Bookish Thoughts

The first time I picked up  The Martian  I only made it two pages in before I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to put the book down and step away. It took a month before I was ready to try again. The exposition is...clumsy. Straight out of a story I or one of my friends might have written when we were 14 and had just discovered fanfiction.net. I guess that's what you get with self-publishing. The author's voice eventually faded into the character of Mark Watney. It helped that he introduced a bunch of other characters back on Earth around page 50. And while they may have been two-dimensional, they at least distracted from Watney himself and made the story a bit more bearable. But ultimately I didn't like this book. It was fast and readable, so I finished it pretty quickly, but I came out of it feeling angry and condescended to. Andy Weir doesn't seem to trust the reader. He reiterates plot points pages after they've happened, because they're about to be rel...

I came at this book from an interesting angle. At my mother-in-law's suggestion I watched the movie before reading the book so that I could experience the various layers of the text.  I can't really judge, having never experienced this story any other way, but I'm gonna go ahead and say she was right. Knowing the ending made certain scenes much more horrific. And it made it easier to follow what was going on. The story in the movie is far more linear than the one presented in the book. It makes sense for the book. For the bulk of the story, time has no real meaning or relevance. And presenting the action as a series of disjointed events which may have happened in any order fits with the frame of Pi remembering this journey. That said, it bugged me that Richard Parker was named, but not revealed to be a tiger, until well after he arrived on the life boat. Though that's probably just because I knew he was a tiger and was waiting impatiently for that reveal....

I tried to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . I really did. But I just could not get in to it. Defoe's style didn't really help matters. He's a big fan of run-on sentences. Here's a sample of a single sentence from this book. And now, in the managing of my household affairs, I found myself wanting in many things, which I thought at first it was impossible for me to make, as indeed as to some of them it was; for instance, I could never made a cask to be hooped; I had a small runlet or two, as I observed before, but I could never arrive to the capacity of making one by them, though I spend many weeks at it; I could neither put in the heads, or joint the staves so true to one another, as to make them hold water, so I gave that over also. There are, like, four sentences in there trying to get out. And the entire book is like this. As soon as I started to get into a flow, I'd start stumbling across commas again. The sentences are so unwieldy that ...

Wow. I doubt I could ever do what Joe Simpson does over the pages of this book. While climbing the 20,000+ foot tall Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, Joe Simpson falls and breaks his leg.  He and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, work out a system that gets them most of the way down the mountain in 300 foot intervals. But as they near the base of the mountain, Yates is forced to cut the rope in order to save is own life. Simpson falls 100 feet and miraculously lands on a ledge about 50 feet down a crevasse.  The crevasse looks bottomless, and Yates has no reason to believe that Joe survived the fall, so he returns to camp alone. Somehow, Simpson finds the strength to climb, slide, hop, and crawl his way back to camp over the next several days.  I read the book, and I'm still not sure how he did it.  It's sheer force of will that keeps him going. What Simpson goes through is horrifying.  He hallucinates and nearly succumbs to madness se...