GRAPHIC NOVEL REPORT: The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

I have a secret.

The twenty-eight books that I've read  this year are not the only things I've read.  I was sneaking in some other material.   "GASP!", you say.  "What could you be reading to keep it secret from the six people who follow your blog?"

I was cheating on my "word-books" with some comic books.  That's right, I read graphic novels.    I read the entire Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman.  You might remember Neil from such book reports as The Graveyard Book and Good Omens with Terry Pratchett. He is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

Neil's written hundreds of comics throughout the years, but his most famous comic series was The Sandman. It was a serial comic which ran monthly from 1988 to 1996 totaling seventy-five issues.

The Sandman series revolves around Morpheus, the King of Dreams.  Morpheus rules over everyone's dreams and is one of the seven 'Endless'.  They are not gods, they are older than them. The Endless are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire, and Delirium (who used to be Delight) 

Morpheus the Dream Lord

The series is broken up into ten graphic novels (over 2000 total pages!).    A couple of the graphic novels are a collection of one-off stories, but most of them are dedicated to one story-arc in the series.

• Preludes and Nocturnes 
• The Doll's House 
• Dream Country 
• Season of Mists 
• A Game of You 
• Fables and Reflections 
• Brief Lives 
• Worlds' End   <my personal favorite >
• The Kindly Ones 
• The Wake 

There is also bonus novel which came out in 2003 which dedicates one story to each of the Endless.

• Endless Nights

The series starts off when a rich eccentric recluse who doesn't want to die finds a way to summon the Endless and capture them.  Trying to live forever he summons Death, but gets Dream instead.  After eighty years, Dream finally escapes to find that he is weakened and his kingdom is crumbling.

After Dream gets his kingdom back in working order, the story line evolves away from Morpheus as the main character.  Instead, he takes a back seat to other characters and stories.  These comics show how much influence Dream has in our waking world.  Dream has been around from the beginning, behind only Destiny and Death and he has seen it all.  Love, hate, power and greed all start with a Dream.

I really enjoyed these comics.  There is an element of horror in the series (especially in the beginning), but each comic was infused with mythology and folklore. Some story lines were better than others obviously; there will be natural up's and down's to a series this long, but  Neil Gaiman is such a great story teller that the realm of Dreams really comes alive.  

The Sandman is proof that comics have evolved away from the standard super-hero/villain template from our childhood. These are deep stories with real character development.  After I finished this series, I started researching the genre a bit more.  There is a whole world out there of  well regarded, non-superman/batman comics out there that piqued my interest and I will definitely be adding them into my rotation.

BOOK REPORT: Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

Title:            Waiting for Godot 
Author:        Samuel Beckett
Copyright Date:  1953

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars ( ok )

Back-Cover Description
A seminal work of twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Back Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater.

The story line evolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone --or something-- named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness.  The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of out time. 

My Thoughts
If you want an example of a play in the 'Theater of the Absurd' style, look no further than Waiting for Godot.  It is a very simple play; just two guys hanging around a tree waiting for Godot to arrive.  Their conversations are playful, light, sometimes funny. But within the playfulness you can see the social commentary in between the lines.  The biggest problem I had with this play is that the characters were SO absurd that I couldn't care for them.  These men had absolutely no short term memory and their dialog was based on this instantaneous ignorance. They just kept going around in circles.  Every now and then, a few other characters would enter the scene to break the circle in their own weird way but even they don't remember events that occurred the previous day.  I couldn't take the absurdity and apply it to humanity and therefore the social commentary was lost on me.  

This isn't to say I wasn't entertained by the dialog, I just couldn't get everything Samuel Beckett wanted me to get out of it.  I saw it more as a literary Abbott and Costello routine.

It is obviously better to see a play acted out on stage with good actors; but if the play is good, reading it can be a somewhat adequate substitute. Shakespeare comes to mind.  I think Waiting for Godot needs to be seen to be truly appreciated.

BOOK REPORT: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Title:            The Things They Carried 
Author:         Tim O'Brien
Copyright Date:  1990

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars ( good read)

Back-Cover Description
They carried malaria tablets, love letters, 28-pound mine detectors, dope, illustrated Bibles, each other. And, if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb. Since its first publication, The Things They Carried has become an unparalleled Vietnam testament, a classic work of American literature, and a profound study of men at war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul.

My Thoughts
The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories that tell of the author's time in Vietnam.  The odd thing about them is that they are fictional, but told as a direct memoir. Throughout the book, Tim O'Brien addresses the reader directly to talk about why he writes fictional stories about his experience during the war. He says that sometimes fiction is more truthful than the real thing. 

While this was a good book, The Things They Carried lacked the cohesion of the other war books I've read.  As I mentioned above, the author jumps back and forth between addressing the reader directly and addressing his memories.  Jumping back and forth between the two breaks up the flow of the book at times and seems redundant in certain occasions.  While most of the stories have a common thread that follows the natural passage of time in the war, you can tell that some of the stories were composed as separate entities, probably for different periodicals where one can't assume that the other ones have already been read. 

Like all good war stories, the reader is closely tied to the horrors, tension, boredom, solitude and camaraderie of war.  The stories revolve around the friendships formed and lost, and the soul searching which takes place everyday in a war zone.  The stories also touch on how a soldiers life is affected when returning from active combat; how you are never the same when you experience those horrors first hand. 

One of the more powerful stories for me actually takes place before Vietnam. It is about the author as a young man in a small Wisconsin town when he gets the dreaded draft letter.  He is forced to choose between possibly dying in a war that he didn't believe in and disappointing his family and community by running away across the Canadian border.  I honestly don't know what I would have done in his situation and I am glad I didn't have to make that choice. I also hope that Sims doesn't have to make it either when he gets to be draft age.

 I think I would have enjoyed it more not reading it cover to cover but by treating The Things They Carried as a magazine and spaced the readings out over a few months.  Each story is well written and deserves to be read in its own time.