Movie Log: Scenes of a Sexual Nature

Netflix recommended Scenes of a Sexual Nature, and its trailer was amusing, so we got it last week.

Scenes's title betrays its origin -- it was, at first, seven separate vignettes, which were combined into one film since they were all about relationships and all took place in the same location (and that would allow the combination to be a movie, released to theaters and all that). A young man tries to pick up an young woman, a middle-aged couple meet for a blind date, an older couple meet by chance and discover they have a shared past -- that sort of thing. (Let's see if I can remember all of the rest: a divorced couple trade their child for a visit, a gay couple talk about children, a married man is caught staring at a pretty girl's "pants," and a very chic-looking couple wander amid columns until we find out something unexpected.)

It's essentially a textbook case of how to create a successful low-budget movie:

• start with a good script, with juicy (but small) roles that actors will enjoy
• get those actors (lots of them) by saying its only two or three days of work, and let them work with people they like
• set the whole thing outdoors (on Hampstead Heath), to avoid building sets, or needing much in the way of props
• and then set up a cast-and-crew joint-stock company to distribute the final product and keep the money going to the ones who made it.

The actors are all good, and the script supports them. The movie's short and light and not as sexy as one might expect from the title. (Then again, it is British, so any sex at all is slightly surprising.) It's a successful comedy that doesn't overstay its welcome (though the "making of" documentary is half as long as the movie, and exceptionally congratulatory). If you don't expect anything large from it, Scenes of a Sexual Nature will be a delight.

Reports of My Posting at ComicMix Are Not Exaggerated

On Monday, I reviewed a book called Graphic Classics: Mark Twain, edited by Tom Pomplun.

There are two other things I've read but not reviewed yet, plus some stuff I hope to pull together for Manga Friday. But I'm running out of week, so we'll see what I can get to...

Me-me-me-me-me-meme!

Yet another one of these iTunes memes, stolen (as usual) from Keith R.A. Decandido:

How many songs total: 16,562
How many hours or days of music: 45 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes and 21 seconds

Most recently played: "She Sang Angels to Rest" by Richard Thompson, from Sweet Warrior
Most played: "Maureen" by Fountains of Wayne, off Out-of-State Plates (64 times)
Most recently added: "Power" by Nick Jaina, from Wool

Sort by song title
First Song: "A.C. Cover" by Camper Van Beethoven, off Camper Vantiquities
Last Song: "( )" by They Might Be Giants (the conversation with Gloria from the answering machine)

Sort by time
Shortest Song: "Kangaroo - SFX" by Carl Stalling and the Warner Brothers Orchestra
Longest Song: "Pelleas und Melisande" by Arnold Schoenberg, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez

(Hey, it missed Sort by Artist, so I'll throw that in, too --
First: 1996 Broadway Cast (Chicago soundtrack)
Last: Aaron Neville
No, wait. Strike that -- reverse it.)

Sort by album
First album: Abacab
Last album: 90125

First song that comes up on Shuffle: "Happy Jack" by The Who, from Live at Leeds

Search the following and state how many songs come up:
Death - 118
Life - 229
Love - 657
Hate - 52
You - 1465
Sex - 75

Melded Again

I'm one of the folks babbling about "What Golden Age SF Got Right & Wrong" today at SF Signal, in their current Mind Meld feature. (Well, I'm babbling; I bet everyone else is coherent and reasonable.)

Joining me in this virtual discussion are James Gunn, James Wallace Harris, John C. Wright, Mike Brotherton, Sue Lange, and Fred Kiesche. I haven't read what they've written yet, but I'm sure they're all thoughtful and interesting and -- insofar as they agree completely with me -- accurate.

Movie Log: Juno

Since the kids had school last Monday -- but I had a holiday at work -- The Wife and I grabbed the opportunity to go out and see a movie for adults in the theater. Juno is about a bunch of teenagers, but it's much more adult than most of the current R-rated movies about killer skeleton-whales and dying grumpy old men.

Juno's been getting glowing reviews and award hype at every turn, and that's all mostly justified. Yes, the first five minutes or so of Juno are in an exceptionally arch patois, but the movie settles down after that. (And I wouldn't be surprised if that opening was in there just to get the script read by jaded young interns at production companies -- much like American Pie was read and bought because the script was called "Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Most Readers Will Probably Hate But I Think You Will Love.")

The sausage-factory workings of Hollywood aside, Juno is an excellent movie. It has about seven major characters, and all of them are played by fine actors doing good work with honest, realistic lines. It's that rare movie that sees all of its characters as individuals, rather than as representatives of a type -- Juno is not popular at her school, but she's not "the Goth," or anything else pre-digested, she's just herself. And the fact that her best female friend is a cheerleader was a great touch, showing quietly that real people don't fit into tidy marketing categories and that the real world is always a bit messier than we expect.

You've probably heard of Juno by now, so I won't bother talking about the plot much -- Juno (Ellen Page) is our main character, and in the very first scene she learns that she's pregnant from what seems to be a one-time experimental thing with her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera, doing much the same shtick as he did in Superbad, only with the creepy passive-aggressiveness dialed down and the quizzical tentativeness dialed up). She almost gets an abortion, but of course no positively-depicted woman can actually have an abortion in a major American work of entertainment, so she decides to have the baby and put it up for adoption. (That might be slightly unfair to this particular movie, which needed Juno to decide to find a childless couple to take her baby -- and the scene where Juno runs out of the abortion clinic works well. But I stand by the general point; there are some stories that just won't be told.)

Things go on from there, and Juno is saved from becoming an Afterschool Special by one part acting and one part writing -- it isn't trying to be A Parable for Our Times (on any side of the teen pregnancy debate); it's telling this story about this girl, and she's quite enough to carry the movie. (Though, as I said, the rest of the cast is excellent as well.)

I Want What He's Got

I missed this New York Times article on Tom Stoppard's excellent traveling book-case on Monday, but caught up with it when PW's Book Maven blog covered it today.

When I travel, I tend to bring three or four books and at least half-a-dozen magazines (for a three- or four-day trip), so I love the idea of this book-box. On the other hand, I stash my reading material in my messenger bag, so I can carry it onto the plane -- that's one of the best places to read on a trip, and I want to have choices then. (Though I'm often reduced to making sure a New Yorker is accessible in an outside pocket and pulling out a current book as I scrunch into the tiny airline seats.)

If I was going anywhere for a week or more, and especially if I'd have reading time while there, I'd love to have a case like this. Pity that they haven't been made for twenty years...

What Is the "Disappearing Bestseller"?

GalleyCat has had two posts in the last few days about a nonfiction bestseller that is rumored to have no copies in the pipeline and won't be reprinted -- here's the second post.

There are plenty of reasons why a publisher wouldn't want to reprint a particular book, and knowing that there are umpteen copies ready to be returned any moment is definitely one of them. Still, publishers usually manage these situations in public, and attempt to move stock around, if possible, to keep the supply where it needs to be.

But what I want to know is -- what book is this? From the context, I think it's a hardcover frontlist title, so I took a quick gander at a Nielsen-branded book-sales-tracking tool to find a few possibilities, with an eye to books that may have some controversy around them:

• Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton
• Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld
• An Inconvenient Book by Glenn Beck
• Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

I have no idea if this rumor has any truth at all about it -- but I'd bet money that it's about Morton's bio of Cruise. Anyone have any other plausible candidates?

I Have An Author on TV!

Cynthia Cooper on a local San Francisco morning show, talking for over seven minutes about her book Extraordinary Circumstances.

Oh, and CFO magazine gave the book a great review, too.

I've never been directly pushing a book this big before -- this is great!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/26

Only four new books hit the Hornswoggler House this week, so I'm not going to bother to categorize them:

Dark Wars: The Tale of Meiji Dracula has a premise that sounds silly at first (Dracula in Japan!) but could be something interesting. The cover is awfully busy, but doesn't go over the top in the way I would have expected from that title. Dark Wars is a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi, best known as the creator of Vampire Hunter D (none of whose work, I have to admit, have I read), with illustrations by Katsuya Terada. It's published by Del Rey, hitting bookstores any day now. It's an interesting choice for Del Rey, and shows that they're really serious about their partnership with Kodansha (and that they think that there might finally be a solid audience for translated popular fiction somewhere in the nexus of Goth, manga, and urban fantasy).

Copspeak is a dictionary of law enforcement (and criminal) terms published in 1996 by that fine and venerable house John Wiley & Sons. (Look for the Wiley label on all the books you buy!) It was written by Tom Philbin, who has written a pile of novels, true crime books, and other crime-related stuff. I can rarely resist books of interesting language, so this was right up my alley. I hope to be peppering my posts with authentic perp talk soon, so be warned.

T is for Trespass is Sue Grafton's new novel, and you've either been living in a tree or make it a point to ignore the world of mystery novels if you've never heard of her "Kinsey Milhone" series. This is the nineteenth of them, set in December of 1987, and I expect it will be just as good as the last eighteen of them -- which is very good indeed.

And Brave Story is an immense doorstop of a fantasy novel, which I'd thought was a young adult book (though the book itself doesn't actually say that anywhere, so I may be wrong). It was written by Miyuki Miyabe, translated by Alexander O. Smith, and has a great oddball cover by Dan May. (When people complain that all fantasy covers are illustrations, and so they have to look alike, they forget that things like this are possible. I'd love to see more like it, if the audience doesn't run screaming in disgust.) Viz published it back in July of 2007, and I remember thinking then, "Is Viz trying to expand into fiction now?" Only time will tell how big that program will end up being, but seeing any SFF in translation hitting US shores is a good thing.

And that's two translated novels (both from the Japanese, which is the flavor of the decade) out of four books this week. Can a PW trend piece be far behind?

The Question We All Must Answer

And by "we," I mean "editors," of which I am now not one. But I was when I answered that old "How Did You Get Such an Awesome Job?" question back on August 7, 2003 in rec.arts.sf.written. Someone called "Luna" asked me, and here's what I said (minus the parts of her question I quoted).

I graduated with a degree in English and lived close enough to NYC to be able to live with my mother for a few years (publishing doesn't pay well -- a little better now than it did ten years ago, but still not well). Other than that, it was pure luck -- I was out of work when the assistant job at the SFBC came open, and my interview with Ellen Asher (then and now the Queen of Science Fiction) went well. I've clung like a barnacle ever since.

A question about how much fun the job was...

Parts of it are lots of fun, and parts of it are just like every other office job in the world, except that the specific widgets we're dealing with are books. There's also the factor of having to deal with books one does not particularly like, but which will sell. (Which can feel something like school in the bad sense -- "I can't stand this Faerie Queene thing, and I still have to read six hundred pages of it and be coherent about it when I'm done.")

Comment about it being her dream to edit SFF.

Like the theater, you have to move to New York and starve for a while. Even then, the odds aren't good (also like the theater). Publishing isn't that glamorous, really, but it's enough more glamorous than auto-body repair that the supply exceeds the demand.

And, she asked, is reading books and writing/thinking/talking about them all the time as much fun as she thinks it will be?

It is. But there's also an element (for me, at least) of having to read books that you don't like -- and doing that regularly.

And I explained that last point a few days later:

Well, yes, but there's also the large segment of "books I don't like personally but which are popular with other people." Private readers can generally ignore these; reviewers and editors need to deal with them somehow.

Aurealis Award Winners

Awards season is on us again -- or does it ever actually end? -- with the announcement of the winners of Australia's prestigious Aurealis Awards for 2007.

