Horse 2463 - 7Books: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke

There is a good mathematical explanation why the book is almost always better than the film (see below¹); in fact, the only example that I can think of where I personally enjoyed the film more than the book, was The Lord Of The Rings trilogy because I find Tolkien's writing to be tedious. This example of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a case where I don't much like the style of writing of the book but I still mostly enjoyed it and where I like part of the film of the book but I find great chunks of it to be a bunch of eye bleeding nonsense.

The basic plot of both the book and the film is straightforward. There is a black thing on Earth called the monolith, which is discovered and more or less kicks off the technological evolution of humans. Another one is found on the moon, which in turn sets off the discovery of another one around Jupiter and a scientific mission is sent to explore it. The ship's onboard computer which has been given sentience through artificial intelligence, realises that it is unable to complete the mission because of the inherent error proneness of the ship's crew; so it kills them all except for one who manages to disable it, and that crew member goes on to explore the monolith in space, before passing through it and inadvertently evolving into the next stage of what humans are apparently.
The book has a lot to say about what it means to be human through the device of a machine which displays more human internal conflict than any of the actual humans in the book.

I think that 2001 suffers from being changed during the process of writing and as I understand it, Clarke was writing it concurrently with the film, which itself was in a state of flux due to the machinations of Stanley Kubrick. The best book in the Odyssey series is 3001 in my opinion because it reads like an old fashioned straight forward adventure novel and Clarke had finally got it right. As a work of writing, 2001 is almost a self-referential piece because it displays its own internal conflict because it doesn't really know what it's trying to be and ends up being an space adventure, commentary on human nature, warning on technology and an establishing piece of world building, but it does it all badly.
So why do I like this book and why is it important enough to make my personal list of seven? Remember the opening paragraph to this blog post - the book is almost always better than the film.

Once upon a time in the land before Eternal September and during the summer after which Win Percy and Alan Grice had won the Bathurst 1000 in an HRT Commodore, I had left primary school but hadn't yet entered high school; when someone thought that I might like to read a science fiction novel. I suppose that my nascent nerdery might have been on display, even as a twelve year old. I don't remember who gave me their beat up old copy but I can remember reading this book, mostly propped up against the door jamb of my room, while the summer raged on and ten billion cicadas simultaneously yelled into the world.
This is one of the reasons why the book is better than the film in most cases. Precisely because the book takes more time to get through and because it requires more of a personal investment of time and emotional hardware, the reward of enjoyment is almost always bigger. Also, because watching a film mostly happens inside a darkened room, there aren't really any other sensory inputs. There's not really that same sense of place or time of where and when you were when you consumed the media in the case of a film as opposed to the book.

2001 was probably the first book that I read that made me think about the act of reading a book and what that book was doing to me. I can still remember when I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Dave Bowman and then shut the book in anger because I thought I was being manipulated by the book and then realised that that's exactly what Clarke intended to do. Arthur C Clarke's intention is to make you annoyed with the almost mechanical humans in the book so that you can see the not quite humanity of the machine. I don't think that I'd ever realised before that an author not only could manipulate you but was actively trying to do so.

This I suspect is the same reason why people go to horror movies or want to watch weepy movies because they want to feel something. 2001 did make me feel something, manipulated, and I resented it. Of course in due time, I kind of grew the emotional hardware to process this and as a result, one of my favourite books is The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald because it makes me want to hate every single person in the whole stupid, tragic story and that includes the narrator². Clarke clearly wants to manipulate you into feeling frustrated with the crew and tries to make you feel some degree of sympathy for HAL but manages to succeed in doing neither. Having said all of that, I will still reread 2001 because it is a necessary component in the journey of getting to 3001: The Final Odyssey; which is a far better book in my not very well paid opinion.

The film of the book of 2001 is considered something of a cinematic masterpiece but as a thing which is trying to convey one of the central conflicts of the book, it fails. Granted, it does other things elegantly (such as making exceptional use of silence as a device, the fantastic use of camera angles and set design, and one of the most inspired soundtracks in cinematic history) but the one thing that it doesn't do that it should, is give that central internal conflict of HAL, his fears and overwhelming need to complete his mission at any and every cost, the necessary time and space to breathe. As a reader, that time and space is a natural consequence of the volume of time that it takes to work through it.
2001 makes this set as an object lesson for why the book is better than the film, even when the book is a little bit naff.

¹Does Hollywood ruin books? - Numberphile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUD8h9JpEVQ
²Nick Carraway fawns over Gatsby, hates Tom and is constantly drunk; which clouds his narration. He is a terrible narrator and hideously unreliable.

