I just can’t help myself. I can’t eat just one! I’ve got all these serious books on my shelf that need to be read and here I am again, consuming literary junk food. But I’m just hooked on these .Hack Project properties. .Hack// AI Buster 2 is a short story collection, with the stories scattered chronologically through the .Hack timeline.

Some of them are good, at least one is pretty bad. None of them are very substantial. But somehow that’s part of the appeal. It’s like seeing a silhouette through a window shade. Shadowy images…enough to intrigue, but not enough to satisfy. Um, ok so now I sound like a voyeur. 🙂 In this volume we get more glimpses at the players themselves, which I find interesting. I think my favorite story was the first one, which showed the events of AI Buster 1 through the eyes of Hokuto, the newbie side-kick, who is much more interesting on the other side of the computer screen.

Still not great books. But another fun guilty escape. Lots of stuff going on in my life right now, and too often by the end of the day I’m just not up to facing the heavier reading on my bookshelf. In fact, I have a few more of these .hack books and I think I’m going to jump right into the next one!

This one was definitely a guilty pleasure. With all the heavier reading I’ve been doing, I was looking for something light and fast to break up my reading sessions a bit. .Hack// AI Buster 1 by Tatsuya Hamazaki fit the bill nicely. (Amazon incorrectly lists Rei Idumi as one of the authors. Rei Idumi is listed as illustrator in the book.)

The .hack Project (sometimes written as “dotHack”) is a series of manga, anime, videogames and novels all set in The World, a fictitious MMO (massively multiplayer online game). Most of the action takes place inside the game, but the characters, like characters in real MMOs, shift their focus between events in-game and events in real-life. A big part of the draw of the various parts of the .Hack project, to me, is how well the creators replicate the culture of these games. Guild drama, PKing, exploiting bugs, wondering who is really behind the avatar….if these concepts mean nothing to you then you probably won’t ‘get’ the .Hack material. As an avid MMO player I gobble it up gleefully. Reading/watching/playing .Hack properties is almost as fun as playing a good MMO.

As to this particular novel…guilty pleasure or not, I have to say it isn’t a great book. It feels more like an establishing piece. The main character spends a lot of time talking to a ‘newbie’ about the mechanics of the game (in turn instructing the reader as to how these games work). The World as an MMO exists in the near future, so while the technology is a bit more advanced than what exists for us today, much of it is recognizable to real life MMO players, so a lot of these discussions between characters just felt like filler to me.

The actual story is very thin here. We have one character, an employee of the company that runs The World, chasing down a rogue AI. A bug, essentially. We have another character, with his newbie tag-along, trying to complete a quest. That’s really it. Some other characters are introduced but their stories are fleshed out in other .Hack properties. Not a lot of actual plot to chew on here.

Worse is that the author chose what I’d call a First Person Limited viewpoint. I can’t really explain this without a spoiler, but honestly the plotline isn’t compelling enough for this to really matter anyway. Nevertheless you’ve been warned. INCOMING SPOILERS! The book bounces between these two main characters, both told in first person. Neither character indicates in any way that they are aware of the other. The big reveal at the end of the book is… they’re the same character! During the ‘bug-hunter’ chapters the character is referred to by his real world name, since most of these chapters take place outside The World. During the ‘quest’ chapters the character is referred to by his in-game name. It really felt to me like the author was cheating. If you’re going to write from a first person viewpoint, you can’t ‘hide’ things like this from the reader. And it wasn’t even like “A-ha! So that is why X did Y when Z happened!” because ‘neither’ character ever really used what the other knew in any apparent way. If just felt like the author was stuck and suddenly decided at the end of the manuscript that these two characters were the same person and never went back to rewrite the earlier chapters.

But the oddest thing of all? I still enjoyed the book. Now take that in context. First, I’m an MMO gamer and more generally I’m fascinated with online culture. Second, it’s a YA book that I read in a couple of short evening reading sessions, so I didn’t make a major time commitment to it. My demands on it weren’t very high. Yeah, the plot was weak, but… It was like having a candy bar wear the nougat center wasn’t all that great, but the caramel layer and chocolate surrounding the nougat were sugary bliss. Not the greatest food in the world, but it satisfied a craving at the time.

