Children's Literature - Rebecca Caudill - Schoolroom in the Parlor (1959)

And now for something completely different. :)

After I finished Banewreaker last night, I moved on to the next book immediately. I told you, I was in need of some escapism. So I decided to reread a book I had when I was little.

As you can tell from the picture, this used to be a library book. Now, I didn't take a book out and just never return it. When I was little, my parents would buy books for me from garage sales. This one was probably purchased when we were in Iowa. By the time we had moved back to Vegas, I think I had graduated entirely to longer books in the form of Fear Streets and other young horror. Listen, I don't need your laughter. At least I liked reading as a kid, assholes. :P

There are two ways this review can go: through a child's eyes, and through an adult's eyes.

When I was a kid, I was never really into frontier books. I remember I had to read Little House on the Prairie for school in fourth grade, but I didn't care for it. My mom really likes frontier fiction, but I never really have. It's just not interesting to me. And you can see it in what I choose to read now. But since my mom liked it, I couldn't escape without having at least one.

When I was the age I think I was when I got this book, I had a couple favorite books. O'Diddy by Jocelyn Stevenson was one, about imaginary friends. There was another that I can't remember the name of and can't find on the internet, about a girl whose parents were going to divorce, but she thought she could stop with with straight As in school, and had to do an egg social experiment at school with a kid who was a jackass. I also really liked Goosebumps and Babysitter's Club books.

So, like I said, as a kid, I didn't really care for this book.

As an adult, I read this book last night in a couple hours. I had trouble keeping the two middle children, Emmy and Debby, straight. Also the book goes out of its way to teach the kid reader about life in the wilderness, which is unnecessary. You want kids to want to read. Not to be lectured at.

There was also a section that plugged Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs. But it didn't just plug it. It used text from it. What the fuck? That was somehow okay? There was also some thinly-veiled racism against Native Americans, but that's true of any frontier fiction.

There was also a section that was comedy gold. Keep in mind, this is in response to seeing the Northern Lights for the first time, after reading about it in their lessons.

"Is the world coming to an end?" she whispered.
Bonnie began to cry.
"Is the world coming to an end, Father?"

Oh my god.

4/10

Fantasy - Jacqueline Carey - Banewreaker (2004)

This review may seem kind of schizophrenic; please bear with me. There are a lot of pros and cons at work here.

I finished reading this last night, a couple days ahead of my personal schedule. (Listen, don't ask about my OCD-like reading schedule. It won't make sense and will only make you think I'm nuts.) This had more to do with the fact that I was in real need for some escapism more than this book being good.

For one thing, it's high fantasy. I don't know if I let this on heavily enough in the intro post, but I utterly loathe high fantasy. Fighting orcs in the forest works for video games and maybe even movies, but in books it's boring. That's the main reason that I, who really like fantasy, don't like the fantasy classics and mainstays like Tolkien, Jordan, or Goodkind. Because high fantasy sucks and is rife with archetypes and formula.

This book is definitely hurting from archetypes and formula. The story itself starts with a prologue that is literally their world's creation myth. Fuckin' A. For serious? You can't come up with a better way to establish your pantheon and main conflict than a prologue that talks about how the land was created, and the people, and all that shit? Listen, Jackie, I know you can. What the fuck, sweetheart?

"If you hate high fantasy, why did you read this?" For two reasons, Gentle Reader. One, it was written by Jacqueline Carey. She wrote the Kushiel Trilogy, and then the sequel trilogy about Imriel. Those books are among my very favorites. In high school, I got up at three in the morning to read more of Kushiel's Dart, and read it all morning, and all day, until I finished it. My hands were black with smudged ink from the pages. Very few books in my library have held me like that, and it was a combination of the language, the story, and the characters that held me all the way through.

The language in her writing is much the same here, even though it is in third-person for once. I still don't think that it translates as well from first-person POV to third. It jostles the reader in a way that it didn't in her first-person books. In the first-person books, you could just attribute it to the way that the character thinks. Now it just looks like she is trying to hide something in the multitude of words you have to look up.

