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2011 Books 7-9
Jan. 21st, 2011 03:23 pm 7) Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts: This is the second of the Bride Quartet - I read the fourth a couple weeks back, and the basic premise is the same. This was easily the least satisfying of the lot: very little time was spent on the target (1) character's reason for being reluctant. It was there, but so understated that we got no sense of the character's conflict so the required... um, what's the romance fiction equivalent to anagnorisis? ... about needing to open his life to true love. Instead the entire conflict was inside the pursuer's head - when to push, when to fall back - so as to not spook the target. This made her come across as very passive aggressive when the pursuer flips out because the target failed to have the desired if unstated response to a sudden massive relationship shift. Worse, said sudden massive shift felt very much driven by the author's imposed rules of pairing off one of the four core characters each season, so a relationship that would have very comfortably and naturally played out over a year turned into a forced mess at 3 months.
8) Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws: this is brilliant, and every GM, even those who don't approach gaming as a narrative form, should give it a read. Laws provides a theory of narrative beats - procedural and dramatic, questions and reveals and so on - and then applies it to three classic works of fiction: Hamlet, Dr. No and Casablanca. The results are not only fun to read but illuminating on how narratives get their power through the building up and reversals of up and down beats, the separation of questions/anticipations and reveals and so on. While this is difficult to apply in a hard and fast way to the free form narrative construction of gaming the ideas inside it can easily be internalized and applied (something I think I may already do on an uninformed level) to improve the emotional power of game sessions. I will definitely be doing this analysis of Pride & Prejudice before embarking on Mech & Matrimony next year.
9) Idiot America by Charles Pierce: when you're trapped in an airport for 9 hours you run through what you bought to read. So you try to find something light to keep you going. This worked. I know Pierce as a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the title caught my attention. Pierce's accurate dissection of the difference between cranks - valuable forces in civil society who can push the social boundaries, or not, without care of what society thinks of their ideas - and the charlatans and frauds who resemble them but are paid, and for some unguessable reason respected, members of the central debate is helpful. As are his three rules of Idiot America: any theory is valid if it moves units; fact is that which enough people believe, trust is determined by how fervently they believe it; anything can be true if said loudly enough. Just because you really fervently believe that dinosaurs interacted with Adam and Even doesn't make it true, and if you believe it but don't care if anyone else does you're just a crank. When you demand that your fervent belief means that people have to take your stance seriously and teach as if it were true you're part of a problem in American discourse.
(1) I'm coining some terms here by making the reluctant future spouse the target and the desirous future spouse the pursuer. This isn't meant to imply some predatory relationship, but that in the form one of the protagonists is the one trying to move the relationship forward to the requisite committed monogamy, even if the characters can trade off that role over the course of the narrative.
8) Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws: this is brilliant, and every GM, even those who don't approach gaming as a narrative form, should give it a read. Laws provides a theory of narrative beats - procedural and dramatic, questions and reveals and so on - and then applies it to three classic works of fiction: Hamlet, Dr. No and Casablanca. The results are not only fun to read but illuminating on how narratives get their power through the building up and reversals of up and down beats, the separation of questions/anticipations and reveals and so on. While this is difficult to apply in a hard and fast way to the free form narrative construction of gaming the ideas inside it can easily be internalized and applied (something I think I may already do on an uninformed level) to improve the emotional power of game sessions. I will definitely be doing this analysis of Pride & Prejudice before embarking on Mech & Matrimony next year.
9) Idiot America by Charles Pierce: when you're trapped in an airport for 9 hours you run through what you bought to read. So you try to find something light to keep you going. This worked. I know Pierce as a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the title caught my attention. Pierce's accurate dissection of the difference between cranks - valuable forces in civil society who can push the social boundaries, or not, without care of what society thinks of their ideas - and the charlatans and frauds who resemble them but are paid, and for some unguessable reason respected, members of the central debate is helpful. As are his three rules of Idiot America: any theory is valid if it moves units; fact is that which enough people believe, trust is determined by how fervently they believe it; anything can be true if said loudly enough. Just because you really fervently believe that dinosaurs interacted with Adam and Even doesn't make it true, and if you believe it but don't care if anyone else does you're just a crank. When you demand that your fervent belief means that people have to take your stance seriously and teach as if it were true you're part of a problem in American discourse.
