During this time period I started to realise that not every book was worth blogging about; so, rather than a comprehensive list, these book posts are moving more towards some edited highlights.
Kashmir is a screenplay about three specialists hunting down Osama bin Laden. An enjoyable, fast read. Probably still available at scriptshadow, if you want to google for it.
After watching Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie about people who stay at home and live their lives through remote drones that look like them, I felt like I needed more exploration of that idea. Kil'n People by David Brin is a noir version of the story (rather than an action-adventure), and it contains both a twisty mystery, great uses of the first person narrator, and a lot of excellent ideas about what would happen if you could clone yourself, live 5 different lives, and then reabsorb the memories of those clones. I was a little disapointed with the mysticism that ended the book, but (overall) a good read.
The Ask and the Answer is the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. As I mentioned last time, I was resisting reading this, but Jenni told me that the book shifted from a single narrator to alternating between two points of view. That (plus the third POV she hinted would be introduced in the third book) was enough to get me reading it again. The Ask and Answer was great at getting me to like the characters again, but in terms of plotting it became a little bit plodding and event-based (this happened then this happened) without any real sense of meaning behind the events. I stopped reading it twice because I almost lost sympathy with the main male character; the author deliberately pushes the line here. However, the story built to an excellent finale.
The sequel, Monsters of Men, is just excellent. Definitely the best of the series; flipping between three different points of view means that the plot is advanced without the annoying 'knock the protagonist out' tricks of the first book. There are cliffhangers with nearly every chapter, and I'm a sucker for battle scenes of mass combat - the ambushes and strategies - which this book definitely delivers.
Overall, this Chaos Walking series has a great payoff but it was definitely a struggle for me to get there.
Exegisis is a short little science fiction tale about an artificial intelligence sending emails to its creator. An ok, fast read with one or two moments of genuine insight about how the world might 'look' to an AI.
How to Make it All Work is about looking at your life from a high-level perspective, setting goals and how to recognise when you're heading in the 'right' direction for you. I'm still figuring out how to apply stuff from this book; I think it'll be up for a re-read in a few months.
The Race is the second book by Richard North Patterson I've read this year. He's got a thing for writing well-researched thrillers which I approve of. This one is about a Republican presidential primary: overall, the story felt a little familiar to me, having watched Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing and followed the last few US elections and mid-terms fairly closely, but it's got a great final act (set at the Republican convention, illustrating the wheelings and dealings that go on). It's also interesting in that the book addresses the internal contradictions and unstable alliances between the different social groups that make up the Republican party (or at least did, pre-Tea Party).
While the first two books of Jessica Amanda Salmondson's Tomoe Gozen trilogy are fun, they didn't really move me. Her stories about a doomed female samurai have quite a bit to say about honour and feminism, but they felt a little disposable. The third book, Thousand Shrine Warrior, is infused with a melancholy mood and Tomoe becomes part of a fascinating moral dilemma: each person that Tomoe is forced to kill in order to save her life is actually part of a grander plan of revenge. That sense of doom and the awareness that violence only made the problem worse lifted this book into Yojimbo style territory. While the ending felt too easy, to me, I would love to read more Tomoe adventures (and I'd definitely want to see a film of this particular story).
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Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Friday, December 17, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Books: April to June
The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first in a trilogy of young adult novels. It should be right up my alley (which is a reference that seems much more relevant to me now that I've moved to an apartment in an alleyway): the series is set on a world that's been colonised by people from Earth, who have had a nasty conflict with the indigenous species, and as a result been infected with a disease that has given everybody uncontrollable telepathy. Coupled with that, the protagonist is trying to escape from the village he lives in, a village populated only by men, most of whom are homicidal patriarchal fascists.
But the book really bugged me. While the author made me care about the main character, he also stuck strongly to a first person POV coupled with a few 'unreliable narrator' tricks. As a result, I felt cheated by the frequency with which information was withheld that the main character knew (or should know), and annoyed at how often the author had to knock the main character out in order to advance the plot.
I've been on the fence about trilogies for many years now - reluctant to read them because for the most part I think they're padding. At the end of Knife, I decided not to read the next two books in the series: while the main character was trapped, indebted to the men he'd spent the whole book trying to escape - an army of men who'd just taken over the whole planet - I wasn't particularly interested in how he would get out of this situation. I just expected he would, and felt no obligation to read two more books to find out how it happened.
It took a few months, but Jenni changed my mind about this (more to come in the next book review post) ...
Reading Knife also reinforced my hatred of modern dust jackets on books. Sure, the design work that goes into a contemporary book is top notch, but I swear that the blurbs give away plot spoilers up to about page 200. It's infuriating.
Jenni lent me What's the Worst that Could Happen? It's her novel about a super-hero whose power is that she can see the worst case scenario for every course of action. I enjoyed reading it, and quickly saw the potential in it. Jenni blogged about our feedback session.
Then I organised a trans-humanist science-fiction death match. I got out two books from the library, read the first chapter of each and then chose which one to continue.
I chose Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod because its Scottish protagonist seemed to have more of an edge. It's a fairly interesting soap opera about the aftermath of a war with AIs and first contact with a distant colony, but by the end, the story was a little confusing and felt like a failure.
Then, when I switched back to Glasshouse by Charles Stross, I was impressed by how smart it was. Our hero needs to go into the 30th century equivalent of witness protection. He signs up for an experiment to recreate 20th century society, where our social and moral codes are enforced by a points system. Things quickly deteriorate as the experiment's participants decide to play to win (and ignore the fact that there's a darker agenda going on). A great examination of how our culture ticks, and a tight little thriller.
In my last book review, I mentioned that there was a book that scared me. Kindred by Octavia Butler is it. It's the story of an African-American woman from the 1970s who's thrown back in time about 150 years to the Antebellum South. What I realised is that I can watch trashy horror films and read Thomas Ligotti short stories all I like, but this story - about this character who seemed very real and very human, thrust into absolutely the worst environment for her - well, this story didn't feel safe. After the first two chapters, I had no idea where it was going or how far it could go, and I ended up putting it down.
I switched, instead, to The Bohr Maker, a science-fiction novel about nano-technology, that felt ... superficial to me in comparison to Kindred (which I was still thinking about). The story follows two protagonists - well, one of them's mostly just a character who things happen to for the majority of the book, and the other is so unsympathetic that I wouldn't have been unhappy to see him/it fail entirely. Perhaps that's a good technique ... it certainly kept the outcome I wanted the book to have alive and in question for me, but made The Bohr Maker a bit of a tough read
Afterwards, I went back to Kindred, and read another two or three chapters. Just when I thought it was settling into a predictable groove, Butler threw a massive curveball into the situation, one that I found very compelling.
After reading to see how that resolved, I had to decompress for a while. I ripped through Roadside Picnic by Stanislaw Lem. My memories of this have faded now, but I found this a tight, fast read infused with melancholy and a sense of transcendence. Actually: recommended. It felt like good Philip K. Dick.
Finally, I finished Kindred and was satisfied with how it all wrapped up. If you're familiar with the RPG Steal Away Jordan, Kindred is one of the media inspirations for that game.
The Sparrow is a definite contender for the best book I've read this year. It's a first contact story: humanity has picked up radio broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The story follows (and deals with the aftermath of) an expedition funded by Jesuit priests to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music. What struck me most about this story was its sense of humour, the lightness of touch and sense of truth in its characterisations and the way it deals with issues of guilt, celibacy, the nature of God and faith - all wrapped in a vivid writing style. Jenni, Helen R: you might like this one.
But the book really bugged me. While the author made me care about the main character, he also stuck strongly to a first person POV coupled with a few 'unreliable narrator' tricks. As a result, I felt cheated by the frequency with which information was withheld that the main character knew (or should know), and annoyed at how often the author had to knock the main character out in order to advance the plot.
I've been on the fence about trilogies for many years now - reluctant to read them because for the most part I think they're padding. At the end of Knife, I decided not to read the next two books in the series: while the main character was trapped, indebted to the men he'd spent the whole book trying to escape - an army of men who'd just taken over the whole planet - I wasn't particularly interested in how he would get out of this situation. I just expected he would, and felt no obligation to read two more books to find out how it happened.
It took a few months, but Jenni changed my mind about this (more to come in the next book review post) ...
Reading Knife also reinforced my hatred of modern dust jackets on books. Sure, the design work that goes into a contemporary book is top notch, but I swear that the blurbs give away plot spoilers up to about page 200. It's infuriating.
Jenni lent me What's the Worst that Could Happen? It's her novel about a super-hero whose power is that she can see the worst case scenario for every course of action. I enjoyed reading it, and quickly saw the potential in it. Jenni blogged about our feedback session.
Then I organised a trans-humanist science-fiction death match. I got out two books from the library, read the first chapter of each and then chose which one to continue.
I chose Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod because its Scottish protagonist seemed to have more of an edge. It's a fairly interesting soap opera about the aftermath of a war with AIs and first contact with a distant colony, but by the end, the story was a little confusing and felt like a failure.
