Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

These days it seems like anyone can create a competent first-person shooter, but the genre is so clogged that  for a campaign to be truly memorable it needs to have moments that go above and beyond all of the other games out there. The Modern Warfare offshoot series of Call of Duty has done this consistently for three straight games now. Modern Warfare featured living through a nuclear blast, Modern Warfare 2 pushed the envelope on terrorist violence in games, and while Modern Warfare 3 doesn't have a game-changing moment bigger than those, it manages to fill itself with tons of slightly smaller ones that keep the game exciting throughout its short run. I realize Call of Duty games are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to storytelling in video games, but I found Modern Warfare 3 to be easily the most coherent game of all and a very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy (unless Infinity Ward doesn't move on to something else next year). Simply put, while most FPSes I can roll through on auto-pilot, Modern Warfare 3 demands your attention and certainly deserves it. But I figure most other Back-Bloggers will play it eventually anyway.

The Princess Bride

Just over a year ago, I watched the movie adaptation of this book. I liked it just fine, but didn't necessarily find it to be super-memorable or worthy of its cult status. Recently, I decided to give the book - one of the oldest items in my backlog, a Christmas present more than twelve years old - a fair shake. Consider me impressed.

The book is written as a story within a story. The outer shell of the story is that a fictionalized version of the author, William Goldman, has decided to create an abridgment of his favorite childhood story: The Princess Bride, a romantic adventure satire by Simon Morgenstern. Goldman's father had read him the book when he was a boy, but unbeknownst to Goldman, his father was skipping a whole lot of boring minutiae all along. As it turns out, and as Goldman wouldn't discover until attempting to abridge the story in adulthood, the original book was a lengthy political satire full of horribly dated jabs and critiques of Renaissance-era Europe, and the story that Goldman's father had read to him as a boy was really just a plotting construct to hold everything together. So Goldman decides to heavily truncate the text into a "Good Parts" version that reads a lot more like the story he loved while growing up. It's a smart and clever way to frame the actual Princess Bride story itself, as Goldman can now just interrupt the narrative and paraphrase long and boring gaps in the action, allowing we the readers to enjoy an optimal ratio of actual eventful scenes to page count. Another benefit to this style is that the whole book, which only spans barely more than 300 pages, takes on a much more epic and classic feel given all the times Goldman interjects something like, "here I'm cutting 80 pages of wedding preparations, a section written with the intent to ridicule the Scandinavian customs of the time."

Now, the inner story - the main one, of course - is also entirely a fabrication of William Goldman; there is no Simon Morgenstern and prior to 1973 there was no classic tale known as The Princess Bride. And it's a well-written one. There's a fairly deep level of characterization going on here, with an appropriate amount of time spent on backstories for the five or six main characters. Goldman also does a fantastic job instilling suspense, action, and romance into the mix. The whole thing is written with a playfully light tone - nothing like A Song of Ice and Fire or anything - but it's a very effective story all the same. Actually, looking back, I'm curious as to how I avoided reading this book for so long in the first place. I got it some time in '99 or 2000 or so, back around the same time I was reading and enjoying both fantasy adventures (like The Hobbit) and humorous irony-laced satires (like Catch-22). Why didn't I jump on a book like this, a combination of both those genres? I can't say. But, either way, I'm happy I've read the book now. Not only was it a real treat, but I've also knocked one of the oldest titles off of my backlog. All progress is progress, but progress on the top end of these lists just feels a bit more rewarding than progress at the bottom.

Family Guy: Volume 9

Having given up on watching Family Guy regularly long ago, I hadn't seen an episode of the show in over two years prior to this thirteen-episode DVD volume. When I last checked in with an opinion, I focused negatively on two very separate issues. One has only gotten worse, but the much more important one has actually shown signs of improvement in an interesting way. So let's cut to the chase.

The time gap between when episodes originally aired and when they get released on DVD has only gotten worse. In my last post, I was a bit annoyed that a DVD released in the summer of 2010 didn't contain any episodes from 2010 on it. Now, in the summer of 2012, I just watched a DVD set that began right where that previous one ended: with an episode that aired in 2009. This ninth volume, like all Family Guy DVD volumes since the show's rebirth, contained thirteen episodes. So I was able just now to catch up on every episode through the third one in the 2010-2011 TV season. Consider that there have now been two full seasons that have aired, minus those three episodes included on this DVD. That's something like 40 episodes, which is three "volumes" worth of Family Guy, stored up in some kind of strange buffer vault. For whatever reason, the show is only releasing thirteen episodes on DVD every year even though they're airing more than 20. I know the idea of TV shows on DVD is a dying concept, fading fast to the likes of streaming, Netflix, and On Demand, but I can't understand why there's such a delay at this point between air dates and DVD dates. The gap will only continue to grow unless they increase either the number of episodes per volume or the frequency of volume release dates. A minor issue, I know, but a strangely frustrating one all the same.

