Serguei Alleko Blog

For some time I was a fun of “suitable for adult” graphic novels. Adult in this context doesn’t mean porno, although some tits are allowed. Adult means they would be interested for grown-ups (up to 25-30 years, to be honest). They have complicated scripts, cynical jokes and a lot of cultural references.  Normally the texts are written by one author, but graphic artists are changed from time to time. The more known a comic novel is, the more talented painters it can attract.

There are several cult comic novels, which are recommended to everybody.

• Transmetropolitan - a genius/jerk journalist (with reference to Hunter S. Thompson)  is fighting the corrupt government in the distant future.
• Preacher - very brutal story of a young priest, who occasionally find himself in the war between heaven and hell
• The Sandman – epic story describing conflict between personified aspects of our life – the Death, the Sandman, the Vengeance, etc. Written by Neil Gainman.

The last one, The Sandman, was so popular, that they started a spin-off called Lucifer (as you can guess, the main hero is the Devil himself, tied from his management position as a CEO of Hell, decided to quit and open his own business). I love it very much, but it’s not as popular as the original.

Almost all of the “adult” novels are stopped, the big publishing houses continue to make hundreds of Superman, Spiderman and the other men-comics. But a couple are still running. Currently I’m following every couple of month those two:

Fables. A novel, which takes all characters from the children fairy tales books and puts them in the modern environment. The Big Bad Wolf is a sheriff, Snow-white is the general manager and Jack the Frost is a greedy and stupid playboy. Very dark and dramatic script, a lot of conflicts, war, death and treachery. The novel was so popular, that it also created a couple of spin-offs: Jack of Fables – adventures of immortal, greedy sexy handsome but stupid Jack and Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love (this one is brand new, the Cinderella is a James Bond-style super-spy)

Hellblazer – a very-very long series of comic books, currently running more than 20 years! The main character is a bad boy (again) John Constantine, who has a lot of occult knowledge and connections in the world of spirits, but doesn’t know what to do with it. He puts himself, his loved ones and friends in a lot of mortal troubles. In the first couple of years he’s made himself so many enemies, that his whole life is just simply running away from troubles. Keanu Reeves played him in a major motion picture Constantine, but of course, in the film he’s 10 times nicer and altruistic, than in the book.

These weeks I have to travel a lot between Belgium and Netherlands, and as I’m spending more time in the car, more books are listened to.

Yesterday I’ve finished another lecture series from The Teaching Company, called “Long 19th Century: European History from 1789 to 1917″. I’m a huge fan of The Teaching Company, the lectures are very easy to listen and very interesting. The most important that they’ve read by people, really passionate about their subjects. Those people are mostly professors, who spend 20+ years studying and teaching on the subject.

This particular lectures covered the history of Europe (+Russia and Turkey) from the first French revolutions till the First World War. Basically how the world managed to start and finish 2 World Wars. The lector was quite honest about the different views on different subjects and mentioned, that he also wears colored glasses. His opinion as an American Jew, who’s family suffered from anti-Jew policy in Europe, of course biased.

Especially when it comes to the pre-Hitler era in Germany.

But in general he’s quete honest. I haven’t noticed, for example, any anti-Russian or anti-soviet political views in his study.

Next book I’m going to listen to is about the history of science from the same company.

It was a huge tragedy, when Terry Pratchett announced his condition. I love all his books, especially the Discworld series.

Somehow he still manages to write with his own style. Actually I could say his latest 2 books are not much different from the last 5 (staring let’s say with Going postal) There is almost no magic in this books, instead he speaks about economy, sociology, business and politics. Vetinari from a tyrant becomes a major figure with his own problems and idea’s.

I refuse to consider Mois von Lipwig to be a major figure in the last books. He’s way too caricature to represent the real character. Instead, the City itself become the real hero. The books look more and more like history novels.

The problems of Ankh-Morpork, it’s wishes and ideas (or should I write “her ideas”) are the central conflicts, with Vetinari as a force, which solves them. Actually he has already solved most of the conflicts, the city is not more troubled by devastating magic wars, dragons or gods. Now it’s time to build and improve it.

I really hope to read some more books of him.

Recently I’ve discovered Neil Gainman. Yes, I know, as a good geek (nerd) I must have read all of him long time ago. At least because he’s an author of cult comic book “Sandman”

But there are so many books around and so few time. Anyway, I went through most of his novels last months in the car.

American Gods - very huge epic novel with a lot of cultural references to different pagan religions. Surprisingly in the world of Gods there is place for every religion: African, Indian, Native American, Irish, Scandinavian, but not Christian! And his comments don’t help either. Apparently he does understand, what is cool and what is not in the world of folklore. Odin is cool, because he’s one big bad m…f…r! And Christ is not, because he’s just simply good.

Anansi boys - a short novel, which utilizes the world of “American Gods”, but speaks about some particular God – Anansi and his sons. I loved the way actor played with different  African and African-American accents!

A Graveyard Book – the latest novel. A remake of Mowgli by Kipling. Very nice written, I can already recognize his characteristic writing tricks.  It looks like he adores Stephen King and users the same technologies to scary people.

I cound’t make myself to read “Stardust” or “Neverwhere”, because I’ve already seen the TV versions and didn’t enjoy them all that much. Nothing wrong with them, could be very interesting for teens. Unfortunately I can not enjoy such stories anymore (ooh, I feel soo ooold)

But the latest one was the best. This book he’s written together with Terry Prattchett – another modern author I adore.

