UberNerds Untie! Uh, ... I mean, Unite!

Starter for 10

David Nicholls

Villard

So, it's been awhile since I admitted to anything completely ridiculous on this blog. You know that I have naughty thoughts about Bruce Campbell and yes, I'm still watching NASCAR even though Junior is out of the Chase (I have some thoughts about him too!) Are you ready for something new? Well, when I was in high school, I participated in what was, at the time, the most socially suicidal of teen activities. That's right geeks, I was on my school's Reach for the Top team. And I loved EVERY minute of it.

I'd like to think that I only qualified for semi-geekdom. I mean, unlike a couple of my teammates, I could not quote at random from either Fawlty Towers or Python's Meaning of Life. Like the hero from Starter for 10 (who played on his university's equivalent of RFTT) I was a voracious reader, I flirted with leftist philosophies and I went to school hoping to escape the circumstances of life in a small town.

I quite enjoyed this novel and it a lot of ways, the narrative reminded me a great deal of Nick Hornby's writing. The characters were well drawn and in spots, the story was so achingly real that it was hard to read. My only criticism of the book was that it read more like a screenplay, in parts, than an actual novel. Three challenging trivia questions out of five.

Only This and Nothing More

The Pale Blue Eye
Louis Bayard
Harper Perennial

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore (back issues of The Economist do count as quaint and curious, right?), while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping (as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my condo door.) "Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my condo door. Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the warm September and ... okay ... enough. I don't think I can keep this up for the whole entry. If you haven't figured it out from the borrowed verse, this week's novel, The Pale Blue Eye, features a very young, and very melancholic Edgar Allen Poe as one of the main characters. Poe has been enlisted by the protagonist -- a wily, but retired, New York City constable -- to help investigate a series of gruesome murders at the West Point Military Academy. Like all great historical whodunits, The Pale Blue Eye if full of mayhem, murk, and melodrama, and Bayard skillfully keeps his readers guessing until the very end.

I have to be honest -- I didn't have a lot of expectations going into this book. Poe is such a huge figure in the American literary landscape/collective imagination that I was quite apprehensive as to how his character would be drawn. Would Poe be just another gimmick/tool to sell more books? It turns out that I needn't have worried. Bayard masterfully uses Poe's own themes, tropes and tone to somehow channel the spirit of the long-dead poet. Four shadowy ravens out of five.

You Have Entered ... the Twilight Zone

The Twilight Watch

Sergei Lukyanenko

Anchor Canada

Sigh. Have you ever read a book that you just didn't want to end? So much so that you procrastinated finishing the novel because you weren't ready to say goodbye to either the characters or the world in which they live? Yeah -- so that's the story as to why I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks -- I've been in mourning for Anton and the rest of his crazy gang.

In terms of pure storytelling, I thought this installment was the most engaging of the three novels in Lukyanenko's series. While it was also broken into three separate "tales", this novel seemed less jumpy than the other two and it felt more like I was reading a complete narrative. Despite the fact that Anton was the protagonist in each of the stories, other characters in the text were more fully developed and I felt that by the end of the trilogy Lukyanenko had truly developed an alternate reality with all the working parts.

I have to admit to also being intrigued by the author's use of allegory. He says a lot about geopolitics, humanism, Russian culture, archetypes, etc, and in some ways, the complexity of his text reminds me of Spenser's Faerie Queene or Dante's Inferno. You know ... those really long poems that you refused to read in high school. Three point five Redcrosse Knights out of five.