
{"id":184,"date":"2007-04-26T06:41:39","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T14:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/04\/26\/solidly-in-genre\/"},"modified":"2007-04-26T06:42:27","modified_gmt":"2007-04-26T14:42:27","slug":"solidly-in-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/04\/26\/solidly-in-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"Solidly in genre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Erica Eisdorfer <\/em><\/p>\n<p>I work with lots of college students and try to pay attention to their interests and tastes.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/04\/simmons.jpg\" align=\"right\" height=\"223\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" width=\"159\" \/> Recently, one of them put a book directly into my hands. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Read this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said seriously. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just read it and tell me what you think.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Generally a jovial youth, quick to laugh, his demeanor, as he offered up the book, was serious and slightly awed. I took the book home.<\/p>\n<p>The novel, The Terror, by Dan Simmons, the Hugo-Award winning author of the Hyperion<br \/>\nCantos, is massive, which I like. I just happen to like a sustained narrative. Also, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s set in the cold cold north (the Arctic Circle), which appeals to me. (I loved Andrea Barrett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Voyage of the Narwhal, another Arctic book, so much that I actually wrote her a fan letter.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The characters are finely drawn \u00e2\u20ac\u201c flawed, complicated, interesting \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re imbued with that slightly depressed tone that I just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get enough of. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no wonder they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re depressed. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been stuck in glacial pack ice for a couple of years when the book opens.<\/p>\n<p>Simmons\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s information is deep: Ask him anything about the English Navy or Marines in the years between 1823 and 1850. Go ahead. Ask him.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read until 2:00 a.m. for about five nights in a row, because I did. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t put the thing down (despite its extraneous 200 pages (apparently Mr. Simmons is important and\/or scary enough that his editors are afraid to do their jobs). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t largely enjoy it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not not recommending it. All I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m saying is this: Why did Mr. Simmons feel that the addition of a boogie-monster was necessary when he already had about 700 pages of scurvy, cannibalism, snow-blindness, gangrene, starvation, Inuit vs. British explorer conflict and a whole bunch of rats? To me, what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s real is a whole lot scarier than what isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, any day of the week.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quibble with taste. Lots of people like horror. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an author named Stephen King who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s made a good living from it. But if you think about Frankenstein and why it was horrible, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll realize it was the inner lives \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of the monster, as well as of the good doctor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that made it so. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what boosts a book out of genre and into literature. As it is, The Terror is a horror story, albeit a really good one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Erica Eisdorfer I work with lots of college students and try to pay attention to their interests and tastes. Recently, one of them put a book directly into my hands. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Read this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said seriously. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just read it and tell me what you think.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Generally a jovial youth, quick to laugh, his demeanor, as&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}