Sunday, August 20, 2006

I Blame Robert Jordan

It has been a long time since I have read fantasy novels - the dragons and sorcery kind of fantasy, not any other sort LOL - and I blame the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan for that. If I had known that the series would have been eleven books long and with no sign of an end anywhere in the next decade, I may have given it a miss, no matter how good the first six books were. Or no matter how well written the main characters are.

The past four or five books in the series have felt like treading water, while still introducing new characters, bringing back formerly dead ones, and halving the length of the books, making it seem like an endless drip feed. Maybe this is what drug addiction is like, because despite knowing that the next book isn't going to end it all, and may not even be good, you still have to buy it, just to get that extra step closer to some sort of closure.

So I would say that over the past three or four years, my appetite for heroic fantasy has gone downhill quite a bit - this from a guy that used to vociferously read - if I have the meaning of big word of the day vocifierous right - Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Raymond E Feist, Tad Williams, David Eddings, even Terry Pratchett. The last few years though, I have been more into books about crime, terrorism and general non fiction - the new terrorism genre of course morphing from the old cold war spy thriller type of book.

But, for the first time in a long time, I am reading fantasy again, and was so eager to get the next book in a series that, with a chapter still to go on book one, I went around three stores in the city on Friday night to find book two. Yes, from Angus and Robertson to Dymocks to Borders, I was on a mission, and I couldn't wait until later in the weekend to buy it. Step up for the 'I Brought Paul Back To The Genre' Award, Steve Erikson.

And he's Canadian as well - with my experience of that nationality, I guess I better run away now LOL. But of course it is going to be Vancouver's season in the hockey this year, surely?

Off to the movies shortly - United 93 most probably. Not a movie to take a bin of popcorn to - perhaps just a subtle soft drink to moisten the dryest of throats. Haven't felt this much trepidation of going to a movie, but at the same time an overwhelming urge to see something so depressing, since Hotel Rwanda. Remembering back, almost five years ago, to the disbelief, the incredulity, the overwhelmingness of what I was seeing on my TV screen, the sense of what on earth happens next.

The other options for theatre today are Thank You for Smoking, Jindabyne and The Sentinel, but I don't think I can stand to wait to watch United 93 - the tension even, and the possibility of delaying it until September 11 itself. No. It will be distressing enough to watch it on August 20.

And no, I won't even go further into the thought that the monthly death toll in Iraq is the same as America's September 11 2001. Not in a single day, of course, but each month, for the last six months at least, and no sign of any change on the horizon. Not going to go into the opinion pieces I have read in the American papers about Iraq the last couple of days. Nor even the Lebanon pieces...

I have got to steel myself to be depressed seeing a movie, get all the crap of the five years since, let alone the last six months, out of my head. Sometimes I just want to go back to the time, September 10, when Mexico was America's best ally and Dubya was a harmless joke.

Yeah, it has to be United 93 now, thinking this much in the last few paragraphs about That Day.

Babbling now, so I will sign off before babbling more.

Paul

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