Evil Under The Sun: I think TV Mysteries are better than Book Mysteries.

Agatha Christie is something of a new-comer to the LOST Literary List, and I'm a new-comer to her work. Evil Under The Sun, a complicated mystery set on an island, is read by Sawyer during 3X14-Exposé and Lostpedia says, one of Christie's best. In it, Hercule Poirot must find the killer of the beautiful, vamp-y Arlena Marshall amongst the vacationers staying at the Jolly Roger which is on a secluded island. This, helpfully, narrows down the number of usual suspects to a manageable list, some of the standouts including her husband, her step-daughter, her lover, her lover's wife, a spooky, certifiably crazy minister, and a jovial man involved in the heroin trade. Well, well, well.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot because I don't particularly want to give it away and its one of those complicated mystery plots. Instead, some plot elements that I thought were pertinent: good and evil (mostly Evil), an isolated island, heroin (yay!), the practice of witchcraft, and messing with time. The best part of this messing-with-time thing is a stealthy adjustment of a wristwatch. Would that our LOST time conundrums could be explained so elegantly and simply! Alas.. So what's it got to do with LOST? Beside those basic plot elements which I won't explain further, at the very basic level of being a mystery, it reminded me of the basic operations of interpersonal mysteries on the show. As a reader of Evil, you must be conscious of everyone and trust no one. There are specious alibis and informational gaps galore. There are overlapping and equally probable motives which cause characters to act in certain ways. No real surprises here.

Also, I think that it's particularly interesting that it was in Nikki and Paolo's episode. It's sort of fluffy: they're sort of fluffy. It's sort of conventional: They're sort of conventional! They do some unfortunate and deadly rich-person blackmailing, and there's some hint of that in Evil. Also, I personally, was a little let-down by their death, after being won over by them in the course of the episode, just as I was a little saddened by finding out the identity of the killer in Evil, as I'd grown to like them. Oh well.

Here's my favorite quote from the book though, as spake by the Crazy Reverend Guy, apropos of not much: "Nowadays, no one believes in evil. It is considered, at most, a mere negation of good... but, M. Poirot, evil is real! It is a fact! I believe in Evil as I believe in Good. It exists! It is powerful! It walks the earth!" ..He is a crazy reverend guy who was in the looney bin, but I think, going out on my own religious limb, that there's something to this statement. What with the prevalence of religious motifs on Lost, and the questions of morality it likes to pose, I think it takes Evil into account as a real force. Uhm. How? Meh.

I don't think this book is terrific--It made me realize how thankful I am that there are mysteries on TV--it's just not as easy to keep track of characters and all their motives, alibis, etc. in book form. I know, it's a little harsh, and I think it makes me sound lazy. Read it if you want to... Aurora's mentioned a weirder Christie,And Then There Were None, which is also set on an Island and has stronger character parallels. Maybe, if you're looking for something weird, check that out instead. Go ahead. I very well might.

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Laughter in the Dark

I'll talk about other things in the post, but part of me really thinks that the whole reason they showed us Laughter in the Dark is one quote. The main character is hooking up with his new mistress for the first time. "As in his most reckless visions, everything was permissible; a puritan's love, priggish, reserved, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu."

Charlie found LitD in Sawyer's stash in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", and Hurley picked it up and started to read it. It's from the same author as Lolita, but it's less disturbing, less sexy, and just generally less good. It's a long and twisty story, but here's a basic plot. A basically happy married dude, Albinuis, becomes infatuated with a teenager, and eventually leaves his wife and daughter for her. But she's no angel, manipulating him for his money and influence. She starts hooking up with an old lover, and Albinus doesn't notice for about 50 pages. He finally figures it out, but then he almost immediately drives into a telephone pole and is blinded. So he has to rely on his mistress for everything, and he convinces himself he was mistaken. Mistress and old lover sneak around him in all these crazy mean ways, and are only stopped when Albinius's brother-in-law steps in and saves him. Or he would be saved, if he didn't decide he had to shoot mistress. Do you remember he's blind? Not surprisingly, it doesn't go well, and he ends up dead.

