All A-Twitter-y

So I signed up for Twitter a week or so ago, mostly out of geek-guilt. This is the new hot thing, right? (Or, more likely, the old hot thing by this point.) So I figured I should do something with it.

But the actual "doing something" has been harder to grasp; I haven't actually twittered yet, nor am I entirely sure what I should twitter. (Is it really just "OK, now I'm in a cab." "I paid the driver, and I'm in front of the building." Oh shit, it's raining." "My hair is horrible!" ? Just a random string of whatever the person is doing at the moment? Why would anyone who isn't fourteen care?)

Today, someone actually signed up to follow me on Twitter, which is faintly ominous. (Why do social networking sites lend themselves to terms that imply uncomfortable things? All this talk of "friends" and "following" and "sharing" makes the Internet sound like one big EST encounter group, circa 1975.)

And now I feel like I need to Twitter something, because now someone's following me.

Has anyone out there used Twitter, and actually found it useful. If so...for what?

Standing Up Against Stupidity

I went out with Thing 2 this morning and bought a dozen donuts at Dunkin Donuts. I doubt Michelle Malkin will notice -- she's very good at missing things that don't fit her extremely blinkered view of the world -- but perhaps Dunkin' Donuts will.

I'd like to encourage everyone out there who has a taste for something sweet this week to consider Dunkin' Donuts -- let's not let the idiots win.

(If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky -- the short version is that Malkin has a certain number of column inches to fill each week and prefers not to have to think while doing so. She also considers any black and white piece of cloth worn above the shoulders to be a symbol of terrorism, so examine your clothing closely if you'll be anywhere she might see.)

It's Manga Friday Time!

And you all know what happens at Manga Friday time, don't you, kids?

That's right! I link to this week's installment, and tell you what I reviewed!

This week, you get Zombie-Loan Vol. 3, Black God Vol. 3, and Sundome Vol. 2.

Isn't that just swell!?

Now sit back and enjoy these messages from our sponsor!

B**ksp*n Exodus Update

Since I know I have some people who used to work for the same "entity" that I worked for -- and weren't those days of having to call it "the entity" fun? -- I thought I'd pass on some news I got the other day from another member of our diaspora.

My one-time fellow club blogger Brad Miner is participating in a blog called The Culture Project, and will be serving on its Advisory Board. His first post is a long piece about the environment of the upcoming Beijing Olympic games.

Welcome back to blogging, Brad!

Movie Log: The Hoax

Clifford Irving, in 1971, claimed to have been in touch with reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and to be acting the agent for Hughes's autobiography. There was just one problem: Irving had never even met Hughes. But that was less of a problem than it might seem: hardly anyone had seen or spoken to Hughes in more than a decade; the tycoon communicated by placing occasional rambling phone calls and sending scrawled notes. Even Hughes's lawyer and top lieutenant hadn't had any direct contact with him in many years.

So Irving lied, and faked Hughes's handwriting, and faked tape recordings of Hughes talking about his life, and sold The Autobiography of Howard Hughes to McGraw-Hill for a hefty sum. (He'd written novels for them before; he wasn't some guy just walking in the door.) Eventually, the whole thing fell apart --Hughes held a telephonic press conference with a group of journalists who would vouch that it was actually him, and Irving went to jail for a while. After he got out, he wrote a book about what he did, calling it The Hoax. (One will note that what Irving did was much more like a "scam" than a "hoax," but let's allow the man a bit of dignity.)

And, just last year, a major movie was made from the book, also entitled The Hoax, staring Richard Gere as Irving. The bones of the story are the same, but many of the details are quite different -- I've just been comparing the movie with Irving's wikipedia entry and this documentary summary -- mostly to turn it into a more standard bit of Hollywood product.

According to other sources, Irving was living in Ibiza, and doing well -- in the movie he's getting his couch repossessed in a leafy Westchester suburb.

The movie has Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina) as Irving's long-time friend, researcher and confidante (one might say sidekick), but it looks like they were just previous acquaintances who met fortuitously in late 1970 and hatched the plot then.

Irving has several children, who are nowhere to be seen in the movie.

Irving jetted around the world during the "research" for the Hughes autobiography -- supposedly to meet Hughes for interviews, but, according to the second link above, actually to meet with Irving's (plural) mistresses. In the movie, he sits in what looks like a guest house and fakes Hughes's voice into a series of reel-to-reel tapes.

And so on and on -- the movie makes Irving into a lovable loser (the movie opens with his latest novel being canned by McGraw-Hill when a sub-rights sale falls through); Suskind into the usual unreliable fat, sweaty sidekick with second thoughts; and Irving's wife from a Swiss heiress co-conspirator into a long-suffering wife doing one last favor for the husband she still loves, despite everything.

The movie tells that story well, and is filled with solid performances -- particularly Stanley Tucci as McGraw-Hill chairman Shelton Fisher -- but I couldn't help wishing (after the fact, as I was looking things up for this post) that it had actually told the real story...instead of perpetrating what is basically a hoax of its own.

The Hoax is a decent movie about book publishing, though it's obviously slanted towards the glamorous side of that business, and is terribly outdated now. (And I wonder if there ever was a time when book publishing took up so much space in floors so high up in midtown Manhattan -- if so, it was before my era.)

Quote of the Week

"Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today's ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than "art" for what he does, to set him apart. There won't be. 'Art' has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to life."
- Peter Schjeldahl, lede of "Uncluttered," p.82 of the 4/28/08 New Yorker

Kitty and the Silver Bullet by Carrie Vaughn

I wrote a chunk about this book in a rec.arts.sf.written thread soon after I finished reading it -- you can read my post here -- so let's see if I have anything else to say about it now.

Silver Bullet is the fourth in the contemporary fantasy series about Kitty Norville, werewolf and radio host, who was instrumental in making the existence of werewolves and vampires public two books ago (though not by her own choice). One of the most interesting things about this series is that Vaughn is willing to hew closer to the laws and mores of the real world than a lot of her fellow writers in that field. The supernatural folks are certainly glamorized in these books, but there's a lurking feeling that they're not beyond human law, and that the regular mechanisms of the civilized human world can deal with them if just given a chance.

This book opens with an example of that -- Kitty is visiting her friend Cormac in prison, where he's currently serving a sentence for manslaughter after one of those all-too-common fantasy-novel showdowns where the Evil Foe just has to be killed. Cormac did kill that Evil Foe...but he also got a manslaughter conviction out of it.

Many urban fantasies treat their supernatural creatures as aristocrats -- buying into the myth -- but Vaughn is one of the growing number who sees them as just another kind of organized criminal. She even has a police detective draw that parallel explicitly in this book. Kitty's main problem when the book opens is straight out of a crime novel -- she wants to go home to Denver, but that's the "turf" of the alpha werewolf whose pack she left. If she crosses her old gang boss, he'll have her killed -- being a werewolf is like being a made guy in the Mafia, and you have about as much chance of getting out.

So this is a gangwar book, in a sense -- Kitty is encouraged at the beginning of the book to join a coup against the established leaders in Denver, and events draw her in that direction as the book goes on. But she never completely loses her faith in the rule of law -- and I hope that stays true as the series goes on, despite the increasing number of woo-woo powers for the vamps -- and that police detective continues to play a major role.

I like to see an contemporary fantasy series where vampire gangs are a policing problem, not something that has to be left to "the supernatural community." And I hope that the Denver police keep getting better at dealing with vamps and weres: that they don't become a boogeyman problem -- left to the special elite Society of Protagonists -- but something that smart, properly trained and outfitted cops can handle.

When Batman Met Grendel

They had a tea party!

Well, no, actually -- they had a big fight. Twice. Because it was the '90s, and it was comics.

Now those two stories -- good, but not anything spectacular -- have been collected as Batman Grendel, and I have reviewed it, in my snarky way, for ComicMix.

Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa

This is the first novel in a police procedural series -- apparently of nine books to date -- which has been massively popular in Japan. (Turned into live-action movies and manga, winner of several major popular literary prizes, massive sales -- that whole deal.) But it took from 1990 until 2007 to be translated into English.

It's been translated by Andrew Clare, and either given a very flat, matter-of-fact style, or maintained that style from the original Japanese. This is not even in the same hemisphere as a Chandler or even a McDonald; Osawa uses words like rough building blocks and cements them together into rough, solid sentences. Don't expect the prose to sing here; the dialogue in particular is flat. (Since that all may be deliberate, I won't count it as a criticism.)

Our hero is Detective Samejima, a lone wolf policeman in a society much, much harder on lone wolves than our own. Samejima was originally a "career" officer, but was too self-righteous and driven to go along and get along, so now he's got a dead-end posting in Crime Prevention in the crime-ridden Shinjuku pleasure district of Tokyo. He gets no support from his fellow officers or supervisors, and will never get another promotion.

But he still is obsessed with justice, and isn't willing to play by the usual rules, which is why the local yakuza call him the "Shinjuku Shark." (If the book were written with more attitude, that would probably become tiresome, but the staccato meat-and-potatoes prose keeps the cliches from being too obvious.)

The plot of this book involves a serial killer of policemen, and, in a very Japanese twist, the killer is using a hand-made gun (created by a man Samejima has put in prison twice and is stalking again), since obtaining regularly manufactured guns is just about impossible in Japan.

I didn't love Shinjuku Shark, and I'm not sure why it was so popular when it was originally published -- from my perspective, it's a decent, if a bit pedestrian, police procedural without as much local color or detail as I'd expected. But I'm not Japanese, and this isn't 1990, which may account for much of the difference. I do hope to read the second book once it's published here, since that's considered by many to be the best in the series. And Shinjuku Shark is a solid police procedural -- it might not be a great book, but it's a pretty good one.

That's the Way to Do It!

I reviewed a book called How to Love today at ComicMix; it's an anthology of short comics stories from the Israeli collective Actus, all on the subject of love (as you might expect).

Movie Log: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I realized that I needed to start taking vacation days, since the year is close to half over -- and how did that happen? -- so I declared last Friday a personal holiday. Since the kids were in school, The Wife and I went off to the megalithic and slightly frightening Palisades Center to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and have lunch at Dave & Busters. (She'd called the place "Chuck E. Cheese for adults," which is quite true -- it has lots of games, many of them very vaguely skill-based, mediocre food, a full bar, and a room full of junk you can "buy" with the tickets you "win" on the overpriced games.)

Do you need me to tell you about Indy 4? I don't think so. I might be a guy who saw it at 10:35 AM on the day it opened, but I'm not the guy who did that because he's a huge fan -- I'm the guy who did that because we were out of the house, without the kids, so BY GOD we were going to see a movie for adults. (Well, more or less.)

If you're actually looking for a review of this review-proof movie, Locus has a decent one from a genre point of view, and Roger Ebert has an appreciative review in a less staccato style. But the vast majority of the country has either seen it or is never going to see it, so it's more message-board fodder than something to review.