I note that of the winners of Best SF Novel, Best Fantasy Novel, Best Horror Novel, and Best Young Adult Novel, I've only heard of one of them, which probably means that a lot of good stuff is not making the long journey up-and-over.

I also note that the winner of the Best Children's (8-12 years) Long Fiction is books 2-6 of a series, which is odd -- they may be wonderful, and they may be long (combined), but whatever happened to the first book? Is that one execrable, or jettisonable, or just not awardable?

[via Locus Online]

In Which I Note The Times Has a Good Horror Reviewer and Twist That Fact To My Own Ends

There's a long column on horror in this weekend's New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty. Rafferty has nice things to say about Joe Hill's superb collection 20th Century Ghosts, and also covers a few books I haven't read myself. (Plus Marilyn Stasio's very regular mystery column, though that's substantially shorter. Stasio, among other things, covers the new book by the great Loren Estelman.)

And our man Itzkoff? Not seen since his December 16th column about what vaguely-remembered SF books the various presidential candidates should be reading. His last review was of William Gibson's Spook Country on August 26th.

There's no reason to believe Sam Tanenhaus reads my blog, but, if he happens to be ego-surfing and comes here -- Sam, get rid of Itzkoff. He's not doing anything at all for you. And, at this point, who could tell the difference if you canned him?

Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce

First of all, that name stops me short every time I see it. I suppose "Wilce" is unextraordinary, but on top of "Ysabeau S.," it looks like some particularly flamboyant version of the Witness Protection Program. I'm sure it's her real name --who would make up something like that? -- but I have a moment of "huh?" every time I see it.

And, second, I read Flora Segunda almost two weeks ago, and haven't managed to think up much to say about it. It's a pleasant YA fantasy novel, but the plot is fairly linear, the main character is yet another Spunky Girl (an interesting one, yes, but still, she's very much a type), and we don't learn enough about the world for that to entirely make sense.

(If I'm remembering and piecing together widely separated things correctly, Flora Segunda and the related short stories seem to be set in a world where the Vikings settled North America, at least to some extent. Columbus probably didn't show up, or didn't lead to any major conquest. I think this is set on the west coast, with the nasty Huitzil Empire to the South and the semi-independent city of Califa in which our story takes place. But I could be very wrong about any or all of that.)

Anyway, our heroine and first-person narrator is Flora Nemain Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca, scion of a once-large and powerful family, dweller in a very Gormenghastly house, and all-around Girl of Spirit (which is how the subtitle puts it). She's not as omni-competent as I expected, which is a nice change -- in fact, there are a lot of things that she thinks she's good at but does not demonstrate exceptional aptitude in.

Her family and house have fallen on rough times, as it customary for this kind of story: she's the youngest of four surviving Fyrdraacas, along with her older sister Idden (off on military duty), her mildly-deranged ex-POW father Reverdy, and her head-of-the-local-armed-forces mother Juliet. (And she's Flora Segunda because she had an older sister by that name who was with the father when he became a POW, and who did not emerge from captivity.) Things are even worse because mama Juliet banished the house's supernatural butler Valefor years before, halting the usual upkeep on the sprawling manse and leaving everything to slowly fall to pieces. (Don't even ask about the all-over-the-place names; they don't make much sense to me but that doesn't necessarily mean no sense could be made of them.)

As the only sane one regularly living at home, Flora is burdened with keeping up the house -- such parts of it as the family still use -- and with managing her occasionally drunk and manic father. She's sick of this, so, when she comes across the insubstantial remnant of the butler, she quickly falls in with his plan to revive himself and take back some of his abilities to keep up the house.

All he needs is some of Flora's energy. And that kind of thing never goes wrong, does it?

Fixing everything eventually requires the help of Flora's "sidekick," a boy from her school named Udo. (He's absent for the first third of the book, because he's grounded, which was an odd narrative choice. As it ends up, he's introduced awfully late in the story for someone who's supposed to be the best friend.) It also involves kidnapping, forgery, the supposedly-dead butler of a failed noble house, at least one pirate, Flora's upcoming coming-of-age birthday party, and Flora's mother's archenemy Lord Axacaya, a dangerous sorcerer who has often been in league with the hated Huitzils.

Flora Segunda has a lot of fun elements, and Flora's voice is spunky without going overboard about it. If I wasn't as impressed as I hoped I'd be, that can be attributed to high expectations, I guess. I liked Flora Segunda, but I couldn't quite love it.

Various Links

Too short to be their own posts! Too interesting to ignore!

• John Klima wants you to know that he's been blogging longer than you have (though he's too polite to put it like that) and that he desperately wants steampunk stories for his great magazine Electric Velocipede (though not quite yet, since his reading period doesn't open until April 1st). So go out there and write some great steampunk for John!


• Geek Alert! Proving once again that everything can be graphed, Virgil Griffith of CalTech has charted various colleges' SAT scores against their favorite books to create Booksthatmakeyoudumb. [via Boing Boing]


• I've recently posted some stuff at ComicMix -- my usual "Manga Friday" feature, covering books called Sundome, Y Square, and Hell Girl; and a review of Marc-Antoine Mathieu's The Museum Vaults. And I forgot to put an exclamation point in this item! So I'll add a few at the end!!!
  

Things That Make Book Marketers Wake Up Screaming At Night

Your author goes on Fox News to denounce a video game that she's never seen or played, gets the facts wrong, and hundreds of gamers descend on Amazon to post one-star reviews of her book, add nasty tags, and camp out in the forums.

Lesson Learned: make sure your authors are capable of staying on-message, and that they know what their message is. Denouncing things you don't understand is very dangerous.

Luckily, all of my authors are much smarter than that. (And mostly unlikely to get on Fox in the first place, but that's a side point.)

A Taxonomy of Pizza

I just ate lunch...and I had pizza for dinner just last night (from the excellent King & Sons in my hometown), but, still, this post from Slice has me salivating.

It makes me want to try to eat my way down the list, that's what it does...

[via Boing Boing, which means most of you have already seen it]

What this Organization Needs Is a Committee!

Or maybe vice versa.

Mary Robinette Kowal is running for Secretary of SFWA, on a very detailed, specific platform.

Important things to note:

• she has identified problems and has plausible solutions for them
• she has experience as Secretary of a similar organization
• she's willing to dive into the SFWA swamp and fight the alligators
• and, most importantly, she wants to be Secretary, not President, like most folks who want to fix an organization. That speaks to a knowledge of organizations and an attitude which has not always been in evidence in SFWA's office-seekers.

I don't know who, if anyone, else will run, or if she'll be able to do what she plans if she wins. But it looks like a great, and achievable, platform to me. (But I'm not a SFWA member, so all I can do is watch from the sidelines.) Good luck to her.

Odd Personal Milestones

As of today, I've been an employee of John Wiley and Sons for exactly as long as I was unemployed.

(Unemployed May 23-September 23, employed September 24-current. Each one, 124 days.)

Now, don't think this means anything -- I was at the old place for sixteen years (sixteen years, one month, and seven days, to be precise), and I have some hope of breaking that record...

Quote of the Week

"Mum always thinks I'm being a sexist, so I try to be careful -- not only with her, but with everyone. It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn't sexist to the right sort of girl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how girls are stupid, and you say "Not all girls are stupid," then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it's a waste of time."
-Nick Hornby, Slam, p.17

Slam by Nick Hornby

Most YA novels that I've read have idealized protagonists -- even if the kids are flawed, they're still generally smarter, more resourceful and articulate than real kids would be in that same situation. Hornby, on the other hand, depicts an absolutely realistic teen boy in Sam, the narrator of Slam.

Sam isn't exactly dumb, but he's not particularly motivated. School isn't the focus of this book, but, from what we can tell, he does OK in his classes without trying much at all. He's also an emotionally authentic teen boy, unconnected with his emotions most of the time and unused to articulating his feelings. He's our first-person narrator, so we get a lot of his voice, but he's still a bit opaque -- we know as much about him as he does, but he doesn't know himself all that well.

(Of course, he's sixteen, so that's very appropriate -- and more convincing than some of the hyper-verbal feelings-obsessed kids in other YA books.)

It's a good thing that Hornby is an energetic writer, used to moving pages forward through voice and creating vivid characters, since someone like Sam could easily turn into a dull lump in the hands of a more slow-moving writer. Hornby doesn't have a whole lot of plot in Slam -- we find out, almost on page 1, that Sam is telling this story from a vantage point two years later, and that something major and life-changing happened for him, but the story is just that: how one thing changed this kid's life forever.

Sam meets a girl, Alicia, at a party and is interested in her. They start dating and become (to quote Juno) "sexually active," and then the major, life-changing thing happens.

Would stating baldly what that thing is constitute a spoiler? Because I have to expect that anyone more focused and attentive than Sam himself would have figured it out by now.

And Slam then deals with the repercussions of that "thing," on Sam, on Alicia, and on their respective parents. (There's room for an interesting compare-and-contrast with the aforementioned Oscar-nominated movie, which I just saw over the weekend, but I'm not sure I want to give away that much of Slam to get into it.)

I want to discuss the end of Slam -- which I found plausible, and thought Hornby meant it to be a corrective to more optimistic or ideologically committed stories, but still didn't like the way it assumed this is the way such a relationship would necessarily be for people like Sam and Alicia -- but I will refrain.

Oh, and I forgot to mention two interesting aspects of Slam:

First, that Sam has a poster of Tony Hawk on his wall, which he talks to. (And which "talks back" to him, in that Sam has memorized Hawk's book Hawk: Operation Skateboarder and spouts back appropriate quotes from it to himself.)

And, secondly, that Slam has what might be a slight speculative element: more than once, Sam goes to sleep in his own time and wakes up a year or two forward in the future, to live a day of his future life before coming back to his original time.

The latter adds an uncomfortable element of inevitability. Again, Slam has a certain opinion about relationships -- a very modern, urbane, sophisticated one -- which I think is valid but not helpful, in the sense that believing in something negative about your own life can help to make it happen.

I'm running around in circles trying not to talk about Slam's ending, so I think I'd better quit while I'm behind. Slam is an interesting YA novel, and a decent, non-preachy example of the problem novel. But Sam and Alicia seem to end up where they do more because of the author's declaration than by their own actions, and that's a problem.

Topic for Discussion

The Dabel Brothers are this generation's Byron Preiss.

Agree or disagree?

Bram Stoker Preliminary Ballot

Ellen Datlow has posted the very long list of preliminary ballot items for the Bram Stoker Award; from my jaundiced position, it looks like every horror publication worth reading that was published last year (and possibly a few that aren't). The fact that I don't much like horror should probably be factored in there.

[via SF Awards Watch]

Always Counting

I'm reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9tail Fox, and trying to piece things together -- some things fit together very nicely, and others...don't. Page references are to the US (Night Shade) edition:

First: when was that?

"9tail Fox takes place a few years in the future and is based on a past where San Francisco's Chinatown was cut out of Central in the mid-1990s and turned into an autonomous subdistrict of the SFPD."

- Acknowledgements, p. vii

"In April 1991, the small sliver of central San Francisco bounded by Geary, Market and Larkin Streets got its own SFPD task force. ... Ten years later, a purpose-built SFPD building opened at 301 Eddy Street, the new Tenderloin Station.

"About five years after that, a similar decision to cut Chinatown out of Central and turn the area into its own SFPD district created such outrage from those within the local community that the whole plan was put on hold, indefinitely. Civic pride, however, needed saving and City Hall's compromise saw Chinatown merged with the Financial District and given quasi-autonomy as an SFPD sub-district within Central, which was, itself, one of five stations within Metro."

