The Not So Secret Society Of S.

Ok...(deep breath)...(muttering to self) you can do this, it's not that hard, just take it nice and slow...(deep breath)...Oh hello sorry about all the pep talking, just trying to figure out how to write this rambling.  See I finished this book that my Hubbin gave me for Christmas and I honestly have absolutely no idea on how to post about it.  Do I try and sum it up in one big push?  Do I break it up into pieces? Do I send every reader a copy of the book, have them read it and THEN let them read this post (actually I did do that with a few of my friends and family)?  Why so much trouble you ask?  Well this is not your conventional book.  S. created by J.J Abrams and written by Doug Dorst, yep this book had a creator and a writer.  It is one of those books that is as much about concepts as it is a story.  Here is the premise in a nut shell.  There is a book with a story and in the margins of this book is another story as two readers trade the book back and forth making notes in the margins.  To further make this book special there are several inserts (post cards, letters, articles and such) to add even more dimensions to the stories.  This makes for a fun read, but hard rambling...but I'm gonna give it a try.

As always SPOILERS AHEAD PLEASE DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE BOOK BECAUSE THE BOOK WILL BE SO MUCH BETTER IF YOU READ IT WITHOUT ANYBODY TELLING YOU HOW TO READ IT.  THERE ARE SEVERAL POSTS OUT THERE ON HOW TO READ THIS BOOK, READ IT THE WAY YOU WANT TO AND THEN READ PEOPLES REVIEWS AND RAMBLINGS TRUST ME!

I will break this up into two parts the first being the story the book tells and the second being the story(s) told in the margins.
The Book- The book is called Ship of Theseus (if you are unfamiliar with the concept it is essentially if you take a ship and replace every single piece...is it the same ship?) and it is written by the fictional V.M. Straka who is a mysterious author who's real identity is unknown.  The book starts with a forward written by Straka's translator (he apparently would send the translator books in various langues and the translator would put them all into one single language.) The translator F.X.Caldeira writes that they were to meet for the first time for Straka to hand over the final manuscript, but Straka was supposedly killed before Caldeira met up with him.  Caldeira finds all but the last pages of the manuscript and publishes it, including Caldeira's own footnotes.  The story is this.  S. is a man who has lost all his memories, he does not even know his

 name.  He wanders into a coffee shop and meets a woman who triggers some sort of memory or feeling.  He is immediately shanghaied and taken to a strange ship.  On this ship he meets Maelstrom the one in charge who is the only one who is able to talk as the rest of the crew has had there lips sewn shut.  A lot of stuff seems to go on during this voyage, but S. (who is told his name by Maelstrom) is given only cryptic bits of information, including the name Sola.  For some reason this again triggers something in S. and even though it appears Sola is the reason for his perdiciment he knows he has to find her.  After a huge storm S. ends up washed ashore in the town of B____ and joins with a group of people attempting to lead a peaceful workers revolt.  When the weapon maker/dealer named Vevoda sends one of his people to set off a bomb and blames it on the revolt leaders S. and his new friends must flee. At some point S. sees a woman he is convinced is Sola, though she is significantly older and goes by another name, but he must run and cannot pursue her.  They make it to the mountains where they encounter a revolting substance that resembles a foul tar.  It turns out this is part of a weapon that Vevoda is making and causes much festering and pain and all around not goodness.  Eventually everybody in the group except for S. is killed and he is again picked up by his mysterious ship.  He is then taken to an island that is on the verge of being invaded.  Here he meets more revolutionaries and is given an assassins kit with poison and names of people to take down.  He is taken to the Obsidian Island where he meets with a woman who shows him books of ships in pristine condition, but as he turns each page the ships gets changed and morphed, pieces being replaced, parts being rebuilt.  He gets back to the boat and sneaks down to the room where the sewn crew members go and discovers that a place to write, he sits and is essentially goes into a trance and writes and writes and writes.  He is then handed needle and thread to sew his own mouth. S. begins his new task of killing Vevoda's Agents in various ways.  Up to this point and through out the book a mysterious S symbol appears to S. and continues through out the story, it is a sign of sorts and helps convince him he is on the right track.  After a while the ship S. is on is attacked and he finds himself in Winter City, a cold dead place where nothing happens.  He finally meets up with Sola and the two embark on a final quest to kill Vevoda and try and end the destruction.  S. also realizes that time passed differently for him while he was on the ship then it did in the real world.  S. and Sola eventually accomplish there goal and sail of into the sunset together on the refixed ship.
The Margins-In the margins of the book two readers Eric and Jen trade comments at various times.  Lucky for us they color coded the comments so we know what order they were written.  Pencil-Eric's original notes, Blue and Black-first conversations, Orange and Green-second conversations, Purple and Red-third conversations, Black and Black-final conversations.  To me there are actually a couple stories going on, but I will do my best to make sense.  Essentially Eric is a graduate student who got kicked out of school after he pulled a destructive prank when his mentor stole the work he was doing.  Jen is an undergrad who is about to graduate who does not know what she wants to do with her life.  Eric had/has been working on the

