GeekReads

I’m fairly tardy with my reviews at the best of times, so I was quite chuffed to discover that my 3 most recent reviews had a thing in common, allowing me to knock off all 3 in one go. Righto then. Toodle-pip. On with the show, wot wot!

Nation, by Terry Pratchett

It might look like a Discworld book, but it ain't a Discworld book

Terry Pratchett is a prolific author by any account, with 38 Discworld novels to his name and several childrens’ books on the periphery (although I say this in the same sense that one would refer to The Hobbit and The Silmarillion as “merely” peripheral works to The Lord of the Rings). It’s a decent body of work, selling over 65 million books worldwide, so when he was diagnosed with early onset alzheimers disease he could’ve just stopped there, having left a pretty decent legacy (also, his daughter Rhianna is a distinguished writer in the interactive space; which is to say video games). But no, Sir Terry just keeps on cranking them out, and not just in his Discworld comfort zone either.

28 years spent crafting a fictional world naturally gives one respectable insight into what makes them tick, and Pratchett unleashes the full brunt of his experience in Nation. In just over 400 pages he brings to life an entirely new world (albeit based on the real one), and a roster of characters every bit as rich and ripe with potential as any he’s ever created for the Discworld.

Another great thing about seasoned authors is their efficiency with words. Pratchett doesn’t waste a single letter; the narration in the first couple of pages contains more story than lesser authors muster in an entire chapter.

The King’s Speech

C-c-can you hear th-th-the drums, F-f-f-ernado?

If I didn’t have a self-imposed rule about writing something for every movie I see in the cinema, I’d have skipped reviewing The King’s Speech. Yeah, the movie was enjoyable and the acting was OK but it didn’t have anything I’d singled out as a “wow” factor. So Colin Firth did a good impression of a guy with a stammer – that’s what actors are paid to do. For some reason this reminds me of the scene in Tropic Thunder where Robert Downey Jr. is lecturing Ben Stiller about going “full retard” and I reckon Firth’s going to go home empty handed (my money’s on Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network).

Also, there’s something I want to ask: girls, please tell me, is Colin Firth really a good actor, or do you like him because he’s the embodiment of Anglophilia due to his having been – and remaining – the definitive “Mr. Darcy”?

To me he’s one of those actors where I can’t see the character for the man. Whenever he’s on screen I have no trouble thinking “yep, that’s Colin Firth” whereas y’know how in some movies, you get so engrossed in the character that you struggle to remember the actor or actress’s name? Yeah, he’s not one of them.

Gnomeo & Juliet

Oui, c'est en français. J'aime mieux que la version anglaise.

What! An animated feature that isn’t from either Pixar or Dreamworks?! And it’s not half bad either, you say? Yet it’s true, I actually enjoyed this one very much.

Firstly, let me dispel what’s likely to be the biggest fear for those considering this movie: Gnomeo and Juliet isn’t a remake of Shakespeare’s play with gardening puns. Neither does it get bogged down in the seriousness of its premise of having garden gnomes that come to life when humans aren’t around – it’s not Toy Story, but in a good way.

The whole thing is played for laughs, and never takes itself seriously at all, which makes it a buckets of fun all round.

Call me strange, but my favourite thing about the whole movie was how every time the characters touched, or made contact with another object, there would be a little stony “chink!” sound that I found really satisfying for some reason.

Manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests!

I have a problem making decisions. On more than one occasion last year I spent hours wandering the shelves at Borders trying to take advantage of a discount voucher, or most recently, $20 free credit for signing up with Borders v.i.p. card. Another thing I have trouble coming to a decision on is climate change. I’m not a sceptic – far from it – I just don’t know whether to believe that mankind is really going to be able to make a difference (which makes me a cynic – not that that’s news to anybody).

Hence why I picked Here On Earth by Tim Flannery – a leading Australian scientist, a global climate change activist, and Australian of the Year 2007. A review in SMH gave the book glowing praise for presenting the climate change debate in optimistic terms – maybe here was the antidote to my misanthropy.

