A short book about hobbits

I've been reading The Hobbit, which is probably the literary equivalent of a nice cup of tea. There's something comforting about it. It can't be nostalgia, because I don't really have any memory of reading it before, even though I found a scruffy old copy of it in my wardrobe. It reads like a gentle wander across Middle-earth, and that's a nice place to be if you're not actually there. Yes, there's violence and terror, but it's a cosy story. Unspeakable danger isn't so bad when it's narrated like a bedtime story. And there's not much to think about, because there are only hints of the deep mythology that Tolkein would create later, like it's just dipping your toe into a very deep pool. Apart from everything else, The Lord of the Rings and the other work that surround it are a masterpiece of world-building. There's more there than anyone could ever know. If you wanted to, you could learn about the history of every blade of grass. And I'm starting to think that's the best way to read it. I've read The Fellowship of the Ring before but then stopped, because, after all, it is very long and sometimes very boring. Maybe I wasn't reading it right. The problem is that I already know the story, so reading it passively isn't going to work. Instead, the fun is in the details. It's like a game to piece it all together, with the maps and the timelines and Appendix B with the things about the stuff. There's a whole world in there. Whether it's worth it or not, I'm not sure. The Hobbit is a children's book, and quite short, so I don't know if my interest will last much further. If I make it all the way through, I could read The Silmarillion, which is mostly in another language.

This is all a contradiction, because I've never had much patience with long books, and I expect I'll leave Frodo somewhere in a field again, halfway through his adventure. I do like the idea of it, though. This is why I don't mind The Hobbit films being too long. They're indulgent escapism. And I can just about see how they did it. The book does fall into three pieces, each with a neat climax, and it can be stretched out to three films if you really take your time and invent some other things. I'm glad they did it. It's fun to be in that world again. At the very least, I'm now the sort of person who browses the Lord of the Rings Wiki for fun. There's a lot on there. I could read that instead.

Bad people ruin good books

I read a book that I really wanted to like. It wouldn't let me, and I'm starting to think it didn't want me to. It's The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The problem is not the story or the ideas. These are good. A teenager is admitted to a school for magic and goes looking for the fantasy worlds he's read about in books, expecting them to be real. It's a story about the idea of escaping into a fantasy place, and what that does to people. This character thinks he'll find fulfilment on a magical quest, and even when he's found it he's always looking for another secret door to take him somewhere else. It's a clever and sometimes brilliant view of the fantasy genre, managing to build its world and still be a parody of itself. It's a fantasy book for people who have grown up reading fantasy books.

Or at least, it would be. The problem is that it's a good story ruined by the decision to make most of the characters awful gits. I didn't want to spend any time with them. They're not villainous, just the sort of people you could meet in real life and wouldn't be friends with. Selfish, privileged, and miserable in their best moments, and really, really horrible in their worst. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not. It's a brave decision to turn the reader against the characters, except I was worried that I was meant to be relating to them. They have recognisable problems. They act and speak like real people. Only, real people that I don't like. I don't remember another time that I've put off reading a book because I could only handle so much of a character in a week. I'm sure somebody, somewhere, must like them. Possibly the author, although it read like he wanted to see how far he could push them down before trying to redeem them. They are realistic, well-written portrayals of rubbish people.

Characters don't have to be likable, but they do have to be interesting. This lot were neither. It feels like a contradiction, because I admired almost everything else. There were elements of the plot that were genuinely surprising and unsettling, with a proper sense of otherwordly nightmare. I like that kind of thing. I wanted this to be one of my favourite books. Obviously, there's plenty of fiction with horrible protagonists. Murderous thugs and villains that you want to watch or read about.This isn't that. This is pretending the heroes are relatable when they're actually deeply irritating. The Magicians is the first part in a trilogy. I want to read more but I can't, because I'd have to deal with these mopes again. It's not worth it. Five hundred pages can seem like a very long time. I'll forgive a book for being a bit boring if I like being with the characters. I can't forgive one that invents a world and a story that's completely brilliant, then sabotages it with people you only want to slap.

