On Bad Reviews

I am contemplating a bad review.

Perhaps I should explain.

I don't mean either someone else's review that already exists, or a review that's done badly -- I mean that I have been thinking, this afternoon and evening, about committing a bad review, about taking arms against a disappointing book. (Though I'm not so arrogant as to think I could end it.) I finished reading a new novel on my train ride home, and I have to say that it didn't come all together in the end -- instead, to my mind, it flew apart at great velocity and left a big mess. And, since I'm "reviewing" everything I read these days, when I finish something, I start to think about what I'd say about it. (The percolation process from reading to reviewing is running about ten days to two weeks right now, which is a healthy span of time -- judgments should be considered, not shouted out immediately.)

But, since the human mind loves nothing so much as itself, after a little while -- after thinking up some disconnected phrases, a few factual attacks and stylistic flaws, after thinking up the bones of that bad review -- I turned to thinking about bad reviews in general. Are they useful, or not?

My early years in the field were in the heyday of SF Eye, a criticalzine that I loved, uncritically, in those days. SF Eye's claim to fame, at least to me, was that it would give negative reviews. Looking back, they were probably snottier and nastier than I remember, and revelled in tearing down what they saw as the idols of the field. But, given that the main review outlets in SFF avoided saying anything negative -- it's long been rumored, and often denied, that Locus has a specific policy against running any reviews with any serious criticism -- SF Eye was necessary. Someone had to point at the shit and say, bluntly, "this is shit."

We're all Young Turks when we start, ready to tear down whatever is in most need being torn down and very ready to point out the Emperor's lack of clothes. But then time goes on. We meet some of those writers -- people whose work we like, whose work we don't much like, whose work we try not to admit that we haven't even read -- and find that we like and dislike them in ways entirely separate from their books. And, mostly, they're nice people who we want to be nice to.

So when Nice Writer X's new book is a bit disappointing, do we say so? How about if it's lousy? Or what if it's actively stupid? I spent about a decade writing promotional copy for SFF books, but I had the great advantage of always being able to pick the ones I wrote about -- there was always something that I liked, so I could write about that honestly. But if I'm saying something about every book I read, some of them are going to be dogs.

On the one side, a reviewer always wants to be honest. If I liked a book, I want to say that -- more, I want to explain what I liked about it, and, as best I can, how I liked it. And I want to avoid soft pedaling a book I didn't like.

But I've also gotten to a point in my life when I like to think of myself as an adult. And adults don't cause offense inadvertently (as someone once said about gentlemen).

I'll still probably say some critical things about the book in question -- look for the review in ten days or so -- but, if I can manage it, none of it will be gratuitous (unlike SF Eye), and all of it will be for a purpose.

So that's the point: I complain because I love. Really.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is better known these days for his opinions than for his fiction, a dangerous place for a novelist to be. Those opinions appear daily at Boing Boing, where the chorus of approval -- and some complaint; it is the Internet, after all -- is immediate and loud. So when word came out that he'd turned his hand to a novel about some of his obsessions -- freedom of information, the right to privacy, and the current "anti-terrorist" nanny state -- no one was particularly expecting a fair and balanced treatment. Little Brother's status as Doctorow's first book for the Young Adult market did nothing to dispel those expectations -- adult writers have been stomping all over YA for the last few decades when they have A Message to promote.

So the first thing to note about Little Brother is that it stacks the deck in an unexpected way: near-future San Franciscan high school student Marcus Yallow, who snuck out of school to play an Artificial Reality Game with his friends, is caught up in a Department of Homeland Security dragnet very early in the book, and shanghaied to a secret prison. So much is to be expected, yes?

But this is in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack: persons unknown have just blown up the Bay Bridge, and thousands are dead. Little Brother takes place in the weeks and months afterward, in a city that's just been hit, and hit hard.

Let me repeat that: the DHS is running around abusing civil liberties and locking people up -- we all expected that in a Doctorow YA novel called Little Brother -- but they're doing it because of a 9/11-level attack. And so a lot of the readers of this book will feel that some degree of panic and overreaction is acceptable, or at least expected.

I settled back at that point, because it was clear Doctorow wasn't going to be satisfied with kicking around a straw man for four hundred pages; Little Brother sees him create a world where repressive government measures would be substantially more justified than our own...and still demolishes all of the arguments in favor of repression and fear.

But let me back up a bit: before we get to Marcus's incarceration, we first have to sit through a chapter or two of infodumps about every piece of technology or newish idea Marcus encounters. He doesn't explain how the BART works, but he does feel the need to go into detail on the security arrangements on his cellphone. It feels like he's explaining everything created after 1995, which made me wonder if Doctorow was really writing for teens. (I can't imagine that they enjoy having everything they already know explained to them.) That opening reads more like a dispatch from teen-land for clueless oldsters.

(The first fifty pages or so of Little Brother also function as a fictionalized catalog of the things liberal, geeky Westerners thought were terribly cool and/or important in late 2007; it'll be a very interesting time capsule in twenty-five years. Doctorow settles down into his characters at about that point, though, and what infodumps follow are more central to the plot.)

So Marcus and his friends are captured -- "arrested" isn't the appropriate word, since it's not by the cops and they certainly don't have their rights read to them -- roughly questioned, and Marcus is set free before too long. But he soon finds that the mildly repressive society he had known, the security measures that he's come to know (and counter whenever necessary) are being replaced by tighter restrictions and a paranoid bunker mentality on the part of San Francisco's new federal overlords.

For quite a while, I thought Little Brother took place not only in the future -- it's set in the school year of 2009-2010, from internal evidence, and a never-named Republican white male is president -- but also in an alternate world where all of the old-fashioned media in San Francisco are run by right-wing fascists who love security theater and hate kids. That didn't fit what I knew of that city, but Marcus is young and hot-headed, so he tends to think of the world as being made up of slim, cool, young smart people (his friends and followers) and nasty ugly old fascists (his deluded father, and, by extension, every other adult). He turns out to be not entirely right in that assumption by the end, which was a nice touch. Looking back at Little Brother, the local politicians also seem to have completely disappeared. This is presumably because Doctorow wanted to both write a story about one kid against the system and to set that story in our recognizable world, but it made my agitprop meter buzz like crazy once I noticed.

To be fair to Doctorow, Little Brother is a first-person novel; it all comes to us through the mind and prejudices of Marcus Yallow. Marcus is a good kid: thoughtful, committed, and only about as bullheaded and self-righteous as is normal for someone his age. Writing in his voice allows Doctorow to rail against various nasty surveillance and security measures -- gait-recognition cameras in the schools, random police checkpoints on roads and mass-transit, police informants on every corner -- in the strongest possible terms. Marcus is a teenager, with the usual teenager's impatience with everything in the world -- he wants things to happen now, and he hasn't been worn down by a thousand petty complaints like those of us older than him. But he can be like a raw nerve, all feeling and pain, and there were times when I wished he would calm down a bit (or, worse, that Doctorow would stop ratcheting through the worst possible reactions of both sides to every new situation).

To get back to the plot, Marcus wasn't in that secret DHS prison very long, but he's there long enough to become radicalized -- just learning firsthand that there is such a thing as a secret DHS prison in his backyard is enough for that. So he might have been vaguely interested in methods of sneaking out of school before, just to hang out with his friends and play games, but now he wants to smash all of the surveillance and security apparatus, because it hurt him. So he works up a secret network to connect like-minded kids, which leads to DHS moles in that group, so he moves to something more like a classical cell network, and so on.

If you're not equally passionate -- and that's very passionate -- about the same causes Marcus is, and as devoted as he is to damaging a wide variety of security procedures, Marcus Yallow can be a little hard to completely agree with. He is very much a teenager -- self-absorbed and utterly convinced of his own rectitude. Little Brother is on his side, but that doesn't mean everything he does is smart or right, or that his rhetoric is useful or positive. And just because the other side is doing stupid, counterproductive things doesn't mean that Marcus's efforts to thwart those efforts are smart or productive. And the ways that the outside media twist his words and ideas against his cause is very familiar in this election season -- Doctorow knows well the ways of spin.

(As a side note, I wish Doctorow hadn't explicitly had another character comment on Marcus's whiteness halfway through; Marcus is relatively common as an African-American name, and keeping Marcus an everyman had power. My mental image of him was fuzzy, but I thought it at least half-likely that he was black, and I was sorry to lose that possibility.)

I've been avoiding talking about the plot, because it's basically a spiral -- Marcus (aka M1k3y, his far-too-1337 online alter ego) monkeywrenches some stupid DHS policy, the kids rejoice, the adults grump, things get worse and more oppressive in San Francisco with new DHS polices, and then we start again. Along the way, he loses touch with his original friends from the beginning of the book, and makes new, more radical connections, including a hawt girlfriend. I assumed Doctorow did this deliberately; it follows the standard pattern for radicalization. Marcus is not actually a terrorist, since he's not killing people, but -- and I write this the day after the Sean Bell verdict -- I can't believe that all of these manipulated confrontations of ordinary citizens with angry, armed men end peacefully. By the law of averages, his plans would have led to at least a couple of shooting incidents, and probably some deaths.

As I said, even if you agree with Marcus's ideals -- even if you go along with Doctorow that his fictional version of the DHS is evil and needs to be stopped -- there can be a lot of collateral damage along the way. (And Marcus, as a teenager, is not all that good at noticing.)

But Little Brother is a bracing read, a classic "if-this-goes-on" tale of things that keep getting worse as well as a clear vision for standing up peacefully for what you believe in. It's a major SF novel by an important writer, published at exactly the right time. I hope a lot of teenagers do read it -- as well as people old enough to vote this year.

Time Magazine Hires Idiots

Lev Grossman in the April 24th issue, during the course of an article about Stephenie Meyer (whose name they spelled wrong in the illo caption, to boot):

There's no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.

The word you're looking for is "worldbuilding." It does exist; you just don't bother to pay attention.

Edit, two hours later: What Grossman is ignorant of is the fact that there is an established body of criticism concerning fantasy works -- or, worse, that he feels free to ignore it. Why is it that a writer for something as respected as Time magazine doesn't even realize he knows nothing about his subject -- or, again, feels that he can completely ignore that ignorance?

Lev, this is your homework: get a copy of the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy and look up "Polder" and "Wainscot." Read those entries, and follow whatever links interest you, for at least two hours. Be ready to show your work.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/26

Last week saw very little activity in my mailbox, and the weekend saw me intensely busy and mostly away from home. Which adds up to a short post that's also late -- so I hope the three people who enjoy this didn't mind waiting...

The one thing I received for review last week that I haven't already mentioned was Kat Richardson's Underground, the third novel in her "Greywalker" contemporary fantasy series. I believe I've only met Ms. Richardson online -- and this is one of the series that I haven't gotten time to read so far -- so I have nothing flashy to say about it. But Underground will be published by Roc on August 5th in hardcover, which is a bump up from trade paperback for this series and a good sign.

Also in the mail last week: Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1, which I reviewed for ComicMix before the week was over (Comics publishers! That could be you! Write to the e-mail to your left for my address!); and a finished copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which I'd just finished reading, and which I'm still struggling with a review for (look for it this week, I hope).

So I don't bug out of here that quickly, here's what I special-ordered from the library last week -- all things I expect to review here or for ComicMix in the near future:

• Penny Arcade, Vol. 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots -- the first two years of the popular webcomic by "Tycho" and "Gabe," as published on paper by Dark Horse in 2005. Sure, the full Penny Arcade archives are available online, but it's just easier and more pleasant to read them in a book than to click "forward" every twelve seconds.
• Rex Libris: I, Librarian by James Turner was only available from one library in my whole county, which shows that too many librarians either aren't paying attention or just aren't self-indulgent enough. Darn librarians with their self-abnegation. It's a comic book about a two-fisted librarian -- how can you go wrong? Slave Labor published this in 2007.
• Megan Kelso's The Squirrel Mother is a collection of short comics stories that Fantagraphics published in 2006. Kelso's art looks very familiar to me, but I can't quite place where I've seen her stuff before. I hope reading it will help me remember -- looks like good stuff.
• And last was Get a Life by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, which Drawn & Quarterly published in 2006. This book collects their earliest "Mr. Jean" stories, about the life of a French literary man (somewhat like themselves, though it appears Jean is a novelist, not a cartoonist). A quick glance at the introduction shows that they started the series of stories in 1989, though this book is only copyright 2006. (Once again I have to mention that, when I rule the world, full and detailed previous publication information will be required for all books.)

