Book Review: The War of the Worlds

(Edit -- this review is kinda messy and all over the place -- whenever I feel strongly about something I get kind of gushy and sloppy over it. I kinda want to take the part where I'm comparing it to Day of the Triffids and The Road and turn it into a separate essay)

War of the Worlds is one of those books that I never got around to reading because I always forgot that I hadn't done so already. HG Wells is one of those guys, like Lovecraft or Tolkien, that became a victim of his own popularity, and was mimicked so many times that it's sometimes easy to forget that they were actually the progenitors of what they were doing, and weren't relying on a bunch of pre-established tropes and cliches.

Skimming through some more recent reviews of War of the Worlds, I feel like it's fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last few years. It gets shit flung at it from all angles -- the sci-fi people hate it because it doesn't really explain anything scientific, the adventure story people hate it because it lacks a strong clear villain and is too classic-y, classics people hate it because it's too adventure-y, and the alien people hate it because they think it paints aliens as one-dimensional aggressors (lots of new agey people actually revile the book because they blame it as the sole reason why so many are inclined to assume that beings from another planet would be malevolent).

The plot of the book, also recently maligned, is well known at this point -- Martians land in England, and being to systematically destroy everything. People also seem to think it fails as a disaster story because not enough stuff actually burns down.

As always, I think people need to calm the fuck down, because they're missing the point. War of the Worlds was written in England and published in 1858 while the Empire was still going strong, and a large part of why the novel was so effectively terrifying and well received was because it showed how fragile and fallible all that shit could be. Novels and movies about a societal collapse are pretty common today, and I think it's important to remember how scary and powerful a well written book about that would have been if it hadn't been experienced before.

While the book may fail today in terms of shock and surprise, it succeeds wildly in two areas: how much STUFF it has to say, and how well it says it. Unlike a lot of other alien/adventure stories, which get by on an exciting plot that keeps you rushing through and turning pages, War of the Worlds takes its time with language and has some truly (surprisingly) beautiful moments of writing. At one point in the story, after all the shit hits the fan, the narrator ends up having to kill somebody. Later on, when reflecting on it, he says --

The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall’ I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of cooperation -- grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses -- all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will....

Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place -- a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

I'm sorry, but to me that's powerful shit that doesn't deserve to be shoved into the abysmal "genre fiction" dungeon.

Understandably, people often compare War of the Worlds with Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series, but I think they have almost nothing in common except for having Martians as central figures. War of the Worlds actually has a lot more in common with John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, which would come half a century later, and would also become much disparaged and relegated to pulp-status, mainly because of the terrible movie with the same title. Not only did War of the Worlds almost (arguably) create the sci-fi genre, but it -- more successfully -- created the post-disaster genre. It would take 50 years for The Day of the Triffids to match it, and I don't think another novel has come close until 2006, when The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published. All three of these novels have been criticized for not having a strong, clear antagonist, because all three of these novels have -- I think possibly more so than Dostoevsky, though that might get me lynched -- shown that the specific nature of disaster is secondary in interest to how humanity as a group and people as individuals deal with it. Chances are that anyone with enough leisure time to sit down and read a book haven't been pushed to the extreme limits of where tragedy can push them, and hasn't had their strength tested or seen what they are or aren't capable of. The fact that something that seems almost arbitrary can cause the light we're reading by to go out and for our entire set of societal assumptions to collapse and leave us to fend for ourselves is, I think, even more of an effective means of terrifying a reader today than it was a century ago, since we're (generally) even more clueless and helpless about how to meet our basic needs than we were back then.

Wells makes repeated references to ants throughout the novel, and how often the narrator was reminded of the way they look to us compared to how we looked to the Martians. The other great message of War of the Worlds is to constantly remind us of the danger of our arrogance, a point driven home when the Martians themselves meet their own anticlimactic demise.

I'm hoping that at some point the general consensus on this book swings back in the other direction, because I think every single inch of its status as a classic is well deserved and I think it's probably one of the most important books ever written. Stupid movies and copycat books aside, War of the Worlds is one of those very, very, very few things that makes me proud to be human, even if it does so by reminding me of how pitiful and small and irrelevant we all are.

Rating: B+
Recommended For: Sci-fi and Alien fans, fans of disaster fiction, fans of human misery.

Book Review: Dog Days -- Diary of a Wimpy Kid

I wasn't familiar with the Wimpy Kid series when I first picked up this book. I was stuck in a rather unpleasant social situation (not at all the fault of the people I was with, mind you, I just wasn't feeling it and didn't have anything to say to anyone) and neglected to bring a book with me. I tried to look casual as I poked around the living room and kitchen desperately in search of ANYTHING to read, and ended up grabbing this as it was the only thing I could find besides crossword/suduku books (taking someone's book without asking and going off to isolate yourself in the middle of conversation is bad enough, and writing in one seemed to cross a line). I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good, but then I opened up to the first page and read --

"For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip. 

Just because the weather's nice, everyone expects you to be outside all day "frolicking" or whatever. And if you don't spend every second outdoors, people think there's something wrong with you. But the truth is, I've always been more of an indoor person. 

The way I like to spend my summer vacation is in front of the TV, playing video games with the curtains closed and the lights off." 