BTW, this book is good if you want to get distracted researching what she's talking about. I learned a lot about plate armor and the reproduction of grasses. But I think it was Stephen King in On Writing that said that you shouldn't write fiction to teach someone something.

The story of Banewreaker is this: Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the evil guys. I wish I was kidding. The supposed good guys even have a character among them that is referred to as the "Bearer". He carries a Mcgaffin that has to be taken to the evil land to destroy the power of the evil guy. He has a group that protects him that is split up by an attack by the evil guys. Seriously. These are things that happen. The main characters are actually the people who are the right hand men of the evil guy.

One thing that Carey does seem to try to explore in almost all of the books she's written that I've read is an examination of sex and religion, and how they relate. In her Kushiel books, it's mostly how people use sex to essentially pray and give reverance to their gods. In this series, the evil guy gave humans the ability to fuck and reproduce, and the god Haomane wants him to take this away. Because Sex =  Bad!!! Even though Haomane's own sentient creations, the Ellyl, are dying out because they do not have the desire to reproduce, which is what Satoris, the evil guy, gave Men. There is an Ellyl woman the story surrounds also, who is naive to a goddamn fault. "The whole thing would be over if you just submitted to Haomane's wishes!" What if Haomane is wrong, you fucking cunt? The whole thing stank of blind faith and fundamentalism, and all it did was make me want the main characters to kill her even more. But they refused to, because they are dicks. You have to give the readers something, Jackie.

And for fuck's sake, we know they are elves and orcs. Why are you calling them Ellyl and Fjeltroll? You described a Fjeltroll in detail, and you would have saved space by just calling it an orc. Because it's an orc.

But on the other hand, I was craving escapism, and high fantasy is very good at helping you mentally escape. It probably didn't help that I was also doing a lot of D&D related research, even though our campaign setting isn't going to be high fantasy either... But still.

I don't know if you could tell from my previous statements up there, but there is another reason I read this: this was actually a reread for me. I reread this book, which has a lot of things that I hate. Why did I reread it?

Because I couldn't remember anything that had happened in it.

I'm sorry, but that's essentially a book killer.

5.5/10

Fiction - Max Brooks - World War Z (2006)

I was actually supposed to review this book after the Asimov one, but I got a package of Penny Arcade crap, so I did that book instead. Then I got distracted by the DVDs that showed up too. So this review may suffer for the break I took from it in the middle, and I apologize.

This book is actually Bryan's. It sits on a shelf in my room because most books live there, but it's really his book. For some occasion or another early in our courtship, I bought him The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, primarily because he had shown an interest in it during some trip to Borders. He bought this one some time after for himself. I'm being vague because neither of us can remember when this shit happened. The first time I remember that it was in his possession was when we went to the Fourth of July thing in Summerlin back in... I think it was 2008, when the Las Vegas Philharmonic still performed there during fireworks instead of at the Springs Preserve, those assholes. It was the first time Bryan and I had gone to a Fourth of July thing together that wasn't just on base with my parents. We parked in a church parking lot and ate baked barbecue chips. On the way home we listened to Mega Man songs, songs from Paint the Line, and also from FLCL and Hellboy.

Yeah, it had to have been 2008. We had just seen the Phil a month before at Video Games Live, and we initially saw the ad for that in the new student lounge at school, and we graduated that year.

Sorry, I kind of got caught up in that. Anyway.

I had been intending on reading Bryan's books eventually, but the deed didn't actually happen until now, when we live together. Well, that's not true. I tried to read a Tom Clancy book of his, and I hated it so much that he actually threw it away, because he didn't really like it either. I know. It stung me to see it happen, trust me.

Anyway. World War Z.