A Busy Weekend

I'm backed up on reviews again -- I've got three things half-written for here, and another one not even started, plus three more not even half-written for ComicMix, and three more not started -- because I had the kind of weekend that kept me away from the computer. (I usually get in some solid hours on a Sunday to bash these things into shape.)

Yesterday was both my sons' Cub Scout Pack's annual Soapbox Derby and the day we were supposed to go away to Great Wolf Lodge in lieu of a birthday party for my older son, Thing 1. (It was his choice; he wanted to go to GWL instead of the kid party, so that's what we did.) We were secretly hoping it would rain heavily early, so the Soapbox would be pushed back to its rain date and we could head out early, but that didn't happen.

So the Soapbox -- in which the scouts race in various dad-built cars with very crude steering down a hill towards the local First Aid Squad Building -- went on. The Wife was in charge of the refreshments stand, but mostly ended up wrangling cars for the races, and I went from a "catcher" (down at the end of the course, to help the cars stop) to a "loader" (dragging cars over to the starting area, getting the kids in and secured, and shoving them up the starting ramps). It was a fun day, with more physical activity than I'm used to, and all the boys had a good time. And as soon as it was done, we were off.

I might have mentioned Great Wolf before -- it's essentially an indoor waterpark with a hotel wrapped around it. The room rates are steep, but the rooms are very nice and large, you get free admission to the waterpark, and they don't mind outside food as much as they say they do (as long as you are discreet). So we had a cooler full of stuff in the room, and a large "towel bag" with lots of food under the towels, which helped us avoid spending a fortune on food there.

Officially, you can check in at 4, and check-out the next day is at 11. But the water park is open 9-9, and you can often get into your room early. Even if you get there before your room is ready, they'll hold bags and you can go to the water park. Similar, on check-out day, all you need to do is take your stuff from your room to your car. So a one-night stay could be two full days in the water park, if you want to and plan it right.

(We didn't plan it right, because of the Soapbox Derby, but the original scheme was to get there Sunday at about noon and leave Monday at 3 or 4 -- as it was, we got there at 5 on Sunday and left at 6 on Monday.)

And then the rain we'd hoped for yesterday hit today, in buckets, as we were driving home. So we got home later than expected, exhausted and waterlogged. So that's why there's nothing substantial here for the last couple of days...maybe later in the week?

Nebula Winners

I wasn't there this year -- a damn shame, since I wanted to get back to Austin after WFC, since it's a great city and my cousin lives there (and her daughter is just over a year old now) -- but that's the way of the world, isn't it?

The winners are an impressive list this year:

• NOVEL: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
• NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress
• NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang
• SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler
• SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
• ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

As previously announced, the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award (which really should come with a cookbook) went to Michael Moorcock.


SFWA has decisively shown that the claim that they never give awards to "outsiders" is untrue -- Chabon isn't quite an outsider, but Rowling definitely is. And Ted Chiang is now 4-for-4 on Nebula nominations; is that anyone's best record ever?

One other question, since I can't google quite the right collection of words: was Pan's Labyrinth one of the scripts available for SFWAns to read online?

(In related news, SFWA has also announced the results of this year's leadership election. The most important thing to note is that Andrew Burt lost.)

[via Locus Online and SF Scope]

Yet Another Link to ComicMix

I reviewed yet another book for ComicMix today -- I'd originally sent this one through for Thursday, hoping to hit every weekday, but they needed the content more for sleepy Saturday -- and telling you about it is an excuse for another post today.

The book is Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso.

Ping: Paul Stevens

Paul, if you're out there, I thought I had your e-mail but I don't. Drop me a line at acwheele at optonline dot net when you have a chance.

The rest of you, just move along with your business. {Jedi hand wave} Nothing to see here.

Manga Friday Totes that Barge and Lifts that Bale

This week's "Manga Friday" feature by yours truly at ComicMix features my bewildered response to a little book called Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1.

And how some people think I'm some sort of manga "expert" in a world with people like the totally awesome Shaenon K. Garrity, I'll never know. (I'll be cribbing from that article for the next six months, I expect.)

But there I am; I may not be an expert, but I hope I'm at least entertaining.

My New Favorite Word

Nick Mamatas anatomizes "fantatwee."

Made me laugh out loud: "Your prize for being picked on in junior high school is a magic wand and a green button that lets you touch boobs."

Made me think:

Unfortunately, fantatwee is all about second-order escapism. Many great stories have elements of escapism, but also a twist of a thematic screw that lets the reader know that not everything is strawberries and cream. Hard choices get made. Misery abides. In the film version of Return of the King, Frodo may have had a big pillowfight with his friends and then moped about the house for a bit. In the book, he was a shattered man, utterly alienated from his communitarian society. That's what you get for saving the world from doom.

Quote of the Week

" 'What ho!' I said.
'What ho' said Motty.
'What ho! What ho!'
'What ho! What ho! What ho!'
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation."
-P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" in My Man Jeeves

Locus Award "Nominees"

Locus has released lists of the top five items in each category of their annual awards -- which could be considered a finalists list, but for the fact that Locus only knows what #s 2-5 are because they've already tallied up the winner.

I'd list them all myself, but they're several dozen other places on the 'net already. (And I threw my back out again this afternoon, so I want to get out of this chair and somewhere more comfortable to watch Hogfather.)

So, no deep commentary from me this time. I did vote for the Locus Awards this year, and this looks like a solid list.

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer

Charles Fort was a one-trick pony, but it was a damn good trick. His four famous books -- The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents -- all collected odd, unusual facts, which Fort arranged in various patterns to poke fun at scientific certainties or to bolster various odd theories.

Steinmeyer, most of the way through this exceptionally engaging biography, makes the point that no leader can choose his followers, and that goes double for Fort. Steinmeyer was referring to Tiffany Thayer -- the puppyish founder of the Fortean Society: always underfoot, overeager, and with a marked tendency for drooling approval -- but it applies equally well to hundreds or thousands of "Forteans" over the past few decades. They might not all be humorless, they might not all be anti-science, but they rarely seem to really understand how equivocal, humorous, and conflicted Charles Fort really was.

To be blunt, most people know Fort as a crank, if at all. But Fort wasn't a crank, or not purely a crank -- his theories were always half-joking. And the main purpose of his work was to unearth spiky facts -- the kind that don't fit the accepted theories -- and see what he could do with them. (Though Steinmeyer also describes what's known about Fort's two lost books, written before The Book of the Damned -- X and Y -- and those sound like more traditional crank books, with potted explanations for everything.)

Steinmeyer draws heavily on the previous major biography of Fort, Damon Knight's Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained, but he's also done some serious original research, particularly in digging into Fort's relationship with Theodore Dreiser. He's a careful and thorough writer, restrained in attributing emotions or actions to Fort that he can't back up; I didn't find a single "he must have," the hallmark of the lazy or sourceless biographical writer.

In fact, there are places where I actively wanted Steinmeyer's speculations. For example, Fort married Anna Filing in 1896, when she was twenty-six. When he died in 1932, he left Anna as a widow...and no children. Steinmeyer resolutely refuses to speculate about their private life, but pure childlessness, in that era, is an anomaly to be at least noted.

If I were a professional book reviewer -- which I am not -- I would have given you a potted life story of Fort, essentially this book in miniature, and avoided talking about Charles Fort as a book entirely. (This is because even professional book reviewers can feel guilt when they come to criticize something they've just been cribbing from.) Instead, I'll just say that if you're interested in Fort's life, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural is written with life and energy, and is just as long as it needs to be. Go read that book instead of some critic's regurgitation of it; it might take a little longer, but it will be more pleasant and enlightening.

And if you don't know who Fort is, click on this link below marked The Book of the Damned for the new omnibus edition of his four great books and see for yourself. In some ways, Fort is one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time -- all the more so because what he was writing wasn't fiction.

This Is the Saddest Comic I Know

Today's review at ComicMix: the wrist-slashingly depressing ACME Novelty Library #18.

A word of warning: never read Chris Ware under the influence of alcohol or while operating farm machinery.

Powers Vol. 8: Legends by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming

I'm continuing my saunter (about two years behind everyone else) through the independent superhero/cop drama by two guys who aren't happy with just being called "Mike." Legends feels a lot like a transitional story: it incorporates and integrates the events of the last two books, showing the audience the consequences and setting up the next change in the superhero status quo. There's also a fair bit of fanboy received wisdom in the background of Legends; the credo of tens of thousands of grown men wearing Spider-Man underoos and collecting "action figures" of superheroines in hooker wear.

That's an awfully long-winded way to say that, in the aftermath of volume 6, The Sellouts (the next book, Forever, was a very extended series of flashbacks) superpowers have been outlawed, so...everybody say it with me! "Only outlaws have superpowers!!!!"

And thus "the city" that Powers takes place in is almost a lawless hell-hole, with murders of cops being common and the neighborhoods a battleground for turf wars among three supervillain-led gangs. Deena Pilgrim, one of our two viewpoint characters, has come out of a coma at the beginning of this book, and quickly goes back to work, tracking one particular cop-killer.

At the same time, Retro Girl (the universally beloved superheroine whose murder was the center of the very first Powers storyline) seems to have returned -- at least, someone wearing her costume is flying around "the city" apprehending criminals and doing good. Christian Walker, our other protagonist (who used to be the superhero Diamond until he lost his powers), knows who the new Retro Girl is and tries to help her once he sees that he's not going to be able to get her to stop.

And then Pilgrim gets captured by one of the gangs, and tortured by the powers of one of the leaders, which causes something that I wish I could say was unexpected. But it's not; what happens to her is exactly what does happen in superhero comics. Powers thus continues its movement from being a cop story set in a world of superheroes to yet another superhero story that happens to have cops in it. It's still pretty good, but stories about superheroes are already far too common in comics; we don't need yet another one. We do need stories about cops.

Ah, well: I'm sure I'll still track down the ninth volume to see what happened next.

One Way to Start Fights

...is to title a book Fantasy Classics.

(Shades of "for the fairest," yes?)

But this particular Fantasy Classics is a collection of comics adaptations of stories by Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, L. Frank Baum, and others, edited by Tom Pomplun, from the "Graphic Classics" series. And that might cut down on the screaming and hair-pulling just a bit.

Anyway, I reviewed it at ComicMix today.

Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko

So many SF novels, particularly first novels, seem to be built out of novellas these days that you'd think it was the forties all over again. (And, yes, you can always see the joins, even with the most skillful writers.) Singularity's Ring is one of the more elegant examples, but it can't hide the fact that the first few chapters really are episodes, and nearly separate stories from each other.

Maybe I'm exaggerating -- the characters are the same, the background is the same, and the chapters follow very quickly in time. And maybe I only notice it because the copyright page alerted me that the first two chapters were originally published as the separate stories "Strength Alone" and "Singletons in Love."

But even if the story is somewhat episodic as it gets going, it's compelling, presenting believable characters in an odd but plausible world. (One thing I'm particularly impressed by is Melko's very contingent near-future; so many SF writers present their worlds as "this is what must happen," while Melko's is the product, like real history, of a dozen accidents and specific moments, not all of which his characters know.)

It's a hundred or so years in the future, and most of humanity is gone. One faction -- presumably the highest-tech First World types -- formed an AI-mediated Community, burned through a frighteningly speedy technological growth spurt, built a Ring around the earth complete with a number of skyhooks, and then all keeled over dead, presumably uploaded to the Singularity. Soon after, or at roughly the same time -- and maybe caused by someone falling over in a lab; it's not clear if anyone knows -- the Gene Wars began, and vast numbers of people died in that, as well.