Now, more importantly, credit where credit is due. I've long been a critic (like so many others) of the level of effort put forth by the Family Guy writers ever since the show's return from cancellation. It seems like the quality of the once hilarious show has diminished slowly year after year while the show has grown more and more reliant on irreverent cutaway gags, shock humor revolving around edgy issues, and lazy political, sexual, and racial jokes. I mean, yes, I've grown up a bit in the past ten years, and personal tastes change over time, but there's been a clear and undeniable downward slope. But among these thirteen episodes, I saw some indications that the show is freshening up its act a bit. There were genuine signs of creativity and a willingness to explore uncharted waters. One memorable episode focused exclusively on Brian and Stewie locked in a bank vault for forty-eight hours. It didn't use a single cutaway gag and it never shifted its focus to anything happening anywhere outside the vault. It was as if Seth MacFarlane decided to respond directly to critics of the over-use of cutaways by, you know, showing he could make a decent episode of Family Guy without a single one. Another episode had Chris dating a girl with Downs Syndrome. I was worried right off the bat that about how hard and how frequently the show would take stabs at that low, low, low-hanging fruit, and I was pleasantly surprised when they avoided those easy "retard jokes" almost entirely, fleshing out the character with a bit of dignity instead. Another episode - the one that lends the DVD set its cover image, seen above - was an hour-long murder mystery with absolutely impeccable production value and a legitimately genre-appropriate background score. This episode also saw the deaths of several minor characters from the Family Guy universe, which can at least be taken as a sign that the show is willing to shake things up and move toward new territory.

Overall, I was impressed by this ninth volume of the show. There were still plenty of cringe-inducing nonsensical gags and plenty of jokes that felt far more insensitive than funny, but the ratio of "times I hated that I was watching Family Guy" to "times I was interested in what Family Guy was doing" was at the lowest point it's been in years. Plus, as much as I pounce on the show's dick-and-fart-joke humor, there are times when it really works just fine. I guess I'm looking forward to where the show goes next with this seemingly new-found willingness to do new things. Or more accurately, I guess I'm looking forward to seeing where the show went in the fall of 2010. If anyone out there has seen any episodes in the past two years, weigh in on this. Were they any good? Is my optimism justified? Or is the show as stale, rotten, and unfunny as its ever been?

Slapstick

I went into Slapstick with low expectations. Sweeney considers it to be Kurt Vonnegut's worst book. Vonnegut agrees, having given himself a "D" grade on the project when he considered it his worst novel to date (back when he had written nine of an eventual fourteen). I can see where the negative reaction comes from. The book is sloppy, plot-poor, and full of irreverent obscurities even for a Vonnegut book. Among its many elements are shrinking Chinese people, peak oil, mongoloid twin incest, variable gravitational pull in New York City, the colonization of Mars, a cult religion called "the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped," the ability to communicate with dead people, and a Presidential campaign and reign based on creating artificial extended families for everyone. Now, based on that description alone, I'd have been dying to read Slapstick to see what kind of crazy plot Vonnegut cooked up involving all of those things. The problem is that there's barely any plot at all. The main character is a hideous guy with an equally hideous twin sister to whom he is very close; after she dies, he creates the artificial families out of a sense of lonesomeness. Every other interesting-sounding thing I brought up just kind of happens in the periphery of the novel, and while plenty of it helps build the book's main theme of loneliness, none of it feels like it adds up to a memorable story of any sort. I actually liked Slapstick, and not because I was told to expect not to and I like playing the contrarian or anything like that. There were some real abstract theme-builders and subtleties in here that seemed rare among the Vonnegut bibliography. Unfortunately, there's also a rare lack of any real story to elicit memories or reactions. Personally, I'd still rank this book above at least two others in Vonnegut's catalogue and possibly more. For now, three Vonnegut books remains. Up next? Hocus Pocus.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

