(Sat, Oct 08, 2011)
I love this: new evidence that our oceans may have been delivered by comets -- like tanker trucks pulling into the back of Sea World. Sea World is cool.
(Sat, Oct 29, 2011)
I've been reading The Hunger Games, a trilogy of extremely violent Young Adult novels by Suzanne Collins. These books were recommended to me by a co-worker and others with a near religious fervor -- and not just the normal you're going to burn type fervor I get from my mom, but that serious mad-eyed Missouri fervor, the kind that marches a body door to door to hand out pamphlets to people greatly annoyed to see them. I suspect these Hunger Game fans are composed largely of Harry Potter devotees in remission, desperate for some substitute, something to help ease the sense of loss and loneliness left in the barren halls of their inner Hogwarts. I can sympathize with that; I felt the same way after Outer Space Astronauts was canceled.
The first book was actually pretty good. Not great: absolutely ridiculous in every way, but entertaining. At first it reminded me a bit of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, in which a class of high school students have to survive alone in an alien wilderness; but really it was more like that crazy Japanese movie Battle Royale in which a bunch of kids are sentenced to fight each other to the death on a deserted island because they were disrespectful to their elders. There were also bits of The Running Man too because the Hunger Games are televised. Did I mention it was violent? This is a book about kids killing one another. Brutally. Sometimes gruesomely. On TV. And yet it actually is pretty entertaining.
Whoa but the second book faltered. The weight of the idiocy of the setting began to crush any kind of plot that might live there. In the first book it was largely possible to ignore this problem because of the story's other qualities, the way one can continue escorting a beautiful girl who smells a bit off, and scratches herself like a monkey. The first book was inventive and ruthlessly bleak and compulsively readable. But the second book offers nothing new so the reader must spend more time contemplating the nonsensical setting, the absurd behavior of the characters, the silly mindless evil of the antagonists. And the fun fades away.
So far I have not been able to read more than a few pages of the final book; it's just too silly. It's a soy burger. And I have the new Neal Stephenson sitting on my Kindle like a huge piece of delicious filet mignon....
The first book was actually pretty good. Not great: absolutely ridiculous in every way, but entertaining. At first it reminded me a bit of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, in which a class of high school students have to survive alone in an alien wilderness; but really it was more like that crazy Japanese movie Battle Royale in which a bunch of kids are sentenced to fight each other to the death on a deserted island because they were disrespectful to their elders. There were also bits of The Running Man too because the Hunger Games are televised. Did I mention it was violent? This is a book about kids killing one another. Brutally. Sometimes gruesomely. On TV. And yet it actually is pretty entertaining.
Whoa but the second book faltered. The weight of the idiocy of the setting began to crush any kind of plot that might live there. In the first book it was largely possible to ignore this problem because of the story's other qualities, the way one can continue escorting a beautiful girl who smells a bit off, and scratches herself like a monkey. The first book was inventive and ruthlessly bleak and compulsively readable. But the second book offers nothing new so the reader must spend more time contemplating the nonsensical setting, the absurd behavior of the characters, the silly mindless evil of the antagonists. And the fun fades away.
So far I have not been able to read more than a few pages of the final book; it's just too silly. It's a soy burger. And I have the new Neal Stephenson sitting on my Kindle like a huge piece of delicious filet mignon....