It’s a rant, I wrote it because it bugged me.

Clever.

Amazing handanimated poem and the world it describes.

It is always hard to fill someone elses shoes. In the case of Douglas Adams I guess we can safely assume that it is almost an impossibility. Yet, Adams’ wife gave permission to Eoin Colfer to write the sixth book in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. The book was published in early October 2010 and it is… Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Firstly I have to say that I have not read any other of Colfer’s books, though I have been told that the Artemis Fowl books are actually quite good, I guess this was why he was given permission to write the sixth book.

On second thought though, high book sales numbers do not necessarily equate with a talent in writing, I am looking at you Dan Brown.

“And another thing…” picks up more or less where the last book left off and tries to bring the story to an end. I am saying here tries because the end is still somewhat open and it would be conceivable that someone else could be tasked with a third trilogy… But let’s hope not.

The problem with Colfer’s book is not so much his writing. He is a fine wordsmith in his own right, but he cannot escape the comparison to Adams’ writing wit and his unique style. This is exactly where Colfer’s book falls short. The way Adams saw and the way he described it was unique to him and Colfer’s attempts at cpying them are, to me, cringe inducing.

This isn’t necessarily Colfer’s fault. As I said, he can write well and if this wouldn’t be the sixth book in a series that was established by a different writer over the course of almost 30 years it would come off as a rather decent, at times even funny book.

The problem though is that the book is based on a series of five books that has been around for close to 30 years and that people are very well aquatinted it with it. It is hard to conceive anybody would start the series by reading “And another thing…” first.

The book reads and feels more like a homage to Adams and “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” than a continuation. It is a bit like the new Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, the movie did not bring anything new to the Start Trek franchise, instead it rehashed the tired and old story elements, put some new shine on it and added some explosions for excitement. It was for all intents and purposes a fan movie with a mega budget.

“And another thing…” is the book version of this fan movie approach, but it lacks the shiny images and the explosions. Instead it is just a somewhat half-hearted retelling of former elements of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy and, unfortunately later on of the Dirk Gently world but it never really reaches the level of either of them.

I know this is probably unfair towards Eoin Colfer, but the book is really one that should not have been written. it is not funny if you know the previous books and there isn’t enough of a “Oh, I remember that” moments in the book that would make it amusing for the fans of the series. All it did for me was asking myself “Why?” and feeling the urge to go back and re-reading the original books (which I briefly did after I was done reading and I had more laughs in the first two chapters than I did in pretty much all of Colfer’s book).

If you like Adams work I suggest that you re-read him and avoid this last (latest?) book in the trilogy, the book should have never been written, much less been published.

Even if your youth sucked, hearing the soundtrack from it down the years almost always cripples or caresses you. You can never tell which it’ll be until you hear it.

Unknown

Someone told me they read on a blog that two people had tattooed on their wrists the phrase “Hope gleams in the idiot heart,” a line from the Russian poet Mayakovsky that they found in my novel THE MARRIAGE OF STICKS. I have always loved the permanence of tattoos, the conviction by the person who gets one that they will be happy to have this thing on their body ten, twenty, thirty years from now. But besides the stupid tattoos I see all over the place today, I have yet to see or think of anything I would want on my skin forever. However hearing about this tattoo today I thought, that’s a pretty cool thing. A good permanent reminder that no matter what, there are almost always surprises around life’s corners and we should keep our heads up to see them coming.

Jonathan Carrol

This sounds like an interesting book:

In a political season when environmental policy is the stuff of candidate debates, Kull offers a different take. According to his observations in Solitude, no environmental ills can be cured until we first remedy ourselves.

On his lonely island, Kull finds that we in this society strongly desire to satiate and confirm ourselves through consumption and production. Our identities have come to depend on it. But in the process, we sacrifice our critical awareness, and become ignorant of the fact that our excessive reaching out for a feeling of being important and being alive actually does very little to achieve the experience of vitality.

“My goal in the wilderness was not to conquer either the external world or my own inner nature,” Kull writes in Solitude, “but to give up the illusion of ownership and control and to experience myself as part of the ebb and flow of something greater than individual ego.”

?

Is now available “for free” from Harper Collins (his publisher).

Just click here:

Though may I be the first one to say: WTF Harper Collins, why not offer a DOWLOAD???? Why chain someone to a browser? It’s not like some Hacker will not figure out a way to pull down the entire thing and throw it up on Bittorrent in the next 24 hours.

As I like his books, I figure I point this little “nugget” out:

Neither seems to like books, which prompted the author of “Life of Pi“, Yann Martel, to send Stephen Harper every second Monday, in the hopes that he would pick up a book, and indulge more into the arts.

“The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.
Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares not a jot for the arts.

But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.”

Yann Martel

When I read “State of Fear” I was a bit torn over it, but overall “enjoyed” the read. It was a nice fastfood entertainment. Little did I know just how insulting he had been to quite a lot of people it seems.

Best-selling novelist Michael Crichton is a vocal critic of global warming science. His 2004 novel State of Fear depicts global warming as a hoax concocted by environmentalists to raise money. In January 2005, Crichton spent an hour talking with President Bush; the two were “in near-total agreement,” according to Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes.

Last March, New Republic senior editor Michael Crowley wrote a cover story called “Jurassic President: Michael Crichton’s Scariest Creation.” It highlighted Crichton’s junk science and the danger posed by President Bush adopting it.

Crichton’s response was to smear Crowley in his latest novel, Next, by writing in a character named “Mick Crowley” who rapes a two-year-old boy.Anyways, I didn’t seem to have been the only one who didn’t really agree with his conclusion, but it seems he only grinds his ax with people who are published in a newspaper.

I think I pass on his new “book”.