The Double

Between the last two books I read and the last two Saramago books I'd read, I've been in a bit of an unimpressive book rut. Hell, each Saramago book I've read has been worse than the last. Stan gave a harsh review to what I thought was his best book I've read, Blindness. And I still had... 8 more books of his to read? Oh shit. Luckily, The Double reminded me of why I bought the Saramago collection in the first place- while it does have long meandering sentences and lack of proper punctuation that Mr. Saramago is known for, I found it to be a taut thriller that kept me coming back for more. As usual, the book is about watching normal people react to a bizarre situation- in this case, history teacher Tertuliana Maximo Afonso, a middle aged high school teacher, discovers his exact double as an extra in a movie. After some research and stalking, it is determined that at all times the two men look and sound completely alike, and have at all points in their lives, right down to scars and facial hair. Rather than devolving into Parent Trap-esque farce, both Afonso and the actor meet up and are forced to reexamine their entire lives- everything is shaken up by finding out that they are not unique snowflakes, but two men cast from the exact same mold. From here out The Double does something no other Saramago books have done- it becomes plot heavy, tense, and twists in some unexpected directions, culminating in an open ended but satisfying conclusion. Am I chomping at the bit to read the next book in this collection of 12? Not exactly, but it's nice to have that renewed sense of enjoyment.

Nine Stories

Well, that's two in a row the underwhelmed me. Unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, I went into J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories collection with low expectations after the painstaking read that was Seymour- An Introduction, but luckily Nine Stories had more hits than misses. Unfortunately not many of the short stories were particularly interesting to blog about. Salinger enjoys writing argumentative dialog between two characters, and that trope appears in the nine short stories fairly often. But while some of these interactions provided interesting characterization (A Perfect Day for Bananafish) or philosophical debate (Teddy), some just went nowhere at all (Down at the Dinghy) or were just mindless prattling between unlikable characters (Just Before the War with the Eskimos). The lows aren't too low, but the highs aren't all that high either. No wonder Salinger's really only known for The Catcher in the Rye.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I've read longer books than Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, but few have matched the grand scale of his epic novel. The book begins with the founding of a fictional Columbian utopia called "Macondo" by Buendia family patriarch, Jose Arcadio. From here the book spans 100 years and seven generations (time expands or contracts in Macondo based seemingly on Marquez's whim) chronicling the important events in the rise and fall of Macondo, specifically focusing on the Buendia family. The Buendias are creative people for the most part, but not in the naming of children, so dozens of characters share a small handful of names- there are something like 20 different 'Aureliano's, requiring the reader to pay close attention to context or face terrible confusion. At the heart of the plot are ideas on family, sex, and sometimes sex with family- despite plenty of other families settling in Macando with the Buendias, they just can't seem to stop inbreeding, despite an age gap of generations. Marquez doesn't stop there though, touching upon more universal themes like war, politics, and religion as well. One Hundred Years of Solitude was certainly an ambitious undertaking for Marquez, which is why I'm puzzled that I was left kinda underwhelmed. A story of this magnitude feels like a huge gamble that could either fall flat on its face or be considered one of the greatest books of all time- it falls into the latter category for most people, but it just didn't leave much of an impression on me. Oh well.

Mystic River

Dennis Lehane is the writer behind a lot of those Boston-set movies that came out over the last few years- Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone Baby Gone are all based off of his books. Somehow I had never heard of him until finding that Ryan owned most of his stuff, and as such it's been added to my log. I haven't seen the movie adaptation of Mystic River before but vaguely knew of the premise- something about trio of young boys in 70s Boston surviving an abduction, setting the stage for one of their daughter's murder 30 years later. While never presented as a simple whodunit, I found the actual mystery at the heart of the book very compelling- I really didn't see the ending coming, but Lehane sprinkled plenty of small hints throughout. In addition to the murder, Lehane explores some deeper issues- gentrification, the philosophy behind organized crime, and the long lasting but unspoken effects of child sexual abuse. Despite delving into some pretty gruesome details, the book was a pleasure to read so I'll get some more Dennis Lehane books posted here soon- Gallagan has like 6 of them.

