Why my Enthusiasm for Star Wars has Waned

There's a new Star Wars movie coming soon to a movie theater near you and me.  Episode VII.  The Force Awakens in a personified fashion.  I'm sure I'll go see it.  Probably even opening weekend. And, hopefully, I'll really, really, enjoy it.  There's no way my inner 10 year old would ever let me miss it. I was, after all, utterly devoted to the Star Wars movies and the Star Wars universe from the time the first movie came out, in the summer of 77, right before 5th grade, until the day Eddie Brascia and I ditched the rest of our classes after Mrs. Holmes Sophomore English honors class to go watch Return of the Jedi at the Cinedome Theaters, one fine day in May 1983. 

I still remember seeing the first movie for the first time, at the movie theater in the University Mall in Provo Utah, while visiting one of my older siblings at BYU.  When I got back to Vegas, I immediately told all my friends that it was the greatest thing that ever happened, and we all needed to go see it together.  In those pre-multiplex days, it was only playing on one screen in town, at the Maryland Parkway Theater on Maryland Parkway and Flamingo, on the largest of its three screens.

After that, it became the mission of our lives to go see that movie as often as we could over the course of that summer.  This was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away, before the existence of VHS, let alone DVD or Netflix.  If you loved a movie and wanted to see it more than once, you needed to see it while it was still in theaters. Otherwise, the assumption was you might never see it again unless you happened to be free the night it was shown, a few years later, on network TV, once. "It'll be out on pristine blu ray video in a few months and you can watch it in surround sound on your wide screen at home?"  No, not our world.

Nevertheless, none of our parents understood the concept of wanting to go back and see a movie again.  "You already know what happens and how it ends." They didn't get it.  This wasn't about how it ends.  It was the ride!  You don't only get on a rollercoaster once because you already know how it ends.  This was a movie that was just fun to experience.  Also, the Maryland Parkway was considered to be "way across town" and not an easy place to convince our moms they should drive us to. So we had to be sneaky.  If any other movie was playing at the Maryland Parkway theater's other two screens, which any of us might have the slightest credible interest in going to see (a Charlie Brown movie maybe?  Um, sure.), we'd get one of our parents to take us, and then we'd all go see Star Wars instead. And if our own parent didn't realize what we'd done yesterday afternoon, and thought we'd been at someone else's house swimming, so we could pull that same stunt again a few days later with a different mom, so much the better.  (We were a diverse group affiliated primarily by neighborhood proximity, whereas our parents had their own friends from outside the neighborhood, and didn't talk to each other much).  Also, if a relative hadn't seen it yet, that was good for another viewing. Grandma wants to do something with me for my birthday?  I know just the thing.  Yes, I even got Ella Carruth, probably approaching 80 at the time, to go see Star Wars, which just might be one of my proudest achievements.  She even brought a friend.  I think I managed to see it more than 12 times that Summer.

And then there was the ancillary merchandise.  We all had the Star Wars double LP (records weren't vintage yet so we didn't know we were supposed to call it vinyl), with the great photos from the movies inside the foldout, and we all became John Williams fans, even before we knew he had done the music to Jaws, let alone that he would be the Meister of soundtracks for every pop culture EVENT movie to be released over the course of the rest of our lives, from Superman through Indy and all the way to Harry Potter.  

We all read the paperback novel, listing George Lucas as the author, but ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, with its mysterious byline ("from the adventures of Luke Skywalker") which suggested more to come, and then, a year or so after that, the sequel novel "Splinter of the Minds Eye."  There was some kind of read-along story one of us bought because it had photographs of a deleted scene, with Biggs on Tatooine.  And the sketch-book, which included Tie Fighter designs not seen in the movie. Then there was the Marvel Comic Book version of the film, which we used as a script to create our own audioplay with a cassette recorder.  It was a great summer.  

And then?  Empire Strikes Back.  Even cooler, in many ways, than the first movie (the opening scrawl, with its "Episode V" title, taught us to start calling the movies episodes, and hinted intriguingly at prequels and sequels galore).  So yes, I'll be going to see Star Wars Episode VII, and hoping for the best.

