Book 32: Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris

You know, as terrible as the True Blood series is on HBO — essentially bad Cajun accents, terrible CSI: Baton Rogue investigative stuff, and al the vampire porn you can stomach — the novels are a pleasant distraction.  I mean, it’s a bouillebaise of supernatural materials: vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, fairies, witches, and one time someone got savaged by a menaed.  They’ve even hinted at elves and goblins. She’s juggling a lot of balls, but she manages to keep the action and story flowing without getting too soupy in her love story.  It was getting a little tragically Anita Blake at times, but now it sets up for a lovely depth of story.  She’s got tons of people pining for her, and Sookie doesn’t know how to handle it.  

POTENTIALLY SPOILERY FOR THOSE PLANNING ON READING THE SERIES:

This story is mighty complex.  Jason has just started turning werepanther.  Someone’s out there shooting the shapeshifters, and he’s being blamed.  Meanwhile, the Weres in Shreveport are looking for a new lord and master.  Harris gets a lot of play out of the old grudges from the earlier novels, setting up some interesting play among the characters.  It’s one of the things I enjoy about reading deep into a series, when they capitalize on characters and events from the beginning of the series.  It all adds up to a bad series of days for Sookie.  

ENDETH SPOILERS.  

I’ve been watching the television series, and while they sort of keep to the first novel, they’ve been setting up for the second novel — the lady who takes in Tara, the visit from the Fellowship of the Sun.  They’ve even managed to dip into the events of this late in the series, setting up things that are going to follow.  One things that’s disappointed me about the series — besides the godawful treatment of Tara’s character, and if this ever gets deep into a third or fourth season (not bloody likely) they’re going to be supremely fucked — is the decision to keep out the campy vampire Bubba.  Who is actually the reanimated corpse of the King, Elvis Presley, only the drugs done made him retarded and able to drink cat’s blood.  He plays in nicely with the series, and he’s a fun character.  So I’m sad they decided he’d be too ridiculous to include.  Of course, sparkling vampire sex isn’t silly.  Or getting high on V (vampire blood) and having wild dream sequence sex is perfectly normal also.  I hate HBO.

Book 31: Candy Girl: A Year In the Life of An Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody

I loved Juno.  LOVED IT.  I get all wet and squishy for any sort of clever, unrealistic banter wrapped shot out by pseudo-hipsters.  It’s why I love Kevin Smith.  When I left the theatre, I was happy.  I smiled.  I don’t fucking smile.  I’m a bitter, angry little troll who lives under an bridge, smashing pretty things with my internet connection.  I used to be loving and huggable.  Now, I am a prickly pear, who fidgets in lines, swears in traffic, and is filled with the brimming hate for my fellow humanity.  So when Diablo Cody wrote a happy little film about a smart mouthed preggo and it won her the Academy Award I was THRILLED.

So I enjoyed the hell out of Candy Girl, which I breezed through in basically a day.  It’s essentially the book, based on the blog that got her writing screenplays, which won her awards.  The language is the same, full of clever little pop-cultural asides and pithy smart ass commentary, interspliced with swear words and big words interchangeably.  Hate her all you want, but Cody is a Pajiban.  She’s unapologetic, dorky, and crass.  And it comes across big time in her writing.  

Essentially, Diablo Cody fell in love with a dude on the internet, and moved to Minnesota to be with him.  She took a unsatisfying job in a cube farm for an advertising agency.  As a lark, she decided to throw caution to the wind and become a stripper.  And so the bio basically covers her experiences: how her boyfriend dealt with it/encouraged her, how she kept it secret from her coworkers and friends, and how she as a Second Wave feminist coped with basically being a fucksock for old scraggly dudes for a few dollars.  It gives an insight into the world of stripping from an intelligent chick and an awkward dancer.  

