Harvard Yard by William Martin

Harvard Yard by William Martin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am a transplant to Boston and at one of my first jobs in the area a co-worker recommended William Martin and his book Harvard Yard. The building we worked in was owned by Harvard and my co-worker loved it for how well it described the history and sense of place, as well as the immensity of the institution in the area. In that I was not disappointed. However the main storyline was quite lacking in my opinion.

As others who have reviewed this book have mentioned, the story is divided into two halves, a fictional historical narrative about a lost Shakespeare play winding its way through American history and Harvard’s history, and Peter Fallon and his search for the play, beset on all sides by others who want to get their hands on it first. If you sensed the sarcasm in the last part of that sentence, then you were correct and that was the feeling I had throughout the Pater Fallon portion of this book. With the constant shifting between the current timeline and the past, as well as the jumps through history from one Harvard generation to the next, the main story becomes disjointed, with only mild payoffs of understanding, usually being a snippet of a letter coming in the final page or paragraph of the chapter. Though there was some action in the Peter Fallon narrative, most of it was trumped by the history and the confrontations of the different past timelines in the story.

That does bring me to what I did like about the book. The amount of history that is in and around Harvard is undeniably impressive, and to see how the world has changed through the eyes of an institution is an impressive feat by Martin. With that I will say I think the excellent fictionalizations of the characters in Harvard’s rich history obliterated the reason why I was reading the book, especially since the Peter Fallon and the lost Shakespeare play narrative is never truly resolved for the reader. This is sad considering the 704 page investment you have with the story when it ends and the object the main character has been questing for the entire storyline is simply going to be found by Harvard at an appointed time, a time is not in the pages of the book. There was no reward to the main story so the whole book felt like a loss to me.

I was hoping this would be an engaging historical detective story and in some cases it was, but for the most part the actual storyline of the book was somewhat of a bore, which had no real resolution, and was lost in the history of Harvard.


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Thinking About Bringing it Back

It has been some time since my last post, which was for school.  However I think that since now I have graduated, and become somewhat employed, that I need to get back to the free form thoughts that blogging does allow.  So you can say I am thinking about bringing the blog back.  Here's to the experiment.

I am trying to keep up with reading and writing as consistently as I should be doing it, so I am forcing to start writing reviews for things I read, so there will be some more activity to come as I blog and do more everyday writing.

For those of you actually reading, thanks.

Vampires and whatnot...

Before Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight I was a huge fan of fantastical vampire stories, even to the point where I read most of Anne Rice’s work and eventually found Brian Lumley.  His Necroscope series has a number of focuses as the series moves forward, but amazingly ruthless vampires thousands of years old appear throughout.  That being said I believe I have a high standard for one of the more ruthless types of characters in the literary world.

In the recent years a slew of vampire based movies, TV shows and other mediums have saturated the market making vampires almost passé.  Having said this I was hesitant to check out a new TV series, SyFy’s Being Human.  This story focus’ around the lives of Josh and Aiden, a recently turned werewolf and a 300 year old vampire respectively, as well as the newly deceased resident of their apartment, Sally.  From this interesting premise, the show tries to look at what exactly does it take to try and have a normal life amidst the temptations, fear, and unknowing surrounding the characters.      

Being Human has a very basic premise but the great thing is that they do not sugarcoat everything with the drippy, long winded concepts of lust and sappy vampire drama made famous by so many others.  These characters play real people trying to deal with what they are, being a ‘vegetarian’ vampire by not eating live people and those repercussions, dealing with the transformation into the wolf that takes place every month, or trying to cope with your own tragic death. 

Being Human is a great show and another one of my total nerd indulgences.  It shows supernatural beings at their rawest, trying to cope with what they are, not lusting around trying to make a decision on whom they should marry or be with. The show is now winding down to the season 2 finale, so anyone who has some free time, I recommend taking some time to get hooked to this great show.  

Plotto

So it has been some time since I posted, and for my few followers I apologize.  Regardless it has been an intense few weeks and a number of stories and other writing based concepts that I have come across.  One such is William Wallace Cook’s story plotting tool Plotto.  I was initially really mad to get this book, reason being my girlfriend’s aunt ordered the book for me without letting me know, so my first time seeing it I was seething at Amazon.  After realizing who it was from and what it was I became curious.  Barbara, my girlfriend’s aunt, explained that she had heard about it on NPR and it sounded interesting so she ordered it for me. 

I was not sure what to make of the book since it contains phrases almost out of an algebra textbook to help come up with themes for stories, character development, as well as fractions of statements that can be mixed and matched together to come up with an (semi-)original three-act story structure. 

This book is way too interesting to describe in a blog post and I recommend any writer who is even occasionally looking for inspiration to pick up this book, or at least leaf through it at your local bookshop and see what it is all about.  It has been described as the book that every author denies using, but has a copy on their desk. 

The brief history of this book is that Cook while writing around the turn of the century was a pulp novelist, meaning that he would pump out sixty novels a year in some years, (yes that is correct sixty, 60 novels) and Cook came up with a much larger volume to keep track of the stories and plotlines he had used.  After a long career he wrote Plotto, a condensed version of his own reference and marketed it to writers. 

This is an excellent reference and I feel guilty that I have not yet had a chance to use it; it does come with exercises to learn how to use it while at the same time help you develop a storyline or theme to flesh out on your own.  But rest assured I have thumbed and learned how to use the book and its crazy algebra like structure and I must say it couldn’t be more interesting, definitely worth checking out.      

