sandmoose.com

Today I finished listening to The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. I suspected it would have cliff-hanger ending about a third of the way through and I was right. Of course, I knew ahead of time that the title of the next book would is Song of Susannah. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the next book is going to focus on her and if that’s the case then it’s unlikely she would deal with her little “issue” in this book.

The language of these stories is starting to take hold in my mind. At work I feel like saying things like, “We need to palaver about our database schema.” or “Where should our ka-tet have lunch at today?”. If someone completes a task to help me out I have to fight the urge to say “Thankee sai.” I suppose that’s a testament to the vividness and believability of the world Stephen King has created in The Dark Tower series.

I’m starting to notice a pattern in the series which became screamingly obvious near the end of Wolves of the Calla. Much of the fiction we have created in this world is appearing in Roland’s world as reality. Just off the top of my head here’s the few instances I can think of.

Some SPOILERS follow. Highlight the following if you want to read it.

1. When riding Blaine the Mono, Blaine made a reference to the T.V. character Edith Bunker as if she was a real person. Maybe this was an honest mistake but it’s something to keep in mind.

2. All of The Wizard of Oz imagery at the end of Wizard and Glass.
3. Robots dressed up as Dr. Doom from Marvel Comics.
4. Lightsabers from Star Wars.
5. Sneetches from Harry Potter.
6. Callahan from Stphen King’s own book, Salem’s Lot.
7. The whole concept of Arthur Eld and the Gunslingers is just a variation on our legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable

So, what’s going on here? We know the Dark Tower is a kind of nexus for all universes. Does that include fictional universes as well? Of course, Danny Fitelson has already read all the books so he’s probaby sitting back and thinking, “Ya Mike, just wait until the final book. Nothing is going to turn out like you think it will.”

On a completely different note I noticed the narrater changed with this audiobook. I liked the other guy (Frank Muller) so much I was a little disappointed with the new narrater (George Guidall). I don’t want to sound like a child but the new guy doesn’t do the voices for the different characters they way Frank did. It’s almost like seeing a new actor take over a familiar role on a TV series. “What happened to Frank?”, I asked myself.

According to the afterword, Frank Muller was involved in a serious motorcycle accident back in 2001 that left him with severe neurological damage. His rehabilitation is going to be long and hard. Sadly, he will likely never record another novel again. Anyone interested can learn more at his website.

Stephen King is donating all of the profits from the Wolves of the Calla audiobook to the Wave Dancer foundation which he helped establish to provide Frank and his family — as well as other disabled professionals like Frank — with the financial assistance required for his lifelong rehabilitation and care.

So, I’m going to take a three week break before diving into Song of Susannah. Only two more books to go. I just may finish The Dark Tower series before the end of the year!

SPOILER FREE

I just finished the audiobook for the fourth book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Wizard and Glass. What an amazing story. I had only read this story one time before almost ten years ago. Still, when I started reading it again I though to myself, “Hey, is this the story where that one thing happens at the end?” And sure enough, it was.

I think this has to be one of the most beautiful stories King has ever told. And longest too. The audiobook clocked in at close to 30 hours! At times I would read the actual book at home to try to get ahead in order to finish the whole thing in three weeks. By doing that I discovered that I read ever so slightly faster than the narrator for the audiobook.

I’m about to embark on the fifth book in the series, The Wolves of Calla. This is the first book in the series that I don’t own in paper form and thus haven’t read before. Things are really starting to get interesting for Roland and his gang. I can’t wait to see what Book Five has in store.

I now have all the audio books for The Dark Tower series and started listening to them about six weeks ago. Yesterday I finished listening to The Drawing of the Three.

I have read The Drawing of the Three twice before — once in high school and once in college — but it’s amazing how much I forget about a book after I’ve read it. I remember the junkie Eddie but completely forgot about the shootout at Balazar’s. I remembered O’Detta and Detta but completely forgot about Jack Mort and Roland’s time in New York. With a book series as long as The Dark Tower it’s nice to be able to go back and listen to everything so all the little details are fresh in your mind.

The Drawing of the Three was narrated by Frank Muller who did a superb job. He adopts the perfect campfire storytelling feel that has been a hallmark of Stephen King’s writing. The voices he does for each of the characters was pretty good as well. It wasn’t over the top enough to sound silly. Just enough so you know who’s speaking and get a glimpse into their personality.

The full story was 12 hours and 42 minutes long. That’s long enough for me to complete in two weeks worth of commuting to and from work. The next book The Waste Lands is 18 hours so I expect that’ll take a bit longer. Books later in the series approach 30 hours so it’ll definitely take me a while to get through everything.

I finished reading The Two Towers for the second time last week. It was actually a much easier read the second time through and I found myself understanding it much better. I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the maps and charting out the path each group of characters takes during the course of the book. Being able to visualize the geography of Middle Earth greatly helps in understanding the story since it involves a lot of traveling.

The ending of the book still leaves me hanging on the edge. I kind of wish the movie went all the way to the end of the book because it would make for a great cliff hanger.

So this isn’t really a “novel” book. More like a compilation of comic strips. Still, it has pages, two covers and a spine so I’ll consider it a book for the purposes of these little reviews.

