Yesterday I brought all the cardboard and junk mail to recycling, making me feel so virtuous I rewarded myself with a shopPING expedition. Since nothing opened until 11, I finished Bel Canto in a Starbucks with a mug of tea. This left me, after the exertion of spending money, with nothing to read over lunch, and lunch I had to have if I was going to go to the gym.
RDC wanted to know why I would drive all the way to Flatirons Crossing when all the same stores are in Cherry Creek. I don't have a good answer to that, especially since the Tattered Cover is in Cherry Creek and all Flatirons offers is a Borders. I was carrying a purse instead of a wallet, and the reason I need to get a wallet-on-a-string is so the wallet-to-purse shuffle doesn't mean I sacrifice my lists of books. I stood in Borders unable to recall a single title.
V.S. Naipaul, Manuel Puig, Virginia Woolf, who are next on my list and whose titles I don't own, all didn't occur to me. I did think of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping; Borders had her new Gilead but not it. I didn't think of Michael Chabon's new title, which John Leonard reviewed in the same article as Gilead. Jared Diamond's new book wasn't available either but while I was in the science section, science fiction occurred to me. So I bought John Scalzi's Old Man's War.
I'm glad to have met and talked with Scalzi and to have had him join us when Weetabix and Chauffi dragged me onstage to sing "Dancing Queen." (Abba should, of course, be sung as a foursome.) I have read and enjoyed the Whatever for many years, and especially since he earned his first JournalCon Karaoke fame singing "I Melt with You" in Pittsburgh.
But I didn't like the novel overall. I liked up to Willie Wheelie, that is, up to when the serious army and alien stuff began. I don't much like much science fiction, and reportedly this book is very Heinleinesque, so perhaps it's a compliment to the book that it is so faithful to its genre. I had plotted several of the plot points because of foreshadowing (is it obligatory?) One character's angst didn't mesh with her earlier personality and its origins. There were nitpicking editing errors, a couple of glitches and one utter word omission that interrupted action. And there were less nitpicky things, such as someone pointing out that your Earth-done tattoo wouldn't follow you into the Colonial Defense Force, then a few pages later that same character showing his own Earth-done tattoo, without specifying, which would have been appropriate under the circumstances, whether he'd had it redone. (But the scene containing that flub is my favorite.) Furthermore, the jacket reads, "They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living" despite, first, that the recruits are trained to ignore the limitations of their humanity, both physical and emotional; and second, that other recruits are even better as soldiers because they didn't start out as 75-year-olds.
Jasper Fforde handled a mcguffin better than anyone else. A deus ex machina saves the day, someone asks what happened, and someone else replies that it, the deus, was [brand name] Plot Save-the-Day doohickey (tm). I forget exactly how he did it, but it was meta and acknowledged both his own resorting to such a device and the fact that I, the reader, would get more pleasure from laughing at his arrogance than a rigorously possible save. (Besides, in the world of Thursday Next, such a conceit is rigorously possible.) Scalzi had to let the exposition fairy slap the dialogue around less gracefully than that. Oh well.
Mostly it was the same stuff that annoys me in almost all the science fiction I have read. It didn't happen with Ender's Game, which I disliked for reasons all its own, because Ender defends Earth, where humans belong. I just don't like humans living elsewhere than on Earth. For all that we fuck it up daily, it's where we're meant to be, this planet that made us and gave us life. So the entire colonization thing had my teeth on edge from the start. That's not Scalzi's fault or the genre's but mine, but it doesn't help me like a book.
Also, right at the start, a bit of unexplainable technology is explained by assuming that Earthlings didn't invent the technology but cribbed it from an alien intelligence. So I expected the cribbing to come up later, and it did. The following wasn't the book Scalzi wanted to write, so I can't reasonably hold it against OMW, but wouldn't it have been great if the technology behind green-skinned, cat-eyed, SmartBlooded bodies, churning with BrainPals and nanobots, had also been cribbed?
My main gripe is how obvious the unfolding action was. How common is it for a newly transferred recruit to want his wedding ring, and why is wearing one allowed, since it's not necessary to survival? If you're allowed to keep some personal effects, why wouldn't the CDF make you keep your ring with them? That, following the unsubtle Ghost Brigades comment, made the course of the action obvious, and all the fiddling around with aliens just that much filler, and too glossy and glossed-over to be amusing filler.
That said, reading a man's books because I have a fleeting online acquaintance with him is a good enough reason for me (given that I enjoy the acquaintance). I look forward to Agent of the Stars, and I'm glad for his successes.
STL and PLT and I were talking about movies, and PLT said that anyone who can name their 25 favorite movies is either supremely organized or a huge nerd. I replied, "Or both."
African Queen
Almost Famous
Becket
Brazil
Breakfast Club
Bringing Up Baby
City of Lost Children
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fisher King
Harold and Maude
Henry V
Holiday
Jaws
Kafka
Lion in Winter
Lord of the Rings
A Man for All Seasons
Paper Moon
Persuasion
The Philadelphia Story
A Room with a View
Pulp Fiction
Sense and Sensibility
Shakespeare in Love
State of the Union
Wings of Desire
I couldn't recall them in alphabetical order. Alphabetizing them makes me nerdier, I should hope. Making this list made me realize my Viewing pages are terribly out of date.
Twenty-five is too specific a number: there are 26. "Breakfast Club" is, of course, because I am Crippled by Nostalgia. I've only seen "Becket" and "Kafka" once each, but having seen the former as a prequel to "Lion in Winter" and having a perverse attraction to Jeremy Irons and a not-so-perverse attraction to surreal movies like "Kafka," "Brazil," and "Cities of Lost Children," they stand. "Lord of the Rings" might not last. "Dead Man" should be in there and maybe "Pirates of the Caribbean," and since I clearly adore Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet both, maybe "Finding Neverland" as well.