So there's a little bit of Lost stuff in there, with the conning, and the attempted revenge, but I think it's a bit of a stretch. There's a couple of big coincidences—old lover just happens to be a business associate of Albinus's, Albinuis turns out to have a painting that's actually a forgery that old lover made years ago—but they don't seem like Lost to me. They're handled a little too ironically. The whole book has a detached melodrama to it that's not very Lost at all. So I guess I really think it was just the polar bear quote. It's a fine book, and I enjoyed it, but I can't see as it's very relevant to our beloved show. Read Lolita instead.

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Of Bunnies and Ben

When I first saw season 3's "Ever Man For Himself", which features Of Mice and Men very prominently, I was confused. EMFH is the Sawyer episode where he recalls his time in prison (reading our book); Ben fakes him out about the pacemaker, and generally breaks his spirit. Sawyer makes a casual reference to the book, and Ben quotes him a long passage. At first, I couldn't figure out why they picked this book, but now that I've reread it, it makes more sense to me. I think this book is meant to connect particularly with this episode, and less with the larger show.

OMaM is a simple story about two wandering farmhands in the depression. Tough George and sweet, slow Lennie have been together for a long time. Lennie is obsessed with touch and soft things, but he doesn't understand how to be gentle. George tells Lennie again and again that someday they'll have a farm all their own, with rabbits for Lennie. They work on a farm, get a little ahead, and for a moment it seems like that dream might actually become a reality. Then this terrible woman tries to seduce Lennie. He gets his hand caught in her hair, panics, and accidentally snaps her neck. He runs away, and when everyone else on the farm finds out they set out to try and kill him. George finds him first, and, calmly telling Lennie about the farm for the last time, shoots him in the back of the head.

It's pretty brutal. Now, there's a lot in the story that has straight up nothing to do with Lost: the importance of a man working his own land, how the bossman sucks, how hard it is for a man to get ahead on an honest wage. Whatever. But there's one theme that makes sense to the show, and I think especially to this episode: the importance of "having somebody" in a mean world. Other characters, and George himself, constantly raise the question of why George puts up with all the trouble and hassle of Lennie. The answer is that a person can't travel alone, it's just no good. Here's the passage Ben quotes: "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. It don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell you, I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick."

Ben's making the point that no matter who Sawyer pretends to be, no matter how many times he tells Kate "It's every man for himself", it just isn't so. But, as OMaM shows, our inescapable bonds to other people come at a cost. Ultimately Ben doesn't break Sawyer with the pacemaker, or even the impossibility of escape. He, just like Kate and Jack, are held tight by bonds of love.

Okay, one more paragraph and I'll shut up. There's a great parallel between Ben and the character he quotes, 'Crooks'. Crooks "the Negro stable buck" is a bright but deeply lonely man, twisted literally and figuratively. A painful spinal problem twists his back to the left (which side was that tumor on?). Because he's black, he isn't allowed to bunk or assiociate with the other men, so he spends all his time in his room in the stable reading and thinking. In the scene the quote comes from, he toys with an unaware Lennie, taunting him with the idea that George will abandon him. When Lennie freaks out, Crooks apologizes, explaining his behavior with the quote. It continues "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets alone and he got nothing to tell him what's so and what ain't so....He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here…" It's interesting to consider Ben as a man warped, maybe to the point of losing touch with reality, by isolation.

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Recent Discoveries

Yo dudes,
As webmaster par excellence (teehee), I am always thinking about the blog. Out of love.
And Lost, out of what I'm coming to realize is a debilitating obsession. Eh? To that end, I just started my mom and sister on the show.

For the blog's sake, I did a little serious google searching and found other sites dedicated to Lost Books. Here's the best one I've found, someone who is doing basically the same thing: Coyote Mercury! Way to go guy, I think you are awesome, and will try not to crib from you.
A different approach is going down at the the Lost Community Book Club, where readers are invited to read and discuss one book a month, this months is Watership Down.
Consequently, I'll be taking Watership Down and Evil Under the Sun on my trip this weekend.

