books

Book title: Mort
Author: Terry Pratchett
Originally published: 1987

I finished reading Mort a couple of days ago, and perhaps the way to best indicate how much I enjoyed it is to say that I’ve already requested Reaper Man, book 2 in the Death series. I had a lot of fun reading this one.

The book focuses in on the Death character of Discworld, who looks like your basic Grim Reaper - skeleton, black hooded robe, scythe and sword. At the beginning of the book, Mort is “all elbows and knees”, and his father believes that he thinks too much. For this reason, his father ends up taking Mort to the village, in the hopes of Mort finding an apprenticeship. Death obliges, and takes Mort under his wing - or robe, as it were. When Death takes a day off and gives Mort a couple of jobs, Mort of course makes a mess of things. He has a crush on the young princess he’s supposed to be “ushering into the next world”, and so instead he kills the princess’s assassin. The rest of the book deals with how Mort tries to “fix” history, which continues to trundle along as if the princess were dead, and how Death tries to get in touch with his, er, human side.

While I enjoyed Mort’s character, what really made this book for me was the character of Death. There were some scenes in the book that literally had me laughing out loud, something I don’t do that often when reading a book. Many of the scenes that made me laugh were ones which dealt with Death’s peculiar character. He’s a mix between a humorless, all-work-and-no-play god, and a small child who is clueless of how the world works, due to his rather abnormal working conditions. This becomes readily apparent when he tries to do things that humans do, like going to the bar:

“I don’t see the point,” the stranger said. [Death]
“Sorry?”
“What is supposed to happen?”
“How many drinks have you had?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Just about anything, then,” said the barman. . . .

I burst out laughing at “Forty-seven.” In the book, Death also has a soft spot for kittens - go figure.

I loved this book, but a word of caution to those who might be inclined to read it after reading my post here: if you don’t like silliness mixed in with your fantasy, don’t read this. I’ve read that the Discworld series has developed over the years to not have such large amounts of gag humor in it, but this being one of the early Discworld novels, it runneth over with silliness. There’s a lot of stuff that just makes no sense, and if you’re someone who’s going to get caught up going “that’s silly” or “that wouldn’t work like that”, you probably won’t enjoy this.

However, if you think you’d like a kitten-loving Death, or a world that is held up by four giant elephants riding a 10,000 mile long turtle who’s floating through space, you’ll love this. Read it.

I recently finished The Crow Road by Iain Banks, sent to me as a gift by Cas (thanks again!). I wasn’t really sure how to take the opening sentence, which left me wondering what kind of book she’d sent me: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”* However, after 30 or 40 pages, I was hooked, and proceeded to plow through it with all possible speed. I loved it.

The plot follows Prentice McHoan, a Scottish university student (who’s majoring in history, cheers to that!) who’s dealing with more than a little death in his family. Indeed, “the crow road” is (at least in the book) a Scottish phrase meaning death. He also struggles with other prominent life issues, like his love life (or largely lack thereof), his flatmate who isn’t the greatest intellect on the planet, and the rift between him and his father over religion: Prentice believes, while his father is a rather vocal atheist.

The narration style is one which I’ve not encountered much, but which I really enjoyed a lot. While the story does have Prentice at the center of action, the narration itself is quite fluid in regards to both time and perspective. Time-wise, the book leapt from one point in time to another; from Prentice’s “present”, to his childhood, to his teen years, etc. Perspective-wise, sometimes the narration was in first-person, other times third-person, focused on someone else entirely (often Kenneth, Prentice’s father). The first couple of these time / perspective shifts threw me off, but after that the transitions were painless, and livened things up.

The thing I probably enjoyed the most about the book was the sheer Scottish-ness of it. After watching the historically-horrendous Braveheart countless times in my youth, I fell in love with anything to do with Scotland, and The Crow Road stirred that love up. Reading about the lochs, the little villages, the castles, makes me want to visit the country, something I’ve not really thought about for a long while. My only trouble with going to Scotland, though, would be if Banks’ characters are a good representation of the country’s inhabitants as a whole. Do those people ever drink anything that is non-alcoholic? It seemed every other page, Prentice, friends, families, everyone was tipping back a shot of whiskey. Are they related to the Battlestar Galactica crew?

* The grandmother exploding was due to her pacemaker not being taken out before she was put into the furnace at the crematorium. The scene was pretty hilarious: the doctor drives into the crematorium lot, jumps out of his car, and starts yelling, “STOP, STOP!!!” This is followed by Prentice hearing a loud explosion from inside the crematorium as his grandmother’s pacemaker pops. Then the doc falls over, having a heart attack of his own.

I like Wikipedia - love it, in fact. It’s a wonderful resource, and is a testament to what is possible when a lot of people put their heads together and get down to work (even if there is an awful lot of arguing between the editors). I check something on Wikipedia once a day or so; at the very least, I’m looking something up there once every two or three days.

But… (Saw that coming, didn’t you?)

