Picking Next Month's Book

Miss Eliza's Book Review - H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau

 

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Published by: Dover
Publication Date: 1896
Format: Paperback, 104 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Edward Prendick was shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean. Some would call it luck that he was picked up by a passing ship, but after what happened to him, perhaps death would have been preferable. He is plucked from the ocean by a man named Montgomery who has a strange animalistic servant, M'ling. The hired crew of the ship don't trust Montgomery and when they get to his destination they abandon Prendick with him. The island is a scientific research station of Dr. Moreau, who Prendick remembers reading about... he was involved in some rather unethical researches if he remembers rightly, vivisection.

Prendick soon learns that Moreau has retreated to this island to continue his work on his Beast Folk, the work others don't understand. His genetic mutations of man and beast drive him and have driven Prendick to flee into the forest to escape Moreau, yet this could be more dangerous then he knows. Moreau has strict laws that his creations must abide by. Besides being as human as possible, walking only on two legs, they must avoid meat and blood. Yet someone hasn't been following the laws... soon Predick's behaviour is secondary to the danger that looms ahead of them. What if the Beast Folk fall prey to their animal instincts?

Growing up in the 80s and 90s if you were a discerning girl there is no excuse for not having the biggest crush on Val Kilmer. I seriously do not know how many times I saw Willow in the theatre, but I know I spent more time watching that movie in the summer of 1988 then doing anything else. Of course this crush meant that after Willow there were many westerns I watched, perhaps the oddest of the Batman movies and then there was The Island of Dr. Moreau. This movie was released right after I got out of high school and I was hoping for it to be the highpoint of my very busy summer. Firstly there was Val Kilmer, secondly there was Fairuza Balk, star of The Worst Witch, the coolest and tackiest movie about witchcraft ever, and then there was Marlon Brando wearing an ice bucket. The movie is so bizarre that there is really no way anyone could categorize it. I just watched it again after reading the book and still, it's just so odd and full of camp and oddly Professor Lupin, that there's really nothing more to say. The Island of Dr. Moreau was just on the cusp of my obsession with reading the book and then going to see the movie. Therefore I had picked up a cheap Dover paperback of the book after I watched the movie and kind of put the book aside thinking I might read it one day.

It took seventeen years but I finally got around to reading the book. And you know what? I rather liked it. The descriptions of the island are so beautiful and poetic that the lack of plot or motivations for the characters makes you wish that Wells had spent more time rounding out the story versus having them run around the island like headless chickens. Also the fact that Prendick, who, let's face it, his name sums up the fact he truly is a dick, seems ok with animal experimentation and vivisection, but as soon as you bring a human or something human esque into it, he gets a bit squeamish. Bit of a double standard there dick boy. Sure it is probably the more acceptable opinion of the times, but, dude, no, just no to the animal experimentation.

Wells has always been heralded as a kind of Nostradamus, and reading this book it is eerie as all get out. He wrote this in 1896! The kind of science he describes would be used by the Nazis in World War II, and if you think about the cloning and gene splicing and steam cells and the use of pig valves in human hearts today, wow. Sure it's a bit squeamish that Wells himself was an advocate of eugenics... but for scientists it's more just a creepy "hands on" Darwinism. Moreau might have been a monster in the eyes of Prendick and the world, but he was a genius that presaged what was to come in the realms of science rather accurately. Makes me openly wonder if perhaps Wells happened to create a time machine and take a quick jaunt into the future... he did strongly believe that the science of this book could be accomplished... he didn't happen to have an island no one knew about did he?

To bring it full circle, let's go back to that weird ass movie adaptation... you know what? I can actually see the framework of the book in the movie, I can also see where it went wrong. I'm not talking about Brando getting to be crazy on set or Val Kilmer's Montgomery shooting up drugs. These things were modernisations of the situations on the island. Where they went wrong was going for ultra violence and trying to make it as a blockbuster with a love interest and all. If they had toned it down, then the little things, the horror of finding the dead bunny would have played better. Let the actors be overstated in the movie and the story be understated... I see now that this movie could have been awesome, and it makes me sad that they had a chance to update a strangely prescient book and failed in the attempt.