Then, when I switched back to Glasshouse by Charles Stross, I was impressed by how smart it was. Our hero needs to go into the 30th century equivalent of witness protection. He signs up for an experiment to recreate 20th century society, where our social and moral codes are enforced by a points system. Things quickly deteriorate as the experiment's participants decide to play to win (and ignore the fact that there's a darker agenda going on). A great examination of how our culture ticks, and a tight little thriller.
In my last book review, I mentioned that there was a book that scared me. Kindred by Octavia Butler is it. It's the story of an African-American woman from the 1970s who's thrown back in time about 150 years to the Antebellum South. What I realised is that I can watch trashy horror films and read Thomas Ligotti short stories all I like, but this story - about this character who seemed very real and very human, thrust into absolutely the worst environment for her - well, this story didn't feel safe. After the first two chapters, I had no idea where it was going or how far it could go, and I ended up putting it down.
I switched, instead, to The Bohr Maker, a science-fiction novel about nano-technology, that felt ... superficial to me in comparison to Kindred (which I was still thinking about). The story follows two protagonists - well, one of them's mostly just a character who things happen to for the majority of the book, and the other is so unsympathetic that I wouldn't have been unhappy to see him/it fail entirely. Perhaps that's a good technique ... it certainly kept the outcome I wanted the book to have alive and in question for me, but made The Bohr Maker a bit of a tough read
Afterwards, I went back to Kindred, and read another two or three chapters. Just when I thought it was settling into a predictable groove, Butler threw a massive curveball into the situation, one that I found very compelling.
After reading to see how that resolved, I had to decompress for a while. I ripped through Roadside Picnic by Stanislaw Lem. My memories of this have faded now, but I found this a tight, fast read infused with melancholy and a sense of transcendence. Actually: recommended. It felt like good Philip K. Dick.
Finally, I finished Kindred and was satisfied with how it all wrapped up. If you're familiar with the RPG Steal Away Jordan, Kindred is one of the media inspirations for that game.
The Sparrow is a definite contender for the best book I've read this year. It's a first contact story: humanity has picked up radio broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The story follows (and deals with the aftermath of) an expedition funded by Jesuit priests to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music. What struck me most about this story was its sense of humour, the lightness of touch and sense of truth in its characterisations and the way it deals with issues of guilt, celibacy, the nature of God and faith - all wrapped in a vivid writing style. Jenni, Helen R: you might like this one.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Books: March to April
While I've lost track of some of the books I've read during the last couple of months, but that's been compensated for by the introduction of a new system for getting books out that's paying great dividends: I read reviews of books that sound interesting; type them into a file on my phone; by the time I get to the library to get something out, I've forgotten the exact plot of the book so I choose something at random, get it out without reading the back cover (which I've found usually contains massive spoilers for up to 200 pages of a book), and then read it with a completely fresh eye.
Going into books blind has been fun!
Lost for books to read, I pulled a Roger Zelazny novel that I've owned for years out my 'To Read' bookshelf. Turns out it was the second book in a series, but it had a pretty good recap of events in it. I was about 80 pages in when I realised that I'd be going to the library the next day and getting out the other four books in the series.
Zelazny's 'Ambert' quintet is fun, smart high fantasy with a taste of Moorcockian surreality ... but most of all, it's a noir. The third book, Sign of the Unicorn, is basically a series of flashbacks explaining backstories (and in some cases, twisted motivations) of the lead character's family members. Later in this post, I'm going to be talking about my dislike of trilogies and series, but this was good. Like, 'finishing one of the books every night' good.
Declare is the first Tim Powers novel I've read. What starts as a reasonably normal Le Carre-esque Cold War spy thriller slowly becomes an alternate-history biography of Kim Philby and a textbook study of how to slowly reveal a complicated mythology. Like a Clive Barker novel by way of John Le Carre, it inspired me to immediately get out another Tim Powers: Last Call - a story about a gambler who once lost a very important game of poker, and is now about to pay the price for it.
Gino: Read Last Call. Anyone else, if you're interested in the Tarot, the story of the Fisher King, or stories that feel like 80s style Clive Barker with less gruesomeness and less misanthropy, check it out too.
Pearce bought a copy of Life's Lottery by Kim Newman, which I immediately seized from him and read three times over the next three nights. This is the literary Choose Your Own Adventure novel I've always wanted to read. A story where the main character changes his very personality based on the choices you make. The story covers about 40 years, centring around Thatherite and Blarite Britain, was constantly riveting and insightful ... and I still feel like I haven't tapped all of its depths. It was also a great deal more magical realist (and violent) than I expected, with a fantastic authorial voices that sometimes talks directly to the reader (and sometimes passes judgement on you).
(Great to see that my propensity for cheating at Choose Your Own Adventure books is undiminished; at one point I think I had four fingers stuck in various pages so that I could try out various alternatives.)
After waking up from a dream in which I had bought a roleplaying game about a city under the ocean, I decided to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. First thing that surprised me: it was in the children's section of the library. Second thing: it's effectively the 1860s version of hard sci-fi. Jules Verne seems to be striving to make every detail seems as plausible as possible based on the science and engineering capabilities of the time. Third thing: it's kinda boring. The book is mostly a travelogue that spends very little time fleshing out its characters, and the big incidents of the book are separated by many pages worth of descriptions of fish.
While reading this, I struggled to see how you could adapt this into a feature film for the 21st century. Surely the sense of wonder about the undersea world has been lost. I didn't get to see Oceans at the Film Festival (which might have changed my mind), but it sounds like I happily avoid the narrator-rage that people experienced in listening to Pierce Brosnan for 84 minutes.
How to Get Rich was a fun non-fiction read about how to be an entrepreneur. Unsparing in its description of the prices you'd have to pay in order to be rich, and filled with a lot of wisdom. Along with the Four Hour Work Week, this is one I think I'm going to have to re-read.
Next post, why I finished The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first book in a trilogy), and didn't feel the need to read the rest of the series; and a book that scared me.
Going into books blind has been fun!
Lost for books to read, I pulled a Roger Zelazny novel that I've owned for years out my 'To Read' bookshelf. Turns out it was the second book in a series, but it had a pretty good recap of events in it. I was about 80 pages in when I realised that I'd be going to the library the next day and getting out the other four books in the series.
Zelazny's 'Ambert' quintet is fun, smart high fantasy with a taste of Moorcockian surreality ... but most of all, it's a noir. The third book, Sign of the Unicorn, is basically a series of flashbacks explaining backstories (and in some cases, twisted motivations) of the lead character's family members. Later in this post, I'm going to be talking about my dislike of trilogies and series, but this was good. Like, 'finishing one of the books every night' good.
Declare is the first Tim Powers novel I've read. What starts as a reasonably normal Le Carre-esque Cold War spy thriller slowly becomes an alternate-history biography of Kim Philby and a textbook study of how to slowly reveal a complicated mythology. Like a Clive Barker novel by way of John Le Carre, it inspired me to immediately get out another Tim Powers: Last Call - a story about a gambler who once lost a very important game of poker, and is now about to pay the price for it.
Gino: Read Last Call. Anyone else, if you're interested in the Tarot, the story of the Fisher King, or stories that feel like 80s style Clive Barker with less gruesomeness and less misanthropy, check it out too.
Pearce bought a copy of Life's Lottery by Kim Newman, which I immediately seized from him and read three times over the next three nights. This is the literary Choose Your Own Adventure novel I've always wanted to read. A story where the main character changes his very personality based on the choices you make. The story covers about 40 years, centring around Thatherite and Blarite Britain, was constantly riveting and insightful ... and I still feel like I haven't tapped all of its depths. It was also a great deal more magical realist (and violent) than I expected, with a fantastic authorial voices that sometimes talks directly to the reader (and sometimes passes judgement on you).
(Great to see that my propensity for cheating at Choose Your Own Adventure books is undiminished; at one point I think I had four fingers stuck in various pages so that I could try out various alternatives.)
After waking up from a dream in which I had bought a roleplaying game about a city under the ocean, I decided to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. First thing that surprised me: it was in the children's section of the library. Second thing: it's effectively the 1860s version of hard sci-fi. Jules Verne seems to be striving to make every detail seems as plausible as possible based on the science and engineering capabilities of the time. Third thing: it's kinda boring. The book is mostly a travelogue that spends very little time fleshing out its characters, and the big incidents of the book are separated by many pages worth of descriptions of fish.
While reading this, I struggled to see how you could adapt this into a feature film for the 21st century. Surely the sense of wonder about the undersea world has been lost. I didn't get to see Oceans at the Film Festival (which might have changed my mind), but it sounds like I happily avoid the narrator-rage that people experienced in listening to Pierce Brosnan for 84 minutes.
