On which I write about the books I read, science, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that I want to. Currently trying to read and comment upon every novel that has won the Hugo and International Fantasy awards.
It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What’s your favorite Thanksgiving Day food? If you’re not American or Canadian, what is your favorite holiday food?
This one is easy: Pumpkin pie. I love all pumpkin flavored things - in addition to pumpkin pie, I love pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin frozen yogurt, and so on and so forth. Well, I love the combination of pumpkin with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, which is really what people think of when they think of "pumpkin flavor". I don't, however, particularly like cloves, which are often included in the mix of "pumpkin" spices. If I'm making my own pumpkin stuff, I always leave the cloves out, but if I'm eating something made by someone else, I usually have to overlook the clove flavor.
So yesterday when I was having dessert after Thanksgiving dinner, you can guess how disappointed I was when I was informed that the pie that had been brought to fill the "pumpkin pie" slot, was actually not pumpkin pie at all. Instead of pumpkin, the pie was made using squash. And despite assurances that it is really the same, it really, really is not. To make up for it, I'll probably be making a pumpkin pie of my own this weekend. And maybe a sweet potato pie. I love those too.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Do you leave a link back to your blog when you participate in weekly memes?
Yes. I'm not sure what else to say in response to this question, but the answer is that when I comment on another blog as part of a weekly meme, I usually include a link to my blog as part of my signature.
It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: You Are It! We are playing #FF tag this week. Comment on as many blogs as you can, even if they aren’t participating in #FF. Just say Happy #FF! at the end of your comment. Keep a running total if you want and update your post with it. The bigger the number the more impressed we will be!
I'll be keeping a running total. Here's my current count: 49.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: You won a 5 minute shopping spree from your favorite book store! What will you grab?
My favorite book store is a used book store - the Reston Used Book Store in Lake Anne. Since I only have five minutes, I can't afford to be subtle or selective. If I am given just five minutes to get in, make my choices, and get out, I won't be able to double check my massive spreadsheet to see if I am looking for a particular book, or check LibraryThing to see if I already own it. I might be able to prepare before I go in, but since the selection in a used book store is unpredictable, and my spreadsheet is so large that there's no way I can remember all of it (which is why I have a spreadsheet), that is likely to be somewhat less than useful to me.
So I'm probably going to just go to the science fiction and fantasy section and start pulling books off the shelves. I'll leave the books that I know I have, but if I have any doubts about a book, I'll take it. In five minutes I could probably clear out a couple of shelves. And since it is a used book store, anything that I grab that I later figure out is a duplicate of a book I already own, I can just donate it back to them.
You may have missed it, safe and sound on the home front, but today was the day of the Great Twitter Music War of 2013. The carnage was terrible to behold, and those of us who were caught in it will look back on this day and remember the terrible conflict.
It started innocently enough, when Commander Sue tweeted that she was pleased that her Pandora station was playing 1970s era soft rock, and that America was assuring her that she could do magic. JD responded supportively, quoting the band Player, and then Sue claimed she has been somewhat let down by the introduction of Barry Manilow. This caused Grave Writer to protest that she would never take a road trip with either of them due to their, in her view, poor music taste. To offer some aid to my good friend and fellow commander, I unknowing fired the first salvos in the war, posting a link to the aforementioned Player song Baby Come Back:
This resulted in a negative reaction from Grave Writer, and realizing combat was about to begin, I fired the next shot quickly with England Dan and I'd Really Love to See You Tonight:
At this point is was not so much a war as it was the posting of excellent music from the soft rock era of the 1970s. JD offered Christopher Cross singing Ride Like the Wind as the hardest that soft rock could get:
But as that song is a little light on the bass, I offered Neil Diamond's America, which I believe used as much bass as any soft rock song ever written. As a bonus, the video has Laurence Olivier, which I think any is a status that no other music video can lay claim to.
And because Barry Manilow had been mentioned, there was no option but to follow Neil Diamond with Mandy. Because no mobilization of 1970s soft rock would be complete without some Manilow.
But while this had been going on, Grave Writer had been gathering her forces, and when she struck, she struck hard, lashing out with Metallica and Disposable Heroes. Grave Writer declared full scale war, and The Great Twitter Music War of 2013 had begun in earnest.
But Grave Writer's attack was blunted when Seals & Croft playing Summer Breeze were brought to the battlefield, a force which not even Metallica could overcome.
But a foe as imposing as Grave Writer was not going to go down that easily. She reached into her arsenal and produced Tool's Prison Sex, blasting great holes in the battlefield:
JD jumped in to defend against Grave Writer's latest attack, pointing out that if it was to be war, we may as well play War. At least their song Lowrider:
I knew that we had to pull out the heavy hitters, so I went with the ultimate 1970s soft rock band, resorting to the use of Bread. This was a serious escalation of hostilities, as there are few songs quite as soft rock as Make It With You, and few bands as relentlessly white-bread in nature as Bread. But in times of war, tough decisions are called for, and in an effort to put an end to this destructive conflict and save lives, I made the call that a full scale assault of this nature was needed.