The End (for now) of A Song of Ice and Fire

Well after months and months of audiobooking I have finished George R.R. Martin’s series’ A Song of Fire and Ice, that is to say the five books that currently make up the series.  I must say as I have in a previous blog or two that I am amazed at the way Martin does storytelling on such an epic scale.  Though in the books there are perhaps 30-50 characters that actually have a chapter devoted to them (a majority have only one, perhaps two) but the major players keep shining through different parts of the story illuminating a small part of the deep world, that Martin allows us to see.  By having the rotating narrative switch from character to character, allowing first person glimpses into each of the characters, Martin takes the small idea of chapters, and blends it amazingly into the rest of the saga unfolding in the rest of the book, giving way to the grander story happening all around these characters.  Masterful in my opinion. 

I have been very pleased with the series and I anxiously await the sixth book in the series whenever it may come out, and I can only hope that Roy Dotrice (who read four of the five novels) comes back for the sixth novel, but at age 86, it remains to be seen if he will.  I personally will miss his voice accompanying me all over Boston,  voice acting every character in the series (he actually holds a Guinness World Record for voicing the 256 speaking characters in the book Game of Thrones: Book One of A Song of Fire and Ice).  As another side note he will be making an appearance on Season 2 of A Game of Thrones on HBO, as Halleyne, an alchemist in the capital city of King’s Landing.  But regardless, I will miss this series until the next installment and the companion to my reading, Roy Dotrice.

Anyone interested in an engrossing fantasy series that is engaging, deep and complex, pick up the first novel, and prepare to be amazed.      

Opposite sides of the coin lately.

Since I have hit a brief respite from my reading in my short novel class I own my nights again as far as reading is concerned.  One of the guilty nerd pleasures that I have is Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Mars’ Trilogy.  It’s a fictional story of the terraforming of Mars.  The three books represent the three major shifts in terraforming towards an earth like planet.  The books are Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.  I have been reading this series off and on for about six months now.  It has been on my night stand for so long it’s nice to be able to pick up where I left off. 

This story is amazing.  It starts as the first person is setting their feet on the Martian surface.  It moves from there through the process of setting up a base, and center of operations and goes on from there. 

What is so engrossing in this story is how the reader gets a first-hand look of how the culture on Mars might evolve.  Again it starts as humans are just landing on Mars.  The First Hundred people from earth land on mars and begin operations.  It grows and grows and the mars planet takes on a whole other worldly feel as cultures, governments, ecologies, and relationships change throughout the process.  In the story the brilliant minds on mars and a many who follow on to mars synthesize a treatment, when if administered at correct intervals a person can live on indefinitely.  The whole story takes place over the course of 150 years or so, a large amount of the story focusing on the First hundred. 

So it has been nice to get back into the politics of mars and its government and see how it transforms.   Like I said a total nerd indulgence. 

The great thing about this story is how it encompasses so much and envisions the world so clearly.  Robinson’s ability to convey every aspect of science that goes into the terraforming of mars as well as the gravity of the culture is stunning.  

One of the other books I have been able to come back to is The Bible According to Mark Twain, it never ceases to amaze me the brilliance of Mark Twain in everything he does.  I am still in the beginning, looking over the different versions of the Diaries of Adam and Eve; starting with the very short beginning pieces to the much longer stories, much more in detail and more complex.  An excellent look at Twain’s process, which I find fascinating.

Fairy Tales and other Stories

So I believe it is fair to say that I am obsessed with the fairy tale television shows on right now.  As I said I have been watching the series Once Upon a Time, but I have also begun to watch the series Grimm.  I like how these two stories represent different sides of the same coin.  Once Upon A Time in itself is pretty tame, with maniacal twists coming at strategic points in the story to maximize effect.  What Grimm does is uses the frankly gruesome Grimm’s fairy tales as a base, and looks at them in the modern context. 

What I appreciate as someone who enjoys the idea of re envisioning stories to give it new meaning and life, I think the darker side of Grimm really hits on that.  with some of the stories reaching a truly demented scale, on example of this is the Series’ fourth episode where a goat like creature called  Ziegevolk or Bluebeards, has hypnotized women, as well as holding them captive and breeding with them.  Some very disturbing subject matter, and it seems that the episodes do not let up, a very chilling way to revision Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales. 

These stories make me realize the interesting things you can do with re thinking material.  As a side note, the BBC’s new series ‘Sherlock’ does a similarly excellent job re envisioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters and stories and applying them to modern day London. 

As for the novel St. Mawr by D.H. Lawrence it ended very well and it does represent an excellent piece of literature.  The way that Lawrence uses the character of a horse to truly examine the concept of passion, as well the state of gender in post-World War I England is enlightening to read.  This is just a great piece of literature and I enjoyed it immensely, the way he portrays passion is something I would like to emulate. 

I have also started he book The Yacubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany.  I am only about half the way through the book, and so far it appears to be a look at the lives of a number of different people who span different social and economic classes in early nineties Egypt.  I think so far it is very interesting and frank in its discussion of Egyptian culture.  I can see why it is an international bestseller, and why it has been translated into nine languages.  I have high hopes for how the story progresses and comes to a head. 

I hope to have more time and more pages done in the future, and actually write.  Until then.

“I think the story is my form.”
Joseph Epstein