But here's the real reason I'm posting, lets be honest. Aurora showed me a fan video yesterday, and it is just too good. So Ladies and Dudes, here it is: Sawyer/Gaston!

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The Third Policeman: DeSelby, Desmond, and the Living Dead

Weird books merit weird entries.
This book is actually summarized pretty well on Lostpedia, and also on Wikipedia..at least as well as you can explain a Flann O'Brien book. I don't even know where to start on this one. Thinking about it is terrifying me. The book is seen on Desmond's shelf in 2x01 and he grabs it as he leaves for his exile in 2x03: Orientation.

The Third Policeman starts out like a regular old book. Our beloved narrator tells us of his sad childhood and his current situation, running a pub with a friend named Divney. Divney decides they need to kill a man named Mathers and steal his black box full of money. They do kill him, gruesomely, with shovels, our narrator (somewhat unwillingly) giving the final blows. Divney refuses to give him any of the money, instead hiding it, only telling him where it is after a year has passed. The box is hidden in the floorboards of the murdered man's home. As our narrator goes into the house to get it, the book moves into its second movement: the one where nothing makes sense and there is no real plot.

It's basically one long hallucination. Our guy finds himself in the house, unable to get the box, but in the company of two policeman whom, he eventually realizes, know that he killed Mathers, and are preparing to hang him. In the meantime though, he walks around his town, I guess, and describes ill-defined buildings which he is stuck in, has arguments with them about the nature of bicycles, and goes to sleep a few times. Ugh. And did I mention the extensive footnotes (written by the narrator) on the non-existent philosopher DeSelby which hoard page space in otherwise reasonably long chapters? It's fun at the exact moment that you are reading, but once you close the book, you have no idea what you just read and no idea what you'll be coming back to when you start reading again. It's pretty futile for much of the book, and all you need to know is that something went terribly wrong when he went into the house.

The LOST connections are pretty well outlined, the most interesting of them being a map on the ceiling of the police barracks which shows a map of the town... one policeman avers that "I did not [make it] and nobody else manufactured it either. It was always there and MacCruiskeen is certain that it was there even before that." The policeman also says that it shows the way to eternity. Does that bode well or ill for the Hatch map?

So they go to "eternity" by way of some sort of elevator. In Eternity, no-one ever need shave since their hair never grows (hmm...Jack?). Also, they come upon a cabinet/machine that produces objects which "lacked an essential property of all known objects"--it reminds me of the smoke monster...there is a certain unexplainable, or as Charlie points out in 1X02 "a certain gargantuan quality" about it.

The Third Policeman also contains a suspicious story about an incident with a hot-air balloonist: when his balloon was pulled back to earth, he was nowhere to be found--but when the balloon was sent back up without him 2 weeks later and then brought back to earth, he was in it "without a feather out of him." What? I don't get it either.

Finally, there's the issue of the titular of the Third Policeman. HM! He apparently never comes into the police station, and no one sees him, and he's busy all the time...He's sort of Jacob character, hazy but important. So whats up? Wait for it...when the narrator finally meets the third policeman, he seems to be Mathers, the man he killed! It turns out that the narrator's been dead this whole time, and he's in a sort of hallucinogenic hell! The book ends with the narrator finally tracking down Divney, in a classic ghost story moment where he doesn't realize that he's the ghost. It's been 16 years, and Divney has a wife and kids, but the sight of our narrator gives him a heart attack and kills him. The end of the book starts the whole cycle over again, with Divney going through the same things alongside the narrator, and no one the wiser, including US, the readers.

So wow. What does this really have to do with our beloved show?
Well, first of all, it seems to give some (more) credence to the Purgatory theory, which, I know, I know, has been debunked, but nevertheless continues to serve as a guiding force for the way the show toddles along, passing judgment on its characters through the smoke monster. The blurry line between the living and the dead, and the punishment meted out to the narrator by his victim (like the visions of Eko's Brother or Ben's mother) also seem quite Lost-like.

