Blog O’ Obscurity

That’s right, constant reader.

Ender’s Game is looking closer and closer to becoming a reality.

The downside is that Wolfgang Petersen has dropped out as director of the project. The good news is that they are actively looking for a new director so they can start casting all of the kids so they can start shooting next year!

Exciting, huh?

Also on the plus side is the recent release of an “Ender’s Game” comic book. The few pages that I saw online looked very promising.

Can’t wait to see it on the big screen.

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Before you continue reading, you better have a seat.

Ready?

Ok.

You all know that I’ve been praising the awesomeness of George R. R. Martin’s epic ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series. Earlier this month Martin posted on his website that HBO has just exercised their option and purchasd the television rights to the series. This means that shortly we could see the first book in the series, “A Game of Thrones,” as the first season of the series in just a couple of short years!

This isn’t a done deal yet, and it’s still not definite. But, this is the next step in the process to bring the series to the small screen. Earlier HBO had purchased the option. Now they’ve exercised the option and have purchased the rights. Looks like they may film it in Spain or the Czech Republic.

A short note to HBO. Please make this series. I just have basic cable right now but will become a subscriber to the Home Box Office when they bring this series to their network. Heck, I’ll forever remain a subscriber if this comes to the screen.

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Monday I’m going to pick up a bookcase from a friend who’s moving and won’t need it anymore.  I’ve got about 5 bookcases as it is, but I always seem to need more shelf room.  You might say I should put less clutter on the shelves, but the fact is all the shelves hold are books.  My husband and I have a library of them.

We’ve got Star Trek and Star Wars; Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High (my husband insists we put them out - I’d just as soon leave those in a box and I’m the only one whose read them); Michael Chriton and Daniele Steele.  We’ve got science books and math books, history books and Harry Potter books.  There’s probably at least one book from every genre you can come up with including the ‘Teen Angst’ genre.

It’s getting a little bit sick , but you can hardly expect me to give these away.  I tend to forget the ending of books so I can always go back and reread them.  Except for ‘On the Beach’.  Most Depressing Ending Ever.

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Even though after seeing the previews for the movie version of “The Ruins”, I had absolutely no interest in seeing the movie, when I saw the book at the grocery store a few weeks ago with an endorsement from Stephen King, I couldn’t help but pick it up and give it a try.

“The Ruins” takes a few pages to introduce all of the characters and the location in Cancun and then quickly drops everyone on a hill in the forest surrounded by natives ready to kill them if they leave. The rest of the novel focuses on everyone’s struggle to survive as they slowly start to realize that the entire hill is covered with a sentient plant that will eventually consume them and anyone or anything else that comes to the hill.

The dialogue is fairly sparse with most of the writing focusing on each characters inner monologue of terror. This is probably the main reason that the movie got such lousy reviews. It’s hard to translate a book to the screen when there’s nothing really for anyone to say in a given scene. The tension ratchets up in many parts of the book and it is occasionally difficult to put down. However, there are lulls in the action where it’s difficult to continue with the story.

So, I’m not terribly blown away by “The Ruins”, but it was a good read as I was busing back and forth to work.

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A few years ago I came across a fun little book in the bookstore that I read for a little while but put back without buying. It was Max Brooks’ “Zombie Survival Guide.” This book was a basic manual that logically stepped through everything that you needed to know about survived the coming zombie holocaust.

More recently, a friend recommended that I picked up the author’s newest addition to the zombie genre, “World War Z.” Very impressive. “World War Z” is a written account of the war against the zombies told from the perspective of dozens of survivors from all over the world and edited together by a post-zombie war politician that is seeking the truth about what happened during that dark time. The book is extremely effective in portraying the terror and helplessness that quickly spread around the world almost as quickly as the plague did. Brooks extrapolates from the current worldwide political scene to shape the zombie future. Every possibility or eventuality of the zombie is explored given the standard zombie myth as a starting point.

I found this book difficult to put down and look forward to Max Brooks’ next excursion into the world of the zombies.

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“Fear Nothing” by Dean Koontz starts with a very promising premise, but like much of Koontz’s work, I found that the execution of that idea quickly fell apart.

Christopher Snow is afflicted by a rare genetic disorder that prevents his cells from repairing damage down by ultraviolet light. He’s not an albino, but he must always avoid light. After his father’s death, he stumbles upon a series of increasingly strange events that take him deeper and deeper into the secrets of the town that he only sees at night.