Again, it reads smart ass and with wonderful style that’s essentially fresh blogging.  It’s honest, it’s mean-spirited, and it’s interesting.  People want to hate on Diablo Cody, and that’s fine.  But the girl’s got style.  And it works for this.  Most people dismiss her as just that stupid stripper cooze who suckered the Academy into giving her overly precious movie an award.  What people fail to realize is, she was a normal person like us, working a shitty desk job, unsure of her life, taking crazy chances.  She parlayed her weirdness through a blog into a successful screenwriting career.  How the fuck do you not back that?  It’s part of the whole hipsters eat their own mentality that pisses me off with the blogosphere.  

Candy Girl’s a bit directionless and sort of peters out towards the end, because basically Cody came, undressed, and left.  There’s no happy ending or magic lesson learned or greater truth to behold.  This dorky punk chick decided to show her goods for cash, and then she wrote about it.  That’s about it.  But she’s got a voice, and she uses it, and I liked it quite a bit.  It’s not going to change your life, but it’s a quick read.

Book 30: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

And yet another one you’ve all heard about and already like, and you’ve already read all her books.  Well, I haven’t.  And I liked this one.  So shut up. 

I had a roommate in college, who used to get extremely drunk and then regale us with three hour long lectures on various battles of World War II.  Now this might sound odious to you.  But it was the most fascinating thing I ever heard.  He would sway, his liquor sloshing just to the edge of his glass but never over, in some sort of ode to the drunken professor.  He would decant facts, quote statistics, give descriptions of policy and procedure and major players.  He would pepper his speech with swear words and violent opinions.  If he were a history professor, I might have changed my major.  

This is the same with Sarah Vowell.  She covering potentially boring territory, but she so goddamned excited about it, you can’t help but get swept up in her revelry.  Also, she knows she’s a dork.  So that helps.  

She covers three presidential assassinations, and does it in such a clever way, that it takes potentially dry information and makes it fresh and interesting.  

The only beef I can see people having with Vowell is that she screams Air America.  She’s a staunch liberal, and everything that Republicans bash the party for.  She’s a neurotic intellectual, disliking hiking, driving, or crowds of people.  She hates Bush, bemoans America’s racist trend of chopping up the brown folk, and doesn’t have children of her own.  She looks like Wednesday Addams, and she seems like a less cunty version of Janeane Garofalo.  

But she writes well.  She’s biased, she’s obsessive, and she’s kind of a weird bird.  But that’s what makes her books so goddamn charming.  She’s giving you the pop culture tour, rather than reciting dry facts.  She’s regurgitating the wealth of information she’s ingested and delivering it an appetizing manner.  

I am curious to read her other works, particularly the non-historical ones, because I don’t know if she’d hold up outside of a context of historical interest.  But that remains to be seen.

Book 29: 7th Heaven by James Patterson

Blech.  I quit you, Jimbo. 

I’m done with this fucking series.  I hurl it to the pile currently occupied by Laurell K. Hamilton’s odious Anita Blake wereporn.  The Women’s Murder Club went from gritty thriller to CSI: Sex in the City.  It stopped being about the murders and started being about this panel of View rejects and the occasional crime story spackled in between “mmhmms” and “girl you go!”s.  Honestly, the four protagonists are a blonde reporter, a brunette homicide detective, a black coronor, and — added after the books stopped taking risks by offing members of the murder club — a district attorney that’s both asian and Italian.  

The love angles are atrocious, the relationships are pitiful, and they’ve begun to make the murders look weak by comparison.  It’s become stale and repetitive and WHY AM I WASTING YOUR TIME WITH THIS?

You all know better than this.  I feel like Morgan Spurlock.  You mean eating McDonalds for 30 Days can be bad for you?  Who fucking knew?  EVERYONE.  Except stupid people.  Who deserve to die. 

Stop writing these fucking books, Jim.  Stop with the Nicholas Sparks rip-offs, and the weird Christian sci-fi action stories for kids with the goddamn angels.  STOP.  Or we’ll send the baggin’ wagon around to Dean Koontz your ass back to one novel every couple of years.  It worked for Stephen King.  He’s apparently back on his game after the accident.  

Rev the murdertank.  We’ve got a novel to help.

