Hitting the Books

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Steven Jay Schneider, General Editor

I usually like reading books like this, books full of all sorts of cool, but rather useless (unless you’re planning on competing on Jeopardy!) information. Such books often send me searching for more information on certain subjects. I thought this book would be lots of fun to read. It wasn’t.

The first thing I want to know is, what planet do these movie critics hail from? They write these lavish articles, praising movies for things that most people go out of their way to avoid. It seems like half of these “must-see” films are either horror and/or horrifically violent, or else highly/purely sexual in theme. Some I had never heard of before, nor do I ever want to again: The 120 Days of Sodom (based on the writings of Marquis de Sade) and Videodrome are two of the worst. And if the films aren’t sickening in subject, then often they are about the despair and futility of life. Ok, so life is hard and meaningless sometimes. I don’t need a movie to tell me that.

Also, who chose the pictures to be included in here? There are pictures in here that are extremely disturbing, to put it mildly. I can’t imagine what some of them would do to a young child who happened to pick it up and flip through it. I know they would have given me nightmares when I was younger. Some still managed to give me the heebie-jeebies.

There are a lot of good movies listed too. But plowing through the trash to find them got real tiresome real quick. Towards the end I was only skimming the entries, trying to avoid the more gruesome pictures (I didn’t succeed) and only reading up on movies I had actually heard of.

If you are fanatical about cinema, and are more interested in nifty camera angles and lighting techniques than in being entertained, then 1001 Movies might have some interesting suggestions for you. For the everyday moviegoer, I would say that in the time it would take to read through this book, you could watch all three of the Lord of the Rings films end to end. And that would be time much better spent.

Dies the Fire S.M. Stirling

I’m a big fan of alternative history–Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South got me interested in the genre. I’d read S.M. Stirling before (Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers) and really enjoyed him. So when I started his Nantucket series, I was expecting a good read. Which they are, and aren’t. The premise of the Nantucket series is that the island of Nantucket is inexplicably hurtled back in time to the Bronze Age. The Islanders must figure out how to survive and interact with this strange new world. (I’ll review this trilogy as soon as I finish Island in the Sea of Time, the first book–I was forced to read them out of order, which drives me nuts)

Dies the Fire is a companion novel to the Nantucket series. You needn’t have read the trilogy to understand what’s going on–it just lets you in on a few characters mentioned in the other books. Dies starts the night of The Event, when Nantucket disappears (tho’ these characters don’t know that) and suddenly anything remotely electrical stops working. Batteries die, cars won’t run, even gunpowder won’t explode any more.

The hero, Mike Havel, is a bush pilot flying a rich family to their place in Idaho when their plane just quits mid-air. He manages to bring the plane down in one piece, but the mother is injured pretty badly. After discovering that nothing works, the party sets off in search of help/civilization. They’ve got two things going for them–Mike is a combat veteran and knows how to survive in the woods, and the youngest daughter, Astrid, is a fantasy-loving Tolkien freak who has her own extremely well-made bow and arrows, and knows how to use them.

Meanwhile, in Corvallis, Oregon, Juniper MacKenzie, a folk-singer/Wiccan priestess is performing in a tavern when there is a blinding light, and then all is dark. Except for the fires flaming out of control from a 747 that crashed in the middle of town. Juniper, her deaf daughter Eilir, and their friend Dennis realize something very wrong has happened, and head for the hills, literally.

The rest of the book is how the two groups grow in size, try to avoid plague, cannibals, and mad warlords, and eventually come together. A pretty good tale of survival.

But while the plot is sound, the whole book felt strained. One of an author’s goals should be for the reader to connect with his or her characters. And I just couldn’t. I cared very little for what happened to Mike, Juniper, or any of the numerous supporting cast. I think the only one I really felt anything for was Astrid, and that’s mainly because I’m a Tolkien freak too.

Also, I understand that, in a post-apocalyptic world such as this, life is going to be mean, nasty, brutish, and short. But I don’t need explicit descriptions of this every other chapter (sometimes every chapter). Most of the people who die (and trust me, a lot of people die), do so in extremely horrific ways, which the author seems to spend entirely too much time describing to the reader. Between the cannibals and sadistic biker (bicycles, not motorcycles) gangs, there’s a lot of raping, blood, and body parts. And chalk it up to me being a new mother, but I got awfully tired of hearing about children being killed or dying in other ways. Maybe once, ok. Too often, and I started just skipping whole sections of chapters. I don’t read horror novels for a reason.

Finally, there’s the whole Wiccan storyline, which after a while started to sound more like proselytizing than part of the story. All the good guys are either agnostic/atheistic or pagan, the Christians are all bigots, or lapsed. Even the sole Buddhist ends up joining Juniper’s coven.

In the end, I’m not sure I can recommend this book. It left a rather sour taste in my mouth and mind. The Peshawar Lancers, sure (at least, I don’t remember it being this gruesome), even Conquistador.

But let Dies the Fire die out on the bookshelf.

PLOT SPOILER ALERT!!!

A final word on the final word–the epilogue was just a little too out-there. Juniper’s son Rudi is now named Artos? Son of the King (Mike) and the Goddess (Juniper)? The young infant grasping the sword on the altar? Into the middle of fallen America springs the legend of King Arthur? Oh, give me a break. Is this book about an alternative history, or swords-and-sorcery fantasy?