#1 Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Laura Hillenbrand

Here is a story about WWII vet Louis Zamperini and his incredible journey from being an olympic runner to being shot down in the Pacific, to becoming a POW in some of the most heinous Japanese camps. Hillenbrand tells this incredible tale with aplomb, and as you read the pages you can see how this story could easily fit to screen. That feeling makes sense, considering Hillenbrand’s last book was Seabiscuit.

Pages: 406

#2 The Marvelous Land of Oz, L. Frank Baum

I found out soon after reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that there actually fifteen books in the Oz series. FIFTEEN! This second in the series focuses on Tip, a boy that has been basically tortured by an evil witch lady on the outskirts of Oz. When the woman threatens to turn him into stone, Tip runs away, but not without first stealing some magic powder that animates a sawhorse. With his new buddy, Tip rides off into the sunset to have adventures with the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and a very dignified bug. Together they fight an army of girls that take over the Emerald City and Tip’s former captor, the evil witch Mombi. Yeah, it’s weird, and certainly not as iconic as the first story, but it’s not bad.

Pages: 154

#3 Let the Great World Spin: A Novel, Colum McCann

I’ll be honest, the first chapter or two of this novel didn’t grab me. The story jumps through the shoes of several people in the early 1970s revolving around the event of a fearless tightrope walker dancing in-between the Twin Towers, but is not about that event specifically. While the story focuses quite a bit on an Irish immigrant named Corrigan, it deftly weaves his tale in and around the stories of others. Throughout the ride you are confronted with abandonment, atonement, and redemption.

After those first couple of chapters, once you see what the book is doing, it becomes very riveting. You start looking for how one person’s story fits in with the rest, and when you find those links it makes it even more worthwhile.

Pages: 349

#4 Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

Hey, hippy runners! Are you tired of Nikes and New Balances making your feet feel terrible? Well then this is the book for you! The story here is that of the author’s journey into Mexico to investigate a little known tribe whose culture revolved around running. The tribesman’s only means of transportation are themselves, and from an early age their bodies are trained to run incredible distances with little help but from small strips of flexible padding on their feet called huaraches. Interweaved with this story is a newer take on how our ancestors thrived (spoiler: we could outrun prey) and other tales about minimalists running and runners. This is the book many point to that kicked off the whole “barefoot” running thing. I guess it worked, because about a month after finishing this I ran a half marathon fully unshod (like a boss).

Pages: 311

#5 American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

This book was an impulse buy for me. Upon visiting Washington D.C., I walked my a table in the Air and Space Museum where a small, white haired man was sitting behind a table covered in these books. I spoke with Mr. Samuel for a few minutes about his book and decided I needed it.

Raiders tells us things that Americans don’t really like to hear, most namely that we aren’t the best at everything ever. The book says that in a more eloquent way, but the information here certainly isn’t what you’d really learn much of in high school history. As WWII was winding down, and reconstruction of European countries was beginning, military officials knew that it would be a perfect time to gain knowledge from the enemy. The book discussed the several operations the military embarked on to take the technology, research, and scientists the Germans created during the war. Much of the focus of the book is around German aviation, specifically jet technology. It turns out the Germans were about ten years ahead of us in jet tech, and had they focused their efforts squarely on getting more jets in the air, the war might have been prolonged.

Although there are times when military acronyms get in the way of enjoyable learning, Raiders is overall very interesting and worth a look for history buffs.

Pages: 451

#6 Bossypants, Tina Fey

Do you like funny people? Then read this autobiography. That’s all you need to know. It’s hilarious. There are few books that have had me audibly laughing aloud like this one.

Pages: 185

#7 A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five, George R.R. Martin

Here we go, the grand poobah of books that came out in 2011. Well, at least in the fantasy world. The fifth book in the Ice and Fire series, Martin tells the other half of the story from A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 4) with all of the characters that you probably wanted to hear from in that book. And it only took five years! I am not going to get into the story, because at this point it’s so complicated (or convoluted depending on where you stand) that it would be moot. At one point in the story, though, book four and book five converge, and set the stage for book six. And if we go on the release schedule from book four, we’ll see book six in 2016! Woo!

Still, these books are the best in fantasy you can get right now.

Pages: 1,016

#8 Tinkers, Paul Harding

This is a story about a man’s life and the evolution of actions and emotions that exist between generations. The story begins with a man at the end of his life, laying in a bed in his living room among his family, slowing fading away. His memories give breath to the lives of his father and grandfather, and their stories flesh out the present.