Book 28: Soon I Will Be Invincible by August Grossman

Now we’re getting into the book club level of review, where four or five people are going to read the same book.  And this, frankly, is why I’m doing the Cannonball Read.  It’s awesome to think that so many people are sharing the same adventures all across the globe and interwebs right now.  Of course we’re going to be influenced by each other’s choices, and want to read them.  Christ, I’ve already filled a list with next year’s 100, based mostly on the second and third books offered by authors I’ve just been introduced to.  And since this has the double distinction of being a Pajiban reviewed tome, it’s going to have a lot of people clamoring to read it’s pages. 

My thoughts, I will be brief.  This was sort of a more introspective version of The Venture Brothers, offering an almost intimate look into the mindset of superheroes and supervillains.  It’s a field that I am very interested in.  Not just your Batmans and Supermans and their ilk, but the day to day reality.  Their foibles, their worries, their problems.   I remember contemplating writing a play where a Supermanesque hero has to go to court for all the minor civil matters brought up against him by the collateral damage he created saving the day.  A guy sues him for medical bills because after he smashed the meteor back into outerspace, he threw it casually into a parked car where he was drinking coffee, giving him whiplash and burns on his chest and lap.  So he presses charges, to get monetary damages.  

I love thinking about stuff like that.  How do superheroes date?  Who decides to become a supervillian?  I was working on an entire collage of plays that were all little 5 minute vignettes about crimefighters.  But it dealt with the day to day absurdities.  And then fucking Heroes comes along and completely ruins my chances.  It made me as mad as the day that I came up with the concept of people being murdered like the hook killer and stuffing babies in ovens, only to find this poor man’s party called Urban Legend on the big screen.  Fuck you, Rebecca Gayheart.  It was my love first. 

Much has been written already for the Cannonball about Soon I Will Be Invincible, and I can only add my hearty recommendation to the already growing pile of accolades.  It’s a fresh voice in a nice genre.

Book 27: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Another fantasy book.  I must admit, I was worried about this one.  The cover is beyond words.  Lady Clevername gazed upon it and immediately burst into cackles of glee.  It’s kind of like if Genny (also Rusty) decided to try to dress up as Ziggy Stardust.  Only in the forest, as a shirtless man.  Do with that mental image what you will. 

The novel is apparently part of the The Kingkiller Trilogy, which means I have yet another two books to read in the OCD that is my reading life.  While Sarina bemoans plowing through the four books of Twilight, I once read all twelve books of the Left Behind series.  Mostly to prove to myself that I was stronger than Christian Indoctrination.  And I was.  Jeezy Creezy he ain’t gots me yet.  

The novel is this pseudo-Beowulf, in which this legendary warrior, posing as an innkeeper in a nowhere backwater, is telling his life story to a story gatherer over the course of three days.  So book one is day one.  At first, I was not impressed with this method.  I thought it was a really cheesy way of guaranteeing yourself a three-book deal.  This story is bigger than just one book!  It’s THREE!   

So this guy, who’s name is Kvothe, which is potentially the worst character name I have come across since the aforementioned Left Behind series.  Kvothe is big shit.  He’s called Kvothe the Bloodless, the Kingkiller, and various other names that give long haired fat kids boner at renfaires.  The first book covers his origin story, at least up until his teenage years.  

The writing is pretty bad.  It’s got this kind of tenor like it was written by a dude who reads a lot of fantasy.  It’s borderline fan-fic, borrowing elements from everything that came before it, and also portions of a life spent in the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Kvothe comes from theatre folk, a traveling caravan of gypsy nomads who do stage productions and are genuinely awesome people.  So of course, they die horribly and mysteriously at the hands of a group of evil magical folk.  Think Harry Potter mixed with The Forsaken in Wheel of Time.  Because I know I did.

So Kvothe tricks his way in the Arcanum, which is a wizarding academy, where people learn how to use magic.  Only they don’t call it magic, they call it sympathy.  It’s a little Bell, Book, and Candle, and comes from a mind that has attended at least one Wiccan ceremony.  And the book becomes your average schoolboy academy story.  I think the problem I had with it is that I’ve come across the damn training session in every other fantasy book I’ve read.  Harry Potter has Hogwarts, Tavi learns furycrafting in Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series, even Wheel of Time has the White Tower of the Aes Sedai.  