But my enthusiasm will be tempered.  My hope for a great evening at the movies more cautious than convinced.  A lot has happened since Empire Strikes Back hit the Silver Screen, and much of it has dampened my enthusiasm for the series.  Maybe if Lucas had died, like Robert Jordan, so somebody else had to finish his oeuvre, things would have worked out better.  But alas, he lived to make more movies.  And as he did so, over the years, this, that, or the other, has weakened my love for the series. These quibbles include the following, in no particular order: 

Seven Problems with Star Wars after the Empire Strikes Back.

1.  The Ewoks.  I mostly loved Return of the Jedi, when it first came out, and the chemistry between Luke and Leia and Han was as great as ever.  But then, for the first time in three movies, there were parts of this movie that I really, really didn't like.  Among those parts: the Ewoks.  What a stupid move.  George Lucas's biggest fans were 8 to 12 years old when the first Star Wars movie came out.  We were 14 to 18 now.  This was going to be the last installment for, what, . . . decades? So there was no need to recruit new young fans.  The established fans were teenagers now and we didn't want Teddy Bears in our most beloved sci-fi franchise. And why such fake looking Teddy Bears?  They weren't wearing any loinclothes, yet they didn't seem to need any. Gee, either these creatures have no ability to digest their food, and they reproduce asexually, or they are really just little kids in dumb-looking costumes. And how do they see when they so clearly have fake  taxidermist glass eyes?  The only thing worse was the styro-foamy elephant at the beginning of the movie in Jabba the Hutt's palace.  But only barely.  

2.  Darth Vader's cheap redemption.  I can't remember where I first came across the following analogy, but I'm fairly certain it was in something written by Orson Scott Card: Hitler is about to kill Himmler's son.  To stop him, Himmler kills Hitler.  Now, despite participating in mass genocide, Himmler gets to go to heaven?  For saving his son's life?  Wouldn't pretty much anyone save their own son's life, such that doing so doesn't really make you particularly special?  What is this, warmed-over Calvinism?  Some people are just better than others and will be saved in the end no matter what? If Darth Vader is to be redeemed, surely it could have been done with some plotting that made more logical sense than, just, . . . this.  Giving his life to help the rebels destroy the empire maybe?  I dunno.  I mean, it's nice that he saves his son's life and all, but, really? In interviews Lucas gave when he was prepping the Prequels, he went back on his earlier promise to create 9 Star Wars, and said that there would only be 6, and that, ultimately, these weren't really movies about Luke and Leia et al. This was Darth Vader's story, the tale of his fall and redemption. Well, then, that makes it even worse: These six movies have all been about Darth Vader's fall and redemption, AND THIS HIMMLER SAVES HIS SON FROM HITLER moment is the ending and ultimate climax of THAT overarching story?  Really?  Wow.  That just makes the entire series so much . . . less than it could have been.  And learning in Episode III that Anakin was a child-killer didn't help.  Pretty sure you don't get a free pass to heaven for saving your own child's life, if you have previously murdered other people's innocent children in cold blood.   

3.  George Lucas's Anti-Americanism.  As if the Ewoks weren't bad enough, on their own and in and of themselves, I had the misfortune to come across a documentary about the making of the original trilogy in which Lucas explained that the Ewoks' use of primitive technology, via guerilla attacks, to overcome the greater military capability of the Empire, was meant as an analogy for the Vietcong's defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam.  Lucas admired the Northern Vietnamese, and wanted to highlight that admiration in the third film.  So, there's that.  Basically, Episode 6 wasn't a movie for people like me. It was a movie for people like Jane Fonda.  Sigh.

4. The CGI heavy reissues.  Full kudos to George Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic for introducing CGI to film and remaining a pioneer in special effects technology decades after the first movie came out.  Compared to say, the Last Starfighter, the CGI in the special editions of the original trilogy was really impressive at the time they were made.  But it was still an emerging technology, and it wouldn't really be put to amazingly effective use until we were introduced to Peter Jackson's Gollum.  So, now, ironically, the parts of the original trilogy which have aged the worst are the new CGI scenes. And it's pretty clear why some of the reinserted scenes were cut the first time around. Han Solo was allowed to leave by Jabba?  Well that doesn't build much tension.  Even when the CGI looked good and not dated, the only film that really benefited was Empire Strikes Back (and the final scene in Return, which reduced the amount of Ewoks). Yet Lucas won't bring back the originals, and apparently Disney is sticking to that position.  Maybe when George is dead . . . .  

