Thumbing my way through Arguably essays by Christopher Hitchens, just reading the ones that interest me. A friend of mine keeps nagging me to read Howl's Moving Castle, and she even went so far as to loan me her copy of it, I just need to take the time to sit down and start on it. The Anthologist by Nicholas Baker is also high on my pending reads list.
<<<WARNING: Bioshock ramble to follow. All persons who have a tendency not to care about Bioshock are advised to stop reading.>>>
I never did finish that Bioshock book I was so excited about... I was REALLY enjoying it, but kept tripping over parts where I felt the author completely misunderstood the source material, or wrote major players completely out of character.
Another annoying habit the author had was forcing direct long stretches of quotes from the game into his dialogue. Tannenbaum, a character who speaks with broken English in the game, is a good example of this. At one point in the book she is in the middle of conversation with another character, speaking in the style the author writes her in, where her English is considerably less broken than in the game, then suddenly for a few sentences the author has her quoting some of her dialogue from the game verbatim and her English gets more broken, once she is done quoting herself her English immediately improves. All this in the course of a single paragraph. Little things like that happened a lot. I eventually couldn't take it anymore. I guess I should appreciate the authors attempt at trying to include as many references and nods to the source material in his book as possible, but I honestly think he took it to an exhausting length. So what if Bridget Tannenbaum doesn't have exactly the same style of broken speech as in the game? I really don't mind, hardly a big deal at all to me. However, once you start having her randomly feel the necessity to start quoting her audio diaries from the games and mixing the two different speech styles within the same sentence, you have something that will pull you right out of the book. It would be like mixing quotes from OT Yoda with quotes from PT Yoda, the result would feel really uneven.
In the game there is an audio diary by Eleanor Lamb, it has her as a child playfully carrying on a conversation with the tape recorder, like a little girl might do with a doll. Eventually she tells the tape recorder that she is going to take him apart, but not to worry, because she will put him back together again. In her mock tape recorder voice she protests, ending in a drowned out "Nooooooooo..." The audio diary went a long way in telling us that Eleanor had a pretty lonely childhood, and also that she was an extremely curious child who liked to take things apart to figure out how they worked.
John Shirley decided to include this scene in his book. He quotes the whole audio diary verbatim, then ends it with Sophia Lamb staring in horror as she watches her little girl start hacking the tape recorder to pieces by stabbing at it with a screwdriver. It make Eleanor come off as kind of a psycho child, rather than lonely and curious.
End overly nerdy nitpicking rant.