The Subtle Knife

The second piece in any trilogy - or more specifically, the middle act in a three act story - is often the most thematically and philosophically compelling part. The world, conflict, and principal characters are introduced in the first piece while the final showdown and its aftermath occur in the third and final installment. That leaves the middle section of the tale as the one that clarifies the stakes and questions, or at least explains, the motives of those involved. The third movie in The Lord of the Rings may be the most grand and epic in scale and in length, but it's that Helm's Deep battle (and specifically, the preparations for the battle) in the second movie that earns the most emotional resonance with the audience. We see old, wounded men and what must be eight-year-old boys getting fitted for armor as their female loved ones, scared shitless, must wait out the battle underground with no real idea of what's going on. We realize, here, that this is humanity's last stand against the evil forces, and even though we can really just jump right into the third movie from the first one without missing a whole lot of plot points, doing so would rob us of enough emotional beats to make the story's climactic resolution more or less irrelevant. If you've seen the movies, you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, you really should. Anyway, I just finished the second of three books that comprise His Dark Materials after reading the first one (The Golden Compass) more than nineteen months ago. When posting about that book, I lamented that it wasn't very exciting until the very end, and by that point I had become so bored by the book that I wasn't quite sure which characters were doing what, or even what the overall conflict was. Before starting this sequel, I took a brief Internet-based refresher course on the characters and events of the first book. And as I alluded to above, this book was far more thematically heavy - and thus more interesting - than that first one. Where there were Gypsy caravans and polar bear fights in the first book, there were biblical allegories and parallel dimensions in the second. The Golden Compass contained a series of adventures and misadventures that the main character went through on her way to the deep Arctic where she intended to investigate a mysterious substance called "dust." Here, in The Subtle Knife, we actually learn some useful things about this "dust" and also learn of a much larger conflict involving rebellious angels plotting to assassinate God. Other thematic territory, such as childhood innocence and coming of age, is also explored. I can't pretend I found myself any more invested in the characters here in the second book, but at least the story overall seems to be shaping up to something larger than I was giving it credit for a year and a half ago. Good. I did say, even back then, that I'd reserve final judgment on the series until I'd completed it in its entirety. I look forward to reading the next book, but can't promise I'll get to it any time soon.

Entourage: Season 7

Since Entourage is a stupid, vapid, hollow excuse for a TV series, I won't waste any time talking about Entourage. Instead, let me try to explain why I ever purchased Season 7 of Entourage on DVD. I'm a completionist. I know that isn't even a real word, but it's true. If I own one season of television on DVD, I need to own all of the seasons of that show on DVD. It's irrational and strange and not the best minor obsessive compulsive habit to have in wallet terms, but I've learned how to live with it while suffering minimally in terms of money and time spent. The first and easiest rule is never to buy these DVD sets at full price. What costs $40 or so MSRP will usually cost something like $30 on release day. The price may then fluctuate between $25 and $35 but almost every DVD set will eventually go into some sort of fire sale. This one retails at $50 originally, but I got it for something like $18. Now, on the one hand that's eighteen dollars wasted. On the other, that's better than $50 wasted. Right? Now, rule number two - how to watch. Something shitty like Entourage that I've both already seen and also have no real desire to watch again is something that makes for great background DVD viewing whilst browsing the Internet, reading a book (double-log-tasking!), or trying to fall asleep at night. I know, it's kind of silly. I've got this mission at hand to watch everything I own, and yet I willingly only half-watch some of the stuff I willingly buy. I guess deep down I know that someday, probably sooner than later, some TV show that I own several seasons of on DVD will just not come out with a DVD (or Blu-ray) of some season. My hand will be forced and my completionist streak broken. Whatever. There are worse ways to spend $18, right? Okay, maybe I should stop seeking my readers' approval. I have a disease, and can no longer pretend I don't when I'm spending $18 on even the shittiest of TV seasons on DVD.

