her life with books

#1: A Game of Thrones (et al.) by George R. R. Martin

There are a number of reasons why I shouldn’t like Game of Thrones. There are also a number of reasons why I shouldn’t be putting Game of Thrones on the top of my personal book pile this year.

But I’m afraid I cannot force myself to entertain any of those reasons at the moment. You see, I am about 200 pages away from finishing Clash of Kings for the second time this year. I also read and re-read A Game of Thrones and Storm of Swords. That is thousands of pages spent in Westeros. Hours and hours of audiobooks. Days of my life, devoted to the pursuit of reading…. epic fantasy.

Oh goodness.

Do I need to give you a summary of A Game of Thrones at this point? Haven’t you all watched the show? Hasn’t every person on the planet read all five books and are therefore in the position to spoil me at any given moment? These books were published in the mid 90s, when I was a child. I didn’t start reading these until the third season of the show was well underway. I am the absolute last person on the boat. I understand.

Just in case you are still unsullied, here’s the best I can do. The time: roughly medieval. The place: Westeros, a continent comprising seven kingdoms, ruled by one king. For centuries, royalty belonged to House Targaryen – a family who once held the throne with dragons, but lately are prone to strategic inbreeding and periodic madness. When a Targaryen king goes completely nuts, the lesser houses rise up in rebellion and seize the throne. Westeros has returned to peace.

But it’s an uneasy peace.

That is all boring politics, I know. I promise, it will get interesting if you read. How can I woo you into reading this book? Well, let me introduce you to the Starks. House Stark controls the Northern parts of Westeros – you know, the woodsy, primitive parts of the continent that nobody ever wants to visit. Consider it the UP of Westeros, if you are from Michigan. After he usurps the crown from King Crazy for his bestie Robert, Ned Stark – a stoic, righteous Northman – returns to his city of Winterfell and has a slew of kids… and one bastard. This Stark family and their crazy kids: they are what A Song of Ice and Fire is all about. At least for me. Robb, Jon, Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Rickon. They are the privileged children of an influential Lord and Lady power couple. Unlike many children in the realm, they do not want for food, comfort, or education. Sure, Lady Stark kind of hates poor bastard Jon Snow’s guts, but he’s got career plans – he’s heading north, to serve as a brother of the Night’s Watch, patrolling the giant ice wall that keeps all sorts of nasty beasts away from Westeros proper. They have a lovely, happy life in Winterfell. They even have giant wolfs for pets! But King Robert calls their Dad down to King’s Landing… and all hell breaks loose.

For everyone.

Everywhere.

I’m feeling a bit at a loss of how to talk about Game of Thrones, guys. I imagine this is how lots of people felt when they read Harry Potter for the first time. A pull. A thrill. A quickening. It’s something about the world and the characters and the way everything gets turned on its head every few chapters. You just know you have to see them through, these Starks. You have to be there when the crown is finally secured.

When peace is restored to Westeros.

Or when every single character you’ve ever loved dies. Because that is an actual possibility.

There are reasons not to like this series. Martin’s storytelling is pretty boss, but his writing is not great. His portrayal of women is sometimes gross. His books are thousands of pages long. But there are are also reasons to enjoy it. I talked about some of them in my review of Susan Cokal’s Kingdom of Little Wounds. I talk about others with… oh… all of my friends. Any time I see them. After, of course, I convince them to read the books or watch the show. There are more, for certain, reasons why this particular series is still on the pop cultural radar, almost twenty years after it began. But for me, all that adds up to the unexplainable lure of fantasy. Unexplainable because I am, at 28-years-old, a hopeless noob. I don’t get it. But I feel it. I feel it bad for all these Starks.

I have read A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords twice since June 2013.

It’s a fixation. It’s a problem.

At this point, it’s a lifestyle.

~

Thank you for enduring this marathon of book posting! If you missed a day, check here!

#2: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The year is 2044. Various political, economic, environmental disasters have left America and the rest of the world in a generic dystopian scenario, where the rich get richer and the poor live in towering stacks of mobile homes rife with poverty and crime. Wade Watts – a seventeen-year-old nerd – calls one of these teetering, vertical trailer parks home, but that’s not where life is. Life is on the OASIS – every day, Wade plugs into his computer and becomes Parzival, a svelter, cooler version of himself who attends virtual high school, hangs out with friends in a secret chatroom/bunker, and hunts for the Easter Egg.

The Easter Egg is Wade’s mission. His raison d’etre. The only shred of hope he has to escape his real-world poverty. Oh, and perhaps the only way to save the OASIS itself from an evil corporate takeover. Before he died, eccentric OASIS creator James Halliday planted an Easter Egg somewhere deep in his virtual-universe; his videotaped will reveals that the first to locate it will earn a controlling share in Halliday’s company. The winner will “own” the future of the OASIS. Chasing the Egg has become a global fixation, a nerdy past-time, a professional opportunity for those recruited by predatory tech companies looking to monetize the OASIS as it never has before. Halliday’s clues are vague. Almost nonexistent actually. The only thing Parzival has is an impressive arsenal of Halliday-approved 80s pop culture and video gaming history, a few egg-hunting friends, and despite a thick patina of sarcasm and cynicism, a heart of gold.