When everything settled back down after the die-offs -- this is yet another vaguely Utopian medium future that we can only get to by killing off 90% of the human race, and it's depressing that we're still getting those after the glut in the '90s -- the world was left as a number of insular communities, either deliberately denying modern technology or isolated enough never to have gotten it, and one dominant faction that had been genetically engineering humans into "pods." Melko never explains how or why this happened, but the appeal of pods -- each a group of two to five humans who function as a unit, tempering each others decisions and always seeking consensus -- is obvious in a world destroyed by war and sudden death. A pod is a radical form of personal democracy, the person as polity, linked by pheromones and a shared history into the legal person of this new society.

Pods started out with duos, then trios. When Singularity's Ring opens, quints are cutting-edge technology, with only a few "prototypes" growing towards maturity. One such quint is Apollo Papadopolous -- Strom, Meda, Quant, Manuel, and Moira -- training in a Rocky Mountain location and competing with several similar groups to be the captain of their society's first starship, the Consensus. Perhaps they'll even be the whole crew; Singularity's Ring occasionally takes note of the fact that its "people" take up more space, need more resources, and can do more jobs simultaneously than current individuals, but only in passing -- that people have two to five very different bodies is normal in this world, so the accommodations to that fact aren't remarked on.

The first five chapters of Singularity's Ring are each narrated in first person by one of the members of the pod, so we get to know them as individuals as well as pieces of Apollo. A pod isn't really a hive-mind; it's the combination of all five working together -- it doesn't have thoughts separate or "above" its components, but is formed by all of them thinking together. The core of the pod philosophy, as we see many times in Singularity's Ring, is that word "consensus." I can't be sure that pods were created to avoid rash, runaway decisions like the ones that sent the Community off into wherever-they-went, but it certainly seems that way.

So we get to know Apollo, in all of his/her facets, and we get to slowly know his world. (I had big questions about this world that weren't answered until late in the book; I mention that in case you, too, read it and start wondering about some big things early on.) The book doesn't go in the way the flap copy would lead you to expect, though the title is a big clue. As often happens in near-future SF, Singularity's Ring is finally about How We Got There, and our protagonists end up being a very, very important person indeed. There's danger and intrigue, and even something like a love story -- those of you who have read "Singletons in Love" will know that my "something like" is meant very loosely -- as the parts of Apollo learn the deep dark secrets behind their world.

I still think the world of Singularity's Ring is weird and only vaguely plausible, but Melko doesn't present it as something perfect and shiny, or as the only possible future, which makes it that much more believable. His writing is compelling, and his viewpoint characters subtly different from each other. I do wish that SF novels didn't feel compelled to answer all of the questions of their settings -- spy novels usually don't devolve into geopolitical explication -- but mine may be a minority taste. Singularity's Ring is a fine SF novel, substantially better than most first novels, and I'm looking forward to what Melko does next.

Call In the G-Men!

My review today at ComicMix: Rick Geary's recent comics biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

For reals, homes. The publishing world is not only stranger than we imagine; it's stranger than we can imagine. And that fact always comforts me.

A Springy Musical Meme

Instructions via Keith R.A. DeCandido, and, before him, the great Internet hivemind:

Music meme: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your LJ along with your 7 songs.

1. The Dollyrots, "Because I'm Awesome" -- A pop-punk gem with great attitude; just the song to sing along to in those first days when you have the windows rolled down.

2. Harley Poe, "Corrupting My Better Half" -- Through some sort of space-time warp, this song fell out of the Violent Femmes's first album and landed in 2006. I haven't heard anything else from Harley Poe yet, but I will.

3. Rachel Smith, "Juanita" -- I have an odd weakness for quiet songs driven by a concertina, and I've heard several of them lately. This is the best of that lot, a lovely song from a woman with an almost-conversational voice.

4. We Are Soldiers We Have Guns, "Songs That No One Will Hear" -- A gem of a song, with a female singer whose voice is almost too sweet and fragile...but never too much so.

5. Blaggards, "Drunken Sailor" -- On the other side, here's an old sea shanty. The Blaggards sound like the Pogues after ten years as the house band for some Austin honkey-tonk.

6. The Shondes, "Let's Go" -- Another tough song with unconventional instrumentation -- fiddles are another sound I love to find in unexpected places -- from a Brooklyn band with attitude and chops to burn.

7. Bodies of Water, "I Guess I'll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I Guess" -- This is what '70s art rock would have sounded like if it had been made by ex-madrigal singers rather than ex-art college kids -- a big song with sharp highs and lows and wonderful harmonies that builds and builds to a magnificent finish.

8. Creature, "Bridgette Bardot" -- A brand-new song that sounds like one of the more bizarre manifestations of '80s Euro-disco; a call-and-response song about Bardot, more or less, that almost manages to make me want to dance.

9. Elis Paprika, "No Me Vas a Callar" -- Well, it's mostly in Spanish, so I have no idea what it's all about. But it fucking rocks, and that's all that matters.

(Sorry, I got carried away. And I also avoided the songs I listed in "Fingertips" back in December, even though I'm still listening to a lot of those a lot of the time. Links on songs are either to legal free download pages or to official YouTube videos. Hope you find something you like, or are inspired to do something similar on your own blog/LJ.)

In Which I Fail To Get It

A couple of days ago (I was lackadaisical about keeping up with my feeds this weekend), Jay Lake wrote the below paragraph, in linking to a news story about that West Texas polygamist sect that is completely different from every other religious group, because they are evil, and everyone else is good:

"Girls in the west Texas polygamous sect enter into underage marriages without resistance because they are ruthlessly indoctrinated from birth to believe disobedience will lead to their damnation[.]" How is this different from any other religion? That's a serious question, not snark. The followers of virtually all religions raise their children within their religious framework, and impose the moral and behavioral rules of their faith on their children. Why is this different? If you're going to give social approval to religious upbringing, where does the line fall in picking-and-choosing? From my atheistic point of view, it's all indoctrination, after all.

Various people immediately jumped on Lake for being nasty and anti-religion and mean to cuddly little bunnies and unappreciative of their personal soulful connection to Invisible Pink Unicorns and Lake, being a polite man, backed off and apologized.

I, however, am not polite. This was also the weekend in which an old man, selected by a bunch of other old men (of which he was then one) to be head of a huge organization, came to my area to insist that everybody just shut up, stop thinking for themselves, and do what he says. (Or else they'll be tortured for all eternity by an all-loving supernatural being who created everyone and knows everything.)

In other words, he taught that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

All other Christian denominations that I know of also teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

The Muslim sects that I'm familiar with teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

Judaism is built on a vast interlocking set of detailed rules, and "disobedience will lead to damnation."

So is the problem merely that Lake is pointing at the most egregious example, and nobody likes to see their own ox being gored? Because it certainly looks to me as if every major religious tradition comes down to "these are the rules you have to follow, and if you don't you'll be tormented for all eternity." And that's exactly what the crazy Texas polygamists are saying, only with their own specific set of rules...but every group has a slightly different set of rules.

The responses all seem to be "well, all the people I know would never play the eternal damnation card...oh, sure, it's there, hidden in the religion somewhere, but only Republicans would actually mention it to the darling little children." Which is hogwash. All Catholics get a solid diet of hell, and so do Muslims. It varies by Protestant denomination, but, unless you get way out to Unitarian Universalists, there's some hell in the mix. Hell is part of the religious equation.

Look, I won the Bible Olympics two years running at my Church in my mis-spent youth; I know what a happy, positive, non-Hell-centric religion looks like. But Hell is still there; damnation is one of the underlying themes. If you don't like that, perhaps you need to reconsider your allegiance to a Supreme Being that insists on it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/19

Another impressive stack this week, so I'll dive right into it without tormenting any publicists first:

The book that made me happiest when I opened its package this week was Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Good-Bye, third in the series from Drawn & Quarterly reprinting his Japanese comics from the early '70s. Tatsumi was in the forefront of the gegika movement, pushing manga in the direction of more realistic, downbeat stories about modern people's actual lives. The first two books of Tatsumi's from D&Q -- The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo -- were among my favorite books of the past two years, and I wasn't expecting to see this book for review. D&Q will publish it in July; start saving your pennies now.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best, from First Second, will be published in August. This looks like its essentially Campbell's follow-up to The Black Diamond Detective Agency; he did all of the art, and Best is credited as the co-writer. It's the story of a famous acrobat, creator of (and namesake of) the leotard, and I expect that it's at least based on true stories, if not precisely non-fictional itself.

Alastair Reynolds's new novel is The Prefect, coming from Ace in June. I've had a copy of the British edition for close to a year, and haven't managed to read it yet -- I hope I can get it in before it publishes here. This novel returns to the universe of the Revelation Space trilogy, in Yellowstone's system before the Melding Plague hit. The title character is Tom Dreyfus, a cop who discovers that his current investigation is part of something much larger and more dangerous than he expected.

From Glen Cook's "Garrett Files" series -- Cruel Zinc Melodies, from Roc in May. This is the twelfth in that long-running series about a tough hard-boiled PI in a fantasy world; I read one of them, many years ago, and it didn't quite take.

Omega Sol is a new SF novel from Scott Mackay, which Roc will publish in May. It's about one of those great Hard SF staples, the Enigmatic Alien Artifact -- in this case, towers on the Moon that are turning our sun into a red giant much more quickly than it should be.

And also from Roc in May is Thomas E. Sniegoski's A Kiss Before the Apocalypse. (Oddly, I remember him best for the Bone side-story he wrote, Stupid Stupid Rat-Tails, which is one of the purest comedic romps in comics form that I've ever seen.) This book looks much more serious; it begins yet another urban fantasy, about a Boston PI who is actually the angel Remiel.

Algonquin Books published Jack O'Connell's novel The Resurrectionist earlier in April. It's a literary fantasy novel, but it's hard to say much more about it without reading it. (The materials about it -- back of the galley, publicity letter -- have lots of details and specifics that don't sound like anything in particular; that's the trouble with writing a book that isn't in any existing genre, so there's no shorthand to explain what it is.)

Publishing at the end of April is the first volume of Osamu Tezuka's series Dororo, which I've already reviewed for ComicMix (through the magic of PDF and wide Internet pipes). It's published by Vertical. I liked it, though not as much as some of Vertical's other Tezuka books, and I thought it would be a good introduction to Tezuka's quirkier side to readers of more popular manga.

The Martian General's Daughter is the new novel by Theodore Judson, whose first novel Fitzpatrick's War got great reviews a few years ago (and which, shockingly, I've yet to read). This new book was published by Pyr at the beginning of April. I doubt very much that it's a traditional Military SF book, though it does seem to have a lot of war and fighting in it.

Kate Elliott's new novel is Shadow Gate, second in the "Crossroads" series after Spirit Gate. Tor published it on April 15th. It also has a magnificent Michael Kaluta cover, which is almost worth the cost of admission all by itself.

Orson Scott Card's massive new collection of short stories, Keeper of Dreams, was also published by Tor on April 15th. It contains twenty-two stories from the past decade, including a story that had been accepted for Harlan Ellison's long-delayed The Last Dangerous Visions anthology.

The renowned Science Fiction Book Club has just published an original anthology called Galactic Empires, edited by the possibly-even-more-renowned Gardner Dozois. I'm particularly pleased to see this not only because the program of original anthologies was a source of particular pride in my days at the club, but because Gardner dedicated this book to Ellen Asher (the once and forever Editor-in-Chief of the SFBC and eternal uncrowned queen of all science fiction) and myself. Thanks, Gardner. Having my name associated with a book containing new novellas by Peter F. Hamilton, Neal Asher, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, and Ian McDonald is a great honor.