Firefly gets cancelled every time I watch it

Rewatching Firefly has reminded me why it was so good in the first place. Where other television sci-fi fills its episodes with cosmic sorrow or grumpy aliens, this is about family. A bunch of characters on an old ship, floating around in space. It's just them. There's no vast fleet to think about. Only nine characters, and you care about them all. That's why it's so hard to see it end every time. The mythology of the expanded world is nice, and the space cowboy thing is so good it's seamless, but it's the characters that make it. It's hard to think of any other cast that fit together so well. When Mal says 'You're on my crew' to Simon, you really believe he means it. I'd choose this over Galactica's army any day. On one of Adama's moody days, there isn't much fun to be had with the thousands of people in the fleet. On the other hand, I'd watch a whole episode of the Serenity crew just having dinner. They wouldn't even have to nearly die or anything, they could just sit at the dinner table eating noodles and having a chat. I'll never get to see that episode because inevitably, every time, every single time I watch it, it gets cancelled. I pretend it won't. On episode six I think it'll go on forever. On episode twelve I start to get worried. Then I'll watch Serenity and pretend that nothing bad is going to happen.

At the same time, I wonder how its shortness changes our perception of it. These characters are preserved in one short season. It's easy to think they'll never change. That they'll go on like this forever, and we just won't see it. But they would have changed, obviously. By season three the crew might have looked completely different. The family would have been lost, people would have been replaced. There are unfortunate events in Serenity that prove that. Except, in my imagination, it would have always been the same nine. And there also isn't room for it to be bad. In every long series, there are times when the quality dips. The 'boring middle part of Firefly Season Four' can never happen, even though that sounds quite good. It might have been saved from all the criticism that happens to normal, not-cancelled shows. It sits above all that as something perfect and shiny, with an imagined legacy that isn't ruined by being real. It's easy to forget that this all happened ten years ago. It's still being talked about because it was ripped away from us, it's only half there, maybe inspiring more love than a proper run would have. When somebody awful decided to cancel it, to dismantle this whole world, they probably didn't know what they were starting.

All the Bond films, from best to worst

A while ago I watched the first ten Bond films and put them into a list. Now I've watched all the others, and put them into the same list. It's a long list. The best ones are at the top, the worst ones are at the bottom, and some things happen in the middle. It looks about right to me. I gave this a lot of thought. For some of them, almost five minutes. Here it is.

1. Casino Royale
2. Skyfall
3. Goldeneye
4. Goldfinger
5. You Only Live Twice
6. Moonraker
7. Live and Let Die
8. Dr No
9. Tomorrow Never Dies
10. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
11. From Russia With Love
12. The Man with the Golden Gun
13. The Spy Who Loved Me
14. Quantum of Solace
15. Die Another Day
16. The World is Not Enough
17. The Living Daylights
18. A View to a Kill
19. Octopussy
20. Licence to Kill
21. Diamonds are Forever
22. Thunderball
23. For Your Eyes Only

Skyfall is very good. I think it's the best looking, best directed Bond film, and a solid, significant story. It seems like a change of pace. It's almost atmospheric, particularly in its build-up to one of the creepiest Bond villains. It deserves to be right at the top, but really, I just prefer Casino Royale. These films come down to a blend of serious and silly, and Casino Royale gets that exactly right. Its story might be less clean and a bit sprawling, but where Skyfall is grim, Casino Royale is escapism. It's got high-stakes poker in a fancy casino and sinking buildings in Venice. For pretty much all of Skyfall Bond is in a mood, but here he's funnier and more confident and sure of his own invincibility. It does all that while still seeming weighty and important, with real characters and plot. That seems like a strange thing to say, but when it comes to things like character and plot, most of these films don't bother. There isn't always a story. Sometimes it's just bits of talking about missiles and satellites to string the action together. Casino Royale and Skyfall are about the people, and that's why they work so well.