Horse 2461 - 7Books: The World According To Clarkson, Jeremy Clarkson

Given the more than 2000 posts here over the years it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that I like cars. I like watching motor racing, I like reading motoring magazines, l like looking at traffic, I like driving and I like driving even when I'm stuck in traffic. I like the styling, the technological aspect, the industrial design problems posed by trying to fit stuff inside a motor car and I like the dumb fun that comes front taking a road trip, more than I like the destination.
It should therefore also be of no surprise that a motoring book should make this list. What might be of surprise though, are the reasons why I should pick one by Jeremy Clarkson.

The first thing that you learn about Jeremy Clarkson from his motoring columns in the Sunday Times and his tweets on Twitter, is that Jeremy Clarkson on TopGear is kind of a caricature of himself. If you cut through the terribleness surrounding bad behavior and a media circus that has no desire to report truth whatever that may be, you learn that the thing that worries him the most is the welfare of his children. The second thing that you learn, and in takes a while to pick this up, is the reason why he got the gig on television in the first place; that is that he was a feature writer for a newspaper and was given ample time to breathe as a writer.

A normal newspaper columnist will start out as a pavement runner, visiting all of the boring places and doing the grunt work of journalism. They will attend council meetings, court cases, accidents, sporting events and everywhere that the newspaper needs a pair of eyes and a pen. Clarkson started out as a cadet journalist in Rotherham; which sounds to me to be less exciting than watching paint dry but not quite as boring as waiting for it to peel. I've seen this in my local newspaper, that a lot of the job must involve meeting a lot of grumpy people who are grumpy over really petty and insanely small things (but not in their eyes) and taking photographs of those same people looking grumpy and/or pointing at things while looking grumpy.
Exactly how Clarkson made the leap from the tedium of provincial news to a national newspaper is unknown to me but it must have given him the necessary skills via osmosis of how to write copy and make a story which actually only deserves fifty words, run out to fifteen hundred. As someone who might have had the nascent skills to be a journalist had I been born fifty years earlier, I appreciate the skills on display where a small thing is spun into a larger thread upon a spinning wheel.

All of this by way of introduction is instructive as to why have put one of Jeremy Clarkson's books on this list. Clarkson is first and foremost a journalist who happens to have specialised  in motoring writing. As a motoring writer,  he spends surprisingly little time writing about motor cars but rather spends more time telling stories. The truth is that it is mostly impossible to convey how a car feels to drive and it's going to be immensely subjective anyway. It is also incredibly boring to most people to read about statistics like power, torque and 0-60 times, unless you are something of a nerd.
Clarkson likes to feign a kind of ignorance when it comes to anything technical despite being in the business of doing motoring journalism for more than two decades. You'll frequently read the words "horsepowers" and "torques" before he might launch into a description of a Short And Long Arm Suspension system that some German marque has installed on their latest alphanumerically named luxobarge.
What Clarkson does best is torture metaphors to the point of breaking, makes hyperbole sit up and beg, and runs around waving the banner of old cobblers. At its heart, that's what the majority of motoring writing is - a fully palletised, packed and ticketed, barcoded, addressed, and containerised, load of cobblers. This is perfectly acceptable for a motoring column but would be inappropriate in other subject areas.*

Given that Clarkson does write a load of cobblers (and he's aware that he mostly writes a load of old cobblers), that should justifiably invalidate him from this list; except it doesn't. The biggest thing that Clarkson taught me as a writer (albeit one who primarily writes for my own amusement) is that there is a distinct rhythm and beat to middle to long form journalism. Just like the majority of Hollywood films are basically 90 minute four act yonkomas, a fifteen hundred word column comes with an establishment paragraph, stumbles its way through a number of paragraphs while collecting plot tokens, before cashing them in for a payoff am the end which is almost always flat. There is also a distinct turning point in a piece where you know that the payoff is coming.

The truth is that I often disagree with Jeremy Clarkson politically, I find some of his analogies needlessly crass, and I think that his columns dwell far too much in the realm of supercars which normal people will never own (though given that they appear in the Sunday Times, which is primarily written for "the City", then this is understandable) but the fact remains he is very good at the craft of journalism; which is why TopGear on with Clarkson, Hammond and May was so successful - they all were.

I know that this isn't specific to Jeremy Clarkson's books but they just happen to be the ones that I own the most of this type, that the idea of collating what are stand alone pieces into a book is viable. Granted that every book of newspaper comics is this very same thing and the transcripts of Clarke and Dawe are also this same thing and even Shaun Micallef's book "Smithereens" is even more fragmented but is this very same thing, this at least shows me that if I ever decide to publish these ramblings, then the format is not unfamiliar. The inclusion of this book is probably more to do with the inclusion of a type of book but in this particular instance, form is function.