Honestly, I need to go back and re-read this book. I think I read it at a poor time, and it didn’t cement itself in my mind.

Pages: 191

#9 The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Full Disclosure: the set of short stories that I read is not exactly the thing that is linked here, but the link gives you everything for $10.

Since what I read is a series of short stories in the Holmes universe, I won’t get too detailed, but I would recommend checking out any Holmes story. They are great and fun, but they might make to snobbish towards the most recent films. Luckily, they will make you like the current BBC show Sherlock even better!

Pages in my version: 312

#10 The Call of the Wild, Jack London

If you want a good story about a dog (Buck) that gets sold to a dogsledder in the great white north, then look no further! London does a really great job of helping you visualize the trials and tribulations of a sled dog by telling the story from Buck’s perspective. It’s quite impressive, really. I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR YOU TO READ.

Pages: 229

#11 Goliath (Leviathan), Scott Westerfeld

The third and final book in the Leviathan series brings back Deryn and Alek in their quest to stop Steampunk WWI and hopefully not let their differing backgrounds tear everything apart. This time we meet a colorful character by the name of Nikola Telsa, and he might have a cannon that can destroy entire cities with electricity. This is a really fun end to the series, and like the other books, there are really interesting historical events peppered throughout the story that make it just that much better.

Pages: 543

#12 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dover Thrift Editions), Robert Louis Stevenson

Over the year of 2011 and about half of 2010, I had started reading some “classic” books, and unfortunately, I think this one is my least favorite. This emotion comes from a mixture of having known what happens in the story by osmosis and because I feel like it’s not written that interestingly, taking from the point of view of a pretty boring lawyer who tries to figure out what’s going on. So poop on that.

Pages: 153

And those are the novels that I WASTED SO MUCH TIME TO READ in 2011. And because I like numbers, in 2011 I read 4,300 pages of text. Yeah! Books!

So I recently had some time to kill (driving through any portion of Western Kansas require some sort of distraction to maintain sanity) and I thought I’d queue up an audiobook I purchased a while ago. I still don’t know exactly how to feel about the book, but it was an interesting listen and kept me from wading out into the corn to find Jesus.

Ron Hansen wrote the book back in 1983 and only recently (2007) has it been adapted into a screenplay. The version purchased I got on iTunes, and doesn’t really contain much information on how it was created. I was a little disappointed at first because of the initial droning on of the narrator (it takes a while to get used to his particular style of voice acting), so as I sped through Kansas my mind wandered and I tended to drift in and out of the story.

That’s not to say it’s bad, the actual plot of the book covers the early life of the James gang and how it evolved over time. It also covers several aspects of the lives of the men involved in the various incarnations of the gang that Jesse James helmed. It paints the men and women involved not just as one dimensional characters but fully fleshed out people with concerns and worries. It also focuses on Robert Ford as much as Jesse James and the eventual motivations that caused the his betrayal and murder.

I’ll admit I was pretty torn about it, while on one hand the James Gang comes across as thieving bandits willing to gun down anything in their path, they also just seem like people trying to make ends meet. Jesse James is also one of the more complicated characters. He’s a deeply affectionate father but shows no qualms in murdering people in cold blood.

The book meanders a bit in the overall plot and execution of its title (which is admittedly wordy) however, this doesn’t fully distract from the development and evolution of the characters and their relationships within the book. I found the most engaging portions of the novel to take place in the aftermath of the death of Jesse James. It’s there that you get to see the real people in the James Gang. I found it interesting because I could tie a lot of what was going on with my personal life.

I feel that modern pop culture tends to give us (or at least me) the understanding that stories have a beginning middle and end, and that’s it. High School is everything when you’re a teenager but not a whole lot of people tend to think of what to do afterwards. The same can be said for college grads, it’s awesome while it’s going on but what do you do next? I feel with this book, it demonstrates that a certain portion or history of your life is just a small chapter of the overall story and you should be constantly considering of what to do next with your life or at least how the decisions you make now may affect you on the down road.

Overall I’d say it was an enjoyable listen. But, I feel like I would have gotten more enjoyment out of it if I’d read it for myself rather than having someone narrate in the tone of banal dictation.