Last this week is a book that's #2 on The New York Times's bestseller lists as I type this. (At least, it is for now -- who knows when the whims of the Times will decide that fantasy is unworthy of the list and stop tracking it, as they already do with religious books, computer books, and several other categories?) That book is Jim Butcher's Small Favor, the tenth in the "Dresden Files" contemporary fantasy series. It's published by Roc, and, obviously, is already available everywhere. And I started reading it almost as soon as it came in the door.

ComicMix Rundown

More of my ComicMix posts that I've neglected to link to so far:

On Thursday, I reviewed three books for kids: Gumby Collected #1 by Burden and Geary (which you won't be able to find at Amazon, so no link -- try asking at your local comics shop), Guibert's Sardine in Outer Space 5: My Cousin Manga and Other Stories, and Sfar's Little Vampire.

On Friday, my "Manga Friday" feature covered the first installment of a series called Kaze No Hana, the first volume of the new Tales from the Crypt, and the third volume of My Heavenly Hockey Club.

Movie Log: Bee Movie

The point was to watch this as a "family movie night" over pizza Wednesday evening, but Thing 1 bailed out at the first sign of unpleasantness -- when the big, tough "Pollen Patrol" bees mildly intimidated Our Hero -- as he often does, so the family was reduced to three. But the three of us made it to the end of Bee Movie just fine.

It's a nice-looking kid's movie that has way too much message and a plot that follows its own logic to some weird places -- I appreciated the latter much more than the former. And the messages are so obvious and hackneyed that I have to take points off for that.

(I mean, "Being an individual is good"? "We must save the environment"? "There's a place for everyone"? Bleeeh.)

It's not embarrassing, like some kids movies I could name, but it's nothing special, and I don't expect I'll want to see it again. I sent it back to Netflix the next day, and neither of my boys have asked about it, so I don't think either of them want to see more of it -- not even to rewatch a favorite scene or poke through the extras on the DVD.

So, if you're looking for an adequate movie to entertain kids for about ninety minutes, and you don't mind heavy-handed vaguely left-wing messages, you could do worse than Bee Movie.

Movie Log: Sweeney Todd

I've always felt that I should be a Sondheim fan, but, for various reasons -- mostly having to do with being a hermit who doesn't get out to see shows all that often -- it's pretty much remained on that level. Whenever I hear a bit of Sondheim, or read reviews of new shows and revivals, I think "Yes, that certainly does sound like my kind of thing." And I leave it at that.

There have been at least two productions of Sweeney Todd on Broadway that I could have seen, and maybe more, but I've seen none of them. So this is my first substantial exposure to Sondheim -- once it's in a form that comes to my door, I'm on it.

The Wife and I watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd film last Saturday night, and I came away with a better impression of the material than of the execution. As usual with a Burton film, the visuals were stunning and the iconography amazing; this is a movie that looks spectacular.

The script is equally good, and most of the actors are excellent. (Jamie Campbell Bower, as the young lover Anthony, is a bit too much, but I suspect that's mostly the way the part is written.) Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are particularly strong in acting the lead roles of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett.

Unfortunately, neither Depp nor Bonham Carter are trained singers, and it really shows. They speak-sing most of their parts, and forfeit much of the potential power of the work along the way. (This is a movie that really calls out for an old-fashioned Hollywood solution -- have real singers, secretly and uncredited, sing for the inadequate actors.) They're not bad singers -- they're always adequate and occasionally better than that -- but these are songs that really good singers could have dug into and done something spectacular with.

So the movie of Sweeney Todd is quite impressive -- it's a work of real power -- but I was left wondering what it could have been if it had singers worthy of the material.

Quote of the Week

"When someone complains about making a living writing novels, what they really mean to say [is], 'I cannot maintain a bourgeois existence that matches the perceived social status of being a novelist by writing just the novels I would like to and at the rate I'd wish to.' "
- Nick Mamatas

Your Headline of the Day

Hulk doll's monster willy

Against: it's from The Sun (the UK tabloid).

For: there's a great photograph of the Hulk doll (with willy) and the six-year-old girl who discovered it.

Sloganeering

Today's meme is brought to you by...I forget, actually. I've seen it at least twice so far, but I forget who was doing it.

To make up, I'll do it twice. (And I do realize that statement doesn't make sense.)

The Wheeler Slogan:

Your Slogan Should Be

Wheeler. Live the Pleasure.

The Slogan Generator

The Hornswoggler Slogan:

Your Slogan Should Be

Hornswoggler. Stronger than Pain.

The Slogan Generator

Penguin UK Tells Stories

A colleague recently passed on a link to Charles Cumming's "The 21 Steps," an online short story told through Google Maps.

And I see that Penguin UK is in the midst of a series of online fiction experiments, called "We Tell Stories" -- the homepage has some more information. (The new stories are all related to classic novels that Penguin has just put into new editions -- Cumming's "21 Steps," for example, is a homage to John Buchan's The 39 Steps.)

The site is a little slow for me, particularly the homepage, so I don't know if I can spare any more should-be-working time on it, but the other stories also look to be told in distinctive ways -- the second one is a couple of blogs, and the most recent one is entirely a series of "infographics."

It's clever and inventive, a marketing device that creates something new and interesting instead of just trying to build hype. (It's also, clearly, a device that took a lot of time and effort.)

Life Sucks by Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, and Warren Pleece

I'm a pretty geeky guy, so I usually enjoy manifestations of geek culture, and most of the usual maneuvers to get my interest or sympathy in a story along those lines work like a charm on me.

Unfortunately, there's one major area where I don't identify with the generic geek at all, and this book is set right in the middle of that territory. The stereotypical geek (young division; the old geek has his own troubles) is a weedy, scrawny, weak, ineffectual chap, whiny about his lack of success with women (or with anything, really) and always being pushed around by bigger, more confident men.

I'm six-foot-three, and my days of being bullied ended in eighth grade when I got into three fights within a month (with three different people). Getting the nickname "Psycho" the next year probably didn't hurt, either.

So when a book relies on audience identification with the poor-me sad-sack of a mid-20s male loser, I usually just can't do it. I have no more sympathy for those worms than the equally-generic surfer antagonists do.

Which is a shame when it comes to Life Sucks, since that's all its hero has going for him.

Dave is the night manager of a Last Stop convenience store, somewhere in a strip mall in Southern California. He's also a vampire; when he went to apply for the job, his boss Lord Arisztidescu ("Radu" for short) fanged him to make him loyal. (It's not entirely clear if -- or why --vampire masters pay their slave followers; the economics in Life Sucks is a bit fuzzy.) Somehow, the same thing happened to his friend Jerome, who is similarly a night manager at Kwik Kopy. (One begins to suspect these young kids are just too stupid to live.) How much of a loser is Dave? He rides his bike to work in southern California. Case closed.

Dave's convenience store is on the flight-path of a nearby night club catering to Goths, so, every night when the club closes, a swarm of attractive young women draped in layers of black wander through the area. One of them, Rosa, has caught Dave's eye -- he's smitten. She over-romanticizes vampirism -- of course she does, she's a Goth -- but our loser hero refuses to use that to win her, and just settles into the usual schlubby, needy, sad-sack, "just friends" mode.

(At this point my hands were itching for a nice wooden stake to put him out of my misery.)

And then there's Wes, another young vampire turned by Radu and the epitome of the evil blond surfer dude. (Except, he's a vampire, too.) And he sets his sights on the hot Goth chick, too. Dave, briefly abandoning whining for a more useful tactic, then maneuvers Wes into making a bet to see who can "get" Rosa first, without using any vampire trickery.

OK, that's all plot set-up. The thematic center of the story is that Dave is a "vegetarian vampire" -- he's never bitten another person, and survives on blood plasma. This has left him weaker than other vampires, and unable to use the full array of Kewl Vamp Trix (hypnotism, superstrength, turning into things, and so on). Life Sucks would like us to believe that this is a principled stand on Dave's part -- that he can be turned into a vampire, but not made to use other people for food -- but he's such a wimpy little loser that it's just another piece of his character. Of course he can't bite anybody -- if he could, he wouldn't be a loser.

The big confrontation at the end goes to the heart of the theme. The good options for an ending -- depending on how writers Abel and Soria wanted to go -- would have been either A) Dave realizes that he is a vampire, and he has to live like a vampire to survive among vampires, and so fully accepts his new life, or B) Dave stands by his principles and finds a way to win as a human, without descending to the level of the vampires.

Abel and Soria, however, pull a third, lousy ending out of the unfortunate plotting hat, in which Dave stays a loser when it counts, but caves in off-page after he's already lost at the important moment. It's the worst of both endings, and it moves Dave off to the side when he should be central -- if this is Dave's story, then it should be determined by his actions. The last five pages of this book are badly misthought and, frankly, a mess.

There's plenty that's good about Life Sucks: the art is well-paced, and deals with a lot of very talky scenes well, keeping everyone identifiable; the dialogue is smart and precise; it has a new and interesting take on vampire life. My problems with Dave are idiosyncratic; they won't bother most people. But the ending just doesn't work.

The Dreaded Middle-Book Syndrome

I faced it head-on at ComicMix today, with a review of three big whomping chunks of middle: Ex Machina Vol. 6, B.P.R.D. Vol. 7, and Queen & Country Vol. 8.

The Best American Poetry: 2007, edited by Heather McHugh and David Lehman

On my last trip to the library, I came across this and had one of my periodic attacks of high culture. I hadn't read any poetry in quite a while, and I felt like I should. So I grabbed The Best American Poetry: 2007 and prepared to better myself.

(By the way -- before I forget -- McHugh is the guest editor of this year's edition and Lehman the series editor. Don't ask me what that meant for their work-flow or about how all of the poems were chosen; they don't explain it.)

I knew I was in for rough seas when McHugh's introduction began thusly:

Poetry attracted me in the first place, fifty years ago, because (half gasp half gape) it seemed constitutively thunderstruck, wonderstruck. The oddity and opportunity of verbal life seemed not just a poem's object but its fundamental subject: In a poem, theme and instrument could not be told apart. Except insofar as verve or the vernacular refresh it, daily life wants language chiefly for a tool of will, to note the sorely needed or the merely known. But as soon as systems of words are wielded by intentions only, predictable and paraphrasable, they begin to bore me. A logophiliacal hunger craves amazement. And words can blaze! -- most brightly where (like fires) their logs are interlaid with airs. They can flow -- or flock -- or fluster! From their arrangement in measures, uncontainability pours forth.... (And so it is with us: We can't contain ourselves.)

Oh, my. Lookie, ma, I's writin' now! And that sets the tone for the anthology, in which a lot of people on minor-college shelves strive to be too clever by at least half.

Some of the poems are pretty good, but I see that American poets -- at least the ones McHugh and Lehman like -- have nearly abandoned meter and rhyme; there are only a few pieces in here with either. (Not that that matters all that much, or that I really care about a hundred-year-old controversy, but if I'm going to grump properly about a book of poetry, I might as well hit the obvious targets.) There's also quite a number of "prose poems," which I know is a time-honored term, but it makes about as much sense to me as "ocean desert." One or the other, writers -- you need to choose. You don't get to claim that you're doing both at once.

It also struck me as odd that the anthology is organized alphabetically -- poets are listed purely in the order of their last names. To my mind, an anthologist has two jobs: first to select the works (including editing, if appropriate), and then to organize them into an pleasing configuration. So it looks to me like Ms. McHugh (or maybe Mr. Lehman, or even both; again, they don't explain any of this) knocked off work for lunch halfway through the job and just never came back.

All in all, this left me seriously underwhelmed. Some of the individual poets are nearly as full of themselves in their notes as McHugh is in her intro. And, sadly, I've already returned it to the library, so I can't single out any poems, or poets, for particular praise or blame.

I do still have a shelf of unread poetry, so maybe it will soon be time to dig into Larkin or Bishop or even dive back into my giant Penguin three-volume Browning (where my bookmark is still in the middle of Collected Poems, Vol. 1 since an Arisia about ten years ago). But I doubt I'll go back to this series to see what previous years were like.

ComicMix Reviews

I've gotten behind in letting you fine folks here know what I'm doing over there...