Good Omens – also, the same as American Gods, huge epic story filled with cultural and historical references. It has favorite Pratchett review of old religious stories from prospective of cynical atheistic liberal 20-century approach. I’ve read that using religion in this mundane way, for example, presentation of angels and daemons as “spys” on earth harms the religion greatly. The same way as in Kevin Smith “Dogma“. Even if Gainman and Smith treat Christian religious symbols with a great deal of respect, the fact of misuse of those symbols is very harmful. But, let the Church take care of his, this is not by responsibility. Anyway, I liked the book a lot.

Hope to read a lot of new works of him.

I’m an old fun of e-Book readers. I still own “always the best” REB-1100, cult product form a now deceased company RCA. Long time after the production was stopped, you still could see them on e-Bay.

After Sony issued the first e-book readers with e-ink, I of course immediately bought one, PRS-500, via American e-bay. It was not possible to buy it in Netherlands, despite on fact that e-ink was developed by Philips. I’ve read enormous amount of books via this device and got a lot of attention from different people in the trains. Everybody wanted to see what is its.

Although the idea is quite old, the market of e-book readers doesn’t look booming. I don’t know, may be because young generations prefer richer media formats, like video/audio. May be because it’s not very clear, where to buy the latest books officially. Amazon Kindle didn’t make a revolution yet, may be it will come.

Anyway, after 3 years my old PRS-500 has died (I guess battery, but I couldn’t send it to support, I was bought it non-officially in the USA), so I was looking for a new device. There are lot of names in the Dutch market, there is the current list on Dutch price comparison site Tweakers. I didn’t know any of them, may be with exception of very advanced and overpriced monsters from iRex Technologies, so I chose  Sony again.

The new reader PRS-600 looks a lot like old PRS-500.

(notice how the old one, on the right, got screwed up. e-Ink is passive, the battery is only used to change the image on the page. This book still shows the last image from more that a year ago)

It’s a bit lighter and the design is more logical. The biggest differences are touch-screen menu (very basic and clean), ability to recharge battery from mini-USB port even from level zero (it was a big disadvantage of PRS-500) and a bit better support of graphics.

You still have to make books via BookDesigner 4.0 and import them via horrible eBook Library program from Sony. But, that’s the price you pay to use non-commodity programs.

OK, I’ve loaded a couple of new books before going to 2-days conference of Kaspersky Online Sales Managers in Ingolstadt, Germany. Can’t wait to test it.

As a normal male kid, I hated Russian literature lessons in the school. I just couldn’t understand why people do what do in the books. After the explanation from the teacher it was clearer and I could follow the story.

Even then Dostoevsky was my favorite. May be because the book from the official program was so unlike others – it was filled with killers, prostitutes, rapists and suicides. Boys like this kind of stuff, aggression lets some of the internal pressure of the adolescence off.

Later when I started to be interested in how people operate, what drives them, I found that the actual field of knowledge is not that important. You can put a lot of disciplines in one like around people:

• history – how people operated
• management, psychology – how people are operating now
• marketing – attempts to modulate future operations of people

Fiction novels normally don’t have a lot of information about the internal structure of the people. Either they’re full of action or describing the operations of just one person – the author.

But not Dostoevsky. It’s his characteristics – he delivers in his books enormous amount if information on the subject of people.  Very often I can find typical examples of people around me in those books, written more that 100 years ago. Scene about students coming to demand their money from count Mishkin in Idiot - very typical behavior of any aggressive newbies on an Internet forum, also known as trolling.

Recently I’ve finished 4th of the most known 5 novels form Dostoevsky – The Adolescent. It’s not a very easy reading, which is only expected from a diary of 19-year old kid (well, 100 years ago he was actually a young man already).  The young man has very big problems in understanding how people around him operate (which is also very normal for 19 years old). Almost through the whole book he tries to understand, what adult people around them want and fails to build a structured model of their behaviour. Well, it’s just a kid after all, it’s clear from the name of the book.

The kid is also as bent as the soviet sickle, and as hard as the hammer that crosses it, which is also something to be expected. So may emotions, so many feelins, it makes me jelous. The positive part also is that the kid is not dead or mentally destroyed at the end of the book, like it normally happens with Dostoevsky heroes.

I recommend it to everybody.

Following advice from Jeremy Schoemaker about what to write in a blog, I’ve decided to make it a bit less serious. I gues I was trying to write a book, not a blog. Ok, personal stuff.

Tree years ago I discovered audio books. I didn’t get the idea first, how could anyone sit on their sofa for hours and listed to a narrative. The information flow is too weak for me, I got bored and want something more active, like browsing Internet. Audio Books are normally slower than normal books. If you’re listening to a fiction novel and have a final pinnacle of confrontation between good and evil, a moment of maximum pressure, this moment can last 40-50 minutes on a audio book, it’s a bit too much.

But then I found you can listen to it in the car! It’s perfect, I spend more than 6 hours per week in the car, mostly on highways. Nothing really happens on highways, so I can spend part of my attention to a book.

At first, I’ve listened to the whole Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, then some other fiction books. Then a friend of my pointed into The Teaching Company. This company produces lectures on history, sociology, psychology, culture, almost everything. The lectures are read by the professors really fans of their own subjects and very interesting to listed too.

But it’s hard only to learn, sometimes fiction literature (sci-fi, history or classic) is a nice change. I’ve got all 5 famous books by Feodor Dostoevsky and enjoying his famous quality of characters. I’ve added a plug-in for Wordpress showing which  book  I’m currently listening to.