Less positively, the inclusion of this book also suggests to me something about the dead ends, and things that just don't make sense on LOST..they might very well not get explained. To some extent, as with The Third Policeman, analysis is futile. I'd like to think that just some of our analysis is futile. To spin that another way, I think this could be some sort of indication of Desmond's psyche more than anyone else's--the inhabitant of the Hatch and "flash" sufferer that he is. I'm going to go out on a pretty shaky limb here and say that he isn't experiencing reality in quite the same way as everyone else, having more than the just the flashes to worry about... I don't think we need to doubt everything we're seeing on the island, but we may need to be more skeptical of some characters' perception of it. UM. yep.

As crazy as this book is, it hasn't stopped people from reading it. In fact, after being featured on LOST, it was bought by so many fans that an extra print run was warranted.
That's awesome. I just wonder what all those Lost Fans thought after they read it.

In other news, Desmond's one fine-looking crazy guy.

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Lancelot.

I think I am getting suckered by this whole quest to read all the books from LOST, because, well, I've enjoyed every book so far (with the exception of Rainbow 6, in progress)... Lancelot ,by Walker Percy, in particular. Sawyer is seen perusing this book in 2X15 Maternity Leave. I'm still puzzling over it being in this particular episode.

Lancelot has some superficial connections to Lost. So here's the plot, where the superificial connections are. There's a guy in the looney bin (like Hurley) named Lancelot, who was once a sort of twisted sort of Southern gentleman (like Sawyer) and at the same time an emasculated overly-educated middle-aged loser who loves his Bowie knife above all (oh, Locke, I love you). The book revolves around his discovery that his wife was cheating on him and had a child with another man (Sun+Jin-esque), a fact he didn't figure out until his daughter was about 6. When he figures it out, he plots revenge on the culprit, which ultimately results in the explosion of his home. He narrates the story to a friend of his from his youth who in the intervening years became a doctor and then a priest (Jack/Eko?...I'm pushing it). He talks about how he's (creepily) into the girl in the room next to his in the asylum (Libby-like)...

There are also an important Kate connections, I think...
Sawyer's Kate predicament echoes Lancelot's, since Lancelot's wife is at once his and not his. Lancelot notes a couple of things in particular: that he could "gauge her sexual desire by her freckles," and spookily that his "jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time
loses its structure. Time stretches out."...it's also worth noting that Kate blew up her father, sort of the reverse of Lancelot..although Lancelot manages to get his daughter out of the house first. I'm not sure what to do with that.

Then there's the way the house getting blown up occurs. Lancelot goes to punish Jacoby, who is sleeping with his wife. He ends up cutting his throat in the glow of a kerosene light in the middle of a hurricane. The whole scene seemed sort of eerie in a Man Behind the Curtain sort of way.
After Jacoby is dead and Lancelot's wife is pleading with him, he relights the lamp which somehow blew out. This spark ignites a methane leak which destroys the house and blows him out of it, "wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight." Could another shadowy exchange with LOST's Jacob end this way? Um, I hope not.

There are broader literary connections too--The narrative style is retrospective, flashing back to the main events of the story. The narrator is constantly concerned with the past, present and future, especially when it comes to morality and restoring it: "I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are a part of this age." Finally, and I don't think I'm pushing here, he's effectively trapped in a Purgatory of his own making, mixing delusion with the truth and morality with perversity at every turn. In particular, the final pages of the book turn into a cryptic dialogue with what may be the listening friend (who is hazily defined) or may simply be his own troubled conscience (a device also used in The Third Policeman)...he states that he's getting out of the asylum but the final feeling is one of extreme, inescapable claustrophobia: he's never really getting out.

My strongest feeling about this book didn't have much to do with Lost, however. Lancelot, when all was said and done, seemed not unlike Humbert Humbert of Lolita (whose progenitor, Laughter in the Dark, is on our reading list)--He's a major creep who forces you to be in his head alone. Lancelot says pretty crude things about the people around him, particularly women and black people, while at the same time insulting the morality of others, and assuming that people think he's enlightened (he's a sometimes-civil-rights-lawyer and a historic home repairer)...when he knows, and we know, that he's not. He reflects nostalgically many times on his first wife (who sounds like H.H.'s childhood sweetheart Annabel) and his final confrontation is with a portly naked man (like Quilty in Lolita)...is there a Humbert Humbert in the LOST world?