How to Get Rich was a fun non-fiction read about how to be an entrepreneur. Unsparing in its description of the prices you'd have to pay in order to be rich, and filled with a lot of wisdom. Along with the Four Hour Work Week, this is one I think I'm going to have to re-read.
Next post, why I finished The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first book in a trilogy), and didn't feel the need to read the rest of the series; and a book that scared me.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Books: February to March
The Iliad occupied most of February. I worked my way through two translations: the funny, pulpy Rieu, and the beautifully written Fagles. It's an impressive war story with a surprising focus not on the beginning or end of the war, but on the showdown between Hector and Achilles. It makes me keen to read the 7-part graphic novel Age of Bronze that tells the story of the war from Paris' dream to the post-Trojan Horse slaughter.
The Hunger Games started off as a ho-hum rip-off of Battle Royale and a third of the way through the book became utterly gripping due to a single character reveal. Vivid, tough, brutal and the sequel (coming up in a few paragraphs) is even better.
I read the script for Tell No One, an adaptation of a Harlen Coben novel. A fast tight read with that thriller plot arc: amazing hook, great second act where you have no idea what's going on, and then a conventional finale. Conventional, but with strong emotional pay-offs.
It makes me think about Se7en, which follows a similar structure but whose finale transcends the conventions through some magical combination of simplicity, implication and acting. However, I've always been taken with the idea that the true ending to Se7en involves David obeying John Doe's instructions: becoming Wrath, conducting the execution, and then - in full view of the camera - blowing his own brains out.
I know that version of the movie could never have been made in 1995, but there's such a dramatic purity (and relentless logic) to that ending that I can't help reshooting it in my head (heh) every time I watch it.
Bully In Sight is an English book about bullying. A little bit of research for Workplace Bully, natch.
The Complete Indigo Prime - in my mind, Indigo Prime is a classic 2000AD serial, riffing off of Sapphire and Steel, and creating an amazing story about reality engineers saving the universe. Turns out that it's far crazier, patchier and more incoherent than I ever remembered, and that I read far less of it than I thought. Nice long story arc involving Jack the Ripper and a time-travelling train, though.
Catching Fire is the sequel to The Hunger Games, which is basically a version of Battle Royale (teenagers fight to the death in the wilderness for the amusement of spectators) in post-apocalyptic America, with a fair bit of class warfare thrown in for good measure. It took me a while to warm up to the Hunger Games, but Catching Fire was excellent - mostly because it completely defied my expectations about how it would play out.
If it's the obligation of the writer to find the way forward that you didn't expect but realise makes perfect sense, then Susan Collins definitely fulfilled her obligation to me. I won't say I'm a raving fan, but I am very much looking forward to Mockingjay.
Shafts of Strife was published as a comic in the Listener in the 80s. I can remember the beginning and the end but had no idea it told such a tight little story.
I followed that up with Aliens vs Pooh, courtesy of Mr Morgue.
The Complete Persepolis is a lovely story about a girl growing up in Iran, that contains an unexpected detour into another country that I found delightful, funny, boring, off-topic and ultimately moving. It's odd to read an autobiography that straddles the line between finding a deeper meaning in the author's life, and just being a series of events that happened.
Dark Days is the sequel to the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. It didn't leave much of an impression on me, except that there were some good action sequences.
The Hunger Games started off as a ho-hum rip-off of Battle Royale and a third of the way through the book became utterly gripping due to a single character reveal. Vivid, tough, brutal and the sequel (coming up in a few paragraphs) is even better.
I read the script for Tell No One, an adaptation of a Harlen Coben novel. A fast tight read with that thriller plot arc: amazing hook, great second act where you have no idea what's going on, and then a conventional finale. Conventional, but with strong emotional pay-offs.
It makes me think about Se7en, which follows a similar structure but whose finale transcends the conventions through some magical combination of simplicity, implication and acting. However, I've always been taken with the idea that the true ending to Se7en involves David obeying John Doe's instructions: becoming Wrath, conducting the execution, and then - in full view of the camera - blowing his own brains out.
I know that version of the movie could never have been made in 1995, but there's such a dramatic purity (and relentless logic) to that ending that I can't help reshooting it in my head (heh) every time I watch it.
Bully In Sight is an English book about bullying. A little bit of research for Workplace Bully, natch.
The Complete Indigo Prime - in my mind, Indigo Prime is a classic 2000AD serial, riffing off of Sapphire and Steel, and creating an amazing story about reality engineers saving the universe. Turns out that it's far crazier, patchier and more incoherent than I ever remembered, and that I read far less of it than I thought. Nice long story arc involving Jack the Ripper and a time-travelling train, though.
Catching Fire is the sequel to The Hunger Games, which is basically a version of Battle Royale (teenagers fight to the death in the wilderness for the amusement of spectators) in post-apocalyptic America, with a fair bit of class warfare thrown in for good measure. It took me a while to warm up to the Hunger Games, but Catching Fire was excellent - mostly because it completely defied my expectations about how it would play out.
If it's the obligation of the writer to find the way forward that you didn't expect but realise makes perfect sense, then Susan Collins definitely fulfilled her obligation to me. I won't say I'm a raving fan, but I am very much looking forward to Mockingjay.
Shafts of Strife was published as a comic in the Listener in the 80s. I can remember the beginning and the end but had no idea it told such a tight little story.
I followed that up with Aliens vs Pooh, courtesy of Mr Morgue.
The Complete Persepolis is a lovely story about a girl growing up in Iran, that contains an unexpected detour into another country that I found delightful, funny, boring, off-topic and ultimately moving. It's odd to read an autobiography that straddles the line between finding a deeper meaning in the author's life, and just being a series of events that happened.
Dark Days is the sequel to the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. It didn't leave much of an impression on me, except that there were some good action sequences.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Made to Stick: Keeping things Simple
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is about creating ideas that stick in people's minds, ideas that make people want to spread them. The first element of 'stickiness' is simplicity.
Simplicity is a proverb
When you're creating an idea, you want it to be short, easy to remember. Ideally you want your idea to be short and WORTHWHILE for people to remember. For instance, think about these phrases:
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
Proverbs are worthwhile ideas that are simple, profound, and (most importantly) useful. They provide a guide about how to behave in a complex situation or a principle to live by. Proverbs provide wisdom. And people share them - the bird-in-the-hand proverb can be found in Spain, Russia, Iceland, and even in medieval Latin documents. Its origin may be from one of Aesop's Fables, dating from around 570 B.C.
Simplicity is the most important thing
Think about a subject you know a lot about. Now, if you want to, try this mental exercise - it should take about 10 seconds. Imagine a friend asks you to explain a bit about that subject to them. They'll give you a couple of minutes to give them a bit of an overview of it.
Have a think about a few of the things you'd want to explain to them.
While you're doing that, I'll try it with the idea of time management. Skip past the bullet-points and I'll keep on with the post:
So, here's why simplicity is good. People who are experts want to communicate a lot to their audience - and the tendancy is to communicate too much. I have 12 things in my list above - the chances are that 10 minutes after I explain this stuff, my friend is going to remember nothing. Maybe one or two things at most.
When an idea is simple, it means you've found its core - the most important thing about the idea that you want to communicate.
You can't have 5 'most important' things that you want to communicate. You've got to prioritise by weeding out the important ideas that aren't the most important idea. You've got to eliminate the superfluous.
What's left is like a proverb or a haiku: the most important thing about your idea.
If I were to do this with my list above, getting rid of stuff that'd merely be nice to talk about, I'm left with this:
If I then eliminate the stuff that I think would be really beneficial to know, I get this:
Those are four principles of time management that I think are really important to know. But four is still too many - if I were forced to choose only the most important thing, then what would it be?
Only do stuff that adds to the person you want to be.
So, I didn't know that before I did this exercise. For me, the purpose behind time management is to help you live the life you want to live, and to help you be the person you want to be. Now, discussing that idea any further would be irrelevant to this post but it's a good illustration of this principle.
***
The chapter on Simplicity goes into more detail about how to achieve short, profound, essential statements of your idea. It talks about relating your idea to concepts your audience is already familiar with, and with using analogies (especially analogies that allow the audience to extrapolate a lot of information from them).
The whole chapter is a worthwhile read, but essentially it emphasises again and again the reason why we should aim for simplicity: when people remember the core of your idea, they know what's important. They know what to focus on in any given situation. Knowing the core allows them to make good choices under pressure.
Next up, ... Surprise!
Previous posts in the series:
In which I am impressed by the cover
An overview of the book
Simplicity is a proverb
When you're creating an idea, you want it to be short, easy to remember. Ideally you want your idea to be short and WORTHWHILE for people to remember. For instance, think about these phrases:
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
Proverbs are worthwhile ideas that are simple, profound, and (most importantly) useful. They provide a guide about how to behave in a complex situation or a principle to live by. Proverbs provide wisdom. And people share them - the bird-in-the-hand proverb can be found in Spain, Russia, Iceland, and even in medieval Latin documents. Its origin may be from one of Aesop's Fables, dating from around 570 B.C.