- Chapter 3, p.9

To review, 1991 + 10 + 5 equals "the mid-1990s." Sure, it does.

Second: what time is it?

"...one eighty-seven-year-old doctor...Misha Persikov...."
- Chapter 1, p.2

Chapter 7 header: "Stalingrad -- Winter, 1942"

"Anyway, Misha was on official business. He might only be thirteen...."
- Chapter 7, p.25

Someone aged 13 in 1942 would be 87 in the year 2016. (Admittedly, the book has not yet explicitly said that the "Misha" of Chapter 7 is Misha Persikov. So this may be a quibble.)

The book opens on Friday, February 6th (year unspecified). 2009 has such a date, as does 2015. Perhaps Misha's birthday is in late January, or the "Winter" in Chapter 7 is at the end of the year. From this evidence, 9tail Fox is set in 2015.

"...in 1978 when Robert Vanberg was admitted...."
- Chapter 8, p.30

"...that had lasted six presidents, thirty years and a couple of major wars..."
- Chapter 10, p.39

I stumbled on that "thirty" at first, and thought it was an error -- but it looks now like just an understatement. As to the six presidents: Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and thus whoever wins in 2008 gets a second term in 9tail Fox. (I doubt that will be important.)

Third: disconnected thoughts

9tail Fox was published in 2005, but, so far, it doesn't really feel like it's set ten years in the future.

Grimwood thinks the National Enquirer is the Weekly World News; the Enquirer has stories about celebrities and it's the WWN that has (had, now) stories about aliens and the resurrected Elvis. (p.16)

He thinks that an American would say "Should I have done?" (p.45)

And a lot of things seem slightly off in ways I can't quite articulate -- I'll hope that these are deliberate, and forge on.

The News From Nowhere

Bad News: J.G. Ballard is suffering from advanced prostate cancer, which sounds terminal.

Good News: That condition spurred him to quickly write an autobiography, Miracles of Life.

I hope the first isn't as true as it looks, but, if Ballard is heading off into that good night, at least he leaves behind the massive legacy of his work. If there's any justice in this world, someday he will be known as one of the best and most characteristic writers of the twentieth century.

Meaningless Numbers

In the tradition of all the writers on the Internet who proudly post their daily word-counts, I hereby declare that I've sent twenty-three e-mails before 9:00 AM.

Further updates will follow, as the situation warrants.

More Bestseller List Shenanagans

Publishers Weekly reports this week on the case of Dave Zinczenko's Eat This, Not That, which is selling very strongly...but does not appear on the New York Times bestseller list. (It is on PW's list.)

The Times sniffed that Eat This "falls under the classification of of a calorie counter book, which the Times does not track."

Anybody else get the sense that the Times is just making it up as they go along? Has the Times ever explicitly deigned to say what categories they are willing to "track" and which they won't?

A bestseller list that ignores the books that actually sell the best is not just a bad idea -- it's a failure and a lie. The Times just keeps digging themselves deeper and deeper into their hole, as they gerrymander these books out of that list and dismissively decide not to track entire categories of books because they don't like them. Why do we still pay attention to these people?

An Unexpected New Neighbor

Torque Control has the interesting news that Michael Chabon has joined SFWA.

So -- all that stuff I said about him pretending he doesn't really belong in the genre ghetto when I reviewed The Yiddish Policemen's Union a few weeks back? I'm taking it all back; he's just bought a condo in skiffytown. And it's nice to have him here.

{via Shaken & Stirred}

BSFA Nominees

SF Awards Watch has the full list of nominees; all we need now is the American version of Niall Harrison to come into the comment thread and sneer at it. (SFWA should designate someone to officially do so...not that SFWA is organized or unanimous enough to do that.)

For myself, the really interesting nominee is Alice in Sunderland, under novel. This is actually a work of comics; what's sometimes called a "graphic novel." I wasn't aware the BSFA's definition of "novel" included comics. (I myself pit novels against graphic novels in my own year-end round-ups, but I'm not entirely sure if it's a good idea for awards to do so on an ad hoc basis.)

Extraordinary Circumstances by Cynthia Cooper

Admission of Partiality: I have a professional connection to this book; it's being published by John Wiley (my employer), and I'm the Marketing Manager for the line in which it is published. So obviously I'd be expected to say nice things about it in public.

But it's even better than I expected; I read nearly a hundred pages Saturday afternoon standing up in a bowling alley during a kid's birthday party. (My younger son, age 7, was in attendance.) A book that can hold a reader's attention like that is something to be prized.

Cooper was the whistleblower at WorldCom in 2002; she was a Vice President and head of the Internal Audit department there, and had come across some discrepancies in the numbers. Like any good auditor would, she and her team followed the thread as far as possible. And that was much farther than any of them expected, and through more roadblocks than usual. Extraordinary Circumstances is the story of what happened: not just the fraud itself, but the story of both WorldCom and Cynthia Cooper, the story of an upstart telecom company from a state considered a backwater and a talented, driven young woman from that very same place.

As I said up top, I'm biased with regard to this book. I was sure it was terrific before I read it, and now I know I was right to think that. But Cooper ranged farther and dug deeper to tell this story than I expected -- I knew it would be personal and compelling, but I wasn't as ready for it to be the definitive story of a company's rise and fall.

I got one of the first copies off the presses -- there's that "insider" thing again -- but Extraordinary Circumstances is on trucks right now, en route to all of the booksellers you can think of (and probably a number you can't). The official publication date is February 8th.

I know my usual audience is not terribly interested in business books (and I've just picked up a giant pile of recent SF/Fantasy, which I hope to be powering through over the next couple of weeks), but this is a great book -- and I say that as someone who doesn't read lots and lots of business books, either.

(And, if you're a blogger or other reviewer who is intrigued and wants a copy for yourself, e-mail me at work at awheeler (at) wiley (dot) com. We'll be sending review copies out starting this week, and I'd love to include you.)

Update, 2/15: Since this is one of the top five Google hits for "cynthia cooper extraordinary circumstances" -- at least at the moment -- here are some other links from people who might be considered more unbiased about this great book than I am.

• USA Today profile/review from 2/14
• BusinessWeek review
• Time.com Q&A
• Reuters review
• KGO-TV Interview
• CNBC Squawk Box Interview
• CFO magazine Q&A

Another List-of-Questions Meme

I haven't done one in a while, and Keith R.A. DeCandido just did three in a row in one post. (Kieth is the Iron Man of Memes, though, so I don't feel so bad in only doing one. I picked the one in the middle, just because.)

1. How old will you turn in 2008?
Thirty-nine

2. Do you think you'll be married by then?
I certainly hope so, since I'm married now.

3. What do you look forward to most in the next 3 months?
I suppose Thing 1's birthday. He's turning 10, so it's an odometer birthday.

4. Do you like to say "I told you so?"
Only when I'm right.

5. Who was the last person to call you?
A creative supervisor from upstairs at working, saying she needs a copy of a book quickly.

6. Do you prefer call or text?
I prefer neither. Can I insert "e-mail?"

7. Do you have any pets?
There is one cat and one fish in my house. They are not my pets. The fact that I seem to now be the one who most regularly feeds the cat is deplorable, but I expected it.

8. What were you doing at 1:30 am?
As far as anyone else knows, sleeping.

9. What were you doing at 3:00 am?
I decline to answer that question on the advice of counsel.

10. When is the last time you saw your mom?
Saturday evening, for our standing dinner invitation.

11. What is your mood?
Bemused, as usual when typing a meme aimed at chatty fourteen-year-olds.

12. How many houses have you lived in?
Let's see...apartment in Albany, apartment and two houses in the Rochester area, house in Wayne, apartment in Lodi, house in Pompton Lakes...five.

13. How many city/towns have you lived in?
Seven -- the ones named above, plus Pittsford and Penfield (suburbs of Rochester).

14. Do you prefer shoes, socks or bare feet?
For myself, and for everyone else in my near vicinity, shoes.

15. Are you a social person?
Not in the slightest.

16. What was the last thing you ate?
An apple.

17. What's your favorite color?
Black.

18. What are you doing for your next birthday?
Getting older.

19. What is your favorite TV show?
Don't really have one; I watch very little TV on purpose.

20. What kind of jelly do you like on your PB & J sandwich?
There's always strawberry jelly in the house, and that's OK, but I usually got for orange marmalade. My favorite, though, is probably apricot jam.

21. Do you like coffee?
I've never had a cup, so I assume "no" without evidence.

22. What are you listening to?
The sound of my fingers typing. (Previously: someone's child playing a "Super Mario" game on a handheld -- I'm going to guess a DS -- in the next officicle, which made me intensely homesick.) Update: she's back!

23. Do you have an iPod?
Yes. Two of 'em right now, to be honest. (Because I got a new one before the old one died.)

24. How do you feel about the last person you kissed?
Well, I married her almost fifteen years ago, so I hope that's a clue.

25. Do you sleep on a certain side of the bed?
The right, looking at it.

26. Do you know how to play poker?
In the vague sense that I know how to do differential calculus, yes.

27. What are you thinking about right now?
That my official lunch hour is just about over.

28. Any plans for this weekend?
Not "plans" as such, but I hope to play a bunch of Lego Star Wars on the Wii with Thing 2.

29. Have you cut your hair this week?
Someone else cut it a week ago Saturday, which is close but no cigar. I do shave and trim my beard every morning.

30. Last picture you took?
Two of Thing 1 doing his homework Sunday night, at the kitchen table, using Thing 2's camera.

31. Are you a tease?
Not in the sense this question means, though the boys probably think I tease them a bit.

32. Have you ever been in an ambulance?
Yep. A cheap little converted-mini-van one, back in 2002 for my "heart trouble."

33. Do you prefer an ocean or pool?
Pool; I hate salt water. Lakes are nice, though.

34. Do you smile often?
I smile only when things amuse me, so no.

35. What color are your bed sheets?
A dark, shiny brown. (If I had Thing 2's giant Crayola box, I could probably give you a decorator-style name for it, but I don't.)

36. What is your favorite thing to spend money on?
I prefer not to spend money, but I guess food, books, and CDs are the most likely to get me to unbend.

37. Do you wear any jewelry 24/7?
A wedding ring.

38. Have you heard a rumor about yourself this week?
No, but if you want to start one I'll be evasive and unconvincing...

39. Who is the funniest person you know?
My brother.

41. Where do you want to go to college?
Wrong tense, dear. I wanted to go to Columbia, but the rat bastards wait-listed me, so they won't see a cent when I'm a bloated plutocrat. I did go to Vassar, which was quite nice.

42. Who was the last person to make you cry?
Ellen Page, at the 10:00 show of Juno yesterday morning. (I love days when the kids have school but I'm off from work.)

43. Do you shut off the water while you brush your teeth?
Of course. What do you need water to brush your teeth for? The mouth does have a certain amount of fluid already within it, you know.

44. Do you wish you were with someone right now?
Not in my officicle, no.

45. Are you mad about anything?
No, just mad in general.

A Great Whomping Load of Condescension

From John Clute's current review of Gregory Frost's Shadow Bridge, which was up to that point lucid and on-point for Clute:

"...as benumbing for an adult to read as almost any story written for the Young Adult market, whose products are about as close to genuine fiction as megachurches are to monasteries where silence is observed."

Clute is revealed as a genre snob, and should henceforth be treated in exactly the same way as the commentators who make similar sweeping pronouncements about SF.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/19

I've got three categories of new books again this week -- first are a couple of items that came in for review:

Life Sucks by Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, and Warren Pleece, from First Second in May 2008. Abel is the writer-artist of La Perdida, Soria is her co-writer on this project, and Pleece is a solid British artist who's worked on more things than I could mention. The publisher's letter describes it as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Clerks," with young, disaffected Goths and real vampires. Looks like it would have been very Zeitgeist-y about ten years ago, but we'll see.