5.  The problem with Prequels.  I don't actually hate the prequels, and actually enjoyed them all when I first saw them.  Although they are not nearly as rewatchable as the original films.  And Jar Jar?  Well, Lucas was a risk-taker. People might have hated Chewbacca, but he turned out fine. And Yoda the muppet Jedi Master, on paper, had to have sounded like an incredibly misguided idea, which might have gone very, very, badly, instead of becoming perhaps the coolest movie character of all time.  Lucas was bound to get it wrong eventually.  So cut him a break.  The main issue I have with the prequels is the same issue that affects all prequels generally.  When you are reading a well-done fantasy or science fiction novel, and the author helps you understand that you are being told a story which exists within the context of a much larger universe, including lots of places on the map you never actually get to see, and a backstory you only hear about second hand, the effect is intriguing and powerful and mysterious.  But when you actually go into the backstory, and see it first hand, you can lose the magic, like learning about Santa Claus.  It just can't be as cool as you had hoped it would be.  I think that's one of the reasons Back to the Future worked so well.  All of us, at one time or another, have wanted to know what our parents were like at our age, and, when they are at the right age, children love to hear the story of how their parents met: it's the ultimate backstory, how I came to exist.  And Back to the Story helped us understand why maybe it's for the best that we never actually get to learn more about that.  I loved the scene in the first prequel when Obi Wan tells Anakin he'll be training him as a Jedi.  But it was still cooler in my imagination. Ditto the final fiery battle between the same two characters at the end of Episode 3.  A good prequel, that works well, will be set in the same universe, but involve ancillary characters, keeping the original story's own back story steeped in mystery and intrigue.     

6.  The Problem with Lucas's Prequels.  Lucas's prequels made this inherent and intrinsic problem even worse. One of the many things that J.K. Rowling got right in the Harry Potter novels was creating a lengthy story that was almost seamlessly integrated. As you read later books in the series, the earlier books made more sense, and what happened in those earlier books added to the enjoyment of the later volumes, as when the full meaning of Tom Riddle's diary in book 2 is revealed in book 6, and its destruction becomes a key plot point in book 7.  Lucas tried to create a similar sense of his story's integration, but it was so forced and awkward that it not only didn't work, it undercut the whole narrative.  Plot points that were meant to be big reveals of what we had never realized before just demonstrated that Lucas hadn't really thought his story through before. One example will suffice: Anyone who ever saw the original Star Wars (except George Lucas apparently) knows that a person living in "an environment such as" Tatooine would have "no use of a protocol droid." Why, then, does a young Tatooine slave boy create one?  Why would any young boy create a "protocol droid" when they could create a robot that does something cool?  No possible reason whatsoever except a lame attempt to try to shoehorn some artificial relationship between the two movie that we are apparently supposed to find cool.  "Ooooh, Vader created C-3PO. Wow." This makes the original Star Wars worse. Now, instead of finding it clever when C-3P0 says "Thank the maker" because Robots would thank their manufacturer in the way humans thank their divine creator, we are reminded that C-3P0's maker was supposedly someone who had no reason whatsoever to make him. Lame.    

7.  The worst movie line of all time.  No one expects a Star Wars movie to have deep, clever, or meaningful dialogue.  Still, does it have to include lines of dialogue so awful they ought to be in Guinness?  Here it is:  

Anakin: "If you are not with me, you're my enemy."  
Obi-wan: "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes." 

For my money, absolutely the stupidest lines of dialogue in the history of cinema.  Probably in the history of English.  What makes this snippet of dialogue so horrendously awful?  How much time do you have? First of all, it was intended as a political rebuke against a contemporary politician. But making contemporary political points is not the purpose of Star Wars.  These stories are supposed to be timeless fables.  And contemporary political points jar you away from all that, whether you agree or disagree with them. As Tolkien once said, a good story will be full of applicability, which the reader can choose, not analogy, which forces the reader into a specific meaning. Give us applicability, not analogy, let us choose our applications as we will, don't force them upon us, like a Sith.  Secondly, the statement "if you are not with me you are against me" was first spoken by Christ, not a modern politician. Matthew 12:30. So Obi-wan's criticism of Anakin's statement is not ultimately a criticism of George Bush, as was intended, but is a criticism of Christ, characterizing Christ as a Sith. And that's just evil.  Third: "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes" is of course in and of itself an absolute statement, meaning that Obi-wan makes himself a Sith for saying it, and that Lucas flunks basic kindergarten logic for writing it.  Finally, the critique Obi-wan is making is just incredibly stupid in context. It's like criticizing Hitler because he lacked nuance. Anakin is not engaged in some righteous crusade, which he has taken too far by being overly zealous towards anyone who disagrees with his means or his methods. The proper response to Anakin's statement isn't to instruct him that he needs to be a little more inclusive in his thinking, and be more open to ambiguity and other points of view. The proper response is to say: "Of course I'm you're enemy. Any decent person in the universe should be your enemy. You are evil." 