Parts of it were purely enjoyable, like Harrison Ford and Karen Allen (whom we've seen far too little of for far too long); parts of it were a little too much, like the atom-bomb test, most of Shia LeBeouf's fake-Brando character, and the moments when the enemies wander away because that scene is over; and parts of it were just this side of hooey, like everything to do with the aliens. All in all, it worked, but Indiana Jones stories work best when the big supernatural thing is kept quiet until the big finale, not dragged out in reel two. (The title, also, is longer and more cumbersome than the other three movies.)

And I certainly hope we don't get a series of "Indy Jr." movies, with LeBeouf as a '60s swinging archaeologist. Some things just shouldn't be.

But, as a big summer movie, Crystal Skull delivers in the ways it needs to. I look forward to seeing it again, with my sons, when it hits video. (But they have to see Temple of Doom first -- maybe Last Crusade, if they want, but that one's not mandatory.)

Data, Endlessly Fascinating Data

I got my monthly e-mail from Amazon, to say that I made a little money as an "Associate," but not enough for them to actually give it to me. (Such is life, eh? I don't think anyone is getting rich off being an Amazon Associate, but I'd probably link there for context even if I wasn't getting a little bitty cut.)

Since data fascinates me, I took a closer look at the things that people have bought through Antick Musings since I signed up with Amazon about a year ago. (In case anyone is wondering, it doesn't tell me who bought what -- just what was purchased.)

There are forty-nine books, ranging from things I recommended (Extraordinary Circumstances by Cynthia Cooper) to things I suggested avoiding (The Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms) to books I haven't thought of in years (Ben and Me), and then some. You folks, collectively, have eclectic tastes, and I appreciate that in a readership.

Someone bought a Zune armband, several other people bought various bits of small electronics -- which included some really fancy, expensive printing paper, as well -- and one person bought Apple's OS 10.5.

There was only one Kindle e-book, despite the hype -- it was the Dann/Dozois Wizards anthology.

There were four bits of music sold -- one MP3 download of "Linus And Lucy" to a person of obviously impeccable taste, and three CDs, including The Very Best of Supertramp. There was one HeroScape game sold. And someone bought a 1959 movie called The Quest for King Solomon's Mines on VHS...but then sent it back.

Three "Dr. Who" episodes from 1984 -- the three parts of The Caves of Androzani -- were downloaded, presumably by the same person. Truly, you people like what you like, and there's no shifting you.

And the most unlikely item is the Tantus Flirt Dildo -- "dildo" here being a euphemism, actually. I do want to encourage more of that -- when you're shopping for brightly-colored sex toys or other deeply personal items, I want you to go to some blog you enjoy, click on the Amazon link, and add a blush to that blogger's reports next month. It doesn't have to be me, but surprise someone and make Amazon reports a little less boring than they have been previously.

Hippo Eats Dwarf by Alex Boese

Boese is the author of A Museum of Hoaxes, both in its original on-line form and the subsequent book. Hippo Eats Dwarf is a brand extension, in which Boese goes beyond deliberate hoaxes -- though there are plenty of those in Hippo as well -- to include confusions, misunderstandings, scams, and other things that are not as they seem.

I read it in bound galley form, even though it was published in April of 2006. (April 1st, unless I miss my guess) My unread piles are wide and deep, and contain multitudes. So if I get any facts wrong, I'm going to claim that's how it was in the galley.

The subtitle is "A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.," and the book is divided into sixteen chapters, from Birth to Death. (With stops at Romance, eBay, Advertising, Politics, War, and Photography along the way.) Boese has a breezy, Internet-age style, with lots of call-out boxes and section breaks; Hippo Eats Dwarf reads as much like a magazine or a blog as a book -- it's very easy to pick it up, read two pages, and put it back down for a while.

There's a lot of Internet material here -- probably because the 'net has ushered in a golden age of hoaxes -- but Boese also thoroughly covers hoaxes and other deceptive tactics in other media and in every day life. Hippo Eats Dwarf functions as a decent listing of all of the things that people sometimes try to convince us, but that are not true.

I am not the expert on hoaxes that Boese is, but, as far as I can tell, he's quite solid; he doesn't claim any whoppers as fact but does bring up unlikely things that were actually true (or, in some cases, that became true because the idea was publicized).

If you have a friend, mother, or maiden aunt who is forever forwarding you emails about Microsoft's newest payment scheme, or hitting the ceiling about a bonsai kitten -- and you have reason to believe she might actually read a book and learn something -- this is the perfect gift. Hippo Eats Dwarf isn't one of the great works of Western Civilization, but it just might help to reduce the amount of stupidity and ignorance in the world, and that might be even more important.

The Fixer by Joe Sacco

Sacco is possibly the world's only full-time investigative cartoonist; he's the author of Palestine and Safe Area Gorajde, both of which were book-length works in comics form, reporting about war zones.

The Fixer is not entirely unlike a sequel to Safe Area Gorajde; it's the story of a return visit to Sarajevo Sacco took in 2001, mixed in with Sacco's memories of the title character from his 1995 travels in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and that character's tales of his own life, mostly during the civil war of the early '90s.

The Fixer is a man called Neven, who claims to have been a sniper in the Yugoslav People's Army during the '80s (though others mildly doubt that), and definitely was part of a loyalist militia during the early days of the civil war. By the time Sacco got to Sarajevo in 1995, Neven had been demobbed and was working for foreign journalists. That's what a "fixer" is -- a man who connects journalists with stories, for a price.

So The Fixer has some history of the war as it affected Sarajevo, and some of Neven's personal history, wrapped up in the frame story of Sacco trying to find Neven again in 2001, when the war -- and the need for fixers -- was long over. It's on a smaller scale than Sacco's other major stories, but it's a long mature Sacco work, which is a good thing. And the smaller scale also means that there are fewer appalling bits of war to deal with -- though, as always, there are some, so I warn those with overly rosy views of the world to stay away from Sacco.

Vampire Loves by Joann Sfar

For those who're wondering -- I got a comment on a ComicMix review after I hit two Sfar books in two days -- Sfar is pretty prolific, but US publishers have been catching up with his backlog over the past few years, and I've been catching up myself on the Sfar books published in English over the past few years.

So, in this case, Vampire Loves was published in France as four separate albums between 2001 and 2003, and translated by Alexis Siegel for a 2006 US publication by First Second.

I'm coming to realize that many of Sfar's books take place in a loose shared world -- this connects with The Professor's Daughter (as well as with several other graphic novels through the same characters) as well as Little Vampire. (The main character of Vampire Loves, Ferdinand, has a very close connection to Little Vampire, but I'll let other readers discover that from the book rather than from me.)

Ferdinand is a vampire of indeterminate age, living in Vilnius in an old castle and obsessing about problems with his love-life. (If his friends were a bit more caricatured and popped in on him more, this could be Vampire Seinfeld.) The four stories here are all pretty talky, with characters wandering around to chat with each other -- sometimes angrily, but usually as friends. As usual with Sfar's work, it's entertaining but a bit more leisurely and meandering than one would expect -- he's telling a story about characters, so he lets them wander around on their own to see what they'll do.

This is lighter and perhaps sillier than a book like The Rabbi's Cat 2, but it's probably a better introduction to Sfar for that reason.

In Which I Read Old Comic Strips and Pontificate

Today, my review of Charles M. Schulz's The Complete Peanuts 1967-1968 was posted at ComicMix.

Go read it...or don't.

Movie Log: You Kill Me

I am precisely the target audience for a romantic comedy about an alcoholic hitman from Buffalo -- well, maybe not the alcoholic part, but you know what I'm getting at -- so I rented You Kill Me almost as soon as I knew it existed. (The Wife and I saw a preview for it on some movie we saw a few weeks ago -- maybe I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With? -- and popped it onto the Netflix queue immediately.)

I don't think many people know this movie exists; I don't remember it hitting theaters at all, and it has crept out onto video with great stealth. And that's too bad, since it's a pretty good romantic comedy. (Though it would make a lousy thriller, and some people seem to think that's what it is.)

Frank (Ben Kingsley) is the designated hitman of the Polish mob in Buffalo -- the boss of this small gang is his uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall), and the main lieutenant is Roman's son Stef (Marcus Thomas). Frank is apparently the only one who can point a gun straight, because the Polish mob is utterly incapable of killing anyone when Frank tips over into alcoholism, as he has done sometime before the movie opens.

Frank is supposed to assassinate the head of the Buffalo Irish mob, Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina, looking distinguished and mob-boss-like but not particularly Irish while leading a whole bunch of redheads) as he catches a train to New York to meet with a group of Chinese moneymen, but he falls asleep in his car after drinking too much. (Again, these are pretty low-rent gangs -- O'Leary is riding Amtrak to visit his bankers so he can expand his territory, like some Amway salesman.) So Stef and Roman grab Frank and tell him he's going to San Francisco to get into AA and clean up...or else.

(The "or else" threat is mildly threatening at the time, but, in retrospect, there's no chance that Roman could do anything but maybe take away Frank's pension from the snow-plow company; Frank is the guy who shoots people that need to be shot. This particular mob has taken the detailed division of labor a bit too far for its own good.)

So Frank gets to San Francisco, where he's met by Dave (Bill Pullman), his minder. Tom is a real estate agent -- so he has gotten Frank a nice place to live -- and an utter jerk, so he rubs in the "I'll tell Roman if you don't quite drinking" part of the deal. Frank refrains from killing Dave, picks up an AA sponsor named Tom (Luke Wilson), and settles into a job preparing bodies at a local funeral home.

At one of his first funerals he meets the sarcastic Laurel (Tea Leoni), the step-daughter of the deceased. They have chemistry, and start dating.

And then the plot you probably expect starts to kick in -- Frank feels the need to tell Tom about his old job, and Laurel about both the job and the alcoholism. And O'Leary's mob starts putting pressure on Roman back in Buffalo...and only Frank could possibly do what's necessary and put two bullets into O'Leary's skull.

You Kill Me is consistently funny, and I didn't find it as dark as many people did. (On the other hand, I consider most black comedies to be just comedies -- that's the kind of sense of humor I have.) To place this in context, it's funnier than The Matador (though less consistent as a movie), but not as funny as Grosse Pointe Blank. If you liked either of those movies, or just think that a black comedy about an alcoholic hitman would be fun, you should enjoy You Kill Me.

An Unlikely Comparison

As The Wife and I were in bed the other night, drifting off to sleep and talking about random things, we had a conversation that went something like this.

The Wife: Did you see that Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are getting married?
G.B.H. Hornswoggler: You mean, now that gay marriage is legal in California?
TW: Yes.
(digression on the charms of Ms. DiRossi, with particular reference to the film Sirens, suppressed)
GBHH: So is Portia going to go straight afterwards, too?
TW: You mean like Anne Heche? Why would you think that? Just because Anne went back and forth doesn't mean it would happen again.
GBHH: I guess, but it seems like that's how it happens in Hollywood.
(and then somehow we got to this comparison, which only a mother would make)
TW: But if someone's never had a gay relationship, how would they know if they're really gay or not? Maybe they'd like it, but they don't know, since they never tried it.
GBHH: You mean that being gay is like eating vegetables? "How can you say you don't like it if you've never even tried it?"
TW: Right, yeah -- if you've never done it, you don't know if you like it or not.
GBHH: I guess that's fair, actually. Gay sex is the Brussels Sprouts of the adult world...