It’s always the same thing.  The lowly poor kids against the spoiled rich kids.  Mortal enemies.  Teachers who love the hero, and teachers who hate the hero from the start.  Legendary exploits that schoolkids still talk about to this day.  Just once, I’d like to see the rich kid be the nice guy.  But apparently, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get a break in medieval times.  

And this is the crux of the first book.  It’s Kvothe’s time in the Arcanum, interspliced with “meanwhile back at the ranch” moments in present time to help break up the giant flashback that encompasses the series.  He keeps making hints at things yet to come, which only feed my seething rage at his inept scheming.  it’s like I’m being tricked into reading the next two books.  

And I wouldn’t except for the love story.  In most books, it’s the worst element.  In fantasy, it’s practically the kiss of eternal death.  Nerds can’t write love.  But Rothfuss absolutely NAILS it.  Kvothe’s pursuit of Denna is the only reason to read the series.  He captures what it’s like to pine for someone, to feel the sting of young love’s rejection, to be friends so hard because you love them that much.  It’s wonderful, and it totally makes the novel worthwhile.  And as Kvothe admits, the story is about a woman.  So fortunately, there will much of Denna in the novels, and so I will continue reading them.  

Dammit.

Jorb: JCVD

Gonna Kick Your Fucking Derriere

What’s probably one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in a long time, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself in the middle of a Brussels bank robbery.  The boss criminal looks like Emo Phillips’ evil older uncle.  It was surprisingly good.  Then again, I’m a sucker for JCVD and meta-films.

Shenanigans: Ride the Pig!

I knew this would happen one day, but this is awesomely hysterical. 

So I did the Repo! review, figuring like usual I’d get maybe thirty people commenting, telling me what a tool I am and so forth.  I came up with my Hot Topic metaphor, which I stick by, and in describing it, I mentioned Jhonen Vasquez in what might have been perceived in a negative way.  It wasn’t really a dis, per se: It’s the kind of thing you expect to be scribbled in the back of a composition book by an eyelined teen who reads too much Jhonen Vasquez and is saving barista tips for a new tattoo.

I was just being my little hyperbolic self, and still can’t for the life of me figure out how people take what I say seriously.  But there you go.  Apparently, word got out to his fanbase, and Vasquez found out, and posted it on his Twitter.  Which is totally what I would do.  The only reason I noticed is that all of a sudden the article got inundated with hits and comments calling me ”faggot” and “motherfucker”.  Sadly, I cannot deny either rebuke. 

But let me set the record straight.  I LOVE Jhonen Vasquez.  LOVE HIM.  I had a fucking Grr keychain that I carried with me through Boston during grad school.   I own Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee.  I NAMED MY FUCKING iPOD SQUEE, not after the happy kitten sound, but after the little boy tormented by demons and monsters.  The man is a fucking genius.  I’M one of the people who read TOO MUCH JHONEN VASQUEZ.  I’m not one of the faithful who has Zim tattooed on his or her arms or anything, but I would.  I respect the fuck out of the guy.

And to his credit, he’s been defending me on his Twitter while people have been hatebombing me.  He knows I meant no discredit or disrespect.  I was just making a point.  The dude’s like Jesus: I got no problem with him, it’s some of his fan club I can’t fucking stand. 

So if this makes its happy little way through the interwebs on the back of a giant pig, let me say, my bad, Mr. Vasquez.  I am a huge admirer of your work, and I think you’re CAH-RAZY talented.   Sorry if it seemed otherwise.  Oops.

Jorb: Repo! The Genetic Opera

Little Shop of Horrible

I had mixed feelings going in to this one.  I wanted it to succeed, as much as I wanted Zack and Miri Make a Porno to be good, and it always pains me when the ball gets dropped.  This wasn’t tragically terrible, but it was pretty fucking bad.  But I don’t work for “Oh Well”, I work for a site about Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People.  So I had to bring out the cat’s claws.  