*I'm looking at you Miranda Devine. You are a bad political opinion writer but might be all right as a motoring writer.

Horse 2460 - 7Books: Why I Write, George Orwell

There is something of a literary joke that nobody has actually read 1984 by George Orwell. This even found its way onto an episode of QI, where the klaxons came out for someone who answered that they had read it. I have read it and I think that it is doubleplusaverage.
There is something to be said about the pieces of popular culture that come into a mind during the years of adolescence, as they seem to make more of a lasting impact on an individual. My first encounter with 1984 happened in Year 10 when in English class, we were reading a novel which I had an almost visceral reaction to; so I looked at the reading list from the Department Of Education and found that the English Department's storeroom had a full 130 whole grade set of copies and so I asked if I could borrow one. That year, I ended up answering the final exam questions in the School Certificate as the only student in our grade who had read this book. As a 16 year old, I had read quite a few dystopian novels; so this was well within my wheelhouse.
Over the course of the following summer, I ended up reading Animal Farm, The Road To Wigan Pier, and Keep The Aspidistra Flying and although they're all fine, none of them made as much impact on my brain as Orwell's essays.

During the 1990s, Australia at both Federal and State level was busily actively tearing down and destroying all of the public institutions that were profitable, so that they could be sold off and privatised. We now live in the legacy of twenty years of almost criminal activity from governments and the terrible thing is that those institutions will never be put back into public hands.
It was in that economic climate that I read a lot of Orwell's essays and while books like 1984 and Animal Farm deal with the oppressive effects of totalitarianism (because he was looking out from the sceptered isle at both Fascism and Soviet Communism), I was looking at the other end of the welfare state and seeing a different set of people claiming the spoils of governance, except this time they were unelected.
Orwell had lived through the era of late imperialism with people like Colonel Blimp, then seen authoritarian answers arise to solve the problems of a continent in disarray. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were the embodiment of those answers but by the time I was becoming politically aware, Germany had reunified, the Iron Curtain had been drawn back, Gorbachev, Glasnost and Perestroika had been and gone, and Boris Yeltsin was busily drinking himself to death, along with the remnants of the old regime. Once the Iron Curtain had been drawn back, the ghosts of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were beginning to be chased away with a little bit of illumination.

People who have read Animal Farm and 1984 might have had the impression that Orwell hated the state. This is probably in ignorance though, as Orwell himself was an employee of the state broadcaster, the BBC. The thing that you take away from his essays like The Lion And The Unicorn, A Hanging, Why I Write and whatnot, is that Orwell was in fact a socialist. I think that the basic question which is driving Orwell in many of his essays, is if it is possible to spend millions of pounds on blowing people up, destroying people's houses, and killing civilians who would have otherwise preferred to go about with their daily lives in noble mundanity, then why wouldn't it be possible to win the peace after the war by spending millions of pounds collectively improving people's lives?
The central questions of economics are: What to produce? How much to produce? How to produce? For whom do you produce? Who decides what to produce and for whom? Why are we producing? Orwell doesn't answer any of these questions but he is concerned about the people with power who get to decide these things and make policy decisions. Orwell's socialism is obvious and he doesn't try to disguise it even an iota.

But the thing that Orwell does that is really interesting, is as a writer, he questions the very medium and process which he is engaged in. In 1984 but especially in Why I Write, he makes a point of using language as a weapon against language which has already been weaponised  in propaganda and which in a lot of cases has been left to wither through laziness of people. Viewed chronologically, there's kind of a hint that this might show up in future in Keep The Aspidistra Flying which was written on the other side of the Second World War to 1984.

My teenage brain in the 1990s, was taking in the effects of state communism falling apart in front of my eyes and so I was never going to be as socialist in outlook as Orwell. I was working with new information that he couldn't have conceived of and I kind of like a lot of the things that capitalism brings. I was also taking in lessons about what language was being made to do and for what purposes; maybe that's something which a high school English class should have done but we were mired in looking for motifs and themes in fiction, which is all fine I suppose but I think I'd prefer to know if the wool is being pulled over my eyes rather than exploring its texture.
I think that Orwell's essays in particular were like someone dragging a three tine cultivator through my brain. I'm sure that the seeds and weeds that would eventually lodge in there and take root but the ground was fertile. Orwell did more to shape my political outlook than anyone else and he did so by breaking apart politics' biggest tool, so that I could put it back together for myself.