The first 2/3 or so reads like a Bill Bryson book – an meandering and largely amiable tour through our history as a species, firmly grounded in scientific fact. He sets up a duality between Darwinian and Wallacean forms of evolution, representing them as “Gaia” and “Medea” respectively, which turns out to be the perfect framework on which to hang a narrative about our continuing relationship with the planet: “Mother Nature or Monster Earth”.

The latter part of the book though, suffers greatly from the shifting sands of political discourse, and as much as I respect and admire Flannery’s sagacity and depth of passion displayed up to this point, it wasn’t sufficient to impart the positive outlook claimed in the book’s tagline: An Argument For Hope. Presented almost as a laundry list of actions that politicians around the world could, should and would do, it’s difficult to believe that enough of them will be adopted in time and at the scales necessary to reverse the damage.

In spite of that, Here On Earth should be on the reading list of everybody who doesn’t have a good grounding in the climate change debate (and that includes anybody in Australia whose only source of information is what they’ve been fed by the media).

Also "CILIP Carnegie Medal WINNER 2010" according to my copy

I’d love to be a writer in England. It sounds as if they’re all amazingly talented, get together regularly, hang and do stuff, and get all sorts of opportunities to work in movies, TV, radio, and so on. Nick Hornby (About a Boy, etc.) and Ben Elton (Chart Throb, Dead Famous, etc.) are both multitalented and well respected; Audrey Niffenegger regularly pops over there and runs graveyard tours at Highgate Cemetary; and Susanna Clarke (of Strange & Norrell) went to a writer’s course where the facilitator thought her work was awesome, and therefore just introduced her to Neil Gaiman (which would be kinda like writing a cool program in computing class, and being introduced to Bill Gates).

Neil Gaiman is one of those people whose name seems to come up a lot. I’ve reviewed him before here on GeekReads, albeit indirectly via the movie adaptation of his story Coraline, and he’ll almost certainly make another appearance in future since Jenny gave me the first volume of the Absolute Sandman series for Christmas. It’s a beast of a thing, so don’t expect it any time soon…

Obviously, the existence of this review indicates that I have actually finished reading something of his, and that is The Graveyard Book, a deceptively simple but extremely imaginative little novel. Because of the timing, it’d be easy to accuse Gaiman of jumping onto the whole occult bandwagon what with the soaring popularity of books dealing with witchcraft and wizardry, and other mythical creatures that – shall we say – suck. You wouldn’t last two pages before that prejudice is completely dispelled. Gaiman’s writing disarms you with a one-two punch of wistfulness and charm before delivering a fatal blow to any remaining doubt with its sheer inventiveness.

Nobody Owens is a boy whose family was murdered while he was still a baby. Brought up by the residents of the graveyard where he had crawled to, “Bod” for short, is the quintessential outsider – the loner who’s different to everybody else, who has trouble fitting in. His nemesis is “the man Jack”, who was responsible for the killings and considers the boy to be a loose end that needs tying up, and it’s only by learning the lessons from the dead that Bod hopes to defeat his enemy.

You wouldn’t pick it for a childrens’ book, but despite leaning very heavily on the macabre Gaiman never lets the story get gross or grisly. This is the kind of story kids would have read prior to Disney turning everything cute and cuddly, and before political correctness whitewashed everything out of fear that something might offend somebody. At the same time, it’s not “dark” in the same sense as Harry Potter’s most recent outings – it manages to retain that sense of child-like innocence from start to finish compared to the latter Rowling books, which reek of adult weariness and cynicism.

Graveyard isn’t perfect – the chapters are a little too episodic and the writing has a certain mechanical feel about it: insert a clue here, refer back to it there, etc. but that’s like complaining that Bach’s Preludes and Fugues are too mathematical, or dismissing Mozart because Eine Kleine wasn’t exactly his finest moment. But like those pieces, the story of Nobody Owens will delight and entertain for a very long time to come.

Maybe I've blown a fuse or something, 'coz my understanding of this book is still pretty murky...

