NERD OUT

Because I can't find a decent place to play my word in my Scrabble game against Tim, or rather, because I've finally finished what I've been calling "the nerd pile," it's time for a book review post. Now, the following is by no means the depth and scope of all the unread books I own that could go into something called a Nerd Pile. Rather, I placed an Amazon order about a month ago and when the box arrived I realized I had bought a graphic novel, a book about Princess Leia, and a book about the history of comic books in America and that maybe I had reached a new level; I had "One-Upped" as it were.

Neuromancer
By William Gibson

This is the book I was actually reading when said box arrived, pushed it's glasses up on it nose, and started talking about physics. It perfectly fits in the category though, so I'm keeping it in the post.

Some professor at Centenary, I don't know who, assigned this book every year for one of their classes, meaning that I looked at it in the bookstore just enough times to start to think it was important. Apparently, a lot of other people thought so too, as it is the only book to have won The Hugo, The Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Awards. According to Wikipedia, it's also the book that spread the word "cyberspace" (coined by the author in 1982) throughout the culture. Don't tell me science fiction never contributed anything to society!

Single-handedly giving birth to the cyberpunk genre is no easy task, and this book is full of the kind of things you would expect from world-shaking, genre-creating, fiction. The characters are all caricatures of lots of things you'll see later on in things like The Matrix. Case, the main character, is a junkie and a loner whose nervous system has been wrecked as punishment for stealing from his employer--but he used to be the best hacker and thief that ever jacked into... wait for it... the matrix.

The rest of the cyber-misfits are there too: takes-no-shit, leather-clad, body-guard/lover; brainwashed, ex-army man sent by the unknown employer to carry out the mission; a mysterious and inbred family of wealthy nut-cases; artificial intelligences gone out of control; a lost love trapped in virtual reality; sleazy, wheedling, backroom arms dealers; a colony of true-believing Rastafari in junky space barges; even the ugly foreign bartender with all the right answers.

But it's never dull, and rarely predictable. Sometimes juvenile and ridiculously self-indulgent, yes. But on some level, what good punk culture isn't?

Watchmen
By Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

All Nerd Snobs have this indescribable feeling when something coveted and beloved enters the popular culture. I can't remember where I read it, but I'll paraphrase one reviewer who I think put it best. "No one will ever appreciate this thing the way that you did, ten years ago, and no movie or ad or breakfast cereal will ever be good enough to represent it's utter perfection, the subtle genius rendered by its creators, but at least hot girls are finally reading it on the train."

This book is another Hugo winner (Surprise!). If you saw the movie without reading the book, you did yourself an incredible disservice, AND you put yourself through the most godawful sex scene in any movie since 8 Mile. (I liked the movie ok--there's just a natural order for things.) I'm not even going to bother telling you what it's about: if you've never read a graphic novel, and you think you don't have the patience, or you "don't like comic books" pull up your pants already and read this.

Wishful Drinking
By Carrie Fischer

"You know I saw yet another one of those Leia figurines recently at one of those comic book conventions--which yes, I go to when I'm lonely. Anyway this doll was on a turnstile. And when it got to a particular place on the turnstile, you could see up my dress, to my anatomically correct--though shaved--galaxy snatch. Well, as you can imagine, because this probably happens to you all the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, so I called George [Lucas] and I said, "You know what, man? Owning my likeness does not include owning my lagoon of mystery." Pg. 87

Yeah, she pretty much goes on and on like that for 200 pages, except she starts at her childhood with Debbie Reynolds, goes all the way through Star Wars, her marriage to Paul Simon, her electroshock therapy and into the present. Which is worth the money if you ask me.

The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America
By David Hajdu

Sadly, entertaining subject matter ≠ entertaining book. Ok--here's the deal. In the 1950's, people went nuts. And as a result of that the comic book industry, which was just shaping up to be the most wildly innovative, subversive and popular form of entertainment for people under the age of 30, experienced a crippling attack by biased, under-informed, overly-zealous politicians and religious types who put thousands of people out of work by whipping the masses into a frenzy and legislating a single art-form to near-death.

It sounds pretty interesting. Until you fill a book full of guys named Frank and Bill and make it sort of hard to tell them all apart or remember why they were all that important. The other major shortcoming of the book is that it is woefully lacking in pictures (there are a few, wedged in the middle). Maybe if I could see those scandalously tight tights, or the cover of the first MAD Magazine, that would help.

In the end, this book will make you smarter, and it makes you appreciate your relative freedom to read whatever you damn well please without being called a commie or thrown in jail. This is definitely a "learn from our mistakes" book more than a "look at these cool old comics" book. Maybe Tim would like it. :)

The Comics: The Complete Collection
By Brian Walker

Like I said, I found the lack of pictures before to be a drag. Considering the numerous chapters in Ten Cent Plague where thousands upon thousands of comics were burned, I figured an anthology was better than trying to find the real thing if I wanted to see what this stuff looked like.

This book is massively large (and currently on sale at Borders, Yee haw!). Not only does it include all of the major artists mentioned in The Ten Cent Plague, like Milton Caniff and Will Eisner, it's got fun old comics like Al Capp stuff, The Katzenjammer Kids and Popeye AND new old comics like Calvin and Hobbes, the Far Side, and even Ziggy (who I find totally repulsive, but whatever floats your boat).

Really I could just read this forever. But it's a helpful supplement to the other book if you're up for some learnin'.

Harry Potter (All of 'Em)
By J.K. Rowling

That's right, I finally finished them. I read the first five before I went on my trip last November, and I just finished 6 and 7 in a week-long reading frenzy. Now I kind of just want to read them all over again.

I can't even bother trying to review them. I thought everyone had spoiled the end for me (thanks SOCIETY), but both books still totally shocked me, and I cried a million times, and I keep unintentionally using words like Obliviate and Apparate in sentences around people who don't know wtf I'm talking about and I thought I was cooler than that. But I can't help it, they just pop in there like normal words.

That's the whole point though.

Good fiction should be so utterly captivating that you forget your whole life, that your true world succumbs to the one on the page in front of you and hours pass unnoticed. And when you finally surface, your emotions and thoughts should remain so entangled in what you've read that you keep thinking about what you've read until your outlook changes. Good literature should so engross you that it has the same effect on your personal character that really meeting people and doing things and living their lives would have--only without you having to have terrible trials and loss day and night, left and right.

I'm not saying I read Harry Potter and thought "well, Now I've defeated Evil, time to buy a new wand." But I'm saying that if you read Harry Potter and think it teaches children to worship the devil, your brain is broken. And maybe your heart too.

Maybe that's why science fiction and fantasy--and even Nerds--are so awesome. Because they're all about embracing what "normal" people have come to fear.