Simplicity is the most important thing
Think about a subject you know a lot about. Now, if you want to, try this mental exercise - it should take about 10 seconds. Imagine a friend asks you to explain a bit about that subject to them. They'll give you a couple of minutes to give them a bit of an overview of it.
Have a think about a few of the things you'd want to explain to them.
While you're doing that, I'll try it with the idea of time management. Skip past the bullet-points and I'll keep on with the post:
- write everything down
- review stuff regularly
- keep a list of tasks you want to do
- have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
- do stuff that's important but not urgent
- do things in small chunks
- do stuff that excites you
- do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
- eliminate unimportant stuff
- keep a notebook with you to write stuff down
- time management is a habit - start small
- there are lots of good books to read.
So, here's why simplicity is good. People who are experts want to communicate a lot to their audience - and the tendancy is to communicate too much. I have 12 things in my list above - the chances are that 10 minutes after I explain this stuff, my friend is going to remember nothing. Maybe one or two things at most.
When an idea is simple, it means you've found its core - the most important thing about the idea that you want to communicate.
You can't have 5 'most important' things that you want to communicate. You've got to prioritise by weeding out the important ideas that aren't the most important idea. You've got to eliminate the superfluous.
What's left is like a proverb or a haiku: the most important thing about your idea.
If I were to do this with my list above, getting rid of stuff that'd merely be nice to talk about, I'm left with this:
- have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
- do stuff that's important but not urgent
- do things in small chunks
- do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
- eliminate unimportant stuff
- time management is a habit - start small
If I then eliminate the stuff that I think would be really beneficial to know, I get this:
- do stuff that's important but not urgent
- do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
- eliminate unimportant stuff
- time management is a habit - start small
Those are four principles of time management that I think are really important to know. But four is still too many - if I were forced to choose only the most important thing, then what would it be?
Only do stuff that adds to the person you want to be.
So, I didn't know that before I did this exercise. For me, the purpose behind time management is to help you live the life you want to live, and to help you be the person you want to be. Now, discussing that idea any further would be irrelevant to this post but it's a good illustration of this principle.
***
The chapter on Simplicity goes into more detail about how to achieve short, profound, essential statements of your idea. It talks about relating your idea to concepts your audience is already familiar with, and with using analogies (especially analogies that allow the audience to extrapolate a lot of information from them).
The whole chapter is a worthwhile read, but essentially it emphasises again and again the reason why we should aim for simplicity: when people remember the core of your idea, they know what's important. They know what to focus on in any given situation. Knowing the core allows them to make good choices under pressure.
Next up, ... Surprise!
Previous posts in the series:
In which I am impressed by the cover
An overview of the book
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Books: January
Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert is the story of an army of mercenaries laying seige to Carthage in the third century BC. I was enjoying it until I lost the library's copy of it on the train. But ... go Project Gutenberg! Here's an online copy of it.
Illium by Dan Simmons took me by surprise. I thought it was a simple re-telling of the Trojan War where the role of gods is taken by time-travelling humans with advanced technology. It's more complicated than that - there's an inter-cutting storyline between three planets that doesn't fully pay off by the end of this first book, but has helped to set up a pretty amazing change in the situation. Favourite subplot: a bromance between two robots.
The Left Hand of Darkness - a simple, ultimately moving book about first contact. Le Guin creates a world that simulataneously feels real and like an parable.
The Four Hour Work Week is filled with some quite inspiring ideas about creating more time for yourself. I'll be re-reading this one more closely.
Olympos is the sequel to Illium (above). If Illium was about exploring the novel's setting, then this is about exploding it into action. There's a game called Sorceror which has a concept called a Kicker: a starting situation that radically upsets everyone's lives and the status quo, forcing unpredictable responses from everyone. Olympos starts with a great Kicker, and continues to place the characters in terrible situations where they must choose, choose and choose again while under time pressures and limited information. It is great stuff, and Achilles is once again a bad-ass.
This stuff has inspired me to give the Illiad and the Odyssey a go.
Mixtape turns out to be a sweet, funny little script. I really liked it and wish it the best in its journey towards becoming a movie.
Illium by Dan Simmons took me by surprise. I thought it was a simple re-telling of the Trojan War where the role of gods is taken by time-travelling humans with advanced technology. It's more complicated than that - there's an inter-cutting storyline between three planets that doesn't fully pay off by the end of this first book, but has helped to set up a pretty amazing change in the situation. Favourite subplot: a bromance between two robots.
The Left Hand of Darkness - a simple, ultimately moving book about first contact. Le Guin creates a world that simulataneously feels real and like an parable.
The Four Hour Work Week is filled with some quite inspiring ideas about creating more time for yourself. I'll be re-reading this one more closely.
Olympos is the sequel to Illium (above). If Illium was about exploring the novel's setting, then this is about exploding it into action. There's a game called Sorceror which has a concept called a Kicker: a starting situation that radically upsets everyone's lives and the status quo, forcing unpredictable responses from everyone. Olympos starts with a great Kicker, and continues to place the characters in terrible situations where they must choose, choose and choose again while under time pressures and limited information. It is great stuff, and Achilles is once again a bad-ass.
This stuff has inspired me to give the Illiad and the Odyssey a go.
Mixtape turns out to be a sweet, funny little script. I really liked it and wish it the best in its journey towards becoming a movie.
Friday, January 15, 2010
2009: Favourite Books
I read this year! Here are some highlights:
Sharp Teeth: a verse-novel about rival tribes of werewolves using LA gang culture to survive.
Presentation Zen: a simple, colourful guide to making your presentations easier to engage with and be remembered. The subject of many many posts this year, and (crucially) started my line of reading books about the essence of story.
The Garden of Last Days: a gruelling, extremely slow-burning thriller about one night in a Florida strip-club. By the author of The House of Sand and Fog. Highly recommended, but ... yeah ... did I mention 'gruelling'? It's an extremely very rather tense read.
The Sleep Dep Online Exquisite Corpse: Chris' collaborative story-telling game that started moody and ended insanely. Led to ...
The Event: a collaborative story about Wellington in the throes of an apocalypse. Great writing from everyone, but especially worth checking out for the character of Margaret's special POV.
The Dip: a book about quitting that led to the toughest-to-write series of blog post I've done so far.
Made to Stick: I have struggled to take notes on this book for the last couple of months, but I'm now ready to start blogging about it. Made to Stick is all about finding ideas that people want to spread (whether that be urban legends, inspirational anecdotes or jokes).
Under the Dome: Stephen King returns to small-town Maine and then nukes it.
Passengers: a script written entirely in first-person, about what it's like to be possessed by a pleasure-seeking parasite that takes over your body and wipes out your memory. A good story, and a brilliant technical exercise.
Buried: a script for a low-budget feature film set entirely in a coffin. It's a quick read, and slightly claustrophobia-inducing.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Synopsis: Made to Stick (An Overview)
Made to Stick is the most interesting book I've read this year.(*) It shows you how to make your arguments and presentations more memorable and more believable.
(*) 'Made to Stick' ties with 'In Praise of Slow' for the book I've read this year that's been most useful in my life.
The authors, two brothers called Chip and Dan Heath, describe six principles that make your story 'sticky'. By 'sticky', they mean that an audience is likely to remember what you've said, believe what you've said, and then tell other people what you've said.
The six principles are:
I'm going to go into more detail on each principle in later posts. For now, here's a preview:
Simplicity: you need to create a proverb
In order to make your message sticky, your message needs to simple and profound. Easy to remember and easy to pass on. A good example of what you're aiming for is a proverb (for instance, 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you').
To achieve this simplicity, you'll need to be ruthless in your efforts to reduce your message to its core. You'll need to exclude everything that doesn't matter.
Unexpectedness: this sub-heading demonstrates my point
People will remember your message if you suprise them. Be counter-intuitive; violate their expectations.
You can also ask questions that reveal to your audience they have gaps in their knowledge. That generates interest and curiousity, and they'll listen to you as you fill those gaps.
Concreteness: talk about people, not percentages
You need to explain your ideas at a human, everyday level. Use real examples, vivid images, and natural speech.
Credibility: how do you make people believe you?
This section talks about how to craft your message so that it helps people test your idea for themselves.
Emotions: how do you make someone care?
Mother Teresa once said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."
You make someone care by making them feel. We are wired to feel things for people: specific people, who are known to us, or seem real. It's not easy for us to feel something for a mass of people or an abstraction.
Stories: preparing us for action
Stories teach us how to act once we believe in the message.
Keep a message simple so that people can remember it and pass it on. Craft your message so that people want to learn more, believe what you're saying, and know what you want them to do next.
Why do we need these principles?
Can you remember ever explaining something and then suddenly realising that your audience wasn't really following what you were saying?
Specifically, can you remember doing stuff like:
The six principles are weapons that can be used to fight the curse of knowledge and create a story that your audience can follow, understand, remember and spread.