Seeing as this weekend was Wiscon, I thought that a strangely appropriate blog-topic right now. Though I guess I should also point out that I mostly don't like eating vegetables, even the ones I've never tried...

Update: I forgot the last part...

GBHH: I think I have to blog this.
TW: Don't mention me!
GBHH: What, I should say "so I was in bed with this woman whose name I can't divulge"? Would that be better?
TW: I guess not...

Reviewing the Mail (SFF Edition): Week of 5/24

This is the second of two posts listing the books for review or notice that arrived in my mail last week; this one focuses on SF and Fantasy.

Life has many joys, but one of the sweetest is when I hear about a book -- and I don't remember how or where it happened in this case, now -- and then that same book arrives in the mail a day or two later. This week, that happened with Superpowers, a new novel by David J. Schwartz that Vintage is publishing in the UK on June 3rd. (The US edition is from Three Rivers Press and is coming a week later, but it's the UK that sent me the book -- and that has the better cover -- so they get all my love today.) It's another one of the current mini-flood of superhero novels, like Soon I Will Be Invincible and From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, and I hope to read it soon. The upcoming UK edition seems to be a smaller paperback format -- they don't have "mass-market" books over there, exactly -- while the US edition is a trade pb.

Batman: Gotham Knight is a more old-fashioned kind of superhero novel; it's the novelization of a movie of the same name (direct-to-DVD, I think), published in mass-market. Louise Simonson wrote it, which gives it more clout in my eyes than it might otherwise have had. (She's a long-time comics writer, and a good one.) Ace publishes this in June.

Also from Ace is Jes Battis's Night Child, the first in an urban fantasy series about "occult forensics investigator Tess Corday." It's also a June book.

CodeSpell is a near-future technomancy novel that could be called "urban fantasy," though it doesn't look like the same kind of UF as Night Child. (There aren't any young hotties with tattoos, tank tops or leather on the cover, for one thing.) It's the third in the series that started with WebMage, it's by Kelly McCullough, and it's yet another Ace June book.

We move back to the Buffy definition of urban fantasy for Phaedra Weldon's Spectre, the fourth "Zoe Martinique Investigation." (I admit that sometimes I have trouble telling the names of UF writers from the names of their characters; I was half-sure Phaedra Weldon was a tough-talking Wiccan priestess in Vancouver or something like that.) Zoe's particular supernatural ability is to travel astrally, and she lives in Atlanta (where she has a complicated relationship with a cop). This one is a trade paperback, but is still from Ace in June.

Nancy Kress's new novel is Dogs, a trade paperback from Tachyon in July. It sounds like a contemporary thriller on the border of SF -- the main character is an ex-FBI agent who gets caught up in the spread of a mutated flu that turns dogs viciously aggressive. (I hope she can sell the movie rights; it sounds like a natural.)

I was tempted to play one of those snarky Internet games with the title of The Invisible Ring -- you know, like adding "in bed" to everything? -- when I realized that it's by Anne Bishop, so it's probably already referring to something unmentionable. (And a quick look into the book proved that true -- it's her usual mix of femdom and fantasy.) This one is from Roc, in trade paperback, in June. (And, I noticed a bit later, it's actually a reprint of a mass-market original from 2000, so Bishop's fans must be clamoring for more durable editions of her books -- but I really don't want to know what they're doing to wear out their old copies.)

Daemons Are Forever is the second book in Simon R. Green's newest series -- I don't think it has a name yet; the first book was The Man With the Golden Torc, and it's contemporary fantasy with a bit of James Bond parody mixed in -- which Roc is publishing it in June in hardcover.

Then I've got something called Destroyermen: Into the Storm, by Taylor Anderson. It's an alternate-world SF novel, in which a WWII destroyer slips sideways into a world with two non-human races at war. This kind of book has been generally ceded to Baen by the rest of the SF publishing world for quite a while, so it's good to see someone else (Roc, in this case) jumping strongly into the subgenre by launching this series in hardcover.

And last this month is Alastair Reynolds's new space opera, The Prefect, which Ace is publishing in hardcover in June. I'm sure it's a great read, since all of Al's books are, but I'm chagrined to note that I now have three copies of this -- UK paperback, US galley, and now the US hardcover -- and that I still haven't read it. Soon, I hope. Soon.

Reviewing the Mail (Manga Edition): Week of 5/24

This week's "Reviewing the Mail" has been bisected, since my mail divided neatly into manga and SFF this week. This, for those who didn't read the label on the tin, is the manga half.

And first this week is something that isn't manga at all: it's the Japanese live-action movie Honey & Clover, which was based on a manga of the same name. It sounds like a coming-of-age story, with maybe a hint of romantic comedy; Viz calls it "the story of five students and their growth while attending art school facing the challenges of school, work, love while moving from adolescence into adulthood." It was released May 13th on DVD.

The rest of this week's manga selections are the product of one large package from Yen Press, the manga-publishing imprint of Hachette in the US. Starting with the things I actually know a little about, Zombie-Loan, Vol. 3 is on top, which continues the undead-teens-working-
for-a-repo-firm story that I reviewed in March. This third volume is publishing in June, and it's created by the manga collective that calls itself Peach-Pit.

Coming in May -- which means it's already out -- is Sundome, Vol. 2, the second part of a Mature-rated series about sexual frustration and teasing in high school. I enjoyed the first volume probably more than I should have -- it's quite broad, very politically incorrect, and about horny teenagers -- so I'm looking forward to this one. It's by Kazuto Okada.

Black God, Vol. 3 is by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, and it's coming in June. I reviewed volume two, so I vaguely understand the set-up -- it's yet another story about a jerky guy with a connection to a young woman who is gorgeous, has amazing powers, but also seems to know nothing about the world.

And now we move into things I'm unfamiliar with -- first of those is Freak, Vol. 3: Legend of the Nonblonds. It's by Yi DongEun and Yu Chung, and it reads left-to-right. Other than that, it seems to be some kind of futuristic/supernatural story with a lot of fighting in it. It's also coming in June.

Then there's Croquis Pop, Vol. 1, by KwangHyun Seo and JinHo Ko. It's about a young man who's an assistant to a manwha creator -- and also has to get rid of ghosts on the side. It's yet another June book.

Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo, Vol. 4 is by Park KangHo and Lee HaNa, was published in May, and it's yet another story about people yelling at each other and then fighting with special techniques.

One Thousand and One Nights, Vol. 4 is by Han SeungLee and Jeon JinSeok, also came out in May, and looks like a very emotional historical story. (Someone is called a "Sultan," so I think it's set in some part of the Arab world, even though the characters mostly wear Asian robes and have manga-boy hair.)

The last volume of Bring It On! is volume 5, which is what I have here. It's by Baek HyeKyung, and is a June publication. I think it's a romance of some kind, with lots and lots of intensely emotional scenes -- streaming tears, smouldering looks or sullen lips, and so on.

Kim MiKyung created something called 11th Cat Special, which was published in May. This is a collection of short stories, but it might also be related to an 11th Cat series (if there is such a thing).

Legend , Vol. 2 is by Kara and Woo SooJung, from May, and looks like a historical girls' comic with some romantic elements.

And last this week is Chocolat , Vol. 5, which I doubt has anything to do with the movie of the same name. It's by Shin JiSang and Geo, and will be published in June. Let me just quote the first line of the back-cover copy and leave it at that: "Kum-Ji may have started following Yo-I to get close to her favorite boy band, DDL, but it's E-Wan of Yo-I that she can't get out of her head!" Add a lightsaber or two, and that could almost be the cast of the Clone Wars...

Movie Log: The Golden Compass

I saw The Golden Compass several weeks ago now, and have mostly forgotten whatever I was going to say about it. Let's see if I can cobble something together and throw it out in the middle of a holiday weekend, when no one will be out there.

In my house, watching Golden Compass was something of an experiment about how confusing the movie was to those who hadn't read the book -- I had read the book less than a year ago, while The Wife had never come near it. She asked me a couple of things as the movie went along, but I don't think she found it horribly confusing.

(On the other hand, the movie does zip through a lot of material quickly, and it's probably most interesting to those who do know the book.)

Let's see, what else? The CGI is generally believable, even on the talking animals. The acting is solid, and Dakota Blue Richards, as Lyra, is just right -- fiery and tough and self-sure in the way of the book's Lyra.

Some parts of the plot didn't make a whole lot of sense, probably because of the truncation from book to movie. (For example, there's no reason in the movie why only Iorek goes with Lyra to save Roger near the end -- if Iorek can go, surely he could lead an army of panzerbjorne?) And, as many people have noted, the actual ending of the book is missing, so that the movie can stop at a happier place.

(I was also amused to see that Golden Compass continued the general rule that all alternate worlds have airships.)

I probably would have been more impressed if I'd seen this on a big screen, but it was pretty good as it was. I'd like to see the rest of the trilogy made, too -- it would give me a good excuse to read the books.

Bonk by Mary Roach

Would it sound terribly weird if I said that I read this book about the scientific study of sex because it was recommended by my new (female) boss?

Thought so -- but that's the truth. She's been reading it for the last few weeks, and mentioned it several times -- so, when I saw it in the library, I picked it up.

Roach is a science writer, so her angle on sex is through science -- she reports on various contemporary (and a few historical) researchers doing serious work, often despite the scorn of their colleagues, on various aspects of human sexual physiology. There are chapters on Masters & Johnson's penis camera, MRIs of couples in coitus, and quite a few on impotence of one sort or another.

Roach tries not to be titillating, but she is a wry and highly readable writer, so Bonk is a pleasure to read. (Just not the kind of pleasure you would expect from a book about sex.) I did find her chapter transitions a bit distracting -- she generally teases or leads in to the subject of the next chapter at the end of the previous one. (And that's a strategy I hadn't seen before in a nonfiction book -- or, at least, I'd never noticed it before, which is nearly the same thing.)

To say much more about Bonk would be to get into the details, and I'm not feeling terribly smutty at the moment. So let me just say that it's a solid work of science popularization by a writer who is ever willing to follow her research and ask the next question.

Manifesto of the Week

I'm clearing out a lot of stuff from earlier in the week today, aren't I?

An anonymous Editorial Assistant blogs as Editorial Ass. Said assistant -- and would I be justified by using the feminine pronoun for this nameless person from here on? well, I'll do it anyway -- went to a recent speech by Jonathan Karp, impresario of the Hachette imprint Twelve, and she came away mightily impressed.

Let me be blunt: if you work for a big publishing company, particularly if you are young, you have a certain image of what you'd like your career to be. You want to work on "big" books that are also important, you want to have time to make them all perfect gems, and you want everyone to appreciate you. (As we used to say at the clubs, every new editorial assistant secretly thinks she wants to work at Knopf.)

