Well, time for another update!!
I started reading
Doctor Sleep right after I grabbed it, even before returning home. Very cool novel, while not exactly a "grand masterpiece", it was a thrilling ride.
I finished on the 7th of September and moved right on to
Duma Key... and am still not finished.
Now, don't get me wrong, the novel is great, the protagonist is very well relatable, his daughter Ilse is an absolute darling
and I also generally like the very slow pace and build-up. I'm now about 200 pages away from finishing the ~750 page book, even read about 100 pages last Saturday but was so conked out I slept around 4 hours in the evening...
But that's not the main point here!
THE BOOK PROJECT OR: 20 BOOKS IN SEVEN DAYS!
The title says it all!
I fondly remember some of my reading sprees in the past. I once managed to read seven books in a single week, the only one of those I actually remember belonging to that batch was a treatise on The Lord Of The Rings... The other splurge I remember better was more than a decade ago, I read something like the last 60 pages of
Cocoon II, followed by the short
Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W. (A German book, actually from the GDR, which is loosely based on Goethe's "Werther" - it was astonishingly good!), that was about 180 pages, then
The Songs of Distant Earth, about 320 pages, and finally, at like 5 in the morning, the first 30 pages of
Hannibal - which I then completed the following day, another 550 pages or so.
Now, as I have also mentioned a long time ago, I have these huge columns of books on and below a radiator - my "book wall", containing roughly 360 volumes (I haven't actually counted in a long time...). Which recently partially came crashing down on me right when I was thinking of a crazy plan I had conjured some months ago: To read (at least!) 20 books in a week!! Now, originally I had envisioned taking a week off to do this, but it soon became clear that this would be nigh impossible to pull through. Not only would I have to take vacation, I'd need to somehow decouple myself from pretty much everything (including this forum
) for a week!
So instead, I decided to parcel it into one day chunks. And yesterday was
DAY 1!!
When my books came toppling down, I used the clean-up to separate out short books of which I should be able to read several a day - if I could keep up the pace of 3 a day, that would do it. I decided to get out pretty much everything of 200 pages and less. Of course, the actual word number depends strongly on the type size, and I've noticed most of these short books also have small type. My general reading speed is 30 pages per hour, but this seems to be for a small type size, for larger ones, it can go up to twice that. In the end, I ended up with a ridiculous
46 books!! And that from only four authors!!! 4 books by Ben Bova (including one later addition, "Star Watchman", after I figured out that the book "The Watchmen" contains two novels including one I had already picked out as a single volume, "The Dueling Machine"), 5 by Frank Herbert (after I found out that "Whipping Star" is linked to the long "The Dosadi Experiment", I added the latter as well though it has 300 pages), and the complete rest distributed among Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. I have an incredible amount of books by the latter, and that's FAR from a complete biography (which is likely impossible to collect, considering he wrote a lot of soft porn in the late 50s to make money which has never seen the light of day again since then...). Just the short books made up exactly half my contingent (and there's another 42 books in my wall...).
On Saturday morning, I sat down and tabulated all the books, writing out the page number and estimating how long it would take to read them. Assuming 12-hour days... over 19 days!!!
This will be a challenge!
I also read a few book intros (with Roman numeral page numbers, so they did not count
), especially for some Robert Silverberg books, seems he reissued a bunch of his early works in 1976.
So on Sunday, I woke up at 11 in the morning, and, after a short stint at the computer, started my project!!!
Warning: Some Spoilers follow!
Frank Herbert - Direct Descent: I decided to start with this one since it had quite large print and was filled with black-and-white illustrations. It turned out to be a ridiculously fast read, just 100 minutes!!!
(That's 112 pages per hour...)The book is set in some far future, Earth has been transformed into a gigantic Galactic Library, whose Prime Directive is: Obey the Government! But what if the government is out to destroy the library because their maxim is that only ignorance is bliss?
It consists of basically two novellas, one set another several thousand years after the first (and the name of the book gets resolved in the very last sentence...). It reminded me a lot of Asimov's original Foundation series, where Hari Seldon also has to use his brains against the crazed, decadent and decaying Galactic Empire to preserve Mankind's future. The thing was a quick, fun read, interestingly from 1980, so among the later volumes in Herbert's career (he died in '86). According to Wikipedia, it's more of a Young Adult novel.
Frank Herbert - The Eyes Of Heisenberg: This one goes much further back, to 1966, a year after the first part of Dune was published. Despite being just 158 pages long, it is a dense, highly engrossing tale of a far, far future in which humans have been split into the "Folk" and the "Optimen" (which do include women
). The Folk are basically worker drones, most of the them are "Sterries" (sterile), sex is completely decoupled from reproduction, reproduction is very rare and completely in vitro. The Optimen, genetically perfected humans who are essentially immortal, reign from a huge fortress located in the heart of the North American Continent (spanning the former border). Of course, this rigid dictatorship foments revolution, in the deep shadows, the Cyborgs coldly plan the downfall of the Optimen, while the Parents Underground try to get mankind back to what it used to be. Quite a few of the passages reminded me of Children of Men - fleeing across a wild landscape in a van pursued by hostiles, trying to protect the only pregnant woman on Earth?? - as well as the Matrix (many of the humans are just clones of clones who do not know that they have lived many lifetimes before in service of their eternal masters). The background of a war between genetically perfected humans and artificial intelligence also is reminiscent to the Dune Universe's Butlerian Jyhad. Really recommended! Despite the small print, I managed to read it in just over four hours (39 pages per hour).