It's no secret that I absolutely love the Final Fantasy series. I've been playing these RPGs as long as I've been playing video games at all (close to twenty years now) and I can safely say that there are four or five different Final Fantasy titles that I've considered at one point or another to be my favorite game of all time. This is the fifteenth installment in the franchise that I've beaten, and the sixteenth if you count Final Fantasy IV and its DS remake as two separate games. Unfortunately, there wasn't always a wealth of these games at my disposal. In fact, prior to the release of Final Fantasy VII, the game that would push RPGs to mainstream status in America and entrench the franchise's place in gaming history, there were only four console Final Fantasy games in the Western Hemisphere. There were the first, fourth, and sixth numbered games from the franchise, and there was also this little peculiarity, a game most fans of the series have tried to ignore or forget about over the years: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Mystic Quest was designed to be a "beginner RPG," a game that could attract American gamers who enjoyed stuff like Zelda and Castlevania by combining action-adventure elements with standard RPG aspects like turn-based battles, leveling up, and saving the world by means of reclaiming four stolen crystals. The idea was to get American gamers ore interested in RPGs so that they'd turn out to buy other RPGs from Japan. Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well, largely because Mystic Quest is a pretty terrible game. There's nothing inherently wrong or broken about it, but it's just the most generic and vanilla RPG I've played all the way through. The story is horribly basic, the characters completely forgettable, and any sense of customization or exploration that you normally get from an RPG was kept out here in favor of a much more straightforward path. And damn, this game was simple. Your party size is limited to two people maximum and your second party member can be set to auto-pilot. You can't equip weapons or armor. There are no random encounters. There are no intriguing plot twists. You just kind of get pushed back and forth by the flow of a straightforward story without any chance for optional side quests or additional exploration. I was fortunate enough to play this on an emulator on my Mac, with the gameplay set to five-times normal speed. I managed to bang it out in five hours or so real time; I don't know how patient I would have been if it had taken me twenty-five. As a kid, when renting the game from Blockbuster, I never noticed its flaws. I mean, I never loved it like I did the other games in the series, but it's not like I actively noticed everything wrong with it. With a more seasoned eye, that's no longer the case. It now makes sense to me that this game was a flop. It may be simplistic, and it may work well as a "beginner RPG," but that isn't really a selling point. In fact, given the complete lack of memorable characters or interesting plotting - two things that, when included and done right, are the RPG genre's biggest strengths - I wouldn't be shocked if someone tried this game out and then saw no reason to play other real RPGs as a result. When Final Fantasy did finally catch on in America, it was because of the sixth and seventh games being released in the states with minimal gameplay alterations from their Japanese forms; lo and behold, it turned out that if you release a great game in America, people were going to play that great game, regardless of whether or not they played that shitty "training wheels" game you released in 1992. I'm glad I went back and played this old game from my childhood, but it's nothing you're missing out on by avoiding altogether.

The Unwritten Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity

Outside of my campy obsessive love of the various X-Titles that Marvel has to offer, I am notoriously picky about what types of comics I read. DC main titles will never sway me to their side, I've dabbled in Dark Horse and Vertigo offerings and other than an obsessive love of Gaimen's "Sandman" series and Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" 'verse I am generally left cold. When in the UK a fandom friend of mine that saw me through Harry Potter and reads as obscure lit as I do sent the first volume of "The Unwritten" by Mike Carey and drawn by Peter Gross and I was astounded.

This has everything I want: history, literature meta, fandom nods, amazing writing and a compelling story. We open to the son of the best selling Tommy Taylor novels, about a boy wizard who along with his two sidekicks and magic trumpet save the world, taking the stage at a comics convention to trade on dear old dad's name. His name is Tom Taylor, and as the inspiration for the magic tale he makes a buck or two answering questions about the mystery of his father's disappearance. It's a good life but Tom has no love for the character of Tommy or the fanatics who love the wizard, he also has no love for his neglectful father who did nothing but isolate him and educate him on the history of world literature as though it were the holy gospel. It's not fun, it's a living.

Until Lizzie Hexman, a woman with a Dickensian moniker, bursts into the question and answer portion of the convention, revealing that there is no Tom Taylor and there never was. What follows is part existential crisis, part literary allegory that shows us the literary struggles of Tommy Taylor and his battle with his vampire nemesis Count Amrbosio, part poking fun of of fandom tropes and part wondering where reality ends and stories begin.

Surely the greatest story ever told was the story of Jesus? Just as the story of the Third Reich continues to reign terror long after the physical has gone. We are left to wonder what forces are manipulating reality, what exactly is real and who in the world is Tom Taylor.

If you like literature, metafiction, cleverness, Harry Potter or the idea of mocking Harry Potter fans this is a great read. I am tearing through the remaining 4 volumes, this series is still a work in progress, but I can't wait to see what comes next.