Any old writer can turn a good story into a bad book, but can a great writer turn a bad story into a good book? At face value Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, contains all the ingredients you would expect from a terrible book: a weird premise; a disdain for punctuation, grammar and sensible structure; a rambling, self-indulgent style; and a character that the author named after himself. Yet these elements are all crafted together in such a way as to produce a coherent – and even likeable – novel.

Coming up with a brief summary is next to impossible. The book consists of three main parts:

• an account of Safran Foer’s (fictional) search for his heritage in Russia – narrated in hilariously broken English by his guide and translator, Alex Perchov,
• a one-sided correspondence between Alex and Jonathan,
• and a fantastical account of his ancestors’ lives in the Jewish village of Trachimbrod that both of them are writing together.

Between them they describe the convoluted history of the characters spanning several generations.

I saw the movie version prior to reading the book and while I’ll say without hesitation that the book is the greater of the two, the writers must be commended for turning the plot into something that not only makes sense on the screen, but was also enjoyable (which is to say that I liked the movie as well). It could so easily have gone very, very wrong.

My greatest praise for this book is reserved for the manner in which Safran Foer was largely able to maintain the “voice” of Alex throughout the novel. I fancy myself an occasional wordsmith and reckon that it must have taken a great amount of discipline and no small effort to write dialogue that sounds as if the character swallowed a thesaurus and that the only cure was to regurgitate as many of the words verbally as possible. The fantasy parts were also very beautifully poetic in parts, although it frequently veered into blah blah blah ok get on with it territory.

I appreciated this novel more for the skill and innovation of the writing than the plot itself (though that could have a lot to do with my aversion to history). Buried towards the end is a tiny nugget of moral dilemma that asks “what would you do?” if confronted with a choice between betraying your friend, or death, which was anticlimactic in both its exposition and resolution but which formed the emotional core of the movie. So to the question I asked at the beginning of this post: the jury’s still out, but if you’re stuck with a crap idea for a book, maybe try turning it into a movie. (That might also go some way to explaining Hollywood :-P)

Ah, the good old terracotta soldier. Where would symbolism of Chinese militarism be without you?

I don’t like history. I have enough problem trying to remember and understand the goings on of the present than to cram several more centuries of names, dates and places into my noggin’. That’s why history books will only make it onto my reading list with a great degree of reluctance.

I received my copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a gift from an anonymous benefactor as part of the Ars Technica forum’s annual “”Secret Santa” in 2009. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I only got around to reading the book in August of this year, and you’re reading the review that I’ve only just written now in November, although I did have a slight distraction to use as an excuse.

To the work itself, the 188 pages contained in this edition obviously contains much more than the eponymous work, which only consists of 13 brief chapters, totalling – at a guess – no more than 8000 words in English translation, and much much fewer in the original language – in the pithy style of idiomatic expression favoured by the Chinese. In comparison, an average novel usually contains 5 times that (according to Wikipedia).

No, aside from the actual text, which only accounts for around 1/4 of the total volume of the book, the work is comprised of: a biography of the translator, Lionel Giles, by John Minford; an Introduction where Giles provides much technical detail about the history of how the text arrived to us, lays the smack down on the entire roster of Chinese commentators throughout all history, and says some stuff along the lines of “war is bad, mmmkay?”; and finally, a comprehensive and deeply scholarly analysis of the text.

This work leaves absolutely no doubt as to Giles’ complete mastery of the subject. I can lay very little claim to my Chinese heritage, having grown up almost entirely in Australia and being educated in Western values, but I still find it funny that a gwailo should be so familiar with Chinese language and history.

As for Sun Tzu’s text itself, it certainly contains a lot of codified wisdom as pertains to practical and psychological aspects of war, but in these modern times its idiomatic nature makes it about as useful as knowing the basic mathematical axioms (1+1=2, etc.) – they are nothing without interpretation and application (hence the flurry of derivative works such as The Art of War for Business.

If you’re truly interested in what Sun Tzu has to say about war, without the academic baggage, I’d recommend you find a good documentary, or as a much more entertaining option, watch John Woo’s Red Cliff (the full / extended version, not the Western cinematic release The Battle of Red Cliff).