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

 

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Published by: Pantheon
Publication Date: January 1st, 2000
Format: Paperback, 709 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Johnny Truant comes into possession of a very odd manuscript written by a man named Zampano. Zampano had spent his life assembling the definitive study of the documentary film The Navidson Record, about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his companion Karen Green who move into a house on Ash Tree Lane with their two young children. The film deals with the startling realization that their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. At first it's just little discrepancies, but soon a door appears. Behind the door is a large and every changing labyrinth thats size is incalculable. They soon start to film their discoveries and even mount a expedition into the depths of the house. The assembled footage is what makes up The Navidson Record.

Only Johnny Truant finds that The Navidson Record apparently doesn't exist. Johnny soon becomes obsessed with finishing Zampano's work, but at the same time he is descending into the same madness that claimed the old man. Johnny is attaching tape measures to the floors and walls of his apartment to make sure they don't move. He rarely ventures out anymore. He is a man obsessed. He finds that above all, he needs to find the house. Finding the house might solve everything.

This book has been logically categorized as if The Blair Witch Project was a book. That is about the quickest way to sum up this book without driving your listener insane. The book is a weird post-modernist twist on literature wherein all the narrators are unreliable and some of them might not even be real. This leads me to the question that is of paramount importance to me, is House of Leaves a parody or is it deadly serious? Are all the copious and minuscule footnotes a parody on academic writing? Is the layout meant to be fun, interactive, and slightly off putting? These two diametrically opposed opinions make the book either good or bad. Because if it's parody it's genius, but if it's deadly seriously, I want to cut the author. It's a dense book that is a slow read because there is so much going on with at least four stories being told simultaneously, and of those I really only like one of them. From a design standpoint it's amazingly done, but design alone doesn't make a book work.

This book is insanely layered and nuanced, meaning, the more you read, the more you find. But the problem I had was that the only storyline I wanted to follow was The Navidson Record. I didn't care about Johnny and his lifestyle of dissipation, or of Zampano, who, let's face it, is seriously just a figment of Johnny's imagination. I don't come by that theory lightly. If you skip ahead and read the letters to Johnny from his institutionalized mother who always believes in the power of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and marking letters that haven't been tampered with with a check mark and then go back to earlier in the book, there's an entry where Zampano quotes directly from the COED and in the lower corner... is that a check mark? Basically proving beyond a shadow of doubt in my mind that Johnny is writing all Zampano's stuff because he is Zampano.

But narrative aside, I don't think this book was good for my health. You know how there are some books that make you feel what it's like to be insane, to be in the shoes of the character, the thing is, I think this book was actually setting out to make me insane and scarily enough succeeding. Hundreds of pages of tiny footnotes just listing photographers or artists or architectural styles gets to you... and yes, I did read them all. Also, all those architectural styles listed to laboriously drill home and prove that the house wasn't like any other architecture but then having the stairs have a banister and the doors frames... that's contradictory... and yes, this are the little things that seeped into my head in the small hours. Seriously, how long before the cardboard and tinfoil and egg cartoons start decorating my room... Not to even mention how the design made you feel like you had fallen into the book and were trapped in some weird Lewis Carroll world and you where never going to get out and you where never going to be free... I got into some bleak trains of thought with this book, none of them good.

Yet the design of this book is meticulous. If it wasn't for the design you wouldn't have that vertiginous sensation that you were falling into the book. Of course the previous one hundred pages of dense type that softened up your mind to fully lose it was more likely to be affected by stretches of blank pages where there was sometimes only a word per page. One week I would only get through a hundred pages and then the next day I'd get through one hundred and fifty more because of the design. The different fonts to identify authorship made it easy to distinguish whose voice I was listening to and did help to make the book less obtuse. Plus, the subtle blue at every use of the word house and all the minotaur references being in red was pretty darn awesome. But as I said above, design doesn't make a book, unless it's a design book I should point out... the design should support a quality narrative not surpass it. They need to be equal and go hand in glove. I shouldn't be giving a full star to the design and the other star just to the one plot line I liked. This book could have been amazing. Could have been is the key for me. Instead I think I'm a little more off balance then before.