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So there you have it. How I learned to stop loving Star Wars as much as I once did, in the years after the Empire struck back.  But wait, there's more. What about the new movie? The latest international trailer really did get me excited, and awaken my inner nerdy child.  But nevertheless, there's a few things that keep me from being as excited to go see this as I once was to go see Episode 1 (probably a good thing, considering how that turned out).   Here they are, in no particular order:

Three Reasons to Temper the Hype over the New Movie: 

8. It's basically fan fiction.  Ironically, one of the driving forces behind fan enthusiasm for the upcoming movie is that it's not a George Lucas film.  I get that, really I do.  See points 1 through 7 above. Still, for good or ill, Star Wars is George Lucas's baby, and a Star Wars movie not based on his ideas or story or outline, is a little bit like those James Bond novels that were written after Ian Fleming had died, or someone other than J.K. Rowling penning a new Harry Potter book.  That's not to say that it won't be great.  Most of the recent Marvel movies have been excellent, even though the original creators of those characters and story-lines had nothing to do with them.  But still, we are in new territory now.  The Star Wars of George Lucas, who created it, is over now.  Other than a possible Stan Lee-esque cameo or two, he has nothing to do with it. Hopefully it gets back on course and stays there.  But even if it does, it's not really canon.  

9. J.J. Abrams Wrote and Directed It.  This means that it will almost certainly include the set-up for some deep and intriguing mystery, or mysteries, which we will learn, in Episode 9, no one knew how to resolve beforehand. "OH, the stormtroopers of Alderaan were all in Limbo!!! Well, that's just stupid."  The Mystery Writers Guild of America really needs to take JJ Abrams to the woodshed and explain some things to him about the basic rules of storytelling.  Before you write a mystery, you determine the truth.  Then you arbitrarily withhold the truth while dropping hints of it all along the way, amidst various red herrings.  Then you reward your reader's patient impatience by finally giving him the truth at the end, causing him to see everything that came before in a new light.  This moment of resolution is deeply satisfying, like the turn that comes in the last two lines of every good sonnet. If it doesn't happen, someone has been robbed. If you are just pretending to be withholding the truth, when in fact there is no truth and you have no idea where you are going with anything in your story, but you are just really good at the set up and the spooky music, you are committing a fraud. If this happens in the new Star Wars trilogy, they could be even worse than the prequels. 

10.  "Chewie, we're home."  I have a bad feeling about this line, from one of the first teaser trailers, spoken by Han, apparently when he revisits the interior of the Millenium Falcon after some period of vacancy. It's not the kind of thing that human beings say in real life.  It's not the kind of thing that characters in good movies say in good movies.  It's the kind of thing someone from the marketing department wants someone to say in a movie, so it can be put in the trailer for the movie, even when it's completely out of character for the person saying it (Han Sole, sentimental nostalgic?) The first new Star Wars movie hasn't even opened yet, but Disney is already working on the new Star Wars portion of Disneyland, so marketing matters. That's all fine and good if it doesn't affect the product being marketed. But if it does affect the product, then it will infect it as well. There was no valid artistic reason to stretch the Hobbit movies into three overly bloated movies, where two tightly plotted movies with narrative thrust and dispatch would have been just the thing.  But I'm sure it made sense to the Warner Brothers Marketing Department.  

Nevertheless, I'll see you on opening night, holding my popcorn and hoping for the best. And despite all of the above, I'll be as excited as it's possible for a middle aged person trying to recapture their childhood to be. That's the power of the original trilogy, and especially the first two movies, pure and perfect entertainment that they were.    

