Tomorrow:
After that:
I very much enjoy reading. Especially fiction. It provides a unique kind of escape and fantasy, substantially different from film or theater, one that both requires and rewards imagination. Good authors paint beautiful pictures in your head with their words so that the world and characters and history and feel of the story become visible, tangible even. When an author creates a compelling world, I am reluctant to leave it. Even as I rush headlong through the pages, I try to soak up every word, pausing to mull over a curious phrase or a particularly striking image. Particularly, I enjoy the long ones, especially if there's a whole long series of long books that hold my attention. Why is this? The easiest answer is because I don't want it to end. There's got to be an x-factor, some excellent quality that pulls me back in not only for each book, but for revisiting the series as a whole at a later date. Now, I think there's an even deeper reason there too, but I'll get there at the end. First I want to talk about my favorites.
I've just wrapped up the fifth book in the George RR Martin series A Song of Ice and Fire. The last few books have indeed been over the magic 1000 page mark. For me, this is the arbitrary magic number, because if a book crests a thousand, I know for a fact that the author (at the very least) is batting for the fences: there's an epic quality, so much to the story that only 3 digits worth of pages cannot contain. This thrills me. The last books of ASOIAF can't come swiftly enough--but first they have to be written, and I'm pretty certain we're going to be getting at least 2000 more pages from Martin. Stoked.
An obvious mention here is Harry Potter. Now, there have been many detractors to this series, but you know what? It's not bad. In fact, it gets pretty damn good at times (I'm looking at you, books 3 and 6). It has a host of well-developed (if archetypal) characters, a fleshed-out world with its own internal logic and mystery, and a rather cohesive overarching narrative. I haven't read them since the 7th one came out, though, but I don't think I'm ready to go back to #1 yet.
The series I'm looking forward most to (re)visiting is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. My history with this series is rather odd. First, I read the fourth book before any of the others. Since I was about 14 at the time, my dear old dad took it upon himself to go through with white-out and take out all the naughty and blashpemous bits (including any mention of the gods, even in phrases like "by the gods"). I thought it was stupid then, I think it's horrifying now. Do that to a book? God forbid. Never going to happen on my watch. Anyway, after that I checked out the first three from the library. My mom wasn't too keen on the idea since she was of the opinion that King got his stories from Satan Himself, but I read them regardless and loved them. Then I re-read the fourth one, which is still probably my favorite, Wizard and Glass. 5-7 weren't out then. In college, the fifth came out, and I read it and liked it, but I sped through that one so quick I barely remember any of it. By the time 6 and 7 were released, I had been so long away from it that I never made the time to get back to it.
That time is coming, though, and as soon as I wrap up my Master's portfolio defense, I'm jumping back into Mid-World with both feet.
I'll interject here about long books that are standalone, for these too draw me in. Problem is, I have a lot of these, but I haven't had the time to get to them. I got 11/22/63 and 1Q84 for Christmas, but there was simply no time to read them before the semester began. All in good time though.
Ok, so going back to this deeper reason for loving the long books, and books in general (and by extension, film and theater and roleplaying games as well). There's a quote by Dave Scott, the 7th man to walk on the moon (ASTRONAUTS ARE MY FAVORITE OF ALL!!!!!!!!). I think it gets to the heart of what I'm talking about, the part of the human existence that lives for this visiting of other worlds:
As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature: man must explore.
Now, Hadley was the moon base for many of the Apollo missions, but replace "Hadley" with Oz, Barsoom, Mid-World, Hogwarts, Westeros, or anywhere and you've got it. This man--a man of science, accomplished, crazy smart, as all astronauts back in the early/glory days of space flight had to be--steps out of his lander and onto the surface of another planet. He can see the earth just sitting there in space, so small, the stars never having been ever so large. His friends have traveled here before (only six of them, true) and no doubt they told the most amazing, beautiful stories about their experiences there. And when he's there, it is nevertheless so new, so awe-inspiring, so maginificent, and what does he say? Man must explore.
This is what fiction brings us: the chance to explore, to go out and experience new places, new people, new things. This is why fiction will never go extinct; the need to explore is a fundamental human trait. This is what makes fiction so great and lasting, and why I love reading it, even over and over again: I've found a place while exploring and it so captivates me that I never want to leave and that I want to share with everyone. I'm sure you've seen or heard me gush over a book--it's because I had such a great time exploring, I want everyone else to come with me!