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Miss Eliza's Book Review - Zadie Smith's White Teeth

 

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: March 19th, 1999
Format: Paperback, 448 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

On New Year's Eve 1974 Archie Jones sets out to kill himself but ends up being unsuccessful, yet like a butterfly leaving the cocoon, he leaves that gas filled car a new man. A new life and a new wife await him! His old army buddy Samad Iqbal has been saying to him for awhile that what he needs is a new young wife, like his own Alsana. That night Archie meets Clara Bowden and by Valentine's Day they are man and wife. Archie is escaping the life left in that car and Clara is escaping her mother, Hortense, whose religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness have stifled Clara's life. It isn't long before the middle aged men are fathers. Archie has a lovely daughter, Irie, and Samad has twins boys, Magid and Millat, who couldn't be more different.

It is 1984 and now Samad's life is about to change forever. He falls hard for his son's music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. The lust stirred in Samad has him questioning everything. But the attraction is mutual, and soon he has a new outlet for his lust. Yet his religious beliefs and the sin he is committing because, as he claims, the lure of the Western world has seduced him, leads him to do something that his wife will never forgive him for. He feels that if he could be degraded in this way, his sons are in even worse danger. He wants to send them back to Bangladesh, but only has the financial resources to send one of them. Magid and Millat are separated and Alsana can never forgive him until Magid is returned to her.

The 90s have come and Irie is grown up and in love with Millat. Millat has indeed fallen prey to the lure of the West as his father feared. He sleeps around, does drugs, gets into fights, and is still somehow the object of Irie's affection, which he doesn't return. One day at school Irie is confronting Millat near resident nerd Josh Chalfen when there is a drugs bust. The three of them get brought before the principal for Millat's marijuana. In the hope that Josh and his illustrious family, his mother Joyce is an author, his father Marcus is a genetic engineer, will be a good influence on Irie and Millat, they are to go to the Chalfens once a week and have Josh tutor them. Soon it's everyday. Joyce takes an extreme interest in Millat while Irie starts to work for Marcus as an assistant. Even Magid, back in Bangladesh, befriends Marcus and decides to return to England. But the life of Chalfenism is divisive, and soon Josh has joined an animals rights group, FATE, to protest his father's genetic engineering of FutureMouse, while Millat has joined a fundamentalist Islamic group, KEVIN, to turn his back on his old life and the fact that Marcus prefers Magid. On the eve of the new millennium, everyone gathers to herald the arrival of FutureMouse... most with differing ideas as to how the evening will go.

From the little blurb I have assembled above you might be drawn to the false conclusion that this book actually has a plot. It doesn't. Well... it kind of does at the very end where Zadie Smith apparently realized she needed one and just threw in a handful of new characters and a whole bunch of organizations with stupid acronyms and built to an unsatisfying conclusion with guns and Nazis and genetically engineered mice. That is right, she brought in Nazis. And I think that's the problem, she brought in whatever she wanted randomly and then just threw it aside when she got bored. Though she never seemed to get bored of slightly tweaking the reader with little asides in some random post modern moments of incomprehensibility. So the book actually feels like a bunch of interconnected short stories, some of which might have been good if they hadn't been thrown in with the morass of crap and depravity that makes up the majority of this book.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend and she asked me if I had read Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I replied that I had, mainly because it was a loosely, if failed, reimagining of Howards End, and was mentioned on The Vicar of Dibley. She was wondering if I was put off by the very detailed descriptions of one of the character's nipples. I honestly said that I had no recollection of this, most likely I had blocked it from my memory. I can honestly say though, after reading White Teeth, I will never forget Zadie Smith's obsession with nipples ever again. In fact, this book can be summed up as very boring with a veneer of eww. If I wasn't bored senseless I was quite literally wanting to throw up. Thirty pages of a 57 year old man masturbating (another friend claims it might have been more, perhaps I'm preemptively blocking this out). Domestic abuse, where the children are placing bets on their parents. Teenagers marrying men in their 40s (proving Smith has daddy issues). A father of Irie's classmate calling her a big black goddess and ruminating about her breasts, when she's only what, fourteen! The aforementioned nipples, except for multiple characters, not just one. I wanted to wash my brain after reading this book.