Review: B (pick up the book if you get a chance)

This book bears only a distant resemblance to the movie.  If they were considered in a metaphorical family, they might be cousins or, perhaps, a nephew and uncle that only see each other at Christmas and funerals.  No, they don’t attend the same weddings.  They simply aren’t that close.  Still, that isn’t what irks me about this book.  Filmmakers are obliged to take certain liberties.

If you only watched the movie, for instance, you might be surprised to discover that the book does not follow a continuous narrative.  You also wouldn’t know that the characters’ lives are separated by decades as well as gang affiliations.  William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was a Bowery Boy, but he lived after the Dead Rabbits had begun to wane.  The book is an informal history, which means it describes many stories and characters over an extended period of time.  Specifically, it describes gangs, gangsters, and villainy in lower Manhattan.  It pays particular attention to the Irish gangsters, who are described as heroes, and the pure mayhem wrought in the decades leading up to and just after the Civil War.

Much of it is more than a little racist.  Chinese gangsters, who participated in many of the same activities as their Irish contemporaries, are typically described as impotent and cowardly.  Black people are mentioned only as victims of mob violence.  Still, one could argue that a little prejudice is just a symptom of that brutish period in American history.  Asbury, our author, was writing in the 1920s and used sources from the 19th century.  Is he not bound to mention names like Ni**er Ruhl?  Isn’t he only being true to history when he implies that Jewish gangsters were ashamed to be Jewish?

Sure.  Fine.  I’ll grant it, albeit irritably.  Here’s the part that pisses me off: much of what he calls history does not appear to be true.  Many of the characters are real.  William Poole, Sadie the Goat, Gallus Mag, Monk Eastman (see picture above), and others are extremely interesting, and their stories are mostly true.  You should definitely find a good list and go perusing through biographies.  But the statistics on murder rates, descriptions of the worst slums, and stories describing the inner motives of murderers and bank robbers are either patently false or completely unverifiable.

At one point, Asbury writes about a tenement that experienced a murder every day during a period when, according to a National Geographic article, all of New York only experienced a murder roughly every month.  The author is so infatuated with violence and the mystique of powerful gang leaders that he doesn’t bother vetting his source material.  Stories about Mose the Fireboy, who is easily as cool as Paul Bunyan, are placed in the appropriate semi-mythological context, but others are just plain lies.

Here is actually a much better discussion than you’re reading now.  Go read that for a better look at the historical side of the book and movie.  Considering the book purely as a reading experience, I have to warn you that it drags a bit in the middle.  You can only read “the people rioted all day, were fired upon by cannon, took a building, and set fire to it while still inside” so many times before it gets repetitive.  The parts about the river pirates are definitely worth reading, as are the descriptions Mose and the very early gangsters.  Just take it all with a grain of salt.  Please read it.  I need someone to be bitter with.

As mentioned on the show, this series is not for the feint of heart. I’ve currently read three and a half of these novels (I’m 300 pages from finishing the fourth book), which comes to the sum total of roughly 2,600 pages. From what I understand, the series originally started in seven parts, with Martin currently writing the fifth installment, but we shall see how it all ends up. It’s very interesting for me to be reading a series that is so well established that also has years and years to go before finishing. I am reminded of Steven King’s Gunslinger series, which has seven novels that took upwards of two decades to complete. I really hope that is not the case here, but only time will tell.

So why all the hubbub about this series? Isn’t it just simply some general fantasy B.S. that we’ve all heard time and time again? Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes in that – sure – the characters and settings are all fictional, set in a time where lords and ladies, kings and queens ruled the land. The series encompasses what one would believe to be the general fantasy canon. And that is where the “no” comes in. The content itself belies the simple nature of its setting, opting instead to bring forth an incredibly rich and thought out plot that doesn’t adhere to most normal fantasy standards.

The series begins humbly at house Stark, where its lord is forced to enact judgement on a fellow who has broken is vows as a protector of the Wall (a 300 foot tall – ahem – wall that protects the lands south of it from the wild, for all intents and purposes, “barbarians” of the north). The gentlemen in question has run away from the wall in the grip of fear. On an excursion across the wall, into the wildling terroritory, his band was destroyed by a group of otherwordly beings. (Zombies? MAYBE.) Stark, ruler of the northern lands, invariably takes the head of the deserter as the law requires of those who break their vows. He does so personally (he doesn’t believe in letting someone else do your work for you) and with great solace, however, as even though it is the law, he would rather not take the life of another if it is not needed. These honorable lessons he teaches to his five children, three boys and two girls.

