What a Steal

Found a new local used bookstore this last weekend and, browsing as best as able with the two small kids, I found a 50th Anniversary edition Lord of the Rings copy for a steal at just a few bucks.  Turns out it can be had from Amazon for only $11, but I still feel pretty good about myself.

I’ve wanted a single-volume edition for a long time, but I despise books featuring cover art from the movies and refused to buy them.  It’s not that I dislike the movies; I actually enjoyed them tremendously, though I was disturbed by several of the creative liberties they took that unacceptably altered elements of the character and story.  The problem is that a movie, even a very faithful adaptation, can never truly represent a piece of literature.  Unfortunately, after a book has been adapted into a movie it the film becomes much more accessible, much more visible, and eventually becomes the dominant popular culture understanding of the original story.  An example of a worst-case scenario is Starship Troopers, which is a great book with a deep, conservative political message tied up in an exciting military science fiction story.  The movie adaptation was just plain terrible (in my opinion), carried none of the author’s original meaning or message, and was packed full of gratuitous nudity and gory violence.  However that movie now represents Starship Troopers to the vast majority of people and greatly reduces anyone’s desire to read the book since they either “already saw the movie” or thought “the movie didn’t look that good”.  I believe this is a real loss.

So on principle, for stories where the book precedes the movie I do not purchase books with movie covers if I can avoid it.  The last thing I want is for the movie to so completely dominate the influence of the book that even the book itself has to be plastered with movie imagery to sell.  Most of the one volume editions of Lord of the Rings I’ve seen lately, including several copies at the used bookstore, were movie covers.  Fortunately they had this 50th Anniversary edition copy there as well with its beautiful watercolor image of Minas Tirith on the cover.

As for the one-volume preference, that one is simply due to the nature of the work; Tolkien always intended it to be one volume divided into 6 parts, and it was his publisher that forced him to break it into three separate books.  Breaking up the book into 3 volumes does make practical sense, as the one volume edition is well over 1,000 pages, but I appreciate Tolkien’s original intent enough to go ahead and lug around the one volume edition.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and read the whole thing again, something I haven’t done since college.  It’ll probably re-kindle my annoyance with the movies but I also have the movies to thank for some very vivid imagery, much of which is faithful to Tolkien’s original sketches (such as Rivendell), which will certainly enhance reading the book.

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Book Review: “The Shattering” by Christie Golden

This is technically a gaming blog and not a book blog, but this is a book about a game so that works… right?

I bought The Shattering for my wife for Christmas, since she is such a large Warcraft fan and also an avid fiction reader, but of course I got to read it too.  I had no prior experience with Warcraft books, or really any video-game books, so I really didn’t know what to expect.  I chose The Shattering because Christie Golden is apparently one of the better Warcraft authors and this book had been very highly praised.  So I figured I would buy this one and if we didn’t like it we wouldn’t have any reason to buy any of the previous ones.

I wasn’t sure how the book would be structured.  Would it be from the perspective of a player character?  Or from an NPC?  Would there be multiple storylines, or just one?  What would the quality of the writing be like?  If you are interested, read on and I’ll try to explain without spoiling anything.

The storyline essentially takes place just prior to the 4.0.3a patch, aka “The Shattering”, which completely rebuilt much of the old world continents.  In fact, you could even say the entire storyline takes place during the downtime just prior to that patch, as if it was some kind of time-warp lasting a few weeks.  There is no mention of player characters at all, this is a purely NPC-driven story.  There are two story lines, one of which follows events within the Alliance with Anduin Wrynn as the main character and one of which follows events within the Horde and jumps between Thrall, Carine, Baine, and Garrosh.  The book explains in great detail the faction changes that occur within the Dwarf and Tauren leadership as well as the new Horde warchief and remains very focused throughout.

The writing is uneven but generally good.  In fact, at times the writing is simply excellent.  There are a few patches where it reads a little awkwardly but they are few and far between.  Overall the book reads like a good mass-market paperback.  Christie Golden is obviously very familiar with the game and the lore, so this is no outside hack job; this book was written by someone who has played the game and who genuinely enjoys the story and characters contained within it.

What I was perhaps most impressed with is how well the book complimented the in-game changes.  While its hardly a comprehensive story of all the changes that occurred within The Shattering, it describes the main events in such a detailed way that I actually feel this book should be required reading for anyone moderately interested in following the lore of Warcraft, which even if it is only a small minority out of a 12 million player base is doubtless a substantial number of folks.  Without reading this book there is so much these players are missing.

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