Now, you're thinking that I missed the point, that the book wasn't about these accumulated repugnant and repulsive moments. I totally get that the book is about heritage and ancestry and genetics and what limitations we are burdened with, nature, nurture, fate. The second generation versus the first generation. You would have to be blind to miss this, especially once we get to FutureMouse. But the truth is, I can't, I couldn't, give a tinker's damn. It doesn't matter if you set out to write the most amazing, most profound story, if your characters are not only unlikeable, but reprehensible, then there is no way I will care. With all this ick as I will pejoratively call everything in this book, there wasn't a redeemable character or any reason to even finish reading this book except for the fact that I am incapable of leaving a book unfinished. So I finished. I read ever last work she wrote and I hated it. Mine is an educated hate, you can't say fairer then that!

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Ernest Cline's Ready Player One

 

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Published by: Broadway Books
Publication Date: April 16th, 2011
Format: Paperback, 384 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

James Halliday is the creator of the OASIS. In all immersive MMO that allows everyone on Earth to escape the horrors of what has become of the world in the near future and go to school, party, or just explore and level their avatar. Halliday was the biggest geek there was and he wanted his passions to be your passions, and his main passion was the 1980s, the time when he was a teenager. When he died he left no heirs and created a treasure hunt within the OASIS to decide who would be worthy of being his successor. His Willy Wonka test was neigh on indecipherable with a little video he made which ended up being nicknamed Anorak's Invitation, after his Avatar, Anorak. Soon a culture of hunters, called gunters, form with the sole purpose of memorizing the minutiae of Halliday and the 80s and finding Halliday's fortune.

Wade Watts is a gunter with the handle Parzival. He has spent five years of his life learning everything there is to know about James Halliday. For five long years no one has made the least bit of headway with the quest until Parzival stumbles on the answer while sitting in his virtual classroom. Within hours two people have passed through the first of three gates that lead to Halliday's egg. It soon becomes clear to Parzival that this is going to end sooner then anyone thought, with more dangers then he could imagine. Now that the first hurtle is passed, it won't be long before things come to a head. While Parzival has troubles trusting the other gunters he's come to view as his friends, the real danger is IOI, a rival organization who wants to win the game, not to win, but to control the OASIS.

As many people have started their review with "this book was written just for my generation and me in particular," well, I figure, I will reiterate that sentiment. Yes, this book was written for me. I was born in 1978, so a little younger then Halliday, and Cline himself, but of the same generation, so to speak. I will not go on and then say that this book is just wonderful and marvelous and just spoke to me, because, well, it just didn't. You know, it actually kind of enrages me that this book is so well regarded and lauded. It isn't the book itself you can be in love with, it just can't be, with it's bland prose riddled with errors, and it's dry clinical writing style, making it almost like a history book, though written by someone with an ego who is very self impressed that they have all this knowledge at their fingertips.

You're in love with the memories this book evokes, the connection it forges using emotional cues from your past. You say "Pac-Man" and I'm a little kid again down at the Brat and Brau feeding quarters into their "Ms. Pac-Man" machine in the few spare minutes I had before the food arrived and my grandmother started piling the A-1 on her dinner. That dark and dingy little restaurant that had the cliched wooden panelling that my basement had and made the restaurant part rathskeller, part sports bar. Side note, I didn't need to read a whole chapter on every level of "Pac-Man" and how the final screen is only half there, I knew that, move on. Cline has taped into the zeitgeist of an era and has just info dumped on us, using touchstones like the Whedonverse to make little geeks and wannabes sqwee with joy. There is nothing that it makes me think of more then the episode of Community "Regional Holiday Music" which they did as a skewering of Glee. One of the songs, to entice Pierce to enter into the singing spirit, was called "Baby Boomer Santa." As Annie said in the episode "Pierce, they're just trying to pander to your demographics documented historical vanity. Resist!" The song is nothing more then a list of things that would appeal to Pierce, from Coca-Cola to The Beatles, Woodstock to Vietnam. This is what Ready Player One does! It just lists things from the 80s that we connect to from Galaga to WarGames and all the hipsters and 80s geeks and everyone is sucked in. To that I echo Annie Edison! RESIST!