Workaholics: Season 2

The second season of Workaholics was actually the first one I saw, since I saw it mostly as it aired last fall before seeing the first season on DVD earlier this year. Fortunately, given the complete lack of continuity the show exhibits, there's no reason any episodes need to be seen in any order at all. In other words, I didn't come out of my second viewing of the second season with a different understanding or appreciation of the show thanks to having seen its first season. At any rate, the show is pretty interesting. It manages to be constantly absurd without ever quite crossing the line into Adult Swim "bizarreness for the sake of bizarreness" territory. The main characters are three idiots full of bad ideas, but none of them is ever completely unbelievable. Even in the episodes that don't really work so well for me, there are too many clever little throw away lines to ever truly dislike an episode. Having said that, I'm amazed by just how hit-or-miss Workaholics tends to be. Some episodes feel burned into my memory like true classics. Others have left no impression on me whatsoever, even after two viewings. I guess when you're watching misguided twenty-somethings doing silly things for silly reasons, you can only handle certain faulty rationales. The show is at its best when it's subverting sitcom tropes, and at its worst when it's just following them. Like I said, it's an interesting show. There's really nothing else like it on TV right now, which might be the most surprising thing about it, given its relatively mundane set-up: three roommates and coworkers get bored and do dumb things. Hey, I enjoy it.

That '70s Show: Season 3

Alright, screw it. There are eight seasons of That '70s Show and even though I only own one more after this one at present we all know I'll eventually log 'em all. Rather than force myself to come up with new things to say about the show each time, I'll embrace how formulaic and monotonous it is to watch eight seasons of a sitcom by coming up with some kind of formula for these posts.

How familiar was I with the season's various episodes?

Remarkably familiar. I can't say that I had seen every single episode, but I had to have previously seen at least 20 of the 25 and probably more. I find this interesting because when these episodes were first airing back in 2000-2001, there was no such thing as DVR or watching shows on the Internet, and I definitely wasn't taping the episodes with a VCR or anything. This means that at the age of thirteen I had made this show appointment viewing. More than likely, I did homework in front of the TV on most nights, but still, I'm kind of surprised I was that committed even back then. (Granted, what do thirteen-year-old kids do on weeknights? Should I really be that surprised that, before I had a driver's license or many real hobbies, I was regularly watching teen-oriented programming on television pretty routinely? Probably not.)

Were there any key ways in which this season was different from previous seasons?

Right off the bat in the season premiere, the actors looked noticeably older than they had at the end of Season 2. In general, they were much more recognizable as the stars - of various celebrity status, for sure - that they are today. I'm pretty sure the DVD cover seen above uses Season 1 stock photos; compare these young-looking kids to this Season 3 promotional photo and see the difference for yourself. Also, in what can only be described as a cast upgrade, Lisa Robin Kelly (older sister Laurie) left the show midway through the year, while Tommy Chong became a frequently recurring guest star as the season progressed.

Any particular highlights or lowlights worth singling out?

Not really. The show's consistency merits more respect than any individual stand-out episodes. One notable divergence from the traditional sitcom-y formula came with a Halloween special that paid tribute to a whole lot of Alfred Hitchcock movies, sacrificing the show's usual humorous beats in a way that didn't really work, but merits recognition all the same.

Final thoughts on anything else relating to the season or series as a whole?

The third season is often an uninteresting one for a long-running network show with respect to its overall lifespan. Season 1 is all about appealing to enough people to get good enough ratings to merit a second season. The writers and actors need to figure out what works and what doesn't, and it's often a very experimental phase. First seasons often feel isolated from the rest of a long-running series in hindsight. Season 2, then, is when shows have mostly figured out what works. It's when the people making the show get to flex their creativity and really have some fun pushing the show in new directions with confidence. The thing about third seasons is that, often enough, they come in hot on the wake of a wonderful second season, but kind of grow repetitious and stale in the third. This leads to big shake ups between the third and fourth seasons pretty frequently. Dr. House revamps his medical staff; they get off the island but they need to go back; Coach Taylor transfers to East Dillon. It's a way to breathe new life into a series, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. At any rate, That '70s Show is no exception, and Season 3 ends with Eric and Donna breaking up, a move that I'm pretty sure doesn't stay permanent, but no doubt greatly alters the course of the series going forward.

So that was Season 3, a consistent and enjoyable but ultimately forgettable stretch of 25 episodes from eleven years ago that hold up pretty well.

Mario Party 9

First of all, I just broke both both a drought and a streak, both of them fairly impressive. The drought? Prior to just barely tying Shy Guy for first place on the final board in Mario Party 9, I hadn't beaten a video game since April. I don't know how many three-month stretches I've gone in my entire life without beating a video game. Obviously there was a lengthy one very early on in my life, and I'm sure there were several sporadic ones throughout my childhood SNES days, but I think this is the longest I've gone between game beatings since 2006. That was the year I graduated high school and began college, and my lifelong gaming hobby got away from me for a period of several months. And as for the streak? It's been exactly two months now since I logged anything other than books. Ten straight books, I'd logged before today - some 5,600 pages combined - without so much as a single movie in between any of it. I dunno, I just think that's kind of interesting.