Twelve is about the closest to that paradigm as you can get in modern publishing, though a lot of person-driven imprints are close. Twelve publishes one book a month, period. That means that one book gets a lot of attention: editorial, marketing, publicity, the whole ball of wax. But it also means that the EBITA for that month entirely depends on the sales of that one book. And anyone who's worked in publishing for more than a couple of years knows that the book world is not fair. Bad books succeed; good books fail. All of the promotion and marketing and publicity in the world can make a sow's ear of a book into a silk purse of a bestseller...but not consistently. And silk purse books turn into sow's ears of remainders with distressing regularity. Book publishing is vaguely consistent, but only vaguely, and the discontinuities can give you whiplash.

Twelve is very successful so far, and it should be successful indefinitely: it's staffed by smart people who are good at their jobs, it's backed by one of the major publishing houses in the US, and its list is packed with strong books on provocative topics. (Mostly nonfiction, I note, though Editorial Ass's post has the usual I-love-publishing slant towards fiction.)

I said "should be." Publishing is often a world of "should be," and regularly that turns into "should have been." Book publishing is not Hollywood -- it's not true that no one knows anything -- but what we do all know every so often turns out to be completely wrong.

As Editorial Ass said, seven of the first ten books from Twelve have been bestsellers. But there will come a time when all four of the books in one of Twelve's seasons underperform. It may be this fall; it may not be for five years. But by the law of averages, it'll happen eventually. And when that happens, some money person at Hachette is going to look at a flood of red ink and be sorely tempted to declare the Twelve experiment over.

Now, I'm a cynic and a pessimist. And I work for a company whose publishing strategies are about as far from Twelve's as possible -- Wiley publishes widely and distributes even more widely, with major scientific and higher-education arms. (Even our trade division is actually called "Professional/Trade," and it's as much the former as the latter.) We publish lots of books for lots of different people each month, while Twelve tries to publish one book that vast numbers of people will all want. So feel free to ignore my opinion as utterly biased. (I won't even drag out that trendy "long tail" concept to pretty up my arguments.)

On a slightly different topic, Editorial Ass also talks about "the gap that is going to occur between the titles you love and the titles you took on that you less than love." Again, I'm a cynic, etc. -- but it needs to be said that this is what a fiction editor talks about. (Maybe some nonfiction editors acquiring in very trade-y areas, too.)

It buys into the old myth that "love" has anything to do with a book's acquisition or sales. Books that are loved may get acquired, but editors are professionals, not gushing schoolgirls. They acquire books that fit their programs, that are good works of their kind, that come from the writers who can best present the material (which may mean the best at writing or may mean the best "platform"), that are available when they're acquiring. Nobody is sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank reading manuscripts and making conversation with Hemingway. Most of the books published simply aren't lovable -- but they're still very useful, and even necessary. The publishing world needs far less talk about "love" -- there's far too much hype and puffy speech already.

A second, subtler point is that Editorial Ass is assuming that Twelve is devoted to publishing books that Karp and his team love. I would instead say that it's for books that they think they can sell. That may include books that they also feel passionately about -- and maybe everything so far has been in both categories. (It's not as hard when you only have a book a month.) But when it comes to one or the other, a smart publisher will always choose the book he can sell over the book he loves. Publishing is a business.

What she's saying has been the mantra at big corporate publishers for the past decade: publish fewer books, give them more attention, get bestsellers. But there's still that undercurrent of "love" and the myths of "great books." Twelve, to my eye, looks more hard-headed and serious than driven by love, as Editorial Ass thinks it is.

But the company that best epitomizes the plan to publish a few books smartly is Workman, a publisher that relentlessly researches and develops all aspects of every new title. They don't have many bestsellers, since they don't focus entirely on the big book-sales outlets, but pick projects that will sell through many outlets. They also hardly ever publish fiction, and I doubt that's unrelated.

If I could have one publishing wish -- unrelated to myself -- it would be to silence all talk of "love" in the business. Luckily for the perennially gushing, that will never happen.

Say What? of the Week

I know thinking of a snappy lede for a review is tough -- I spend a lot of time trying to do it myself, and I'm sure I've committed some real stinkers -- so I don't want to cast too much mud. But I'm wondering what works Bookgasm reviewer Ryun Patterson had in mind when he opened his take on Paul Melko's Singularity's Ring this way:

Big, hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists — which Paul Melko’s Singularity's Ring is — usually get published because a publisher can hang an easy hook on them (with quotes from big-name authors saying “like Neuromancer … on speed!”) and they easily fall into slots in a publisher’s slate. (The Road is really hot right now. We need a post-apocalyptic dystopia stat!”)

(By the way, my own review of Singularity's Ring is here.)

The question at hand is: does Patterson have specific works in mind, or is he just making stuff up? (Reviewers do make things up; I've done it myself on occasion.)

We'll first need to get a pool of "big hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists," which may not be easy. I first took a look at Locus's Recommended Reading list for 2007, which lists 9 titles in the "first novels" section. Sadly, as the Great Cham might have said, the ones that are hardcover are not science fiction, and the ones that are science fiction are not hardcover. (I'll leave off trying to define "big" for the moment.)

OK. Further googling led me to Fantasy Debut, a blog I was unaware of before. That blog tries to announce every major-publisher debut book in speculative fiction. Excellent!

So I'll work backward from their posts and build a list of recent candidates. Most of these were published in 2007, with a few in the prior couple of years:

• Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery
• Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe
• The Genesis Code by Christopher Forrest
• KOP by Warren Hammond
• Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell
• The Outback Stars by Sandra McDonald
• Old Man's War by John Scalzi
• Elom by William H. Drinkard
• Truancy by Isamu Fukui

And that's all I've dug up, which are almost all from Tor. I'm sure other house have been publishing first-time SF writers in hardcover, right?

What other candidates are out there? Remember -- we're talking about "big," hardcover, SF novels. Blind item #1 is "Neuromancer on speed" and blind item #2 is a post-apocalyptic dystopia reminiscent of The Road. What could these books be?

Update: Novels added due to comments follow, and I expect this will be a growing list.

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
• Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
  

Indiana Jones Ages Rapidly

I saw a report that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull just wrapped filming with a scene set in 1950. Since pointless numbers fascinate me, I decided to figure out just how wide the gap between Professor Jones and his alter ego Harrison Ford has gotten.
(Sources: IMDB, The Indiana Jones Timeline)

• Birth: Jones was born in 1899; Ford in 1942.
  
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: Takes place in 1936, when Jones is 37.
  Released 1981, when Ford is 39. (Gap: 2 years)
  
• Temple of Doom: Takes place in 1935, when Jones is 36.
  Released 1984, when Ford is 42. (Gap: 6 years)
  
• The Last Crusade: Takes place in 1938, when Jones is 39.
  Released 1989, when Ford is 47. (Gap: 8 years)
  
• Crystal Skull: Takes place in 1957, when Jones is 58.
  Released 2008, when Ford is 66. (Gap: 8 years)

Ford, like most movie stars, is aging pretty well, but, still, the cinematic Indy is clearly being battered pretty badly by life. Must be all those snakes...

Update, 5/23/08: I've now seen Crystal Skull, and the original date I had (1950) was incorrect. So I've now fixed it to reflect the fact that Crystal Skull takes place in 1957.

Thus, the age gap between Ford and Indy hasn't gotten any wider -- it grew quite a bit between the three '80s movies, but not during the long Jones-less interregnum of the '90s.

Also, Shia LeBeouf is older than I thought; I wanted to see if he'd been born when Last Crusade came out, and I found that he was born June 11th of 1986. (I think I was taking my senior finals that day.) Last Crusade was released May 24th of 1989, just a couple of week's before LeBeouf's third birthday.

The first two movies, though, came out well before he was even a glint in Daddy Le Beouf's eye.

These pointless anecdotes about people's ages are brought to you by the fact that I'm sitting around by the basement computer, wondering if a hornet is still about. Apparently not.

The ComicMix Mambo

It's been absolutely frantic at work this week, which is my excuse for the few posts here and whatever else may be wrong in my life. But I'm now into a four-day weekend, so I'll either find some time to catch up on the six books that need reviewing...or laze around and relax.

One thing I've neglected is linking to my ComicMix reviews this week, so here are the ones I've missed:

• on Wednesday, I reviewed a new book by Jo(h)ann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and guests, called Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant
• yesterday, I reviewed another book by Sfar, The Rabbi's Cat 2
• and today was Manga Friday, where I covered Haridama: Magic Cram School by Atsushi Suzumi and The Reformed by Christopher Hart and Anzu

Quote of the Week

"The twentieth century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward -- and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion."

- Martin Amis, "The Voice of the Lonely Crowd," in The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom

The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis

At least three times now, my fingers have mis-typed that title as The Second Place, which I'm sure must be deeply meaningful, but I'm damned if I know how or why.

Martin Amis is an opinionated man from an opinionated family -- his father was Kingsley Amis, so Martin comes by his pontification the old-fashioned way -- and this is an opinionated book. In twelve essays, mostly newspaper columns, and two short stories, Amis here gives his opinions on the post-9/11 world and all that portentous phrase implies. On those subjects, he's mildly right-wing -- mildly from where I sit; any view of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that isn't brow-beating and wailing seems to be considered beyond the pale in the UK -- he thought the Iraq war might have been necessary at the time, but he's decided that was wrong.

And The Second Plane has generally been reviewed from that point of view as well -- the mid-Atlantic literary world is a very liberal one, and Amis has never fit easily there.

On the other hand, The Second Plane has also been reviewed negatively because it doesn't have a strong central focus or argument, and that's completely true -- most of the pieces collected here are op-eds or reviews, work done because a magazine or newspaper wanted famous Martin Amis to say something about Subject X by Tuesday in 2000 words. There's not much sign that Amis has rethought any of these pieces, and they do cover a six-year span.

So the nonfiction in The Second Plane shows a thoughtful writer intermittently poking at the raw subjects of terrorism, war, and hatred, but not bringing any overall framework to bear on the subject. I doubt any readers will agree completely with him, but he's less dogmatic here than he sometimes is on literary subjects, so it's less likely that non-dogmatic readers will be completely incensed.

The two bits of fiction -- "In the Palace of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" -- don't fit as well, though they're both good in their own ways. The former is stronger, a totalitarian fantasia about one of the many doubles for an unnamed dictator. The latter is Amis's imagined version of Atta's last day; it's strongly written but feels like Amis's personal catharsis about the attacks rather than a story.

There's something thrown-together about The Second Plane, as if Amis realized he had enough stuff on this topic to make a book, so he just threw it all together. It would have been better if he'd gone back, re-read all of these pieces, and sat down to write something new and comprehensive on the subject. But he didn't, and The Second Plane is what we have. It's not top-shelf Amis, but it has its strengths.

More Silly Things on the Internet

Did everyone already know about Will It Blend? and just not tell me?

