John Dies @ the End

I just noticed that I missed noting the anniversary of this blog on February 3!

One of the odd things about reading John Dies @ the End, by "David Wong" (a pseudonym for Jason Pargin) is that John first seems to die on page 59 (but it's only an illusion), and he literally gets the last word on the final page, 371, proving that the title itself is yet another in a long line of possibly clever but ultimately headache-inducing illusions.

The book was initially written as an internet serial at www.johndiesattheend.com, and it shows. The story escalates from one bloody battle to the next, adding levels of surrealism until its readers can hardly remember what realism might have looked like.

Despite these drawbacks, however, the humorous tone of voice and the riddles kept me reading. In fact, the reason I decided to read the book was that I read the prologue, which is a riddle, and quite a peculiar and funny one.

I was amused by the tone of voice in this passage, which keeps it from being just another cliche-ridden musing on mortality:
"People die. This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truh about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you'll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there'll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.
I was lucky. I learned this a long time ago, in a tiny, stifling room behind my high school gym. Most people don't realize it until they're laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.
And no one cares. You kick and scream and cry out into the darkness, and no answer comes. You rage against the unfathomable injustice and two blocks away some guy watches a baseball game and scratches his balls.
Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is. Well I know. It's apathy. That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck."

The tone of one passage even reminds me of the "missing reunion scene" between Westley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride:
"We kissed and said some gooey things to each other that would sound silly if you weren't there. I stood around and waited for her to board, passing through security and letting them check her shoes and all that shit, watched her walk away and kept watching out of a terminal window as her plane climbed and turned into a speck in the sky. I didn't cry. And if you think I did, good luck proving it, asshole."

Occasionally the humorous tone of voice saves something derivative from seeming so; when the image of a man made of cockroaches threatens to become a mere imitation of the "bug man" from the movie Men in Black, the narrator says:
"you see people in horror movies standing there stupidly while some special effect takes shape before them, the dumb-asses gawking at it instead of turning and running like the wind. And I wanted to run, to do the smart thing. But this was my car, dammit." I also enjoy John's observation, as the thing drives off: "I knew that was gonna happen."

The ultimate mystery turns out to depend on an Ender's-Game-like deception, although again, the tone of voice in which this is revealed is amusing enough to defuse some of the similarity:
"I'm not tellin' you these games have been around and I'm such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn't exist before last month. And now they're everywhere, on every TV set and hey, ask around and people say they've been common for years and years. I'm a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn't sell these games before, I know they didn't because it's insane that they do at all. But I start seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that's training him. Tell me it ain't. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hours and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside."

The descriptions of beings from other dimensions are entertaining, too, usually presented in terms of animal likenesses:
"The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.
You heard me.
John said the thing was as tall as the truck and walked on six legs that looked horned and armored like something seen at a seafood buffet. But there was a part that had the feel of a mammal, too, fur and arms. Please remember that from John's distance the beast would have been the size of a dime, so I won't criticize his crab-riding monkey description even though we all know it's retarded."

Although this book does sometimes descend to the level of a ten-year-old boy who labels something that's not quite right "retarded," its humorous tone, the riddles, and the sheer inventiveness of the plot and characters kept me reading.

Beginnings

Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.

Favorite Books

When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.

My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.

So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.

A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.

My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.

Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.

With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.

The reunion scene from The Princess Bride

My first copy of The Princess Bride, published in 1973, is subtitled "A Hot Fairy Tale." In 1988, when I assigned the book for my "Fantasy Literature" class at the University of Maryland, College Park, I sent away for the reunion scene, just to make sure we weren't missing anything.

This was before the movie came out, so no one had seen Goldman change Buttercup and Westley's exchange from
Westley: Were you sorry? Did you feel pain? Admit that you felt nothing--"
Buttercup: Do not mock my grief! I died that day.
to the movie version:
Buttercup: Do not mock my pain!
Westley: Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The movie did a nice job of framing the story to emphasize that this is "the good parts version." What you miss if you haven't read the book, though, are the pervasive references to Morgenstern and how Goldman is editing the original text. The missing reunion scene, when Buttercup has been engaged to Prince Humperdick and Westley has been the Dread Pirate Roberts, is missing in both versions, only Goldman claims to have written one and gives an address so you can send in for it. This is a small sample of what you get if you write to that address:

Dear Reader,
Thank you for sending in, and no, this is not the reunion scene, because of a certain roadblock named Kermit Shog.
As soon as bound books were ready I got a call from my lawyer Charley---(you may not remember, but Charley's the one I called from California to go down in the blizzard and buy The Princess Bride from the used-book dealer). Anyway, he usually begins with Talmudic humor, wisdom jokes, only this time he just says, "Bill, I think you better get down here," and before I'm even allowed a 'why?' he adds, "Right away if you can."
Panicked, I zoom down, wondering who could have died, did I flunk my tax audit, what? His secretary lets me into his office and Charley says, "This is Mr. Shog, Bill."
And there he is, sitting in the corner, hands on his briefcase, looking exactly like an oily version of Peter Lorre. I really expected him to say, "Give me the Falcon, you must, or I'll be forced to keeel you."
"Mr. Shog is a lawyer," Charley goes on. And this next was said underlined: "He represents the Morgenstern estate."

The letter goes on for four pages, saying nothing in the most entertaining way possible, and ends with a May, 1987 P.P.S. that says "But at least the movie got made."

If you like the movie and you haven't read the book, you should know that you're really missing something. And it's not the unabridged Morgenstern version, complete with long descriptions of the scenery in Florin. I was 13 in 1973, and when I first read The Princess Bride, I remember being a little puzzled about why William Goldman keeps pretending that he is editing a longer book when clearly he's just making it up. I was also a little puzzled about the song "You're so vain" about that time. I remember thinking "but the song IS about you." Clearly, I was already destined to study irony, being slow to catch on.