Sunday Morning Book Thread 07-07-2013: Heroes and Ante-heroes [OregonMuse]

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the the award-winning AoSHQ's Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Jack Reacher Questions

OK, so Mrs. Muse and I watched the movie adaptation last night. I had low expectations for it, but I have to admit, all things considered, it was competently done. But I have no idea how much it does or doesn't line up with the books, since I've never read any of them. So, my questions are:

1) Is Tom Cruise a believable Jack Reacher? I know he's a lot smaller than the Jack Reacher of the novels, but did he manage make it work? Cruise does not have a physically intimidating screen presence. Sandy's "brothers" all thought, yeah, I can take this guy, and were then unpleasantly surprised. I can't imagine any bad guy in the novels thinking this.

2) The movie bad guy ultimately turned out to be (wait for it) a large corporation. Really? I see this so often in movies, it's just so boring. But is that true to the book? I remember what they did to Clancy's novel Sum of All Fears where the Arab terrorists were, for no reason I can discern, turned into the left's other favorite bad guys, American Neo-Nazis. Much to the detriment of the movie, I might add. So I'm wondering if something like that happened here.

[Update]: Apparently, the appropriate moron question is not whether Tom cruise is a credible Jack Reacher. Commenter perdogg gets to the heart of the matter:

45 I actually thought the movie was good. The question I have is does Rosamund Pike ever wear a bra in the movie. Posted by: perdogg at July 07, 2013 11:26 AM (ziD3M)

A fair point. Mrs. Muse and I both noticed some parts of the movie where the scene was dominated not by Jack Reacher's menacing presence, but by Ms. Pike's ginormous hooters. (please note that I resisted the obvious "Pike's peaks" joke)

"Honey, I think I Left My Curling Iron Plugged In!"^*

^*Mrs. Muse does this to me every time we go someplace, and it drives me nuts.

Books By Morons

The sixth chapter of the book of Genesis contains the following curious verse:

Gen 6:4 There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

"Giants" is a translation of the word "", and some versions don't even bother translating it in that verse, like the ESV, whch reads "The were on the earth in those days, and also afterward..." So who were these guys and what were they doing? Depending, of course, on how you interpret "sons of God", it could be that they're some sort of angelic/human hybrid, but how is that even possible? As you might guess, there's plenty of opportunity for speculation here, which gives storytellers like infrequent moron commenter and author 'Doctor Cynic' lots of room to work. He has just released the Kindle version of his book-of-Genesis-meets-epic-fantasy novel Antediluvian with dead-tree edition to follow. The storyline is that a huge, dinosaur-like beast, called a leviathan, has crawled out of a sea inlet and made its way upriver and is threatening livestock and people in the surrounding villages. It seems that nobody can beat this fearsome creature, yet something has to be done, so it falls on a young farmer named Noah (yeah, that Noah) to find a way to either kill it or drive it back into the sea. He enlists the aid of the , and then things get complicated, both for him and also for the entire human race. The Amazon blurb contains a surprisingly large number of plot points and outright spoilers, so I need to stop here.

I greatly enjoyed screenwriter Brian Godawa's movie To End All Wars of a few years back, and while poking around on this '' topic, I discovered that has a series of 'antediluvian' novels of his own, whch he calls The Chronicles of the :

Noah Primeval
Enoch Primordial
Gilgamesh Immortal
Abraham Allegiant

Pedants who point out that the last two books take place after the Flood, and therefore should more properly be called 'postdiluvian', are obviously racists.

I'm guessing there's probably a metric boatload of novels by other authors in this genre. Like vampire or zombie novels, the ideas and characters and storylines that could be mined from the available material is potentially inexhaustible.

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Moron commenter 'J.D. Nock' has just released More Than Mischief (The Hurley Vance Series: Book One) on Smashwords, and as the title says, it's the first of a series (Nock is nearing completion of the first draft of the second book). He describes it as

...a dystopian novel written from the libertarian/conservative perspective, and it is intended for a “new adult” audience. My hope is that this story will serve as an unapologetic and entertaining way to carry a message. And to bring this message to an audience otherwise indifferent to issues concerning the State.

And for the next week, it will be available for FREE at Smashwords. All you need need to do is input the coupon code "SW100" at rhe checkout. There are a number of formats available, pdf, epub, mobi, etc.

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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, rumors, and insults may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'g'-mail, dot you-know-what.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as we all know, life is too short to read lousy books.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:50 AM

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