On Friday, my "Manga Friday" column reviewed Kieli, Vol. 1 and Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 3, both from Yen Press.

Yesterday, my review of Paul Goes Fishing by Michel Rabagliati was published.

And today my review of Lars Martinson's Tonoharu: Part One went up.

Tomorrow will probably be a round-up of middle volumes of very different ongoing series, and maybe some kids' books for Thursday.

In Over My Head

Item 1: my regular mailman came back from vacation this week. Seven packages arrived yesterday and four today. (Including some really wonderful stuff, like Jim Butcher's Small Favor and the new Yoshihiro Tatsumi collection from Drawn & Quarterly, so don't think I'm complaining or anything.)

Item 2: baseball season has started, and with it the specter of overscheduling. The Wife had a bunch of Thing 1's Cub Scout compatriots over this afternoon after school to paint their Soapbox Derby car (a kid-sized brakeless, barely steerable cart on little wagon wheels), then ran off to Thing 2's first baseball game at 5:15. (And it's real baseball this year, after two years of T-ball -- girls shunted over into the parallel softball league, playing with boys one and two years older with some actual skills, semi-real pitching, and so on.)

I headed right over there after work, pausing only to grab a quick drive-through dinner and vote for the school budget. She left about 6:30 to take Thing 1 home to finish up his homework; I stayed until the end of the game at about 8:00. Then all the hurried bedtime stuff, The Wife rushing off to vote, and finally we get to settle.

So it looks like things are getting quite busy around here -- and the next game is on Friday...

J.K. Rowling Is Wrong

J.K. Rowling is currently in court in New York, trying to assert complete control over all critical or secondary works even vaguely related to her copyrights (and, more importantly, Time Warner's trademarks) in the Harry Potter properties, by suing the publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon. She's trying to stop publication of the book, which, if I remember my Constitutional Law class from long ago, requires a much stricter test than an action after publication would.

To be blunt, I think she is absolutely wrong in her actions, and must lose the case if there is any justice in the world.

Reasons why Jo Rowling thinks she should get what she wants, in this as in everything:

1) Having someone write non-fiction about her fictional world makes her sad. "It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month," she said in a New York Times article on the trial. Also compare to her sadness last year over early reviews; I'm half-convinced Rowling would outlaw all reviews or criticism of Potter if she could.

2) She is the only one allowed to decide who may profit, in any way, from Harry Potter. From the Times: "She said the book, which would cost $24.95, would compete unfairly with an encyclopedia she had been planning to create since 1998, the profits of which — possibly millions of dollars — she had planned to donate to a British charity."

3) Some of the entries steal her words. "She claims the author has lifted large chunks of her own language without quotation marks," reports the Times.

4) Some of the entries don't steal her words. The Times: "She complained that the entries consisted of words like 'Death' or 'Voldemort' arranged alphabetically, followed by what she considered bare-bones definitions."

5) Some of the entries say things that are original, and she doesn't like those, either. "She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s," notes the Times.

Those reading carefully will note that only #3 is actionable in a court of law, but all five came up in her testimony yesterday. So what is she really saying? "I'm rich, powerful, and well-liked, with millions of zealous fans, so you have to do what I say"?

The bottom line: Rowling is demanding more power and control over secondary works than any entity should ever have. Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing this case without a jury, should rule strongly and unequivocally against her claims.

[relying heavily on The New York Times's coverage]

Tiptree Winner

The annual James Tiptree, Jr. Award was recently bestowed upon The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall.

As usual, there was also an "honor list" of works which didn't win but were contenders. (I presume that's what "honor list" implies; these weren't the nominees or shortlist since they were only announced after the winner was selected.)

That "honor list" contains:

• “Dangerous Space”, Kelley Eskridge, (Dangerous Space, Aqueduct Press, 2007)
• Water Logic, Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom, Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
• The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
• Interfictions, Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.) (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
• The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
• Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
• Flora Segunda, Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

[via SF Awards Watch; it's not up on the Tiptree Award site yet]

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Every so often, I stare at my to-be-read shelves and a great lassitude falls upon me: I can't decide what to read, or think of a reason why I ever thought I might want to read any of those books. That is the time for Wodehouse.

That time came again recently, and so -- after dithering in front of those shelves for probably half an hour, picking up books and putting them back down -- I read My Man Jeeves.

This book, originally published in 1919, collects some of the very earliest Bertie-and-Jeeves stories: four of them, along with four somewhat similar stories about Reggie Pepper (another amiable upper-class dullard, adrift in New York as Bertie Wooster is in his stories, but without the steadying hand of a Jeeves). Comparing the two series of stories shows immediately how useful Jeeves was for Wodehouse -- Reggie had to be at least somewhat intelligent, to get out of his own scrapes, but Bertie could be sublimely incompetent so long as he had Jeeves to guide and save him.

Bertie is himself from the beginning of his first story, and even his background is pretty well worked out -- he's in New York to get away from his overbearing (and as-yet-unseen) Aunt Agatha. Several of the plots will be familiar to Wodehouse readers -- and not just because Wodehouse re-used the same plot motivators many times, but because he re-used the entire situations of some of these stories for later works. These Jeeves stories aren't as sublime as the best later ones, but Bertie and Jeeves are always good company.

This shouldn't be anyone's first Jeeves book -- I'd suggest Joy in the Morning, The Code of the Woosters, or the stories in Very Good, Jeeves! -- it could go quite well as the fifth, or tenth, or (even, sadly) last.

Am I Now Or Have I Ever Been?

Yet another meme-list-of-questions; Janni Simner invented it, and Gwenda Bond did it in public where I could see.

1. Have you ever killed a man? I have never been convicted of a felony in New York State.

2. With your own hands? I never use my own hands.

3. What, in your opinion, is the best way to transport contraband across state and country lines? State is easy -- trucking will do for most contraband. Country lines are a bit tougher, and generally require small watercraft.

4. Even if you're transporting explosives? I do generally prefer to send nuclear material via train, but trucks are just fine for everything else.

5. Really? Have you ever known me to lie?

6. Have you ever stolen a library book? Oh, yes.

7. On purpose, or only because you found it under your bed years after you reported it lost and paid the fine? Very much on purpose. Through defenestration, actually.

8. Where were you on November 1, 2007? Wouldn't you like to know?

9. Can you prove it? No. More importantly, neither can you.

10. You had to think about that, didn't you? Not for a second.

11. How much is it worth to you for me to pretend I didn't notice? The operative question is actually how much is your life worth?

12. Have you spent years building up an immunity to iocane powder? (And if you know a faster method, will you share it?) There is no such thing as an immunity to iocane powder, only a stubbornness to accept death.

13. Name three different ways to start a fire. Matches, calling on Zeus for a lightning strike, and begging the next campsite over.

14. Now try to convince me you only know that because you were a Girl/Boy Scout/Guide once. If you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do about it.

15. How many digits of pi can you recite from memory? Five after the decimal place.

16. Did you have to count out the digits on your fingers to answer that? No.

17. Did you check online to make sure you remembered right before answering? No.

18. Does all this talk about numbers make you uncomfortable? No.

19. Or are you just wondering what it has to do with the rest of the meme? One does wonder.

20. Seriously, where did you bury the body? Burial is for amateurs.

21. Where were you on March 16, 2036? I was at the opening of the Ruckheiser Center, but I will be assassinating the Anti-Pope. By the third time around, I'll probably be in Timbuktu.

22. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too? I would have been the one who pushed them.

23. What is the ninja replacement score for your life? -1

That was more enjoyable than most...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/12

This week's pile is somewhat larger than the last few, so I'd better dive right into it.

Another pleasant surprise leads off this week: Penguin's Tarcher imprint has a new biography of Charles Fort, by stage magic designer and magical historian Jim Steinmeyer, under the easily-findable title Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural. I've read various little pieces about Fort's life before, but I've never seen the whole story -- so this is very welcome. (I see Steinmeyer is also the author of Hiding the Elephant, a book I've wanted to read for a long time, and might even have a copy of lying around somewhere.) Charles Fort publishes on May 1st. (And I've started reading it already, if that means anything to anyone.)

To tie in with the biography, Penguin is re-issuing his four great books as The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort with a Steinmeyer introduction. I think Fort's four amazingly skewed books have been unavailable for a while -- I read them in a library omnibus edition over a decade ago, since that's the only way I could find them -- so it's great to see them come back, especially with such an appropriately garish cover. Every book about the paranormal since the thirties -- whether credulous or skeptical -- derives directly from Fort, and very few of them have even come close to equalling his dry, witty tone and command of obscure data-points. If you've ever suspected that "we are property," this is the book for you. It will also be available from booksellers everywhere in May (and one of those booksellers, whose name I blush to mention, has a blanket 5% additional discount for all pre-orders).

Cory Doctorow's new novel is Little Brother, and it's aimed at a teenage audience for the first time in his career. It comes with a glowing Neil Gaiman quote, and a lot of strong pre-publication reviews. I have to admit that I haven't managed to read any of Doctorow's novels yet -- though I've seen a lot of his short non-fiction and stories -- so I'll probably have to remedy that this year. Tor's Starscape imprint publishes Little Brother in May.

My one manga this week is the first volume of Kaze No Hana by Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta. The cover shows a cute teenage girl (with big eyes, of course) in a school uniform, and a sword peeks out from behind her on the back cover. Using only those facts, I suspect most of my readers can figure out what this book is about -- our heroine has some sort of mystical powers (or is in the possession of a sword that does) and she has to fight monsters. A quick glance at the back cover copy reveals that is substantially true -- and that she's also an orphan with amnesia! Yen Press is publishing Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1 in April, which means it's probably already in stores.

Ace/Roc sent me some of their new paperbacks this week, and on top of the stack is Talia Gryphon's Key to Conspiracy. It's the second in a contemporary paranormal fantasy, and boasts a Laurell Hamilton quote. (I don't remember Hamilton giving out quotes much, so that could be a big deal.) Our heroine is a Paramortal psychologist/ex-Marine Special Forces operative, and -- reading between the lines of the back-cover copy -- I suspect that she, too, has was is euphemistically called a "complicated love life." (Didn't I read that one Ace author had that written into her contract?) Key to Conspiracy is on sale April 29th from Ace.

From another subgenre comes Lisa Shearin's Armed & Magical, a humorous fantasy novel from the author of Magic Lost, Trouble Found. It's another Ace book, also coming April 29th. (And Ace has been very strong in humorous fantasy for a couple of decades now, so I expect this will be a lot of fun, if not terribly deep.

And then there's Sean Williams's Earth Ascendant, second (and last?) in his Astropolis series. It looks like far-future space opera, which is something Williams does well. This is yet another Ace book for April 29th.

Last from the Ace package is their trade paperback reprint of 2007's Wizards anthology, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It contains a number of excellent stories by people like Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Nancy Kress, Garth Nix, Kage Baker, Tad Williams, and Peter S. Beagle -- it's pretty much an all-star cast. (Full disclosure: I liked it so much I bought it to offer at my old job at the club.) If the hardcover last year was too rich for your blood, perhaps this paperback -- coming May 6th -- will be better for your wallet.

The first of the "Year's Best" books that I've seen this year is Night Shade's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Two, edited by Jonathan Strahan. It's a collection of last year's best stories, it's got a neat John Berkey cover, and it was published in March.

Also from Night Shade is John Joseph Adams's reprint anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, which published in January.

Paolo Bacigalupi's first collection is Pump Six and Other Stories, and Night Shade published it in February. I see that I've read most of it as the stories appeared in "Year's Best" anthologies, but I'm still hoping to get to it soon. (Although that's in part to see if Bacigalupi's growing mundanista pessimism gets toxic in large doses -- the stories I've read are all excellent, but they all also very definitely have a grim outlook towards the future.)

And last this week is a novel that people have been telling me I should read for the past ten years -- Glen Cook's space opera The Dragon Never Sleeps. It, once again, was published by Night Shade, and it was available in February. So those of you who have been haunting the used-book outlets for fifty-dollar copies of the mass-market paperback from twenty years ago are now in luck.