Frank Herbert - The Green Brain: Another one from 1966, and in this case, it looks very much like I actually have the first, original paperback from that year!! Hah! Nearly 40 years old. The name of the book - and the pretty horrible title picture - just screams "B Movie"!!
And the plot is not far off. In a not-too-distant future, the most powerful non-western nations, especially the BRIC ones, have decided that they need more living space, more farmland, better yields, and less disease. The solution? Wipe out the insects. ALL OF THEM!! Of course, they aren't quite THAT stupid, and plan to fill the ecological roles of the beneficial insects with mutated bees. After a 22-year war, China is declared "all green", and the director of operations there has come to Brazil and look into their efforts. The main character of the book is the boss of a Brazilian pest control team (this group really reminded me of the guys from John Carpenter's Vampires...), and of course, there's a beautiful, red-headed Irish entomologist thrown into the mix. And while rumors of giant man-eating bugs spread, deep in the heart of the Amazon, the self-aware insectile hive-entity that just knows it self as The Brain plots to stop the human efforts to turn the Red into the Green...
If all of this sounds like the plot of a movie from The Asylum... Well, it pretty much is!
But this is Frank Herbert, after all, so the rather limited plot is very nicely packaged up, it was quite thrilling and just downright enjoyable in a kind of "so bad it's good" way. Well, maybe not really, more like a small action movie gem, low budget but just cool. Yeah, the John Carpenter comparison makes some sense. At 160 pages, it took me just over 4.5 hours to read. And about half-way through, like ten in the evening, I started to get really tired! Lying in bed all day might not be the best idea for this... I finished it somewhat after midnight and it was becoming work! For the next one, something shorter, please. My eyes were getting bleary... Whipping Star was too long, not to mention I want to read that back-to-back with The Dosadi Experiment. But of course, I have a bunch of Robert Silverberg Books to choose from, and I got...
C. L. Moore - Vintage Season / Robert Silverberg - In Another Country: This is an interesting double effort. Admittedly, C(atherine) L. Moore is otherwise an unknown to me, but it seems her novella Vintage Season is an absolute SF classic. In an otherwise unnamed American city set roughly in the "now", a young man rents out one of his houses (in which he also lives himself) to a group of elegant foreigners who speak perfectly enunciated English, clothe themselves fabulously and just generally have a very peculiar manner. They wish to live in this house during this beautiful May, eschewing the comfort of a grand hotel down the road. Soon, more of these elegant humans, who almost walk as if they were gods, show up. Are they waiting for something? And why have they gathered here, at this time? The story (about 80 pages long, quite large print) is superbly written, and feels astonishingly modern. While a telephone is mentioned, and a "transcontinental airplane", it is otherwise devoid of things that might date it, and thus bridges the time span easily. Silberberg's book then (about 120 pages making for a total of exactly 200, I took 3.5 hours to read the two) was written as a deliberate companion piece to Vintage Season, now from the perspective of one of the visiting foreigners (one never mentioned in VS, part of another group). While it is more specified that it is the late 20th Century (Silverberg's book is from 1989 and thus also plays in the "now"), the city is still unnamed. "Twin Towers" are mentioned, but also that it is neither the largest nor the most important city in what seems to be the USA, and it lies in a deep valley surrounded by hills, I don't think that's the case with NYC (also, no mention of a nearby ocean). This story was not quite as good as the original, especially since much of the suspense concerning the strangers' origin and goal was completely gone. But it was fun when this tale again and again crossed paths with the characters and occurrences of the original. I spent the last 80 pages in my computer chair so as to keep awake, and shortly before 5 in the morning, I had made it!!
I actually read four books in a single day! Wowzers!!! The books for Day 2 are already on top of my column, again, I should be able to do four.
I'm curious as to how much I read! The crazy thing is, I actually used a stop watch to time my pure reading time. Up at the computer or fixing some food? The timer stops. In total, I was up about 18 hours and spent 13.9 of those reading. NOT GOOD ENOUGH!! I'd rather have it 15/16 or so... I'm roughly guessing I read between 150,000 and 200,000 words, likely closer to the latter, or about a 600 page novel in normal type.
No exact idea when I can continue this. I'll shoot for this Sunday, of course, and try to keep it up weekly, but I'll not always have the time. also, for the most part, I'll only be able to read three books a day, as most of them are 180 - 200 pages in small print, and I'll likely take about 5 hours to read each of them.