Grave Writer's response to the double assault was predictable really. Backed into a corner by the twinned attack, she unleashed the Guns N'Roses, but in the view of the historians who have looked over the Great Twitter Music War of 2013, she made a tactical error by deploying them in the Right Next Door to Hell formation, which was not one of their better maneuvers.
Hampered by their leader's orders, Guns n'Roses was vulnerable to counterattack, and counterattack came quickly, as ABBA went into guerrilla warfare mode with Fernando, who were able to confuse Grave Writer's forces and defeat them in detail.
At this point, Grave Writer was becoming desperate. Her forces were in disarray. Her territory was being invaded on two fronts. With nowhere else to turn, she resorted to bringing out System of a Down playing Psycho. It was really a maneuver of last resort, but it was a powerful move which might have turned the tide of battle for her.
I had no choice but to bring out the obscure Russian guns. Actually guns from Jamaica, Montserrat, and Aruba by way of Germany singing about a Russian. To sum up, I pulled out Boney M singing Ra-Ra-Rasputin, which represented yet another escalation of the conflict, as it introduced disco to the war. This was a dangerous move, because disco is an insidious weapon to be deployed only in the most careful manner. But because I was invoking an obscure band few in the war had ever heard of singing a song that was new to most of the combatants other than me, it was a calculated gamble.
And the gamble paid off. Invoking disco brought aid from an unexpected quarter, as a new ally for the side of soft rock entered the fray when Talia put the Limousines singing Internet Killed the Video Star into the field.
But even though Grave Writer was apparently out of troops to put on the field, she still had angry rhetoric to retaliate with, and she was soon asserting that the 1970s were dead and gone. This propaganda could not go unanswered, and so The Eagles were deployed, parachuting in to stake their claim to continued relevance with I Can't Tell You Why.
But since Talia had put the Limousines into battle, they needed proper support, so I quickly reinforced her with some vintage forces, moving the Buggles into position with Video Killed the Radio Star.
But Grave Writer would not relent, asserting that disco was as dead as John Travolta's reputation. This was the final straw. Faced with the possible loss of untold millions of lives, I did the only thing I could, deploying the nuclear weaponry that had been held back until now. Once they had been brought up, nothing could stop the Travolta bombs from being used. First, Let Her In destroyed Hiroshima.
And then I put forward the only thing more potent than John Travolta warbling out a love song: John Travolta teamed up with the Captain and Tennille singing a cover of an Elton John and Kiki Dee song. Yes, that's right, the war was ended by a cover version of Don't Go Breaking My Heart. Nagasaki was annihilated by this attack.
For the most part, the war was over. The true horrors of conflict had been unleashed, and there was little to do but try and rebuild and figure out what it had all meant. Commander Sue asked where Let Her In had been found, wondering how a weapon that powerful and that obscure could be located, calling it something "from the pit of hell". But that was not the most difficult weapon in the arsenal to locate. After all, I had held David Naughton's Makin' It in reserve, and since the war was all but over, I could reveal it in all its glory.
But there were even more dangerous secret experiments under development as hostilities ended. After all, we had to be ready for the next war, which would surely escalate into nuclear-musical fire in short order. So, in the interest of stockpiling munitions, we returned to Bony M, keeping Daddy Cool in reserve, just in case. And if needed, David Naughton's Dr. Pepper commercial spots could be used as well.
The war had ended. The casualties on both sides were enormous. But the world had been made safe for 1970s soft rock and obscure disco once again. Was it worth it? Was the vast wasteland of dead musical notes and spent dance moves offset by the gains made? To answer that question, you'd have to ask a veteran. And for this veteran, the answer is yes.
I am always amazed at how truly banal most pop music is. Perhaps amazed isn't the right word to use here. Perhaps I should say dismayed. Or perplexed. Or disappointed. In any event, as evidence I point to Daft Punk's extraordinarily popular and yet extraordinarily dull hit Get Lucky, which is approximately the 10,457,832nd song about someone trying to get laid. For the most part, pop music is dominated by songs about getting drunk, getting laid, partying (which is almost always defined as getting drunk and getting laid), falling in love, and breaking up. Once in a while there is a song about something else, but there are so many songs on these limited number of topics that pop music is more or less an idea wasteland.
And I think that is at least partially why so many nerdy people have flocked to artists like Jonathan Coulton, Paul & Storm, and The Doubleclicks. I think that is at least partially why outlets for user generated media like YouTube have exploded in popularity. Because while the mainstream entertainment industry wallows in rehashing the same tired and mediocre paeans of ennui and tedium, the parallel world of nerdy and off-beat media is creating music, film, and stories that cover all kind of much more interesting topics like a girlfriend who turns into a werewolf, a Christmas song sent from a prisoner on an asteroid run by robots, or an ode to a velociraptor. As Molly Lewis has said, she writes songs that are not love songs because the ratio of love songs to songs about other things is simply way too high.