Well, I think that’s enough summary to convince you that this book is the province of nerds. I actually find it a bit baffling that this book found as much critical success as it did, but perhaps that’s the thing about being a geeky kid – like Halliday, like Parzival – you have this idea that you are alone in your geekiness. It’s not true, I suppose. Once everyone abandons whatever Game of Cool they are playing in high school and college, the truth comes out – yeah, I played Space Invaders on my DOS PC until my little seven-year-old hands hurt. Played Adventure and Humbug, too. I sneaked into my parents’ room after my bedtime to catch Monty Python reruns that appeared on PBS in the middle of the night. I didn’t return that Gameboy game you lent me, boy I dated. I didn’t break up with you when I should have because I was in the middle of Ocarina of Time on your N64 that you let me borrow, boy I dated.

Yes, Ready Player One is a nerd’s holiday, a nostalgia parade, a justification for all that probably meaningless pop culture that we Gen X/Yers hold in our brains. In the world Ready Player One, the geeks will inherit the earth. Or the OASIS, which is, arguably better than the earth. But beyond all that, Ready Player One is just effing exemplary storytelling. The competition provides strong narrative structure. The “quests” that Parzival and his friends encounter are clever, rollicking, and have high stakes. Cline ramps up the tension periodically as the race to finish Halliday’s puzzle comes closer and closer to an end, but this book reads more like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than anything else – the reader knows the protagonist is in the right, and it’s clear who deserves to come out on top. The fun isn’t the will they win, but how will they win, and at what price.

(And how cool the next level will be)

Ready Player One was 100% the most fun I’ve had reading all year. Not only did Cline send me into multiple fits of geeky, nostalgic delight, he wrote a book that reads like a game. Or, more accurately, like you are hanging out with your best geeky friend. You watch each other play, gasping when they miss a jump, screaming out suggestions, your fingers twitching over invisible thumb-sticks while you try just one more time to beat that impossible boss.

Genius, man. Genius.

Now excuse me… I have a variety of semi-legal game emulator software programs to download.

#3: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

I thought long and hard about how to place these last three books, my favorite three reads of the crazy year that was 2013. If I could rank them all equally, I would. I mean, I guess technically I *could* rank them all equally. I run this rodeo. I can do what I want. But you know. I can’t. Because I can’t. You understand.

Fangirl was the one book I read all year that inspired something primal in me. Like a really elongated yesssssssssssss. That’s what Fangirl made my soul say. It’s realistic fiction. It’s older YA. It’s all anxiety and introversion and self-doubt. It’s a swoony love story. It’s on everyone else’s end-of-the-year lists. It’s nerd heaven.

Loved it so much, I bought it in hardback AND as an eBook. This is living large for me, guys. Behold, my not-so-recent review of my third favorite book of the year.

~

Introverted Cath isn’t the most well-adjusted, outgoing teen in Nebraska, but she knows where she stands. With her mother gone and her father a little flighty, Cath keeps an eye on things at home. Her twin sister Wren is her best friend. And the rest of her life and livelihood is Simon Snow – specifically, her life is Carry On, Simon the epic, episodic work of fan fiction Cath writes for an audience of thousands of Simon fans around the world.

College upsets everything. Cath worries about her father and his empty nest. Wren has a new roommate and a new weekend partying habit, while Cath’s roommate is older and eyes Cath’s Simon Snow posters suspiciously. Cath’s creative writing class isn’t what she hoped it would be, and she either has time for schoolwork or updating Carry On, Simon, but not both. It’s awful. But she has to deal with it. Or drop out. Or fall in love. Or not.

There are a lot of conversations you could have about Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.

– You could talk about whether or not Fangirl is YA, or whether or not any book set in college could be considered YA.

– You could talk about if a character’s Internet-Life can be adequately and richly portrayed with prose, and whether or not Rowell did Cath’s fandom any justice.

– Rowell includes excerpts from Cath’s fan fiction as well as from Simon books themselves – you could talk about fiction within fiction… or more accurately, fiction-based-on-other-fiction all within fiction. Yikes.

– You could talk about “slice of life” fiction. Is it boring? Is it realistic? Is it an artistic form or a mark of authorial laziness? I

– If you are an introverted English major who somehow survived college feeling a little beaten and bruised – come on, I know most of you probably are – then you could talk about how Rowell must have been spying on you in your dorm room, subsisting on the cereal bars stashed in your dresser drawers rather than think of stepping into the school cafeteria.

I could write a blog post on any of those topics, but I believe I would need an entire post for each question. Maybe more. I know this blog has taken some strange turns over the years, but I’m not about to start a Rainbow Rowell Literary Analysis Only blog. Or, A Dramatic Retelling of My College Experience blog for that matter.

However, I would like to propose a theory to you, my few and amazing readers: the more discussion a book raises, the better the book. The more questions you have, the better the book. The more different angles you can come at a book, the better the book.

Obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule, but think about it next time you finish a book. Does the ending wrap itself up in a bow? Can you see where the plot is leading you at every turn? Do you understand every narrative decision the author made? Do you agree with every narrative decision the author made?

It’s nice to read a tidy book, but a tidy book is usually a safe book. Rowell’s narration is pitch perfect and yes, there is a fairly traditional romance plot, but I would argue that this is not a safe book. It’s a book you can critique. A book you can dissect. It’s a book you can love, but makes you think about why you love it.

I should also mention: I loved it. Loved it hard. Didn’t want it to end. It’s been years since I’ve added an author to my Must Read List, but welcome aboard, Ms. Rowell.