UPDATE: So, what did I think of that movie once it did come out after all: 

I loved the new characters and the charismatic actors who played them.  I am excited to see our new Jedi heroine and her ex-stormtrooper love interest in action in future installments; and I loved that the new X-Wing fighter is much more likable, and given much more to do, than Wedge Antilles.  I loved the music and the visuals.  I find as I get older that I am increasingly willing to give a movie some slack if I find it visually interesting.  This is odd, as I've always cared much more deeply about the story than the visuals.  Perhaps I'm developing a new interest in aesthetics.  Must be my newfound interest in photography.  Or maybe that came second.

I hated that Han Solo was still a not very good smuggler.  When last we saw Han, he had put off the smuggler, and was a rising military and political leader, whose role in the battle of Endor and imminent marriage to Princess Leia seemed likely to earn him a prominent role in the new and restored Republic.  I would have liked to have seen that Han Solo: an Elder Statesman who had guided the Republic through various political upheavals and had grown to be so much more than he once was.  Instead, it's as if, 30 years after the events of the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton is still hanging out with college kids at the local tavern next to Columbia college arguing politics, having experienced no growth or increase in status after the key role he played in the events of the Revolution.  Pathetic.  Han Solo's final years actually make me not all that interested in the solo upcoming Han Solo movie. 

I hated that the political situation of the galaxy was never explained, and who exactly the New Order was and the backstory as to why they are allowed to exist and war against the New Republic was never presented.

These two hates arise out of the same fundamental flaw in the whole story: an attempt to give the viewer the same experience he already had with the first trilogy.  We miss Han Solo the smuggler, the thinking must have gone, so let's bring him back.  We need good guys and bad guys, who look and dress just like the good guys and bad guys from the original trilogy, so let's rename the rebels the republic and rename the empire the new order, and then we can all know who is good and who is bad when we visit the new Star Wars attractions at Disneyland.  Thus, the saga is no longer a saga (which implies a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end) but an ongoing cash cow which, like a 1980s era tv-show, must leave the heroes exactly in the same place at the end of every episode as they were before, so we can tune in at any time and know the basics of what is going on.  Why even have a 9 movie arc though if the whole thing is just a tv series?

I also hated the stupid little things that didn't make sense and no one but JJ Abrams would be stupid enough to include in a move: like Han Solo skipping past the barriers of the starkiller base by flying in at light speed, and dropping out of light speed at just that kabilliasecond when he needed to, on the basis of an oral command.  Cause yeah, that would work.  

THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOYS. On Creating Lifelong Readers.

I recently came across a blog post claiming to identify the 40 absolutely “best” books for boys, ages 8 to 16.  The whole point of "best of" lists is, of course, to stir up pseudo-anger and indignance and good-natured apoplexy about snubbed omissions and poorly chosen inclusions.  So here's my pseudo- indignance: This particular list was written by someone who, in the course of her listing, admitted never being able to get into Harry Potter, never having herself read any of the Narnia books, and whose omissions and inclusions showed she had no critical taste or faculty whatsoever in books for young male readers (Riordan's demigod series has a unique voice that transcends its Harry Potter rip-off origins, but still: to list him and not Rowling?  Lewis but not Tolkien?  No Bradbury?  No Ender? A year spent reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, as though the cheesy jokes don't get poke-me-in-the-eye stale in the first half of the first book?). Clearly, such lists should be written by someone who has actually been a boy.  Her omissions, in a list with the word “best” in it, made me sufficiently annoyed that I decided I needed to write my own list instead.

Elementary school teachers routinely admonish their charges’ parents to ensure they are reading for twenty minutes a day.  But I don’t know anyone who became a great reader by simply fulfilling this mandatory checked-off task.  Kids either find an author or a series they love and start passionately reading for pleasure (for many more than 20 minutes a day), and then, having consumed that gateway drug, begin a lifelong quest for more such material, or they don’t.  Those who do soon reap what are for the young reader entirely unintended academic benefits of their purely pleasure-motivated self-indulgence.  Those who don’t often find themselves struggling in ways which go far beyond mere academics.  Because most of those who don’t ever pick up the reading addiction and its benefits are boys, it’s especially important that parents of boys be given suggestions (lots of suggestions; what works for some will not work for others) in the hopes that their sons will latch on to something.  This is especially important in a culture where the illiterate screen is ever beckoning.