If I had to add it up, I'd say this book was Lolita+Kurt Vonnegut+Lost.
As with most of these books, I don't think it has a ton to say about the big questions themselves, but it does say well that personal morality is a tricky thing...the choices we make and the way we execute them are often quite hard to understand outside of our little heads. Also, to crib from Aurora's words, I'm realizing that LOST uses a lot of standard literary tropes, which is why we are seeing so many connections--and that's a good thing. Its skill is really in the way it weaves them together. Good Job, LOST.

P.S. Check out near the end of Chapter 5 starting with "Lock, I need a favor..". I think it describes Locke pretty darn well. adios.

Coming up: The 3rd Policeman, addenda to TOTS and Of Mice and Men...

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Carrie.

Dang, Carrie.
Stephen King's first book makes its first appearance in Episode 3x01 "Tale of Two Cities". The Other's book club is meeting to discuss it at Juliet's pad, and their bickering is interrupted by the cacophonous arrival of Oceanic Flight 815. It also appears in Juliet's flashback in 3x07 "Not in Portland" and is read by Ben in 3x16 "One of Us."

Here's the exciting news I have to report: Carrie the book is better than Carrie the movie, and probably applies a little better to LOST. The book and the film cover almost exactly the same material: the terrifying terrain of high school, hyper-Christian home-life, and telekinesis. However, the book gets inside of multiple characters heads by interspersing real-time narrative with fictional news articles and book excerpts which discuss the origins of Carrie's telekinesis and the impact of her prom blow-up.

Carrie, a misfit, gets her first period in locker room showers and other girls make merciless fun of her. The girls who made fun of her get in trouble. One of the teasers gets barred from the prom, and plots revenge. Another feels bad, and gets her boyfriend to take Carrie to prom. Carrie's mom is a crazy Christian who is obsessed with battling evil, especially in the form of sexuality, and is thus furious about Carrie's period, prom plans, and basically anything else she does. Oh yeah, and Carrie realizes somewhere in here that she can move stuff with her mind.

Bucking her mother's demands with teenage will and telekinetic force, Carrie goes to the Prom. Once there, she gets crowned Queen, gets pigs blood dumped on her head, gets laughed at and loses it, starting an electrical fire which more or less kills every prom-goers. She then goes home, starting some fires in the town along the way, and stops her mothers heart with her mind, but not before her mother stabs her, causing her to slowly bleed to death. Oof. Heavy stuff. Gorey. And tons of fun--Carrie lays it on thick with teenage angst, questions of good and evil, supernatural occurences, and some serious, but not senseless violence.

With the exception of teenage angst, all of these sound pretty darn Lostean. And we know that Stephen King is an unapologetic Lost fan whose also had some pretty serious influence on the show. The Carrie connections are less grandiose than The Stand's end-times battle or the multiple realities of The Dark Tower. What it comes down to, for me, is the "special child" thread which Stephen King and LOST both embrace. Walt's possible special powers come to mind, especially his apparent ability to appear in more than one place at a time.

But since she's a major player in the three episodes where we see the book, Juliet seems like a stronger candidate for a Carrie connection. Stephen King depicts Carrie as a social misfit both by nature and by situation, and lets us sympathize with those who have cast her out at times ...though the book follows Carrie, we never really get inside her head. We know that her actions aren't all bad (she's getting some rightful revenge) or all good (she's hurting tons of innocent people). This seems to me much like the way we can't be certain of Juliet's motives, and feel ambivalent about them even when she seems to explain them...or does she? Furthermore, Carrie focuses a ton on the danger of female sexuality--Juliet's life's work involves fertility, an important part of that sexual equation. Plus, yo, Juliet's kind of creepy, pretty unhappy, and one time she willed that her ex-husband get hit by bus, and lo and behold, he did. She's proved that she could be a powder-keg, in a manner of speaking, if the circumstances were right.