Louie: Season 1

I'm going to try something different here. Louie is a very unique show, and even in only a thirteen-episode first season it managed to be a whole lot of different things both tonally and thematically. Rather than try to summarize the season with one long-winded and wavering paragraph, I want to go through it episode by episode as I re-watch it on Blu-ray so I can touch upon not just the season in general but how the different pieces (episodes) add up and leave us with a very distinct show that does a lot of things well, but still may have taken a while to really "find itself." My goal isn't to recap episodes or highlight specific jokes or gags, but to spend however long is necessary on each episode to discuss the way it helps lend definition to the show as a whole. I'll be using the present tense as if I'm seeing each episode for the first time, but with the understanding that I have full knowledge of what comes later on in the series. (I've now seen two full seasons' worth, after all.) This may be a terrible idea, but I'm willing to try it. I hope you find it informative or at the very least readable and somewhat interesting.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

You may recall two things that happened a year and a half ago. One, I played through (and absolutely loved) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. And, two, Disney released an action movie also called Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This game, which is not called The Sands of Time, was also released a year and a half ago. Coincidence? Of course not. Gigantic marketing gimmick. But because I loved that PS2 game so much, I went ahead and bought all of its sequels, including this very obvious marketing gimmick. I'm very pleased to say though that this game was just as fun as I remember Sands of Time being a year and a half ago. What could have been a clumsy movie tie-in was instead thankfully a game very much in the same vein as Sands of Time in terms of gameplay. Once again, I spent about eight hours running around a gigantic Persian palace fighting off sand warriors and climbing the walls, swinging on flagpoles, and generally flinging myself about. I was worried that this game, being one of those movie tie-in marketing ploys, would be terrible. But the only signs of shoddy creation work were a few physics glitches where I fell through walls or got stuck in beams. Other than that, the game flowed smoothly and looked great. And my biggest problem with Sands of Time, the slow combat, was fixed here, replaced by a bland and generic (but effective!) hack and slash system. I still have three more Prince of Persia games in my backlog: the two PS2 sequels to this game and Sands of Time in addition to one other cel-shaded spin-off. I look forward to all three; so far the first and last game in the series have both been awesome, and how could the other three possibly be any less than good? No telling whether I'll rush right in or hit up some other game next, but either way I hope I don't end up waiting another year and a half to play Prince of Persia again.

Friday Night Lights: Season 5

It is a rule of thumb in television that even the greatest shows can't stay great for very long. Most shows are never all that good in the first place, and even the ones that are often succumb later on in life to overly convoluted plots and characters acting out of character just to mix things up. And because great shows are often highly-rated (at least in theory) you often see a show pass its prime and stick around for several years in which it slowly degrades into a shell of what it once was. So what is perhaps most amazing about Friday Night Lights is that even in this fifth and final season, the show felt as fresh and warm and enjoyable as it ever did. I understand why it had to come to an end, and if anything NBC was extremely generous in even giving it more than one season. But I maintain that if the ratings had been there and if the cast and crew stayed interested, this show could have gone on for several more years without suffering a drop in quality. (Maybe it's for the best that I'll never have to see if I'd been right or not, but still. Just an opinion here.) I mean, Friday Night Lights already did jump the shark, way back in Season 2, but thankfully that season's sloppiness and terrible stories got swept under the rug with the writers' strike and the showrunners were allowed to do a hard reset for Season 3. I think what allowed Friday Night Lights to be successful (critically, if not financially) and good for so long where so many other high school dramas fail to do so is that Friday Night Lights did what so many other shows are too afraid to do; it allowed its high school student characters to graduate and move on, and it replaced those characters with new characters. You still had old characters showing up every now and again, visiting home during breaks from college (as is realistic), but it's not as if the same kids who were playing football in Season 1 were still doing so in Season 5. The central characters of the show, the anchors, were Coach Taylor and his wife and daughter. And even the daughter became a recurring character in Season 5. All in all, Season 5 may have been the second-best year of FNL ever. (Season 1 comes first for me, and Season 2 is last and Season 4 is fourth - what I can't properly place is where Season 3 belongs, as I've only seen it once.) Since this is the final season of Friday Night Lights, I should end this recap by reflecting on its overall legacy. And without question, FNL currently goes down in my top ten favorite dramas of all time. Perhaps top five, although its quiet and dignified portrayal of small town America just doesn't compare on an "epic" scale to shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire. Still, whereas a once-great show like Lost was addictive for years, but went out with a total whimper, FNL quietly remained consistently touching and engaging in its understated way for years. Great show, great final season, and I'm looking forward to watching  it all over again someday on my DVD sets. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