It's a very simple concept: some guy named Tom Dickson, who seems to work for the blender company Blendtec, drops an unlikely item in one of his company's blenders, and sees what happens.

But there's great retro '50s-ish theme music, a similar logo, and seeing things destroyed pointlessly never gets old.

The Memoir Question

The back-page piece in the current issue of Publishers Weekly, by Martin Kihn, collects bits of disclaimers from about two dozen memoirs from the last half-century or so. Reading them all, I was struck once again by wonder at the vituperative bile spewed at James Frey, whose work is no more or less fictional than the general run of that category.

Public figures often have memoirs that can be fact-checked, and they were the mainstay of this category for decades. But the surge of the last decade of "poor-me" lives are all at least mildly fictionalized; they're lives first as they are remembered and then as they're put into words -- twice separated from whatever really happened.

(Here's one test: any memoir with dialogue contains fiction, unless the author habitually tape-recorded his life.)

So what was the deal with all the anger at Frey? Was it that he "fooled" Oprah, and that can't be allowed? Or was it that he made a whole lot of money, and so jealousy on the part of fellow writers (and wanna-bes) is really at the core of the "outrage"?

Because it sure doesn't seem to have anything to do with the scale and scope of his "lies." He just did what any modern memoir-writer does -- combine events and people, dramatize the bland bits, and package it for the reality-TV generation. He just was the most successful at it, and the one where people were actually motivated to list all the discrepancies between his book and what actually happened.

Publishing Death Watch

The New York Times reported earlier this week on the supposedly-imminent departure of Random House CEO Peter Olson.

Schadenfreude alert: this is the same Olson who said to a reporter in 2003, while walking the halls at BEA, "I recognize hundreds of people here. Many of them worked for me. Many of them I fired personally. ... There are so many people here that I've fired that we could have a reunion." Perhaps now he will have time for that reunion.

The Times coverage is a bit sloppy and confused, though, at least as I see it. Their references to the Bertelsmann direct-to-consumer operations, for example, refers to the current conglomeration of music, video/DVD, and book operations as "book clubs," and makes inferences from that which I do not believe are warranted.

(Once again I quote from Publishers Weekly's Sara Nelson: "a closer look at the reports from B&N and Borders and the book clubs, and several off-the-record conversations with experts show that while revenue growth is sluggish, book sales are up slightly; it's the decline in sales of music CDs that have dragged the numbers down. You may not realize, for example, that while the old Bookspan's revenue last year was down from 2006's, it was still about $700 million.")

If the Times can't distinguish between an integrated direct-to-consumer powerhouse (which made a big deal about how big and integrated and cross-product it was when it was formed last year) and a "book club," what else does it get wrong?

And, on the Bertelsmann side, how much of this can really be ascribed to Olson to begin with? He's famously bottom-line-oriented, so it's hard to see how Bertelsmann can replace him with someone even more so and hope to continue in its dominant trade position. (Especially in big trade publishing, you need to spend money to make money.) I haven't seen figures to show that Random House did substantially worse than anyone else last year, which was a mediocre year (at best) for publishing, so blaming him for the Bush economy is rather cruel. (Crueler than Olson was to Ann Godoff? That's a separate question.) And he only took on oversight for the Direct Group in September of last year, so one might think that others could be more reasonably held accountable for that group's poor performance.

But it looks like he's going, to suffer for his sins or whoever else's.

My money's on "to spend more time with his family," though "to pursue outside interests" is a good possibility. BEA opens May 29th, so I'd expect Bertelsmann would want Olson out the door a good week before that, so it's not the only thing people are talking about at the show. I wonder if there's a secret Random House office pool to predict the day already?

Edit, 5/20: The news is hitting the wires this morning; Olson is out and Markus Dohle, a printing-company executive with no publishing experience and a plan to "shake up [Bertelsmann's] slow-growing businesses," is in.

And it always works out so well when people who don't understand a business are put in charge and told to change everything, doesn't it?

I'm so glad I don't work for Random right now. [New York Times; Wall Street Journal]

Softspoken by Lucius Shepard

I don't know if Softspoken was a trunk novel, but I have my suspicions. It's a short novel in the Southern Gothic mode, about a young woman, Sanie Bullard, stuck in her husband's family's decaying southern house, deep in rural South Carolina. Sanie has been drifting away from her husband Jackson -- who is currently studying to be a lawyer, and was previously a successful businessman -- for some time, but isn't quite sure how, or even if, to break free.

The Bullard family is famous in those parts for its eccentricity; Jackson's father became a monomaniac late in life after a very successful law career of his own, and Jackson's siblings -- brother Will and sister Louise -- have their own problems. (Will is a quiet drug addict; Louise shuns nearly all human contact.) They all live together in the large, typically Southern house, which is on a quiet stretch of road, away from everything else.

And of course the house has a ghost.

And of course Jackson becomes less friendly and loving toward his wife as this short novel goes on.

Of course, of course, of course.

Softspoken is a genre exercise; the prose equivalent of a villanelle. All of the elements are predetermined ahead of time, and the delight is in seeing what particular use the writer will make of them this time. For a long time, there is delight in that; Shepard is a smooth, subtle writer, the Gene Wolfe of decadence and decay. But the end of this novel takes a turn that does not work; the Southern Gothic (like most of its kin in the fields of terror and horror) is a profoundly moralistic form, and the morals need to line up. Softspoken bobbles its morals badly; it needed to either set things up differently (and less obviously in its particular genre) or end more shatteringly, to clearly and obviously blast through Southern Gothic to its own place. As it is, though, it feels like a Southern Gothic with the wrong ending, which is just unsatisfying.

I Know Exactly What The Facts Is

Today for ComicMix, I reviewed an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story (by Michael Zulli and Todd Klein) with the mellifluous title The Facts In The Case Of The Departure Of Miss Finch.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/17

I still wish the SFF folks were sending me more books --after so many years at the clubs, I only feel as if things are cosmically right when I have to open many, many packages full of paper and grey fluff every week -- but there's plenty enough this time for me to ramble on about.

For instance, first this week was Thomas M. Disch's The Word of God, which is...well, that's hard to explain. In 2005, Disch, annoyed about things in general, declared that he was God. (Not in the "thou are God" sense, but in the "YHVH, creator of the universe" sense. No, I wasn't aware that was possible, either.) And The Word of God is his memoirs as God.

If I were still at my last job -- which I am not -- I'd be jumping all over this. The clubs used to sell piles and piles of somewhat blasphemous speculative stories, starting of course with Stranger in a Strange Land (which we never counted) and going through Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, Parke Godwin's "Galactic Bus" books, and the very silly God The Ultimate Autobiography. (We used to joke about doing a "blasphemy flyer," printed on a brain brown-paper wrapped, but never quite got around to it.) Tachyon is publishing Disch's theogony in July in trade paperback.

From Del Rey Manga, here is something I didn't think existed: a one-volume manga story. Haridama: Magic Cram School is by Atshushi Suzumi, and is set in, yes, a magical school, where boy and girl best friends are enrolled as "Obsidians," students who have to use swords to enhance their magic. It's not"volume one," it's complete here, and it publishes May 20.

Also from Del Rey, also apparently complete in one volume, but facing the opposite direction: The Reformed by Christopher Hart and Anzu. This one is in manga-style, but reads left-to-right and was created by non-Japanese. It's a vampire story, with another in the ever-popular line of tormented vampire heroes, who can live forever with can never know...love! It's coming June 3rd.

And then, to complete the trifecta of manga-ish things, is Maid Machinegun, a light novel from Del Rey, by someone calling herself Aaliyah (not the dead singer) with illustrations by Suzuhito Yasuda. This one will be available May 20th, and it's about a young "fangirl" who works at a struggling maid cafe -- it's not clear where the machineguns come in, but I guess they do, eventually.

From Del Rey's corporate twin sister Ballantine came the second in what looks like a Jennifer Stevenson trilogy (after The Brass Bed, last week) -- The Velvet Chair. It's more sexy contemporary fantasy (or paranormal romance, or romantic fantasy, or fantasy romance, or some combination of those words), and it will be published May 20th.

Moving a few floors away in the Random House building, we come to Pantheon Books, who thought I might like to pass on the fact that Jessica Abel's La Perdida will be out in a new trade paperback edition on May 20th. (I reviewed La Perdida last year, and had somewhat mixed feelings about the main character, but Abel is a real talent, and La Perdida is well worth reading.)

Also from Pantheon is Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat 2, sequel to the popular graphic novel of the very similar title. This was published April 1st.

And last this week was a care package of the last three issues of the new Weird Tales -- the most recent ones since Ann VanderMeer took over as editor. I do intend to read these, but my track record of reading fiction magazines has been very bad lately -- Ellen Datlow gave me a copy of the issue of Subterranean that she edited, and I'm still carrying it around more than six months later. (I've also been friendly with the last half-dozen or so people involved with Weird Tales without managing to read an issue, though I keep hoping to break that streak.) So I'm hoping that I have some readers who are more devoted to short fiction than I am, and can tell me what's particularly special and Weird these days.

Sunday Is Friday When You're Lazy!

I neglected to link to this week's Manga Friday review at ComicMix -- in which I covered the first volume of Toto!: The Wonderful Adventure and the tenth volume of Path of the Assassin Volume -- at the time, due entirely to my own indolence and sloth.

But I spent several hours walking through the woods with a bunch of Cub Scouts this morning, so sitting at a computer and typing no longer feels anything like work. With any luck, that energy will continue, and I'll catch up on some of the books I've read but not yet reviewed.

Quote of the Week

"Last week, [Sean] Avery made agitator history, in the third game of the Rangers' best-of-seven first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils, by inventing a new idiot technique. During a Rangers power play, he positioned himself in front of the Devils' goalie, Martin Brodeur, to block his view of the puck -- a standard technique known as a screen. Avery, however, turned to face Brodeur, and, ignoring the play, began waving his arms and his stick in Brodeur's face....Goal.....The next day, amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the N.H.L. issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was. The innovation, like midget batsmen and airplane shoe-bombing, would prove to be short-lived."
- Nick Paumgarten, "Puckhead," p.23 in the 4/28/08 New Yorker

Walking the Mendoza Line

Be warned: I might start blogging about music more than I have been, because I just got an e-mail from Amazon about their latest shiny new toy. They've been selling DRM-free music downloads for some time now, but they're rolling out a widget that allows sampling of those tracks by their affiliates (like me).

And what do you do with a shiny new toy? Well, you try it out, of course. So here's my first attempt -- a quick collection of some of the best songs by The Mendoza Line, a band I've been listening to a lot lately. (In my typical fashion, I discovered them almost precisely at the time that they were breaking up.)

I'll probably do more of these, though I don't honestly expect many people to use it to buy music. (I would be very happy to be proved wrong.) But it will allow me to talk about music and give anyone who cares a chance to listen to what I'm talking about, and that's a bonus.

