Ryan Shrugged

I first heard of 1984 when I was in middle school. It was then mentioned in multiple classes each year of my four years in high school. Friends read it. Teachers recommended it. And the story sounded absolutely fascinating. But for many age-old reasons, I never got around to it. I say "age-old" because I know that I'm not alone; we all have stories like this, stories that we say we're interested in, and we honest to God are interested in, but that we're not interested in enough to drop what else we're doing and dive into them. For me, that story is 1984.

One thing that gets me to read a book or see a movie I've had on the backburner for many years is coincidental repeated exposure to it in the course of 1-2 weeks. That happened, I'm certain, with 1984, although the only exposures I can cite are Wikipedia's V for Vendetta article (1 week ago) and the talk surrounding the UK's evolution into a nanny-state (i.e. Orwell's world of 1984) with the highest number of CCTV cameras of any country in the world (i.e. 1984's Big Brother). Edit: well, I just remembered a third one, and that's my watching of the edited HAL9000 sequence on Youtube taken from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Thinking of Clarke's novel triggered Orwell in my mind, and thinking of HAL's all-seeing camera-eyes reminded me of the Big Brother concept.

While I was at the store, I considered purchasing other books but refrained. "One thing at a time," I said. These books are recreation fighting for time alongside continued studies of biochemistry (the bits I didn't get to before the test) as well as the launch of my self-remediated neurology studies. Anyway! The other books I considered were:

• Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
  
  • Why: because I remember Matt reading it in high school, because it's famous, because it's another philosophical and utopic/dystopic novel like 1984, etc.
  
  
  • Why I Didn't: 1300+ pages!? Are you fucking kidding me? I thought my friend Ben was lying when he told me [before we located it], "It's the 3rd longest book ever written. It's even longer than War and Peace!" (He was right: that one weighed in at over 1100 pages.)


• books by Mr. Modesitt
  
  • Why: because he's Aaron's favorite fantasy author
  
  
  • Why I Didn't: Andrew described his books as being very "focused in on one central überman," explaining that the other characters in the novel, while perhaps sometimes more important within the realm of the world Modesitt creates, were mere ants compared with the protagonist to whom Modesitt bestows so much detail. Andrew described one such central character as being a man who was capable of keeping millions of soldiers from getting past him. Sounds cool in a Shonen Jump sort of way, but not what I'm looking for right now. In fact, I remarked to Andrew that this explains why Aaron (a huge Shonen Jump fan) was probably so enthusiastic about Modesitt's stories.


• books by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series)
  
  • Why: recommended by a guy in my medical school class, sounded cool
  
  
  • Why I didn't: Andrew explained that Jordan's greatest strength is tragically (outside of his control) his greatest weakness: that Jordan's writing style is to have, at any given point in the story, 6 to 7 different major plot arcs developing, and that these arcs will sometimes intersect in a spectacular literary fireworks display ... but that most of them are highways to nowhere because Robert Jordan is dead and so one who reads Jordan's collection will wind up bitter and frustrated by the lack of closure. I'm no stranger to this, although death is not what kept Yu Suzuki from completing Shenmue. I may look into Jordan some day, but not right now.


• books by George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire series)
  
  • Why: he's Matt's favorite fantasy author, his stories sound very cool -- I'm a whore for family dramas if you couldn't tell!
  
  
  • Why I Didn't: A, it's 2nd on my ToRead list, actually. B, Barnes & Noble's copy had a moderately scuffed dustcover and I'm a perfectionist when it comes to things like that. C, I say it's "2nd" on my ToRead list but that's a bit dishonest because what's really (continuously) on my ToRead list is the (quite excellent, just a little too so) Romance of the Three Kingdoms. And honestly, the storyas Andrew non-spoileredly explained it sounds very similar to RoTK. The only difference is that the factions in RoTK are we-cry-manly-tears-for-China fellow countrymen and not members of the same family by blood.

I haven't started 1984 yet, but I expect that I will either tonight (perhaps shortly!) or tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it.