And from Papercutz, which seems to be an NBM imprint, is Michel Plessix's adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's novel Wind in the Willows, in yet another iteration of Classics Illustrated. CI -- comics adaptations of "great books" -- has always been a decent idea with mixed messages. (On the one hand, it's supposedly about getting kids interested in these stories via comics, but they often end up being used like Cliffs Notes.) I've always liked The Wind in the Willows, and the art looks nice, so I have some hopes for this one.

I also bought some books this week:

Confessions of a Blabbermouth is another book from DC's Minx imprint, written by Mike Carey (also behind the best Minx book I've read, Re-Gifters) with his daughter Louise Carey and illustrated by Aaron Alexovich. It's another story firmly aimed at teen girls, with a plot about mixed families and blogs -- and I love seeing comics aimed at a wide audience without fantasy trappings, so that's promising.

Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata by Stephan Pastis is the second-most recent "Pearls Before Swine" collection, which I somehow missed the first time around. It confused me a bit when I saw it in the store, but I recovered quickly enough to make sure I didn't already own it.

Kitty and the Silver Bullet is the fourth novel in the series by Carrie Vaughn. I liked the first three well enough to re-publish them in an omnibus back at the old place, and I'm planning to keep reading the series as long as still the engaging, non-standard take on urban fantasy that it has been so far.

I also recently realized that Hard Case Crime had published three old Lawrence Block novels that I didn't have, so I remedied that situation -- I now have copies of Grifter's Game, Lucky at Cards, and A Diet of Treacle for when I need some old-school paperback mystery/pulp fun.

And then there was a library trip, mostly to pile on the recent SF/Fantasy that I missed since leaving the old job and that hasn't come in to La Casa Hornswoggler for review:

Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst, a Norton-nominated first novel by a writer I keep running into at conventions and similar events.

9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, a mystery about a dead detective whose cover proclaims it to be science fiction.

Ian McDonald's Brasyl, another one of those books with three plotlines set centuries apart from each other. That kind of thing often annoys me, but I've liked nearly everything of McDonald's I've read, so, on balance, I'll give it a try.

Keeping It Real by Justina Robson, first in a contemporary fantasy series that's becoming quite popular. (The second book is titled Selling Out, which may or may not be a wink at fan complaints.)

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff, who I've run into on-line for ages now and who I think I met at the Baltimore WorldCon a decade ago. I've never read one of his books before, and that's starting to embarrass me.

The Braindead Megaphone, a collection of essays by George Saunders. Saunders won a World Fantasy Award for his story "CommComm" in 2006, the year I was a judge. I haven't read a lot of Saunders otherwise -- though I did dislike the very arch The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a particularly thin and obvious allegory -- so I thought essays might be the way to go.

Eclipse One, first in what I hope will be a long-running series of original anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan. (Though I also have to admit that the landscape of the last two decades is littered with the wreckage of previous original-anthology series.)

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente. I've met Cat a couple of times -- most recently at JohnCon at World Fantasy -- and this book has sounded like the kind of thing I might enjoy. (Though, back at the old job, my freelance reader, who also thought she would love it, very much did not love it.)

And Axis by Robert Charles Wilson, since I read Spin, and generally find Wilson a solid SF writer (if sometimes too consumed by his hobbyhorses).

(Note: I originally had the cover art of all the books mentioned here, but that was just too much. So I only left a few.)

Great Novels of the Future

In ten to fifteen years -- when the generation brought up entirely on modern videogames is in its prime creative years -- I fully expect to see a great literary novel entitled Anything Not Saved Will Be Lost.

If you're part of that generation, feel free to use that title -- but what you write has to be good enough to support it.

Worlds That Never Meet

Running through the blogroll today, I see that Pat's Fantasy Hotlist is reviewing Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods. He's very positive, as he usually is, and burbles a bit more than I would have. (I like American Gods, but I found the ending a bit of a fizzle.)

What intrigued me, though, was his description of American Gods as "Neil Gaiman's signature work." And my first reaction was, "Come on, he'd been Neil F-ing Gaiman for nearly a decade when American Gods was published; there's no way that's his signature work." But then I thought about it a bit.

American Gods was Gaiman's first "big" novel -- it came after Neverwhere (the novel version of Gaiman's script for a teleplay that wasn't a big success in either form) and the odd object Stardust. (It was around that era when I pointed out that Gaiman's publishers were promoting every single Gaiman novel as his first something -- first novel, first illustrated novel, first novel-written-as-a-novel, first YA novel -- and wondered, as a joke, how long they could keep that up.) For those benighted souls who don't read comics and never came in contact with Sandman, American Gods might seem to be Gaiman's signature work.

I still won't admit that it is -- that would be like saying Woody Allen's magnum opus was "The Kugelmass Episode," simply because it's his best-known piece of prose -- but I can see where it comes from. Though it still does seem odd to me that the worlds of fantasy novels and of comics, which have so much in common, can be so separate to some audiences.

Semi-Review of Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

Another busy Saturday means another old RASFW post dragged out for a semblance of daily content. (For good or ill, I'm almost out of these.) This one was originally posted 2/13/04 on rec.arts.sf.written, in reply to a general request for information about the book:

Well, I'm selling it in the SFBC, so my opinion is probably biased. (So I'll try not to get into opinion.) Despite the title and cover, it really is a science fiction novel.

It has Neanderthals in spaceships and an interesting alien race with very different forms for the two genders. I've heard that it's related to Wheelers, but I couldn't tell from reading it -- it's set in the medium-far future, so it could be the same timeline (but it certainly didn't seem to have to be).

I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't love it -- it's probably best for readers who really like SF and want lots of ideas thrown at them. (Which is why I think the title and cover are unfortunate.) The antagonists are somewhat reminiscent of the evil Catholic church from Dan Simmons's "Hyperion" books.

I think those are all relatively factual things, so I'll leave it at that.

Quote of the Week

"All I can say is that, believe it or not, sex is like anything else good: once you have it, you stop being quite so bothered about it. It's there, and it's great and everything, but it doesn't mean you're happy to let everything else go out of the window. If having sex regularly meant listening to Alicia's dad being snobby, and giving up skating, and never seeing mates, then I wasn't sure how much I wanted it. I wanted a girlfriend who'd sleep with me, but I wanted a life as well. I didn't know -- still don't know -- whether people managed that. Mum and Dad didn't. Alicia was my first serious girlfriend, and it wasn't happening for us either. What it seemed like was that I'd been so desperate to sleep with someone that I'd swapped too much for it. OK, I'd said to Alicia. If you'll let me have sex, I'll give you skating, mates, schoolwork and my mum (because I was sort of missing her, in a funny sort of way). Oh, and if your mum and dad want to talk to me like I'm some no-hoper crackhead, that's fine by me too. Just...get your clothes off. And I was beginning to realize that I'd paid over the odds."
-Nick Hornby, Slam, p.71-72

Making Love by Richard Rhodes

Libraries are wonderful places for unexpected discoveries. On the main shelves, there's the presumption that everything is worth reading -- it's what has survived purges over the years, and was bought, after considered thought and perusal of reviews, in the first place. So a book that's battered and old might be particularly special, simply because the librarians have had to make a decision, every year or so when they realize space is getting tight, to keep that specific book.

I found Making Love by pure serendipity -- it was in the case next to the one where I found Larry Miller's Spoiled Rotten America, and I'm not a man who could avoid a quick browse of the sex books when I found myself right in the middle of them. I vaguely remembered it, and Rhodes; he's a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and Making Love was his attempt (back in 1992) to write a modern, honest sexual autobiography. (Though, doing a bit of research after I finished it, what I may have been remembering was Martin Amis's demolition of it in The New York Times Book Review.)

Rhodes had an admirable aim: he wanted to write about his own sexual life with the same honesty as he had written about other topics -- and, since he'd won a Pulitzer, one would expect that his prose will be solid.

But one would be wrong.

In Making Love, Rhodes is a clunky writer in several ways. Amis's review nailed the cliches and hothouse quality of many of Rhodes's descriptions of sex, but he skipped over Rhodes's clinical streak and his unwillingness to use earthy terms where appropriate. (Making Love is a hundred-and-seventy-three page book about fucking in which the word "fuck" never appears.) Rhodes has a tin ear when it comes to sex; he manages to consistently hit the wrong tone, and to do so in one of five or six different ways in rotation. For just one example, he massively overuses the descriptive term "vaginal introitus."

I suspect Rhodes is an obsessive; his explanation of his masturbation routine (which seems to require the whole of an afternoon -- who but a freelance writer has such time?) is the best example of this, with extensive preparations and hours of what doesn't really seem like fun. And Making Love focuses on obsessiveness rather than on sex too much of the time.

Rhodes covers his deflowering in a quick initial chapter, mentions his teenage group-home "situational homosexuality" honestly but doesn't really go into detail in chapter two, and then plunges into adulthood. He mentions that he's had sex with eleven women in his life, but he doesn't run through them, or organize the book chronologically. Instead, we get a few of chapters of thematic meandering (one on the penis, one on an abortion in the '60s, a very long one on porn) to cover most of his adult life (the late '50s through about 1982) and then he gets sucked into the vortex of ESO.

Rhodes was the ghostwriter on a sex book, ESO: Extended Sexual Orgasm, after he browbeat the sex researchers Alan and Donna Brauer into letting him tape their spiel and turn it into a book. He'd attended one of their demonstrations in 1981 -- of a woman supposedly remaining in an orgasmic state for hours -- saw a direct connection to his plateau theory of extreme masturbation, and was instantly intrigued. The ESO phenomenon started slow, but I know from my early days in the business that ESO books were selling like mad by the early '90s, and they don't seem to have entirely died out even now. Rhodes took to ESO like a duck to water, throwing himself completely into its regimen. (ESO is something like the extreme sports version of sex, requiring training and record-keeping; for an obsessive like Rhodes, it was like coming home.) One does wonder what his then-current wife made of this; I don't believe he ever directly mentions her or talks about their sex life together.

The back half of the book is one part extended paean to ESO, with unsexy physical descriptions and clunky pseudo-poetic writing about emotions, and one part love sex letter to his current (as of 1992) inamorata, G_____.

In time-hallowed fashion, G_____ was:

• two decades younger than Rhodes
• incredibly physically fit
• amazingly attractive
• working in the media (at a radio station), where Rhodes met her in his capacity as Big Cheese touring author
• amazingly multi-orgasmic and willing to indulge Rhodes in his ESO operations.

Rhodes himself was married at the time, but that didn't last long. The last, long chapter details his relationship with G____ in unarousing detail, culminating when she finally breaks down and tells him that she doesn't want to spend her life counting and timing her orgasms in search of ever-greater heights of ESO. Rhodes briefly sulks, then settles down to a slightly less acrobatic sex life as the curtain falls.

There are at least a dozen novels that are at least as "real" about sex as Making Love and which are much better written. It was a noble experiment, but it was one of those experiments that shatter the test-tubes and leave the lab a mess. There's no real reason to read this book these days, though I will admit it's very short.

When Supervillains Meet ConEd

The United Nations, Encapsulated

Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power.
Dude #2: What?
Dude #1: They have been underestimating my power for quite some time now.
Dude #2: What are you, a supervillain? Who's been underestimating your power? The justice league?
Dude #1: No, the electric company. They say I owe them eight hundred dollars.
Dude #2: Dude, you and I were having two totally different conversations.