Yeah so remember how I was talking about crunch time? The universe has a sense of humor… my neighborhood lost power for a bunch of hours this afternoon. So I couldn’t work. And I was already in the middle of being stuck. And boyo was it ever hot. (On the plus side maybe some forced time away from the code was just what I needed; once power was restored I started making good progress again.)

Anyway so I took the opportunity to finish up Holly Black’s Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. It was a really fun read. Kaye is a teenage girl living a kind of fucked up life… her mom is a struggling musician and pretty heavy partier. Kaye isn’t averse to a few drinks and lots of cigarettes, herself. Which I found odd, given that this is categorized as a “YA” novel. Kaye is a pretty edgy young lady. Maybe I’m showing my age. But anyway…

The sub-title really says it all. Kaye gets introduced to the land of faerie that exists here in our modern world. Amidst the trash and the pollution lie secret portals to the Unseely Court, and Kaye finds herself caught up in an adventure that gets very personal very quickly after she saves a faerie knight that she finds wounded in some woods just off a highway. The whole juxtaposition of modern and faerie makes it a really fun read. The characters are just ok…they don’t really ‘pop’ as much as they might and it wasn’t the kind of book where you find yourself deeply caring about these people as if you knew them. But the scenery is a joy, the action moves along quickly, and overall its a swift read. Well worth your time.

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sometime in the mid-1970’s. I remember cutting school because I couldn’t put the books down, I was so entranced. I new then that I was going to be a JRR Tolkien fanboy (though we didn’t use that term back in them old days, sonny!) for life. I do have some remembrance of also reading Farmer Giles of Ham and finding it unsatisfying.

Fast forward to last fall when I finally read The Silmarillion. Call me silly, but I’d been ‘saving’ that book for all those years, not wanting to find myself having read everything Tolkien wrote. And when I finally did read it, I was vaguely disappointed in it.

Which brings us to The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. This is a tale of the Eldar Days, long before The Shire and the Hobbits that dwell within. It’s a tale told, in much briefer fashion, in The Silmarillion as well, but this longer version has a slightly more narrative feel to it.

That said…I’m sorry, but it is still not even close to the magnificence that is The Lord of the Rings. The reader still feels distanced from the characters in the story, much more like listening to a narrator telling the tale as opposed to living it ourselves. And the tale itself is so unrelentingly morbid and sad…there is no lightness to it. It seems like despair from front cover to rear.

Once again, it is worth reading for Tokien buffs. But let’s face it, they’re going to read it no matter what I say. But if you kind of like Lord of the Rings but didn’t go nuts over them, you can safely skip this volume.

I’ve been quite lax, to say the least, in my blogging. I finished Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog quite some time ago, and never reported in. And in fact since then I’ve reread The Hobbit but I won’t be reviewing that here since I’ve read it so many times that there’s no way I could do approach it with any resemblance of objectivity. But anyway, back to the Dog.

The only other Connie Willis book I’ve read is The Doomsday Book which was about a future historian time traveling back to research The Black Death. I read it quite some time ago but I remember it as being rather somber, as the topic would suggest. In To Say Nothing of the Dog we follow another time traveling historian but this time out the tone is distinctly light-hearted.

The title here is a tribute to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog!, published in 1889. This is the story of, well, three men and a dog taking an excursion along the Thames. The hero of Willis’s book, Ned Henry, also ends up in a rowboat on the Thames and actually encounters Jerome’s trio.

And I’m telling you nothing about the actual book, am I? Aye, I’m a bit rusty.

Anyway, Ned Henry, historian, has been doing too much time traveling of late, resulting in a bad case of ‘time lag’ which leaves him generally confused. He is sent back to Victorian England for some R&R, but immediately gets caught up with ever more convoluted and silly adventures when he does so. Watching him trying to navigate the social customs of the times while trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of the upper class without doing anything to corrupt the time stream becomes more and more funny as the book goes on.

Yeah, well, it’s been a good while since I finished it…so I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it. But I will say I really enjoyed it and plan on looking for more of Ms. Willis’ novels. She captures the feel of these historical times so … well, I was going to say accurately, but how should I know what it really felt like to be rowing down the Thames in 1889? But it *feels* accurate, and that’s good enough for me!

I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.