Whoohoo! Two books at once!

[le_bebna_kamni]

Spring break has arrived, and I'll finally get around to sending e-mails toward people's inboxes. I've got a busy week ahead of me, but in a good way. I have a lot of things that I've been wanting to do (errands, chores, as well as fun things) that I hope will get done this week.

To inaugurate my week of fun, I've already done two things: purchased Guild Wars:Nightfall and read two books over the weekend. I'm exceptionally pleased with Nightfall. I was getting to the point in Prophecies where I couldn't do most of the quests without resorting to joining a group. Apart from the few people I game with, I absolutely hate joining groups, because you often end up with immature players who are only in it for themselves. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a group where someone will drop out just because things aren't going as quickly or as smoothly as they wanted, leaving the rest of the party in a bind because we no longer have our tank or our healer or some other critical member. And they usually drop out at the worst possible moment (i.e., in the middle of a crucial battle with a boss).

Guild Wars has henchmen you can hire, it's true, but the henchmen are only good up to a certain level before the AI just isn't good enough to handle the harder tasks. But Nightfall has made up for this problem by adding Heroes. Heroes are like henchmen, but you can control them directly ‒ you can change their armor and weapons, and even go so far as telling them exactly which spells or skills to use in battle. And the AI is pretty good if you don't feel like micro-managing. Unlike Alesia (the Prophecies henchman healer), your Hero healers won't go off and get themselves killed unless you specifically set them to attack. You can even set them to run away from battle if things start getting rough. As most RPGs go, healers are the lifeblood of the party and should be kept alive at all costs ‒ the rest of the party can die, but if the healer still lives they can always resurrect the party.

I've only done about four hours of gameplay so far, but I like what I see. I enjoy the fact that Nightfall gives you much more experience for the quests than Prophecies has done. I also like the new Dervish class that has been added, and I'm looking forward to purchasing Factions so I can play a Dervish/Assassin ‒ a combination that I've heard kicks ass.

Now on to my books:

Book #5: A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Penultimate Peril, by Lemony Snicket

As the series is winding down, I don't know if I'm just getting tired of the story line, or if the author is merely caving in to the pressure to churn out more books. For those of you not familiar with the books (or who didn't see the so-so movie adaptation), A Series of Unfortunate Events is the tale of three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Forced to leave their happy home when a mysterious fire destroys their house and kills their parents, the three children are thrown into a world where villains abound and very few things turn out the way they want. Throughout all the books, the children are chased by the evil Count Olaf, who wants to capture the children and steal the Baudelaire fortune. They also find themselves enmeshed in a mystery surrounding an organization called V.F.D., and the novels revolve around their discoveries of how they, their family, and their various guardians are all related to this organization.

The 12th novel, The Penultimate Peril, brings the Baudelaires to a place called the Hotel Denouement, where they work as concierges to try and discover which people are the villains, and which ones are on their side. While the story is still good, the writing seems more tedious to me, and lacks some of the more clever humor that I saw in the earlier books. Of particular note, I loved the tongue-in-cheek asides that catered to the adult crowd ‒ things that children would have read and gone, "Daddy, why is this funny?" Perhaps the parents got tired of trying to answer certain questions and complained to "Mr. Snicket". I also feel sad that Sunny is learning to talk. While it speeds up the comprehension of the story, it also loses some of the many subtleties where Sunny makes pseudo-cryptic remarks that are quite hilarious if you figure out what she's saying.

While I highly recommend the series, this book is probably not the best one he's written.

Book #6: A Series of Unfortunate Events: The End, by Lemony Snicket

The book finds the three siblings washed up on an inhabited island, along with the nefarious Count Olaf, as well as another character that you might be surprised to see. The orphans have to deal with the over-controlling island mediator, Ishmael, as well as thwart Olaf's plans to take over the island, while trying to learn more about how V.F.D. is connected with the island. Sunny has reverted to more of her old talking, which makes me quite pleased.

While the story itself is good and keeps you reading, "Mr. Snicket" spends way too much time creating lists in this book. He goes back over the history of the Baudelaires several times, listing events that have happened; he lists debris that washes in with the storm; he catalogues items in the arboretum; he describes every spice in the kitchen; he drones on about obscure references to things that are tangential to the story and never explained (more so than previous books, where the interruptions were much more humorous). It slows the book down, and made me want to skim for a few pages to avoid the tedious lists.

The book itself answers very few of the mysteries that it raises in earlier books, but this is not entirely uncalled for. One of the messages of this last book is that no one ever knows the whole story. Every book is really en media res ‒ every character (or person in the world, for that matter) has a life before and after the book, and every character has something about their lives that causes them to act the way they do in that particular book, even if it isn't explained. No one is entirely villainous or good, although we still may tend toward one side or the other. All in all, a good book with enough teasers to keep you reading, even past the tedium.

Don't forget to read past the end of The End. Technically there is a fourteenth book (consisting of a single chapter) hidden just past the author and artist credits (by the way, if you haven't been reading the credits, you might want to see the pictures for that particular set). I wonder if this means that technically I've also read Book #7...