Fiction - Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves (2000)

Obviously, like any creature of the internet, I heard about this book from this XKCD strip and Wil Wheaton's blog post. But it wasn't until I saw it on a Buy 3 Get the 4th Free table at my local B&N that I bought it. But then there it sat on the bookshelf until a friend of mine saw that I had it, and encouraged me to read it.

House of Leaves is nigh impossible to describe. It starts out being about this one guy having been dealt a poor hand in life, and his friend lives in an apartment complex. And in this apartment complex is an old hermit of a man that has just died. They go into his apartment and find tons and tons of writing, apparently a dissertation on a film called The Navidson Record, where a photojournalist and his family move into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. At first, this discrepancy could be easily explained away; the difference is only a quarter of an inch after all, so somebody just messed up measuring somewhere. But then a door appears that should lead outside, but instead leads to a dark, cold place that just keeps changing in shape.

More than just being hard to describe, House of Leaves is hard to analyze. First off, I could give two shits about Johnny Truant. This guy is really just a gateway to his mother's letters, of which there is a whole separate book apart from just the insanity at the appendix. But the more fluid language of Johnny is a nice contrast to the highly technical analysis of Zampano. But the odd formatting is only briefly touched on before it HITS like a ton of BRICKS. You'll know it when you see it, but I implore you to power through until at least the Minotaur chapter, which is a work of suspenseful art.

The problem is that then the whole book seems to fall apart.

Too much time is spent after that chapter away from what everyone is interested in, the fucking house, and instead on Navidson and Karen's relationship. Listen, dude. No one gives a fuck. Even the so-called climax is not as powerful as that chapter in the middle of the book.

I know, you're thinking "hur hur, bigger on the inside, it's a TARDIS". And when I read the description on the inside flap, I felt the same way, with a dash of "aren't there a million SCPs that do this?". But it's really more than that. This book really explores what that concept means. If it's bigger on the inside, how big is that? Twice the size? Miles more? Bigger than the earth?

For that chapter and approach alone, I must suggest you get yourself a copy. For the typography tricks, I beg you to read it. The whole thing isn't the best in the world, but you will not regret your time spent on this book.

9.85/10

Buy it @ Amazon.
Buy it @ Barnes & Noble.

Fiction - John Grisham - The Testament (1999)

I've never really endeavored to read what I call a "beach book"--that is, a book that comes out usually around summer and is a bestseller because it is a lot of action and little thought, meant to be read on airplanes and on shores by vacationers. I haven't read Dan Brown, and I never read John Grisham until now.

Technically, this book is Bryan's. He bought it for his Modern Literature class. I guess the teacher had him underline a line in the first chapter: "The money is the root of my misery."

This has little to do with the book, but I'm going to dig into this subject anyway. Bryan's ModLit teacher was a dumbass. For one thing, this book came out in '99 and we graduated in '04. There is no fucking way that this book could be called modern literature. At the very best, it would be contemporary literature, and the use of the L word would be shaky at best. Modern is from about 1850ish to about 1950ish. Everything else after is contemporary. My ModLit teacher had a giant girl boner for the Harlem Renaissance, and we never really got much farther than that. For the next thing, Grisham is not literature. It's a beach book. Sold in airports and convenience stores in coastal towns. That sentence is not a theme for the book at all, and not just because this book doesn't have a theme, other than things always work out for everyone. It's fiction, sure. Lawyer fiction, absolutely. Action? Well, there's a plane and boat crash, so I might be able to grant you that. Literature? Fuck no.

So why did I read it? I hate the fact that there is a book in my collection that I won't read, even if I know going into it that it's not going to be the deepest of stories. And it really isn't.

Some old rich guy makes a handwritten will that cuts all of his legitimate children off and hands his billions to an illegitimate daughter in Brazil who is a missionary and couldn't care less. Then he kills himself. Enter the law firm that fixed up all his other wills. They have to uphold it, even though the legitimate children are swooping in to say that the guy was not in his right mind, he didn't know what he was doing, give me some goddamned money motherfucker. They have to find the girl, so they send someone in their firm that's yanked out of rehab for alcoholism and send him to Brazil to find her.

In On Writing by Stephen King, he mentions that many books that people read on planes or whatever are for people who don't read. They have the book because otherwise they would be reading a magazine or sleeping. But when someone makes a mention of them reading a novel, they feel shame and say, "Yeah, but I'm learning so much about Subject X from this book." Because apparently reading is shameful in today's society.

The bulk of The Testament is a foray down the rivers and swamps of southeastern Brazil, and a huge exploration of the culture, climate, and geography there. The chapters are studded with Portuguese words for things we have our own words for, and explorations into how the residents live day to day and feel about Americans and their own Indians. In any other context, I might have been interested by it, but it was clear to me that Grisham was putting it in to teach the reader something, so they could point to the book and say what they learned from it, rather than how it resonated with them. Because it doesn't.

