VAGUE SPACE

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline's 2012 debut novel Ready Player One is an ode to the '80s and as someone who knows people who grew up in the '80s, I thoroughly enjoyed the weird combination of futuristic plotting mixed with nostalgia for the time in which fictional virtual reality gamemaker James Halliday (and the author) grew up.  The basic story is this -- the year is 2044 and the world is pretty much a wasteland.  We've run out of oil as a planet and we're overpopulated and only the very rich can afford anything resembling the life we lead today.  The rest of the country live in desperate straits off the government's meager dole (because there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone) in mega trailer parks near formerly midsized cities where the trailers are stacked on top of each other up to a dozen levels high.  This was actually a feature in the plot of Cory Doctorow's novel from a few years ago Makers, and Doctorow is given a reverent reference in this story so I wonder if it was a cribbed idea, but it's a bleak future is what I'm saying.  The only relief, and most of the world's only interest, is an Internet "game" called OASIS, which is like Worlds of Warcraft or SIMS on steroids, a fully immersive virtual reality world in which your avatar enjoys all the things that he can't in the real world -- like movies and TV shows and parties and sex -- well, at least if you can afford to travel around the OASIS, which costs OASIS dollars and most of those dollars can't be earned until you power up your avatar levels through missions, which takes U.S. dollars to pay for initially.  And that brings us to Wade, a just turned 18-year-old high school kid in Oklahoma City living in a trailer with his aunt and about a dozen others, who has basically lived the past 5 years in the OASIS searching for the "Easter Egg" that Halliday left behind after his death -- the first person to find this Egg will get his full multi-billion-dollar inheritence and also have the ultimate control of the OASIS.  Sadly, Wade is dead broke and can't leave the "planet" where his (virtual) high school resides so he can't go on missions searching for the Egg.  Luckily, though, he has no life, so he spends all his time researching the life and loves of James Halliday -- which include such vintage '80s things like WarGames and Ferris Bueller and Family Ties and Silver Spoons and Atari -- tons of Atari games and references -- and even the first computer I ever owned, a TRS-80, which we lovingly called the Trash-80.  Damn I'm old.  Anyway, that's the basic plot of the story and it's dense, filled with not only these references but also a wealth of information on this virtual world, told in Wade's point of view, and it's really quite fascinating.  I'm not exactly a video game person -- the last game I played with any regularity was Madden on my PlayStation 2 -- and I never got into any fake virtual world or massively multiplayer game, but it was still utterly fascinating how well the author creates this world and how easily you begin to identify with both Wade and his avatar Parzival (long story).  And the story of how he becomes the first to have any kind of breakthrough in the 5-year-old quest by the entire world for Halliday's will of riches.

Looking for Stupid Shit to Ban Because We're a Backward Nation

(Editor's Note:  This was written before President Obama came out on gay marriage, which, yay!... but after North Carolina joined 30 other states to write a ban on it into their constitution, which boo!, so that may color my coverage of this somewhat minor issue in comparison, but yeah I still can't believe we're having debates about book bannings and contraception and gay marriage and evolution let alone global warming in 2012 for crying out loud, but this is what we do, and we are either a nation of completely backwards idiots or our media only writes about issues that seem to show that to be the case.  Anyway, read on...)

So I've read a couple John Green books over the past few months and I'm in the middle of "Paper Towns" right now because I happened to read the brilliant (and critically lauded) "funny cancer story" The Fault in Our Stars in the depths of my trauma over the potentially incurable nerve damage to my foot and it was, oddly, one of the only things that cheered me up (odd because it's a story about teenagers with incurable cancer).  And also, it was a really great book.  Green writes young adult novels aimed at teenagers and while I am not a teenager, my soon-to-be-published-(if-I-can-find-an-agent-or-publisher) novel that I wrote over the past couple years would likely be classified as young adult since most of its characters are teenagers and as such, I've definitely read my share of young adult novels in recent years, some very good, some not as much, and some -- like "The Fault in Our Stars" -- really perfect and what I aspire to be able to write.  So one of Green's books that I've recently read was "Looking for Alaska", his first novel, the highly acclaimed story of a lonely teenaged boy who ships himself off to boarding school where he meets a force of nature named Alaska and falls quickly and madly in love.  I won't talk about the plot too much because it's tough to talk about the story without giving too much of the plot away, but I didn't enjoy it near as much as "The Fault in Our Stars" and I think may have been written on a slightly less advanced level -- ie. the issues it discusses are likely much more relatable to teens than grown men -- but it's a good book, it's a good story, and there are definitely a lot of issues that it raises that should be discussed by teens.  So I would definitely encourage any young readers of mine to pick up "Looking for Alaska" (and any older readers to pick up "The Fault in Our Stars") but this post isn't about the book so much as it's about the politics of book banning that I find abhorrent, not only as a writer but as an American and as a human being. 

