Geeking Out, Part One

So, about ten years ago, this time of year in fact, I was finishing one of the most riveting trilogies I'd ever read: Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. It was a remarkable experience. I'd read his first novel, Tailchaser's Song and thoroughly enjoyed it, and promptly hopped on the bandwagon when the third volume of the trilogy (MST) was in hardcover. Through time and multiple moves, though, my copies got lost somewhere.

Over a year ago, though, I started thinking about them again. I'd been reading the first volume of his new series, Otherland, but wasn't finding it nearly as engrossing as the first series. So I broke down, bought new copies of MST (finding that the third volume - which has considerable heft in hardcover - had been split into two volumes for the paperback release). I set out to not only read the books, but to go into them with the kind of detail that accompanied the ballyhooed Lord of the Rings trilogy and, to a lesser extent, The Dragonlance Chronicles, the latter of which I read in 1990 (still working on LOTR). So accompanying the four-volume purchase at the Barnes & Noble in Potomac Yards was a small, empty volume with a couple of hundred pages of graph paper. I wanted to go through the book with a fine-toothed comb, redisovering and shining a great amount of detail on all the nooks and crannies of the story that so captivated me. Ieven wrote to Tad, thanking him for creating a series that was so engrossing it still captured my imagination a decade later, something very few books have ever done.

So, for the past year, and especially the past few months, I've been spending almost all of my free time rereading and analysing the series. My little book of graph paper has pages and pages of tiny writing about the history of Osten Ard (the land in which the story occurs), the people, the calendar, what day each moment of the story occurs, all based on the words of the story.

My work took a dramatic turn on 27.June of this year, when I started compiling what is turning out to be a truly exhaustive and exhausting index of the entire series. This work, in turn, led me to realize that what I liked so much about MST was that it was so engrossing. Williams constantly reminds the reader not only of where s/he is in the story, but where the characters are (he has a marvelous gift of description), and where they have been, frequently including detailed back stories of the characters, of the myths and gods they believe in (including a great parallel of Christianity, Aedonism), and plays the forces of past against present.

I'm only 170 pages through the first volume of the trilogy (which, in paperback, rings in at around 3200 pages) as far as the indexing work goes (I've read through the first 300 pages of the third volume), and as I get more and more involved in that world, I have greater and grander fantasies out of what I want to come of all this. I want, someday, to be able to pick up an omnibus volume of MST, in full and brilliant color, with a truly exhaustive appendix about Osten Ard, and an index that rivals (or even surpasses, which is absolutely achievable, for as for as I've come so far with my index) that of LOTR.

And I wonder why I don't have a girlfriend.