So when someone takes a horribly dull song like Get Lucky and transforms it into a song about how the Avengers nabbed the Asgardian mischief maker Loki, the world is made a into better place. Granted, the Avengers movie was itself mass media, but writing a song about a comic book movie is not. As I mentioned when Broken Record Films transformed pop-culture pablum into Roll a d6 and Halo, there is a magic in taking the bland products of fashionable culture and turning them into something so much better than the original, and in the case of Get Loki, the tediously repetitive original is made into something almost infinitely greater than the instantly forgettable efforts of Daft Punk.
It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Are there any book to movie adaptations where you think the movie is better than the book?
Tarzan. This isn't so much a specific book adaptation into a specific movie, but rather a character from a group of books that was placed into a series of extremely loose adaptations that may or may not have much, if anything, to do with the books that inspired them.
Beginning in 1912 with Tarzan of the Apes (read review), Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote more than two dozen books about his most famous protagonist Tarzan. This character first appeared on film in 1918, and since then there have been almost ninety movies featuring Tarzan, which displayed varying degrees of fidelity to the books. But, for the most part, the movies in which Tarzan featured have been better than the books that inspired them, mostly because the movie makers have removed or otherwise muted the more cartoonish or objectionable attributes of the Lord of the Apes. In most movies, for example, Tarzan doesn't terrorize and murder black Africans simply because he thinks it is funny, although most of the movies, having been made between the 1920s and the 1950s, do present a rather racist viewpoint.
But on the whole, the Tarzan movies are better than the Tarzan books. Granted, the Tarzan movies are often fairly simplistic and were mostly made to show actors like Buster Crabbe, Johnny Weissmuller, and Gordon Scott in loincloths, and to show actresses like Maureen O'Sullivan and Enid Markey in somewhat skimpy outfits. Granted, the most famous of the movies transformed Tarzan from a cultured super-genius aristocrat into a monosyllabic savage. Granted, most of the movies take almost nothing from the original stories except the central characters and the idea of a child raised to adulthood in Africa by apes. Despite these admitted foibles, the movies generally provide more enjoyable and more palatable stories than the books. In a very real sense, the fame of Tarzan is the result, not of the books, but rather of the movies, which have eclipsed the books in the popular imagination.
I know. It's not Monday. But if Monday Night Football can have a Thursday night edition, I can post a Musical Monday on Thursday so long as I have a good reason for doing so.
And I do have a good reason for doing so. The reason is Desert Bus for Hope, a charity gaming marathon done by the comedy group LoadingReadyRun, that raises money for Child's Play, a charity that provides toys and games for kids undergoing treatment in hospitals. The marathon starts tomorrow, on November 15th, 2013, and continues until the donations stop. The short version of this post is this - you should stop by Desert Bus for Hope some time this weekend and maybe donate some money to keep them driving and help give some sick kids the opportunity to play while they are stuck in treatment.
The key to the marathon is that Desert Bus is a truly terrible game. The object of the game is to drive a bus from Tuscon to Las Vegas at 45 miles per hour in real time, with no save points or stopping in between, with the entire route taking about eight hours to complete. Because the drive between the two cities is basically a straight line through a featureless desert with no other traffic on the road, the game's scenery is essentially changeless for the entire run. The bus pulls slightly to the right, so you have to constantly steer the bus very slightly to keep it on the road. If you run off the road, the bus is towed back to Tuscon in real time. If you persevere and make it to Las Vegas, you score one point. You then get the option to drive back to Tuscon for another point. And so on. Desert Bus is not only a terrible game, it was intentionally made as a terrible game, and succeeds at being terrible in a spectacular fashion.
The charity marathon works like this: The members of LoadingReadyRun play Desert Bus live on the internet. They keep playing as long as people keep donating money to keep them at it. Each hour of play costs just a little bit more than the one before, so the first hours are cheap, while later hours can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to sponsor. Along the way the LoadingReadyRun crew keep things entertaining for the audience by singing, performing impromptu skits, interviewing internet personalities, and auctioning off goodies (with the auction proceeds also going to Child's Play).
And that's where The Doubleclicks come in. Last year, one of the things auctioned off was a Doubleclicks song. Or, more accurately, the right to have the Doubleclicks write a song about any topic the winner wanted. And the winner wanted a song about Desert Bus. So Angela and Aubrey wrote the theme song for a hypothetical television show that would take place on the bus ride depicted in the game. The song is peppy, happy, and fun, which is exactly the opposite of the actual Desert Bus game, but exactly what the Desert Bus for Hope gaming marathon is trying to provide for children. As a further note, both the Doubleclicks and Molly Lewis will be performing during the pre-marathon warm up show starting at 6:30 PM tomorrow, so that's yet another reason to go and visit the Desert Bus for Hope page.
So, once again, you should go visit Desert Bus for Hope this weekend. Donate money to charity. Watch people play a terrible game. Listen to nerdy music, funny skits, and cool interviews. Have fun.
Short review: Bilbo goes there and back again, and assists in killing a dragon and restoring a dwarven kingdom along the way.