They're not the best because they're new. Quantum of Solace is proof of that. It's a flimsy series of action sequences held together by nothing at all. It seems like a better film than it is because of Daniel Craig, but even he can't save it. There's nothing there. Nothing memorable. There are others, that even when they're not bothering to be serious, work because you can remember than, and they're just good fun. I was worried that Goldeneye might be all nostalgia, but it really is one of the best. After that the Brosnan films go downhill, with the quite-good-really Tomorrow Never Dies, and the really-very-boring World is Not Enough. Die Another Day is only worth talking about as context for how off the rails things went. The invisible car and ice palace are fine, but the bit where he surfs down a crumbling cliff then rides the wave to safety is so out of place it could have ruined the entire franchise.

I'd like to write about the Dalton films, but I can't really remember them, which probably says more than enough. At least they were better than the last few Roger Moores. For Your Eyes Only is at the bottom of the list for being more boring than all the other boring ones, even A View to a Kill, which is the one with the airship. Trying to reboot it with a serious tone didn't work as well with Dalton as it did with Daniel Craig. It seems like the series goes through cycles. It doesn't always know what it wants to be. When everyone gets tired of the jokes they put on serious faces, and when that gets old they try to have more fun again. It's when the two meet that things go best. And anyway, this list is just how I saw it, and it's not always easy to judge. I know that I enjoyed Moonraker more than I thought I would, but On Her Majesty's Secret Service is still just hanging around, maybe a few places too high. I might have been too mean on Thunderball - it was only at the bottom of four films before all the others piled on top of it. And who really knows or cares whether Octopussy is better than Licence to Kill?

When it comes down to it, their age is irrelevant. It would be easy to say that the old Connery ones are the best, but they're not. If you ignore what you're meant to think about the style of the classics and the unfair advantage of modern special effects, Casino Royale is a better film than Goldfinger. It's harder to judge the present, but a good film can be made at any time, and the best work on this series has been done this century. That being said, they are hardly ever consistently good, so the next one might be rubbish.

Earthbound is the game I missed twenty years ago

In 1994 Nintendo released a game called Earthbound on the SNES. At least, they released it in most parts of the world. It didn't come out in Europe until this year, possibly because they forgot about it. So I hadn't played it until now. I could have downloaded it from some dodgy website, but I like to be nice and legal, and I didn't really care that much. But it's a classic, both in the sense of it being really good and quite old. It's an adventure, about a boy leaving home to fight aliens with his friends. It's funny, and inventive, and charming, and reminded me how special games can be.

Even by the standards of 1994, this is not a very good looking game. But at the same time it is a very good looking game, because sometimes all you need is a few pixels in the right place. And it's also just a basic RPG, even though that makes it constantly compelling. The thing that makes this game special is that, more than anything else I've played recently, there's a sense of adventure. At the start, a boy wakes up in his bedroom, says goodbye to his family, and goes out to save the world. He wanders around the town, eating burgers and fighting snakes. He goes to the next town, saves a friend from a brainwashed cult, then goes to the next town to fight zombies. Soon you're on a different continent altogether. There's a long way to walk, and it's always strangely brilliant. It's funny, and I don't just mean there's a few jokes. The entire game is a surreal comedy, both in the script and the way it plays around with gaming conventions. This was back in the days when games were made by a few people, and this is all the vision of one Japanese designer, Shigesato Itoi (and translated to English by one guy). It's a very personal game - to the people who made it, and to the people who played it.

I didn't realise how wrapped up I was in all this until I was standing in a desert and a monkey taught me how to teleport. Suddenly, after plodding around the whole world, I could warp to wherever I wanted. I didn't go straight for some item shop or old dungeon. The first thing I did was teleport home. There was no reason, even in the story, for me to go back to the house where I started, but that's what I felt I needed to do.When I got there my mother was watching television, and said she was proud of me for saving the world. My point is that with simple graphics and brilliant writing, this game from twenty years ago made me care. It's a shame I didn't play it back then, because good game + time = nostalgia. I know it would be something I'd look back on as being part of my childhood, as many other people do. More than any other media, games are what I remember from that long ago. The best ones can take you back to another time, even by just hearing the soundtrack. They are different worlds that never change. Parts of your childhood that you can always go back to. To a lot of people, Earthbound is that special. To me, twenty years late, it's just a very good game.