Anyway, let's see if this works. Below this line should be an Amazon widget called "Best of Mendoza Line," with a bunch of great songs:

Paul Moves Out by Michel Rabagliati

I've finally caught up with the middle of the "Paul" books -- this one came in between Paul Has a Summer Job and Paul Goes Fishing, in 2005.

It has more of a central plot thread than Paul Goes Fishing did; it's all about the early days of Paul's relationship with his wife Lucie. (Well, she wasn't his wife then, but you know what I mean.) He meets her, she meets his parents, they move in together -- that whole kind of thing.

Like the other "Paul" books, it's not told in a straightforward linear fashion, but Moves Out loops around a lot less than Goes Fishing did, and does focus on one time in Paul's life, rather than bouncing between several.

Moves Out covers the years between 1979 -- when Paul met
Lucie at their art school, Studio Seguin -- and 1983, when they move in together. There's a lot of relationship stuff, some art-school teachings (including the inevitable influential teacher who turns out to be gay), and the couple's relationship with Paul's freespirited aged great-aunt Janette. The end of the book also has a long sequence about a visit of Lucie's two nieces (very young at this point) for a day and a night.

I thought Moves Out held together as a single story much more than Goes Fishing did, though Goes Fishing has some stronger individual scenes. Still, Rabagliati is a consistently charming cartoonist, who easily manages the difficult task of turning his own life into fiction without becoming self-indulgent.

Melding the Minds of Adults With Those of Teenagers!

To make up for the quiet on this blog today, I not only had a review at ComicMix (see link below), but I was also part of the latest Mind Meld hullabaloo at SF Signal, where I and a host of science fictional luminaries answered the question "Which young adult sf/f titles, if any, would you recommend to an adult reader who would not otherwise consider reading YA fiction because they think it's only suitable for kids?"

Among my respected compatriots: authors John Scalzi, Lawrence Watt-Evans and Delia Sherman; editors Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Sharyn November, Jonathan Strahan, and Ellen Datlow; and all-around smart people Farah Mendelsohn and Marianne Case.

Among the books I mentioned: Jonathan Stroud's magnificent "Bartimaeus Trilogy:" The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, and Ptolemy's Gate; Steven Gould's Jumper; Daniel Pinkwater's 5 Novels; Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea; Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle; and Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness. Oh, and Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning.

Check Out My New Leotard!

Today I reviewed Eddie Campbell's new graphic novel (maybe) The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard for ComicMix.

Hypnotic Replay

Today's ComicMix review -- well, the one today from me, to be more precise -- is Alex Robinson's forthcoming graphic novel Too Cool To Be Forgotten.

In Which I Am More Sexist Than I Thought I Was

I'm still figuring out who everyone is at the new job -- I pretty much know my department, and the editors I work with, but the larger company still has huge blurred areas in my head labeled "here be Higher Ed" or "those people who work in Toronto." So I find myself looking people up on our Intranet Portal and following the org charts up and down when I'm not sure who people are.

And recently I found my expectations needed to be realigned.

In one department, there are two people who work in the same area: one man, whom I think is a bit older than I am; and one woman, whom I think is a bit younger than I am. (I could be wrong about their ages as well.) In my minor contacts so far, I'd dealt with the man.

You've figured this out already, right?

I thought she reported to him, but that was exactly backward: she's the boss.

And now I have another reflexive assumption to watch out for...

The Squirrel Mother by Megan Kelso

The Squirrel Mother collects Kelso's short comics stories from the early years of this decade; Fantagraphics published it in 2006. Some of them have aspects that may be autobiographical, but Kelso in general seems more like a literary short-story writer, polishing small moments and short sequences into fiction.

Kelso works to a small page-size, with two or three tiers of smallish panels. Each story begins on a right-hand page, and there generally are four blank pages -- two to end the previous story, two to begin the new one -- in between each of the stories. So, even though Squirrel Mother is about a hundred and fifty pages long, it feels like only about half of the page-space actually has any comics on it; these stories are framed very carefully with tinted backgrounds and each set out like a sandwich on a plate.

The stories themselves are mostly elliptical, telling small vignettes from a life or from history but clearly meant to resonate far beyond that. They're not related to each other in any real way; this is just a collection of independent works. And Kelso is quite talented, but, from these stories, it looks likes she's been working entirely as a miniaturist. It might be nice to see her spread out some more.

(And I figured out why Kelso's style looked familiar -- I read her strip Watergate Sue in the New York Times Magazine last year.)

Mixing Some Comics

I'm getting back into the ComicMix saddle after the dry patch last week, with today's review of Jeff Lemire's dour hockey-and-farming Canadian tale Ghost Stories.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/10

Yet another slow week; it may be time to wonder if the publicists have abandoned me for younger, hipper, flashier bloggers. But I will soldier on with what I have, and drag in some other stuff to fill out this column as well...

Both of the books that came in the mail this week were from the mighty Ballantine group (of the far-flung Random House empire) -- first was Daryl Gregory's first novel Pandemonium. Pandemonium is coming in trade paperback in September, and it sounds like an odd contemporary fantasy -- for the last fifty years or so, random people have been possessed by "pop-cultural avatars that some call demons." One possessee -- former possessee, or so he thought -- is the main character of the book. That seems odd enough, but the back cover copy also promises that the novel contains Philip K. Dick and a group called the Human League. So Pandemonium is clearly something out of the ordinary -- and I remember Gregory from his fine story "Second Person, Present Tense" of a couple years back, so he can be very good when he's on top of his game.

The other actual submission this week was Jennifer Stevenson's The Brass Bed, which has a very paperback-romance cover. I won't say that I was about to ignore it, but it didn't look like any of the things I usually read -- until I realized the author's name was oddly familiar. Stevenson's first novel was Trash Sex Magic, which Small Beer published back in 2004 and which is still sitting on my gosh-I'd-like-to-read-these-someday pile. So suddenly Brass Bed became an object lesson in the different ways of packaging (or maybe even of writing) fantasy novels set in the modern world and featuring a lot of sex -- Trash was aimed at the "classy" end of the market, in trade paperback from a small press and with a subdued cover design. Brass Bed, on the other hand, screams mass-market, from its bright colors to the reading line quote: "More fun than pillow fighting naked!" And sometimes we assume "not published in a classy way" equals "trashy book," but that is only an assumption. Brass Bed is the first in what will be a paranormal romance series about Jewel Heiss, a consumer investigator in a Chicago filled with odd, inexplicable magic. I might just have to read this one -- I don't think I've read anything explicitly published as paranormal romance before, and I'd like to see how the romance genre accommodates a series in which the heroine (apparently) deals with some kind of sex magic in each book. Brass Bed was published on April 29th.

I also made a trip to the library this week, so I'll stretch this post (and give you a preview of some other things I hope to review soon) by listing some of the books I picked up there.

Mary Roach's Bonk has been a bestseller recently, but I really picked it up because one of my colleagues just read it and really enjoyed it -- and her highest praise is that Bonk is a book all about sex, but she didn't find any of it creepy. (I suspect I have a much higher tolerance for creepiness than she does, so I might find it a bit tame.) Roach is the author of Stiff (about dead bodies) and Spook (about ideas of the afterlife), both of which have sounded interesting but neither of which I've read. It takes sex, I guess, to drag people like me in the front door. Bonk is all about the scientific investigation of sex, rather than being a sociological look at different sexual "weirdos" (like so many book in this same general publishing area), so I hope to learn something.

Vampire Loves is a graphic novel by Joann Sfar; I've read his Little Vampire and some of his work on the Dungeon series. This is also published by First Second, who have been bringing out a lot of good work lately. I grabbed it partly for those two reasons, and partly because I think I need to be better-read in French cartoonists in general.

I know I read about Shinjuku Shark (by Arimasa Osawa) somewhere recently, but I can't remember where. This is the first novel in a Japanese hard-boiled police procedural series about a tough detective in a seamy Tokyo district -- the series has been wildly popular over there, and this book won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, which looks like the Japanese equivalent of the Edgar. Shark is from 1990, but it only made it into English sometime late last year. And it's published by Vertical -- I've been impressed by their publishing choices in manga, so I figured I should see what they're doing in fiction.

And last is Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, which I first got three weeks ago and just renewed, since I still want to find time to read it. It's a modern werewolf novel set in L.A. and told in verse, with great quotes from Michael Moorcock, Gregory Maguire, David Mamet, and Nick Hornby. How could I not read a book like that?

Another Meme Coming

This one came via the Barbarienne:

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Prowling across the cliffs, carrying a jeweled meat hammer, cometh G.B.H. Hornswoggler! And he gives an ominous bellow: "I'm going to bludgeon you into the fast lane, then make toast!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys

Get a Life by Dupuy and Berberian

The flap copy does reveal the first names of this French graphic novel's two creators -- Philippe and Charles -- but they're credited as simply "Dupuy & Berberian" here.

Apparently, D&B have created a long sequence of stories, of which Get a Life is a collection of (some? all?) of the earliest. All the stories are about "Mr. Jean," a young French novelist whose life borrows bits from D&B's own careers (translated from comics to prose, of course).

So this is yet more semi-autobiography, but it's less specific than most -- D&B are really just taking the usual events in the life of a young, reasonably successful artist -- concerns about his work, contacts, and lots and lots of stories about dating and sex.

It's all done in a fairly slick French style, with some true warmth and expression to it but also clearly aimed at a wide audience rather than trying to dig into personal experience for really detailed particulars. It's not the overwhelming surprise Three Shadows was, but it's pretty good. And semi-light comedies about dating and finding one's place in the world will never get old.

Rex Libris, Vol. 1: I, Librarian by James Turner

Rex Libris is a very talky, computer-drawn black-and-white comic (it looks like nothing else so much as Chris Ware's very early Floyd Farland strips) about a semi-immortal, two-fisted librarian. I, Librarian collects the first five issues of the series, in which Rex retrieves an overdue Principia Mathematica from Space Warlord Vaglox amid other crises. Think of L-space by way of Raymond Chandler, and you'll be in the ballpark.

I expected to love it, but I found it a real slog -- it's relentlessly wordy, never giving the art space to carry the story and just not as tightly and crisply written as it needed to be to bring the concept off. For example, when you open this book up, on the first page of art are the Five Laws of Librarians:

1. Books are to be read.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

Flat, bland, and tepid. That "his or her" could be eliminated with a bit of thought and rewriting, and #s 4 and 5 are frankly lousy. All of the dialogue and captions in Rex Libris are on that level -- not bad, not substandard, just long-winded and ungraceful. It made reading the book -- which has a lot of captions and dialogue, many of them in Rex's on-and-off tough-guy voice -- something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

I'm hoping that the great librarian-action comic is still out there to be found; perhaps it's Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, which I'm still looking for.

Penny Arcade Vol. 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots by Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik

Penny Arcade is the most hermetic of the gaming webcomics, tightly wrapped in a ball of references to itself and to whatever geek passion blazed highest on the day that particular cartoon was made. I'm only a mild gamer, and on the "wrong" platforms, so I often don't really know what PA is about. I can usually translate it, though it sometimes takes a bit of thought and work.

