otherland

I sure wish I had something profound to say. Nothing’s coming to mind, though. It may shock you to learn that not all my thoughts are deep and meaningful. 🙂 But I will have you know that I can be just as shallow as the next person when I try. For instance: “Hey, that’s what credit cards are for!” or “You’re right, that UPS guy IS hot!”

Okay, I guess that was pretty lame.

Oh, I forgot about this; it’s kind of interesting. Doc and I went to see a movie last weekend, Dreamcatcher, and I thought that it was pretty lame. In fact, I said it was a waste of $5.50 and 2 hours of my life. I also said that the book (which I have but have not read yet) was bound to be a zillion times better than the movie, as almost all Stephen King books are, with the notable exception of The Shining (one of the greatest movies of all time), thus implying that I planned to read it. So he said, “You plan to spend, what, 20 hours or so reading that book? When you’ve already seen the movie, and know the story, and didn’t like it?”

Through subsequent discussion, we discovered that he feels about books the same way that I feel about movies (and vice versa): I feel that it’s hardly ever a waste of time to read a book, even a bad book, but if I see a bad movie I resent having those 2 hours of my life taken away from me. Doc, on the other hand (and probably the wiser hand, really), feels that it’s hardly ever a waste of time to see a movie, even a bad movie, but why in the world would you want to devote 20 hours of your life to a bad book, or even just a so-so book? He would resent the time he took to read that book.

So unless a movie is just awesome and completely blows me away (which a good number do, thank you very much), I tend to wish I had that time back. And he feels the same way about books: unless it’s totally brilliant he is not going to spend the time and effort to read it.

I, of course, make the argument that there’s pretty much no way a movie can accurately interpret and portray everything that goes on in a book — it would have to be 20 hours long to do that. So movies based on books give you the Reader’s Digest version, which annoys me. I like books because, if they’re well written, you can so completely lose yourself inside the characters that it’s almost like being someone else for a while. I know that good movies do that too, but I guess the point is that I don’t see it as a waste of time to spend hours and hours on a book when you can get the same thing in a 2-hour movie.

Otherwise, I would never ever have read Tad William’s Otherland series, one of the most brilliant sci-fi-technology-fantasy-adventures I’ve ever read. And by far the longest (3,270 pages). Not to mention that I started the series when there were two books already out. I finished them right about the time book #3 hit the stores, and I tore through that in about a week. Then it was more than a year, maybe even two, before the final volume was released, and of course I’d read a bunch of other books in the meantime and so had forgotten some key elements and plotlines of the Otherland series, so… I had to go back and read the first three volumes before I could begin on the fourth.

Yeah, crazy, I know. But I loved these books so much that I wanted to be completely immersed in the characters when I started #4. I didn’t want to forget any details that might be important to what happens in the finale.

[“Tad Williams’ Otherland is a complete universe co-existent with the real world, incorporating elements of the Arabian Nights, the Alice and Oz books, the Neanderthal Age, the Trojan War, Roman history, monstrous insects, and numerous nursery rhymes and fables.”]

Seriously, you need to read these books. Tad Williams is one of my favorite authors, ever. He makes you want more, so badly! I was so incredibly sad (quite literally) for a few days after I finished the series, because I knew that was the end and there would never be any more adventures with these characters that I’d grown to love.

In brighter news, he’s got a new book out in May, right around the time that my book is released (must throw in a plug for the book!)