The Last of the Mohicans

Whenever you read an older novel or watch an older movie or play an older video game, you expect it to be dated in some way, and do your best to judge it accordingly. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, is hideous to look at, clunky to control, and completely void of story. But because it's nearly prehistoric (by video game standards), it gets a free pass for all of those modern-day sins and when people rave about it today they do so because it is, all things considered, a fun game to play. Still, those shortcomings do exist. They do affect just how enjoyable the game can be in this day and age. Even if we can forgive it for being dated, The Legend of Zelda is dated all the same. Most readers of this blog know that I often struggle to get through a lot of nineteenth century literature because of how thickly and heavily worded it can get. The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, is no exception. In an effort to write an American novel that would be respected overseas by the British, who still considered themselves to be culturally and intellectually superior to their former colonies, author James Fenimore Cooper uses the thick and heavy prose that was in vogue in Britain at the time to romanticize the American frontier and wilderness. The result was a novel that was incredibly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but critically panned as well for lacking tonal consistency. An extremely outspoken critic of the book, and of Cooper in general, was Mark Twain some fifty years later, who wrote a lengthy essay detailing all kinds of "offenses" Cooper was guilty of, especially regarding fluctuating personalities of the main characters and greatly exaggerated superhuman feats. To be honest, I didn't notice many of these issues, and if I did they didn't bother me. Late in the book, once character dresses up in a bear suit, and the idea that other people were buying his disguise seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but other than that I had no real issues with the plot or the characters. My usual gripe about unnecessarily heavy prose notwithstanding, my biggest problem with this novel was a race-based one. Specifically, I'm still not quite sure what Cooper's stance on racial segregation between whites and native Americans was. It seems complicated at best. On the one hand, the novel's hero, Hawkeye, is a white man who befriends and lives with Indians and who adapts their ways as his own in order to survive to in the wilderness. On the other, that same hero is unabashedly proud of his pure white heritage, and maintains a number of times that just because he's adapted many Indian ways does not mean he has any Indian blood in him. Further complicating the racial overtones of the story, a white man falls for a white woman who has a mixed race half-sister. And the father of these women accuses the man of racism for favoring the white one over the mixed one. But the mixed one, herself, falls for a Native American. And Cooper implies that she does so because something about her own mixed-race-ness makes other non-whites appealing to her. Meanwhile, the chief antagonist of the novel, Magua, seeks to plant his seed in the mixed-race daughter in an act of vengeance against her father; Magua knows that "tainting" this man's bloodline with Indian blood will psychologically torment the guy. But thsi is the same guy who has already fathered a half-black daughter, and who has accused the white daughter's white suitor of being a racist for ignoring the half-black daughter. Confused? Me too. Maybe Cooper was trying to pull off a novel in which he offers some progressive ideas but also plays into his audience's fear of Indian assimilation. And ultimately the mixed-race daughter and both of the Indians who wanted to put it in her end up dying, leaving no more mixed-race would-be couples, so is Cooper himself suggesting that mixed race couples are doomed? Or does he use this threesome as a group of tragic heroes who we're meant to empathize with? It sounds like either way, Cooper was progressive for his own time, but his racial ideologies seem fairly discriminatory here and now in the modern day. So I return to where I began this post, and posit that while it's easy to acknowledge the datedness of certain works, it can also be difficult to view them without a present-day bias of some sort; I have no idea what The Last of the Mohicans is trying to convey on the racial front, and as such, I have no idea whether or not I found its themes engaging and agreeable. I did love the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis movie though. That musical score was absolutely awesome.