So, even though I do enjoy reading Penny Arcade every day, I'm not in the target demographic, and I figured it wasn't a good idea to spend my own money on the collections. Luckily, a library near me had this first volume -- though no libraries I can get books from have any of the later books -- so I at least got to see the beginnings for free.

Attack of the Bacon Robots collects the PA strips from the beginning (11/18/98) through the end of 2000, with commentary by writer Jerry "Tycho" Holkins. (Holkins's preferred essayistic style is a variation of the overly-clotted, snarkier-than-thou, random-pop-culture-reference style beloved of his and my generation...and I'm not that far off the template myself, so I shouldn't talk.) The commentary does help to put the strips into context, such as it is -- except when Holkins has completely forgotten the context, which happens pretty often.

If you were a huge computer/console gamer in those years, these strips will bring back memories of your own gaming times. If you read the strip now, it'll be interesting to see how far they've come, though they were intermittently quite good all the way in the beginning. And if you're me, you'll be confused by the lack of any actual Bacon Robots.

Quote of the Week

"Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain."
- Nick Paumgarten, "Up and Then Down," p.111 of the 4/21/08 New Yorker

Onion Editorial Cartoonist Try-Outs

Glenn McCoy seems to be gunning for the job with today's totally awesome cartoon.

McCoy is an interesting editorial cartoonist: his style is wonderful, very fluid and loose, and he has a true gift for caricature. He also has the meanness that a lot of the best editorialists have had; he digs in his heels and really lays into the same people, over and over. (In particular, he seems to loathe Al Gore, and spends an awful lot of ammo attacking someone who lost an election eight years ago and then made a movie.)

On the other side is the fact that McCoy's cartoons are politically blinkered to a level that I've never seen from anyone else. Even the purest "liberal" cartoonists like Herblock or Tom Toles will beat up on the other side when that's what's going on in the news, but McCoy maintains a frighteningly obsessive focus on the evils of liberals.

And I mean that literally -- many, many McCoy cartoons try to make the point that Liberal Policy X will immediately lead to Godless Commies tapping our Precious Bodily Fluids.

I don't know where McCoy's cartoons originally appear, since I see them on the Internet. But he's managed, as far as I can tell, the astounding feat of working as an editorial cartoonist for the past 10 years without drawing a single cartoon criticizing the current president.

Anyway, there have been a lot of cartoons about the fuel-food crisis, but McCoy manages to make petroleum look humanitarian with this one -- and that's a real gift.

Before I go, let me link to another one: this cartoon has great pacing and made me laugh out loud...even though I don't think it's true.

Movie Log: Hogfather

So the British TV miniseries of Hogfather finally dribbled out to the great American public; it was originally supposed to show up on a US cable station for Christmas of 2006 (when it aired in the UK,) but that fell through, and if it was shown for Xmas '07 here, I missed hearing about it entirely. But now it's on video, though April is a weird time to release a Christmas story.

I saw the two parts separated by a week, like an old-fashioned mini-series was meant to be. (That wasn't on purpose; life has just been busy lately.)

It's nice but seems quite British, and some of the Pratchettisms get a bit smug when filmed, or don't quite work as well. Hogfather feels like a very faithful adaptation -- though I didn't sit with my copy of the book to make sure -- so that happens every now and then.

For example: to get that authentic DEATH voice, the actor speaks...slowly...and...distinctly, which keeps his dialogue from having all that much energy. And the line about a "pune, or play on words" falls very heavily when the "e" in "pune" is pronounced -- not that it was all that funny on the page to begin with. There are other things like that, enough to make Hogfather just a step slower than it might have been. (The fact that it's over three hours long doesn't help, either -- zippy satire isn't at its best at great length.)

So Hogfather is pretty much exactly what the conventional wisdom would expect: a pleasant realization of a mediocre novel by a writer who's done much better, and a movie of maximum interest to really serious Pratchett fans. I can easily see why it didn't end up on US television; if it had been my decision, I'd possibly have gone the same way.

In Which I Am Neither Sexy Nor Sensible

Things that look like reviews have been scarce this week, both here and at ComicMix, and I expect that to continue. (You see, the pile of books that I read recently and which I need to write about is sitting on my printer, about a thousand miles north of here in lovely Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. So even my usual desultory fact-checking and looking-up of references is currently impossible.)

But I did send one review into the ether before I flew off to sunny Florida, and ComicMix published that review on Monday. The book in question is Sex and Sensibility, a collection of 200 cartoons by female cartoonists edited by Liza Donnelly.

Wiley Road Show 3.0

Inspired by a walk into town this afternoon:

the world desperately needs a topless tapas bar.

Just try to say that out loud without smiling -- I dare you!

In Lieu of a Comment Elsewhere

GalleyCat doesn't have comments, so I couldn't reply to the following lede there:

In 2005, 31% of the roughly 1.5 billion books printed in the US were returned to publishers. Guess what: that not only doesn't make sense for anyone's bottom line -- people don't buy more books because they see big luxuriant stacks of books on offer, it seems!-- it's bad for the environment!

First of all, this is what the Scottish courts call "not proven." It may be so that big piles of books don't induce more sales than merely having one copy always available -- though I tend to doubt that so many publishers would pile books so high for so long if there was no evidence that it worked -- but no evidence has been given to support that assertion.

And that attitude, which is very common among publishing observers (though less often among those who sell books into accounts and track title sales) ignores a simple fact: if there are three books on a shelf, and two customers come looking for it, two sales will result. If there is one book on a shelf, and two customers come, one of them is out of luck -- and so is the bookseller.

You end up with returns because it's impossible to always have precisely one book for every purchaser in the right place at the right time. I've been tracking sales of one particular book closely lately, and watching various branches of one chain place single-copy orders with my employer when there's stock of that book in at least one of that chain's own distribution center. Does that annoy me? Hell, no -- those are books running right back out onto shelves to refill space after sales, and I want to see them get back in stock as quickly as possible.

Sure, online sellers don't have this problem in precisely the same way -- they can have books drop-shipped from a distributor or printed on demand -- but, for a physical person in a physical location, a book can only be in one of two states: available or not.

I look at the 31% figure for returns, and I first wonder where it came from and what's included in it. And then I say that's pretty low, unless it includes a lot of nonreturnable sales. If the universe of returnable books had a 31% return rate, then a lot of potential sales were lost due to lack of books.

Like most things, book publishing has two failure modes. The first is when would-be buyers find an empty shelf: let's call that a "false negative." The other is when books sit idle at retail without would-be buyers: that would be a "false positive." You can manage a business to minimize one of those, but doing that, either way, is dangerous. The smart way is to keep an eye on both measures, and balance them out across a publishing line.


I could go on and on about this, but...I need to get dressed for the Wiley "Prom." Honest to Ghu. So that'll be it for me for today.

Wiley Road Show, Mark 2

In one of my many meetings today, a colleague from my marketing group handed out a flyer of Wiley titles of particular interest in our parlous economic times.

At the top of that flyer were printed the words "Don't Panic."

I am certain that I'm the only one in the room who noted (quietly, to myself) that those words were in large, friendly letters.

Movie Log: Paris, Je T'aime

Take sixteen filmmakers. Ask them each to make a movie about love in Paris -- any kind of love. The only thing is, each movie has to be about five minutes long. Mix, stir, and bake at 350. Two hours later, what you have is Paris, Je T'aime.

It's impossibly to review a movie like this without doing a mini-review of each section, and I wouldn't be up for that even if I hadn't sent it back more than a week ago.

The Wife and I enjoyed this: not all of the pieces are equally good (or equally to anyone's particular tastes), but they're all professional and have their good points. Nothing is substandard or particularly pretentious, and they're not allowed to overstay their welcome.

A couple of the stories are over the top in one way or another -- the vampire one and Oscar Wilde in the graveyard, in particular, were a bit silly. But even those were entertaining. Really, if you take a bunch of pros and don't let them go too long, the results are bound to be worth watching once, at least.

So don't expect any structure, and don't expect to love everything equally. But Paris, Je T'aime should have pieces that anyone willing to see a movie with French words in the title will love.

My Attitude

For no particular reason, other than to reinforce my reputation as a grumpy bastard, here are the refrains from what are probably my two current favorite songs. (In other words, these are the things I'm yelling along with in the car these days, when I'm alone.)

The Mendoza Line, from the song "We're All in This Alone" on Lost in Revelry

Everybody thinks that "we're in this together"
And everybody wishes "always be together"
But we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone
And the world is all alone

Harley Poe, from "Corrupting My Better Half" on The Dead and the Naked

Now Jesus died for them, it's true
But what's a poor devil to do?

Oh when the saints go marchin' in
I won't be there, 'cause I love my sin
Am I so bad that you hate me?
There was a time when I could see
My hopes and dreams, they are no more
I'm not a rich man, but blessed are the poor
Old man forgive me, I've turned away
I won't come back, so I'll have to pay

And now I've got to get some sleep, since I have wall-to-wall meeting tomorrow.

Edit, the next day: The Harley Poe song lyrics above may actually be from a song called "What's a Poor Devil to Do?" ("Corrupting My Better Half" being a different Harley Poe song, with different lyrics.) This would make sense, but it doesn't explain how I originally got the song with the wrong name attached. All research from this end has been fruitless; if I still care when I get home, I may learn the truth.

Your Jaw-Dropping News of the Day

Bad News: JP Morgan is reported to have plans to lay off 10,000 of Bear Sterns's 14,000 employees. (And 1,500 of their own.)

Good News: Those canned will get nine months of full pay and an immediate cash payment equal to a third of their bonuses last year.

Both pieces of news via Financial News.

You know, I thought I'd done OK when I got laid off last year, but, in this as in everything, we're all pikers compared to the big swinging dicks.

Allowable Prejudices

A biff on the conk to Elizabeth Blachner, who committed this sentence:

If you’re going to be so self-actualized as to try to create a loving, honest, authentic life, why would you do it in the suburbs?

during a BookSlut review.

That's it: don't bother to actually make arguments; just assert things. It makes intellectual life much easier.

I'm glad to hear than "honesty" and "authenticity" are the unique qualities of wherever the fuck Blachner happens to live.

(The rest of the review veers between similar unreasoning prejudices of people who happen to be a sigma closer to the norm and some actual insights.)

Wiley Road Show, Take 1

You know you're in a third-rate American city when...

on the way from the airport, you pass a building named Municipal Auditorium.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/3

The gods of publicity are turning their back on me, I know it. Only two things arrived this week, so I'll have to stick some things I bought onto the end to bulk this out. But, first, here's what those few wonderful publicists did send to me this week:

From Del Rey Manga, the first volume of a new series called Toto! by Yuko Osada. I have no idea if "Toto" is the name of the dog -- though that's quite possible -- but the boy whose shoulder he's on is named Kakashi. From a very, very cursory poke through the pages, I think I can detect the influence of both Masashi (Naruto) Kishimoto and Hayao (Princess Mononoke) Miyazaki, but I could simply be fixated on airships and the main character's goggles. This will be published on May 13th.