--Penn Station

Overheard by: 13Atlantic

via Overheard in New York, Jan 14, 2008

Reading Into the Past, Week of 1/13

I'm going to stop explaining, apologizing, and predicting at the tops of these posts, and just do then when I do them. This week the number is 12, so these are the books I was reading this time in 1996:

• G.B. Trudeau, Doonesbury Nation (1/6)
  The then-new Doonesbury collection, back when they were short, square, and devoid of color Sundays. It's also the one with the parody of Woodstock '94 (which implies strips were being reprinted roughly a year later).
• Andy Garcia, Awkward Universe (1/7)
  I'm pretty sure it was comics of one kind or another. Garcia did the excellent Oblivion City series for Slave Labor around that time, and I think this was either a spin-off of that or an unrelated new project. He had some real talent and ability, with a very specific viewpoint, so it's a shame that he's apparently fallen out of the comics world entirely. But it also can't be easy trying to carve an entertainment career out when you have the same name as a movie star.
• Michael Williams, Arkady (1/7)
  I suspect it's another graphic novel, given the company, but I can't remember or Google any information about it at all. All those moments, lost in time...
• Mike Kazaleh, The Collected Adventures of Captain Jack (1/8)
  The first collection of a pleasant anthropomorphic humor/SF comic, which I read way back before it was forgotten. I hope Kazaleh is working in animation or something similar, making big piles of cash drawing cartoons -- he was very good at it, and the direct market world never gave him much love. This series is low-key and a bit underpopulated, but the art was always snappy, and the characterizations were excellent.
• Jim Silke, Rascals in Paradise (1/9)
  Silke is an exceptional artist in the pin-up idiom, and a passable writer when it comes to making up excuses for his female characters to get into those poses. Rascals was a retro jungle adventure, complete with spunky girl hero and lots of action. It was nothing you'd want to put on a "great graphic novels" list, but it did what it set out to do, and wasn't as leering as half of Marvel's 2007 covers.
• Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (1/10)
  Waugh, in his first decade of book-writing, would travel somewhere cheap and knock off a travel book every time he needed money. (In another example of how Then is not Now, such books were guaranteed sellers.) He didn't have a whole lot of respect for those books, and he eventually pulled them from circulation, to be replaced with this "good parts" compilation. (The original texts are now all back in print in the Everyman's Library book Waugh Abroad, which I recommend only slightly less highly than his novels.) In 1996, I'd run through all of Waugh's novels, and this was about the only other thing in print -- I think I dug up Scott-King's Modern Europe a year or so later. When the Going Was Good is a great introduction to Waugh's travel books, and perhaps to Waugh himself. His novels are better, but Going gives you full-bore Waugh, for good or bad. (He was not a pleasant man, and that comes across much more strongly in his travel writings than his novels. But he was always an interestingly unpleasant man.)
• Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1/11)
  I was on a classics tear that week, so I went straight from Waugh into a heaping dose of London. London is exceptionally readable, though -- the only thing that makes him "classic" is that he's a dead guy who wrote great books. Call of the Wild, like most of London's fiction, is an adventure story with depth.
• Jack London, White Fang (1/12)
  Another damn good story about a dog wolf.
• Jack London, Selected Klondike Short Stories (1/14)
  I'm sure "To Build a Fire" was in this; back in those days, the Library of America prided itself on publishing the complete works of notable authors, so their two volumes of London included all of his published fiction.

I was in the middle of reading the Library of America Novels & Stories volume of London's work; I finished The Sea-Wolf on the 15th and the "Selected Short Stories" section on the 16th. And, right after that, I read George Macdonald Fraser's great novel Flashman and began that series. (And then more London, with The People of the Abyss and The Road -- they were from the other Library of America London anthology, Novels & Social Writings. Ah, for the days when I'd think nothing of jumping into two thousand-page books by the same guy, one right after another, and read someone's major works in two weeks.)

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

I got this last Saturday morning and had finished it by the time I went to bed that night. It's a slim volume, but there's more to Born Standing Up than most comedians' books.

Martin isn't trying to immortalize his routine, or hack out something quickly to make a buck, and he comes to Born Standing Up after successful turns writing screenplays (L.A. Story), fiction (Shopgirl), and plays (Picasso at the Lapin Agile). He already knows how to structure prose, so Born Standing Up doesn't have the usual comedian's acknowledgment of "the man who brought order to my chaos" or a similar giveaway -- Martin actually sat down and wrote this book himself, something very few celebrities of his stature are willing or capable of doing.

Born Standing Up is a memoir, and a closely focused one: it's the story of the birth and flourishing of Martin's stand-up routine. As such, it starts with some details -- the pertinent ones, that is -- of his childhood, and then gets into his performance career. He worked at Disneyland from the age of ten, selling program books and then working in a magic shop. Selling magic led to performing magic, which led him to Knott's Berry Farm, and so on. Martin is candid about the strengths and weaknesses of his act in those days -- he admits it was pretty weak -- and only provides a few details about his life outside of performance in those days.

The book covers Martin's performing life from 1955 (that Disneyland opening) through 1980, when Martin quit his stand-up act and jumped into movies with The Jerk. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of his subject, but the book feels absolutely honest and true. Martin's equally impressive in writing about the good side of being a mediocre comedian and the bad side of being a national phenomenon.

Born Standing Up is short, clear, and thoughtful book, from a man looking very far back and not entirely recognizing who he used to be. It's as far above most comedians' books as it's possible to imagine any book being.

Mix and Mix Again

Today at ComicMix: my review of the graphic novel Paris, by Andi Watson and Simon Gane.

Friday: my review of the first two volumes (one, two) of The Guin Saga Manga.

Plagiarism in Romance?

Second in our series about scandals in genre publishing; collect them all!

Galley Cat reported on a string of posts at Smart Bitches about a pile of romances by Cassie Edwards. Now, I haven't read every last bit of the supposedly plagiarized pieces, but they all seem to be factual descriptions of actual Indian rituals, behaviors, beliefs, and so on. And changing the wording substantially, when describing actual real-world things, would tend to make one's description diverge from that thing. The technical term for this is "getting it wrong."

Now, if a writer doesn't do any research, that's bad.

And if a writer does research, and gets things wrong anyway, that's even worse.

But if you do research, and get things right, that's bad, too. Apparently even a romance writer now should footnote her references.

Does anyone else think this is insane?

Edit, a week later: Well, it's now looking like Ms. Edwards has copied nearly everything but her own name in various books, so let me climb down from this increasingly shaky limb. I won't say Edwards is a plagiarist, but the weight of the evidence certainly points that way.

I do still wonder about my original point (though Edwards's case did not turn out to be like this) -- in historical fiction, or works that otherwise draw from specific reportage, how can a writer be both accurate to reality (as depicted in the original sources) and original? You'll recall that Ian McEwan got yelled at last year for using descriptions of medical procedures in Atonement that were "too close" to his (acknowledged) sources.

Copying another writer's invented dialogue or descriptions is clearly wrong, but what about closely following another writer's detailed description of something real? Particularly when dealing with technical language, there may not be any other clear, accurate way to phrase a sentence.

There are more and more of these plagiarism complaints lately, since it's trivial to compare electronic texts. Perhaps someday we'll see a vast database of all English-language text, and any book projected for publication will be required to be compared against the database, and only works with a sufficient percentage of purely new content will be allowed to continue. But what will that threshold be? What with cliched language, standard descriptions, the seven basic plots, and so on, I wonder if most novels would be as much as 5% original.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/12

Assuming I can keep it up (always a problematic assumption), my weekly "Incoming Books" posts will turn into more in-depth "Reviewing the Mail" posts. (I still won't have actually read the stuff in question, since it just came in, but I'll give the books a bit more time and space.)

This week brought four books for review:

Black God, Vol. 2 by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, from Yen Press. From the author's names I'm going to guess this is manwha rather than manga. The back-cover copy talks about the protagonist trying to balance a normal life and "an unbreakable pact with a divine being," which could mean anything from Death Note to Oh My Goddess! It's rated for Older Teens, coded LSV for Language, Sex, and Violence. (Though not N for Nudity, for those scoring at home.)

Zombie-Loan, Vol. 2 by Peach-Pit. I know I've heard of this, but I can't recall anything specific. It has another one of those amusing manga premises -- teenage schoolkids working for a loan office as bounty hunters slaying vampires. (I have an image of three giant wheels on the wall of some Tokyo office, and this is where they came up in this case.) I'm presuming that these zombies somehow took out loans, which they're now delinquent on, but that might just be my SF-trained mind trying to make sense of a premise that doesn't work that way. Still, "Zombie-Loan" is an undeniably catchy title, and I always like that. It's also from Yen, and also aimed at Older Teens, with their love for LSV.




Hell Girl, Vol. 1 is by Miyuko Eto, though the book also notes "Original Story by The Jigoku Shoujo Project." (A quick Google doesn't give me much information on said project, though I have a sense that "Jigoku Shoujo" probably means "Hell Girl," and that makes the whole thing very circular and even less clear.) I'll guess that this is a shoujo version of Death Note, since the plot involves a "strange website that appears only at midnight," and typing one's enemy's name into that site sends the Hell Girl to drag that unfortunate off to hell. (However, the person entering the name is also damned -- it looks like a perfect opportunity for "Let's You and Him Fight," to me.) This one's from Del Rey Manga, also aimed at older teens (though Del Rey doesn't break down what aspects of the book might be objectionable).

The Museum Vaults is by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and comes from the Louvre in France via NBM's ComicsLit program. An art expert descends deep beneath the Louvre to "appraise the vast collection of an antonym of the Louvre." It's the second of four graphic novels (by different creators) commissioned by the Louvre and all co-published by NBM -- it's an interestingly quirky idea, and the kind of thing comics needs more of.

I also got the word that the library the next town over (the one I use the most) had a couple of my reserves for me:

Flora Segunda, the Norton-nominated first novel by Ysabeau S. Wilce, with the enticing subtitle "Being the Magical Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House With Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog." I'm a few pages in already, and I'm finding the narrative voice engaging and the world-building distinctive and individual. From the author's note, and my vague memory of Wilce's novella "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire," I believe all of her major work to date is set in the same setting -- if that entices anyone.

Nick Hornby's Slam is also a YA novel -- the author's first for that audience, but obviously not his first entirely.

I guess I'll be reading YA books this week. One of the things I love about YA novels, which both of these books have, is that immediate first-person narration. It's not a requirement for YA, but I find a lot of the best YA are written that way, in the pure voice of a real teenager.

The Speed Queen by Stewart O'Nan

Every so often I make the pledge to only read really good books -- ones that matter, that make you look at the world differently afterward -- but then realize, after hitting one, that a steady diet of that could be dangerous.

The Speed Queen is a great example. After I read Last Night at the Lobster, a few weeks back, I thought I should read some more Stewart O'Nan and see if I agreed with his glowing reputation. On the basis of those two books, I think the critics are justified in their praise -- but he's also practically the American Ian McEwan.

Speed Queen is the first-person narrative of Marjorie Standiford; she's talking into a tape recorder on the night before she's to be executed by the state of Oklahoma. She's the central figure of the three "Sonic Killers," whose deeds shocked a nation. And she claims that she didn't kill anyone -- or, at least, she wasn't the one who directly killed any of them.