So ends the first couple of chapters. We’re introduced to house Stark and those within it, pretty simple stuff. At this point, with the great care that was given to describe the happenings of this one house, I could only think that the rest of the series would stay with and among these few central characters. And this is where things are different from the norm. While house Stark is a major player in the series, it is by far the only in the game. And all the business about zombies? Well, it’s much less of a major plot point than you might think. I also didn’t even mention the fact that the children all get giant wolve puppies as pets and the wolves end up being their guardians. That part is cool, too. But did I mention the Lannisters? The Dornishmen? Those of the Eyre or of Riverrun? House Tully? The Free Men from beyond the Wall? The Greyjoys who live on the Iron Isles? The list goes on and on and on.

What strikes me as interesting about the series up until this point that I have read is that there are these story elements that you feel will be so central to the plot (Zombies! Wolves!) that you can’t even stand it that don’t end up that way. They’re important, sure, but in the end you feel like they are not there to “give a message,” so to speak, but instead they are simply points in the story of this living world. There is no “good” and “evil” inherently present in most of the characters. There are some that you know fight for good, and some that you just hate, but their actions and how the world ends up don’t align themselves to those simple slots. There will be characters in the series that die, and die for good, and they die way too soon for you. You will hate it; you will be pissed. But the realization you gain is that just because they’re a “good guy” does not give them a free pass if their head gets cut off. And even though you will sit and be pissed off that your favorite character of the whole damn thing dies, you will enjoy the fact that Martin didn’t puss out and let them slide. He’s telling the story of this land, not the story of one character, and during war anyone is vulnerable. And yes, one of my favorite characters died, and I was PISSED. In the end, though, it all works to the series’ favor; I haven’t been so invested in a group of characters in a long time, and with 2,600 pages to go over, you’ll get very knowledgeable of the land of Westoros and its inhabitants.

So why write a hunky article on this series? For one it’s because we simply need more high fantasy that doesn’t settle for being high fantasy for its own sake. Second, I’m sitting here looking at A Feast for Crows, wondering how Samwell Tarley will be able to accomplish the task he’s been given without being too scared and I thought it was just necessary to put to page a few more words on how great the series is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.

Night Watch is a book of three stories, all taking place in and around Moscow. There are vampires. There is magic. There are tornadoes of evil stuff that attach themselves to people’s heads. In the world, there are two kinds of people: Humans and Others. If you are a human, you are ignorant, weak sheep. If you are an Other, you have contact with something called the Twilight. The Russian word being translated as “twilight” is sumrak, which is translated as “gloom” in the movies. Think of a localized, sort of pleasantly ponderous darkness. If you can enter the Twilight, your first trip there will make you a Light Other or a Dark Other. Dark Others include folks like vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, dark magicians, and the like. Light Others include all manner of healers, light magicians, and generally kindly magic users. The two groups of Others have been at war for as long as anyone can remember, and some of these people are hundreds of years old. What I’m saying is that it’s an old ass war between good and evil.

That’s the world. If you’re thinking so far that this is something any hack scifi author could have written, you’re right. It’s a simple set up of good versus evil. The greatness of the book comes of it’s being so incredibly Russian. The main character is a guy named Anton. He’s a mediocre magician and essentially gets jerked around by both his boss and by the bad guys. One of the genius aspects of this book is that the good/evil war has entered a cold phase. The two powers have struck a sensitive detente, so most of the fighting tends to be either entirely strategic with very little violence. Another really neat aspect of the stories is that, even though this is a war between the categorically good and the undeniably evil, there appears to be a huge amount of moral ambiguity. When the Dark Ones make the case for joining their side, it’s hard not to sympathize with them. Over all, I got the impression that I was reading about a chess game from the point of view of a pawn. Big things happen, and the main character usually doesn’t know why.

There is also a tragically abortive love story between Anton and a woman he meets seemingly by chance. That part of the story is downplayed a little, but it lasts the whole book and asks an interesting question. Should you commit to loving someone even if you know that your relationship won’t last? It isn’t quite as dramatic as it sounds, but the characters have some interesting emotions between bouts of intense spy stuff.

This is a cool beach read. Andrew Bromfield’s translation is smooth and easy to dive into. If you want something interesting that includes a crazy amount of moral ambiguity and certified glitter-free vampires, read Night Watch.