The fact that Wikipedia articles come up as the #1 result for so many things is a bit irksome to me. Yeah, it’s a nice resource, but what is its pagerank, 312? (It’s 8, actually.) I can’t think of any specific examples other than the one that I just ran into now, but there have been numerous times in the past when I’ve searched for something, and thought “huh, the Wikipedia article is first in the results? Weird.” The one I ran into a moment ago is the search “discworld.” To me, the fact that the Wikipedia article about the Discworld series ranks higher than Terry Pratchett’s site about his own books is a little peculiar. Yeah, Pratchett’s site is #3, but, while I’m all for the best resources being listed first, I think the author’s own website about his own books should have more weight than the Wikipedia article.

What do you folks think? I suppose when one looks at the big picture - that Terry Pratchett’s site is visible “above the fold” - it’s not a big deal at all. Certainly, it’s not something I’m going to get upset over. But on principle, do you think the author’s site should come up before Wikipedia’s article about the book series in question?

We’re halfway into the first month of the new year, and I’ve not said anything about 52 Books in 52 Weeks for a while. What gives?

For anyone who was keeping track, I fell woefully short of the 52 book mark, ending the year having read 36 books (and started 4 others, which weren’t completed when my clock clicked over to 2008). I think I ended up not reaching 52 total because I got hung up on some of the books near the end - specifically, the books for classes, most of which were history, which typically take me longer than a week to read. I suppose it goes without saying that the time and mental effort it takes to read a Harry Potter book is a bit less than that needed to read A History of India.

Am I going to do it again? No, I don’t think so. It made reading for pleasure too much like work for me. With school, I have enough deadlines to meet without creating more for myself. As can be seen by looking at the 2007 list, I skipped writing posts for quite a few books, and most of those ended up being books I read for university courses. For most of those books, I had to write responses / papers on them for class - the last thing I wanted to do was turn around and write a blog entry for them. But more importantly, like I said, the 52 books in 52 weeks thing just made pleasure reading too much like work. If I fell behind, I felt crappy about it, which generally just made me fall more behind. The more I fell behind, the more nasty the idea of rushing through a dozen books to “catch up” sounded. I didn’t want to rush through books I was reading for fun - I wanted to take them at whatever pace seemed appropriate.

Perhaps - indeed, I’d say almost certainly - I’ve taken this, and blown it out of proportion. But ultimately, I didn’t like setting myself a goal - even if it was as silly as reading 1 book a week and blogging about it - and then falling short of it. I’m going to obviously continue reading books, and I’ll continue to blog about them. But no more scheduled reading for me, unless the schedule is handed to me by someone I usually address as “professor.”

Incidentally, while I don’t plan on forcing myself to stick to a reading schedule, the 52 books in 52 weeks experiment did lead to me seeing how many books I can read, if I stick to (mostly) one at a time, and focus on getting through it. Certainly, 2007 is the year in which I’ve read the most books thus far.

Over a month ago, my boss at work, who knows I love reading, plopped the library’s copy of Eragon down on the desk I was sitting at. “You said you really enjoy fantasy, I read this, and I’d love to have your opinion on it.” Well, the book still isn’t finished - and I’m afraid to say, it’s not going to be. I’ve expressed before how much I dislike abandoning a book half-way through, and I really tried to stick with Eragon, but it’s just… not good. No, that’s being kind; it’s bad. I know, I know - the fellow wrote it when he was 15. I know that. But the fact is, there’s a reason not many books by 15 year old kids are published: they aren’t good enough to be sent to press!

When I first started reading it, I thought it was decent - it was no “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”, but it wasn’t atrocious, either. But the more I read, the more bored I became - I felt like I could see through the 300 pages between me and the ending, right to the ending. There was no suspense, no intrigue, no interestingness. Young boy finds dragon egg; dragon egg hatches, dragon chooses boy; bad guys come and level boy’s home; mysterious old bearded man takes young boy under wing and starts training him, while hiding his real identity for no good reason. Yes, yes, and in the end, the young boy grows up a bit and wins a huge battle against the evil King of the Empire, right, while helping the rebels? Well, yes, actually, that’s exactly right (I cheated and read the plot summary at Wikipedia after throwing in the towel.)

I knew as I read through it that much of it was stuff lifted straight from other books, but I didn’t realize how much near-outright theft had taken place until I explored some of the amazon.com reviews. Paolini stole (admittedly, probably unintentionally) from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Pern, and other stuff to put together his work. His heavy borrowing from other works definitely shows, with the story (the half of it I plowed through, anyway) feeling extremely generic.

As many of the amazon.com reviewers remarked, hopefully Paolini’s parents self-publishing his book for him (before a big publisher picked it up) hasn’t led to an over-inflated ego. His huge commercial success might have already led to him thinking he wrote something truly great - which he didn’t. The book is mediocre at best, extremely bad at worst, not to mention full of borderline plagiarism (just look at the names!). I hope he reads the criticism and takes it to heart; he’s got a long way to go before he’s a good writer.

Now that I’ve tossed Eragon aside, I’ve moved on to The Crow Road by Iain Banks, which Cas sent to me as a gift. I’m only about 30 pages into it, but so far, it’s excellent. It’s got a feel to it I’ve not encountered before in a book, and I’m digging the Scottish bent it has.