That sounded like a direct quotation from the diaries that me and all of my loser friends would have kept if we weren't too busy spending the summer trying to beat Banjo Kazooie to pick up a pen (it's true -- I actually got honestly upset that my evil mom and sister were making me go on a Caribbean cruise before I had finished this game in the summer of 98. I specifically recall staying on the ship several times when they went out to the beaches, rereading Nintendo Power and fantasizing about how I'd play it as soon as I got back to civilized society). If I had been able to actually put down the magazine and pick up something like this to read at that age, I would have rejoiced at finding a new role model and literary voice to speak for me (STFU, Holden Caulfield). I'm self obsessed and vain enough still so that, even as an adult, I will automatically enjoy anything that sounds like it was written by me, even when it is gentle (in this case) or severe (Notes From Underground?) self-parody.

Dog Days reads as the summer-long diary of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who just wants to stay the fuck inside and be left alone to do his own thing. The quick read takes the reader through Greg's summer at a brisk pace but takes enough time to set up characterization, jokes, and awkward situations without making the whole thing seemed rushed or irrelevant. The book manages to highlight some of every awkward kid's worst summer nightmares -- public swimming pools, long car rides, time spent with a douchey friend's family -- while for the most part avoiding cliches that would make this seem like an obvious rehashing of similar stories done by better authors. The writing is solid -- Jeff Kinney is mostly convincing as the voice of a middle school student, only occasionally slipping into bitter adult-writing-in-retrospect-as-a-kid tone. The highlight, though, is probably the hilarious illustrations on every page. The writing may not have been enough to stand alone, but works really well with the illustrations as a sort of comic/short novel hybrid. I found myself genuinely excited to turn each page to see what the next would look like. The drawings are simple, but very effective for this kind of story.

Dog Days never gets particularly heavy or tries to pass itself off as a biting social commentary about the plight of the misunderstood child, and I was impressed that it never got preachy or took itself too seriously. It's nothing earth shattering or life changing, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a day that I would have otherwise had to have spent talking to other people and being sociable.

Rating: B
Recommended For: Comic fans, cranky underachievers, gaming nerds, light reading.

Book Review: The Five People You Meet In Heaven

When Chris gave me my Christmas presents this year, I was surprised to see something that looked like it may possibly be a book. I’ve been asking him for years to buy me books, and he always complained that I had too many of them and would buy me things that he claimed that I either needed or would never buy for myself (clothing, shoes, a toothbrush…)

I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”

I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.

For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --

“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”


Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.

Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:

“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.


(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)

So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).

I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.

Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.

Book Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

My favorite thing about reading David Sedaris is that it always feels like I’m spending time hanging out with my faggy, cigarette-smoking best friend, staying up late and making fun of people. Nobody is spared while I’m crankily waving smoke away from my face and begging him to move closer to the window -- crippled people, dead people, old people, Jews, and least of all, ourselves. It may not always be the most stimulating or thought provoking conversation, but it’s something that I desperately need and crave for my own sanity, and likewise I always find myself looking forward to each of Sedaris’s new releases as if this friend was going to be back in New York visiting me after a couple of years away, and in the interim all I had to speak to were a bunch of college professors.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames continues where our last late night bitch-fest left off in 2004 with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, with both of us seeming a little more tired and old, but still filled with a few good stories and more than a few good bitchy remarks. It’s a little more subtle and less punch line focused than the previous book, and a lot more self-conscious than earlier books like Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- it works really well in stories like That’s Amore, about an elderly woman who lived in his apartment building, and Old Faithful, a surprisingly sweet story about him and his boyfriend’s aging monogamous relationship (it must be nice to have someone be willing to lance your pus-filled boils for you and still want to sleep with you afterwards -- I haven’t quite reached that point in any of my relationships).

One complaint that I’ve noticed a few reviewers bitching about, though, is that he’s fallen victim to the same thing that fucks up most successful essayists after a certain point. Early books have a whole lifetime of material to draw from, while later books seem to have progressively less and less and become a lot more self conscious and talk too much about being famous, money, etc. It makes the stories a lot less approachable, and for whatever reason, a lot less funny. Sedaris does this a little bit here, but I think he’s a good enough writer to make it not matter so much as it did when, say, Michael Moore became a recognizable person and his post-Bowling for Columbine documentaries reeked of celebrity bullshit.

One of the things that has always made David Sedaris so approachable and welcoming is that he’s always almost gleefully shared with us the worst parts of himself -- his selfishness, his vanity, his insecurity, his self-centeredness, and all the other things that most of us normally pretend we don’t think and feel. These strengths lend themselves much better to the transition into self conscious fame-writing than if he had always been writing about what a normal, down to Earth person he was, and how he loved a normal, quiet life. No, this isn’t his best work, but I also don’t think it’s egregiously inferior or horrible like I hear a lot of other people whining about. Think Samantha in the Sex and the City movie getting together with the girls as soon as she gets in from LA -- it’s a little weird at first, but all differences and changes are quickly forgiven when everyone realizes what a good time they’re having.

And if any straight men are reading this, I’m really, really sorry for that reference. I can blow you if it’ll make you feel better.