Two Books in Two Weeks

Last May, a friend of mine in the U.S. sent me his copy of the Iron Man 2 book after he found out how much I loved watching the movie (particularly Robert Downey Jr. :p). Due to my very busy schedule, I only got to start reading it a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed the book in the sense that I was able to understand a little more the complexities of Tony Stark’s and Ivan Vanko’s inventions. But, due to the sometimes heavy technical jargons, I have to admit I still didn’t “get” everything.

Whenever I finish one of those techie chapters, I would stop reading lest my eyes start glazing over and just resume the next night. I didn’t feel like crowding my brain with so much information I’m not likely to use in my lifetime :p To illustrate, here’s a headache-inducing sample from page 194:

“The lasers were derived from the European HiPER project to develop laser-powered fusion. Like HiPER, Tony was using neodymium glass in his lasers, but he had made a few tweaks, including a much-improved chirped pulse amplification to get more focused delivery of energy from each laser, as well as the King Kong of optical frequency multipliers that took the frequency of each pulse way up into the ultraviolet.”

I guess I’m not just into these kinds of sci-fi-like stuff. Too, I got confused when, in the last several chapters, the description of Iron Man’s suit suddenly shifted from Mark IV to Mark VI. In the movie, weren’t there only five suits (including the portable Mark V they call “football” in the book)?

I might have gotten lost somewhere but I didn’t want to go back and check where I made a wrong turn. I just thought that the book version, which says on the cover “Based on the Screenplay” must have been written hastily to ride the Iron Man 2 wave while it lasted -- thus the rush to finish it, and thus the typo errors. Oh well, at least I enjoyed the other parts that made for more normal reading. Still, it took me more than a week to finish this book, which is slow in my standards.

Back in college, I remember playing my dorm roommate’s cassette tape copy of the Beaches film soundtrack over and over. At the time, the most popular song there was Wind Beneath My Wings but I loved listening to I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today more.

I also remember seeing the movie with my friends but the details were hazy now. All I could remember was that it didn’t have a happy ending and that Bette Midler sang some great songs.

Three days ago, I finally found time to open a copy of the book which I bought from Booksale a few months ago. I was hooked from page one. I was almost halfway through the book when the alarm went off and I realized it’s time I prepare the kids’ breakfast so they won’t be late for school.

I wanted to continue reading but I had to attend to my writing deadlines and household chores. I finished the book last night. It made me want to watch the movie again and see how much it deviated or not from the novel. Here’s hoping I find a DVD copy soon.