That said I think there could also be some special child stuff going on with Hurley, Ben, or even Alex. Alex, especially, since I saw her recently on an episode of That's So Raven as a telekinetic kid. Eerie.

But I digress. In addition to the "special child" theme, I can see the Terrible Parent (a mother instead of a father this time around), extremes of good and evil and the space between them that the most people occupy, and the news reports, interviews, and book excerpts which effectively let the reader flash back and forward, as pretty Lost-like.

So that's it. I don't (at this point) think that this book is going to be any real key to the show, but its got character, thematic, and literary style connections, plus its fun. I like to say that what little Stephen King I have read is sort of like a bag of potato chips--you can devour it all at once, and you feel a little gross afterwards, but it sure was tasty while you were eating it. And that while you were reading it, at least, it made you feel like you were smart for understanding the dilemmas at hand. Not unlike Lost, in some respects.

p.s. Emilie de Ravin was in a 2002 TV remake of Carrie, as the girl who plans the pigs blood stunt...hmm... bad sign for her?

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The Turn of the Screw

Ok, here we go.

LOST stuck this book in one of the most prominent spots on the show, no freeze-framing or squinting necessary to catch it. In episode 2x03, "Orientation", Desmond tells Jack and Locke to watch the titular film, hidden behind a copy of TotS. So is this book our training video?

Man, I hope not. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed TotS. But it's designed to be a frustrating experience, a ghost story with lots of questions and no clear answers. Just like the orientation film, TotS is both mesmerizing and frustrating, important details missing, enigmatic phrases suggesting layers you'll never see.

The basic story is pretty simple *Heavy spoilers for the book ahead, so proceed with caution*: a young governess is put in charge of two seemingly angelic children, Miles and Flora, at a country estate. She begins to be haunted by two ghostly figures, and becomes increasingly convinced these ghosts are trying to steal, possess, or kill the children. The governess finds out that the ghosts she sees look like two dead former servants who used to spend a lot of time with the kids but died under mysterious circumstances. The children, in turn, act increasingly bizarre, sneaking away, lying, and being generally creepy.

After she finds Flora wandering outside alone, she sends her away and attempts to confront Miles. In this final confrontation, she tries to get him to explain what's going on and own up to some past misdeeds, and he starts to do so. In the midst of all this, she sees the ghosts again, and pulls poor terrified Lil' Miles close to her. The governess thinks she is finally beating this thing, but Miles jerks suddenly, and falls into her arms, dead. The End.

Phew. Those summary paragraphs were incredibly hard to write, mostly because I've left out one important detail. Through all of the story, no one but the narrator ever definitely sees the ghosts, and we have no idea whether all this is in her increasingly unstable head. Apparently scholars have argued viciously about whether you can trust this unreliable narrator ever since the book was published, with no consensus yet.

The ghosts are pretty Lost-ey, and not just because they refer to them as "The Others". The governess begins to suspect that the apparitions are trying to lead the children to their doom, like happened to Shannon with Walt, or might have happened to little Ben with his Mom. The governess speculates about why a ghost might want to take the children "She suffers the torments...of the lost. Of the dammed. And that's why, to share them...she wants Flora." Yick.

The creepy little boy in the story reminds me pretty hard of Ben. He's constantly lying, and saying shit like "I'll tell you everything, I will. But not now." It's never clear in the story whether he believes in any of it, or how much he's been corrupted by the evil that surrounds him. Is he a conniving demon or a just a gullible, lonely boy? Search me, man.

I totally recommend it, both for pleasure reading and for Lost purposes. For one thing, it's a classic with a tough reputation, so that will make you feel smart. But its not really that hard, and only 100 pages, it's a quick read. As far as Lost goes, I don't think you're going to find a book that says more about the way the producers are building their mystery (sorry, anyone who has Sarah Mclachlan stuck in their head now). I just hope Lost doesn't end in a way that leaves scholars arguing about it for a hundred years.

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This is how it will work.

