Category Archives: books

The Lord of the Rings

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The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings is a book about hairy midgets by J.R.R. Tolkien, written, you know, just ages ago. The little guys are called "Hobbits," and they have some incredible adventures in a made up fantasy world called "Middle-earth."

The fun all starts when one old "hobbit," named Bilbo Baggins of all things, has a birthday party and puts on a magic ring that he stole from a nasty little midget called Gollum. The ring makes him disappear, to everyone's amazement, and he goes back home to plan one last adventure. Gandalf, a wizard, comes by and convinces him not to take the magic ring with him, because he thinks it is up to no good. So Bilbo leaves the ring in the care of his nephew, named Frodo (who told him these were good names? Maybe if your name is Jrr, you start to get crazy ideas about what names are good), and leaves Frodo in the care of the wizard, Gandalf. Gandalf later reveals to Frodo that the ring is no good™, and sends him on a quest to see some elves and determine what to do about it.

Frodo takes his best "hobbit" friends and goes on a journey that leads him through a scary forest and over rivers and hills, all the while pursued by evil ghost men who stab him, and manages to get to Rivendell (where the elves are) in time for their leader to heal his poisoned wound. Then he takes part in a council of men, elves, dwarves, and gandalfs, where they decide that the ring must be destroyed in order to defeat their great enemy, Sauron (I think this means "Lizard man"). There is much debate about who will carry the no good ring, but in the end, Frodo the "hobbit" volunteers. That very day he sets out with 8 other adventurers–three "hobbits", two men, one elf, one dwarf, one gandalf–to destroy the ring.

The fellowship comes to the land of some other elves, who give them presents and cornbread and boats, and then down the river to a fork in the road, where they have to decide where to go. One of the men decides he wants the power of the no good ring, and tries to take it from Frodo, and then everybody is attacked by orcs, and the group splits into two. Frodo and his gardener, Sam, go on to destroy the ring, and the rest of the party (except the bad man who is dead, and Gandalf who was killed by a whip monster) go on to the big kingdom of men in the south to prepare for war.

On the way to war, the big party meets Gangalf, who has come back from the dead even stronger than before (and in different clothes), and they fight another wizard, and they help some horsemen defeat a bunch of orcs, and they talk to trees. Then half of them go on to the war in the south while the remaining man in the party, who is secretly a descendant of kings, rounds up a bunch of ghosts to help protect the southern shores. Just in time, the king man gets to the battlefield with the ships he has won in battle, and the enemy is staved off. Then, in the wild hope that the ring will be destroyed in time, the party decides to mount a last desperate battle at the gates of the lizard man.

Meanwhile, Frodo and the other "hobbit" discover that they are being followed by the Gollum, and enlist him into their service as they attempt to get to the mountain where the no good ring was made. On the way they meet the brother of the bad man, and fight a giant spider, and spend a lot of time crossing terrible ruined lands, and Gollum betrays them and steals the ring for himself, but, well, it all works out in the end.

Finally, for some reason, there is a lot of genealogy in the book, dealing with the ancestors of the king man, and of dwarves, and a whole almanac of calendars and alphabets. This was my least favorite part of the book.

If you like to read about stuff that doesn't exist1, then you will probably like this book. There is some violence, but no sex. And considering every third person in the book is highly magical, there is very little magic. I'd say it is PG at worst, for its apocalyptic themes.

I understand that some movies were made about this, and that they were well received. Perhaps I will review them one day too.

1. See my review of "Harry Potter," a series of books about junior Gandalfs in school.

John Swartzwelder

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The Exploding Detective
The Exploding Detective
John Swartzwelder

This year's John Swartzwelder novel is The Exploding Detective, which is a Frank Burly story dealing with supervillainy, time travel, and jetpacks. If you've read any of his other novels, and especially The Time Machine Did It or How I Conquered Your Planet, then that's all you need to know. If not, I will explain a little.

John Swartzwelder is, as the cover of his books say, the author of 59 Simpsons episodes. He stopped writing for the Simpsons in 2004 and started writing these books (though he was back to write on the movie). I'm sure most people will find their way to these books from the high praise they get on the commentary tracks to the latest few Simpsons DVDs, as I did.

There is a piece of the commentary for season 10 where the staff says that John Swartzwelder can get them to keep anything in the script, no matter how ridiculous, by prefixing it with "for some reason" (a gunfight breaks out between the cowboys, for some reason, one starts digging a hole). I'd say something like 1/5th of the humor in these books comes from something similar–a little tag at the end of an otherwise cliché sentence.

Anyway, the books are short and not too expensive, so I'd say start with The Time Machine Did It and work your way up. He's writing about 1 a year, if you include the non Frank Burly Double Wonderful.

Harry Potter

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter is a series of books about teenage wizards fighting against a twisted dark wizard named Voldemort. You might want to consider not saying his name. It's fucking cursed. In book 1, Harry learns all about wizard school and the crazy wizard lacrosse game, Quidditch. Quidditch matches are to Harry Potter as hunting parties are to the novels of Anthony Trollope: expect that you will have to read about a match every 200 pages. (An aside here, Quidditch is scored like Family Feud–you can play the first two rounds, but the third round all alone is worth 300 points and basically determines the outcome of the game. Similarly, the team that "catches the golden snitch" almost always wins.) He also saves an artifact called the Sorceror's Stone from falling into the hands of the bad guy. Some dude has two faces and it sucks.

In book 2, Harry discovers a secret room in the castle, and is attacked by a lizard. There is also a talking book. It reminded me of Stevie Wonder's seminal 1972 album, Talking Book. He saves a little girl.