I'll dig into them in later posts. In the meantime, here' sTrent's review of 'Made to Stick', over at The Simple Dollar.
Here are my first impressions of the book.
I first mentioned Made to Stick way back when I was synopsising Presentation Zen.
(*) 'Made to Stick' ties with 'In Praise of Slow' for the book I've read this year that's been most useful in my life.
The authors, two brothers called Chip and Dan Heath, describe six principles that make your story 'sticky'. By 'sticky', they mean that an audience is likely to remember what you've said, believe what you've said, and then tell other people what you've said.
The six principles are:
- Simplicity
- Unexpectedness
- Concreteness
- Credibility
- Emotions
- Stories
I'm going to go into more detail on each principle in later posts. For now, here's a preview:
Simplicity: you need to create a proverb
In order to make your message sticky, your message needs to simple and profound. Easy to remember and easy to pass on. A good example of what you're aiming for is a proverb (for instance, 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you').
To achieve this simplicity, you'll need to be ruthless in your efforts to reduce your message to its core. You'll need to exclude everything that doesn't matter.
Unexpectedness: this sub-heading demonstrates my point
People will remember your message if you suprise them. Be counter-intuitive; violate their expectations.
You can also ask questions that reveal to your audience they have gaps in their knowledge. That generates interest and curiousity, and they'll listen to you as you fill those gaps.
Concreteness: talk about people, not percentages
You need to explain your ideas at a human, everyday level. Use real examples, vivid images, and natural speech.
Credibility: how do you make people believe you?
This section talks about how to craft your message so that it helps people test your idea for themselves.
Emotions: how do you make someone care?
Mother Teresa once said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."
You make someone care by making them feel. We are wired to feel things for people: specific people, who are known to us, or seem real. It's not easy for us to feel something for a mass of people or an abstraction.
Stories: preparing us for action
Stories teach us how to act once we believe in the message.
Keep a message simple so that people can remember it and pass it on. Craft your message so that people want to learn more, believe what you're saying, and know what you want them to do next.
Why do we need these principles?
Can you remember ever explaining something and then suddenly realising that your audience wasn't really following what you were saying?
Specifically, can you remember doing stuff like:
- discovering while you were talking that there was something vital they needed to know in order to understand your point
- using jargon
- assuming your audience knew about things that had happened earlier in the week
- skipping over the basics and discussing reasonably advanced or complicated details
- not finishing sentences, because it was very clear in your own head what you meant
- realising that you'd told the story out of order
The six principles are weapons that can be used to fight the curse of knowledge and create a story that your audience can follow, understand, remember and spread.
I'll dig into them in later posts. In the meantime, here' sTrent's review of 'Made to Stick', over at The Simple Dollar.
Here are my first impressions of the book.
I first mentioned Made to Stick way back when I was synopsising Presentation Zen.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Under the Dome: The Conclusion
As I mentioned in the previous post, Stephen King's is a 900 page novel about a small town that's been cut off from the outside world by an invisible force-field. By the time we hit pages 600 to 700, Under the Dome has to resolve three big questions:
+ What is the Dome?
+ Will they get out?
+ How will the political situation in the town be resolved?
I felt the end of Under the Dome was a bit of a let-down, actually. The book spents most of its length setting up a series of impossible-to-resolve-happily relationships, bringing everybody into conflicts that seem like they will only be resolvable through extended guerilla warfare and public executions. King instead chooses to spin this around and in one vividly written sequence refocuses the story on three scattered groups of people, and chooses to completely ignore the conflicts between them.
I'm being intentionally vague about this section of the book, because I don't want to spoil anything. However, this choice removes a lot of the Lord of the Flies-esque tension I saw in the premise of the book. I have heard that a TV series version of Under the Dome is being planned, and I can totally get behind that as a concept - using the novel as a starting point, I think there's a lot of tensions that can be explored (and subplots that can be invented) that will give this story the sense of epic scale that I sense its striving for.
In fact, if I were to sum up the reason why I don't think Under the Dome quite works as spectacularly as I think it should, it's that it feels caught between doing two things well: being an extremely fast-paced airport novel about people under pressure versus being a mean-spirited and leisurely observer of humans trying not to give in to the worst elements of their nature.
I also think that it doesn't play hardball enough. I won't go into details, but at about page 500 I started giggling because I thought I'd figured out where the novel was going to go. It suddenly occured to me that in the sort of novel King was writing, there was actually no guarantee that any particular character would survive. (And no particular reason for them to, either - this is a pretty great example of an ensemble cast of characters.) The story is primed to deliver a sucker-punch of such magnitude that it'd leave the reader reeling, wondering what would happen next. I leave it to you to discover what actually happens.
As for the resolution to the story: What is the Dome? Do they get out? ...
... You might remember I pointed out that this town exists in the same universe as Castle Rock and Derry. The long-term King reader might also note that this implies it exists in the same universe as Haven - which in turn implies a pretty neat explanation for the existence of the Dome.
(But that's not where the story goes.)
I was actually fine with the explanation for why the Dome exists, and the finale reveals that the whole novel has an admirable thematic consistency - it's a nice examination of hate and empathy, qualities that all the characters have been touched by.
In total, I enjoyed Under the Dome but felt it played a little too safe. A slow start, an INCREDIBLE middle section, and a resolution that I felt deflated a lot of the tension that had been built up. (However, that resolution did contain a great little scene in a fallout shelter.)
I'm looking forward to re-reading this one.
+ What is the Dome?
+ Will they get out?
+ How will the political situation in the town be resolved?
I felt the end of Under the Dome was a bit of a let-down, actually. The book spents most of its length setting up a series of impossible-to-resolve-happily relationships, bringing everybody into conflicts that seem like they will only be resolvable through extended guerilla warfare and public executions. King instead chooses to spin this around and in one vividly written sequence refocuses the story on three scattered groups of people, and chooses to completely ignore the conflicts between them.
I'm being intentionally vague about this section of the book, because I don't want to spoil anything. However, this choice removes a lot of the Lord of the Flies-esque tension I saw in the premise of the book. I have heard that a TV series version of Under the Dome is being planned, and I can totally get behind that as a concept - using the novel as a starting point, I think there's a lot of tensions that can be explored (and subplots that can be invented) that will give this story the sense of epic scale that I sense its striving for.
In fact, if I were to sum up the reason why I don't think Under the Dome quite works as spectacularly as I think it should, it's that it feels caught between doing two things well: being an extremely fast-paced airport novel about people under pressure versus being a mean-spirited and leisurely observer of humans trying not to give in to the worst elements of their nature.
I also think that it doesn't play hardball enough. I won't go into details, but at about page 500 I started giggling because I thought I'd figured out where the novel was going to go. It suddenly occured to me that in the sort of novel King was writing, there was actually no guarantee that any particular character would survive. (And no particular reason for them to, either - this is a pretty great example of an ensemble cast of characters.) The story is primed to deliver a sucker-punch of such magnitude that it'd leave the reader reeling, wondering what would happen next. I leave it to you to discover what actually happens.
As for the resolution to the story: What is the Dome? Do they get out? ...
... You might remember I pointed out that this town exists in the same universe as Castle Rock and Derry. The long-term King reader might also note that this implies it exists in the same universe as Haven - which in turn implies a pretty neat explanation for the existence of the Dome.
(But that's not where the story goes.)
I was actually fine with the explanation for why the Dome exists, and the finale reveals that the whole novel has an admirable thematic consistency - it's a nice examination of hate and empathy, qualities that all the characters have been touched by.
In total, I enjoyed Under the Dome but felt it played a little too safe. A slow start, an INCREDIBLE middle section, and a resolution that I felt deflated a lot of the tension that had been built up. (However, that resolution did contain a great little scene in a fallout shelter.)
I'm looking forward to re-reading this one.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Under the Dome
by Stephen King
King's latest book returns to familiar ground: a small town in Maine.(*) The premise is simple: the town of Chester's Mill has been surrounded by an invisible force-field. No-one can get out and nothing can get in. The town is completely cut off from the outside world.(**) What happens next?
* See also Salem's Lot, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things, and Bag of Bones. In fact, Chester's Mill is located just outside of Castle Rock and TR-90 - the settings of those last two books.
** In fact, Under The Dome feels like a cross between The Simpsons Movie and Lord of the Flies.
The book starts well: quickly establishing the situation and exploring it in clearly described scenes that feel truthful and reasonable. Over the next 200 pages, though, the book starts to bog down a little bit - moving from scene to scene between a vast number of characters; Under the Dome has such a large cast that in the earlier stages I often lost track of who I was reading about or what their story was. I also found myself not caring about many of the characters - something I've never experienced in a 'small town' King novel before. King has a gift for rapidly establishing why a character is worth paying attention to - something which seemed to occasionally missing here.