Stephen King Makes a Plea for Fiscal Sanity

I stopped reading Stephen King years ago, not because his writing wasn't great, or because his fiction wasn't thoroughly enjoyable (it largely was) but more because I grew out of an interest in the types of novels he happened to write.  In fact, the only book of his I read in recent years was his nonfiction account of his writing career - On Writing, which was excellent.  Equally excellent is his attempt to contribute to the discourse on American politics this week.  Not that anyone is listening to the state of politics anymore, but hey, maybe if America's favorite fiction writer says something...

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!

What charitable 1-percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “Okay, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

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Here’s another crock of fresh bullshit delivered by the right wing of the Republican Party (which has become, so far as I can see, the only wing of the Republican Party): the richer rich people get, the more jobs they create. Really? I have a total payroll of about 60 people, most of them working for the two radio stations I own in Bangor, Maine. If I hit the movie jackpot—as I have, from time to time—and own a piece of a film that grosses $200 million, what am I going to do with it? Buy another radio station? I don’t think so, since I’m losing my shirt on the ones I own already. But suppose I did, and hired on an additional dozen folks. Good for them. Whoopee-ding for the rest of the economy.

The Passage

Rice professor Justin Cronin's best-selling postapocalyptic novel The Passage is close to 800 pages, is apparently the first in a trilogy (which I didn't learn until I was almost finished), and incorporates so many loosely connected characters that at times it's maddening, but it was so damned compelling that I couldn't stop reading, plowing through a story I didn't want to start and didn't think I'd finished and now, sadly, I can't wait for the sequel The Twelve to come out in the fall.  It's not terribly well-written, at least not compared to the literary style I perhaps prefer, it's too damn long-winded -- going on and on about minor characters or settings or the intracacies of certain scenes that don't require more than a mere mention let alone a dozen pages, and this motherfucking bastard could have easily trimmed a third with some prudent editing, but fuck if I didn't read it every night, devouring the pages like the nightmare vampires inside devour the world.  It's a genre story -- part horror, part sci-fi, part Mad Max-esque end of the world stuff, part western -- and I don't like genre stories, or I haven't, not since I was in college and devoured Stephen King like a madman but I'd outgrown those stories and outgrown that sort of fiction and if it weren't for a compelling interview with Mr. Cronin in a literary magazine that I read named Slice, I never would have picked it up.  And again, I didn't know it was 800 freaking pages.  But I couldn't put it down. So yeah, I guess in the end, I highly recommend.

Death by Kindle

This is something I didn't know but probably should have and as a writer it doesn't sound good, but I'll let you determine for yourself.  Personally I don't really use my Kindle (purchased for me as a gift) that much, really just when I'm on the road, because I've found that reading a physical book is a more pleasurable experience.  But maybe it is really bad for writers, at least if Amazon intends to kill small presses in the process as this post (written by a small publisher) makes clear.

By now, if you’re following the industry in any way, you’ve heard that Amazon pulled the plug on over 5000 Kindle ebooks distributed by IPG (who handles all of SFWP’s titles). You can read about it here, and here, and here, and probably a hundred other places. This came about because Amazon wanted a larger slice of the pie. Though I see it as an attempt to take the whole pie, and I worry that IPG is only the first of many victims.

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Shutting down all the IPG titles was done with a flip of a virtual switch. In a matter of minutes, Amazon did more damage to independent presses than the last 30 years of chain bookstores.

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The small, indie presses are not the middlemen. They are the dying voice of true publishing and writing. They are more loyal and respectful of writing than the big presses…and certainly more so than Amazon, which invites authors to cast their work adrift in a vast, uncharted ocean. Attacking the indie presses is simply an element we’ve seen in every other facet of American corporate culture. It’s a reflection of the death of the ma and pop shops, the general stores, our neighborhoods, true indie music and film… Big fish eating little fish in some sort of insane attempt to…I don’t know what. It all seems pointless, especially when these big companies collapse in a blaze of horror and shame.

