was anything wrong with this, but I am sure that even in 1950-whatever this was not acceptable.
• A character was introduced solely for the purpose of killing her off and making another character lose her shit. How lazy is that?
• A fire literally suffocates the town during the time when all the Bad Things happen. It's like the World Wrestling Federation gave the author lessons on subtlety.
• Exposition Fairies narrate most of the book. They possess characters and don't let them go. 

This book is what happens when an author has the plot, climax, and dénouement already nailed down, and just fills in the blanks.

This was horrible, awful, and shittastic.

If you want my copy, let me know. Otherwise I'm leaving it in the subway.