Haiku
A little hobbit,
Thirteen dwarves, and a wizard,
Go kill a dragon
Full review:The Hobbit is a book that is difficult for me to review, as it is wrapped up in hazy and happy childhood memories. I remember my father reading me part of the book over a summer when I was about seven or so, covering a page or two a day before petering out and leaving the book unfinished when school started again. I remember watching the Rankin-Bass animated version of the story when it was televised shortly thereafter. I remember listening to the album version of the tale narrated by John Huston, playing it almost every day for months while living in Tanzania. And finally, I remember one night during the summer in between my fourth and fifth grade year, starting the book, and reading straight through until I reached the end of the book in the early hours of the next morning. In many ways, this book is what made me into a fantasy fan.
Against this background, it is not an easy task to write a review for The Hobbit that is not clouded by nostalgia. This task is further complicated by the fact that I have read many of Tolkien's subsequent works - the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Silmarillion, and various other sundry and related works including J.E.A. Tyler's Tolkien Companion, David Day's Tolkien Bestiary, and Humphrey Carter's biography of Tolkien. The end result of this lifetime of reading material by and about Tolkien and Tolkien's work is that it is difficult to separate the book from the mythology that surrounds the book, and consequently difficult to review this book solely on its own merits. The end result is that any review of the Hobbit is bound to be influenced by a mixture of fond memories and extratextual knowledge that is bound to produce a review that is not so much a review, as a melange of information both about the book, but also about the personal history and Tolkienian mythology within which it resides.
All that said, The Hobbit is a fantastic book, both as a piece of Tolkienian myth and on its own merits. The story of Bilbo and his thirteen dwarven companions has a somewhat idyllic tone, almost like a Victorian travelogue, even though it involves nearly getting roasted by trolls, an escape from the clutches of goblins, an encounter with massive spiders intent on eating everyone in the company, a sojourn in the elven king's prison cells, a suspicious and malevolent dragon, and finally a bloody and terrible battle between five armies. And of course, the focal element of the story is Bilbo's encounter with Gollum resulting in the famous riddle-game and the acquisition of the ultimate MacGuffin in the form of the One Ring - which seems to transform Bilbo from being a bumbling misplaced grocery store clerk into a competent and capable burglar, mostly be allowing him to become invisible at will. But the story feels like a vacation at times, with Gandalf talking about looking to replace lost luggage, or the entire party stopping off to take extended hiatuses in the homes of those they come across in their travels. On the whole, much of the book has something of a quaint feel, with the author interspersing asides in the narrative to tell the reader that some particular event that just happened will become important later on, or to make some sort of ominous declaration, and so on.
And this almost precious tone that crops up throughout the book makes clear that the book wasn't really intended to be the start of a series. It, of course, did end up being the opening act that led to The Lord of the Rings, but the transition from The Hobbit to the following series is a bit ragged at times, both in terms of story and style. Those who read this book after reading (or viewing) the Lord of the Rings will find Bilbo's use of the One Ring to be incredibly cavalier. He pops it on whenever whimsy strikes him, keeping it on for days and weeks at a time. The tenor of the writing and the way that Tolkien treats plot elements like the Ring shows quite clearly that this book was not written as the prologue for the larger story that followed it, and was only loosely connected to the mythology that he had been writing since his time in Britain's armed services during World War One. This distance gives The Hobbit a charm and character that is substantially different from any of Tolkien's other works, but is still recognizable as his. The book is also laced with an often gentle humor that is simply lacking in many of Tolkien's other books: To fool the reclusive Beorn into accepting a large company of somewhat less than welcome house guests, Gandalf misleads him with a meandering story to comic effect. Biblo huffs about, forgetting handkerchiefs, breaking the buttons on his coat, and creating silly rhymes to taunt spiders. But the humor is also dark as well, such as when Gandalf keeps a trio of trolls arguing among each other in a blackly humorous sequence. Even the goblins get into the spirit, making macabre jokes about the dwarves they and their wolf allies have trapped in a group of fir trees.
The level of violence in the book is also quite muted for the most part. The party appears to carry no weapons at the outset of their journey, and only acquire a couple of armaments after Gandalf tricks some trolls to death. The rest of the journey they spend their time running away from every threat they come across, at least until they are captured by giant spiders at which point they engage in an epic battle for their freedom armed with rocks, sticks, and pocket knives. It isn't until the Battle of Five Armies that Thorin and his company engage in armed combat arrayed for war, and when they do so it costs Thorin and two of his companions their lives. Despite being an adventure tale, the story isn't about brawn, but rather wits mixed with a whole lot of serendipity. Despite Gandalf's involvement, the entire expedition seems haphazardly organized: The dwarves seem to have only the vaguest idea of how to get from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain, relying upon those they meet along the way to give them directions as to which road to take, and what hazards they might face while traveling. They need to be resupplied twice by the kindness of strangers. They need Elrond to tell them how their map and key to the mountain works, and once they reach the mountain, they have no real plan for how to deal with Smaug other than "send Bilbo in to purloin a bauble or two". On the whole, the entire affair seems more like a lark than a serious attempt to reclaim the dwarven kingdom, and the only reason they protagonists seem to succeed is blind luck.