I may have been spoiled by other zombie novels I have read, but I think that the key to a good zombie story is not just the fear of the creatures and the emotion of having friends and family become zombies. Those might be successful in movies or even video games, but there is a lot more involved in a book, I think. But, then again, what do I have to compare World War Z to? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Feed. Both had a certain aspect to them that World War Z only brushes on, that I really liked. Please bear with me, I'm going to compare them all, high-school-essay style.

I have a confession: I never read Pride and Prejudice. We didn't read it in school, and if it was a classic, I probably didn't read it as a young person. I was more into the horror and mystery, then the fantasy, and then the fantastical horror that actually did introduce me to a nonacademic interest in classic literature. (What? I consider Lovecraft classic literature. Bite me.) By the time I was an adult, I was having to play catchup. I still haven't read Pride and Prejudice without the added zombie element. I'm more interested in doing so now, mostly because I want to see how certain parts work out without the undead threat and the martial arts scenes. But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was not about the zombie apocalypse; it was about how society could still uphold itself even with a constant supernatural threat. Basically, how do well-to-do human beings adapt, or not adapt, to their new world? It was interesting to think that it would really only change the standards on marriageable women and when people could travel, as if the undead were just a bout of bad weather. (If you must know some background, that book is also Bryan's, but it was given to him for Christmas '09 by my family.)

Feed blew my goddamn mind away. It was suggested to me by a friend of Bryan, who had read it and wanted someone else to read it so that he could talk to someone about it. I actually went out with him and his now-fiancee to dinner and stuff while Bryan was out of town last summer. One of the places we went was a B&N, and I picked it up then because why not? Now, to be fair, I thought the characters were shit. They were stock characters out of any movie: the cynical reporter, the daredevil survivalist, the ditsy technologist. But the greatest thing to come out of it, and it is pretty great, is the world-building. A zombie book could easily just fighting off the undead menace, or running away in fear. This zombie book was about how an infection present in nearly all mammals changed the way the world worked, but still continued on in some aspects, as if nothing ever happened. For instance, they go to a restaurant and then expound on how beef can no longer be eaten because of the infection. But their journey in the book revolves around a presidential campaign. I loved Feed, even with shit characters, because the world-building was so rich and satisfying.

What I'm getting at is that, after two seemingly ridiculous undead romps in fiction, I actually had pretty high standards for this book.

World War Z also brought with it a lot of the neat world-building that I loved in Feed. The part about the "preventative drug" Phalanx and the part at the end about whales was in particular interesting and enriching.

But there were some reasons for me to put this book down in favor of a DVD series of shows I had already seen before. One of them was built into the structure of the book itself. Since the whole thing was put together as if the war was real, it had no real climbing structure and climax, no real reveal. You know the war is over before the book even begins. Instead of an actual story you want to indulge yourself in, you get details of many people's stories about an event that already took place.

And then the book is filled to the brim with characters. Most of which you only hear from once. There are a select few that, at the end, you get to hear from again, and there is one character that you get to hear from an amazing three times. As a result, you can't build any real emotion for them, have any real stake in how things turn out for them. I understand that the point was to explore a broad range of subjects from all sides, but it ends up being stretched thin, character-wise.

The last gripe I have is more personal than the rest. I get that it was a war. I get that you have to fight zombies, and that's why there are so many games dedicated to it. But the sections talking about various battles and fighting off the zombies and stuff? I actually was turned off by that. That isn't to say that the imagery at the end of the Yonkers section isn't great. Who wouldn't want to see a zombie with his respiratory system hanging out of his mouth? But it was not interesting to me. The most interesting parts were the parts about how they responded to the threat. The K9 squads. The undersea divers. The holy assassins of Russia. That stuff was great. The generic, seen-it-in-a-million-movies battlefield scenes? Yawn.

All in all, it wasn't the greatest zombie book I've read, but it was interesting. I would recommend it.

8/10

Graphic Novel - Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins - The Halls Below (2010)

I told you I read comic books. Bet you didn't know that usually meant webcomics in book form, did you?