Herewith, a list of what are, in my purely subjective opinion (which happens to nevertheless be actually objectively accurate), the truly superlative books for boys.  The qualifications for a book making this list are two-fold.  It is comprised entirely of books that I personally read and loved between the ages of 8 and 18, or that one of my three sons (currently aged 10, 20, and 23) personally read and loved between those ages.  In other words, actual boys who have learned to love reading did so via these books.  Alphabetical by author:

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels.  I never finished the first book, but my son, and lots of other young men with the right sense of humor, have loved them.

Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy; the Robot series.  The kind of mind-blowing stuff that makes sci-fi so popular during that adolescent period of our lives when we get to ask the big questions, and (spoiler alert) if you read far enough in both series they eventually merge. 

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451; Something Wicked This Way Comes; The Illustrated Man; The October Country; The Martian Chronicles; A Medicine for Melancholy; I Sing the Body Electric; and other short story collections.  The Twilight Zone TV Show was, alas, before my time.  But I had the short stories of Ray Bradbury instead.  They had the same spooky tricky endings, with the added bonus of beautiful writing.  

Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything. I'm fairly certain that this book is the reason my second son became a science major in college.  Bryson's engaging writing shows how fascinating scientific literacy should be, if only so many schools didn't do such a good job of taking what should be fascinating and making it interminably boring.  

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes and the sequels / series.  Tarzan was the original superhero.  He had an origin story that explained his superhuman strength, agility, intelligence, and ability to talk to animals, a dual identity (Lord Greystoke and also Tarzan), untold wealth, just like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, plus lots of cool enemies from the hidden temples and lost civilizations of darkest Africa.  What's not to like?   Burroughs never researched anything, and his stories were full of errors about the geographical locations of various species, proving they were written with one goal in mind: entertainment.  

   

Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game and its sequels;  Ender’s Shadow and its sequels.  Ender's Game and its parallel novel Ender's Shadow are both great reads, despite Hollywood's failure to do the first novel full justice.  (For a great adaptation, instead of watching the movie, listen to the audioplay, Ender's Game Alive, available via Audible.com) Adult readers will enjoy the sequels to Ender's Game (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind) and younger readers will enjoy the Shadow Series, although both series dwindle with each volume, rather than building to a satisfactory conclusion, which is typical of Card, who is much better at stand-alone novels than at series.  If that depresses you, then just read Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.  They work on their own without any need to find out what happens next.   

Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 A Space Odyssey; Childhood’s End.  More good mind blowing big idea sci-fi.

Eoin Coifer: Artemis Fowl series.  Never read these myself, but my two oldest boys must have consumed them, as the house was littered with them when they left home.

Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator; James and the Giant Peach.  When I was in the 6th Grade I had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of an audience.  I chose the long humorous poem about the little girl who ate her grandma's laxatives from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which was a big hit with students and teachers.  It's still the only poem I've ever memorized (literary memorization had clearly become a disfavored educational trend when I was growing up, stupid public education trends--I could use some good memorized poems).  

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo.  I read this as an adult, but my son read it while he was growing up.  A great story at any age.  

Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels.  Loved this book when I was a kid.  Tried to get my kids into it by playing an audiobook on a road trip.  But alas, the egotistical Ms. Engle had decided to narrate the book herself, long after she was of the proper age to do so, and her elderly and screeching voice, not to mention moist inadvertent lip-smacking, was so annoying to my kids they begged me to turn it off until I finally had to relent because I couldn't take it any more either.  A note to publishers.  Authors write.  Hire an actor to do the reading.  Especially if the author is in her last gasps.  

Walter Farley: The Black Stallion.  Also a very good movie from my youth.

John D. Fitzgerald: The Great Brain series.  Set in turn-of-the-century Southern Utah (and, in the later volumes, SLC, where the children attend the Catholic academy) and narrated by the titular genius's younger brother, these incredibly entertaining books deserve a much wider audience than they have.  Personally, I think they are better than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, not as literature, but as entertaining reading for boys.  

The Guiness Book of World Records.  Always loved these as a kid.  They are even more popular now that they come in big color annual hardbacks.  Although I'm not sure they have as many cool facts as they used to. 

Frank Herbert: Dune.  One of the great sci-fi novels of all time.  But don't bother with the sequels.

Conn and Hal Iggulden: The Dangerous Book for Boys.  The publishing of this book could not have been more timely.  Just what our world needed. 