At its core, the subtitle of this book, There and Back Again, is what this book is about. It is Bilbo's journey that the entire story hinges upon. The doings of dwarves and goblins, of kings and heroes, and of wizards and dragons, are all entirely secondary to the story of a hobbit who ran out of his house without a handkerchief and wound up returning home more than a year later a changed man (er, hobbit). Events move along at a steady pace after the background has been presented in the opening chapter, with the band of fourteen travelers and one wizard moving from adventure to adventure at a rapid clip, with a new situation coming up in each chapter, and usually being resolved by the next. The story never leaves Bilbo's viewpoint, filling the reader in on events that take place out of his sight only when he becomes aware of them. Because the reader's window into Middle-Earth is filtered through Bilbo, the workings of this fictional world can be explained without feeling forced or artificial. And because Bilbo is something of an everyman, albeit a version who is an English country gentleman, the reader is both encouraged to root for him, and identify with him.
Unless, of course, the reader happens to be female. The one serious criticism that can be leveled at this book, and a large portion of Tolkien's oeuvre is the lack of female characters. And in The Hobbit, the absence of women is almost complete. Other than some elvish maidens frolicking in woodland feasts and anonymous Laketown women hustled onto boats to row away with the children while their menfolk fought Smaug, women simply don't appear in the book at all. Tolkien's fantasy world as presented here is an exclusively male affair - men doing manly things while other men gaze in wonder at their accomplishments.
But this quirk of Tolkien's aside, The Hobbit remains a classic foundational work of fantasy literature. With an action-filled linear narrative detailing the travels of a likable and more or less ordinary protagonist and his mostly interchangeable dwarven companions through a fantastical landscape, the book is an entertaining and engaging read. This is the book that made me a fantasy fan in general, and a Tolkien fan specifically. It is hard for me to conceive of a fantasy fan who has not read this book, but if there is, they should read this. If one chose to read only one of Tolkien's works of fiction, this would be the one I would recommend. In short, The Hobbit is a must-read for any fantasy fan.
Subsequent book in the series:The Fellowship of the Ring
In the United States, we recognize November 11th as Veteran's Day. But in Britain this day is Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, because it marks the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. This piece of music is Cortège, written by Cecil Coles during the war while he served on the Western Front. Late in the war, Coles was killed while helping recover wounded comrades.
In some ways, the First World War, which began nearly one hundred years ago, has become not a forgotten war, but an ignored war. There is a tendency to view the war as a drawn out pointless stalemate that served as little more than a prelude to World War Two. But even though there is a small grain of truth in this view, the conflict was so much more than merely the endless slog of trench warfare that it has become famous for. The war was global in scope, and global in effect. I would suggest that in many ways the First World War was more important in shaping the world we now live in than the Second. The twentieth century was, in a very real sense, made by this conflict.
World War One was an incredibly destructive conflict: More British, French, and Italian soldiers died in this war than died in World War Two. More than nine million soldiers perished in the war and untold more civilians, especially in Eastern Europe. Three great empires - the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire - collapsed and broke apart under the stress of the war. Germany remained intact, but its Kaiser was forced into exile and a republic was put in his place. However, out of this conflict rose the modern world that we recognize now as national identity began to seriously assert itself. This is most obvious in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, which resulted in several new nations being formed out of the carved up corpse of the dead empire. The Ottoman Empire was dismembered and mostly taken over by Britain, but this destruction led to the creation of modern Turkey.The unresolved conflicts in the Balkans and Middle-East resulting from the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires still haunt us to this day.
But this was also driven by policies adopted by the victors in their desperation to avoid defeat. Both the French and the British recruited troops from their colonial possessions. The French put nearly six hundred thousand men from their colonies into uniform, most of whom served in the war in Europe. The British also drew soldiers from their colonial possessions. From India alone the British put more than a million men under arms, and about seven hundred thousand Indian soldiers fought in Britain's campaigns against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle-East. When these soldiers returned home, their presence helped push the cause of independence in the various colonies. By leaning on their colonies during the war, the French and British watered the seeds of nationalism.
Without World War One, there probably would not have been a World War Two. As French Marshall Ferdinand Foch said of the Versailles Treaty, "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." The humiliating conditions imposed upon the Germans coupled with the myth of the "stab-in-the-back" formed a toxic cocktail that provided the conditions for Hitler's rise to power and the renewal of the conflict almost exactly on Foch's predicted schedule - he was only off by sixty-two days.
Without World War One, there likely would not have been a Soviet Union. The Tsar may have been deposed in some other way, but without the weight of warfare pressing down upon it the Kerensky government might have survived. Without the German push to get Lenin into Russia, the Bolsheviks would not have had a dynamic leader. No matter what might have otherwise happened, what actually did happen would not have. And without a Soviet Union there would have been no Cold War, which was the defining conflict of the second half of the century.
But the war had all kinds of other effects - with British encouragement due to their desire to deny the Germans a coaling station in the Far East, the Japanese took Tsingtao in China, and then expanded their influence in northern China, laying the groundwork for the Sino-Japanese conflict that would later ignite into the war in the Pacific against the United States. The war also marked the rise of the United States as a world power mostly due to the allies heavy reliance on American financing and industry to fuel their war efforts. The Great Depression was probably caused, in no small part, by the fallout from this conflict. And so on.
