Short and Sweet

I'll try to keep this one short and sweet.

I hate reading books that are a series.  Well, check that.  Hate is a strong word.  I despise series.  Yet, I read a great many books that are part of a series.  My rule to this is that I do not normally start a book until the last book has been published and I can sit and read it all the way through without being thoroughly annoyed when there is a cliff hanger ending or that feeling of wanting more and not being able to have it.

I sat and read all seven Harry Potter books, beginning to end, in about a three week time period a few years ago.  I loved them.  And I do not have that annoyed feeling of wondering what will happen next.  I did not have to wait a year or two between each book.  I did not have to go back and skim over the previous book to remind myself what had happened before picking up the next book.

The quandary I face today is that I have hungrily devoured the first three book of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I am having a hard time restraining myself from picking up the fourth book, which will inevitably lead me to the fifth book -- only to leave me what?  Hanging?  Annoyed?  Frustrated? And the worst part of this is that George R. R. Martin is a notoriously SLOOOOWWWW writer.  Game of Thrones was published in 1996.  Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords came along fairly quickly, published in 1999 and 2000, respectively.  The fourth book, and the one I am currently hesitant about picking up and starting, A Feast for Crows, was not published until 2005.  The last published volume, A Dance with Dragons, came out just recently in 2011.

At his current rate, Martin won't finish and release the sixth book (of the planned seven books) until 2016 or 2017.  If I pick up the fourth and fifth book now and plow through them, will I be thoroughly annoyed and angry and have to let that anger and annoyance stew for 5+ years?

Inevitably, I am going to read the remaining published books.  Inevitably, I am going to be angered and annoyed.  And this will serve as a reminder to myself never to pick up another series again until all planned books have been published.

Just to Clarify . . .

So I seemed to have opened up a Pandora's Box with my last post.  What I started out writing was about my love affair with westerns in my youth.  Off hand comments about John Wayne seem to have upset a few people who took the time to read my diatribe.  Let me clarify my position from a few days ago.

I loved John Wayne, and still love John Wayne and his movies.  He is an iconic American.  He made great movies.  But, his movies became somewhat campy in the mid-sixties almost through to the end of his life.  His best movies were made in the 40's and 50's, movies like The Searchers, Sands of Iwo Jima, Red River, Fort Apache, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon . . .  the list could go on and on.  Can any of you name a truly great movie he made in the last part of the Sixties or the Seventies?  He made two horrible detective movies, Brannigan and McQ, which was a ploy of the studios to try and piggy back on the success of the Dirty Harry films (which John Wayne wanted to star in, but the producers felt he was too old to play the character, and subsequently gave it to Clint Eastwood).  Obviously there were exceptions -- The Cowboys come to mind -- but most of the movies he made towards the end of his career would have been mostly forgettable movies, if they had not starred John Wayne.  Although I have been chastising his work in the Seventies, in my opinion, he did find redemption at the end . . .

His final two films, Rooster Cogburn and The Shootist, were two of the best of his career.  The banter between he and Katherine Hepburn, who wanted to work with John Wayne in atleast one film before either of them retired, is the stuff of celluloid legend.  The Shootist, John Wayne's final film, was a good bye film.  Contrary to popular belief, John Wayne did not know he had cancer while filming the movie.  He had undergone procedures in 1964 that removed his lung, and was declared cancer free a few years later.

His character was that of a dying gunfighter, diagnosed with an incurable cancer.  Instead of withering away and dying a slow and painful death, he decides to go out on his own terms.  There was a line in the film that has always stuck with me since the first time I heard it as a kid.  John Wayne, gasping for breath after shooting a man who tried to sneak into his room, tells the character, played by Lauren Bacall, "I'm a dying man, afraid of the dark."

John Wayne died before I was born, so when I first saw the movie, I had the knowledge that this was his last movie, and that he would be gone just three years after filming this scene.  I felt, as I was watching him utter these words, that he was not acting.  To me, it was one of those eerie moments on a movie screen, the moment when John Wayne was reluctantly telling the world goodbye.

To retrace and head back to the basis of this blog, mainly books, I have to say that I have had a fairly voracious reading habit the past few months.  After finishing Dead Man's Walk (which I highly recommend to fans of books, not just fans of the western), I decided to take a break from westerns for awhile and went back to Westeros.  I flew through A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, better known to everyone as Game of Thrones.