At some point between pages 200 and 300, however, the story picks up. Characters begin to interact with each other, their scenes and stories begin to tie together. Most importantly, it became clear to me that the first 200 pages had set up a series of questions I desperately wanted to know the answers to. As I sped through the next 400 pages of the book, at first it was because I knew exactly what disasters and crises I wanted to read about and King kept paying them off in better, more intriguing ways than I'd imagined. And then he started to spin the situation into chaotic directions I didn't expect, and as a result I surrendered myself completely to his story-telling.
The middle section of Under the Dome is a pleasure to read.
If I have criticisms of the first two-thirds of Under the Dome, it's that on my first read the deterioration in the town feels too quick. Partly that's because people react in extreme ways very quickly once the dome goes over the town; partly it's because there are a couple of utterly bugnuts crazy people already in the town. Chester's Mill is unstable before the Dome goes up, which is great for creating drama, but not so great for observing what would happen to a bunch of normal people in this situation (which I think is what I was expecting to read).
Which brings me to the end. Under the Dome has to resolve three big questions:
+ What is the Dome?
+ Will they get out?
+ How will the political situation in the town be resolved?
I'll deal with that in the next post.
King's latest book returns to familiar ground: a small town in Maine.(*) The premise is simple: the town of Chester's Mill has been surrounded by an invisible force-field. No-one can get out and nothing can get in. The town is completely cut off from the outside world.(**) What happens next?
* See also Salem's Lot, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things, and Bag of Bones. In fact, Chester's Mill is located just outside of Castle Rock and TR-90 - the settings of those last two books.
** In fact, Under The Dome feels like a cross between The Simpsons Movie and Lord of the Flies.
The book starts well: quickly establishing the situation and exploring it in clearly described scenes that feel truthful and reasonable. Over the next 200 pages, though, the book starts to bog down a little bit - moving from scene to scene between a vast number of characters; Under the Dome has such a large cast that in the earlier stages I often lost track of who I was reading about or what their story was. I also found myself not caring about many of the characters - something I've never experienced in a 'small town' King novel before. King has a gift for rapidly establishing why a character is worth paying attention to - something which seemed to occasionally missing here.
At some point between pages 200 and 300, however, the story picks up. Characters begin to interact with each other, their scenes and stories begin to tie together. Most importantly, it became clear to me that the first 200 pages had set up a series of questions I desperately wanted to know the answers to. As I sped through the next 400 pages of the book, at first it was because I knew exactly what disasters and crises I wanted to read about and King kept paying them off in better, more intriguing ways than I'd imagined. And then he started to spin the situation into chaotic directions I didn't expect, and as a result I surrendered myself completely to his story-telling.
The middle section of Under the Dome is a pleasure to read.
If I have criticisms of the first two-thirds of Under the Dome, it's that on my first read the deterioration in the town feels too quick. Partly that's because people react in extreme ways very quickly once the dome goes over the town; partly it's because there are a couple of utterly bugnuts crazy people already in the town. Chester's Mill is unstable before the Dome goes up, which is great for creating drama, but not so great for observing what would happen to a bunch of normal people in this situation (which I think is what I was expecting to read).
Which brings me to the end. Under the Dome has to resolve three big questions:
+ What is the Dome?
+ Will they get out?
+ How will the political situation in the town be resolved?
I'll deal with that in the next post.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Strain: ... and now I have a sore throat
Weird how reading a book where the primary symptom of vampirism is 'having a sore throat' can make me more aware of my own developing ill health.
The mid-section of The Strain starts developing some of the infected characters and their family members (aka future victims). This part of the novel felt very early James Herbert - it was good at rapidly building up mildly sympathetic characters and then killing them just as I was getting interested in them.
It also hinted at a bigger political situation involving ancient vampires that feels just slightly a little bit totally like antediluvians in Vampire the Masquerade.
cf. Penny Arcade.
The Strain finishes off with a lot of pulpy action that will undoubtably make a reasonable movie finale; it also draws on some stuff about rats that reminds me a lot of Scott Westerfeld's Peeps and The Last Days (*). The Strain is the first part in a trilogy, which means it feels like it stops at a reasonable point, rather than feeling like it's finished telling a story. That's irritating - it makes me want to read the next book, but by the time Book 2 comes out, it will totally have to rebuild my slowly emerging sympathy and enthusiasm for the characters - which, for me, may make the whole enterprise worth skipping until they've finished writing all three and I can read them from start to finish.
(*) Hmm, I've been reading a lot of vampire stuff recently ... not sure why ... and I'm seriously considering rewatching Season 3 of Buffy.
Conclusion: Moody, trashy, quite fun ... and probably worth waiting until they've finished the series - by which point I'm sure the first movie will have come out.
The mid-section of The Strain starts developing some of the infected characters and their family members (aka future victims). This part of the novel felt very early James Herbert - it was good at rapidly building up mildly sympathetic characters and then killing them just as I was getting interested in them.
It also hinted at a bigger political situation involving ancient vampires that feels just slightly a little bit totally like antediluvians in Vampire the Masquerade.
cf. Penny Arcade.
The Strain finishes off with a lot of pulpy action that will undoubtably make a reasonable movie finale; it also draws on some stuff about rats that reminds me a lot of Scott Westerfeld's Peeps and The Last Days (*). The Strain is the first part in a trilogy, which means it feels like it stops at a reasonable point, rather than feeling like it's finished telling a story. That's irritating - it makes me want to read the next book, but by the time Book 2 comes out, it will totally have to rebuild my slowly emerging sympathy and enthusiasm for the characters - which, for me, may make the whole enterprise worth skipping until they've finished writing all three and I can read them from start to finish.
(*) Hmm, I've been reading a lot of vampire stuff recently ... not sure why ... and I'm seriously considering rewatching Season 3 of Buffy.
Conclusion: Moody, trashy, quite fun ... and probably worth waiting until they've finished the series - by which point I'm sure the first movie will have come out.
Friday, July 17, 2009
The Strain
I've just started reading 'The Strain', a vampire novel co-written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hagen.
In some ways, it's reminding me of the Garden of Last Days in the way it's spending so much time focusing on the arrival of a plane filled with dead passengers (*), and the ensuing examination by the CDC. Like Garden, The Strain is also creating a sense of approaching doom.
(*) A nice riff on Dracula's arrival in England on the Demeter.
In other ways, it's reminding me of novels like the Keep and Nightworld by F. Paul Wilson with a little bit of Tom Clancy thrown in - pulpy, Euro-mystical (although not as bug-nuts insane as Wilson's 'Nightworld'), with a bit of 'super-competent protagonist' syndrome we usually find in modern blockbuster fiction. Oh, and a tendency to show off the authors' ability to google every single detail in the book to add an air of authority to what they're saying. (**)
(**) Something I'm guilty of, too!
I'm enjoying it so far (A biological horror novel? That sounds tailor-made for me), and I'm wondering how nasty and apocalyptic it's going to get. From the foreshadowing that's been going on, I can certainly see an I Am Legend level of civilisation destruction approaching -- and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out compared to the book's current sedate, precise tone.
... oh, and it has gotten under my skin. Last night, just after I started reading it, I had three separate vampirey/cannibally dreams ... which is a slightly higher rate than usual.
A couple of other things of note:
In some ways, it's reminding me of the Garden of Last Days in the way it's spending so much time focusing on the arrival of a plane filled with dead passengers (*), and the ensuing examination by the CDC. Like Garden, The Strain is also creating a sense of approaching doom.
(*) A nice riff on Dracula's arrival in England on the Demeter.
In other ways, it's reminding me of novels like the Keep and Nightworld by F. Paul Wilson with a little bit of Tom Clancy thrown in - pulpy, Euro-mystical (although not as bug-nuts insane as Wilson's 'Nightworld'), with a bit of 'super-competent protagonist' syndrome we usually find in modern blockbuster fiction. Oh, and a tendency to show off the authors' ability to google every single detail in the book to add an air of authority to what they're saying. (**)
(**) Something I'm guilty of, too!
I'm enjoying it so far (A biological horror novel? That sounds tailor-made for me), and I'm wondering how nasty and apocalyptic it's going to get. From the foreshadowing that's been going on, I can certainly see an I Am Legend level of civilisation destruction approaching -- and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out compared to the book's current sedate, precise tone.
... oh, and it has gotten under my skin. Last night, just after I started reading it, I had three separate vampirey/cannibally dreams ... which is a slightly higher rate than usual.
A couple of other things of note:
- I'm not really interested in any of the characters yet - they seem more like chess pieces with arbitrary flaws and likeable traits - but because they're in an interesting situation, I'm willing to follow them
- However, one character (Gus) has just been involved in a vividly written, short action sequence that's gotten him into a lot of trouble. He may be a Hispanic gang-member but what's happened to him is unfair, and I'm interested in finding out what happens to him next
- ... and if people are interested, I can talk a little about the thing the novel is doing that I once considered doing myself and decided that it would be in bad taste (there would be spoilers, though)
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Gerald's Game
by Stephen King
I like to re-read books. After my difficulties reading Garden of Last Days, I went back and re-read one of the lesser-known Stephen Kings. It's also one of the books I've been consistently tempted to adapt, probably due to its simple premise: Gerald's Game is about a woman handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere. No-one is coming to rescue her, and if she's going to survive she's going to have to think her way out.