World War One made the twentieth century. It redrew the map cross the globe, and drove the cause of nationalism over empire. Almost every conflict that came afterwards was either caused by or influenced by this war. The politics and economics of our world still feel its effects. This conflict should not be ignored in the way that it seems to be.
It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Vlog Contest! Vlog about why you want to be next weeks feature! If you are too shy to put yourself on camera – tell us why you are sooo shy.
This post isn't actually being posted on Friday. But that's okay, it also isn't going to include a vlog. Not because I'm too shy to put myself on camera. Rather, because I don't actually have a camera that I can use to film a vlog. I know that this is an almost unbelievable lack of technological preparedness, but I just have not had a need for a web camera over the last couple of years, so I never replaced the one I had that I misplaced. I don't think that even if I had a camera I would really be able to answer the vlog question, because I've already been the featured blog, and I don't have a good reason why I should be featured next week over people who haven't gotten their chance yet. Mostly because I wouldn't want to be featured again while there were people who had not yet had their moment in the sun.
Short review: Tarzan and his entire family are kidnapped by Rokloff. In response, Tarzan sits around for a while and then enlists a menagerie of animals to help him rescue his loved ones.
Haiku
When Rokloff escapes
And kidnaps Jane and her son
Tarzan needs the beasts
Full review:The Beasts of Tarzan is the third book in the Tarzan series. In this book, Tarzan and Jane seem to have settled into comfortable domesticity in London and had a child. This idyllic life is upset when the evil Rokloff escapes from the French prison he was sent to at the end of the last book. Rokloff immediately begins to set his plans for revenge in motion (as he clearly has nothing better to do than plot revenge against Tarzan) by arranging to kidnap both Tarzan and his son. Jane is kidnapped as well, as a sort of lucky bonus to Rokloff's plans. Once in custody, Tarzan becomes passive as he (and his wife and son, although Tarzan doesn't know this) are whisked away on a steamship to Africa where Tarzan is marooned. Rokloff then details his plan to have Tarzan's child raised by cannibals.
Tarzan, as usual when dumped in the wild with his loved ones at risk, becomes passive. Tarzan takes up with a band of apes, tames a wild panther, and hunts until a group of natives show up in canoes. With the help of his animals, Tarzan kills all but one native, who then becomes his ally and servant (since the natives are just waiting for a strong European to guide them I suppose). He gets his apes and panther to paddle him and his black friend to the mainland where he learns that Jane and a baby passed through a month before, chased by a band of nasty white men. Finally, after sitting on his butt for weeks, Tarzan decides he should rescue his spouse and progeny.
Tarzan then pursues Rokloff through the jungle. His animal companions are improbably competent and loyal through his various adventures. Through a series of increasingly improbable coincidences, Tarzan finally rescues Jane, recovers his baby, and Rokloff is killed. Tarzan then has to commandeer a ship of mutineers (mutiny seems to be the norm in Burroughs' version of the world: One wonders why anyone ever hires a crew for a ship to begin with), abandons his animals and returns to England safe and sound (with his native companion and a serendipitously found spouse for him).
Tarzan's character in the first two books is best described as a cartoon figure with improbable strength, skills, and intelligence. In this book, he becomes even more of an unbelievable character - taming a wild panther by smacking it on the nose a few times, talking a gang of apes into paddling a canoe, and a collection of other over-the-top accomplishments. Tarzan is, by a wide margin, the most unbelievable of all Burroughs' creations. The adventure is adequate, although there are far too many improbable coincidences for it to be truly satisfying. Even so, as pulp action goes, it is a classic of the genre, and worth the brief investment of time that reading it will take.
Short review: Tarzan steps aside so Jane can be wooed by another man, and then gets pulled into a series of eclectic intrigues that all improbably involve the villain Rokloff.
Haiku
Tarzan in Paris
Then he becomes a French spy
And in the end, Jane!
Full review:The Return of Tarzan starts up where Tarzan of the Apes left off. Having concealed his true identity so as to allow Jane Porter to marry the wealthy Lord William Clayton as opposed to the destitute not-Lord William Clayton, Tarzan sails for France. On the way, the wheels of adventure begin to turn. He comes to the aid of a gentleman cheated at cards, and then to the aid of Olga de Coude a beautiful woman accosted by miscreants (who turn out to be husband and wife), incurring the wrath of Rokloff, their tormentor. Back in Paris, he becomes Rokloff's target, and de Coude's close friend. A complicated plot of Rokloff's results in Olga's reputation being potentially compromised, but Tarzan is such an honorable individual that Olga's husband becomes his friend and ally (apparently having a noble bloodline gives one a fully developed sense of honor and propriety without the benefit of any kind of education in such matters).