Once again, wow.  Just wow . . . just when you think you might know where the story is going, something happens (usually someones unexpected death) and you are left saying to yourself, "What the f . . .?"

I've been watching the second season on HBO.  It's been true to the books as well as a television series can be to a 1000+ page book, and it has been quite enjoyable.  I even ordered the graphic novel of the first book and am anxiously awaiting its arrival.  I am finding it a fascinating study in the different forms of media that the same story can take.  And I see, from what Amazon is suggesting for me, that even more media is out there for consumption for those who are obsessed with the land of Westeros.  There is a board game, a cookbook of food inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, CD's of music inspired by the books, books on the philosophy and logic of the stories, satire books and videos . . . the only thing that seems to missing is action figures of the characters.  I don't know about you, but I'd love a little action figure of Peter Dinklage to adorn my desktop.

And with that, I will leave you for the day, an image of a Peter Dinklage action figure in your mind.  How do you picture his action figure looking?  Is he wielding an axe?  Is he dressed in armor, or a red and gold cloak of House Lannister draped over his every day wear?  Or does he come with a glass of wine?

It's Been Nearly Two Months!

Wow, I am a horrible blogger!  Its not like I don't have anything to say.  I guess I am just being lazy and a bit antisocial lately.  Logging onto a computer means checking email; checking email means interacting with people; interacting with people means . . . well, talking to people. Ew, who wants to do that.

Anyway, I think I am a bit out of that funk, as this blog would attest to.  I am back on a computer, back to talking to people, back to the human race.  Hell, I am sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Rosa, CA, inside a Barnes and Noble bookstore writing this.  Surrounded by people.  It's a bit refreshing.

What have I been up to the past two months of solitude?  I haven't really been antisocial -- that was my attempt at sounding cool, like some introverted, J.D. Salinger-type author who can only take a moment or two to acknowledge people before burying my head back in the sand and hoping people forget me while I work on the next great American novel.  

I spent a week in New York City at the end of March.  It had been well over a year since I visited the Big City.  It welcomed me a last gasp bitter chill of winter.  I was caught walking between Ninth Ave and Seventh Ave in a rainstorm of epic proportions at 1am and spent the remaining days fighting the onset of a savage cold.  I was in town for a dear friend's nuptials.  It was a beautiful, 1920's themed wedding and offered me an opportunity to dress like a snappy gentleman.  One of the guest told me I looked like a gangster on Boardwalk Empire, which I gladly accepted as the highest of compliments.  

I'd be lying if I said that I did not miss New York City, even just a little.  There was a sort of ease at being able to hop on a train and go where you needed to go.  There was a comfort at knowing that no matter what you needed, you could find in the City if you just took a few moments to look.  I needed a nice fedora for the wedding.  I had something specific in mind.  I had hunted around the Bay Area in a fruitless search.  When I arrived in New York, I got my handy dandy smartphone out, went on Yelp, typed in Fedora, and twenty places popped up, from second hand thrift stores to vintage clothing.  One, near the bottom of the list, was a shop on Fifth Ave near the Empire State Building that specialized in hats.  I found the perfect hat, at an incredibly perfect price.  As I walked out of the store with my giant hat box in hand, I thought to myself, "Only in New York City."

Because I went mid-week, many of my friends and former colleagues were toiling away in their offices, so I had quite a bit of spare time on my hands.  In all that time, I whittled away the hours by doing what I like to do best.  I read.  

Thinking back my previous blog, where I talked about my relationship with Stephen King and how it was born in my wee youth, it got my mind on a nostalgic road, reminiscing on what I used to read as a child and a teen.  I grew up in a household that owned every John Wayne movie available on VHS.  My grandmother had shelves full of VHS tapes that she had recorded John Wayne movies on.  When one would come on AMC, she would pop a tape in and press record and meticulously pause the recording when a commercial would interrupt the movie.  Then, whenever she felt like watching Hatari, Hondo, or True Grit, she could just find the VHS, pop it in and press play.

Occasionally, she would record a non-John Wayne movie.  I remember one evening I was watching a movie called The Ox-Bow Incident and about half way through the movie, I asked her, "Where's John Wayne?"

She looked at me a bit confused, and said, "John Wayne isn't in this movie.  His name is Henry Fonda."