Brian Jacques: The Redwall Series.  I haven't read these, but my oldest son devoured them when he was growing up. 

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird.  If you read this for school because you had to and you didn't enjoy it, do yourself a favor and read it again.  There's a reason it's so famous.  The greatest American novel ever written.  And it's great for boys who need actual heroes but are living in a popular culture that increasingly refuses to give them any. 

C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters.  Every Christian should read the Narnia books when they are still too young to understand and decode the symbolism, so they can internalize the symbols instead. And everyone should read the Screwtape Letters at least once a year.

James Michener: Hawaii, The Source.  Books I started to read in my youth primarily to prove to myself that I could read something really long, but kept reading as they gave me a love of history. 

George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm.  In addition to reading modern YA dystopian novels where the dystopia is merely the backdrop to an adventure story, make sure your kids have read these books where the story had a prescient point to make.  Great reads and great social commentaries at the same time.  

Gary Paulson: Hatchet.  A book I have not yet read, but included here at the counsel of my youngest son, who I am still working on turning into a life-long reader.

Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows; Summer of the Monkeys.  Books to make a Fourth Grader cry.  

Ripley’s Believe It or Not books.  I don't know if they still even publish these, with their drawings instead of photographs, and their weird facts.  But I remember being fascinated by the paperbacks when I was young. 

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series.  My oldest son and I began reading these when he was 8 and the first three books had been published.  They were instrumental in turning at least three of my children into life-long readers.  I love the Harry Potter movies.  Nevertheless, I consider it to be one of the great tragedies of our age and among the most terrible crimes ever committed against imagination that those movies were made so soon, before the series had even been completely written.  Could not one generation of readers have experienced the Harry Potter universe purely and solely as books?  Oh well, at least some of my children got to experience them when they were wholly new, and we were able to read each book before its respective film was complete.  

Louis Sachar: Holes.  Fun plotting. 

Donald J. Sobol: The Encyclopedia Brown series.  In the part of Las Vegas once known as "Charleston Heights" where a grungy locals casino now unfortunately stands, on Decatur between Charleston and Alta, there was once something so much better: a large red, white and blue slide, the kind you use a blanket to slide down, and behind that: a shopping center, with a local library branch, right across the aisle from where I got my hair cut.  I can still remember the librarian in that location who introduced me to Encyclopedia Brown.  I could rarely figure out the solution to each chapter's mystery without checking the back of the book, but Enclopedia Brown did inspire me to try to read more of our family's set of encyclopedias.  I still think of these books every time I spin an egg to test if it has been hard boiled or not.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings.  The greatest works of fiction ever written. Bar none. 

Leon Uris: Exodus. A great historical novel about one of the most interesting stories of the 20th Century, the founding of the nation of Israel.

Jules Verne: Around the World in 80 Days; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  The original steampunk sci-fi.  One of my favorite stories from LDS Church History is about John Taylor, the third President of the Church, coming into the parlor one evening and, upon seeing his son reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, advising him he shouldn't be wasting his time on such things as novels.  Son went to bed, and upon waking up the next morning, came down to the parlor to find John Taylor finishing the book, which he had stayed up all night reading.  He told his son he'd changed his mind and that this was a very good book which he should read. 

Bill Watterson: Calvin & Hobbes collections.  I truly believe that Bill Watterson will be remembered as a genius in the same way that other artists who have been the best in their genre, be it painting, jazz, or baseball, have been remembered.  The rules of the comic strip make it a fairly brutal form to do well (here, take four little panels, now draw me a little picture and add some words that will make me laugh; repeat every day).  This is why most comic strips are just lousy, with most of the comic page of the newspaper not worth the ink it is printed on, giving us 20 Marmadukes or Garfields for every one Frank and Ernest or Wizard of Id or Hagar the Horrible.  Watterson nailed it and his comic strip collections are perfect for boys who are Calvin's age or slightly older. 

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine; War of the Worlds; The Island of Dr. Moreau.  I didn't know til I was much older that H.G. Wells was most famous in his own day not for his fiction, but for his social and political commentaries, most of which were nutsoid early versions of the socialist utopian ideas that made the 20th century so dismal for so many.  Oh well, he still wrote good books.  At least as far as I can remember.  It has been a very, very, long time since I read them. 