The mystery and suspense and eerieness that fill the first few pages seems to quickly taper off. It quickly becomes obvious that our character will move from one strange occurrence to the next until the end of the book. The problem is that these occurrences just become less and less spooky and more and more feel like filler until the end of the book. Pages seem to fly by without much really happening. Every time someone is about to give information that the reader might want to know, that person either changes the subject, thinks better of it, gets killed, or the main character runs away.

Koontz’s books all seem to have strong starting points, but weak stories to fill the pages in between the setup and the payoff. Fear that.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been noticing a very strange trend with my brother and his friends. I’ve managed to get him hooked on a couple of things over the years. Back in junior high I introduced him to the Dragonlance series. He enjoyed it and passed it along to a couple of friends who liked it too.

A few months ago I finally convinced him to read “A Game of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin. It’s just an amazing series that completely engages the reader in a fully realized world that is strange and familiar at the same time. Yesterday I finally convinced him to watch a few episodes of “Dexter” online. He went through five of them.

So now he’s passing these things along to his friends. He has three now reading Martin’s books and two others watching “Dexter.”

Somehow I think my brother is like Mikey from the old Life commercials. Mikey doesn’t like anything. Give it to Mikey, if he likes it, it must be good.

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I have a guilty pleasure to admit to. I read books written for teenagers. I feel so much more free now that I’ve admitted it. It’s been like a dirty, immature secret.

I just finished the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants trilogy plus one (what’s the word a 4 book series?) and I am still seething about Kostos. I know he and Lena weren’t together anymore but he was always so sensible. He should have known he was never going to find happiness with someone else’s ‘traveling pants’.

But now I’ve finished all four and I don’t know what to do with myself. With the cost of books, I refuse to try a new author without an excellent recommendation. And even though I was desperate enough to do it for the fourth book of this series, don’t expect me to EVER go back into the Knowasis (aka teen study room) at the library.

Ah, sweet angst ridden life….

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I know that Hollywood is out of ideas, but really, do we really need every single Dr. Seuss book turned into a movie. Children’s books make great movies, but not children’s books based on modern day nursery rhymes that can barely make it to 20 pages.

Seriously, if they ever get around to making “Green Eggs and Ham” into a movie, I’ll boycott that studio for life. The entire book only has 50 words. They’re just repeated over and over. The only word with more than one syllable is ‘anywhere’.

I will not see this film.

I will not see it here or there. I will not see it anywhere.

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I used to love to write. I fancied myself the author of a book one day. Just one book, though - I figured I could rake in the dough with just the one fabulously engrossing and wildly acclaimed book. I’d retire on the money I made by the age of 18 - no need for college (something I was against since the time I found out about it “What?! You told me I could drop out when I was 16, then you told me you’d kick me out if I did but that I could quit school after high school! Now you say that’s not enough! Do you want me to waste my life in school?” (door slams)).

Then I didn’t turn out to be as good a writer as I imagined myself. I had it all together in my head, but it took so long to write it, by the time I got to the end of a sentence, half the words were missing. Like that last sentence would have been, “I had it all together in my half the words were missing.” Or I would write myself into a corner and have to go back and redo everything only to realize it wouldn’t work anyway I came at it and then I’d have to scrap the whole thing and come up with a different idea. The second idea was never as good as the first (all my first ideas are brilliant).

I would write these dark short stories that brought me to tears. So heartfelt, so insightful, so utterly, utterly deep. (pause for somber effect). Then I would reread them and they would bring me to tears again - of embarrassment at the sappiness of it all - more like utterly, utterly silly.

In school, they always had a very precise formula to write by - topic sentence, concrete detail, commentary, commentary, concrete detail, commentary, commentary. Repeat five times and you had an essay. If you did not follow the formula, you got marked off for it which burned me up no end. Where was the option to write creatively? Why in the name of all that anyone holds sacred did I have to follow this BEYOND boring method and then hold HEMINGWAY up as a fine ideal? (How was I supposed to know what “Hills Like White Elephants” was really about? How could anyone know what that was really about? This is supposed to be GOOD writing?!) I used to rebel by refusing to reach the minimum word requirement. HAHA, that’ll show them!

Now adays I just write what comes to mind. I think they call it verbal diahrea but here I just call it wordiness cuz I don’t know how to spell diahrea. And, really, I don’t want to know how to spell it.

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