This post isn’t about that book. Maybe next time. Today, I’m writing about Starship Troopers. As is fitting with the great tradition of American science fiction, Starship Trooopers was eventually made into a crappy/fantastic movie. I recommend the movie if you have some time to kill or if you just like silly adaptations. (I usually do.)

The gist of the story is that humanity has colonized space and is now at war with an alien race called the Arachnids. As a bildungsroman, the story follows Johnny Rico from high school boy with no responsibility to battle-hardened man who commands his military unit. For people to become full, voting citizens of Earth’s planetary nation, they must perform a certain amount of military service. Because of the war with the “Bugs,” that little commitment is a pretty huge deal. People are dying out in space in unspeakable ways. This makes citizenship an option (and it is only optional) that most folks don’t choose. Needless to say, Johnny’s parents are not super psyched that he wants to join up. After he takes the future’s equivalent of the ASVAB, he gets placed in the mobile infantry.

Now, the mobile infantry is basically the marine corps in this world. Instead of storming beaches, though, these guys storm planets. From space. In power armor. With these military units, Heinlein invents the drop trooper. These are the first guys to make planet fall without a space ship. Their power armor is super macho, flame-throwing badness. The only thing that would make these suits better is a pair of truck nuts tacked to the front. They’re amazing.

Now, there is some controversy surrounding this one. Heinlein wrote it during the Cold War after he started supporting U.S. nuclear testing. Yes, the book has a fairly pro-military, pro-war, pro-violence-in-general statement to make. I don’t especially agree with the message, but I was still able to really enjoy the book. Every chapter begins with a brief quote that talks about the proper way to raise a child, what makes a good soldier, or something else in that direction. Mostly, they’re interesting, and they always have something to do with the chapter. “The Ballad of Rodger Young”, if you’ll pardon the pun, is a running theme in this book. The book even ends with a historical note about the real Rodger Young, a no-shit WWII hero. At 260 pages, Starship Troopers is a short and brisk read. I recommend it for anyone who digs on military fiction, good science fiction, or manifestos in favor of the military industrial complex. Keep an eye out near the end of the book for when Johnny encounters his father. It’s quite a moment.

In it, Dai Sijie draws on his own experience as a young man being re-educated during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to tell the story of two boys who have been labelled “young intellectuals” and deemed potential reactionaries.

The sons of bourgeois pigs, the two boys grew up together and are both sent to a rural village on Pheonix Mountain. Having been taken from their bourgeois pig parents, they are made to live in a house above an actual pig sty. The smell is apparently awful. Because the book is told as a first-person narrative, we never get a lot of details about the speaker. We find out in a kind of off-handed way that his name means “horse,” though, which means his name is Ma. His companion, the one who does not narrate, is Luo, and their adventures on the mountain are numerous. They frequently revolve around the boys’ search for entertainment but, for a while, focus specifically on Luo’s desire to get some strange out of a tailor’s daughter, the cutest girl on the mountain. Their shared enemy in their pursuits is the village Headman, a staunch Maoist who appears to hate fun of all kinds.

One day, the boys managed to convince the Headman that they should be allowed to visit a neighboring village and watch a movie that was being shown there. No one in the Headman’s village had ever seen a movie, and everyone wanted to know what they were like. The condition for the boys’ departure was that they return in two days and recount the movie in perfect detail. They made the trip and watched the film twice. Thanks to Luo’s genius at storytelling, the Headman made their trip a monthly ritual. Finally, the boys had a job that didn’t involve working in a mine. This was how the two passed their time for a while. Ma had a violin, which he played in the evening, and when the two weren’t working in the mines, they were putting on an aural cinema. Then, the Seamstress fell for Luo. From this point on, Luo disappears sporadically, and it is always assumed he is enjoying a rendezvous with the his new lover. Then, almost as though the story must complete the book’s title, Ma gets his hands on some Balzac. Another young intellectual has smuggled forbidden books onto the mountain, and Ma obtains the boy’s copy of Ursule Mirouet. The book, of course translated into Mandarin, gives his spirit the release he’s been looking for.

While Ma’s quest becomes to obtain more books from the stingy smuggler, Luo realizes that he is dissatisfied with his conquest of the Seamstress because she seems too parochial for his taste. To make himself feel better about banging some chick he met in the country, Luo decides to use Ma’s books to educate her. On their liaisons, his ritual becomes first to make love to her and then to read to her from these exotic Western novels. The ending is something I honestly didn’t see coming.