I didn't like this, if you couldn't tell. The whole thing was one predictable development after another, and at no point does it make the reader have to accept anything hard. Nothing particularly difficult happens, and the conflict itself is asinine. Not to mention that a super rich old guy bitching about having too much money sounds like whining on the part of the author.

If you don't like your wads of cash from your mediocre books, hand it over to me. I'm sure I could make a home for it.

3.5/10

Fiction - Eric Garcia - The Repossession Mambo (2009)

I told you the next review wouldn't be fantasy. But of course that meant I had to read it, and let me tell you up front, it wasn't fun. I actually read most of it yesterday, in one sitting. Not because it was really good, but because I didn't want to be sitting on it for a long time because I didn't like it.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I bought the book in my last shopping trip too; I don't know why I keep reading these books that haven't been in my house for very long, but there you go. If the title sounds familiar, it might be because the movie Repo Men was based on this book (which is a lie, but I'll get to that later). I never watched Repo Men, primarily because I didn't give a shit, and also because, after Sherlock Holmes, how can Jude Law be anything but an awesome Watson?

I mentioned that it was a lie to say that that movie was based on this book. The Wikipedia page can tell you some, but the author's note at the end describes the process in more detail: he wrote a short story, then a manuscript of a novel on the idea, and then the script and movie was started before it was published. Then, once the movie was pretty far into production, he decided to publish the book with very few of the edits made to the plot for the movie.

And dear God, it reads like it.

In the author's note, one of the things that Garcia mentions he kept was "the unruly structure". His words, not mine. But they are apt; it was a pain in the ass to keep track of which section was referring to which time in his life. He flips frequently between the past and the present, focusing a lot on his military experience, the parade of wives he traipsed through, and his being on the run. It doesn't even get to the parts we care about, why he got an artificial organ and why he didn't pay for it, until the second half of the book. And it flips randomly around between these subjects. It's not like he goes into the military stuff, then the wife stuff, then the present, or anything like that. Fuck, he doesn't even talk about these things chronologically! The whole thing reads more like a stream of consciousness diary than a novel.

And that's not even going into the fact that the premise is suspect as well. People get artificial organs with usurious loans, and when the default, they die. Seems simple enough, I guess, until you start to think about the changes this would make to the world, and how unbelievable it gets the more you think of it.

For instance, the economic destruction that comes afterwards. These aren't just people getting artificial organs to replace the ones that fail. They are getting them with tons of unnecessary features, features that serve no real purpose other than convince people with healthy organs to get artificial ones as well. And then, when they can't pay the loan on them (and most of them go for as much as a house), repo men are sent out to reclaim the organ so that they can sell it again. They don't mention whether or not the organs cost that much to make, or if they are just overpriced. If they are overpriced, do you happen to remember the housing crisis of the past few years? The only thing saving this Credit Union from going belly-up is the fact that people are lined up around the block to try to get a loan to buy an organ.

On the same note, they mention that sometimes people just can't afford it, and fall delinquent on their loan in order to pay for food and rent. If the price of not paying is death (which it always is), why wouldn't you pay that first? The book tries to explain it away by saying that the bills run up to several thousand a month, and you pay mostly interest anyway. So the whole system is set up to fail. Awesome. How is that legal?

And why wouldn't the government get involved? It has things that each side of the aisle hates: death panels and preying on the poor. It sounds to me like there would be a lot of congressional hearings with whoever is in charge of the Credit Union, possibly every day based on what the book describes as gross negligence on the part of their repo department. Allow me to explain.

There is a described incident in which a repo man repossesses an organ from a guy while his wife is trying to convince him that they are all paid up. The repo man goes back to the office to find that oh, she was right. He just killed a guy for no reason. Where are the legal repercussions? The murder charges, the wrongful death lawsuit, the arguments on pundits' shows that these men have too much power? Nothing. Nada. They pay her some cash and that's it. Yeah, I don't think so.

There are also multiple incidents that someone's nonessential organ is repossessed, but because they do not receive any medical care whatsoever afterwards, they die, usually of blood loss. There is a character with a gall bladder. He could have lived! They even mention that there are some other organs that are repossessed with the same deadly results, such as eyes and tongues. You can live without both. Why do they die? Because nothing is done. This is why they should be paying through the nose in settlements and lawsuits.

For a book that I didn't like, it certainly gave me a lot to talk about. Mostly because the premise is okay, but horridly handled. There was a lot of opportunity for great world-building and even philosophical questions, such as if a person is mostly artificial parts, are they still human? But the author didn't even try.

There were two, and exactly two, saving graces to this novel, and that is why this book gets such a low score:

1. The opening sentence.

The first time I ever held a pancreas in my hands, I got an erection.

2.   The reason he quit his lucrative job as a repo man, even with an artificial heart.

1.5/10

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