Alright.
Here's the deal. We are best pals and roommates (thus the blog title). We are Lost Fans. We have hour long discussions about it, have a door devoted to pictures from it, and do the jigsaw puzzles. Not surprisingly, distraught by the hiatus from its very first day, we sought something to fill that void in our lives. Some might have taken a walk, volunteered with children, or learned how to cook. We, however, decided to fill our TV void with books.

As any good fan knows, Lost has lots of literary references, obvious, implied, and in episode titles. A lot of these books are classics or just plain good stuff that I am embarrassed not to have read yet, so it seemed like a great opportunity. Stuff like Watership Down, The Turn of the Screw, Catch 22--It is a worthy challenge!

So here's the rules: We're going to read each of the books. I'll read some, and Aurora will read some, and we'll both read important ones. We'll weigh in, give a summary of the book, talk about interesting plot threads, how we think it relates to Lost in general or to specific characters or episodes. We'll talk a little about cultural ties and criticism of the book outside of LOST. Finally, we'll give our opinion of the book on its own and its potential relevance to the show. But um, probably we will spoil books a little, and we'll be talking about LOST through the end of Season 3, so don't get spoiled, OK?

Lostpedia's list serves as our guide to what we will read, DarkUFOs list works too. J. Wood's blog is probably a little (a lot) smarter than ours will be, but we will probably be indebted to it sometimes, and its cool. We don't plan to read any of Lost's philosopher references, and it will probably be awhile before we get around to The Fountainhead, but we'll read some comic books, maybe talk about related TV and films a teeny bit, and about books that we see connections to which haven't been mentioned on the show.

We will also let you know if we see Locke's face in a peanut butter sandwich. Here's hoping.

Coming Soon: posts about The Turn of the Screw, Carrie, The Moon Pool, Of Mice and Men, Lancelot, and um.. Rainbow 6.

In the mean time, please enjoy this Sawyer montage.
Adios.

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Orientation Pt. 2

Hi Internet. How are you today?

Favorite Book: The Watchmen, Matilda.
Favorite Lost Character: Hurley. Sayid is a badass, and I love Sawyer, but make fun of Hurley and I will cut you.
Other TV Shows I Enjoy: The Office, Buffy, Veronica Mars, Jeeves and Wooster.
One Thing I Think Would Make Lost Better: Swordfights.
One Thing I Would be pretty mad if Lost did/stopped doing: Was completely and utterly explainable by science.
Favorite Pizza Toppings: Banana Peppers, Olives.
5 Reasons I Watch Lost:
1) The WTF.
2) Thinking about it, trying to be a detective, learning all kinds of weird interesting shit.
3) The characters.
4) Its lack of cynicism and willingness to take on themes like redemption and faith. I can't think of another show that even talks about this stuff.
5) It's funny. Remember that time Jin told a ghost story?

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Orientation Pt.1

Hi.
Ok, so we're going to read books that are featured on LOST, and we thought it might be appropriate to make clear our deep devotion to the show before we get started.
We've already started reading, but we're still working on our format, which we will let you know about soon. In the meantime...

We have introductions to attend to! So. Here are some self-posed questions about Lost and other cultural subjects. And here are my answers:

Favorite Book: Peter Pan!
Favorite Lost Character: Locke (duh). Sawyer OR Hurley second.
Other TV Shows I Enjoy: The Office, Veronica Mars, Boy Meets World, 21 Jump Street.
One Thing I Think Would Make Lost Better: Another strong (not romantically entangled) female.... Ana-Lucia.
One Thing I Would be pretty mad if Lost did/stopped doing: Had it be all in someone's mind. Sorry, Dave, you were a great episode, but you would have been a let down.
Favorite Pizza Toppings: Anchovies and Green Olives
5 Reasons I Watch Lost:
1) Really Good Storytelling
2) Christian Undertones
3) Roughing It.
4) Really smart literary and cultural references
5) Hotties. Or good actors, either way.

And that is all I can think of. I'm sure many more of my feelings on our beloved program will soon come to light. Now dharma whateversenstein will introduce herself.
Good luck, dweeb.

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LOST

LOST

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