But enough about all that positive and negative momentum I just interrupted. Let's talk about Mario Party 9. This should be fairly brief, because, after all, who needs to hear anything more about a Mario Party game at this point? You know the drill. Four players traverse a virtual board game independently, intermittently playing mini-games. Winning the mini-games provides coins, which can be used to buy stars, and the player with the most stars after a certain number of turns is the winner. Half of the challenge is trying not to flip out when the game inevitably shakes up the standings and erases your gigantic lead with two turns left. Really though, you can win every mini-game and still lose the overall game because of some unlucky dice rolls or because some randomly triggered event gave fifty coins to an opponent. Really, Mario Party has always been at least as much luck-based as skill-based, which makes it simultaneously a great party game and a terrible single-player game. When my friend screws me over entirely with a late game comeback, I can get angry and yell at him and lament the unfairness of it all, and it's done in the spirit of having some fun with an obviously heavily random video game. When I'm trying to complete story mode alone on a Thursday night and an AI-controlled opponent does the same thing to me, it only makes me feel hopeless and annoyed. After all, why bother spending an hour on a level which essentially comes down to a coin flip?

The thing is, this Mario Party felt even more luck-based than most. But it was also different in a lot of ways from the previous eight installments, and I appreciate the "innovation" at hand. The first game came out for the N64 in 1998, and by 2005 they had released the seventh in the series. That's a game a year, which means that before anyone could even figure out what worked or didn't work in any given new release, development had already begun on the next entry in the series. It's no wonder the gameplay remained largely unchanged during those first seven games. By contrast, Mario Party 9 came out five years after Mario Party 8 did. That means the people responsible for this game had plenty of time to revamp and overhaul certain aspects of the series. Some of these changes were for the better in my mind, and some for the worse. I'm not going to go into great detail on the various pros and cons, but my point is that merely by making an effort to mix it up, the Mario Party franchise has kept me satisfied even this late into its run. I still can't shake the feeling that games like this one are such insubstantial fodder, a feeling that if I'm going to be spending summer nights playing video games, at least they should be good ones. But, hey, the backlog is the backlog, and every game counts.

Batman: Court of the Owls

With newest Batman film just around the corner I've been doing my best to down all Batman-related material to appease my anxiety for upcoming movie (even though I bought my tickets a month ago, the earliest IMAX screening I could get my hands on was for Saturday morning... bah!). Well this is it. The last post I'm going to make about the Dark Knight... at least for a while - I'm still trying to track down The Dark Knight Strikes Again. As I've been reading through nothing but comics these past two months, I've concluded one thing: comics are way too damn convoluted. I don't mean that the stories are too dense and hard to follow. Far from it. They're simple, exciting, and a blast to read - plus there are pictures! What I mean is that the setup of the comic industry just makes my head spin. Let me begin by stating that I just finished the first year's worth of issues for the rebooted Batman comics of DC's The New 52. Heard of this? Basically, DC Comics took 52 of their most popular comic brands and rebooted them for the new age readers. (Makes sense considering the recently growth in comic popularity over the past decade.) Now let me pose a scenario to you. You're interested in reading up on some Batman - like me - and you walk into the store or go online to purchase some new issues only to find out one bewildering fact: There are at least 12 different comics that relate to Batman. Twelve! Not only is there the classic Batman, but then we've got Detective Comics, Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman and Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman, Batwing, Nightwing, Catwoman, Justice League... and the list goes on. Then you think to yourself, "Who cares? I'll just read about the character I care about and leave it at that." Wrong. Both brilliant and frustrating, the writers are great and making the main story arc (at least in these new reboots) cross-over to multiple different comics. So, if you're really getting into the story - which I was - you'll be encouraged to continue buying up new comics, starting down completely new, yet still tangential, story arcs. In retrospect, it does seem like I'm just bitching about something being too good - it's clear I am - but at the same time respect that I don't have all day to continue reading through every story nor do I have the money to drop $2 - $3 on every issue - I'm a foodie and need that money to afford my $45 Ruth's Chris steak and lobster habit! Whew... Now that I've got that out of my system, let's jump into the first Batman story arc of The New 52: The Court of the Owls.


