Weekly Entertainment

[new_to_liirness]

Since everyone THREADED LIKE MADMEN yesterday, I'm gonna make this simple.

Book recs: things you've read lately, old favorites, things you can't believe aren't represented in the game, whatever you'd like. Tell me what to reeeeeead.

Comments

[unddann]

Christopher Moore, dude. And not just Lamb. (*waves to Biff*) Travis (Practical Demonkeeping) and Tommy (Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck -- the latter of which is NOT Moore's best work) and Tuck (The Island of the Sequined Love Nun) and Theo (Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove) and holy crap, why did almost all his early protagonists have names starting with T? Someone should totally bring in a Sam Hunter from Coyote Blue. Just 'cause the meta would amuse the hell out of me. . . . Fun fact, Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Moore is the only book that ever prompted me to write fan mail to the author.

Anything by Esther Freisner. Seriously, anything.

Douglas Adams is a no-brainer. Elizabeth Peters to get someone non-sci-fi-fantasy-humor on the table. She's romantic-murder-mystery-humor. Robert Rankin, to go back to the absurdist fantasy folks, especially his Brentford Trilogy (all five of them, but he stole that shtick from Adams).

To get more "literary", Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and others). Who I have a new and abiding love for since I read the first part of his non-fiction work Maps and Legends and discovered that he loves genre fiction and especially the archetype of the trickster as much as I do. Tom Robbins I loved for awhile, but then started to get tired of his overly enigmatic metaphors and realized he was just in love with his own far too wordy voice. Of course, it's also possible that Fierce Invalids at Home from Hot Climates just isn't his best work -- I really ought to reread Villa Incognito and Jitterbug Perfume, since those are the ones I fell for him on.

I could probably go on. Scratch that, I could definitely go on, but I have babbled enough.

[new_to_liirness]

I love Moore. The vampire books are some of my favorites, though Fluke and Lamb are awesome. ...I have a weakness for anything with Emperor Norton in it.

Robert Rankin! *squeees*

Esther Freisner is a lot of fun and I thought for the longest time I was the only person who really enjoyed her stuff.

Never tried Chabon. Will have to do that sometime.

[unddann]

Heh, I'm not a huge fan of vampires (understatement) so I think it's a pretty good compliment to Bloodsucking Fiends that I managed to actually read the whole thing.

Personally, I think Tommy's solution to vampires is the BEST THING EVER.

I honestly think his earlier work is stronger. I enjoyed Fluke, but not on the same level as Island of the Sequined Love Nun and Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove. I still need to read Dirty Job (it's on my shelf, I've started it, I just keep not picking it up again).

If you ever want to see me go into "I took far too many literature and religious studies classes in college for my own good" mode, ask me what I really think of Lamb.

[new_to_liirness]

...you tempt me. I love lit geeking and I'm always up for religious discussion.

And I'll have to try the earlier stuff.

[unddann]

You should most definitely try the earlier stuff. If nothing else, he had such brilliant titles. . . .

The short answer to what I think of Lamb is that the first two-thirds or so of the book are utterly brilliant and wonderful. And then he gets to the stuff covered in the gospels, and Joshua loses all sense of personality he had in the rest of the book as Moore starts backpedaling like mad to make sure he doesn't piss off any Christians.

[new_to_liirness]

Siiiiigh.

Backpedaling. It makes me sad back when Chaucer did it and it makes me sad now. Then again, I've noticed that when someone doing something like that hits the part that's actually actively covered, they have problems. Maguire goes a little wonky when he hits the sections that actually involve Dorothy, like he doesn't know what the hell to do with her. Maybe it's not just the backpedaling (I don't doubt the backpedaling) but also just that when you have more canon to work off of, it can be harder to work in what you've done.

[unddann]

That's quite possibly true. Lord knows I hate going over canon ground in fanfiction. But there was something almost spectacularly disappointing for me in the ending of Lamb -- to the point where I haven't picked the book up to read again, because I know that disappointment is lurking. Of course, at the time I'd read it, I'd just finished a course on representations of Jesus in ancient and modern media, so I knew the gospels, synoptic and apocryphal, backwards and forwards and had been knee deep in Christ figures for six months. . . . But Lamb really built up something unique with the explorations of Eastern religions influencing very early Christianity, which just makes the sudden switch over to being "the adventures of squooshing Biff into the Gospel of Matthew, complete with weeping and gnashing of teeth" all the more painful.