Sijie eventually made his story into a film that I’d love to see. This is a novel that rides on the strength of its story and the simplicity of its telling. There aren’t huge explosions. There are few scenes of suspense or horror. Some of the best fun for me was encountering the names of classic novels mentioned in the smuggler’s collection. I recommend it to anyone. It’s a relaxing read that won’t turn your brain to mush.

Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, which Joe and Garret reviewed, and The Diamond Age, which I would love to write up sometime.  He’s a great author and has a huge, nerdy fanbase.  Today’s book, however, is why am not a drooling fanboy for him the way I am for Gaiman and Gibson.

Cryptonomicon is half alternate history, half love story, half bildungsroman.  Seriously, three halves.  That’s how much story there is here.  This book could have been divided up into duology, maybe even a trilogy, and each book would have still been a really great story.  It’s all one book, though.  Like a 64 oz. steak, it looks up at you from your plate and says, “I dare  you to start me.  I’m going to own you.  When you’re done, who will be the victor?  You may consume me, but I will overtake you in the end.”  That being said, it is a fun book, if you can stand the bloated feeling you get at times.

The two most central characters are Randy Waterhouse and his grandfather Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.  The two eras are when these men are young, in the late 1990s and during World War II.  They are brilliant but socially inept.  (I can’t decide whether or not I think Lawrence has a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome.)  Much of the story involves their social maturation.  In that vein, there are pontifications on love, courtship, masturbation, and getting blow jobs from Nazi spies.

Yet, the book is also about information technology, specifically with reference to cryptography and the art of stealing information.  Much is made of Van Eck phreaking, one-time pads, and bingo balls.  The Cryptonomicon itself is a fictional compendium of all humanity’s understanding of codes and cyphers.  If you are a mathematician, crypto buff, or just like geeking out on information theory, this book is for you.  Some of it was way over my head, but I still enjoyed it.  There’s even a special cypher involving playing cards called The Solitaire Encryption Algorithm.  If you like, an appendix teaches you how to use it.

In side stories that could be novellas themselves, Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo are WWII soldiers, American and Japanese respectively.  They play out the grunt work involved in the information war between the Axis and Allies.  This is where most of the action comes in, but they aren’t just G. I. Joe toys in writing.  Just about everyone in this book is a fully three-dimensional character.  Even Bobby’s granddaughter Amy (short for America), who becomes Randy’s love interest, has a working brain behind her lusciously tan body.

If I keep going in any one direction, this review will go on for days.  Suffice it to say that there is more.  Much more.  If you have a lot of time to kill, pick it up.  It can get a little intense, though.  Sometimes the descriptions of Lawrence’s mathematical ponderances can be tedious.  I took several years to finish it because I would read it for a few weeks and then have to go read something else for a while.

What really keeps me from being a fan of this book, though, is the ending.  One of Stephenson’s signatures, it seems, is a curtailed denouement.  Sometimes it works, as in Snow Crash.  Here, I think, it doesn’t.  The story comes to a roaring climax, but the future is left so uncertain as to leave the reader wanting.  There is so much happening, just so much story, that the resolution hinted at in the end just feels like a cliffhanger.    This may be because it was written to connect Snow Crash and TheBaroqueCycle (three links).  I don’t know.  I choose to believe this because it lets me think that Stephenson is a better writer.

This week, I forced myself to make a tough decision.  I was either going to review Good Omens, a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, or Marvel 1602, a graphic novel compiling Gaiman’s vision of Europe in the year 1602 if Marvel superheroes had existed back then as they do today.  From this post’s title, you should know which way that decision went.  Still, I do highly recommend Marvel 1602.  I enjoyed it in a way that made me feel uncomfortably geeky.

Our full title this week is Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.  (Really, I could stop here, because I know you’ve already fallen in love, but I go on!)  This book begins with the birth of the Antichrist, and it just gets better from there.  Aziraphale and Crawly are an earth-dwelling angel and demon, respectively, who have had integral parts in humanity’s development ever since Crawly gave Eve the apple of ill repute and Aziraphale offered the primeval couple his flaming sword on their way out of the Garden.  Unfortunately for their higher-ups, these two have gotten pretty comfortable during their six thousandish years on Earth.  When the infant Antichrist gets accidentally swapped to another family in the maternity ward, neither one of them is too keen on finding him, so he is allowed to grow up in a quiet English suburb.  You did know the Antichrist was going to be English, right?  His name is Adam.