Book 3 is a family story, with Harry learning lots about his parents and his Godfather. He also does a lot of sneaking around and gets a magical map. The book is also about racism. Get used to that, too.

In Book 4, Harry is entered in the junior wizard olympics, fighting dragons and swimming underwater and going through a hedge maze. At the end it turns out that the bad guy (I said his name at the top) is back, which eats shit. Also, Harry has his first crush on a girl, and starts growing hair in places.

Book 5 is about a super secret club called the Order of the Phoenix, dedicated to fighting the bad guy wherever he goes. It is also about exams. Exams in England don't make much sense, and wizard exams don't actually seem any stranger than secular exams. I will spoil it for you now: Harry ends up doing pretty well, but not as well as his know-it-all friend Hermione.

In Book 6, Harry gets some help with his schoolwork from an old book. It's kinda cheating, but he thinks maybe the book belonged to his dad (it didn't), and I thought maybe it had belonged to his mom (it didn't), and it isn't until the very end that it turns out that it belonged to bad guy #2. Also, Harry's wizard mentor is killed, and leaves Harry with a daunting task that leads directly to book 7…

In which Harry goes looking for about 10 different magical items that he needs to either possess or destroy in order to win the fight against the main bad dude. His friends fight and they spend a lot of time camping, and then there is a big battle at the end and a lot of complicated stuff about magic wands. You could replace most of the second-to-last chapter with a discussion about the merits of turbochargers as opposed to the merits of superchargers if you want, Harry is going to recap all of the wand stuff in a dramatic monologue at the end anyway. Oh, and it turns out bad guy #2, well, I don't want to spoil it.

I got to Harry Potter by a circuitous route, after reading Can You Forgive Her, Phineas Finn, everything by Haruki Murakami, The House of Mirth, and The Satanic Verses. One day I had an extra 5 minutes, and I started reading a wikipedia article about magic wands in Harry Potter. I was warned that the books weren't really about magic wands, but still I embarked on the journey.

Although I wrote the review as if you hadn't read it, I don't feel the need to offer a recommendation. Either you will read it or you won't. You know which you are.

The House of Mirth

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The House of Mirth (Signet Classics)
The House of Mirth (Signet Classics)
Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth, like many Victorian novels, is about marrying well. Stay with me, here, because there are two differences between this and the reviews of several English novels I've read in the last two years. In the first place, it isn't English. It's a story of old New York, turn of the century. Of course, it is about the upper class, and they spend a great deal of time in Europe, but it is not English. Second and more importantly, it does not have a happy ending. Not even a happy ending for the main character tempered by, say, an unhappy marriage for her best friend. It is not Can You Forgive Her.

Lily Bart is a stunning beauty and an accomplished flirt, but, for whatever reason, keeps ruining her prospects for a good marriage. She's self destructive. She is also poor, and running with a wealthy crowd which exhausts her resources and puts her in debt. She has a number of unsavory business associations, which hurt her social prospects, and she finds her name connected, in rumor, to two different married men.

There are sympathetic characters in the story, like Gertie Farrish, but they are few and far between. Almost everyone in the book is unlikeable, including, for the most part, Lily. Still, by the end, I had come around to hoping things would go well with her, and I was a little disappointed when they did not, but I suppose that's part of what makes the novel fresh.

Phineas Finn and After Dark

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Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (Oxford World's Classics)
Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (Oxford World’s Classics)
Anthony Trollope

Phineas Finn is the second of Trollope's six parliamentary–or Pallisers–novels. It concerns the political career of a young Irish barrister, who is returned for two different boroughs, both of which are eventually abolished, learns to prize his parliamentary independence over his position in government, falls in love with 4 women, and marries. He also fights a duel and rides horses and attends the great parties and occasions of many members of the upper class, because it is a british novel. He doesn't, however, gamble, and while he amasses some debts and has difficulty about them, they are not on his own account but on those of a friend, and the debts are resolved by deus ex machina, rather than the usual device of "getting money from some lady who loves him."

Those are the ways it is similar to regular british novels of the 19th century, and those are the ways it differs from one.

It is the second in a series, so it is probably best to leave it until you have read Can You Forgive Her, although the story isn't really about the same characters (The Duke of Omnium and his clan, who are minor characters in Can You… are again minor characters in Phineas Finn) and you could probably just pick this one up. But why? If you are willing to read 600 pages of Trollope's musings on the parliaments of the 1860s, why not start at the beginning. Why are we even having this discussion. Read the first one first!

After Dark
After Dark
Haruki Murakami

After Dark is, by my count, Haruki Murakami's eleventh novel. Of all of his novels, it covers the shortest time frame (a single night), and in fact it is among the shorter of his major works. It has a lot of trademark Murakami elements: normal people, normal japan, strange parallel universe which intrudes into their affairs. Music. Prostitution. Hotels.

I read it and I enjoyed it, and if you liked any of his other novels (except Norwegian Wood), you will probably like it too. In the weeks leading up to it, I re-read Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, and South of the Border, West of the Sun, and after I finished it, I re-read Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance. I re-read Kafka on the Shore at the end of last year, so I am reasonably current in my Murakami.

For fun, then, I give you my top Murakami novels in some semblance of order:

  1. A Wild Sheep Chase
  2. Dance Dance Dance
  3. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
  4. Norwegian Wood
  5. Kafka On The Shore
  6. Sputnik Sweetheart
  7. Pinball, 1973
  8. After Dark
  9. Hear The Wind Sing
  10. South of the Border, West of the Sun
  11. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

You could read them in that order, of course, but I actually suggest reading them in the order 1,2,4,5,3,6,8,10,11,9,7. Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are very difficult to find. I won't disclose what my copy of Pinball cost me.