I remember back when I was in Jr. high school every morning I would bring in our newspaper, sit down at the kitchen table with some Earth Grains donuts and read the comic page before going off to school. Bloom County was my favorite. The exploits of Opus the penguin and the rest of the gang in Bloom County kept me thoroughly entertained and laughing for a long time.

Then Berkely Breathed decided to stop making Bloom County. I wondered what would become of my mornings before school. Our newspaper replaced Bloom County with some new cartoon that I was immediately suspicious of. How could anything replace my beloved Bloom County? After a few weeks I was began to warm up to this new comic strip about a boy named Calvin and his tiger Hobbes.

Then sometime during my college years Bill Watterson decided to stop making Calvin and Hobbes. By this time I was living on my own and didn’t get a daily newspaper anymore but I read the books and looked for it in the newspaper whenever I happened to be near one. Now what was I going to do? First Bloom County and then Calvin and Hobbes. There is no way a worthy successor could step up a second time.

Then one day when I was cruising around on the Internet on my 14.4 dial-up connection I ran across this Dilbert character. Not only was this a worthy successor but it was a comic strip I could relate to. I had recently graduated from college and was working in an environment not unlike Dilbert’s. Also, I didn’t have to buy a newspaper to read this comic! Scott Adams posted every single strip on his web site a week after it appeared in newspapers.

Dilbert continues to be a good comic even if it has lost some of the wit and magic from it’s early years. A few years ago I stumbled across an online comic strip called User Friendly. Like Dilbert its cast is mainly tech workers but unlike Dilbert the comic is exclusively online and targets a very specific audience: UNIX geeks. User Friendly may never achieve mass popularity like Dilbert but among UNIX aficionados it’s highly revered. A comic written just for “us”. Sometimes you have to know UNIX to understand the jokes and sometimes it’s written broad enough for anyone to laugh at. It’s usually the first site I look at every day as I eat my breakfast at work which kind of reminds me of those years in high school reading Bloom County.

Check out the userfriendly.org website and read it for yourself. The entire User Friendly archives are online. Here’s a few selection from the Root of All Evil compilation.

I finally finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson last night. It took me longer than usual to finish this book because it has gotten colder outdoors now and I usually do most of my reading in the atrium at work while I eat my lunch. Nevertheless, I did manage to finish it and here’s my report.

Snow Crash was a very enjoyable book and I can understand why the computer geek culture is very much into it. Not only does it take place in a somewhat more high tech future but one of the central settings in the book is the Metaverse. The Metaverse is like an advanced 3D version of the Internet where you are represented with an avatar and can interact with other avatars in a variety of ways. When you hand someone a data card in the Metaverse information is transferred from your computer to theirs. When your avatar is on The Street you can walk through other avatars because the collision detection would require too much CPU time. However, certain buildings developed by good programmers can changes these rules. Programmers who have bought development licenses can build their own buildings in the Metaverse and can override the default behavior if they so desire. It’s interesting to see how things like Everquest can be seen as a very crude and primitive version of the Metaverse. Five years from now we might be looking at something that more closely approximates what is described in the book.

One of the questions in my mind as I was reading Snow Crash is exactly what year the story is set in. We find out near the end that two of the main characters — Hiro and Raven — were born in the early seventies. Their ages were never mentioned but since they are both very athletic I’ll assume they can’t be any older than forty. Hey, if Barry Bonds and Jerry Rice are still getting it done in their late thirties then surely Hiro and Raven can also. So assuming they are forty years old the book can’t be set any later than around 2012. That’s only ten years from now.

It is interesting to see how Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future is manifesting itself currently. Independently owned retail stores are all but extinct. Everything is a franchise. Hyperinflation means people routinely deal with billions and trillions of dollars. The US government is no longer the main authority in the US. There are no more laws. The Mafia operates openly and recruits from colleges the same as any other company does. Suburbs have become their own little nation states with their own police forces and prisons. On-time pizza delivery is so vitally important that drivers have been known to be executed for failing to deliver within thirty minutes. The main plot of the book has to do with a telecommunications mogul who is trying to control people’s minds through a virus that affects the brain. This raises the issue of intellectual property that is such a hot topic these days. Do your ideas belong to you or your employer?

The narration can sometimes be a little jerky and there was too much about Summerian mythology in the middle of the story. But since this was Neal Stephenson’s first novel so we can forgive these little niggles. Besides, it was supposed to be a graphic novel to begin with anyway.

Seeing as how it was originally intended for a graphical presentation it seems like perfect material for a movie. It’s got a charismatic sword-wielding good-guy (Hiro Protagonist), the sexy but street-smart girl (Y.T.) and a bad guy that truly inspires fear and awe (Raven). Add in some interesting sci-fi technology and a string of fast-paced action sequences and you have everything you could ask for in a Hollywood blockbuster. It may not be deep and meaningful but if it was handled right then Snow Crash could become the next Matrix.