Agnes Nutter, now, she’s an interesting character.  Much of the book revolves around one of her descendants, Anathema, who has lived her whole life by Agnes Nutter’s nice and accurate prophecies.  Understand now that “nice” here is used in the archaic manner, meaning “exactingly precise.”  Agnes was burned as a witch, which she saw coming.  She left the book where the right person would find and save it after her death, all of which she saw coming.  She tried to forestall the end of the world, which she… you get the idea.

Adam, on the other hand, has no bloody idea who he is.  He lives his life in idyllic simplicity, playing with his friends and subconsciously warping the fabric of reality.  Because of his metaphysical position as the agent of doom, his desires become manifest in the physical world.  For that reason, though there have been many highways planned through his town, none has ever been built.  Contractors and planners have gone mad trying to build it, but they’ve all been stymied by events that defy understanding.  Unless you know who lives in the town.

As with Neverwhere, half the fun of this book is just reading the style used to write it.  Gaiman and Pratchett actually wrote it before either one of them was any kind of famous.  One day, they just decided to collaborate.  When it was finished, they were absolutely proud of the story and absolutely certain they would never do it again.  It doesn’t have the same kind of macabre feeling of other Gaiman works, but it does have the same sense of humor.  The characters are too derranged not to be based on real people.  Particularly fun are the Four Horsemen, who serve as the nucleus of an ad hoc biker gang near the end of the book.  The members of this gang are the big four–Death, War, Famine, Polution (replacing Pestilence after the advent of penicillin)–and the other four–Grievous Bodily Harm, Embarassing Personal Problems, Cruelty to Animals, and Really Cool People.

In short, it’s another fun read.  I do highly recommend it for anyone who is a human.

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, we can get down to business. Last time, I made an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, and it seems like I really ought to follow up with Neverwhere because it shows just how much Gaiman has blown this type of story out of the water.

Our story starts with Richard Mayhew, a run of the mill, 9-to-5, 20-something doofus. He’s the very promising sort of nobody that corporate culture really jives with. His fiancee is what you would get if you were to cross Paris Hilton and an Oxford education. That is, she very capably helps run a museum in London, but she apparently does so with the intention of being seen at the museum. Richard tries his best to keep up with her demands for their relationship, but he even finds that his little rebellions against her tyranny (rebellions that always take place when she’s not around) leave him feeling unfulfilled. At least, until he takes his tumble down the rabbit hole.

One evening, as Richard and Jessica are walking along an empty street, a girl in rags suddenly appears as if thrust from a wall near the sidewalk. Against Jessica’s vehement protests, Richard takes the unconscious girl back to his apartment, where the figurative shit hits the figurative fan. Twenty pages and a vigorous brush with death later, Richard and the girl, whose name is Door, are in London Below, the world where place names are literal and strangeness is the norm. There they meet the Marquis de Carabas and travel the maze of pipes, tunnels, and sewer lines below all of London in their adventure to thwart the terrifying Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar and to discover who has been killing off Door’s family. Someone has been killing them off, you see. Door’s only clue as to why comes from a passage in her father’s diary. Following it, they seek the Angle Islington.

Now, if you have ever read Gaiman’s work before, you’ll know that half the fun of his stories is just reading the way he puts words together. His dry humor runs throughout this story, but it carries a morbid edge that never lets the tone quite become light. For instance, Knightsbridge is a subway stop in London Above, but in London Below it is an actual bridge. A bridge that is very dark. Because it belongs to Night. And sometimes it eats people. Cute people, whom you thought might become key characters and are actually kind of sad to see go. Earl’s Court, again, is a subway stop in London Above, but in London Below, it is an actual court. Held by the Earl. In a subway car. I think you see where I’m going with this. The point is that it is all very amusing to read but does not take away from the gravity of the adventure.

Magic in this one is slightly downplayed but fun when it pops up. It is thankfully not overused as a plot device. The references to actual London landmarks is also fun, and even if you aren’t a Londoner you can follow them on the subway map at the front of the book.

This is a great one, especially if you hate your life. If you see yourself as a Richard Mayhew, wasting away inside as you die the slow death of commercial preoccupation, you must try this novel. It’ll have you wandering down lonely streets, just waiting for some injured girl to pop out of a wall to save you from your stupid life.