Shit was bomb! I don't think I ever been disappoint by any Batman comics I've read so far - although I have been focusing on only those that are recommended by fans as the best. A Death in the Family was probably the worst/campiest; then again it did show Batman and Robin punching Middle-Eastern terrorists in the face. Priceless, but I digress. As to this story, it's starts off in present day with Batman and all of his cronies already being establish (no origin stories to this reboot). Bruce Wayne is having a talk with a candidate for Mayor of Gotham, Lincoln March, when all-of-a-sudden an assassin leaps out from the shadows trying to kill Bruce and the Mayor. Luckily both survive, but Bruce and the assassin topple through a plate-glass window in one of Gotham's high rises. Bruce grabs on to the ledge, saving himself, while the assassin plummets to his presumed death, smashing into a parked car. When Bruce looks back to check on the body, the assassin is mysteriously gone. 

This all leads into a mystery that has consumed Gotham folklore for centuries. The mystery of the Court of Owls. Presumably, it's suppose to be a secret society that watches over everyone in the city with the intention of wiping out anyone that poses a threat to Gotham's prosperity. Supposedly, they're responsible for the murder of Bruce's great grandfather. Dragging him down into Gotham's sewers and murdering him someplace discret and hidden. However, it's only suppose to be a legend. So begins Bruce/Batman's hunt to uncover this secret society and stop the individual(s) that are behind it. 

It's really a great story. Batman is almost constantly being pushed to his limit. Then whenever he is, whenever he reaches that point where he looks as though he'll finally die... BAM! He just releases rage upon his foes and kicks some serious ass. 

Don't fuck with the Batman!

Along with Batman's conflict against the Owls, there are two other parallel story lines. One focuses on Bruce's parents before they passed away; the other on Alfred's father. Both of which allude to struggles they've had with the Court of Owls as well proposing the theory that Bruce might not be the only heir to the Wayne fortune. It's really a well designed story and has a very entertaining ending. And, like I mentioned earlier, it does keep you wanting to explore other DC comics in order to expose more of this mysterious story arc. 

That's it! Done with comics for now. While about to go on vacation to Hawaii in a week, I'm going to try and catch up on my Vonnegut library. The Sirens of Titan is calling me.

Foundation

Science fiction!

As readers will recall, I was recently blown away by the first four books of the Song of Ice and Fire series. I was so enthralled with these novels that I realized I could no longer dismiss the genre of high fantasy as something too childish, nerdy, or quirky for my own taste. With this revelation fresh in mind, I decided to dabble with a similarly stereotyped genre I've spent my adult life avoiding. I went to a used book store and made a few purchases based on well-known authors and titles. I focused on shorter books when possible. I was committing these items to my backlog, after all, and if I didn't like them I didn't want to have to spend too much time laboring through them and regretting my decisions.

Foundation was one of the books I opted to purchase. Everything about it, from its recognizable author and Hugo Award stamp right there on the cover to its two-dollar price and 200 page count, piqued my interest. This isn't the first Asimov work I've read - his short story "The Last Question" is one of my all time favorite pieces of short fiction - but it was the first such novel. Really, the novel was a collection of five short stories set in the same general place at different points in time about twenty or fifty years apart each. Because of this, characters from one part of the novel (one story, really) were rarely present in any other part. Rather than being character-driven, then, the book's main concern was describing the formation and early history of a collective known as the Foundation. Here's the gist.

Tons of millennia into the future, mankind has come to inhabit almost every corner of the galaxy. There is one galactic empire of sorts, to which all the other star systems and planets must pay tribute, but the empire is stretched thin, decadent, and fading fast. One man recognizes this inevitable decline and asserts that a 30,000 year "dark age" will follow the fall of the empire unless mankind prepares appropriately by documenting all of its accumulated knowledge into one gigantic encyclopedia. In this way, when war and anarchy break out and communication lines are interrupted and broken, the dark age will last only for a thousand years before people are ready and able to rebuild without having to rediscover all sorts of old knowledge. The collective responsible for creating the encyclopedia is sent to a remote and uninhabited planet where they'll be unimpeded by others, for the most part. They are known as the Foundation. This is the first chapter or short story, and it's well made with a neat little concept. But it also only lasts like 35 pages. In the ensuing 165, we witness the Foundation expanding its scope and power, eventually declaring itself autonomous and ultimately becoming a galactic superpower in and of itself. There are plenty of interesting ideas at play, but with the story fast-forwarding several decades at a time, I found it difficult to reconnect with new characters and catch on to new events every so often. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have to use Wikipedia to fill in the gaps for some plot points I had glazed over.

In the end, I found Foundation to be a mixed bag. There were premises in there that were worth reading about, but the writing left me wanting something more. Apparently Asimov wrote four sequels and two prequels, as well as setting several of his other books in the same universe, so I'll certainly get my chance to read more about the Foundation should I want to. For now, I'll hold off. I've still got a few other sci-fi books to read, after all.