Tarzan, despite his incredible physical talents and seemingly genius level intellect has been unable to secure employment in Paris, and when de Coude offers him a job working as a spy for France he accepts and travels to Algeria to spy on an army lieutenant suspected of passing secrets. It turns out that the lieutenant's contact is none other than Rokloff, who once again tries to take revenge on Tarzan. On the way, Tarzan rescues a beautiful Arab princess, becomes friends with her sheikh father before evading Rokloff's attempts on his life. He is abruptly called away to carry some papers for the government, and when he arrives on his ship, none other than Rokloff is there to steal them from him and toss him overboard.
And we haven't even gotten to the part where Tarzan swims to shore, finds himself near the cabin he was born in, becomes king of a tribe of Africans, defeats a gang of slavers who attack his village, journeys to the fabled city of Opar, gets captured, escapes, and then rescues Jane.
In a parallel storyline, Jane has been sailing about with Clayton, her father, her best friend, and, of course, Rokloff. They are shipwrecked right off the coast where Tarzan's cabin is, and wind up right under his nose. Clayton turns out to have known all along that Tarzan was actually Lord Greystoke, and proves to be less than successful at braving the wilds, causing Jane to finally tell him she doesn't want to marry him. Clayton then gets sick right after Jane is captured by the simian inhabitants of Opar, and eventually dies.
Most of the book is simply an excuse to move Tarzan from place to place so he can foil Rokloff in a variety of settings, or otherwise show how smart, strong, and brave he is. Every beautiful woman who crosses his path is smitten with him, and of course, he chivalrously declines them all while pining for Jane (who for all but the last ten pages of the book he believes is going to marry Clayton) because, apparently, fidelity is something that is instinctual for those of noble birth (or maybe he learned it during the years he was living with the apes). For a man who lived in the wilds until he was twenty-three or so, by the time he is twenty-four Tarzan is improbably well-spoken and cultured: Sipping absinthe, smoking cigars, and spending his nights at the opera. The most hilarious episode takes place in Opar, where he has a detailed and poetic conversation with La, the high-priestess of the human-ape hybrids that inhabit the city - all in the language of the apes.
The adventures in the book are all, individually decent enough, but the book as a whole is disjointed and there is simply too much serendipity for the overall story to hold up at all. Tarzan's character is simply too much of a Mary Sue wish-fulfillment vehicle to really be taken seriously, and Jane is too dimwitted through most of the book to believe she could be the object to Tarzan's undying devotion. Even when regarded as nothing more than a pulp adventure, it never rises much above average in quality.
Short review: Tarzan is raised from infancy to adulthood by apes and becomes the strongest and smartest man in the world.
Haiku
Orphaned as a child
Brought up by a band of apes
And then he meets Jane
Full review: Tarzan is the most famous of Edgar Rice Burroughs' creations. In general, however, I find the character to be less interesting, and less believable than many of his others. This seems odd, since Tarzan ostensibly lives in early twentieth century Earth, while for example, John Carter wanders about the red sands of Barsoom, and Julien is a reincarnating individual fighting invaders from our own moon. The problem is that Tarzan is essentially a cartoon of a character. He is apparently the strongest, most agile, handsomest, and most intelligent individual alive - so much so that he almost resembles a Mary Sue character. Tarzan has superhuman strength - apparently all that is needed for that is living in the wild. Wild living also enhances one's agility to superhuman levels, and enhances one's senses to a level that one can track prey by smell and hear whispers spoken miles away. With nothing more than a small collection of books and no assistance at all, Tarzan is able to teach himself how to read despite the fact that he cannot speak English (or any other language other than "Ape").
No real explanation is given for Tarzan's incredible gifts. Most people know the basics of Tarzan's story: A foundling raised by apes in the jungles of Africa who rises to the top of his band of primates and has adventures across the whole of the dark continent. In addition to the couple dozen books featuring him, Tarzan has been the subject of numerous movie adaptations, cementing him onto the cultural landscape like few other characters. As most people have come to know Tarzan through these somewhat watered down movies, the brutality and violence of the Tarzan featured in this book will come as something of a shock to some: Tarzan fights and kills a couple of apes in bloody, graphic combat, there are explicit descriptions of hunting and killing prey in the book, and for a portion of the book Tarzan essentially terrorizes an African village by abducting and killing residents because he thinks it is "funny". (It is apparently okay though, after all, they are only black cannibals - did I mention that the book has some pronounced racist overtones?)
The racism and classism prevalent in the era when the book was written is apparent through the book. All common sailors are presented as little more than criminal rabble kept in line by the firearms carried by their officers. The book gets kind of muddled with respect to Tarzan himself - at turns his brutality is excused as a result of his life in the wild, at others his heritage as the son of an English lord (a lord who is killed when Tarzan is an infant, after which the lord of the apes has no contact with humans until he is an adult) is used to explain his instinctive chivalry and magnanimity. Apparently one's bloodline, rather than one's upbringing, is what makes you treat women well and rescue wayward French officers from evil cannibalistic natives.