Quietly Gloating

When today started, I had a stack of fourteen books on top of my printer -- that's where things sit between the time I read them and when I finish writing about them. It's probably as tall as that stack has ever gotten, and my main job today was to work the stack down.

(Not to mention that I also had the stack of books from my Montclair trip yesterday that I wanted to post today, and the stack of review copies that came in last week for my Monday morning post. I was surrounded by tall stacks of books, believe you me.)

Not everything is ready to post yet -- and it'll dribble out over the course of the week, anyway -- but there are now only five books left in that top-of-the-printer pile, and I've written partial reviews of all of those.

I think I'm done for the day. With any luck, there will be a blizzard of my opinions about books in this coming week. (It's up to each of you to decide if that's a good or a bad thing.)

Incoming Books: 12 April

I took a trip to my favorite local bookstore, the Montclair Book Center, yesterday, and brought up a good-sized pile -- so I'll list those books separately from the usual Monday "Reviewing the Mail" post. My two boys accompanied me, and I let them each pick two books -- Thing 1 chose two Yu-Gi-Oh volumes (which I wouldn't link to even I could remember what they were -- probably middle books of Millennium World), and Thing 2 picked:

The Pigeon Wants a Puppy by Mo Willems, latest in the picture-book series about a pushy pigeon by a guy who's won a couple of Caldecotts already. It's the fourth book in the series, but it's still energetic and original -- Willems isn't milking the concept yet.

Flotsam by David Wiesner, which won the Caldecott itself a year or so ago -- it's an engrossing wordless book with a wonderful gimmick that I won't spoil. Wiesner has done a bunch of great wordless picture books, like Sector 7 (about a boy who vists the Empire State Building and befriends a cloud) and Tuesday (about the very strange occurrences one Tuesday night) -- he's good at image-to-image transitions in ways that I bet comics people would be interested in as well.

And then, for me, the loot included:

Four P.G. Wodehouse books from Overlook Press -- Plum Pie, Money for Nothing, The Inimitable Jeeves, and The Girl on the Boat -- because I'd somehow gotten behind. I love this series: they're cleverly-designed and very eye-catching, with impressive production details. And Wodehouse is one of the funniest writers of all time, as always.

Flann O'Brien's The Complete Novels, in a handsome Everyman's Library edition -- I didn't know this was going to be published, but now I can get rid of my ratty old copy of The Third Policeman and, with any luck, actually get to read At Swim Two-Birds this year. Or maybe next.

Rick Geary's biography of J. Edgar Hoover snuck past me earlier this year -- it was published by Hill and Wang's "Serious Comics" imprint and seems to have mostly avoided comics stores, but I finally saw it and nabbed it immediately.

I'd been hoping the Morrow people would send me Jeffrey Ford's new novel The Shadow Year for review, but that didn't happen, so I bought it myself. Jeff Ford is always worth it.

I also continued getting the new snazzy Penguin edition of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, with Moonraker. Someday I might just sit down and read five (or all?) of them in a row. As I recall, they do progress from book to book, so it could be an interesting experiment to read them as a meta-novel.

I special-ordered Greg Egan's Dark Integers and Other Stories, since I didn't expect to see it in person until a convention (if then). I probably should have done a bit more research, since it contains five novellas, four of which I've read -- I'm still happy to have more Egan short fiction on my shelf, in a durable form, but I was looking forward to reading more new stuff by him, and this won't be it. (Perhaps the new novel will come along soon, though.)

Sex and Sensibility is a book of cartoons by women cartoonists, with some interpolated essays, about sex and love and related matters. It's a big new collection of magazine-style cartoons, which I love, so I couldn't resist it. It's edited by Liza Donnelly, and, oddly, was published by Twelve, the big newish Hachette imprint which does one book a month and promotes the hell out of it -- I wouldn't think this could sustain that level of hype.

And last for me was Martin Amis's new nonfiction collection with the exceptionally long title: The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. I've heard that Amis's views on Islam are controversial, to put it mildly, but he's always an engaging writer, even when he lets his own hobbyhorses run away with him (as in Koba the Dread and, fictionally, in Night Train).

So that's way more than I'll be able to read soon -- plus a big pile of review books that I'll list tomorrow. Better get to cracking those books...

Authors on TV

Cynthia Cooper, who wrote the fabulous Extraordinary Circumstances about her experiences as the WorldCom whistleblower, will be on TV not once but twice in the coming week:

• Her reading and Q&A on C-SPAN's Book TV will re-run on Sunday the 13th at 4:00 PM. (And again Monday morning at 6:00 for you early-birds.)
• And she'll be interviewed by Tavis Smiley on his PBS show on Tuesday the 15th.

Other people will probably be less excited about this than I am, but I don't care.

People Who Need Boundaries

Dear Author has the story of DeborahAnne MacGillivray, a romance writer (and "secret co-publisher" and cover artist for Highland Press) who clearly doesn't think three-star Amazon reviews are good enough for her darling prose.

MacGillivray's attack on the reviewer who dared to not love her book is covered here, while more of the convoluted story of Highland Press is here. (I can't say I understand all of this, and some of it seems to be posturing on one side and hysteria on the other, but it's definitely weird, unprofessional behavior.)

She's off the reservation and running wild, folks -- and some of the passive-aggressive responses in comments are nearly as entertaining.

[via Diana Pharoah Francis]

Itzkoff Level Now Orange

Dave Itzkoff is a hard man to track down -- he's supposed to be the SF reviewer for the New York Times, but he's more often found doing other things. If he's not reviewing literary fiction, he's interviewing a scientist. If he's not searching for the "new Arthur C. Clarke," he's providing reading suggestions for presidential candidates. Where, oh where will the Itzkoff turn up next?

This week finds Itzkoff on the Times's PaperCuts blog, using Charton Heston's recent death as a springboard to quote the ending of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!

It's nice to see that there is another SF novel that he's read -- even if it is one that's thirty-plus years old -- but, in typical PaperCuts style, the post is really just an excuse for a blogger to grab a YouTube clip, retype something out of a book he already owns, and call it journalism. And Make Room!'s trendy dystopian environmentalism is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected the young Itzkoff to have gravitated towards.

So I still stand by my original characterization of Itzkoff: "the guy who read some SF in college, and didn't engage in it terribly deeply." Although, if he comes back with a passioned defense of A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, he may have a chance to convince me otherwise.

Quote of the Week

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
- George Orwell

The Born Queen by Greg Keyes

I've been a big supporter of Greg Keyes's "Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone" series from the beginning -- I bought the first book, The Briar King, as a Selection at my old job, and burbled about it thusly:

Six years ago, I introduced a fantasy novel to the SFBC by saying “If you love good fantasy, you owe it to yourself to read this book.” I don’t say that kind of thing lightly, but I said it about A Game of Thrones, and I’m thrilled to say it again about The Briar King: this is a book you have to read if you like sweeping fantasy.

Now, I have to admit, here, that I thought Keyes's previous series, "The Age of Unreason," went somewhat off the rails as it went on, after a brilliant first volume (Newton's Cannon). So I was a bit apprehensive that the same thing might happen to "Kingdoms:" that it might lose focus on the characters that made the first book so impressive and wander away from its strengths.

But "Kingdoms" is now complete, so I can say, definitively, that didn't happen at all. Keyes shows a real brilliance for keeping his story moving in Born Queen, shuffling between about half-a-dozen viewpoint characters but cutting out all the fat -- scenes are precise, only as long as they need to be, and they get shorter and tighter as the book goes on. It's wonderful to see a writer who really understands how to control tension and keep the stakes high. The Born Queen is an epic fantasy novel that's just the right size, not bloated like so many of its competitors. (In fact, I expect many readers will wish it was substantially longer -- but that's the essence of entertainment: leaving the audience wanting more.)

A plot summary probably won't make much sense to people who haven't read the earlier books, and could give away plot-points for those in the middle of those books. So I'll skip lightly: a certain viewpoint character is now in power, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Another one of the viewpoint characters also comes into power -- and, in both cases, I'm speaking in a fantasy sense more than as in a political one -- with unexpected, and not positive, results. Other than that, it starts out about as you'd expect the last book in a multiple-viewpoint fantasy series to do: the major characters are scattered, doing separate things. I was about to throw in their names, but it always annoyed me, back at the clubs, when the descriptive copy for late books in fantasy series would say things like "Llad'nafar must re-invoke the Stone of Forgetting, while the Duke of Dork races to save the life of the fair Melililiii, beset by Orcs in the Darken Forest." So I'll avoid that part. The cast here is made up of the people who survived the previous books -- you know, by now, who they are.

If you've read the earlier books: The Born Queen finishes up the series with a bang, and without any filler. It starts at a brisk walk, and picks up speed as the book goes on.

If you haven't read the earlier books: for god's sake, don't start here. But the series is now completely, and excellently complete, so go grab a copy of The Briar King and get ready for something special.

Either way, this is one of the better epic fantasy series out there. Even more, it was planned for four books, and was completed in four books, without bloat or fuss. Keyes is a damn good writer, and an even better storyteller; he knows how to tell the story he set out to tell, without getting distracted by other things. That should be celebrated, in our era particularly.

A Meme I Am

This one came from Diana Pharoah Francis:

You're feeling: a bit hungry

To your left: is most of my officeicle, including too many papers strewn across the work surface

On your mind: how to sell more books, Sales Conference, lunch

Last meal included: Grilled cheese sandwiches and pretzels

You sometimes find it hard to: care

The weather: is outside, and I am not. I prefer it that way.

Something you have a collection of: Take your choice -- if I have more than two of something, it starts to look like a collection. Books, CDs...I've even got four computers now.

A smell that cheers you up: the sea.

A smell that can ruin your mood: That's rather a personal question, isn't it? (Or maybe this didn't mean mood as in "in the mood.")

How long since you last shaved: approximately six hours

The current state of your hair: growing out, but still controlled

The largest item on your desk/workspace (not computer): here at work, the looming, ominous overhead bins.

Your skill with chopsticks: indeterminate. I've only used them once or twice, and didn't make a complete fool out of myself.

Which section you head for first in a bookstore: manga/graphic novels, usually -- but generally because I'm with one or more of my boys. On my own, I tend to poke through the remainders, look at the new tables, and then wander off towards fiction and/or SFF.

Something you’re craving: King & Sons pizza

Your general thoughts on the presidential race: I was hoping for convention fights on both sides, but I've realized that the rules are so different now that it can't happen that way. So now I just wish it was already over, and Anybody But Bush had already won.

How many times have you been hospitalized this year: None. But the year's still early!

Favorite place to go for a quiet moment: The couch in my dining room.

You’ve always secretly thought you’d be a good: international assassin.

Something that freaks you out a little: Not being absolutely sure of what I'm doing.

Something you’ve eaten too much of lately: Little chocolate eggs.

You have never: been convicted of a felony in New York state.

You never want to: True dat. It's the central flaw of my character.


(And, the other night, I realized why I enjoy doing these silly list-of-questions meme; it gives me a chance to channel my inner Al Jaffee. Yes, I'm yet another American ruined by Mad magazine.)

Numbers, Endlessly Fascinating Numbers

Publishers Weekly this week has an article with a couple of charts from R.R. Bowker's new PubTrack Consumer service, tracking book sales in 2007 by source of purchase and by genre.

The "Source of Purchases by Units" is what PW led with, but it's fairly boring, and doesn't say much that's interesting. (Though "Book Clubs" is the third-highest source, at 12%.) But on the "Genre Purchases by Units" chart, the numbers are quite different from the conventional wisdom, and I had to read the article a couple of times before I could figure out why. (More on that later; for now, the sales are to adults of new books, and are of units, rather than dollars.)