I saw a few scenes at Comic-Con, and I only remember hating one of the scenes, but figuring I saw it out of context.  But it was actually worse in the film.  Second thing, they actually had a typo in the film.  This is a many fucking million dollar project, and they can’t spell the word “feud”?  At first, I began to doubt myself.  You know how if you write a word a bunch of times, you start to get vertigo about how to spell it?  But it came up later in the movie spelled correctly.  

Balls!  And they are doing a sequel.  Ugh.

Book 26. Ice Station by Matt Reilly

This was the stupidest book I’ve ever read, and I loved every fucking minute of it.  It’s stupid in the way the Transporter is stupid, or most action films.  If you sat down and worked through the logistics of the actual events unfolding before you, your fucking brain would implode.  If you gave one deep thought for even a moment, your left eye would twitch, and blood would gush from your teeth and nose.  It’s so brazenly ridiculous and bad for you, you just devour it wholesale without even once worrying about it.  This is not a book meant to be taken seriously, and if it is, I want Matt Reilly sunk to the bottom of the ocean in the deepest trench, in a safe filled with crawfish.  

A crack team (they’re always a fucking crack team — just once I’d like to see a fucking idiot platoon try to save the day, but I guess that’s for Tom Arnold to crew) of Marines are called out to an Antarctic research station on a distress call.  Here’s something to understand about Antarctica.  It’s basically the wild west.  There is no governing body, so all the countries of the world have essentially staked out a claim and built a base to do all sorts of insane testing.  Nuclear, biohazardous, prehistoric research, zombie penguins, whatever.  But it’s really fucking cold. 

Okay, so these Marines get to the base, because….the people supposedly found a spaceship frozen in a hidden cavern 3000 feet below the base.  So the Marines get there, and then all manner of crazy shit happens.  No, crazier than what you are possibly thinking.  The Marines get attacked by: French paramilitary, British SAS, and ICG, which is apparently a military organization supersecretly run by the American government to ensure that Americans will be the forefront of technology, even if it means that they are killing their own men.  So we’ve got MOLES!  

But, let’s not stop there!  We’ve also got killer whale packs that tear people to pieces.  And also!  Giant fucking radioactive elephant seals.  Also, there are grappling hook guns, and liquid nitrogen canisters, and hovercraft chases!  And I think I killed a guy with a trident! 

It’s so brazenly over the top and just jam packed with action, it feels like a spin-off of National Treasure or something you’d see on TNT starring Noah Wiley or, I don’t know, Christopher Lambert in a jaunty seacap. 

What makes it so retardiriffic is two fold.  One, it’s just jampacked with military jargon.  It’s overly jargony.  It’s resplendent with jargon.  This is like those kids in high school, who’s fathers used to get those magazines like Soldier of Fortune, who would talk about getting into gunfights and name the specific make and model and caliber of the rifles and why they preferred them to the others.  And you’re all like, “Armalite this!  I’m a mothafuckin’ ninja turtle!”  And then one day he comes to school in a black trenchcoat.  I don’t remember what happens after that. 

Second, and this has been happening so much in the novels lately, it’s just incredi-cheese with the fucking narrative.  He loves to end a paragraph with an elipsis…

…and then get over dramatic with italics and an exclamation point!

And it’s almost always some sort of well, no shit that’s going to happen moment.  Randy Steele dangled precariously over the edge of a five story drop to the frosty dive pool…

…and then he fell in the water!

Reilly constantly has chapters that end at some highly dramatic moment and one of his characters will see something insane or cliffhangy and shout, “Oh shit!” or “Oh damn” or “Oh JESUS!”  It’s a little like attending a baptist church or an movie in the inner city.  

But it’s impossible not to get wrapped up in the brazen stupid glory of the novel.  The body counts are epically high, and the finishing moves are fucking spectacular.  And nobody’s safe.  They killed someone with a jumping whale biting them in half.  Come on!  You know you want to see that shit in technicolor! Fuck this PG-13 shit!  Give me a guy getting his face melted off!  Or shot through the chest with a Desert Eagle.  

AMERICA!  FUCK YEAH!

This was recommended to me as a lark by TK.  I will thank him with a beer.  But not some fancy microbrew.  It’s gotta be a big stupid beer.