Fargo Rock City

I've always been pretty easily entertained by music journalism and I'm not sure why. At a friend's house when I was a kid I would always read through stacks of out-of-date Rolling Stone magazines, then at a later age moved on to the bitingly hilarious Your Band Sucks until it's unceremonious ending, and finally settled on the constant daily updates of Pitchfork.com. With all that said, I wasn't particularly interested in reading Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, even though I like the author and know his chops for music journalism. The subject matter of how hair metal affected children growing up in the Midwest in the 1980's just didn't appeal to me. Don't get me wrong, I think 'Round and Round' is a fun song and all, but I just always figured 80's metal was something I would never 'get' or appreciate quite like people who were living through it at the time. I don't think I'm alone, and it's probably why Rock of Ages is currently flopping in theatres (note: I started this entry weeks ago). Still though, Klosterman's got a pretty good track record so I gave Fargo Rock City a shot, and it proved to be a pretty good read. It's obvious that Chuck feels very strongly about 80's metal, and while he doesn't try to claim it is ridiculously important and draw broad conclusions from the phenomenon, he rightly feels that the 80's metal trend was at least somewhat important and deserves better than to be swept under the rug. He basically takes on every topic you can think of- what separated 'hair' and 'glam' from other types of metal, which bands have proven themselves over- and underrated in years since, the sexuality (Warrant made a career out of a vagina joke), whether or not having a keyboard was cool, power ballads, and of course how the music affected a teenage Chuck Klosterman. If you've got any interest in 80's music (I know someone on this blog who does...), then you'd do well to check out Fargo Rock City.

A Feast for Crows

"Disappointing" barely begins to describe A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in the otherwise fantastic series A Song of Ice and Fire that I've been reading so fanatically all summer long. I had been warned by the Internet at large before beginning this 970-page snoozer that it was a serious let down, particularly as it came on the heels of the best book in the series to date, and that all expectations should be greatly tempered. I was therefore pretty well prepared for a lackluster novel, but it still managed to fall well short of the much-lowered bar I had set for it.

So what the hell went so wrong with this one? The answer is actually pretty well documented. George R. R. Martin intended for his beloved series to contain two separate trilogies set five years apart. So when he began writing the fourth book, he had given himself the task of bringing the reader back up to speed by exploring the five years gone by. He tried to do this in several ways - a very lengthy prologue, a bunch of flashbacks within the pages of the story itself, and even just allowing five years to have passed without any real events occring - but Martin wasn't satisfied with any of them. Eventually he scrapped the five year gap, but by that point he'd already come up with story threads for all kinds of new characters and left many of these in the story anyway. Meanwhile, he struggled with certain characters' timelines and the way they should all be pieced together. He realized after spending a few years on the book that it was well over the length of the (1200-page) third book, and that he wasn't even close to finished writing everything yet, let alone trimming it back down and editing it. So in 2005, a full five years after the third book had been released, Martin released A Feast for Crows, the fourth of what would now be seven planned books. Rather than cut the original fourth book's story in half temporally, though, Martin decided instead to focus only on half of the characters. His logic was that he'd rather tell "all of the story for half of the characters" than "half of the story for all of the characters."

This was the fourth book's fatal flaw. Martin's logic is fine, but in practice it failed for two key reasons. For one thing, the characters he chose to include in this book were far less interesting and meaningful to the overall series than the characters he omitted. In fact, the three most compelling characters by the end of Book 3 are entirely absent here in Book 4. More importantly, also absent were compelling stories for the characters Martin did include in the narrative. What's the point of telling "all of the story" for half of the characters when the story isn't interesting or climactic in the least and the best characters are missing? The frustrating part is that through the entire book, Martin remains an extremely talented writer, displaying mastery of the third person limited narrative style once again and bringing an imaginary world to life with apt descriptions and attention to detail. The individual sentences and paragraphs were as well-written as ever before, but the book's overall flow suffered thanks to go-nowhere plots and unfamiliar characters.

I wanted to like this book, and I guess it'd be unfair to say that I disliked it overall. But the extent to which I enjoyed reading it came almost entirely from the good will Martin had built up with that nearly flawless original trilogy. If I wasn't familiar with most of the characters and the overall story arcs going into the book, nothing about the book would have enticed me to go back and read the other books in the series.There's just too much wheel-spinning going on here, and too much of it occurs from the viewpoints of minor characters who are only given one or two chapters. If the author can't be bothered to develop some characters beyond a chapter or two, why should I the reader be invested in said characters?