mystery of Straka's identity and Jen soon starts to help him.  They discover that F.X. Caldeira is actually a woman, not a man like they all assumed and that she was in love with Straka, even though they never met in person. They also find that she left coded messages in the foot notes of the book.  There are several candidets for the true identity of Straka and Jen and Eric go through several of them, discarding most for various reasons.  They also discover that most of the authors that are possibilities for Straka were revolutionaries themselves to some degree, with most of them being killed for their beliefs at some point.  Jen and Eric eventually decide that the best candidate is Valcav Straka, a 19 year old boy who jumped to his death holding a manuscript after being jilted by a girl.  They speculate that a couple of the authors rescued him and kept his survival a secret, enabling him to write whatever he wanted.  There is much speculation about secret societies, betrayals, love triangles, hidden children and so forth.  There is also several refrences to Bouchard a cooperation that Starka had run in's with. They decide that Straka was afraid that he was going to be killed and wrote this last book as kind of a memoir, a way to sum up his life. We also find out about Jen and Eric's history.  Jen (though it takes her a couple tries to get the whole truth out) ran away for four days when she was 10 causing her parents to become extremely overprotective which is now causing problems.  Eric was raised by super religious parents and his Uncle drowned in a boating accident after a teenage Eric left the boat in anger.  The two of them also end up falling in love and moving on to continue their research.

Did you get through all that?  Are you wondering why I wrote all that when I am assuming you've already read the book?  Mostly 'cause I have been reading other peoples reviews and trying to see what they got out of it but everybody is trying not to spoil things so I haven't had much luck.  Already now that I have already written a ton I am now going to go on at length about my thoughts on this book.  I thought the concept was really cool, it had a researchy feel to it which I loved.  I know a lot of people have various suggestions for reading it (e.g. read the story first then go back and read the margins, read the margin notes in chronological order, read it upside down by the light of a full moon while wearing monkey ears), but I just read each page in its entirety, tell me what worked for you.  I thought the story itself was as straight forward as any quasi-metephorical story can be, I followed it just fine.  The margin story on the other hand got a little muddled for me.  Jen and Eric came through very clearly, but the whole thing about Jen being watched and her barn

burned down...I never knew what that was about.  Also they kept talking about old S and new S and new new S which got a bit confusing.  I got that the original (and possibly ancient)S was a radical social group that threatened the higher ups, and I think the new S was a group who was killing off the old S and trying to change what the group meant?  I don't know it was just kind of thrown in there.  Sometimes I rolled my eyes at Jen and Eric, they both (but especially Jen) seemed kind of whiney.  Oh woe is me, I broke up with my jerk boyfriend now I don't want to graduate and be a productive member of society, or Eric "I don't trust anybody cause I grew up with religious parents" crap.  I did not understand why Jen felt she needed to keep changing the story of how/why she ran away, which just made me irritated at her.  As with a lot of J.J. Abrams stuff if you read this book carefully it can lead you to a lot of cool real life references like the identity of B.Traven or the Taman Shud case.  There is a great website called SFiles22 that lets you delve deeper into some of the more obscure parts of the book, and hopefully find some more answers, also Eotvos Wheel which comes from the perspective that the Straka timeline is real. The inserts were cool and added an extra dimension to the whole thing, just be sure you know where they all belong or it can get confusing as I know from experience.  Overall I loved reading this book, it held my attention and made sense for the most part, don't expect all your questions to be answered, but only a few of them really bugged me so not to bad.  I would recommend this book to anybody with a little bit of patience, people who like an esoteric (love that word!) mystery, people who like pretty books, or anybody who is a J.J.Abrams fan (cause this book reads like watching Lost, and if that makes sense then you should read this book).  I give it 8 out of 10 refurbished ships.

How did you read this book?  Did you like the book story or the margin story more?  Do you think you know who Straka is?