Month: April 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline. I have a weird fascination with what I’ll call, in very broad terms, fantasy games. In that I include fantasy sports, traditional desktop role playing games, and online RPGs. I say fascination because I love the idea of creating an alternate world where we are in control of characters and teams. But when it comes to the execution of the game, I lose interest. Drafting a fantasy baseball team is fun. Dealing with the team for six months, not so much. Same goes for RPGs. I always enjoyed the rolling up of characters, deciding how to equip and align them, and then the first few games more than spending months or years playing with a group of friends as you broadened your character’s abilities and possessions. When computer RPGs developed, I was always kind of interested, but the idea of spending hours playing these online games when I could be doing other things kept me from ever checking out Warcraft.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that this book appealed to me. Set twenty-plus years in the future, it focuses on an epic, online quest that will end with the control of OASIS, a virtual, online world that pretty much everyone spends all their free time plugged into, in the hands of either the hackers who promise to keep it open, or a giant corporation that views it as a source of endless monetization opportunities. The quest is full of puzzles, alliances, and battles between good guys and bad guys. In short, it has all the elements of a great fantasy game without me actually having to play it. And as a bonus, the creator of the quest was a Gen Xer. Thus all the players attempting to solve his puzzles must dig through massive amounts of 1980s pop culture to find clues. I don’t know that someone who is 55 or 25 will enjoy it as much as readers my age will.

Safe At Home – Richard Doster. I bought this ebook sometime last year, when it was on sale. And it sat in my Amazon account, untouched, ever since. I finally decided to (virtually) crack it open last week, which ended up being perfect timing. It’s a story about breaking the color line in minor league baseball, and last week was the celebration of Jackie Robinson doing exactly that in the Major Leagues.

This takes place in a small southern town, where a class C team is struggling to find a way to remain relevant in a society where TV is beginning to keep people home for their entertainment. After a chance encounter with a family from the city’s black high school, a sports reporter suggests that perhaps the team should sign the school’s budding star and lure black fans to games. This opens all kinds of cans of worms, as this particular town seems perfectly comfortable keeping the “separate but equal” lines between the races intact.

The kid is signed, there is controversy and anger and violence. The ending is not a happy, bow-tieing ending but rather an uncomfortable one where you don’t feel like anyone really learned anything.

Which is probably pretty accurate for 1950s southern America. The books draws on many famous moments in Jackie Robinson’s, and other black baseball players, early days as pros. But the context of a small town gives it an original element. I expect the scenes from the town are fairly historically accurate. I hope any reasonable person who reads this will be infuriated at how we treated fellow citizens not too long ago.

This isn’t a great book, but it is a nice little read that sucks in both baseball and the massive gears of change that were beginning to crank in America 60 years ago.

Gentlemen – Bob Gendron. This was my second crack at the 33 ⅓ series of music books, a series in which authors tackle a specific, significant album in roughly 100 pages. Previously I had read Christopher Wein’s take on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and thought it was interesting, but just ok.

Here, Gendron examines The Afghan Whig’s overlooked work of genius, Gentlemen. It’s clearly from from a fan’s perspective, and thus is a bit over-written. But it tells the story of the band and how they arrived at the recording of their fourth studio album in 1992. There’s an unevenness to the writing, though, which detracts from that story. The 33 ⅓ books force authors to hone in on a narrow focus because of their length restrictions. I didn’t think Gendron ever found that solid, central focus and instead tried to pare down what should have been a longer book into this format.

I’ve loved this album for nearly 20 years, but knew little of its back-story. So I did learn much about both the band and their masterpiece. But I felt like the story could have been told in a better way.

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Zazen – Vanessa V. File this under books I’ve wanted to read for several years, and when I finally did, was disappointed.

Zazen takes place in the near future, with the world on the verge of a mysterious war. People are fleeing the United States as war approaches and energy and individual liberties are severely rationed. Those who remain face daily bombings by various groups looking to either destabilize the existing power structure, or just scare the crap out of people. I liked the idea of a society in chaos and people struggling to figure out which path to take.

In execution, though, it was a bit too arty for me. Or poetic, perhaps, is the better term. Odd phrasings and random, oblique sentences thrown in. Metaphors that were a little too obtuse for me to find meaning in. And the characters weren’t terribly interesting. It’s hard to connect with a story when none of the main players are appealing.

Lots of people liked Zazen. It even won some awards. It just wasn’t for me.

Idiot America – Charles P. Pierce. File under political books that are written just how I like.

I complained earlier this year that Rachel Maddow’s book Drift suffered from how Americans want their political books written so they can be bought, read, and filed away quickly. No need for deep explorations of issues. Just throw out some anecdotes, pithy reactions, and move on to the next issue.

Pierce, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to explore a subject in depth. Here he looks at how Americans of all political stripes have cast aside the idea of true political debate that the Founding Fathers were interested in for a dumbed-down, commoditized form of debate. Facts, evidence, and reasoning are no longer the most important elements of a political discussions. Instead, a sexy theory is valued more than experience and evidence and quality of presentation trumps truth. Imagined conspiracies (Who shot JFK) are given more consideration and legitimacy than real conspiracies (Watergate, Iran/Contra) which are dismissed as too complex to understand or not important to regular folks.

He presents a three-fold argument on how issues enter the mainstream of political discussion. 1) A theory is valid if it sells, 2) anything can be true if someone says it loud enough, 3) and fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measure by how fervently those people believe.

It sounds cynical, but as he lays out over and over again, it is sadly an accurate description of our culture.

It has never been easy to be an informed citizen. It takes work to do research instead of just listening to people who share your worldview and adopting their opinions. That task is even more difficult in our society, where we live in a flood of information. It’s easier to view politics and government as just another form of entertainment and sit back and watch the show instead of taking the time and effort to dig through the mess and find out where the real, boring truth lies.

But, as Pierce points out, giving in to the temptations of our entertainment-political media is what gives the cranks that used to be shunned, or viewed as momentary diversions from reality, control of our dialogue. And that’s how we end up fighting about either issues of absolute zero importance (who wore a flag pin on their lapel) or about manufactured controversies not based in truth (He shares a long list of ginned up controversies by various right wing talk show hosts that were built on lies that, when repeated often enough, were treated as reasonable arguments by the mainstream media). Which does two things: turns people off of political debate and pushes those who remain engaged further apart.

And that’s how you get elected officials, even those in the political minority, who refuse to even talk to their counterparts opposite them in ideology and a citizenry that refuses to hold those officials accountable for ruining the country.

In other, shorter, words, this is a real up-lifter.

Summer Of 68 – Tim Wendel. File this under great idea that could have been executed just a little better.

1968 was a momentous year in baseball, culminating in the fantastic World Series between St. Louis and Detroit. It was the “Year of the Pitcher”, when Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and Luis Tiant all turned in historical performances. It was the last year before the second round of expansion, which split each league into divisions and birthed the League Championship series before the World Series. And, in response to the insane pitching numbers, the mound was lowered and strike zone reduced before the 1969 season.

Meanwhile MLK and RFK were murdered, Americans fought each other in the streets of Chicago as the party of the incumbent president tried to select its candidate for the fall election, and the Vietnam war continued to take the lives of young Americans in Southeast Asia. While baseball seemed as popular as ever, Joe Namath’s New York Jets were about to win the Super Bowl, forcing the NFL and AFL to merge, and completing football’s ascent as the nation’s most popular sport.

There’s a lot going on there, and much can be said about the shifts taking place in the US in 1968. But Wendel keeps it fairly light. There are no deep dives to find out what it all means. It’s just a chance to take a look at a great baseball season and connect it to some other important events in the country’s history.

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