The first part of the book is devoted to telling the story of how Tarzan's parents came to be marooned in the wilds of Africa, and how Tarzan came to be adopted by an ape. The second portion details Tarzan's life among the apes as he grows from an infant to a superhuman adult. In the third section of the book, Tarzan's world is turned upside down by the arrival of another band of white castaways (including Jane Porter, the Jane from "me Tarzan, you Jane" fame in the movies). The final section concerns the civilizing of Tarzan, as he is taught French by an officer he rescues, and then travels to Paris and later to the United States.
Tarzan is, in the end, an entirely unbelievable character - more so even than characters who tramp about on other planets or inside the bowels of the Earth. He is also a contradictory character, at times excusably savage, at others improbably civilized. On the whole, it seems odd that Tarzan is the one Burroughs' character who has become the one everyone knows about as he is one of the most absurd of all of them, and since Burroughs' books are pure pulp, that's saying a lot. On the other hand, it may be because Tarzan is so over the top that he has become so popular. In any event, while I found this book to be reasonably good, it was not one of my favorite Burroughs' works.
I'll start off by saying that yes, The Battle of Evermore is a Led Zeppelin song, and I definitely will be posting a version of this song by them as a future Musical Monday. But most videos of the concert version of this song done by Led Zeppelin are of poor quality, or have other problems, so I have not settled on which one I want to use. So instead, I am posting a version of this song by what is probably the premiere band for producing cover versions of Led Zeppelin songs: Heart.
In the mouths of the Wilson sisters, this song's lyrics soar to even greater heights than they did in the original recording. The tale of an epic battle between light and dark featuring the Queen of Light, the Prince of Peace, the Dark Lord, angels from Avalon, and the ringwraiths riding in black is brilliant when sung by Robert Plant and Sandy Denny, but it takes on a new dimension when Ann and Nancy get their hands on it. Plant's Celtic-tinged Tolkienian-inspired story takes on an even more otherworldly tone in this rendition, a feat that I would not have thought possible before I heard it performed.
Location: World Fantasy Convention, Brighton, United Kingdom.
Comments: From my perspective, the most notable thing that happened at the 2013 World Fantasy Awards is that Susan Cooper received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, Cooper was one of the authors that I read during my formative years who transformed me into a fantasy fiction fan. Along with Alexander, Cooper's fiction introduced me to, and stoked my love for British mythology, notably the mythology of Cornwall and Wales that intersects with the myths and legends concerning King Arthur and his knights. None of Cooper's individual works were ever nominated for a World Fantasy Award, partially because much of her writing was done before the awards existed, and partially because her writing is classified as young adult fiction, a category that the World Fantasy Awards pretty much systemically ignore, so seeing her recognized for her impressive body of work is extremely gratifying.
Other Nominees: Crandolin by Anna Tambour The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
Other Nominees: Breaking the Frame by Kat Howard The Castle that Jack Built by Emily Gilman A Natural History of Autumn by Jeffrey Ford Swift, Brutal Retaliation by Meghan McCarron
Other Nominees:
Didier Graffet and Dave Senior
Kathleen Jennings
J.K. Potter
Chris Roberts
Special Award, Professional
Winner:
Lucia Graves
Other Nominees:
Peter Crowther and Nicky Crowther
Adam Mills, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer
Brett Alexander Savory, and Sandra Kasturi
William K. Schafer
Special Award, Non-Professional
Winner:
S.T. Joshi
Other Nominees:
Scott H. Andrews
L. Timmel Duchamp
Charles Tan
Jerad Walters
Joseph Wrzos
Go to previous year's nominees:2012 Go to subsequent year's nominees:2014
It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book are you embarrassed to admit you LOVED? (Try to think beyond Twilight).
I'm not going to go with a single book on this question, but rather an entire series of books: Lynne Johnston's collections of her For Better or For Worse comic strips. I don't know if I'm so much embarrassed to admit that I loved reading these books, but they are the books that result in the most incredulous reactions when people see them on my shelves. They aren't fantasy. They aren't science fiction. They are just a collection of mildly humorous stories about an almost tediously ordinary suburban family. And as a result, people who find the collection of these books sitting on my bookshelves or who otherwise find out that I have almost every single volume of For Better or For Worse comic strips ever produced are often almost dismayed by their discovery.
And even though it is true that this isn't really something that is in my normal reading, and is a bit domestic in tone, I still loved reading them. The salient point is that unlike most other comic strip series where everyone exists in a perpetual time-halted now, the Pattersons, the family depicted by Johnston, age, grow, and change. Each member of the family has a specific birthday, and every year that passed during the run of the strip resulted in everyone getting a year older. This was especially apparent when it came to the children, who would change quite dramatically from year to year, and in the course of the strip's run, grew up, graduated, moved out of the family home, fell in love, got married, and had children of their own. And that's what I love about For Better or For Worse: There is an extended, ongoing story here that runs through years of the lives of the characters.
The story of the Pattersons is mostly finished now: Johnston decided a couple of years ago to stop advancing her character's lives, which in my view robbed her strip of the vitality that gave it its unique flavor in the comic world. And in more recent times, many newspapers have begun simply rerunning older strips, in some cases starting from the very beginning. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a couple of decades of stories about the interweaving lives of the Pattersons and their friends and neighbors. And I loved that ongoing story.