The handcuffs are the most obvious of the two antagonists in this book. The second antagonist is the lead character's own mind; Jessie Burlingame experienced something genuinely horrible 25 years ago, and has spent most of the intervening time repressing it. That's led to her mind not only creating a bunch of different voices to represent different aspects of her personality, but also a deeply self-destructive desire to undercut her own achievements, make her screw up, and ultimately kill her (because she 'deserves it').
These voices rise to the fore once Jessie is handcuffed: without any way of escaping, she finally has quiet time to listen to her thoughts without distraction. The truth of this really hit me; it's a phenomena that's been experienced by me and a few people I know recently as we've been dealing with some unpleasant mental crap.
For me, this idea of the antagonist being your own thoughts is the strongest idea of the book and oddly under-developed.(*)
(*) I've now realised it also has a lot in common with one of the new things I'm playing around with.
Instead, the psychological complexity that I admire in Gerald's Game threatens to go completely out the window once King introduces a psycho-killer with pallid skin, sharpened canines, and a suitcase filled with human bones. It becomes a little difficult to focus on the idea of an enemy inside your own mind when you're afraid that Leatherface is going to come back and kill you the next night.
At least, that's been my memory of this book over the last 15 years. However, I realised during this time through that, to his credit, King does play with the idea that the killer is imaginary. In fact, he does more than play with it -- by the end, the killer is not only real, but it's also how the self-destructive elements of Jessie's own mind have chosen to manifest themselves.
Still, my scriptwriter voice kept yelling out while reading it that the idea of the killer was a bit lame. That he's there to motivate Jessie to escape, putting a time-limit on her actions. To 'Scriptwriter Me' there's already a character in this book that serves this purpose: a scared and hungry stray dog. In my hypothetical adaptation, I'd up the threat from this corner, and bring out Jessie's 'Inner Antagonist' voice more strongly.
I'm not even sure it needs the killer in the book. The reliving of Jessie's repressed memory is horrible enough - visceral, repulsive, banally evil - and King takes his time detailing the aftermath of it, as much as he would with any other thriller setpiece. Reading these sections reminded of conversations with some of my exes, in which we've watched a movie (like, True Romance, for instance) and they've been baffled at what I could have seen in it. Questions have been asked like "Why would you want to watch something like that?" "How does it make the world a better place?"
After reading the icky repressed memory sequence, I'm beginning to see their point.
Re-reading it, I was suprised to find that the repressed memory at the heart of the book is pretty much openly acknowledged about 1/4 of the way through, and vividly [shudder] dramatised at about the halfway point. And just when I figured that it was all done with, King does something really exciting: he ties Jessie's chances of escape to her ability to remember by hinting that there's something else that she's repressing, something that we haven't been made aware of. This inverts the value of her memory - making it something she has to use rather than push away from her.
Later, King pushes the timeframe of the story forward, much further than I expected him to. It had the effect of pulling me out of the book, but after taking a break and pushing on, it actually seemed quite natural. King used the flash-forward to demonstrate massive character change in Jessie, dump a whole bunch of exposition on us, and dramatise her final triumph over her mind (through the act of finishing a letter).
After finishing it, I realised that Gerald's Game might be another one of those books that I've long wanted to adapt but subsequently realise that I don't (Phantoms by Dean Koontz also falls into that category). If I were to push myself to articulate why this is, it'd be something like: there are things about this book that I find compelling, things I find easy to visualise cinematically, and especially there are things that I would like to do differently. The question is: would I like to spend two years doing them?
And maybe the answer is that, for me, Jessie's transformation is satisfying but not quite meaningful enough. She goes through hell, she triumphs over some really nasty adversity, but the emotional bang isn't quite there for me. And I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure how to make it happen - and THAT is what any adaptation of this story really needs.
Random thoughts:
I like to re-read books. After my difficulties reading Garden of Last Days, I went back and re-read one of the lesser-known Stephen Kings. It's also one of the books I've been consistently tempted to adapt, probably due to its simple premise: Gerald's Game is about a woman handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere. No-one is coming to rescue her, and if she's going to survive she's going to have to think her way out.
The handcuffs are the most obvious of the two antagonists in this book. The second antagonist is the lead character's own mind; Jessie Burlingame experienced something genuinely horrible 25 years ago, and has spent most of the intervening time repressing it. That's led to her mind not only creating a bunch of different voices to represent different aspects of her personality, but also a deeply self-destructive desire to undercut her own achievements, make her screw up, and ultimately kill her (because she 'deserves it').
These voices rise to the fore once Jessie is handcuffed: without any way of escaping, she finally has quiet time to listen to her thoughts without distraction. The truth of this really hit me; it's a phenomena that's been experienced by me and a few people I know recently as we've been dealing with some unpleasant mental crap.
For me, this idea of the antagonist being your own thoughts is the strongest idea of the book and oddly under-developed.(*)
(*) I've now realised it also has a lot in common with one of the new things I'm playing around with.
Instead, the psychological complexity that I admire in Gerald's Game threatens to go completely out the window once King introduces a psycho-killer with pallid skin, sharpened canines, and a suitcase filled with human bones. It becomes a little difficult to focus on the idea of an enemy inside your own mind when you're afraid that Leatherface is going to come back and kill you the next night.
At least, that's been my memory of this book over the last 15 years. However, I realised during this time through that, to his credit, King does play with the idea that the killer is imaginary. In fact, he does more than play with it -- by the end, the killer is not only real, but it's also how the self-destructive elements of Jessie's own mind have chosen to manifest themselves.
Still, my scriptwriter voice kept yelling out while reading it that the idea of the killer was a bit lame. That he's there to motivate Jessie to escape, putting a time-limit on her actions. To 'Scriptwriter Me' there's already a character in this book that serves this purpose: a scared and hungry stray dog. In my hypothetical adaptation, I'd up the threat from this corner, and bring out Jessie's 'Inner Antagonist' voice more strongly.
I'm not even sure it needs the killer in the book. The reliving of Jessie's repressed memory is horrible enough - visceral, repulsive, banally evil - and King takes his time detailing the aftermath of it, as much as he would with any other thriller setpiece. Reading these sections reminded of conversations with some of my exes, in which we've watched a movie (like, True Romance, for instance) and they've been baffled at what I could have seen in it. Questions have been asked like "Why would you want to watch something like that?" "How does it make the world a better place?"
After reading the icky repressed memory sequence, I'm beginning to see their point.
Re-reading it, I was suprised to find that the repressed memory at the heart of the book is pretty much openly acknowledged about 1/4 of the way through, and vividly [shudder] dramatised at about the halfway point. And just when I figured that it was all done with, King does something really exciting: he ties Jessie's chances of escape to her ability to remember by hinting that there's something else that she's repressing, something that we haven't been made aware of. This inverts the value of her memory - making it something she has to use rather than push away from her.
Later, King pushes the timeframe of the story forward, much further than I expected him to. It had the effect of pulling me out of the book, but after taking a break and pushing on, it actually seemed quite natural. King used the flash-forward to demonstrate massive character change in Jessie, dump a whole bunch of exposition on us, and dramatise her final triumph over her mind (through the act of finishing a letter).
After finishing it, I realised that Gerald's Game might be another one of those books that I've long wanted to adapt but subsequently realise that I don't (Phantoms by Dean Koontz also falls into that category). If I were to push myself to articulate why this is, it'd be something like: there are things about this book that I find compelling, things I find easy to visualise cinematically, and especially there are things that I would like to do differently. The question is: would I like to spend two years doing them?
And maybe the answer is that, for me, Jessie's transformation is satisfying but not quite meaningful enough. She goes through hell, she triumphs over some really nasty adversity, but the emotional bang isn't quite there for me. And I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure how to make it happen - and THAT is what any adaptation of this story really needs.
Random thoughts:
- Gerald's Game is a companion piece to Dolores Claiborne. I seem to remember it was written at a time when he had come under a small amount of criticism for not being able to write women as psychologically deeply as he did men.
- Actually, re-reading it made me realise how influential this novel was on me: the precision with which King deals with describing how Jessie tries to get out of her predicament. It's something I drew on when writing The Limit (in fact, that script contains a woman in a very similar situation).
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Garden of Last Days
by Andre Dubus III
I'm about 40% of the way through this novel at the moment. Do you remember that sequence in Boogie Nights where everybody's lives have turned toxic and now things are going horribly wrong for them? It's a sequence that goes on for about 15 minutes, intercutting (if I remember correctly) between Mark Wahlberg, Heather Graham, and Don Cheadle - all of it scored with this slowly tolling bell, ringing over and over again.