This info dump mentality makes the book like the carrion of literature displaying the largest lack of imagination I have seen in a book. Ready Player One is part Willy Wonka, part Ender's Game with John Hughes doing the adaptation. I defy you to find something actually original in this book. All the humor and originality is directly lifted from other sources. Why is the final battle Parzival faces so funny? Because he's in Monty Python and the Holy Grail! The entire action, the entire everything is Monty Python's genius, NOT Ernest Cline's! This happens again and again throughout the book. And then there's Halliday and Morrow. Let's talk about James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, or as they really are, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Even if Cline hadn't laboriously pointed that the "fictitious characters" had been compared to these two real men, there is no grey area here. They are 100% these two men. Halliday even dies! Add to that the fact that Ready Player One goes into Phone Phreaking a lot, and Wozniak was part of this phenomenon, and they just get more and more similar. Then, in the, really, you really had to do that, bash my head against the wall, make me want to light the book on fire, there's the fact that the Wozniak character, Ogden, had the nickname Og, like Wozniak with Woz. Seriously? I mean seriously? It's not funny, it's a joke that is flat. Also, let's keep in mind that everyone knows that Woz is the one who was more, how shall I say, fun and relaxed of the two, so he wouldn't be litigious, even though he's spinning tunes as a DJ in a glass bubble before shooting lightning out of his fingers (yes, this seriously happens, and if it was me, I'd have my lawyer on speed dial). This is just degrading to me and in my mind to him, a man I very much admire. Sure he was on Dancing with the Stars, but you know what, he had a choice in that. I have a strong feeling, that while Halliday is never depicted negatively, if Jobs hadn't been on his deathbed, there might have been some serious legal action on this book.

If I where to just talk about Cline's writing, I would have to go back to the major flaw in this book in that Cline NEVER sticks to his own internal rules he has created. One minute there's never been a game like the WarGames simulation in the first gate, the next second Wade is on a date with Art3mis and they're in a Goonies rendition that is exactly like the simulation no one had ever thought of. When he's getting ready to clear the first gate, it's a Thursday night, clearly stated as Thursday, because he says he only has one more day of school before the weekend. Because of clearing the gate he sleeps through school, but then gets up bright and early the next day and goes to school... on a Saturday? Then the stupid Fyndoro whatever can only be used once in 24 hours, and then they use it like 6 hours later? Um, if you're going to phone in half your book by ripping other, better, people off, the least, the very very least you could do is get your own writing right. To step further away from all the things that are like or ripped off from other sources, let's talk about the part of the book that is Cline's. It's like he doesn't know what he wants his world to be. Is it dystopian, well yes, but then he drastically shifts away from this interesting study of the poor Wade and his living in "the stacks" and goes 180 and it becomes about this "affluent" kid that Wade has become, lured by the gadgets money has bought him. Which takes the soul out of the book. And then it just becomes the typical "Big Brother" story about a company trying to take control of the OASIS at any cost, deaths allowed. So, now the book is a thriller with corporate espionage? Really, Cline, you needed to keep a similar feel and a through line through this book. Instead you made Wade a douche and then I almost wanted the bad guys to win. And in the end, what was the moral? Stop playing games and get a real life? Because, Halliday just had these gunters waste SIX YEARS of their lives to learn that lesson. Douche Halliday. Also, you kind of made me never want to go near a computer again. And what fantasy world is this where a company would actually keep your information private, cause it's not ours? Now that is pure fiction.

To finalize what I refer to now as my ranty rant. There are just so many books and movies and music that Cline has mined, all of which are more original and better, so just go and give credit to the original, not the wannabe. Also, if you want something that actually captures the feeling I think Cline was aiming for, go read or watch Scott Pilgrim. As I read in another review among those fellow haters, I think Sissyneck on goodreads summed it up perfectly. "In a nice manifestation of the novel's lack of self-awareness, Cline at one point derides the villains of the book for simply using "Johnny 5" style robots from Short Circuit instead [of] coming up with their own design. This appropriation, he explains, demonstrates "a lack of imagination," a valid criticism that only too accurately applies to the ostensible heroes of the book, as well as to Cline himself." Right on Sissyneck! And here's a little Pierce Hawthrone to sing us out...