What I’ve Been Into Lately April 12, 2006
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in Books, General Incoherency, Star Wars.add a comment
So, I’ve obviously been away for a while. I’ll give an update on some of the more noteworthy events that have been going on in my life. Don’t get too bored… 
Timothy Zahn
In late February I got to meet Timothy Zahn, author of Heir to the Empire trilogy of Star Wars novels through two events organized by my Star Wars friends. In the first, we had dinner with him at the Big City Tavern in Roseville. The next night was a book signing for his latest novel, Outbound Flight (on my reading list), in which we were asked to dress up in costume (for atmosphere 
), interact with the attendees and hand out prizes for trivia questions they answered.
I was especially thrilled to meet this man, as it was his Star Wars novels that were largely responsible for making other such novels commercially viable. Picking them up and reading them in high school was almost like re-living the original movies, which I didn’t think would be possible.
Girlfriend
You could say I’ve already accomplished one of my New Years resolutions, as I started seeing a wonderful young woman in early March. Sarabeth has come from Texas to stay with our mutual friend Sannie, through whom we met. We spend a good deal of time together, and we’re both enormous geeks. It’s wonderful stuff!
Costuming
I’ve volunteered to be a guinea pig for Sannie and Sarabeth while they work on a Robin (as in, the Boy Wonder) costume for me. Both women are creative, artsy types who like the idea of dressing me up, and I’m a fan of the Boy Wonder, so it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. I’ll try to put pics up once the costume is more or less completed.
FINISHED!!! :-D February 14, 2006
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in Book Reviews, Books, General Incoherency.add a comment
As you can see, I’ve finished Kavalier and Clay, and I now feel like I can call myself at least marginally cultured, now that I’ve read something that’s won a major literary award. It only took me a full year to do it (almost to the day).
Simply put, it got even more interesting as the story progressed (as is the case with most good stories).
It’s been a long time since I’ve really had a hand in collecting comics, but while I read them in high school and college, I took in the origin stories of more than a few super-heroes. Most of the ones I read about (the Marvel heroes: Spider-Man, the X-Men, Avengers, etc.) had their births well after the time in this book (in the 1960s), but a few others–Batman, Superman, and the like–are right out of this period, and warrant the occasional reference during the story. The fact that Stan Lee briefly appears as well adds a little bit of entertainment value to this story for me.
While I’m neither a professional critic nor exceptionally well read, I can see why this won the Pulitzer a few years ago. It’s obviously a fictitious account of life during the Golden Age of comics, but it’s also well researched, seems realistically enough portrayed (given my limited knowledge of comic books and how they started out), and draws on many themes and ideas that make for a good recounting of life in America. It’s a good telling of the highs and lows intrinsic to the pursuit of the American Dream, brought on by external events as well as personal hopes, dreams and fears.
Michael Chabon looks into the settings, people, and other minutiae of many different arenas, from Josef’s interest in escape artistry and how it dovetails with his escape from Prague during Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, to the cityscape of 1940s New York City, during the birth and rise of the comic book hero. Joe’s cousin, Sammy Clay, is a young Jewish man with a kind of unfocused creative genius whose pairing with his refugee cousin heralds the creation of the Escapist, a hero that eventually springboards the boys to fame and fortune. Yet along with the fortunes this and other creations of theirs bring, each of the boys must deal with the specters in their professional and personal lives.
Putting my love for comic books aside, this was still an impressive story, indicative of how the heroes we create can spring from our individual hopes and fears, and how the ones that stand the test of time are the ones that appeal to our core humanity on some level. Chabon does a good job of putting a stamp of reality on a work of fiction, as well as selectively taking creative license with locales and personalities that are real. Given my fascination with the world of comics, it’s easy for me to like this novel, but looking beyond it (objectively speaking), I think it could appeal to just about anyone concerned with the human drama of loss, gain, and perseverance.
Slow Reader… No, Really January 30, 2006
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in Books, General Incoherency, Rants.add a comment
Some people I know are trying to take the "50 Books/Novels in a Year" challenge, and will read themselves silly this year. I know that for some, this kind of thing is child’s play; they can read 50 books in 2 months. I, on the other hand, am seriously struggling with the reading end of my New Year’s resolutions (nope, no newspapers yet, and yes, I’ve only read Starfighters of Adumar thus far). If I can’t read 4+ books per month, there’s just no way I’ll be able to handle such a task. So good luck to those insane dedicated readers. I envy you.
It isn’t that I’m illiterate or anything. I do like to read, and (in my own completely objective opinion) express myself pretty well through my writing. I devour escapist fiction pretty easily, particularly Star Wars and Harry Potter (and usually Star Trek), but when it comes to sitting down and reading something more substantial, it usually takes me forever to get going.
Take The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which has been on my Currently Reading list since I started this thing in July. It was lended to me by a friend who thought it was right up my alley, and I’m in total agreement: it’s about two fictitious guys and their rise to fame by creating comic book characters during the "Golden Age of Comics." Great stuff. Whenever I do read it, I enjoy the story immensely.
But I’ve been reading it since February. February 2005.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Michael Chabon, with such subject matter, should have pulled me in immediately. I should have been finished with it in a month! The story (what I’ve read so far, anyway) is interesting, the characters are well-crafted and complex. And now that I’ve gotten into the middle of the book, I’m sufficiently compelled to keep reading at a more strenuous pace.
But why did it take me a year?
I’m like that with so many things. Books, movies and TV shows (it took me forever to get around to watching Firefly, but I was hooked when I did), video games even! I delay watching, or reading, or otherwise experiencing things until long after I’ve either possessed them or heard about them, especially when they’ve been recommended to me by friends.
I won’t get through the book by Wednesday, but hopefully I can finish it this week. I also have a work of nonfiction I can start reading afterwards. I suppose the question now becomes, when will I do it?
I Haven’t Done This In a Long Time… October 10, 2005
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in Books, General Incoherency.add a comment
In the last few days, I’ve expanded my Currently Reading list, and believe it or not have actually been reading most of the books mentioned on there. This is the first time in a long while that I’ve actually taken large chunks out of my day to simply kick back and read for pleasure. Having grown up with the Nintendo Entertainment System and about ten Brazilian PC games, it’s pretty easy for me nowadays to just fire up the PC and just let the audiovisuals do the work.
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, I remember when I was in first or second grade, and my mother would say I was just like her when she was a kid: "Always with your nose in a book." I remember loving the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary in third grade, as well as Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White. I definitely used to be a hard-core reader. Discovering more about the world and the people in it through books used to have an undeniably exciting effect on me.
Then, in fourth grade, one of my friends got the NES… and that was definitely the start of the downward spiral. While the games were imaginative, and I still recognize them and today’s games as such, one thing they definitely took up was time, and huge amounts of it. This, of course, took away from my reading time, and also made me less willing to do it. I like writing stories, and did much of that into high school and college, but I drew upon video games and television for much of my imaginative works. Very little I can recall came from the characters or places I encountered through books.
I suppose it’s an attempt to reclaim some of that past, my renewed attempt to read more regularly. I plan on discussing one of the books at a future book club meeting, and have various other "utilitarian" purposes for reading the others, but I have to admit that this feels good. The stories are interesting. I seem to have the time. The kittens like curling up at my feet while I sit on the couch. And, of course, there’s writing the book reviews that, for some reason, I just like doing…
I don’t pretend for a moment that I’ll be giving up video games. After all, I’m too big a geek to forsake City of Heroes for too long. But I’m hoping this will be the beginning of a time in my life when reading "tugs back" at the hold on my time, the way video games did so long ago, when I was ten and fascinated by Castlevania…
Wish me luck!