Marjorie is answering a set of questions sent to her by "America's King of Horror," who has bought the rights to her story for his next book; she hopes to counter what she calls the lies of a book written by her ex-lover Natalie, who is already out of jail. She tells us a bit about her childhood and lot more about herself and her husband Lamont. She and Lamont start using drugs, and, as using turns to dealing, a number of events fall into place one by one. Marjorie is in a car accident and goes to jail on a possession charge, where she meets Natalie. Once they get out of jail, Natalie moves in with Marjorie and Lamont (and their infant son). And a drug deal goes badly wrong, sending the three "Sonic Killers" out. As Marjorie tells it, none of it is exactly her fault -- but we can see that she could have stopped things in several places.

The story is compelling; Marjorie's voice is mesmerizing. But from the first page, any careful reader knows what's going to happen, and has a sense of how horrible it's going to be. Reading The Speed Queen is like watching an execution in slow motion; it's impossible to look away but it's painful to see.

I've come to believe that the true test of a great book is that it requires work: sometimes intellectual work (though that's more common for a merely good book), and nearly always emotional work. That's why a steady diet of great books can be upsetting: it's poking at the same exposed nerve endings over and over and over again. And so I find that I run from a great book to mediocre ones for a week or two, to build up some scar tissue.

The Speed Queen is a great novel, by a writer I'm coming to believe is one of our great contemporary novelists. But don't start it if you're already emotionally shaky; this is a book that demands a lot from the emotions of its readers.

(Note: I read this in a library hardcover, with a silvery cover featuring a grid of images. I had to return the book before I could scan its cover, and there's no decent-sized version of it online. The image above and below is the current trade paperback.)

Spoiled Rotten America by Larry Miller

Residual affection can go a very long way. Larry Miller is a generally amusing actor who was a fine stand-up comedian -- I remember, in particular, an HBO special he had, fifteen or so years ago, which culminated in what seemed to be a half-hour long bit about a comically horrible ski trip. It probably wasn't as epic as I remember it, but it was very long, very involved, and amazingly funny. Add that to a host of movie and TV appearances, and Miller had built up a great store of goodwill with me.

But I think he's just spent it all.

Let me say up front that Spoiled Rotten America is not a bad book -- not at all. It is bland, derivative, and shows absolutely no original thought or ideas, but Miller's voice is engaging (and very similar to his stand-up voice and the characters he usually plays) and it's pleasant to read.

Miller has been writing columns recently for The Weekly Standard, and this book is probably a fix-up of those columns. (The book itself is slightly coy on the subject.) Perhaps because of the venue, the essays are backward-looking, curmudgeonly, and obsessed with the imagined virtues of past eras. (In Miller's childhood, all men were strong, all women were beautiful, and all children played outside until dark.) His thesis, essentially, is that everything about the modern world sucks. (Once again I must mention the infinitely superior The Trouble With Nowadays, by Cleveland Amory, which had the good sense to know it was a parody of itself.) Miller affects introspection, but his thoughts about anything -- the world, himself, his family -- only descends about a molecule deep. He's exceptionally good at describing the surfaces of things, and talking about image -- he does live in Hollywood, after all -- but never even tries to go further than that.

Miller can still be very funny, and when he's not hitting his cultural talking points, Spoiled Rotten America is great fun. But I found myself skimming more and more as I went on, as the waves of secondhand thought and received wisdom crested higher and higher. If you want conservative cultural criticism, there are fire-breathers like Michael Savage and Bernard Goldberg -- I haven't read them, myself, but from my limited knowledge, Miller seems to be trying to be the Bush 41 to their Reagan. I'm not entirely sure there's a strong need for a book like this, but here it is. If you're a conservative, sentimental boomer who doesn't like actually thinking things through, I highly recommend Spoiled Rotten America.

Award Roundup

Trying to shake off the lassitude that Tom Lutz's book has given me, with a herculean effort the Hornswoggler lists some recent awards news that has been posted many places already:

Imprimis. Christopher Barzak has won this year's Crawford Fantasy Award, for his debut novel One for Sorrow. The Crawford is given to the writer (not the book), but the writer is chosen because of a notable first fantasy book published in the previous eighteen months. It's administered by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, from whose website you can find a list of previous winners and a press release about this year's winner. (Those damn frames prevent direct linking to either.)

Secundus. The finalists for this year's Philip K. Dick Award, for "distinguished science fiction published in paperback form in the United States" have been announced; I got the list from Locus:

Grey, Jon Armstrong (Night Shade)

Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Minister Faust (Del Rey)

Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Bantam Spectra)

Gradisil, Adam Roberts (Pyr)

Ally, Karen Traviss (Eos)

Saturn Returns, Sean Williams (Ace)

The winner will be announced at this year's Norwescon, in Seattle.

I've read only one of the Dick-nominated books, and wasn't more than mildly impressed. This of course means nothing. Good luck to everyone, though of course six of the seven will be left broken-hearted and despondent in their loss.

Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz

This book infected me with a particularly virulent (but very pleasant) case of slackerdom.

First, I was planning to read it over the holidays -- I figured it would take three days, maybe more if I wasted more time than I expected. As it happened, I didn't read more than a couple of pages at home, and finished it off while commuting to work.

And then...well, I finished it a good week ago, and I haven't reviewed it -- or any of the books I've read since. So I do need to warn you all up front: this book is catching.

Other than that, it's not all that exciting: it's, as the subtitle declares, "A History of Loafing, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America." Lutz starts off by complaining about his teenage son, who graduated from college directly to Dad's couch, examines his own history of slacking off, and then dives into the meat of the book.

That meat is essentially a literature survey of attitudes towards work, mostly (as the subtitle says) by Americans, but with some side trips to Europe (Samuel Johnson gets the compare-and-contrast treatment with Benjamin Franklin in an early chapter). Lutz is an entertaining writer on the sentence and paragraph level, but, as the book goes on, it becomes more and more clear that he doesn't have any real organizing principle or interesting idea behind the book. Each chapter moves forward in time, covering Walt Whitman, the Beats, and Douglas Coupland in turn. But, again, it's chronological by default, and it all feels somewhat mechanical.

Lutz does take a stab, now and then, at the great dichotomy of worker/slacker attitudes, which also leads him into digressions on union organizing and labor relations in general. And I'll reiterate that all of the pieces of this book are well-researched, engagingly written, and interesting -- but they don't, in the end, quite add up to something singular and substantial.

Doing Nothing is a pleasant read, but it ends up being a lazy stroll through the literature of the last two hundred and fifty years on the subject of avoiding work. It doesn't really build from chapter to chapter, and seemingly forgets things it said was important fifty pages before. There's room for a much better book on the subject...but that one would require a lot of hard work, so I don't seriously expect it will ever be written.

Nebula Preliminary Ballot

Since every SFnal blogger is posting this today, I guess it's now my turn. I got it from Ellen Datlow:

Novels

• Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell (Tor, Jun07)
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, May07)
• Species Imperative #3: Regeneration, by Julie E. Czerneda (full PDF on Private Edition)
• (DAW, May06)
• Vellum: The Book of All Hours, by Hal Duncan (Del Rey, Apr06 (Macmillan hardcover Nov05 (UK)))
• The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman (Ace, Aug07)
• The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson (Warner Books, Feb07)
• Mainspring, by Jay Lake (Tor, Jun07)
• Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt (full PDF on Private Edition)(Ace, Nov06)
• The Outback Stars, by Sandra McDonald (Tor, May07)
• Strange Robby, by Selina Rosen (full PDF and hardcopy offer on Private Edition)
• (Meisha Merlin Publishing Jul06)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
• Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer (Analog, Feb07 (serialized in Oct06 through Jan/Feb07 issues; Tor book, Apr07))
• Blindsight, by Peter Watts (free Creative Commons versions)(Tor, Oct06)

I'm thrilled to see the Chabon there, and very happy for the recognition for people I know and like (Buckell, McDevitt, Sawyer, Hopkinson, Lake). And I'm very surprised to see the Rowling, which I'd bet large sums of money will not make the final ballot.

Novellas

• "The Helper and His Hero," by Matt Hughes (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Mar07 (Feb07 & Mar07))
• "Fountain of Age," by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, Jul07)
• "Stars Seen Through Stone," by Lucius Shepard (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Jul07)
• "Kiosk," by Bruce Sterling (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Jan07)
• "Memorare," by Gene Wolfe (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Apr07)

As far as I can tell, I haven't read any of these. So who's going to send me Year's Best books to review this year?

Novelettes

• "The Children's Crusade," by Robin Wayne Bailey (link to Private Edition) (Heroes in Training, Martin H. Greenberg and Jim C. Hines, Ed., DAW, Sep07)
• "A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange," by Beth Bernobich (link to Private Edition) (Asimov's, Jun06)
• "Things That Aren't," by Michael A. Burstein and Robert Greenberger (link to Private Edition) (Analog, Apr07)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," by Ted Chiang (F&SF, Sep07)
• "Sister of the Hedge," by Jim C. Hines (link to Private Edition) (Realms of Fantasy, Jun06)
• "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change," by Kij Johnson (link to Private Edition) (Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• "The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom," by Andrea Kail (link to Private Edition) (Writers of the Future Volume 23, Algis Budrys, Ed., Galaxy Press, Sep07)
• "Safeguard," by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, Jan07)
• "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders," by Mike Resnick (Asimov's, Jan08)
• "Tonino and the Incubus," by Peg Robinson (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))
• "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," by Geoff Ryman (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Nov06)
• "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche," by Delia Sherman (link to Private Edition) (Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Juvenile, Jul07)
• "Not of this Fold," by William Shunn (link to Private Edition) (An Alternate History of the 21st Century, Spilt Milk Press, Sep07)

More stuff I haven't read. (Yet, he added with hope.)

Short Stories

• "Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse," by Andy Duncan (link to Private Edition) (Eclipse 1: New Science Fiction And Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan, Ed., Night Shade Books, Oct07)
• "The Padre, the Rabbi, and the Devil His Own Self," by Melanie Fletcher (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))
• "Always," by Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's, May07 (apr/may07 issue))
• "For Solo Cello, op. 12," by Mary Robinette Kowal (link to Private Edition) (Cosmos, Mar07 (Feb/Mar07))
• "Titanium Mike Saves the Day," by David D. Levine (link to Private Edition) (F&SF, Apr07)
• "The Story of Love," by Vera Nazarian (link to Private Edition) (Salt of the Air, Prime Books, Sep06)
• "Captive Girl," by Jennifer Pelland (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, WS & LWE, Ed., Oct06 (Fall06 issue -- #2))

I'm going to root for "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," because I love that title -- even though I haven't read it. (Or even seen the book that it's in.) On the other hand, "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" is a pretty darn awesome title, too.

Scripts

• Children of Men, by Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby (Universal Studios, Dec06)
• Pan's Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro (Time/Warner, Jan07)
• The Discarded, by Harlan Ellison and Josh Olson (script on Private Edition) (Masters of Science Fiction, ABC-TV, Apr07)
• Blink, by Steven Moffat (script on Private Edition) (Doctor Who, BBC/The Sci-Fi Channel, Sep07 (Aired on SciFi Channel 14 Sep07))
• The Prestige, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathon Nolan (Newmarket Films, Oct06 (Oct 20, 2006 -- based on the novel by Christopher Priest))
• V for Vendetta, by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski (Warner Films, Mar06 (released 3/17/2006 -- Written by the Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd and published by Vertigo/DC Comics))
• World Enough and Time, by Marc Scott Zicree and Michael Reaves (script on Private Edition) (Star Trek: New Voyages, http://www.startreknewvoyages.com, Aug07 (Aired 8/23/07))

I still have no respect for this award, and I never will, until there's a report that SFWAns are actually reading the nominated scripts to decide between them. It's a "Best Dramatic Presentation" award under a false cloak.