The sense of doom is near unbearable. (*)
* In a film filled with great cinematic moments, this sequence is the one I find the strongest due to its ability to create and sustain that single emotion.
The Garden of Last Days has created and now sustained that sense of doom for 191 pages. I've had to stop reading halfway through a chapter because a character I at first thought was despicable (and have now come to feel sympathy for) is just about to accidentally do something that will get him into so much trouble with so many characters ...
In fact, that's the reason I've stopped reading. I feel that the book is just about to change up: from a sense of doom, to the situation exploding. Not only am I nervous about finding out what happens, I'm also nervous about the dynamics of the book (which I've been enjoying immensely) changing so dramatically.
Brief summary: The Garden of Last Days, so far, has taken place entirely over one night at a strip club in Miami. It rhythmically switches between characters at the club - including an elderly widow prone to panic attacks, and a three year old girl - slowly building up a sense of character identification and momentum. The overall impression is of a book about people whose lives are in the process of not turning out well, and the story seems to be in the process of turning from a drama into a thriller. (**)
** Ian McEwan meets Carl Hiassen, I guess.
I'm about 40% of the way through this novel at the moment. Do you remember that sequence in Boogie Nights where everybody's lives have turned toxic and now things are going horribly wrong for them? It's a sequence that goes on for about 15 minutes, intercutting (if I remember correctly) between Mark Wahlberg, Heather Graham, and Don Cheadle - all of it scored with this slowly tolling bell, ringing over and over again.
The sense of doom is near unbearable. (*)
* In a film filled with great cinematic moments, this sequence is the one I find the strongest due to its ability to create and sustain that single emotion.
The Garden of Last Days has created and now sustained that sense of doom for 191 pages. I've had to stop reading halfway through a chapter because a character I at first thought was despicable (and have now come to feel sympathy for) is just about to accidentally do something that will get him into so much trouble with so many characters ...
In fact, that's the reason I've stopped reading. I feel that the book is just about to change up: from a sense of doom, to the situation exploding. Not only am I nervous about finding out what happens, I'm also nervous about the dynamics of the book (which I've been enjoying immensely) changing so dramatically.
Brief summary: The Garden of Last Days, so far, has taken place entirely over one night at a strip club in Miami. It rhythmically switches between characters at the club - including an elderly widow prone to panic attacks, and a three year old girl - slowly building up a sense of character identification and momentum. The overall impression is of a book about people whose lives are in the process of not turning out well, and the story seems to be in the process of turning from a drama into a thriller. (**)
** Ian McEwan meets Carl Hiassen, I guess.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Sharp Teeth
A novel about werewolves, written in verse.
Spends the first two-thirds getting up to speed
And the last third delivering
On its promise.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Flashforward
Robert Sawyer's novel takes a starting situation I found pretty interesting (due to an experiment gone wrong, everyone in the world gets a two minute glimpse of their lives 21 years in the future), and uses that as a springboard to examine the conflict between free will and determinism.
And it's soon to be a TV series. The book provides an excellent tapestry for a show, and so far it seems to be making changes that make it (a) less cerebral, and (b) more likely to sustain a 3+ season TV series.
Flashforward's inspired me to seek out other sci-fi novels with strong 'What if' premises and good characterisations. Anybody got any suggestions?
And it's soon to be a TV series. The book provides an excellent tapestry for a show, and so far it seems to be making changes that make it (a) less cerebral, and (b) more likely to sustain a 3+ season TV series.
Flashforward's inspired me to seek out other sci-fi novels with strong 'What if' premises and good characterisations. Anybody got any suggestions?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Duma Key
by Stephen King
Rather than talk about the plot of King's latest novel (the owner of a construction company loses his arm in a horrific on-site accident, and has both medical and supernatural difficulties adjusting to his new life), I'd like to talk about the way it feels.
The novel's beginning is both brutally efficient at changing the status quo by destroying a man's life, and contemplative - it's interested in and observes the ideas of healing, and of establishing a new routine. It takes about a hundred pages to deal with this setup, and then the focus clearly shifts into the main character's new life, his new routine, meeting new people, and slowly ramping up the supernatural elements. From there, it's the steady accumulation of back story, placing tension on old and new friends, and a rising animosity (from the supernatural threat.
Duma Key is definitely a companion piece to Bag of Bones - almost an echo of it in some ways. The two stories both deal with grief, relocating, and a generational mystery - but Duma Key feels looser, more relaxed, and King is diving right into an exploration of the creative process (this time painting, rather than writing) rather than exploring the idea of writer's block. The threat here is also far more epic than in Bag of Bones. Its reach is (theoretically) global, and the sense of power and evil that King manages to create at times approaches the One Ring.
The writing contains King's standard tricks - end of chapter foreshadowing, italicised inner voices speaking in sinister fragments, wealthy protagonists, and Outsiders versus the White (although not referred to by those names). These things have been done many times before, but they're still effective. What's even more effective is his gift of creating characters you care about - which leads to a great 40 pages towards the end of the story that are so desperate and awful, so unafraid to truly screw with the characters you care about, that is easily matches Bag of Bones' concluding experiment in point-of-view for horror.
Recommended - and it makes me wonder if he's gearing up to write stories that are completely non-supernatural, non-thrillers. A fulfilment of the "modern Dickens" label that some publishers and reviewers have been applying to him ever since the Green Mile.
Rather than talk about the plot of King's latest novel (the owner of a construction company loses his arm in a horrific on-site accident, and has both medical and supernatural difficulties adjusting to his new life), I'd like to talk about the way it feels.
The novel's beginning is both brutally efficient at changing the status quo by destroying a man's life, and contemplative - it's interested in and observes the ideas of healing, and of establishing a new routine. It takes about a hundred pages to deal with this setup, and then the focus clearly shifts into the main character's new life, his new routine, meeting new people, and slowly ramping up the supernatural elements. From there, it's the steady accumulation of back story, placing tension on old and new friends, and a rising animosity (from the supernatural threat.
Duma Key is definitely a companion piece to Bag of Bones - almost an echo of it in some ways. The two stories both deal with grief, relocating, and a generational mystery - but Duma Key feels looser, more relaxed, and King is diving right into an exploration of the creative process (this time painting, rather than writing) rather than exploring the idea of writer's block. The threat here is also far more epic than in Bag of Bones. Its reach is (theoretically) global, and the sense of power and evil that King manages to create at times approaches the One Ring.
The writing contains King's standard tricks - end of chapter foreshadowing, italicised inner voices speaking in sinister fragments, wealthy protagonists, and Outsiders versus the White (although not referred to by those names). These things have been done many times before, but they're still effective. What's even more effective is his gift of creating characters you care about - which leads to a great 40 pages towards the end of the story that are so desperate and awful, so unafraid to truly screw with the characters you care about, that is easily matches Bag of Bones' concluding experiment in point-of-view for horror.
Recommended - and it makes me wonder if he's gearing up to write stories that are completely non-supernatural, non-thrillers. A fulfilment of the "modern Dickens" label that some publishers and reviewers have been applying to him ever since the Green Mile.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
[Script] Good script, Bad script - my notes
Good Script, Bad Script by Tom Pope is a screen-writing manual that compares notable successes and failures from Hollywood. Here's what I extracted from this book:
***
***
There are no rules. This may be the single most important idea in this entire book. The only rule (sic) is that the script must work, and if it works by breaking all the accepted rules and more power to.
Aristotle believes a drama begins when the problem begins and ends when the problem is resolved.
All stories must contain both external and internal problems. Ideally these internal and external problems will resolve themselves at the same point of highest tension. Ideally the internal and external problems should dance together, one creating the other, where character creates action, and action catalyses character. If you avoid any internal conflict, your film is completely reliant upon external conflict to carry the ball.
Typically the first act ends with the protagonist's decision to grapple with the initial problem.
The second act complicates the initial problem and serves as the playing field on which the characters reach for a dramatic arc of change or catharsis, and in which action is initiated by, and in turn serves to catalyse, the characters.
The third act generally begins in a physical and psychological low point for the protagonist. Scenes with the greatest emotional weight come at the end.
The strongest narrative strategy is to build on existing problems and make things steadily worse. For example, each scene in the first act of Singing in the Rain either creates a new problem or augments an existing problem and makes it more complex.
When in doubt, combine.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Eric Brighteyes
by H. Rider Haggard
A 19th century action-adventure novel about vikings in 10th century Iceland. I've not fallen in love with a story this hard for many years. It's a saga, a tragedy, a bleak comedy about fate, and a kick-arse action fantasy.
All the while I was reading it, I couldn't help feeling that it'd make an excellent series bible for an HBO show (ala Deadwood).
A 19th century action-adventure novel about vikings in 10th century Iceland. I've not fallen in love with a story this hard for many years. It's a saga, a tragedy, a bleak comedy about fate, and a kick-arse action fantasy.
All the while I was reading it, I couldn't help feeling that it'd make an excellent series bible for an HBO show (ala Deadwood).
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