Was It Good for You?

Fire It Up

I'm aghast that some people are calling 2009 the year of the Kindle, but apparently some people – not booksellers, mind you – would like us to think that the demise of the traditional paper-and-glue variety of book is at hand (a hand I gladly and ferociously bite). For me, a born reader since Richard Scarry and A.A. Milne, the Kindle represents neither progress nor some sort of literary evolution, but a cheap po-cultural power grab by an already insanely wealthy and far too influential corporation desperate to keep ahead of some imagined bottom-line curvature. Its bland design puts one in mind of a cheapie B-movie sci-fi prop, or a Soviet-era not-so-great leaps forward. Even Ray Bradbury, who wrote the classic novel of a bookless future society, Fahrenheit 451, has chimed in on the debate, saying that "E-books smell like burned fuel." (As opposed, one assumes, to the headier and more melancholically aged smokiness of printed matter. Oh, the irony.) The most salient – and potentially fun to explore – question is this: At what degree Fahrenheit does the Kindle auto-ignite? Buy me one, and I'll let you know via YouTube.

Enough hating, though. One honest-to-goodness book that rocked my world this year was Ron Currie Jr.'s Everything Matters! (Viking), a strange and beautiful novel about a young man who learns while in utero that the Earth will cease to exist in 36 years, 168 days, 14 hours, and 23 seconds, thanks to a rogue comet that will impact the planet. Currie previously wrote the excellent short story collection God Is Dead, and his nuanced characterizations, darkly comic asides, and sheer powers of imagination render this debut novel less a doomstruck downer than a celebration of a life lived in the shadow of mortal inevitability. Highly recommended, this one.

Not so with Stephen King's 1,000 pages-plus Under the Dome (Scribner), which is in reality a terrifically overdone and ultimately dull reworking of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," a chestnut of an old Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling circa 1960. King overkills on Serling's original idea – alien forces fuck with American small-town folk causing the precepts of civilization to vanish overnight – and it turns out to be King's weakest work since the similarly themed Tommyknockers two decades back. Makes one helluva doorstop, though.