Nick > Recent Status Updates

Halfway through this and so far it's bad 'The Stand' fan fiction. Amazing how the message so many authors took from the source was "man, what if the world ended and something MESSED UP happened to one of the survivors?!"

"Man, this is really intense and kind of a downer. I think I need a break before I continue."

::comes back a month later and promptly reads a rape scene::

"God DAMN IT."

As an atheistic technocrat, there's something deeply weird about a book that's cheerfully anti-technology and eager to embrace the charismatic leadership of an extremist religious figure who wants all her followers to pack up and move to a town in the mountains to prepare for their final battle against the forces of darkness. Ugh. This reads so much more poorly than it did when I was 17.

Every interesting thing you think of when you think of 'The Odyssey'-- the blinding of the cyclops, the escape from Circe, Charybdis and Scylla--happens in one chapter, halfway through the book, in a flashback. Most of the rest of it is Odysseus's son whining about the guys trying to marry his mom and take all his dad's stuff.

By my reckoning it's not until the tenth book of this translation that we actually start to hear, in flashback, the story most people traditionally associate with "The Odyssey."

It's amazing how chapter to chapter in this book you can go from thinking that Robert Moses was a visionary hero who single-handedly built NYC as we know it to thinking he's the pettiest, nastiest little tyrant ever to wield power and who ought to have been strangled in his youth.

Tom Clancy has a go-to move where the bad guys are terribly bad and dangerous, but never so bad or dangerous that they do any real damage. The nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl fizzles; the Ebola biological attack isn't as contagious as they expected; the 'Army of God' invading our buddies in the Middle East can be whooped by a small group of gung-ho good ol' boys. It's all very Fox News and fascist right out of Eco.