The charts aren't online, so here's the genre one -- overall, fiction was at 49% and nonfiction 51% --

• Mystery/Detective 17%
• Romance 11%
• Science Fiction 5.5%
• Religion 5%
• Bio/Autobio 4%
• General Fiction 3%
• Espionage/Thriller 3%
• Cooking 3%
• History 3%
• Fantasy 3%
• Graphic Novels 2%
• Health & Fitness 2%
• Business/Economics 2%
• Horror/Occult 2%
• Computers 2%

Anyone else get that huh? moment, too? Perhaps when SF is listed at being nearly twice as large as Fantasy? (There also must be a lot of tiny genres, since the non-fiction categories listed above only add up to 21% of its 49% share.) Surely those of us in the publishing business would notice if SF, in aggregate, was selling twice as many copies as Fantasy was?

(As far as we've noticed, it hasn't and isn't.)

Here's the deal, and the intriguing bit (which also may explain why Romance is relatively small) -- these numbers are self-reported, via "an online weekly survey of consumers' buying habits that is completed by about 15,000 consumers weekly." So, assuming that these people are representative -- and I think that's a fair assumption -- then the takeaway is that readers think that they're reading more Mysteries and SF books, and fewer Romances and Fantasy books, than we in the publishing world think they are.

Some of that may be negative perception of those genres -- Romance and Fantasy are the most obviously, blatantly escapist genres, and many people may not perceive their own reading that way -- but some of it is also clearly a difference of perception about the current group of cross-genre books. Most of the mystery/romance/fantasy crossovers -- urban fantasy, paranormal romance, etc. -- are published as Romance or Fantasy, but it seems that readers view them somewhat differently.

Or am I reading too much into one statistic? (And, in any case, what are the other 28% of nonfiction readers reading?)

Playing Chicken With the Lawyers

Keith R.A. DeCandido has discovered a book called Star Trek: The Death Wave, by a chap named Austin P. Torney. (Actually, Torney describes Death Wave as a "screenplay/novelette," which sounds an awful lot like "Office? Submarine!")

Pretty boring, huh? Well, what if I told you that Death Wave was published by an outfit called CreateSpace, and that there's no sign that it was authorized by anyone who actually owns Star Trek trademarks?

So -- anyone think that Viacom will be as warm and fuzzy with Mr. Torney as they have been with Phase II?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/5

It's been another light week at the Hornswoggler compound. If this keeps up, I'll have to go back to writing about the books I get from the library -- and, trust me, nobody wants that. Time to bug some publicists, I guess...

First this week is Psycho Busters: The Novel, Book One. It was written by Yuya Aoki, who is credited as "creator of Get Backers," but who also wrote the manga derived from this novel. Actually, the press release says that this is a "light novel," which means that it's not all that long (169 pages) and has manga-style illustrations (in this case, by Rando Ayamine). I imagine the story isn't terribly different from the first volume of the manga, which I reviewed for ComicMix. Psycho Busters: The Novel is being published by Del Rey as a small trade paperback on April 8th, which means it's probably in most stores already -- or maybe still on the truck on the way to those stores.

Then there's Fantasy Classics, fifteenth in the series of Graphic Classics published by Eureka Productions and edited by Tom Pomplun. I really like the idea of these books -- classic works of literature (usually popular ones -- Mark Twain rather than Henry James) adapted into comics by a wide variety of creators -- even if I find the results a bit wordy sometimes. This volume is anchored by a 47-page adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, plus works by Lovecraft, Hawthorne, Dunsany, and Baum. Fantasy Classics was published in March 2008.

Little Vampire is an omnibus of three stories by Joann Sfar, the first two of which were published individually in English a year or two ago. It contains "Little Vampire Goes to School," "Little Vampire Does Kung Fu," and "Little Vampire and the Canine Defenders Club." First Second will publish it in May of 2008. I think it's officially for kids -- as many of First Second's books are -- but I'm looking forward to reading it myself.

And last this week is a book by Andy Mangels to tie into an upcoming movie: Iron Man: Beneath the Armor. It's a guide to all things Iron Mannish, with a history of the character in great detail (a random poke through it got me to a page about Mike Grell's work on Iron Man in 2003), extensive dossiers of characters from the comics, and, inevitably, a gallery of all of the different armors Tony Stark (and others) have worn over the years. I did mention this once when I saw a bound manuscript, but now I know that Del Rey is publishing it April 8th, so I can mention it again.

The Ol' Battleship

When you have kids, you find yourself doing things you never would have expected.

Case in point: I spent last night in a bunk on the decommissioned Battleship New Jersey (BB-62) last night, in the company of my two sons, much of their Cub Scout pack, and a couple hundred other scouts.

So I'm a bit groggy and out-of-sorts today, since there wasn't all that much "sleeping" going on. (Lights-out at 23:15, scattered giggling and fart noises for half an hour afterward, reveille at 06:00 -- and I don't sleep well in a three foot by six-and-a-half foot by three foot box to begin with.)

I've said to The Wife at least six times that, if this had been a day trip, I would have loved it -- we got a great two-and-a-half hour tour of the ship with an ex-Air Force mechanic docent (thanks, Arlene!), and many parts of the experience were wonderful.

The sleeping arrangements, however, were the exception. (The food wasn't wonderful, either, but who would have expected it to be?)

Anyone expecting coherent thought from me before I get a real night's sleep will be disappointed.


Footnote: This post originally was scheduled to open with a reference to the fact that the two berths above me were filled by the daughters -- twelve or so years old each -- of some guy in our group, but I couldn't manage to make a "I'm so tired because I spent the night under two pubescent girls" joke that was sufficiently funny or shocking to work. But, honestly, who brings two daughters of that age to such an incredibly boyish stag party as a Cub Scout camp-out on a battleship?

It's a Novel, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Since Certain Persons seem to expect this blog to immediately jump on any appearances of the fiend David Itzkoff in a well-known broadsheet published from West 40th Street -- and I am loathe to disappoint anyone -- the following bit is dedicated to you, my dear readers:

Itzkoff reviewed a novel in this week's New York Times Book Review, yclept Blood Kin by Cerwidden Dovey. Don't bother looking it up at Locus; it's not SF or Fantasy. It does seem to have some pomo qualities -- unspecified location, unnamed narrators, written as a "master's thesis in creative writing" -- for those seeking such things.

I haven't read it, or even heard of it before today, so I can't speak to Itzkoff's critical judgment. And only a weaker man than I would note that he wrote 800 words, and got paid for them, for reading a 183-page novel by an unknown. I will also not be so bold as to suggest that he is, once again, shirking his primary job of reviewing SF for The Times.

No, no. Perish the thought.

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, edited by Ben Karlin

The trickiest part of any anthology is the one readers most often forget about: picking the contributors in the first place. Of course, it's rare that everyone you invite has the time and inspiration -- ask me about the writers who kept saying "I'd love to, but..." to the original anthologies at my old job someday -- but that initial list molds the project, and determines much of its direction.

I'm going to bet, using my secret Publishing Knowledge, that Things I've Learned From Women Who Dumped Me was a completely closed project -- that everyone in it was invited by editor Ben Karlin, or someone he dealt with at Grand Central Publishing, or suchlike. (Nonfiction anthos are massively less likely to have an "open reading" period than grubby genre fiction to begin with, for one thing.)

And that initial list settled it. This kind of book could have gone in many different ways -- twenty years ago, it probably would have been made up entirely of young novelists, and thirty years ago it probably would have been heavily illustrated by B. Kliban. But the 2008 Things I've Learned From Women Who Dumped Me -- the one that actually exists in our own time and space -- is made up almost entirely of essays from TV writers and ex-Onion hands.

Thus, the emphasis is on quick, facile "lessons," and Things I've Learned is a quick read, but not one that will last long in memory. It's humorous rather than really funny, and only a few of the pieces are more than "eh."

Now, I've read at least two reviews of this book that said exactly that -- in fancier words, sure, and all gussied up in some for-pay publication, but essentially the same thing -- and I still picked the damn thing up myself. It's got a great title, a neat cover, and it looks like it will be a lot of fun. So you may well find yourself reading it as well, like I did. And, if so, you'll then have your chance to write a review like this.

Manga Friday Has a Slight Flaw

(But in not in its character.)

My "Manga Friday" feature at ComicMix this week reviews the first volume of a new* series by Osamu Tezuka, Dororo.

*Well, new on this side of the Pacific, at least.

Another Comment Turned Into a Post

Every so often, I get carried away and write long comments somewhere else, and then feel like I should have something tangible for all that typing. So I copy-and-paste them here.

Today, it's a comment on this Booksquare post, about Bob Miller's new imprint at HarperCollins (for which he left his job as president of Hyperion very abruptly, which nosy Andrew Wheeler wonders might be a more interesting story). The Booksquare blogger, Kassia Krozser, is much more thrilled by "new concepts," "new media," and other buzzwords beginning with "new" than I am...or maybe I'm just an old cynic. She thinks this is something unique and special and wonderful, and I...well, this is what I said:

Let's take those "key points" in order...

#1 -- Not new at all; Miller is re-using the concept of the Perseus imprint Vanguard Books (ably run by a very savvy publisher, Roger Cooper). It's a plausible concept, but let's not pretend it sprung full-formed from the head of Bob Miller.

As you note, the devil will be in the details; Hollywood has spent the last century poisoning the well in this area. It remains to be seen how many writers to be willing to wait for "profits."

#2 -- There have been plenty of "no returns" schemes over the years; some work and some don't. The ones that don't work founder on the shoals of "we need to get lots of copies of this really great book into stores," at which point the stores rightly point out that they won't shoulder all of the risk.

#3 -- From inside the business, this looks an awful lot like "we're only going to publish small, marginal books." Miller will have to fight to change that perception, particularly by spending money on other kinds of promotions.

Paying for placement is ubiquitous in retailing; it's not something special to bookselling. The supermarket world is much more rapacious, as well -- it's fairly common for every planogram slot to be bought and paid for.

Also, this may have been the biggest publishing news of the day, but it's still well below Borders for the year so far...and the year is still early. Comparing it to Gutenberg is silly -- this isn't even in the same class as the Kindle.

The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson

Lloyd is the co-author of The Book of Liff (with the late Douglas Adams; it was a collection of humorous definitions for place-names) and a well-known UK television producer (Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, QI, and so on). Mitchinson is apparently his colleague on QI.

This is yet another book of odd facts and little-known information, organized in the time-honored "you thought X, but the real truth is Y!" format. As you can see from the bookshot to the left, the subtitle is "Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong." (Many of us recognize the thought: in its pithier form, "Everything You Know Is Wrong!" has been the tag-line for a thousand comic book issues and TV episodes over the past several decades.)

The point of reading a book like this is to learn new things, but the only way to evaluate these books is by checking the facts you already know. So a book that tells you entirely things you didn't know before could be absolutely amazing...or utter crap. And a book can be completely accurate, and still useless, if it only tells you the things you already know. General Ignorance only had a few facts that I already knew, thus allowing me to test it, and I don't recall anything in it that I knew was false. So, by that completely personal and idiosyncratic measure, this is a very good collection of little-known facts. But your mileage may vary.

Quote of the Week

"Canadian Courts have, so far, not ruled on how the intrinsic characteristics of magical items demonstrate who holds what property in them."
- Omar Ha-Redeye and Jacob Kaufman, Lord of the Rings as Property Law

Greasy Kids's Stuff

My review at ComicMix today is a round-up of four graphic novels for kids: Flight Explorer, Volume One, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart, Kaput and Zosky, and Classics Illustrated #1: Great Expectations.

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Singularity, schmingularity, says the rich, happy society of Walter Jon Williams's very entertaining eighteenth novel. They turned aside from ever-increasing AI power over a thousand years ago, and it's worked out very well for them.

The eleven semi-autonomous AIs they did allow run on individual matrioshka arrays in close solar orbit, providing enough energy and computing power to stabilize wormholes into the forty-eight pocket universes -- most of them Dyson spheres with a small internal sun -- in which much of the human race now lives. (Other groups headed out to the stars hundreds of years ago, but, since physics is taken seriously in this book, they don't impinge directly on the action.)

