Pac-Man Fever

On the back cover of Ready Player One, the reviewer blurbs are full of people I’ve never heard of, who have written books I’ve never seen. But, the first review is from Charlaine Harris, who wrote the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood books. I don’t have the book in front of me, but her blurb says something like, “I don’t know anything about video games and I loved this book!” It’s an obvious bid to woo the ladies to read the book, but I’m with Charlaine.

The book focuses on a not-so-distant future, when everyone is plugged into a virtual world for most of the day and the real world has become a Mad Max kind of place. The creator of the virtual world, James Halliday, has died and his fortune is held in escrow until a gamer manages to find three keys and go through three gates. Halliday is obsessed with the 1980’s, so almost everyone in the world has become an expert on the decade. That, of course, was the hook for me. I wasn’t lost during the focus on gaming, but I certainly wasn’t enough of a geek to know programmer trivia or cheat codes for Pac-Man and I really don’t know much more about Dungeons and Dragons than the basics.

I’m going to tell you that the book was pretty long, and it focused on one main gamer who didn’t go outside for weeks at a time, his best friends who he’s never met in person, and an evil corporation determined to win Halliday’s inheritance and control of the virtual world. There’s endless 80’s pop culture references and the vast majority of the book is descriptions of a virtual landscape or games within the game. Ignore all that and read it anyway. It’s as engrossing as any adventure movie and moves just as fast.

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer

She was only two-foot eight-inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia “Vinnie” Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P. T. Barnum, married the tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century, and transformed into the world’s most unexpected celebrity.

                                           - from the Goodreads summary

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb: A Novel was outstanding. Using the bare bones of Mrs. Tom Thumb’s actual memoir, Melanie Benjamin turns tiny Vinnie Warren into a fully articulated person. Far from being an exploited sideshow attraction, Vinnie actively pursues a life on stage, joining forces with P.T. Barnum to create insatiable public interest in her life. Benjamin’s thesis is that Vinnie is deeply in love with Barnum and, understanding that they will never marry, is mostly content to be his confidante and equal. For Barnum, she is willing to marry General Tom Thumb, whose fame and size are his only recommendations. Vinnie persuades her shy and naïve sister Minnie to join her on tour, completing a quartet of “little people” for the public’s amazement. Smarter than almost everyone around her (with the notable exception of Barnum), Vinnie convinces herself that what she does, she does for the good of all, but she, like Barnum, has an addiction to manipulation.

Vinnie and Minnie were both born normal-sized, and grew normally until the age of two, when they simply stopped getting taller. They were perfectly proportioned, just tiny. I knew from the prologue that Minnie had died in childbirth, and that was one of the most interesting parts of the story. Vinnie had always refused to consummate her marriage to Tom Thumb, fearing that pregnancy would likely produce a full-sized infant, since she was 6 pounds at birth. Minnie convinced herself that two small people would certainly have a “fairy-sized” baby and got pregnant. She weighed less than 30 pounds and stood less than 30 inches and carried the baby to term. Doctors only attempted C-sections after the mother was past saving, so Minnie labored until she died and then they cut the baby out of her and it didn’t survive. The doctors had recommended that Minnie abort the baby and she had refused. I boggled at the logistics of carrying and delivering a baby that weighed 1/5th of your body weight and was more than 1/2 of your length. I do believe that YIKES is the only correct term I can use in a family-friendly spot like this. (Yes, C-sections, giant baby heads and little tiny pelvic areas, and little cows being torn apart are totally family-friendly, so hush.)

Papa Don’t Preach

When I was a teenager, Norma Klein wrote Young Adult books featuring savvy New York kids who were about 15 years more sophisticated than anyone I knew. These kids talked like the people in Woody Allen movies, and talked about stuff that the teenagers I knew wouldn’t have said out loud even for the promise of a new Benetton sweater. They talked frankly to each other and their parents about the decision to have sex and, since we’ve firmly established how repressed I happily am, you guys know it was always awkward even to read. I don’t think these super-literate and rational teenagers really existed outside of Norma Klein’s head and I watched enough NYC Prep to confirm that. There’s a veneer of sophistication to these kids, but they still have bad skin and a ladleful of hormone soup to swim through.

I just finished Catherine Greenman’s Hooked and she might have grown up on the same Norma Klein books as I did. Thea falls in love with Will in her junior year of high school and gets pregnant as a senior. They decide to keep the baby and move in together. Sounds simple, right? This book is so foreign to anything I can imagine happening if I had gotten pregnant in high school that it feels like science fiction.

Will’s parents only care that he stay in college. Thea’s mother doesn’t care much about any of it and her usually distant father is the only one who seems to care about Thea or the baby. The parents all kick in money to allow Thea and Will to sub-let an apartment while Will goes to school and Thea stays at home with the baby. An accident happens with the baby (nothing too traumatic, I promise) and all the people drift back apart as if they had never met. It’s a strange story, with some subplots written clearly and movingly and other, more major plot points half-drawn and abandoned before they develop real meaning. I still don’t have any idea whether Greenman meant to portray Thea as a good mother or as a little girl making a grownup mistake.