Uglies, Pretties, and Specials
ok. so on top of all the other stuff i have been reading lately, i became thoroughly engrossed in a series which has not let me down in the slightest. this is a bit long winded, but keep in mind it is in reference to reading three books.. and i am trying REALLY hard not to give away spoilers..
it is hard to write about this book because in the context of the review, the keywords and mannerisms of the characters society seems like nothing but grammar and spelling errors. bear with it though, in the books, you are so washed over with the word use and logic that it actually makes sense in the proper frame.
the Uglies trilogy (now a quadrilogy?) was very engrossing. Book one, Uglies, describes a world where there is no war. there is no famine, hatred, or turmoil. 200-300 years in the past over population, strip mining, clear cutting, genetic engineering of plants and animals laid waste on everything in the world. humans have rebuilt from the ashes after we destroyed ourselves. our generation is referred to as “the rusties” since everything left from our world is covered in rust and falling apart.
Tally Youngblood is 15 years old, and only months away from becoming one of the “pretties”. in this world, to remove all of the dangerous human habits of destruction, you are born and raised by your parents, once you hit a certain age (8 or 9 from what i could tell) you are shipped off to school as an ugly. at the age of 16 you are taken from school where you will be put under the knife and remade as a better person. your bones are ground down and or elongated, you have new muscle tissue added to your body, and you have full facial re-constructive surgery. all “pretties” have a choice on how they look, with in the guidelines of the governments rules of morphology. they effectively remove all extremes in height, hair color, skin color, etc. everyone is similar and there is no need for hatred.
Tally, in waiting for her 16th birthday meets a new friend, Shay, who has no desire to become one of the pretties. a week before their shared birthday/graduation from being uglies, Shay decides to run off to a rumored group of rebels who have shafted the system and stayed ugly, and foregone all efforts to work within the system. Tally however has no desire to join her friend and sticks around for her surge (surgery). her only desire is become pretty and join her friends in New Pretty town, where she can dance and play and enjoy the life she has been programmed to want since birth.
Unfortunately, Tally is roped into a game of social change. she is scooped up by the fearsome and dangerous police force that acts as bogeymen for the government. Special Circumstances (the Specials) only comes forward when needed, generally letting the local police force take care of everything. This being a “Special circumstance” Tally is forced to follow her friend to the encampment of rebels (the Smoke) and betray her friend, and everyone who has escaped so far. if she does not, she will be denies surge and will forever be Ugly. and in this society, this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.
Book one was so good, that i had an itch to move on to book two immediately. i hate doing that. i love to stretch a series out if possible, and draw out the enjoyment from the story line. so when book one was finished, though i really wanted to move on to the second book, i ramped myself down and read the Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja book. Book two immediately followed and when finished i lost all self control and my fingers and eyes forced me to read book three next.. it took about two days with my schedule.. two lousy days.. why couldnt it last longer… i wasted a great book by reading it too soon..
well, not a waste. damn. it was so good, i had no choice really.. it was in my best interest to read the book. or so i keep telling myself. there is a fourth book. it was written after the trilogy was announced, so it is a bit of an anomaly, thus the trilogy quadrilogy notation above. unfortunately, the book Extras is still in hardback edition, so until it hits paperback, i will have to force myself to wait.. this sucks..
these books, written by Scott Westerfeld, fall into the teen-fiction category. they are written for teens, but the story line and books themselves do not lend themselves only to teens. being thirty years old, i literally could not stop reading these books. if you need a good break from your normal reading schedule, i would throw these in the mix and read them. they all rank around 300 pages of single space small print, so they are not some little read you would use to sturdy the kitchen table. instead, they are full of vibrant ideas, technology, tattoos that i wish were a reality. there were no obvious plot twists that made me think “why am i reading this” or “how predictable” instead, i was often surprised and left feeling “bubbly” as they state in the book.
imagine a world full of barbie dolls being slowly destroyed by barbie’s cyber-punk kid sister that has been kept in the closet for years.
i was sad to come to the end of this series, but glad to know that i will have at least one more book to close it all up in the near future.
anyone who is interested should note that all three of the first books can be bought in a boxed set for under 20 bucks.. this is how i got sucked into them.. a really good price for a nice story line idea turned into one of the best purchases i have made on books in a while. now, i just have to hope that hollywood has not gotten their hands on the thought of movies. these would be thoroughly ruined and not done justice.. read them before someone fucks them up for you… thats all i have to say on the matter.
passable perfection
there are exceptions to everything, the following has nothing to do with the exceptions. we all like to think that we ARE the exception, and feign surprise when we are told we are not.
we are living in the post polaroid age. people no longer wait for film to be fully used, then developed to see what they took a photo of. we are past the days of polaroid cameras and 1 hour photos. instant prints and an hour wait are too long to see snapshots of what just happened, “living history”. we want the instant rewind. we want the ability to edit something on the fly till it reaches a “passable perfection”. we want the digital camera.
waiting seems to be a cancer everyone chooses to flee from. 12 hour drives reduced to two hour flights. instant downloads of music the day it is made for sale, often times earlier. sports cars that are faster though the users are either unable to drive fast, or unwilling to drive fast. advertisements on bus benches stating you could sell your house in 24 hours.
i saw a commercial on television touting the benefits of a anti-histamine that works (up to) two hours faster than their leading competitor. thats it. their whole marketing strategy was based around the promise of “up to two hours” faster relief.
we are all participants in the race between the tortoise and the hare. except, it seems that not only is the tortoise slow, but someone put him in a box and locked it before the race.
maybe i think about it too much.
please share any thoughts you may have.
