GEEK
THROWDOWN VOL 2:
To
blatantly steal from Fukuyama, the Geek Throwdown is now in the End of
History. The zero-sum game has ended; we
are beyond competition for supreme hegemony.
It’s
good at the top.
Call it
hubris, or the sweet flush of victory, or overwhelming relief, but I did forget
to mention the final books I read in my race to the top. And since I know you all wait with great
trepidation, here they are. Pay
attention, they’re some good ones.
1. The
Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides: It
is easy to forget how amazing this book is, to remember only the movie and the
soundtrack and to lose sight of how the prose wraps itself up into your bones
and takes root there, blooming in strange and unexpected ways when you see a
field of grass or the summer scabs on a young girl’s knee. It’s a primer for being a sentimental boy,
for trying, and failing, to know a girl, for the consequences of binding our
souls to something lost long ago. In
another life, Lux and I could’ve been sweethearts.
2. Ready
Player One, Ernest Cline: So I’ll admit
that the premise, and how it was originally described to me (“It’s like someone
crammed every geek culture reference into ONE BOOK and MADE IT AWESOME”) didn’t
sell me at all. There are too many books
out there that try to be self- and geek-aware, and fail miserably, like your
mom using LOLZ in her awkward texts. It
doesn’t work far more than it does. RP1…
worked. I think it worked because the world was fully realized and
consistent, which is where many science fiction novels fall down. I think
it worked because it made sense. I think it worked because I cared about
the characters. Ultimately I’m not
really sure what the secret was… because I was way too busy getting all
ehmehgerd!!! over the Dungeons &
Dragons references.
3. The
Magician King, Lev Grossman: So…
hm. I felt tricked by the first in this
series (It’s like Harry Potter if Harry were Holden Caulfield and Brett Easton
Ellis wrote all the characters to be like his terrible friends!)… and I
couldn’t put it down. I feel exactly the same way about the
sequel. It feels cheap to make such
self-aware jabs at Harry Potter and Tolkien and then to lift, wholesale, entire
plot devices from Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling.
I imagine Mr. Grossman explaining how clever and post-modern the whole
premise was using Power Point to some room of jackasses at the NYT Book Review
and then getting high-fives (Ironic Pro-Plebe High Fives, at that) from Michiko
Kakutani. But I bought it, and read it,
so I guess Grossman wins.
Necessary Noxious Navel
Gazing:
Last week I booked my ticket to fly to Spain and hike the
Camino de Santiago. Seven short weeks
from now I’ll start that trip and it feels both very shockingly real and
impossibly far away. I originally
started thinking about it from the pilgrimage perspective, and then, as things
went suddenly sideways in Boone last spring, as a time to find some peace and
let go of the expectations I’d had, and lost, for the future.
Right now I’m mostly curious about what will happen. I feel confident in my ability to do the
physical work and to navigate the process.
I feel confident in my commitment and ability to pick up enough Spanish
between now and then to stumble through the basic interactions. I feel comfortable in just committing to it,
letting the process happen, and being grateful for the opportunity to reflect
and examine my faith and myself.
I think I’m less confident in the kind of support I’ll get from
my family – it seems like all of the major decisions I’ve made as an adult,
they immediately fall into questioning and focusing on the potential problems
or disadvantages. Or, to be honest,
seeming distant or uninterested when I try to talk to them about why it feels
important to do, what it could mean.
Part of being an adult means standing on your own – I
understand that. But I’m often jealous
of people who have parents who get excited about the great things they are able
to do ahead of time. I only really get that excitement after the
fact, so when it comes time to take the plunge, I nearly always feel alone.