It's a plausible human society, it's rich and varied without being the moneyless utopia of Iain M. Banks's Culture, and, all in all, it's a place I would be more than happy to live. But, you ask, is there any room for adventure? Of course there is...

We begin with a man named Aristide, walking across a desert landscape on a low-tech world called Midgarth. It was created by an odd alliance of fantasy gamers and medieval reenactors, and is crammed full of orcs, bandits, flashing swords, and loot. (And everyone who dies comes back in a central location -- only having lost his experiences since his last back-up -- after a waiting period.) Aristide is a scholar of the implied spaces, he says: he studies the things that come up inadvertently in the space next to or behind the carefully designed thing. In Midgarth, he's interested in the desert between the cavern-filled mountains and the rich coastal plain -- and in what societies have sprung up.

OK, OK, that's the boring stuff. What you really want to know is that he also wields a sword named Tecmessa that banishes his enemies forever and is accompanied by the talking cat Bitsy, the avatar of the first of the AIs, Endora. Aristide himself is also much older, with much more history, than he first appears. And he soon runs into something unexpected, which will send him back out into the original universe to consult with an old flame and to learn that things are very seriously wrong with at least one of the AIs.

From an opening that reads like epic fantasy through a threat to the human race reminiscent of mid-90s John Barnes, Walter Jon Williams is back with a SF novel as full of adventure and ideas as his Aristoi or Metropolitan. Implied Spaces is a great new novel from one of the best SF writers out there today -- go and read it already!

A Double Shot of ComicMix

I thought I'd have posts four days in a row on ComicMix, but it ended up being two today (and the rest of the week is still to come) --

• a review of Tim Sievert's debut graphic novel, That Salty Air
• and a review of Cyril Pedrosa's amazing Three Shadows.

Look for more by me there later in the week, Ghu willing and the creek don't rise.

Learning a New Term

First, the quote, from this month's Ansible:

Publishers and Sinners. A Games Workshop mole reports sweeping cuts in their publishing arm after a poor Christmas for games sales. Marc Gascoigne, founder of the imprints Solaris (sf/fantasy) and Black Library (game ties), is now on 'gardening leave' with redundancy expected to follow. BL seems safe but the future of Solaris is less certain.

(Credit Where It's Due: I saw the quote first when Rose Fox quoted it.)

I'd never heard of "gardening leave" before, so I had to Google it to see if it was a widely known term -- and it seems that it is. The wikipedia definition sounds a bit more final than Ansible's bit -- "expected to follow" implies that the termination hasn't happened yet, and that there's a chance that it might not happen -- but that may just be Dave Langford being hopeful. (I'd rather be hopeful myself; Marc's a good guy and smart about books, so I'd rather believe he has a chance until it's definitively proved otherwise.)

I do have two points to mull on.

First, it's so damn typical of modern conglomerates to make "sweeping cuts in their publishing arm after a poor Christmas for games sales." (Emphasis mine.) And they never seem to see what idiots they're being when they lay off Peter because Paul had a rotten year.

Second, something very much like "gardening leave" is common in the US, though it tends to happen in cases of layoffs -- not when an individual employee goes to a competitor or is fired for cause. From the references I googled up, it looks like this kind of leave is very common in the UK after all kinds of separations. On this side of the pond, though, it seems to be more a case of common practice than of employment contracts -- since those contracts are pretty rare over here.

Movie Log: Girl From Rio

Girl From Rio is the kind of movie that can give you whiplash, as it bounces from seriousness to farce without any transition. It can also give you brain cramps, if you think seriously about the plot as it's going on. Luckily, it has Vanessa Nunes as the title character, and, once she appears on screen, one can at least look at her and forget everything else.

(Is that sexist? My apologies...but my wife completely agrees with me, for what that's worth.)

Raymond (Hugh Laurie) is a clerk at a London bank who loves to samba, but the rest of his life isn't working out too well -- he learns that he's not getting a promotion just before Christmas, his wife barely tolerates him, and even the rain seems to fall heavier on his head than on anyone else's. (His wife is also -- in a fine example of how Girl From Rio never does anything by half, even when it would have been a good idea -- having an affair with Raymond's boss, and is in fact jetting off for the Christmas holidays in the Canary Islands with said boss.)

So, Raymond's had all he could take. What does he do? He steals as much money as will fit in two large black garbage bags, as he locks up the bank for the holidays, and jets off to Rio to try to meet a famous samba dancer (Orlinda, played by the very fetching Nunes in a fascinating sequence of exceptionally short, tight skirts).

And there things begin to get odd. Raymond hails a cab at the airport, and gets Paulo (Santiago Segura) for a cabbie. Segura doesn't quite mug to the camera, but he clearly thinks he's in a broad comedy. Paulo is also somehow beholden to some kind of local crimelord, played by Nelson Xavier -- I think, since I never caught that guy's name. (Since he was dubbed in a high, nasal voice, like a minor Looney Tunes character, I took to calling him "Marvin the Crimelord.") On the way to the hotel, Marvin's goons hijack Paulo, kick out Raymond in a road tunnel, and take back Paulo's nice taxi. Why? It's not clear. Raymond walks out of the tunnel by himself, and is met by Paulo in an older, crappier taxi, and the movie continues as if that didn't really happen.

Paulo sets up Raymond in a fancy sea-side hotel, takes him shopping, and so on. Raymond declares he wants only to find the fair Orlinda, and Paulo acts weird and shifty. (More than usual, I mean.) There may have been a scene that explained this shiftiness -- I kept expecting to find out Orlinda was his sister, or something -- but, if so, it was left on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, Paulo introduces Raymond to Orlinda.

I have to pause here for a second to say that Orlinda talks a lot (when she isn't dancing), and that her accent, while beautiful and charming, is just enough so that half of what she says isn't quite comprehensible. So maybe she was explaining the plot of the back half of the movie -- but I doubt it.

Back to Raymond and Orlinda: they dance, they go back to his hotel, nudge nudge wink wink. In the morning, Raymond wakes to find Orlinda has stolen absolutely everything he owns. (Down to his dirty clothes, apparently -- another thing that made very little sense.) Raymond finds Paulo and sets out to 1) get the "them" who robbed him and 2) save Orlinda from "their" grasp. (He really is quite remarkably stupid when the plot requires it.)

Meanwhile, Orlinda goes on a shopping spree, until Marvin the Crimelord finds her and takes all her money.

Um.

Let me expostulate upon Marvin briefly. We don't see him running whores, or taking bets, or selling drugs. We don't see any sign that he provides protection, or has politicians in his pocket, or controls local businesses. He's just a guy with a funny voice (and a Chihuahua on his lap) who drives around in big cars with a couple of thugs. I'm calling him a crimelord, since the movie seems to view him that way, but all he ever does is grab large sums of money from locals. Perhaps that is a lucrative criminal niche in Rio?

(I'm not even going to get into what he does with the money, which makes far less sense than anything so far.)

Things go on from there, getting even less likely, if that's possible. I'm afraid that Girl From Rio, which started off solidly (if in a very cliched way) in London, turns into a big mess in Rio. It does have the requisite happy ending, but it takes quite a while, and goes through some very odd turnings, to get to that ending. I can't really recommend Girl From Rio; I got it because I like British comedies, and I like Laurie (particularly when he walks straight and has his proper accent), but it really doesn't work.

On the other hand: Vanessa Nunes. Yum.

April's Fools

I may add to this, as the day goes on and I discover more amusement out there, but, to start the morning, here are some links to unbelievable stories of the day:

• Locus reports on a new Heinlein novel, multiple Moorcocks, Top Writer, and more
• Shelf Awareness has Book Sense buying Borders, Rowling demanding control of the words "Harry" and "Potter," and more
• Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen has the news on two exciting books: Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings and a novelization of the movie Suburban Commando
• SF Scope teases us about a Good Morning, America appearance today by Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein
• Google is teaming up with Virgin to colonize Mars
• Ann & Jeff VanderMeer to edit yet another theme anthology: Squidpunk!
• The BBC reports that President Bush and ex-Prime Minister Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
• Jay Lake goes corporate
• Cheryl Morgan adopts a post-human AI
• ComicMix to publish Superman stories
• All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder takes over Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin
• R. Stevens hand-drew the web Diesel Sweeties strip today
• George R.R. Martin crosses over with himself
• From Writer Beware: PublishAmerica buys Disney!
• Jed Hartman rounds up some great new Google features, including searching tomorrow's web

Read in March

Yes, we're all another month older and closer to death. But let's not dwell on that...let's obsess about books instead!

Here's what obsessed me this past month:
Michael Maslin, The More the Merrier (3/1)
A mid-80s collection by a New Yorker cartoonist, which I grabbed and read because it was on the shelf at my local library. (Decent libraries all have the same list of central, important books, but they also each have their own idiosyncratic other stuff in and around those books, like this -- why would they have this collection, by this artist?) It's all very New Yorker-y, with lots of couples in living rooms and talking about the relationship (sometimes both at the same time). But much of it was amusing, and Maslin has, or had, a loose, energetic style that contrasted well with the buttoned-up subject matter.

• Grant Morrison & various artists, Doom Patrol, Vol. 6: Planet Love (3/2)
• Dall-Young Lim & Sung-Woo Park, Black God, Vol. 2 (3/3)
• Shiro Ihara, Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 2 (3/4)
• Peach-Pit, Zombie-Loan, Vol. 2 (3/5)
• Iain M. Banks, Matter (3/6)
• Nicole Hollander, Skip Morrow, & Ron Wolin, editors, Drawn Together (3/8)
  Wolin was head of the Cartoonist Guild, for which this seemed to be a fund-raiser. (And it wasn't entirely clear if he had any other connection to this book, besides his introduction.) Hollander and Morrow seem to have done most of the heavy lifting for this 1983 anthology, which has a very wide array of recent and older cartoons about relationships. (Mostly of the boyfriend-girlfriend type, though the book opened up towards the end. The take is very '70s -- just past the first flush of feminism and the sexual revolution, and not entirely sure where things would go from there.
• Mitchell Symons, Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? (3/9)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 1 (3/10)
• Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World As Stage (3/11)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 2 (3/12)
• Kyle Baker, The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (3/14)
• Lewis Trondheim, Little Nothings, Vol. 1: The Curse of the Umbrella (3/15)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 1 (3/17)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 2 (3/18)
• Florence King, Deja Reviews (3/20)
• Terry Brooks, et. al., Dark Wraith of Shannara (3/20)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 4 (3/22)
  The library finally had the next volume while I was there, so I read two of these quickly. I'm still twenty-five books behind, but I can catch up quickly once I get out of the first half-dozen, which are never on the library shelf.
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 5 (3/23)
  And so I read two of these in two days; Kishimoto is really quite good at action scenes and has a spiky style I like. (And he's managed to keep the character of Naruto himself an interesting mix of bombastic teenager and all-thumbs failure, though I expect he'll become superpowerful eventually, since all boys' manga heroes have to.)
• Min-Woo Hyung, Priest, Vol. 1 (3/24)
• Moyoco Anno, Sugar Sugar Rune, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces (3/25)
• Kazu Kibuishi, editor, Flight Explorer, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Masatsugu Iwase, et. al., Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, Vol. 1 (3/26)
• John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance (3/27)
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 9: Battle for Power, Part One (3/27)
  More sex, violence and political maneuvering in feudal Japan; the civil war is about to heat up again, so the names are flying more quickly than I can keep track of them. Reading this series is a bit like wading through a big Russian novel: there's a lot of good stuff, but you have to admit that you don't really know precisely who a lot of the secondary characters are.
• Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows (3/28)
• Tim Sievert, That Salty Air (3/29)
• Ben Karlin, ed., Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me (3/29)
• Lars Martinson, Tonoharu (3/30)
• Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart (3/31)

And that was the month of March -- thirty-one books in thirty-one days; which, happily, is what I usually shoot for. So now I can only be unhappy about the fact that so many of them were comics, so I didn't get through as many "real" books as I wanted to...