Penny Arcade sits on an understocked shelf at our house, next to Futurama and nothing else: a shelf of repeated references of dialogue in our day-to-day conversations. The phrase Ultimate Fucking Pussy Mode comes up frequently when playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Donkey Kong Country Returns. We refer to the UNR Wolfpack teams as the Dickwolves. Throwing old food in the garbage incurs a recitation of whether or not this "crystallized demon blood" is still good. So it's safe to say that in the Rosenberg household, Penny Arcade has the stamp of approval.

So it may surprise you to know that we didn't have all six books until, literally, yesterday. It came in the mail, finally, along with their TV show on DVD and my extra-giant Black Mantle hoodie. Last night, while imaging computers at work, I read the whole thing. Now, I'm not going to discuss the strips themselves, though this tome includes several good ones, not limited to just the one with the Ikea delivery poop guy. They've been on the internet for six years now (this book is of all of the strips from 2005), so if you want the strips without the accompanying text, you are physically capable of just reading them.

In a textual sense though, it started off really strong. The intro is by Chris Perkins, the creative director at WotC who also DMed for the PA guys, Scott Kurtz, and Wil Wheaton. In the intro he also digs at Wheaton, which is funny. Seriously, don't split the party.

I like having the books of the strips mostly for the text that comes with the strips. It's fine to go back and read the strips and the newsposts on the site. But usually the newsposts are fraught with news, and not so much the thought process that led to the joke in the strip. The thought process is what I really like, and I love that it has been immortalized for some strips in the form of podcasts and Fourth Panel videos. Some of the accompanying text includes this, but sometimes it just talks about the strip. I don't play and digest video games like other people do. I am certainly not teh hardcorez. I like Sims. I occasionally do a replay of FFX. I'm not good at FPSs and I don't play WoW. (Jesus, isn't this blog supposed to be about books?) Because of this, I can't really appreciate some of their jokes without an explanation, which sometimes tears a joke apart.

However, it did get points for referencing Arcanum, an RPG I wish I liked the gameplay of more, because the world needs more steampunk RPGs, and a game I had never heard of until Bryan lent it to me before I moved out of my parents' house.

Overall, it was a nice way to kick out some time. I had actually been reading something else, but when something like a Penny Arcade book lands in your lap, post-apocalyptic zombie fiction can go suck it for a night.

There were two things I had problems with. The first is less complex than the second. First, during the part about Jerry's first child's birth, there was a conversation documented about how their first sons were born on console launch dates. Mike's first son was born on the anniversary of the Dreamcast's launch. But the way that this was presented made it sound like Gabriel was much older than he could have been, somewhere in the vicinity of 11. Kid is 7. I had to do some Wiki searches to confirm this, because the book made it very weird to wrap my head around.

The second is something that I actually feel shame about. The last section of the book is dedicated to immortalizing the world of Battal, which was a high fantasy setting that was essentially community-built. The Elemenstor Saga strip came into being in 2005, and began a creation of a fictional franchise that was essentially a parody of the development of other fantasy franchises. There was a fictional cartoon series, a fictional fetish community, and apparently a thirteen-book cycle that was present in this section, including the first book of said cycle being rewritten four times. There was a four page timeline! Four pages. That's too long.

I do feel shame in not wanting to read it. I understand that most of the data in this community-built world was lost to server crashes, and I appreciate that it was included in the book for those that like that kind of thing, but GOD. That was boring. It was high fantasy, which I already don't like, and that timeline killed me. Timelines are not for me. They are the pizza crusts that get left on my plate and other people berate me for not consuming. I imagine the comments may feature some of this argument, but I just don't enjoy shit like that.

Like I said, I appreciate that they included it for the people it is for, but it isn't for me. (Do you see what I did there?) But it is still a Penny Arcade book that includes text by Holkins, who would instantly dethrone Anne Bishop as my favorite author if he would just get off his ass and release a novel.

9.25/10