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I beg of you to remember that indie presses, indie bookstores, and indie-friendly distributors like IPG are the backbone of our literary culture. When they die, that’s it. Don’t be fooled by the apparent freedom offered by Amazon. It all may be fun and games now but, when they get tired of you, or when they fold, you’ll all look up and around…and find yourselves alone. Mark my words.

But, you know… Tra-la-la. No point in this rant, I guess. What I have done is create an SFWP page for all of our titles listing alternative ebook sources. So you can get them on the Nook, on your fancy iPad, on your phone, your computer, through Google’s ebookstore, through Indiebound, through our distributor, and so on. Endless choices. You can even hack your Kindle Fire if you want. Don’t let it be said I’m not trying.

 

Columbine

I'm not sure whether to recommend this book -- Time's back cover description "Comprehensively nightmarish" is a perfect analysis -- but I read the entirety of its 370 pages within 2 days, so I guess that's reason enough for a recommendation.  Dave Cullen, a reporter who admits in the introduction that much like the rest of the media, he got the story wrong, writes this detailed account of the Columbine massacre from April 20, 1999, and it really is an amazing story.  Through extensive research into the truckloads of evidence collected by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office ("Jeffco") but withheld from the public for much of the past decade, Cullen weaves an extraordinary tale detailing both the how and the why of such a devastating tragedy.  I remember Columbine vividly, or I thought I remembered it vividly, but it was a Tuesday and I was likely working and I don't really remember where I was or how I heard about the events as they were unfolding.  But I remember searching for the answers to "why" and I remember reading the contemporaneous accounts that evolved in the days and weeks after the attack -- reports about things like the "Trench Coat Mafia" and Marilyn Manson and Nazi imagery and retribution on jocks and bullies and the girl touted as a martyr by evangelicals when she admitted to believing in God just before she was killed.  I remembered all these things.  And they were all wrong.  Even the Michael Moore documentary largely about gun control, Bowling for Columbine, repeated an urban legend that the killers went bowling on the morning of the murders.  They didn't.  Everything you knew or thought you knew about Columbine after the attacks was wrong.  And Cullen not only reveals the facts but he makes them fascinating and he explains how and why the media perpetuated these falsehoods, while also explaining how such a tragedy occurred. 

Flight

I hate to travel.  And my extreme intense dislike for flying is a big, big part of that.  Well that and the fact that most of my traveling is for business, which is not enjoyable or fun or anything I look forward to, even to a place like Scotland, which I got to visit last week, unfortunately for business.  The flight there was horrible, not because of any issues with the flying itself but because I was sick as a dog, I'd been recovering from a week's worth of flu/cold or something but I thought I was better until I got on the plane and it hit me, almost immediately, in the throat and the head and the nose and then it was 7 straight hours of debilitating pain.  I watched Sherlock Holmes in flight but I was so sick I couldn't even finish it and then I lay there, for hours, trying to catch some sleep to put me out of my misery, but it didn't come, and when the plane landed it was 7 am (Glasgow time) and I had to spend the day working, not getting back to my hotel room until close to 5.  I'd been up for some 32 hours straight.  I'd been sick all day and night.  And I was in no mood to see any part of Scotland.  But after a too brief nap in which a few moments of sleep kept getting interrupted by coughing fits, I got up and washed up and took a walk to one of the dozens of eateries in Ayr, the town where I was staying, to try to get some enjoyment out of my night (and to get enough drinks in me that I might actually be able to fall asleep without coughing).  I brought along the book I'd been reading -- the one I'd grabbed just as I left for the flight, a "backup" in case I finished the other book I'd been reading -- and as I sat in a beautiful little cafe called Saffy's, eating the most wonderful dish of sea bass I'd ever eaten (possibly because I'd never eaten sea bass before), I opened the novel and read it all the way through.  I slept well that night and had a pretty good rest of my week, the best week of business travel I've had in longer than I can remember, but the best part of the week remains that meal at Saffy's, drinking a pint of Peroni, and reading Sherman Alexie's aptly titled novel Flight.

Genesis

Genesis

A novel by Bernard Beckett

New Zealand's Bernard Beckett wrote this slight novel while he was on a Royal Society genetics research fellowship investigating DNA mutations, and when I think of how difficult it is for me to find the time to work on my writing while designing warehouses during the day, I'm just in awe of the magic that he created in this book.  The man is clearly brilliant, and he's written an almost perfect novel, 150 pages that I can guarantee you will burn through in a single reading.  It's that gripping.  And that wonderful.  I can't -- or I won't -- get into many details of the plot of the novel, because each page is a new revelation, but it ostensibly takes place in a future world in which a girl named Anax is undergoing an oral examination to join the vaunted Academy, and the novel is divided into four parts based on the four hours of her intense examination.  As such, the story is largely told in a question-and-answer dialogue between Anax and her Examiners, but since her examination is about the history of Adam Forde, an important figure in the history of this future world (he lived from 2058 to 2077, we are told on the second page), much of the story is simply Anax recounting the history of this time, in response to the questions, but what a fascinating history (future history, in our case) it is. 