So read, my friends. Read. No matter what else you've got going on, there's always 20 minutes at least that you can sneak in before you go to bed (for example) for you to explore every night. Don't deny yourself that experience.
If any of you ever have had a conversation with me in the past year or so and asked me what I was reading, I would have told you, based on the time you asked, that I was reading A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast For Crows, or A Dance With Dragons. All of which are the first five books in George Martin's excellent A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Ok, now this is where you want to stop reading if you haven't read the series through ADWD or if you never plan on reading them or if you just love spoilers. Because the entirety of the rest of this post is spoilerrific.
Seriously. Stop reading unless you know what's going on. Here, I'll even put a page break in here for you! Continue only if you really want to.
Ok, so bear with me here. I think I've come up with a slam-bang idea for a new comic book/cartoon. The pitch is this: imagine the first few original stars of the Book of Genesis/Bereishit (you know, like Adam, Noah, and Abraham). Now imagine them as part of the world's first superhero team!
This is how I picture it: Adam is the team leader, the wisest, and quicker in mind than in body.Seth, Adam's New Favorite Son after the Abel Incident, is a tank, just a really huge guy, but a softie daddy's boy at heart. Enoch has magical powers and all kinds of weird magical friends (giants, robots, animal hybrids, etc--seriously, the apochryphal Book of Enoch is full of crazy stuff). Noah can build anything with his mind but is kind of a buzzkill, always serious and dour, no fun at all. Abraham is the all-around badass: charismatic, strong, quick, super smart, and he has all kinds of hare-brained secret projects (which usually end up coming in handy and/or saving the day later). Moses is the youngest member of the group, a little stuck-up, and is trying desparately to grow out his beard but he's already shown he's quite adept at his skills, but no one takes him seriously.
These six were given their powers by Yahweh or Jehovah, who is to the Patriarchs as Nick Fury is to the Avengers. He's their contact, their controller, their boss, essentially. Now, even if your bible history is rusty, you'll remember that once upon a time, God created Man, called Adam, and placed him in the paradisaical Garden of Eden. Same here, except that God decided to also give Adam super powers. Really, this isn't too much of a stretch, because Adam basically invents the entire world and civilization and agriculture and writing and also lives to be 900-something years old (and that's all canon, in the book, if you will). You'll also remember that in the GoE there was a bad guy, a snake, who tempts Adam and his lady wife Eve. This also happens here, except that we know from the get-go that the snake is actually Lucifer, or Helel if we're keeping things Hebrewical, and that he and Yahweh are like Magneto and Professor X. Lex Luthor and Superman. You know, archnemeses. And in good measure, Lucifer/Helel builds up his own team of bad-guy supes, called the Masters Mahan, whose founding member is Cain himself.
As you can imagine, this is going to be rather irreverant. That doesn't mean it's going to be amoral or anything. Nothing sacred will remain that way, however!
So the general plot revolves around the whole good-guy/bad-guy struggle, but also around how Yahweh, Helel, and the other gods interfere in the world of men, both directly and indirectly shaping the development of humanity. But in a fun way. Also, after a while, Yahweh is going to tell the Patriarchs that they need to start recruiting for a next generation of heroes because Helel is just not giving up, so we introduce The Prophets as a sort of New-Mutants kind of group, under the tutelage of their predecessers, but unique in their own right. This team consists of Solomon,Elijah, Samson, Yeshua (Jesus), and Mohammad. David starts off in there too, but he will have to be let go because of the whole Bathsheba thing.
Now, I know that this is probably the greatest thing you've ever heard. And I'm so totally with you there. Let me finish up this semester and then we'll go to town on this idea!
And in case you don't think I'm dead serious about this, I made a picture! So while there's no exact 1:1 correlation, Supes is obvs Adam, Batman is Seth (daddy issues up the wazoo, come on!), Aquaman is Moses (the joke, also water), Cyborg is Enoch (see robots comment above), Flash is Abraham, and then I guess that makes Green Lantern Noah. Yay!