Andre Norton Award

• Vintage: A Ghost Story, by Steve Berman (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
• Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
• Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, by Ysabeau S. Wilce(Harcourt, Jan07)

Hooray for Sarah, and I hope to read Flora Segunda soon. (I have a hold on it at the library -- in fact, it may be the book they've just notified me about.)

Quote of the Week

"When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London."
- Bette Midler

Movie Log: Broken English

I'm not entirely sure how Broken English got to the top of my Netflix queue, but it did, and we watched it on New Year's Eve.

And then I didn't bother to write about it for nearly two weeks, so the memory is a bit fuzzy. Parker Posey is our lead, a youngish New Yorker named Nora who works as the head of the keeping-rich-assholes-happy department of a boutique hotel. She is Not Happy With Her Life, so we get lots of shots of her drinking. (and drinking, and drinking. I've seen some people try to argue that she's not an alcoholic, but that dog won't hunt.) She's also clingy and unlucky in love, desperate for A Man.

I'm wondering now if the director, Zoe Cassavetes, was a little too specific and "indy" in telling this story -- Posey's character might have worked better if she felt more like an Everywoman, like the representative of a generation. (She doesn't; she's utterly individual, which makes Broken English her story rather than something universal. That's not good or bad, I'll add; but it is.)

Back to the plot: Posey has a helpful friend (Audrey, played by Drea de Matteo), married for a few years and starting to feel that all of the early excitement is gone. She also has an not-quite-as-helpful mother (played by Gena Rowlands). They do their bit to cheer Nora up, and convince her that Being In A Relationship is not necessarily the sole end of life. Nora pretends to listen, but it doesn't really touch her.

In a more Hollywood movie, we'd establish Posey's character a bit, and then go through a "hilarious" montage of her bad dates. Broken English doesn't quite do that, though it does have a few scenes, in quick succession, of Posey dealing badly with various men (potential mates or not). And I was left with the feeling that the standard montage might be a cliche, but it got to be a cliche because its an efficient vehicle for delivering both a mood and a message. Broken English wants essentially the same message and a slightly different mood, but isn't able to create either as quickly and cleanly as the tacky Hollywood product would have.

Eventually, Nora does meet a decent guy, or what the movie wants to be a nice guy. (I found him more than a little stalker-ish: he doesn't leave her side for more than twenty-four hours, doesn't talk much, keeps trying to get physical, and is never seen to tell her his name.) This is a Frenchman named Julien (Melvin Poupaud), and here's an example of where Broken English's complete freedom from cliches is very helpful. In any other movie, a pretty young New York girl meeting a mysterious Frenchman would be the purest schlock, but, here, it's just about these two people, and it works.

The movie meanders on from there -- it's not a plotty film, really. Unfortunately, it's not a deep movie of characterization, either; it hovers outside its characters -- even Nora -- and doesn't let us get into their heads. Nora changes, I guess, or she's said to change, but she still looks to me like the same clingy, alcoholic wreck she was at the beginning. I didn't find the ending entirely convincing, but then I think I had different images of Nora and Julien than the movie wanted me to have. That may be partly my fault, and partly the movie's fault, I guess.

For a small, independent movie about New Yorkers, Broken English is remarkably free of self-indulgence; it does see these people from outside, but it sees them clearly and distinctly. It's not a great movie, but it's a decent one, which is better than you can get a lot of the time.

Spectrum 14 edited by Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner

I "read" this more than two weeks ago now. (Actually, there is a very long, and occasionally tediously political, introduction from co-editor Arnie Fenner, so there is something to "read" here.)

On the egoboo front, there's a great piece from Stephan Martiniere, art-directed by Nicholas Sica (who lost his job from That Company at the same time I did) and for one of the books in the SFBC 50th Anniversary Collection (which I conceived back in 2002 and then acquired and published 40 books over the next five years). Congrats, Nick! (The art is for Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and is on p. 51.)

Also from the old digs is a nice piece by Patrick Arrasmith, on p. 152, art-directed by David Lai. (I never met Lai, which I think just shows how talented, and deep, a bench of art directors that now-gone iteration of the company had. It was full of great creative professionals, doing hard, wonderful work every single day.)

But, besides the stuff I have a tenuous connection to, there's also another two hundred and twenty pages or so of great art from 2006 in this book. I used to get the "Spectrum" books because I was choosing artists and deciding on art styles for SFF books; now I get it just because the art is amazing and inspiring. They're great books, and they only get better year-to-year.

Riders of Gumdrops

Hey, remember the candy Battle of Helm's Deep last year?

Well, the same team decided to recreate The Battle of Pelennor Fields this year.

Some kinds of insanity are good. This is an great example.

I Reviewed a Book Last Week...

It was called Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, the review was at ComicMix, and it was utterly nuts. And I mean that as a high recommendation.

In other news, I finished another book today, while thinking all the way along that I should just quit it. Now five book-reviews behind and counting...

(On the other hand, I'm caught up, just about, in Bloglines for the first time since about Christmas. And I've finally swapped keyboards, so typing is pleasant again -- even fun.)

Drug Abuse in SF!

Better watch out, or I'll turn into the Drudge Report, but This Just In...

Jeff VanderMeer reports widespread drug abuse in the spec fic community!

Millions aghast!

Mothers cry!

Babies whimper!

Tongue firmly in cheek!

Nepotism in SF?

Carol Pinchefsky thinks so. (Or at least is willing to entertain the idea long enough to write an article on it.)

The money quote: "one editor of a major publication house gave his girlfriend, an author, a large advance and bragged to his colleagues about making his next house payment."

Since Antick Musings is all about uncomfortable questions and making connections between things that should be left separate, we're going to tackle the important question -- who the heck is that mysterious editor?

Who could he be? According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Editor Wiki, the current male SF/Fantasy editors are:

• Lou Anders, who is married
• Gardner Dozois -- has he bought anything from Susan Casper on the house-payment level? (I seriously doubt it.)
• Russell B. Farr of Ticonderoga Publications -- of whom I have no knowledge, but he's Australian, and the Australian SFF Cabal invited me to their wild party before World Fantasy, so I'll give him the element of the doubt.
• James Frenkel -- is he Joan Vinge's editor? That would be odd, but not unknown. (cf. the late James Rigney) On the other hand, they're married, so she's not his "girlfriend."
• David G. Hartwell -- is married
• John Klima -- is married, and I doubt he has that kind of budget to begin with
• Peter Lavery -- I know nothing about his home life
• James Minz -- is married
• Darren Nash -- another one I don't know
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- is married, to a fellow editor at the same house
• William Schaefer -- owns his company, so who would care?
• Stanley Schmidt -- is married
• Paul Stevens -- nah, don't think so
• Gordon Van Gelder -- is married
• Sean Wallace -- also married
• Jacob Weisman -- similarly married
• Sean Wright of Crowswing Books -- no idea, but I don't think he has a house-payment sized budget

Wikipedia has a longer list, also including many among the dead and inactive. If this is an old and hoary anecdote, it could be about one of them.

I'll also note that I have essentially assumed that a married man could not have a "girlfriend" as well -- an assumption belied by the actual history of the SF field, and I know that -- to simplify things. I also am concentrating on men, even though female editors could also have "girlfriends," simply because it seems ruder to pick on women in this way. (Is that sexist of me?)

I don't see any good candidates here. Closely reading the quote, "house" implies book publishing, which limits the list. "Colleagues" also implies that this person works in the company of other editors, also limiting the possibilities. (Knowing salacious gossip about who is sleeping with who would help, but I'm usually out of the loop about that. Anyone who wants to cure my ignorance is reminded my e-mail is acwheele at optonline dot net.)

Anyone want to make guesses? (If so, please be cognizant of the libel laws in your locality...)

Incoming Books, Week of 1/5

Remember how yesterday I promised things would get better on the posting front today? Well, this week is the Pinewood Derby for my two young Cub Scouts, plus a very busy week at work, plus I wasn't quite done fiddling with iTunes, plus I still haven't swapped out keyboards (so I'm still using the horrible one, which, frankly, does not make we want to type anything). And then I got sucked into watching TV for an hour with The Wife, because one of those house-hunting shows was running around Wayne, NJ (where I grew up, and the next town over).

Put it this way: I'm at least 600 articles behind in Bloglines, so posts of my own, being more effort than reading other peoples', are less likely for another twenty-four hours or so.

But I forgot to list what came in last week: one manga volume for review, and four books from two different libraries (Saturday was a busy day, with renewing my library card and getting Thing 1's very first card, plus a birthday party and other errands). Nothing I actually spent money on, which is good.

I'm liking this library thing more and more. At the old job, I could get nearly anything new in a cheap book-club edition, and return it to the unread shelf (or its owner) when I was done. So I was out of the habit of getting library books -- but that's perfect for things I only want to read, not to keep.

Excuses

I've been quiet here for most of the last week, to the point where I'm another review or three behind.

The reason is that I got a new computer and iPod just before Christmas, and so have spent a lot of time setting up the new ones and fiddling with the old ones (in new places, for new purposes, and in new configurations).

And, mostly, over the last week, I've been obsessed with the "Cover Flow" view on iTunes/iPod -- so I've been running through my too-large music library and making sure everything has covers. (And, along the way, fixing a lot of other incorrect information.) Large, semi-pointless projects that involve checking or massaging data soothe me, so this has been a pleasant week. (If a busy one, for reasons entirely of my own making.)

I expect to be done very soon, and get back to pointless meanderings here, instead of pointless organizational projects. (I also spent most of a day working on the organization of my CD collection, over the holidays.)

Not that any of you really care, but I do hope to be posting more in the coming week.

More Bragging about My Smart Kids

On the other side of the basement:

Wii: 15-all.

Thing 1: Isn't that "deuce?"

Thing 2: No, 40-all is deuce.

(And everything either of them knows about tennis is strictly from playing Wii Sports for the last two weeks.)

The Other Quote of the Week

Anyone who follows comics at all will figure out the context, but the rest you will just have to enjoy it in Confuse-O-Vision:

"Why does the devil want a marriage? You can't put that shit on a wall. You can't make a rug out of it. You can't re-gift it on Christmas. "
- Nina "Scoop" Miller of The Factual Opinion (link for the terminally puzzled)

Quote of the Week

"Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him."
- Jacqueline Susann, on Portnoy's Complaint

This is Just To Say...

That the keyboard that ships with new Macintoshes -- the ultra-skinny one with chiclet keys -- is a horrible abomination in the eyes of god and man. I'm swapping it back for my old keyboard as soon as I remember to do so.

I gave it a couple of weeks to see if I could get used to it, but it's like tapping my fingers on a bar of stainless steel. It's horrible and we hates it. It also causes vastly more typos than other keyboards I've used -- really, it's the most useless keyboard I've ever touched.

On the other hand, its design sense is fabulous! Feh.

The Hugo Race Begins

The nomination period for the 2008 Hugo Awards is now open; any members of last year's Worldcon (Nippon 2007) or this year's Worldcon (Denvention 3) can nominate up to five works in each category. (Or as few as one work in one category.)

I probably won't nominate this year; I don't have a membership in Denvention 3, I don't intend to attend, and spending $50 just to nominate does not excite me. I also haven't been reading as intently in the field for the last six months, for reasons related to my employment status.

But that just means that your vote will have greater impact; if you're eligible, at least put up something.

Anti-Social Networking

I finally broken down and signed up on Facebook recently, and I now have a grand total of one "friend" there. Whoo-hoo!