Other | Comment (1)peeing out my ass/peeing out my butt
wtf..
you write one little post about reading a good book on the john and suddenly half your site traffic is recieved from devoted fetishists searching out defecation videos?
I DEMAND A HIGHER CALIBER OF WEB VISITORS!
those of you who actively read and participate in communication here aside of course.
as a side note, today i have been alive for 11,154 days.. overall it was a good day.
Check out
http://www.11154.net/
once you get deeper in to the flash animation on the site, there is a hell of a lot of interesting music on here, smooth stuff based on hiphop, breakbeats, some stuff that drove me crazy, some that didnt.
that is all.. oh yeah.. peeing out my ass.. dont ever search that phrase.. you will be sad at how lame the internet is..
image found on sepiamutiny.com
Other | Comment (0)self help, and how to be someone you are not.
in the last couple months i have read two books that have walked me through the process of learning how to be someone i am not. One teaches the inner “way of the zombie” and how to incorporate the highly successful methods and habits of zombies to bring you to enlightenment and the culmination of your goals. the other is about how cool ninjas are and how you can become one if you can find one, get kidnapped by one, or fake it if you have the gut feeling that you could hack it in single combat with a pirate. neither of these books did anything for me except make me laugh, which, i gotta say, is the greatest self help technique in the world.
either way, they could both be considered self help, and i may actually need more help after finishing them than i did before reading them. well, these two books bring you to contrasting versions of reality. they drop you into worlds that are uncomfortable and unforgiving. one is semi useful yet ridiculous, the other is completely ridiculous and not useful in the slightest… unless you need that laugh described before.
The Zen of Zombie:Better Living through the Undead
Scott Kenemore is the a Zen Master. breaking down the barriers of modern life, he is able to pinpoint specific areas of your world where the emulation of Zombie characteristics will enable you to excel at all you do and say. and by say i mean, dont say.. because zombies do not talk.
in fact, that is one of the points that he pushes. why come across in a meeting as a kiss ass when a simple moan will pass along both feelings of dismay as well as appreciation for an idea. if you speak a lot about nothing, people assume you generally have nothing to say. if you limit your vocalizations as a zombie would, then people will recognize more weight in your statements. when a zombie makes a sound, everyone better listen up.
the basis of this book is single-mindedness to achieve a goal. nothing stops a zombie. zombies dont care about being PC or about material possessions. they have no desire for a fancy car or a big house. this is not to say that you could not care about these. through reading this book, you are (very heavy handedly) taught that you do not need to be the undead in order to emulate the undead. their resourceful ness and uncompromising approach to life [?] is the key to happiness at its basest of levels.
If a zombie can chase down its prey with one leg, you should be able to get that promotion, or ask the girl out in your office that you have had a half chub for. zombies do not follow laws or let others tell them what to do. we have all the bonuses of a living human, and by taking the positive aspects of zombism, one could become the next step in social evolution.
it was humorous, and actually had a fair amount of decent points in it.. though i read it only for the zombie humor, it was a well thought out book with a fantastic set of ideas, provided you took many of them a grain or two of salt.
Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book
Author Robert Hamburger really let one loose here. The book is written from the perspective of a 13 year old boy, though never really described fully. Robert is completely obsessed with Ninjas. They are as he describes “The SWEETEST mammals ever”. James Novy, illustrates all of the ninja magic and awesomeness.
Robert Hamburger himself exists and is not 13 years old. He runs a ninja homepage over at http://realultimatepower.net under the 13 year old persona he created.
This book changed my life. when i grow up i want to kill someone!
-Cindy, age 7.5
i hated to love this book. i loed to hate it. every 2 or three pages i would want to put it down. i wanted to rip out the pages and leave it behind for someone to tape together and torture themselves with later. generally, with in seconds of this feeling i was bowled over with a complete attitude overhaul as Robert filled my brain with violence and bizarre childish humor. moments later i would be back in a cyclone of regret as i trudged another page waiting for another nugget of joyous banter.
Dealing with Ninjas on a personal level, page 113-114
If a ninja wants to kill you there’s pretty much nothing you can do. You can tell all your family that you hate them before you go, but that’s about it. But if you think you’re lucky, you could try putting a bowl of chili outside your window. If a ninja is about to kill you and he’s sneaking through your window, he might see the chili, eat it, and come inside your room and hug you while you’re sleeping, holding you in his arms, rocking you back and forth, wishing for a better life for you, somewhere far away from here. If this happens, then just lie there and enjoy it. And don’t move either, because I heard that there was this one kid who woke up and the ninja was really embarrassed and it got pretty weird for everyone involved.
wow.. i mean wow. robert is a messed up kid in this book. he equates killing and destruction with cuddling and the manly figures that play ball with young boys. he describes the hatred his family has for him and the torture and loneliness he has from school. it is all rolled up into a never ending run on sentence with the words sweet and boner used as often as physically possible.
a few “chapters” in, we started seeing foot notes which are used to introduce Robert’s babysitter. John edits the book, adds additional information to clarify and strengthen Roberts points. as you read the book you see their relationship dissipate and die. it is all in the name of good humor and joyous introspective teenage looks at what is cool and what is “bullshit”
Robert is obsessive, dirty minded, semi-illiterate, suicidal, a run-away risk, and overall one of the most fucked up characters i have ever read a book by/about.
screw you Robert Hamburger. you got what you deserve, and yet.. i hope that your father really is a ninja.. i think you deserve that too.. scrap that.. i loved the laugh.. and the book.. but still it lurks in my subconcious that i should hire a nija to kill the author.. it would serve him right, prove his point, and partially make up for unleashing this shitty awesome book on the world..
i want to read it again… and again.. then burn it and make robert hamburger eat the ashes through his ass…great.. now i am thinking like a 13 year old…
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