Some things about the book would definitely have to be changed though. At the end of the book Hiro and Raven confront each other in the Metaverse but the fight was a little short lived and anti-climatic. The movie should have a really good knock-down-drag-out-samurai-swords-flying-in-the-air fight. The relationship between Hiro and Juanita should be developed more in the movie. Also, we should know a more about L. Bob Rife’s motivations. This would give the filmmakers an opportunity to explore the issues of intellectual property and what that means to us today.

I look forward to reading more of Neal Stephenson’s work in the future but I think I’ll breeze through Michael Nelson’s Mind Over Matters first.

Another book from the Left Behind series done with. Like the last book this one was kind of slow until the last few chapters. Like all of the books that have come before it, The Mark is somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, the writing really isn’t that good. But on the other hand, it’s amazingly compelling. You just can’t wait to see what is going to happen next. Who will take the mark? Who will be executed for refusing the mark? How are David and his gang going to escape the Global Community’s headquarters?

Like I said earlier though, the writing just isn’t that good. Before the authors ever started working on the series they must have decided to tell the story only from the point of view of the Tribulation Force members. This means that the only way we, the readers, can see or hear something is if someone from the Tribulation Force sees or hears it. This concept may work for some novels but for a series of books of this scope it really limits the storytelling possibilites. We can never see what goes on in remote parts of the world. We can never know how other groups of believers around the world are responding to events. We can never really know what goes on inside the Carpathia regime. We only get the small glimpses that the Force members get.

This requires the writers to invent unlikely plot devices so we can get those glimpses to begin with. In The Mark, Buck and Albie travel to Greece and infiltrate the GC Peacekeeping troops just so they can see the first marks being applied to prisoners there. They know there are fellow believers imprisoned there but they have absolutely no way of helping them. Essentially, these two characters risked their lives just to see a bunch of other believers get their heads cut off! The only reason they undertook this little operation was so we, the readers, could see how the believers in Greece courageously handled the situation.

Then, of course, there is David’s outrageously comprehensive (and supposedly secure) bugging system. Again, the only reason for this unbelievable system is so we the readers can hear what goes on in high level meetings. It’s also rather convenient that we now have a believer who had the mark forced on him. This allows the good guys to keep a mole inside the GC to keep “paving the way” for them to infiltrate the GC military.

The Left Behind series is interesting in that it’s a complete picture of the authors interpretation of prophetic writings in the Bible. But it’s not exactly well written fiction. If you don’t expect good storytelling you just might enjoy it. Therein lies the paradox. For some reason it is indeed enjoyable.

Like the last book review this one is also late as I finished reading this one a couple of weeks ago. Most people have seen the movie Fight Club and know it’s about an insomniac guy who gets fed up with chasing material success and tries to find a way to out of the rat race and get a little sleep at the same time. That may be a ridiculous simplification but it’ll have to do.

The book reads almost exactly like the narrative from the movie. There’s only a few things that are different between the book and movie. The way Tyler and “Jack” meet is different. There’s also a bit in the book where Tyler sends Marla’s mother candy and she sends her fat back in return. Tyler and Jack use the fat to make soap. Marla find out about this little scheme and justifiably gets very upset with Tyler and Jack so they leave the house and spend the night in an unlocked car in a used car lot. In the movie they simply steal the fat from a liposuction facility. Other than that almost every scene from the book was reproduced in the movie. Maybe not in the same order and context but in essence the majority of the book made it to the screen.

If you have seen the movie but haven’t read the book I highly recommend it. If you haven’t seen the movie then I recommend it even more. It’s a fairly short novel and even a lazy reader could finish it in a couple of weeks.

Chuck Palahniuk is going to be an important writer whether or not he’s on the bestseller lists. I understand he has a few other books out now and I intended pick a couple of those up at some point in the future.

Next up in my reading list: The Mark. After a short detour I’m returning to the Left Behind series. After that one I think I’m finally going to read Snow Crash. It seems that everywhere I turn people in the tech industry reference this book as one of the best pieces of science fiction around today. I guess it’s high time I actually read it. Who knows? Before the year is out I just might get around to finally reading Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

This review is quite a bit late since I finished this book almost a month ago. The story takes place over the course of three days where the ruler of the world Nicolae Carpathia lays dead. On the third day he comes back to life but this time he’s different. This time he is indwelt by Satan himself and vows to wreak havoc on the Christians and Jews. Along the way both Rayford and Buck find their way back to the United States and the group moves into a new safehouse.

Oh, and Chloe wants to kill her baby. Her reason is that by killing her child it will be guaranteed salvation. But if the child should fall into the hands of the Global Community and become brainwashed then that would be too horrible to bear. No doubt that would be a horrible thing but come on! The solution to the problem is not to kill your baby! At least Tsion had the sense to try to talk her out of it and thankfully no babies were killed in this book. The absolute ridiculousness of this reminds me of an article on popular satire news site The Onion.

The other thing that worries me about this character is that she is supposedly the CEO of this International Co-op that consists of tens of thousands of “employees”. We’re supposed to believe that this new mother is the lone CEO of such of huge concern and she manages the whole thing from her laptop and phone in the safehouse. Now I’m willing to suspend some disbelief in order to enjoy the story but this is asking a little too much.

The ending wasn’t much of a cliffhanger so I’m going to take a break from the series to read Fight Club.