I cannot go into any other details without possibly revealing too much, but let's just say that the twists and turns are truly stunning and completely compelling.  It's a very cerebral work, not something that can be read lightly, but the language is clear and robust, and if you are able to take a few moments to reflect on the extraordinary themes in play about the nature of consciousness and freedom and fate and future, in the midst of your reading, I'd definitely recommend.  But it will be difficult to pause and think, for this is also a wonderfully suspenseful thriller that you won't want to wait to finish.  I'm not typically a reader of books like this -- I'm not sure how I ended up placing it into my "Saved for Later" cart in Amazon, or why I decided to purchase it many months later -- but in any case I haven't read a lot of sci-fi fiction, although I wouldn't call this a sci-fi book necessarily, and I'm not a philosophical reader, although this is certainly more than a philosophy book (even if several characters have great philosopher names), and I'm not really even a suspense novel reader (but this is much more than suspense).  This is probably something akin to a Philip K. Dick novel, but since I've only seen the movie versions of his stories (Blade Runner, Minority Report), I can only guess.  It seems to be thoroughly original to me.  And highly recommended.

• Buy Genesis.  Now.  Please.

I Guess I Remembered It Wrong

Our Noise:  The Story of Merge Records
Written by John Cook with MacMcCaughan and Laura Ballance
Rating:  An Absolutely Brilliant Must-Read

Buy it at Amazon

I first discovered Superchunk in 1995 after hearing "Hyper Enough" on modern rock stations and MTV, and I ended up buying Here's Where the Strings Come In, their 7th full-length record (including two singles collections).  They instantly became one of my favorite bands and I bought up their back catalog of releases for the next several years.  But although the band never officially broke up, they stopped touring in 2001 and stopped recording and focused their efforts in other areas, coming together only for a couple special shows a year in the past 7 years, while recording only a handful of songs here and there.  In 2009, they've been more prolific, releasing a 5-song EP Leaves in the Gutter (consisting of the songs they've recorded the past 7 years) and then a 7" this summer called Crossed Wires.  So they might not be done after all.  But even if they are, they are among the very select handful of bands in my life as a music fan that have affected me for the past 20 years, since I first started discovering so-called "alternative" music back in 1989.  In fact, I'd almost have to say no band -- not even my all-time favorites The Smiths and Pavement -- have influenced my life and my enjoyment of music more than Mac and Laura and Jim Wilbur and Jon Wurster.  And I thank them for that.

But Superchunk is only half of the story of a new book released to mark the 20th anniversary of Merge Records, the label founded by Mac and Laura (lead singer and bassist in Superchunk) back in 1989, and built into a juggernaut of independent music over this past decade.  What was started by Mac as simply a way to put out the 7" records of Superchunk and the other bands he and his friends were playing in has turned into one of the only success stories in a dying industry, as they've had their most successful years despite (or as a result of) the crumbling of album sales and the consequent failure of major labels.  And this book is a chronicle of both Superchunk and Merge, a combined Chapel Hill success story that I read cover to cover within 24 hours a couple weeks ago.  It is one of the best chronicles of independent music ever written.  It is a must-read for any fan of indie rock, Superchunk, The Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, Destroyer, or any of the dozens of beloved bands signed and nurtured by Merge into major successes or minor cult followings.  It really is that good.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I recently read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, a fascinating look at the modern American diet and what is so horribly wrong with it that's making us fatter and less healthy than at any time in our history.  But it ultimately left me wanting -- for what exactly to do about it (where to shop, what to eat, other than simply "more fruits and vegetables").  So I've since read his prior book, the best-selling 2006 tome The Omnivore's Dilemma.  And where Pollan whets your appetite with his knowledge and proscriptions in In Defense of Food, his previous effort was absolutely brilliant.  I cannot emphasize this enough -- anyone who eats food from American supermarkets today should read this book, right now.  It's that powerful.  It's that shocking.  And it will change the way you view the food you are putting into your body.  It has for me, at least.