People seem to feel the need to apologize for and soften the blow of their works that use Christianity in a humorous context and/or try to bring something new to the table on it -- Kevin Smith did the same with Dogma, and I think it weakens the work considerably to do so. If the work is strong enough, then it shouldn't need an apology. It should speak for itself, and one's love of the subject matter will shine through, even as one pokes fun at it.

[new_to_liirness]

I've always wondered if it was social or personal pressure that caused apologies in things. Whether, really, is it just society or is it the same kind of unspoken of fear that makes us say "I'll walk around, not under, the ladder; no really, it's just safer, right? And you shouldn't open an umbrella inside anyway, it's silly."

And as I've never done that much religious schooling (other than going to a Lutheran high school), I always saw it (the ending) as kind of a metaphor. All the fun and awesome and interesting and personality gets squished, painfully, into doctrine, flattened between the pages of history into something bloodless. You had this Character and now he's just Jesus. And that change over is so painful to read, I have to think that maybe it was part of the book itself. It was meant to hurt, to make a point, considering what the rest of the book is and represents. I kind of saw it as him asking the world at large, "why this sudden switch from being hip and groovy to... this?"

...but I see books very oddly. It's one of the reasons I 1. like Son of a Witch and 2. defend it to the death despite lots of obvious problems.

[unddann]

That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't thought of. I think it would work better for me if it weren't quite so abrupt? If we saw more of the duty of being the Christ dragging down Joshua's vibrant personality.

Of course, I also think that he could have been true to the synoptic Gospels without losing the energy of the character. People think that because we have the Gospels, the story is completely told and there's nothing that could be added, but if you ever actually read the things? They're drier than hell. The story is there, but it's so sunk within the two thousand year old language and lofty parables that it's practically obliterated. The Gospels are about the message of Jesus, primarily, and about other people's reactions to Jesus. There is very little about the man, himself.

Even without losing the focus on the message and the reactions, you can still retell the gospels (or at least one at a time) without lobotomizing your main character. Just look at Godspell. I'd point to JCS, but, well. Pilate and Judas totally make it through that one way better than JC does. ;D

[new_to_liirness]

I blame the Innocet muse up there, but I always tend to look at a book as an experience, which sounds so lame but it's true. I mean, I pull back from, like, the House of Leaves level of craziness (...and there is nothing on this earth that will make me make that first word blue, NOTHING) but I like when the whole book kind of functions to tell the story, not just what happens but in a larger context. The phrasing, the wording, the tone, even how the book functions. I saw the abruptness in there as being used to make it hurt, really let you see the difference. A gradual pull down has more drama, but an abrupt cut has more oomph. I guess I see it as just having to be intentional just because the extremity of the change; we know he can write this character and we know he feels comfortable messing around with the ideas and preconceptions of Christianity, so why would he start NOW? kind of question.

I can't speak for the synoptic Gospels as I haven't read them. ^_^

[unddann]

Honestly, when reading, I'm often much more focused on character and how that tells the story. I think that -- and mind you, I haven't reread the book since shortly after it was published -- the abruptness seemed to be too much of an out of character move, in Lamb. Part of it may be that it's Biff's perception of everything, and lord knows that sometimes friends that you know well can seem to change at the drop of a hat and for not much of a reason, but there didn't seem to be a reason for the change in Joshua other than "this is how it goes in the gospels", which is a large part of why I dislike it.

[new_to_liirness]

Oh, I didn't like it and I agree it was too hamhandedly done, but I could see what he might have been going for.

When I write, I tend to be very character-based. When I read, well, it depends on what they're doing. I can't say I like one thing or another, but I will say that I will read a bad book for a good character, but I will not read a good book if I can't stand the character, so I guess there's that.

[grand_fallguy]

Esther Freisner! Woot! *misses Fandom Tim Desmond*