The fifth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, unfolds in parallel with this fourth one, and at least in theory it should focus on all of the main characters this book ignored. That gives me hope. Still, I'm worried. After banging out the first three books in 1996, 1998, and 2000, Martin had to spend eleven years writing the fourth and fifth books, which, again, were originally intended to be just one book. At this new rate, the final two books in the series will come out in 2017 and 2021 respectively. That's a long time away! Hopefully Martin gains steam and confidence as he barrels toward the series' ending and can manage to get the next two books out by 2016 or so. (We'll see.) Either way, I've got Book 5 to get through first, and a small break from the series before starting that one. I'm serious about that break this time around because I do not at present own a copy of the book.

Batman: The Long Halloween

As I first began my journey into comics (specifically Batman) this story arc appeared on many top-read lists. Even Sweeney suggested this one to me explaining he had heard much of it was used as the bases to Nolan's The Dark Knight. After finishing this, some of that definitely holds to be true. Basically this story arc serves as an origin story to Two-Face, all spilled out over a 13-part series. It's actually quite inventive. The first comic takes place on Halloween, with each following issue occurring on a specific holiday in chronological order. So as you progress through each issue, you slowly make your way through one full calendar year eventually concluding the epic back on Halloween of the following year. Let me give you a little taste of what this story has to offer.

Gotham's crime ring is controlled by two main mob families - Falcone and Maroni - each struggling to gain the upper hand on one another for wealth and power. Meanwhile, to put a stop to these dangerous thugs, Batman, Gordon, and Dent have made a pact to take these guys down at all costs. At this point they hint that they may have to push the boundaries of the law to be successful in locking these guys up. Halloween comes along right after this. It's during this night that one of Falcone's men get whacked while in the bathtub - gunned down by an unknown man. At the crime scene, the murderer leaves the pistol that was fired, a rubber nipple to a baby bottle (used as a make-shift silencer), and a jack-o-lantern symbolizing the holiday. This unknown murderer becomes known as the Holiday Killer.

These murders continue on with each passing month. Always occurring on a holiday (Christmas, New Year's, etc.), always killing a Maroni or Falcone and always with the same set of evidence left behind - substitute the jack-o-lantern with a trinket appropriate to the corresponding holiday. As we head through the year, Batman battles most of Gotham's typical villains (many of the regulars make an appearance) who all seem to either be angry with the Holiday Killer for doing their job of terrorizing the city (Joker) or are hired by Falcone (Poison Ivy, Scarecrow) to help out with his struggling crime operation. Even though Holiday Killer runs free with no leads on who it could be, the pact Batman, Gordon, and Dent have made to bring down the mobs is actually working. Maroni, scared with most of his men killed off, has turned himself into Gordon and Dent for safe keeping from the Holiday Killer in the agreement that he'll testify against Falcone. During this court hearing, with the eradication of the crime organizations so close at hand, Maroni betrays Dent tossing acid in his face...

He ain't going to be pretty no more!

So is the beginning of Two-Face. Maybe his origin isn't the same story that was represented in Nolan's The Dark Knight, but I believe there was a flashback to this scene in the movie Batman Forever. Anyways, with the birth of Two-Face all hell breaks loose. After escaping from the hospital, he enters Arkham Asylum and releases each inmate based on the flip of his coin.  Everything culminates as Two-Face - along with just about every Gotham villain - heads for a showdown at Falcone's house where Batman has to do his best to intercept and kick some major ass. There's also the long awaited reveal of who the Holiday Killer really is.

I've got to say, the ending to this book really surprised me. Won't ruin anything. Just, wow. There's also a bit of a love story between Bruce and Selina (Batman and Catwoman) - she manages to save Bruce when he falls under the hypnotic spell of Poison Ivy - but nothing ever really culminates. I suppose that's how their relationship always carries out... he's the hero, she's the villain. Still, it would be interesting to see something actually pan out there. Maybe there will be in the upcoming Batman film. Who knows? Anywho, another Batman comic down. Don't really know where to go from here? There is The Dark Knight Strikes Again (Frank Miller's follow-up to The Dark Knight Returns), but I'm not sure what else to read. All of these books I've been reading so far have been downloaded onto my iPad via an app called Comixology, but to be fair... the app kind of sucks. Many of the story arcs that look somewhat appealing are incomplete. Tried to find Bane's origin story, but could only download one of the multi-issue story arc. Pointless. Also, The Dark Knight Returns isn't even on available. What do they expect from me? To actually drive to a book store! 

Ugh... I'm headed to bed. Feel free to suggest any other comics you think might be worth my time reading... and are hopefully within a fingertip's reach.