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Duelling Book Club
Apr. 12th, 2006 10:39 pmRobin and I seem to have become involved in a bizarre macho informal book club.
It all started when I saw a guy in dance class with the book 1632. I told him, "Hey, I'm supposed to read that." It was recommended to me by Indigo Rose and sounded fun.
So he hands the book to me. He had just gotten it back from lending it to our dance teacher.
So I read the book and then Robin did. It's fun, in a fantasy kind of way. There are a lot of time travel stories where one or two people go back or forward in time with just what they can carry. What if you came to a new time, and you had all your stuff? So, in this story, an entire town is yanked of of 20th-century US and trades places with an equal-sized area of land in Europe in 1632, which is during the thirty-years war. And the Americans all have weapons because they all hunt! And they all love democracy! And they're all tough and used to working together because they're in a coal miner's union! And yet they're almost totally not sexist! So it's good fun, and you probably learn a bit more about the time and place.
The swath of horror that armies made as they passed through made me wonder why you'd want to win if you had just ruined all the land you had just captured. So I did a little research and learned that it was only trails of land that were ruined--many areas remained untouched throughout the whole war. And when people heard that an army was coming, they generally left town. Wise. But some areas could recover in a few years as people returned and started over.
So, the next week I return the book. This book reminded me the most of Alas, Babylon, a classic post-apocalyptic novel that has a similar feel of a whole town being suddenly relocated to an alien and inhospitable locale (post-nuclear war America). But since it's a classic, I thought it likely that he'd already read that before, so I also brought Emergence, another postapocalyptic novel that I really like.
It turns out he's read these books and many more and said it was unlikely we could find a good book that he hadn't read. Robin took this as a challenge and presented him the following week with City of Diamond, one of his all-time favorites, by an author who has moved to the more lucrative field of television (she's worked on "Dark Angel"). Our friend didn't recognize it right at first, so he took it home to read.
Robin also lent a copy to our dance teacher. The next week, the teacher returned that book and said, "I see your City of Diamond and raise you Partners in Necessity." This is a collection of three books which Robin sucked down in a single week, but which I have not yet begun. Robin likes them enough that he will buy them. There are two more in that story line as well.
It's a very interesting dynamic. "Have you read this?" "Oh yeah? Well have you read this?"
It all started when I saw a guy in dance class with the book 1632. I told him, "Hey, I'm supposed to read that." It was recommended to me by Indigo Rose and sounded fun.
So he hands the book to me. He had just gotten it back from lending it to our dance teacher.
So I read the book and then Robin did. It's fun, in a fantasy kind of way. There are a lot of time travel stories where one or two people go back or forward in time with just what they can carry. What if you came to a new time, and you had all your stuff? So, in this story, an entire town is yanked of of 20th-century US and trades places with an equal-sized area of land in Europe in 1632, which is during the thirty-years war. And the Americans all have weapons because they all hunt! And they all love democracy! And they're all tough and used to working together because they're in a coal miner's union! And yet they're almost totally not sexist! So it's good fun, and you probably learn a bit more about the time and place.
The swath of horror that armies made as they passed through made me wonder why you'd want to win if you had just ruined all the land you had just captured. So I did a little research and learned that it was only trails of land that were ruined--many areas remained untouched throughout the whole war. And when people heard that an army was coming, they generally left town. Wise. But some areas could recover in a few years as people returned and started over.
So, the next week I return the book. This book reminded me the most of Alas, Babylon, a classic post-apocalyptic novel that has a similar feel of a whole town being suddenly relocated to an alien and inhospitable locale (post-nuclear war America). But since it's a classic, I thought it likely that he'd already read that before, so I also brought Emergence, another postapocalyptic novel that I really like.
It turns out he's read these books and many more and said it was unlikely we could find a good book that he hadn't read. Robin took this as a challenge and presented him the following week with City of Diamond, one of his all-time favorites, by an author who has moved to the more lucrative field of television (she's worked on "Dark Angel"). Our friend didn't recognize it right at first, so he took it home to read.
Robin also lent a copy to our dance teacher. The next week, the teacher returned that book and said, "I see your City of Diamond and raise you Partners in Necessity." This is a collection of three books which Robin sucked down in a single week, but which I have not yet begun. Robin likes them enough that he will buy them. There are two more in that story line as well.
It's a very interesting dynamic. "Have you read this?" "Oh yeah? Well have you read this?"