E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web.  The one book I tried to read to all of my children.  A timeless classic.

T.H. White: The Once and Future King.  The definitive version of the Arthurian legend for the 20th Century.

The sad fate of my two oldest sons, who learned to love reading in their childhood:

Originally posted on January 28, 2015.
Last Update February 11, 2015

Pathfinder, by Orson Scott Card

The thing about time travel stories is that they inevitably have plot holes that don't make any sense.  How does Harry Potter survive the dementor attack the first time, to live long enough to come back from the future and save himself?  If Doc takes Marty and his girlfriend 30 years into the future to save Marty's children, how is it that a 48 year old Marty is there in the future with children to save?  Shouldn't he and his girlfriend have skipped and jumped over the intervening thirty years in the car ride, like the dog skipped one minute when the car was demonstrated for the first time at the beginning of the first movie?  But the biggest problem of all in any time travel story is the lack of believable suspense: if you have the ability to change time, won't you just go back and fix anything that goes wrong to keep the plot from ever being forwarded?

All those problems are probably present in Pathfinder as well, but I enjoyed the story so much I didn't think about them. Indeed, in his afterward to this, the first book in a new young adult series, Orson Scott Card says he deliberately embraced the paradoxes of time travel, just for the fun of it.  Thus, for example, the main characters find that when they get a visit from one of themselves, from the future, with a warning to help them avoid some catastrophe, they don't actually have to make the trip for that visit themselves, in the future.  Rather, some other version of themselves did that and presumably winked out of existence or something.  This gets a little dodgy but you learn to just go with it and suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story.

And it is a really enjoyable ride, a return to form for OSC and one of his best books in a long, long time.  The best parts of this book aren't the time travel bits in any event.  Rather, the book tells two stories (a space travel/colonization story told in brief flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter, heavily driven by ideas and reminiscent of the best old-time pulp magazine short story sci-fi of Bradbury and Asimov juxtapositioned against a vaguely medieval story in the main text) and the fun is in  slowly determining how the two stories will eventually reconcile.  As the puzzle comes together, and you realize how characters in one story are related to those in the other, the plot takes on an extra dimension of satisfaction.

May 15, 2011
Highly recommended.

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Ruins
Book 2

So I just finished reading Ruins, the second book in this series, and I continued to highly enjoy the cool sci-fi ideas that drive the plot-focused story.  In this chapter, those ideas focus on what it means to be human, as Rigg's little fellowship of timeshifters and soldiers visits some of the different "Wallfolds" that were created to subdivide humanity when the planet Garden was colonized over 11,000 years ago, and learn how humanity developed and fared, or failed to do so, in the different worlds.  Are you, for example, still a human if you have joined in a symbiotic relationship with an alien parastic life form that enhances your abilities but also influences your actions?  If mice were bred to have near human intelligence, and, when acting as a group, greater than human ablity, would they have human souls?   These are all the kind of cool sci-fi questions that I used to love when I read books like this in my youth, and, like the first volume, this reminded me of some of the cool mind-altering idea-driven Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov short stories and novels I loved as a young adult.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the clunky manner in which two of the characters, Umbo and Param, are written.  Card apparently wants us to see these characters "grow" as they seek to overcome their annoying adolescent weaknesses.  But some of their intemperate acts are so sudden and random that they aren't believable and jar the reader out of the narrative.  Card's trademark style of having his characters engage in lengthy inner dialogues also gets a little tiresome.  I wonder if this is how Orson Scott Card thinks.  Does he argue with himself all day and challenge and refine his own assumptions for hours on end, such that he thinks this is a normal way to show his characters' inner lives?  I dunno, but it occasionally devolves into tedious self-parody here.

This is a plot and idea driven story though, not a character driven one, so those issues don't prevent the book from working.  I enjoyed getting to know Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf, the three non-annoying characters. The stuff with the expendables also continues to be fun and intriguing, as the reader can never quite figure out how self-driven these robots are.  I enjoyed the ideas and trying to figure out the same mystery the characters are dealing with, as they learn of a future destruction of the planet Garden by the people of Earth and try to find out why that happens and how it can be prevented.   If Card gives us satisfactory answers to those questions in the next and final volume, then this series will be one of the higlights of his career.  If he lets the series disspate (as he has with some of his other series), and doesn't wrap it up with a satisfactory conclusion, then it won't be.