I thought she was joking.  "John Wayne is in every western."  I told her confidentially.

She laughed.  I sat and watched that movie all the way through, wondering when John Wayne was going to make an appearance.  If you know the story of The Ox-Bow Incident, you know its about a mass mob trying to lynch a man.  As the string him up and he hands a letter to Henry Fonda to deliver to his wife, I knew that this was the moment John Wayne would come riding in and save the man and shame the mob.  But he did not.  In my young mind, I found that the fact that John Wayne had not come in and saved the day more devastating than the fact that an innocent man had been lynched.

After reading a couple of Stephen King novels, Cujo was the first, followed by Cycle of the Werewolf (which I picked up because it had pictures in it!) I decided that I was in a bit over my head with these types of books.  The Lonesome Dove miniseries was a huge hit around this time, and surrounded by a family obsessed with westerns, I picked up my first Louis L'Amour novel.  I can't remember which one to save my life, but I know in the following years, I probably read nearly all of his novels, as well as Lonesome Dove books, Max Brand, and Zane Grey.  After I read my father's stash of westerns, I borrowed books from my uncle. Once I had gone through what he had, I borrowed from my grandmother.  Although many of the books were formulaic, I loved them.  I guess I felt about westerns as a spinster feels about Harlequin romances.  There was a world beyond my reach, a world I wanted to live in and could not, so I escaped into the books and movies.

I recently picked up Westword the Tide by Louis L'Amour.  I do not remember ever reading it as a kid. But I realized that as I picked up other books that I know I read, I don't remember them.  I think as a 10 year old kid, or an 11 year old or even older, I may have been reading all these books, but not actually absorbing what I was reading.  I wanted to read everything as quick as possible and move on to the next one.  So, although I may or may not have read many of these books as a kid, it's like reading something new all over again.

Specifically talking about Westword the Tide, I have to admit it was quite a struggle to read.  It was Louis L'Amour's first published novel (1950), and the story focuses on a wagon train heading west from Deadwood, South Dakota, into Montana.  One of the organizers may or may not have nefarious plans of killing and robbing all the members of the wagon train and only the main character seems to see the bad guy for who he truly is.  And all the while, the good guy and the bad guy are nearly coming to blows over a woman they both have fallen in love with.

It's a typical western, formulaic and to the point.  Yet I found the book difficult to read.  I usually will power through a book, despite how bad I feel it is.  But this one was difficult.  I put it down numerous times, not wanting to finish it, only to have it look back at me from its perch on the bookshelf, mocking me in a way for giving up on it.  I finished it . . . and was not surprised by how it ended.

I found the second book Louis L'Amour published, The Riders of High Rock, but could not convince myself to attempt to read it.  Instead, I picked up Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk, his "first"novel of his Lonesome Dove Series, though it was the third novel he wrote in the series.  It was a thousand times better than Westword the Tide, not formulaic in any way other than its about Texas Rangers and they are dealing with Indians.  But making an appearance is the daughter of a Scottish noble, stranded at a leper colony in New Mexico.  I don't remember a Louis L'Amour character at a leper colony, or John Wayne playing a Scottish Noble (though he did have an unfortunate turn playing Genghis Khan in a horrible movie called The Conquerer).

Has my love affair with the western, a genre I lovingly recall from youth, became jaded with age?  I still enjoy a good John Wayne western, but even that was shaken recently by the Coen Brother's re-imagining of True Grit.  It's so much better on nearly every level than the John Wayne version (which John Wayne won his only Oscar for Best Actor) that watching his performance in that film is almost laughable.  He was playing his old stand by, drunken ornery cowboy with a heart of gold routine.  I had a conversation with someone recently about why I thought the Coen Brother's version was better, and when I commented on John Wayne being a comedic character compared to Jeff Bridges' incredible portrayal, the man I was speaking with looked ready to strike me.   I had blasphemed against John Wayne . . . how dare I!  I backtracked a bit on my comment, and said what I meant was I disliked Kim Darby and Glen Campbell in the movie, but John Wayne was able to carry the film despite them.  This seemed to appease him and saved me the trouble of trying to see through a blackened and swollen eye.

Nevertheless, what I found exciting as a child and teenager, I now find boring and (dare I say) trite.  I moved on from Westerns for now, but plan on revisiting them in the near future.  For now I will say ado, and hope to see you soon.