The third planet is sure that they're being watched by an eye in the sky that can't be stopped

I'll start with The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky. It was an okay book. Ultimately forgettable, it hardly ever grabbed my heart out. The format was interesting and the idea of it all was cool (writing a diary in letters to someone who doesn't know you, an address you just pulled out of the phone book) but I wasn't too in love with it. It was kind of like... Like when I described what Crabwalk by Gunter Grass was like to Emma. It was like sleepwalking. All the climaxes were a little under-dramatic. Like the climax at the end--oh. Okay. Huh. What? It was too slow a ticking time-bomb. The difference between this and Crabwalk however, is the fact that... well, one, I liked Crabwalk more. Two, maybe sleepwalking isn't the best way to describe this... It's more beyond sleeping, it's like trying desperately to stay up for the end of a late night movie. It's less dreamy than it is drawn-out. Painfully slow. The images are like the fleeting few details that you remember about that late-night movie... that fade incredibly quickly. Maybe it wasn't fair that I compared these two. Yeah... it wasn't. Anyway, the reason why I read this book is because it became rather popular at my school. It was okay, but for my money, Crabwalk. I... I think this is the most muddled and confusing thing I've ever yet blogged.

First, I feel the need to mention Charlie's (the main character) sister. She gets better later on, but her first relationship is weird. I know how Emma loves crazy women, so I figure I'd bring her up. See, this guy likes her, and she plays hard to get and is verbally abusive all the time. Finally, the guy's temper snaps, and he slaps her across the face. He apologizes or something, or maybe just leaves the house, and she turns to Charlie and says something like "We're going steady now". The next time Charlie sees them, he walks in on them having sex. Umm. She disgusted me. I hated her the whole book for that. Sure, she brought it upon herself, she really was being a nasty awful girl, but hooking up with a guy because he physically accosted you and then having sex with him the next day is just... Ugh. Besides my disdain for her, the second she told Charlie they were together I was just like "Big Mikey would loathe this girl". Man, I know I do.

"I opened the door, and I saw Patrick kissing Brad. It was a stolen type of kissing." I don't know what a stolen type of kissing is, but I like that description of a kiss. It sounds cool.

"I had an amazing feeling when I finally held the tape in my hand. I thought to myself that just in the palm of my hand, there was this one tape that had all of these memories and feelings and great joy and sadness. Right there in the palm of my hand."


Second book, one of my personal favorites, War of the Worlds by HG Wells. You know what I find strange about this book? It's perfect for a movie translation. Honestly, right in some more dialogue, and you've practically got a script or viable plot for a movie. Multiple perspectives, a little romance (okay, it's not so much a romance, it gives you more the feeling of a soldier in combat longing for his wife), killer martians... Yet, I don't think it's ever been kept in its original format. The version of the fifties and the most recent were both rewritten to be set in the US... Recent for their times... Of course, I haven't seen the most modern, but I read the Mad parody... haha. But the father was divorced, and I'm thinking most likely he just grew closer to his kids who didn't really like him much before the attack. In the fifties one, I think instead of the curate, the hero falls in with a girl and they have that whole scene stuck in the fallen building, and she doesn't die. And that scene basically ends the movie...
But! I think it would be seriously badass if they followed the book: Aliens attacking a Victorian-era Britain!? Someone hide Mr Darcy! He's their greatest asset!

Anyways, I love the book. The reason why it's a classic most likely lies in that it's a 'first' (like The Scarlet Letter, or Jekyll and Hyde or some such) and in this case, according to the back of the book it is "The first modern tale of alien invasion..." Modern tale? Were there stories of alien invasion before this? The only older sci-fi writer I can think of is Jules Verne... I want to find these earlier stories... But, regardless of its first status, it's still a good book. It's a little outdated, sure, but not for long because I'm bringing pocket watches back. It's still readable after, you know, a hundred some-odd years, so props to HG Wells. It probably doesn't hurt that I'm terribly biased and love that man, no?

Like Pride and Prejudice, the opening line is great enough to be quoted just because. "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves around their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water." Phew. I've written about Cosmos before on here, right? In one of the episode that line is read with an octopus's eye in a fish eye camera view. Creepiest thing ever. It makes my skin crawl, no lie.

HG Wells is very on describing the martians and their intents, and comparing men to martians. Their intents are obviously to kill (and harvest!) us and mark our planet as a new home. We are, as said later, like ants to them. Quite often are people described in such a way in comparison to the martians. But! "And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison or dodo, but upon its own inferior races." ...HG Wells... bison aren't extinct... But, besides that, he's got a good point. The humans:martians::dodo bird:humans. Bet nobody expected to see one of those word problems after third grade, huh?

"He met a wagoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told and his appearance were so wild--his hat had fallen off in the pit--that the man simply drove on." HAHA. This cracks me up. This may in fact be my favorite scene in the book. Y--your hat fell off! Good God man, you must be mad! That's my new theory. You can cure asylum inmates by putting hats on their heads. Thanks HG Wells. PS. I love you.

Our hero describes a pamphlet he found about the martians and their conquest:"The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. HG presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect." I mark this because, although our hero speaks of this form not being proper, it appears to describe the most popular images of the martian spaceships--usually when talking of this novel, they are referred to as 'the tripods', as well. Irony! Poor Wells. And look at this statue in Woking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woking_tripod.JPG Hmm. Looks like he only read the misinformation too...

"It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer..." Here our hero continues in describing the writer's theories on evolution ringing true with what the martian bodies revealed are like. The writer he referred to so impressed? HG Wells himself. The whole paragraph following this is basically name-dropping himself. Hehe.

"I could see his staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch-chain." HG Wells is talking about pocket watches! High five, Browski!

A man our hero runs into talks of how the world will change when the martians rule. Man will be like cattle, since martians sustain themselves off our blood, but how not all would despise the martians--how some men would love the martians with all their hearts for the fact that their alien overlords and consumers feed them and take good care of them. "'They'll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.'" From there, some men may be trained to hunt other men like dogs after a fox, and maybe some men would be kept as pets till they had to be slaughtered. "'Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them to do tricks... get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed.'" What's the most disturbing, I think, is how it rings true--how many people would rather be fed and safe, even while knowing what would happen in the end. Or maybe, eventually, people will be just as unknowing as the cows we snicker at in the slaughterhouse, unaware of what their life will end in.

SPOILER! "...slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the weed was slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things God, in all his wisdom, has put upon this earth." I believe this line is what the 1950's film ended on. That movie had a very religious feel, indeed. And there is some very nice foreshadowing in this book, actually to the point where I thought the foreshadowing (with the dying red weed) was actually our hero speaking in metaphors, and that the red weed was literally the Martians themselves. (And proceeded to whirl in confusion as I tried to figure out what the next 100 or so pages were about...)

Anyways, I can't vouch for the new movie, but the book is quite nice, and I'd say it's better than about 95% of modern (as in the last 40 years modern) sci-fi tales. For real. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find myself a TARDIS and go back in time to grovel at HG Wells's feet.

EDIT: On the Friday I was reading this in the hallway, Bob Darraugh walked by and said: "War of the Worlds! I hope that doesn't happen over the weekend!" Samesies, Bob Darraugh, samesies. And it didn't.