I've also been on LinkedIn for most of a year now; that's actually professionally useful and designed for grown-ups.

If you're on either of those, and want to add to your number of contacts/friends, and I'd be likely to recognize your name, please feel free to ping me there. If not, that's fine, too.

Something Vaguely Creepy I Didn't Notice At the Time

My former other blog -- the one from the employer I'm trying not to name in public for the next several years -- ran for almost precisely one year. My first post was May 19th, 2006, and the last post (which went up about ten minutes before I was called into a Fateful Meeting) was May 22nd, 2007. 369 days, in all.

I'm sure that means something, and, if I could only figure out what, all of the secrets of the universe would become transparent to me.

Nope. Can't quite get it.

Learning Something New Every Day

Reading this post in Cranky Editors, the words "submission agreement" (in context, something an agent signs and encloses with a submission to some manner of publisher) caught me up short.

I've never heard of them.

Anyone familiar with them, and want to explain the concept? (This isn't some bog-standard trade publishing thing that I've managed to ignore for the past two decades, is it?)

Update, tomorrow: The poster over at Cranky Editors, according to information I found three clicks away, is an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics. So I guess this is a "comics thing."

A Dispatch From the 21st Century

Thing 2 (who is now 7) is watching Teen Titans with his older brother on the other side of the basement. The heroes are battling Not-Godzilla, and Thing 2 calmly remarks, referring to Starfire, "Her attacks do the most damage."

Fear him, DMs of the future. I detect the birth of a rules lawyer...

My Favorite Books of the Year

Unlike everyone else, I always wait until the new year to post my favorite books of the previous year -- in part because I'm a stickler for minor points of protocol, but also in part because the book I'm reading on December 31st just might be one of the best of the year.

I've now done this three times -- once was coincidence, twice was happenstance, so this time it must be enemy action. As before, I'm listing the favorite books I read each month individually, with runners-up as necessary.

And, as before, I don't divide books into categories. I pit mysteries against graphic novels against non-fiction against SF. Good is good, and I'm not going to do an artificial "this is the best of this sub-set of the books I read" list. The best are the best, and they never all fall into any one pigeonhole. (I also don't hold myself to only new books; any book I've never read before was new to me, so I compare them all to each other.)

January: I read three excellent short story collections -- Alastair Reynolds's Zima Blue and Other Stories and Galactic North and Kage Baker's Dark Mondays -- plus Kim Deitch's Shadowland. But the best thing I read was Yoshihiro Tatsumi's amazing Abandon the Old in Tokyo, manga stories originally published in 1970. (Drawn & Quarterly, isn't it about time for another Tatsumi collection?)

February: The New Space Opera (edited by Dozois & Strahan) had good points, but also (for my taste) some bad ones as well, including an over-long, massively over-reaching Dan Simmons story. Wizards (edited by Dann and Dozois) was more consistent, but also not a pure knockout. Martin Amis's House of Meetings was a return to form, and a powerful novel. And I'll always have a soft spot for Strahan's Best Short Novels: 2007 -- we made it four years, Jonathan! That's something to be proud of, and those were some damn good stories. But the book of the month was Calvin Trillin's perfect, heartbreaking About Alice.

March: I finally got to Donald Westlake's hard-to-find novel Adios, Scheherezade, but didn't love it as much as I'd hoped. Otherwise, there were some good books -- like Scalzi's The Android's Dream and Richard Sala's The Grave Robber's Daughter -- but fewer great ones. The book of the month was Kage Baker's The Sons of Heaven, which wrapped up her huge "Company" saga with more energy and momentum than I'd realized she was capable of; she dragged entirely new virtues out of her storehouse for this book to add to her already impressive talents.

April: I liked several novels this month -- Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, John Scalzi's The Last Colony, Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels, Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies -- but the best book of the month was nonfiction: Barry Malzberg's argument-starting, fascinating, grumpy and perfectly opinionated Breakfast in the Ruins. If SF is dead, at least we have Malzberg to show us its shattered glories.

May: Christopher Buckley's Boomsday was an excellent near-future satire, until the ending collapsed. And Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat and Daniel Pinkwater's The Neddiad saw very different creators, working in very different forms, doing the same sort of things they'd done many times before, but still doing it with verve and passion. The book of the month, though, took most of my month: Steven Erikson's The Bonehunters.

June: Roger Ebert's Your Movie Sucks is a book of film criticism for everyone, full of movies we all know about and love to see skewered. Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings saw him stretch his west-coast Asian-American ennui into a full-length graphic novel for the first time -- and do it very well. Other excellent comics were Andy Hartzell's wordless Fox Bunny Funny and Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito. Haruki Murakami's After Dark stuck several first-class stories at the end of a collection of mostly secondary work. Charles Stross sent an IM from tomorrow and called it Halting State, deciding to write it in second person just to make it harder for himself and more immediate for us. And above them all was Tom Perrotta's new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, diving straight into the culture wars but making them utterly personal and concrete.

July: Max Barry's Company started very strong but lost momentum with its big reveal. Michael Swanwick collected his latest batch of first-rate stories in The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Larry Gonick finally had a new entry in his essential set of histories with The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I. And the best book of the month was Gene Wolfe's twisty, terse, tricksy Pirate Freedom, proof once again that he's still the master of leading his readers down paths both false and true.

August: I spent most of this month reading Loren Estleman mysteries, on a lark -- the best of them was Sinister Heights, and all of them were pretty darn good. I was also generally impressed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; it wasn't perfect by a long shot, but there are so many ways to go wrong at the end of a series that big, and Rowling avoided them all to stick the landing. But the books of the month are Lat's cartoon memoirs of his childhood and young adulthood in Malaysia, Kampung Boy and Town Boy.

September: Simon Rich's essay collection Ant Farm was as funny as anything I read this year. Jo Walton's Ha'penny continued and deepened the world of Farthing; her plotting made me angry and unhappy with humanity, but I think not precisely for the reasons she wanted. Terry Pratchett's Making Money is one of the very best in a long-running series of very consistently excellent novels; his secondary creation is now as deep and real as the primary one, and as good a vehicle for social satire as anyone has ever invented. And the book of this month was Joshua Ferris's amazing Then We Came to the End, the best book about American office life -- or life in general -- in many years.

October: Matt Kindt's Super Spy and Kevin Huizenga's Curses were both excellent, thoughtful comics, in two very different idioms. Michel Rabagliati's Paul Has a Summer Job was even better than that. Despite all of its flaws -- and I've come to think there were even more of them than I did when I reviewed it -- the best book I read in October was David Michaelis's controversial biography Schulz and Peanuts. No life looks the same to all viewers, and Michaelis shone a piercing light on a great American artist.

November: This is a tough month to decide among; the top candidates are John Banville's interesting but flawed The Sea and Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, which I got to about a decade late. (Also of note: The Surgeon's Tale by Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer, the mildly anti-revisionism graphic novel Doctor 13: Architecture and Mortality, and Alain de Botton's interesting but bland The Architecture of Happiness.) The Sea takes it on points.

December: Shaun Tan's The Arrival is the best wordless book I've ever seen, and had the best reason to be wordless. Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a stunning achievement that faltered a bit at the end. And my book to end the year is Steve Erickson's Zeroville, an intensely American great novel.

And, to put the top picks into a handy list form, these are then my Top Ten Twelve books of the year:

• Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Abandon the Old in Tokyo
• Calvin Trillin, About Alice
• Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven
• Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins
• Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters
• Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher
• Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom
• Lat, Kampung Boy and Town Boy
• Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
• David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts
• John Banville, The Sea
• Steve Erickson, Zeroville

Happy New Year to you all -- and happy reading in 2008!

Read in December

This is mostly for my own record-keeping, so if you folks pass on quickly to more interesting posts (here or elsewhere), I won't mind. Besides, if a thousand authors can post daily details of their word-count, surely I can have one list of books read a month?

As always, links are to my reviews, here or at ComicMix. Anything that didn't get its own post here also gets an Amazon box down at the bottom, just in case anyone decides "it must be mine!" on the spur of the moment.

• Lemony Snicket, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming (12/1)
  
• Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (12/3)
  
• Hideaki Sorachi, Gin Tama, Vol. 1 (12/4)
  
• Takao Saito, Golgo 13, Vol. 1: Supergun (12/5)
  
• Steve Erickson, Zeroville (12/6)
  
• Kentaro Yabuki, Black Cat, Vol. 1 (12/6)
  
• Andy Runton, Owly, Vol. 4: A Time to Be Brave (12/7)
  
• Dan Piraro, The Best of Bizarro, Vol. II (12/9)
  
• Shaun Tan, The Arrival (12/9)
  
• Mark Crilley, Miki Falls, Book One: Spring (12/10)
  
• Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (12/11)
  
• Mark Crilley, Miki Falls, Book Two: Summer (12/11)
  
• Stewart O'Nan, Last Night at the Lobster (12/12)
  
• Matt Diffee, editor, The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap (12/15)
  
• Jeff Smith, The Art of Bone (12/16)
  
• Kyo Shirodaira & Eita Mizuno, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 2 (12/17)
  
• Susan Minot, Rapture (12/17)
  
• Keiko Takemiya, story by Ryu Mitsuse, Andromeda Stories, Vol. 2 (12/18)
  
• Naoki Urasawa, Monster, Vol. 2 (12/19)
  
• Takehiko Inoue, Vagabond, Vol. 2 (12/20)
  
• Kiyohiko Azuma, Yotsuba&!, Vol. 3 (12/21)
  When I read the first volume (and somewhat less with the second), I obsessed about the character of Yotsuba -- a little girl who is either a completely free spirit or has some sort of brain damage -- and finally decided that she's not meant to be a representation of a person with something mentally wrong. (And so I was able to enjoy the book for itself.) The series itself is light-hearted fun about a certain kind of everyday life; the kind of thing I enjoy in several media.
  
• Craig Thompson, Carnet de Voyage (12/21)
  
A sketchbook account of two months spent traveling in Europe and North Africa in 2004, partially as research for "the next book" and partially touring to support Blankets. Thompson does incredibly detailed and specific sketches, so this is nearly as interesting as a less hurried book. It's a lot like a more in-depth version of Mo Willem's You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons, actually. (For the five people who have actually read the Willems book.)

• Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds (12/23)
  
• The Art of Bryan Talbot (12/24)
  
• Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (12/26)
  
• Stephan Pastis, The Sopratos (12/26)
  More comics filled with puns and death from the strip "Pearls Before Swine." I'm glad I live in a world where this strip is in millions of people's breakfast reading; it's not something I expected but it's a nice bonus. (And this world has so many drawbacks that we do have to take the small bonuses where we find them.)
• Ilya, editor, The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga 2 (12/27)
  
• Neil Gaiman & John Romita, Jr., Eternals (12/28)
  
A perfectly respectable and readable retooling of a classic comics property (Jack Kirby's late '70s creations) for a new generation. There's nothing at all wrong with it, but it has a journeyman feel, which contrasts with Gaiman's superstar profile. (I'm sure Gaiman would say something about how every one of his projects is different, which is true -- but this felt like something the Gaiman of 1990 would do, or like something any dozen other writers could do. Most of Gaiman's recent work, on the other hand, couldn't have been done by anyone else.) It's no 1602, but it's fine for what it is. But the ending is purer comics than I've ever seen from Gaiman: it's practically begging for an ongoing series, and Gaiman generally is good at ending his stories (unlike most comics writers, who flee real endings like vampires and daylight).

• Out of Picture, Vol. 1 (12/31)
  

Once again, it looks like too few "real books" this month. Maybe if I get away from the computer a little more often...