Reading and More Reading

For most of the trip to Las Vegas, I was reading Stephen King's Under the Dome. As I've said before, it's a Llong book coming in at 1,074 pages.

Now I like Stephen King. I enjoyed Night Shift long ago, have read and liked The Shining and Salem's Lot, and Firestarter is a great book of secret psionics.

Under the Dome is a great concept with things anyone can relate to; not just someone from a small town. I'm not from a small town, but I can see how something like what happens in an isolated town could. And most of the story had me riveted, but when I learned the force behind the Dome...

It was like I was in a car with a flat on the Oakland Bay Bridge. I had to keep going because I wasn't able to stop, but I knew I was going to enjoy the journey as much as I had hoped.

Now I can't say that I could come up with a better source for the MacGuffin, but i just didn't like this one.

***

In contrast (and this is only a pun that come to mind after having read a book full of color references), is Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. I burned through this book starting the night before we left Las Vegas, and got much read in Long Beach, and finished it tonight.

The Thursday Next books are fun with their literary references, and the Nursery Crime series has grown on me, but this new series (intended to be a trilogy as revealed at the end of the book) kept me focused the entire time.

I can remember reading about Utopias in high school (freshman or sophomore year), and even creating one as a project for the class. We had read Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and I had also read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World on my own. This book is reminiscent of those creations.

It takes place in a world where Something Had Happened. The capitals are Fforde's. And in the changed world, people cannot see in the dark, and have limited color receptors. You are graded by the amount of color you see. Commonly you see in one color, some see in two, and (as yet) no one sees with any strength in all three. And around this is a strongly restrictive society built.

It's really a fascinating concept, and I look forward to the next two books in the series.

Anotehr Book Down

Last night, I finished The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry.

Mom had described it as a poor man's Thursday Next book (the Jasper Fforde series), but it really isn't like that at all.

While it is very surreal, it has a pretty good internal logic. I enjoyed the layers you learn of in the Agency, and the things work in the sub-levels of the Agency.

It is like coming in towards the end of a series, and having a flunky take overt the story. Say, as if you had never read a Sherlock Holmes book, and a new book by Sir Arthur was found where Watson is the new hero and is looking for Holmes. And yet, not.

Plus, I liked the "everyman" kind of descriptions as well as the generic descriptions of the city as well.

As a mystery, I'm sure it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it a nice break from other things, and yet it still had elements of a good sci-fi kind of story too.

The Chain, Follow the Chain

So I'm reading today's comics, and I get to Two Lumps; specifically this strip.

So I head over to Amazon to see if Jasper Fforde actually has a new book out.

No such luck, but he does have a book due out December 29.

So I decide to head over to his official webpage. And then I see that the Thursday Next series is a planned octology.

GAH!

Although I have to admit that the new book sounds very interesting.

Part social satire, part romance, part revolutionary thriller, Shades of Grey tells of a battle against overwhelming odds. In a society where the ability to see the higher end of the color spectrum denotes a better social standing, Eddie Russet belongs to the low-level House of Red and can see his own color—but no other. The sky, the grass, and everything in between are all just shades of grey, and must be colorized by artificial means.

Eddie’s world wasn’t always like this. There’s evidence of a never-discussed disaster and now, many years later, technology is poor, news sporadic, the notion of change abhorrent, and nighttime is terrifying: no one can see in the dark. Everyone abides by a bizarre regime of rules and regulations, a system of merits and demerits, where punishment can result in permanent expulsion.

Eddie, who works for the Color Control Agency, might well have lived out his rose-tinted life without a hitch. But that changes when he becomes smitten with Jane, a Grey Nightseer from the dark, unlit side of the village. She shows Eddie that all is not well with the world he thinks is just and good. Together, they engage in dangerous revolutionary talk.

Stunningly imaginative, very funny, tightly plotted, and with sly satirical digs at our own society, this novel is for those who loved Thursday Next but want to be transported somewhere equally wild, only darker; a world where the black and white of moral standpoints have been reduced to shades of grey.