Finished A Wrinkle in Time. Not good.
Finished The Big U, by Neal Stephenson. I highly recommend it to anybody interested in higher education. Though highly unrealistic, it is hilarious satire of university life. Stephenson skewers everybody: various student types, administrators, trustees, the Pres, unionized staff, and notably, those silly faculty members. I wanted to read The Big U because it involves Dungeons and Dragons being played in the tunnels under the university.
Now I'm reading The Dungeon Master, an account of the real-life disappearance of Dallas Egbert, a 16-year-old genius college student at Michigan State when we were there. It's written by William Dear, the private investigator who found Egbert. Though self-aggrandizing, Dear's account is well written. Egbert was known to have played D & D in the steam tunnels under good old MSU, thus the connection with The Big U.
My interest in these books had nothing to do with my current interest in Lost. Imagine my surprise when they began to overlap. Egbert's obsessions look amazingly like those of Locke and Eko. The underground tunnels in both books remind me of the various hatches on the island. And in The Big U, as in Lost, the line between reality and fantasy blur. In The Big U, the underground gamers see radioactive rats the size of dobermans, there are swarms of bats in upper dorm rooms, and students take directions from electronic devices such as TV test patterns, neon logos, and box fans.
Or maybe I'm just seeing things.
Seeing all this intertextuality with works that may or may not have any actual influence on each other, you could well have been an English major.
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