A new series of Dungeon books is starting from NBM, under the umbrella title "Monstres" and featuring stories written by series creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim but illustrated by other French comics artists. Volume 1: The Crying Giant has two stories: one illustrated by Jean-Cristophe Menu, head of the comics publisher L'Association; and one illustrated by an artist known as Mazan. (The Crying Giant also has a useful graphic to show how all of the various Dungeon series are connected -- and that's something I've been wondering myself.) The Crying Giant will be published in June.

And then here are some of the things that I picked up on trips to comic shops this week. (It was Free Comic Book day on Saturday, which I see I neglected to mention ahead of time.) I paid my own money for them, so no publicists will get their wings if I review them:

Path of the Assassin Volume 10: Battle for Power Part 2 from Dark Horse sees Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima adding another three hundred-odd pages to their long, engrossing sagas of samurai battles in pre-modern Japan. At least, I think it does: I haven't actually opened the shrink-wrap yet.

Fantagraphics has published the latest book in their Complete Peanuts series, including all of the strips from 1967 and 1968, wrapped up in an elegant design from Seth. We all know that this is one of the very few indispensable comics projects currently being published, right?

I also got the next (for me) collection of the Brian Michael Bendis/Mike Avon Oeming Powers comic -- the one about cops in a world of superheroes. It was volume 9, Psychotic, and I see that, with this, I'm only two books behind. I expect more mayhem and unfinished sentences, and probably creeping superheroism. (And I will say that reading these does not make we want to start picking up Bendis's mainstream superheroes. Of course, I have minimal interest in anybody's mainstream superheroes, so that doesn't mean much.)

The big collection of Matt Wagner's two Batman Grendel stories finally came out, so I got that as well. Though I do wish Wagner would actually move forward with something new -- the third Mage series, stories about a Grendel who isn't that psychotic asshole Hunter Rose, anything but more Batcrap. Though I guess Batcrap generally pays better than creator-owned stuff, and I don't begrudge Wagner making a living. He's just too good to be wasting his time doing Year 1.5 bullshit all the time. (Long-winded complaint about corporate-owned long-underwear characters deleted here.) I will note that this was solicited as Batman/Grendel -- note well that particular bit of punctuation -- and that the cover on BN.com calls it Batman Vs. Grendel, but the book itself refuses all punctuation or explanation to call itself merely Batman Grendel, as if it were a law firm.

The next collection of the Hellboy sidebar series B.P.R.D. follows only a couple of months after the last one, which is weird. Still, I saw Killing Ground (as usual, written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and John Arcudi and illustrated by Guy Davis), and I grabbed it.

On the other side, there's the long-delayed graphic novel The Facts In The Case Of The Departure Of Miss Finch, illustrated by Michael Zulli from Neil Gaiman's original short story. The book doesn't say, exactly, who adapted the story into a comics script, which my cynicism takes as an indication that it was Zulli -- Dark Horse would probably have made it clear if Gaiman had done a new script.

And last for this week is The Education of Hopey Glass, the newest collection of the Jaime Hernandez half of Love & Rockets.

Another Promoted Comment

Step 1: some people start an online Harry Potter RPG about a repressive government in 1985 and call it Hexennacht. [Edit: originally named "Kristallnacht," changed to Hexennacht quietly on that page without making reference to the change.]

Step 2: James Nicoll links to it, not explicitly saying anything but implying that we should all disapprove.

And then I got grumpy, as I am wont to do, and commented thus at James's LJ. I'm rerunning it here because, as always, I agree with myself:

I'm not Johan, but my reaction was very similar to his -- that's why they named it what they did, because it's supposed to immediately invoke those feelings. (Their timing may have been unfortunate, but that's a side issue.)

Are we now saying that no forms of art can use names in any way derived from nasty historical events? Or that only those events that are within recent memory are forbidden? Or maybe only those events with large, organized groups who will complain loudly?

Or is it that an RPG isn't "art" enough to be worthy? There have been novels, plays, paintings and plenty of other artistic interpretations of kristallnacht, and I've never seen an attack like this on them. I suspect this is mostly a high art/low art snobbery -- that games aren't "important" enough to address issues like this, or that they're too tainted by commerce, or something similar.

Just a few days ago, I read a manga story called "Hell," by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, from 1971, about a photographer sent to Hiroshima right after the blast. It's a damn powerful story, but it's also low art about a major, horrible, recent historical event. Is that impermissible? Is it worse because that was much closer to the event, or acceptable because it was by a Japanese man?

Would "Hexennacht" be OK if the organizers were Jewish and explicitly linked it to the Holocaust? Would it be better or worse if it were a reference to the Armenian genocide?

Personally, if there was a similar game involving evil wizards flying dragons into buildings in NYC to kill massive numbers of Muggles, I'd still have no problem with it.

Art is how humanity turns life into memory, and memory into history. The response "you can't say that" is never appropriate for a work of art. This kind of whiny nudnik-ism does no one any good.


Also, James, if you're going to do these "oh, look at these horrible people; let's all cluck behind our hands and show how morally superior we all are" posts, at least get the facts right -- the game is called Hexennacht (or was), not kristallnacht. It's a small but telling error.

And, as a final point, there are at least 32,000 Google hits for "hexennacht;" it appears to already exist as a word. So, all you offended ones, go forth and complain everywhere you can find it.

I am surprised to note how much I have internalized the Scott McCloud theory of art, but there it is.


Edit, early in the morning: Well, it was called "Kristallnacht" at first, which is slightly more tone-deaf than I'd thought, but doesn't change my essential point. (Except for the point at the end, where I was just wrong.) So I commented again:

From the comments here and elsewhere, it looks like this was originally called "Kristallnacht," thought the linked page doesn't make any reference to that now. (I wonder why?)

I apologize for missing that the first time through...but, James, I do think you're doing a lot of throwing raw meat out these days, and I wonder why.

I also think the dinks running the game have a bad case of tone-deafness, and are rude to boot, but that doesn't particularly matter. The bleating against them is mostly "but you're hurting and offending people," as if that were some sort of Stop-Everything card. People get offended; people get their feelings hurt. If that's the worst thing that happens to you today, stand up and cheer.

Again, I think the Internet is far too prone to dogpile onto things because some group -- and those groups are many and varied -- doesn't like them. And the reply of "you've offended me, so now you have to change" is appalling. If you're that easily offended, you probably shouldn't be on the Internet in the first place, where far worse things are lurking.

My Weird Weekend

I'm writing this from a hotel room high in the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, a room that came complete with a balcony from which I can see the water (without even stretching around a corner). Yesterday I was running about with Thing 2 while The Wife and Thing 1 roughed it in the woods; it's been an eventful few days.

Perhaps I should back up and take this straight through.

Friday was an only slightly frenzied day at work, given that it was the last working day before Sales Meeting. (Which every other publisher calls Sales Conference; Wiley doesn't do anything just because everyone else does.) There are two possibilities for why I wasn't run ragged. Either, as I hope, I got what I needed to do early, and my line of books isn't big and flashy and trade-y to begin with. Or -- and this is what I'm pretty sure isn't the case, since I've rechecked the schedule of meetings a dozen times over the last week -- I've forgotten something of massive importance. Well, we'll see.

We also had a department lunch out for a colleague who's going to be going on maternity leave soon, which was the usual fun. (It's a nice group to begin with, and who doesn't like gala luncheons?) Partway through, I realized that I was the only one of the bunch who already has kids, which made me feel old.

Then I had to hit my comics shop, which is no longer "local" in any sense, but I can't quite give it up. (Midtown Comics by the Port Authority -- if there was a comparable store anywhere reasonable in Jersey, I'd switch in a minute, but there isn't.) And going to the comics shop generally means taking a bus back out into Jersey, and...I've been spoiled by trains now. I take the train every day, and it has absolutely spoiled me.

See, on a train you go smoothly, usually through interesting scenery (either through bits of nature or the backs of industrial areas, both of which have stuff to look at and think about if you feel like it), with a more comfortable ride, with more space, and all by yourself on the track. On a bus, you're stuck on the road with ten thousand idiots riding one to a SUV, in a herky-jerky stop-and-go motion, and crammed up against someone who doesn't like you either.

Once you go to a train, you just can't go back. It's like being cast out of Eden. I have the knowledge of good and evil now...

Eventually, I got home, grabbed dinner, and drove by the house -- I thought I was going to Thing 2's baseball game -- and stopped, because my mother-in-law's car was there. She was watching my younger son, and hadn't taken him to the game because my wife had been all morose about the weather and talked her out of it.

(The Wife had headed off, during the day, to a Cub Scout Weebelo campout for Thing 1, after waiting for the guys to deliver and install our new washing machine -- which I needed to do laundry so I could go on this trip. My family for the last three days has been like an intricate meshing of gears, where any misstep would cause calamity.)

So mother-in-law went home, and Thing 2 and I settled into our boy-dad time together. We stayed up late (late for him, at least) playing videogames, and then I put him to bed.

Yesterday, he slept late, so I did, too. (Until 8! That's late for me these days.) I let him have a lazy couple of videogame hours -- why not? -- and then set off on our errands. First was a birthday party at a horse ranch fifteen minutes up the road -- I never cease to be amazed at how rural it gets so quickly when I head north from where I live; it's rod-and-gun country almost immediately -- which was cold and damp and foggy but not actually raining. (And that was very good, since real rain would have sent us all to move the festivities into the barn. It's not a cute picturesque red barn, either, but a real, modern, concrete working barn full of horse stalls and other indications that horses frequent that vicinity.) The kids got to go on a hayride and ride ponies, but what they liked best, inevitably, was running up the hillside above the party area, where there was a huge exposed rock that they could play around on.

After that, Thing 2 and I went off for the possibly even more important festivities: Free Comic Book Day! (I've had to miss it once or twice in recent years, due to the Nebula Awards, so I guess there's one bright point to losing my skiffy job.) We went to Joker's Child in Fair Lawn, a decent (if very superhero-focused) shop that I only seem to make it to once a year for FCBD. But I actually spent some money, so that should be OK.

One of the things I bought -- Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos Digest -- was for the boys, and it was a great thing to get, since Thing 2 read it in the car during our next leg of the drive, read it while I was getting a haircut (I desperately needed one), and read it while I was buying some new clothes for Sales Meeting (yes, it's officially casual dress, but I'd prefer clothes that don't make me look like a bum while I'm trying to convince them of the merits of Wiley GAAP 2009). So I don't want to hear anybody complaining about how Franklin Richards is just a Calvin & Hobbes rip-off -- which, by the way, Thing 2 has been also reading a lot of lately, though he still likes Garfield best (what can you do? he's seven) -- when it can keep an antsy boy's attention like that for more than an hour. Sumerak and Eliopolus, I salute you.

Then we collapsed in exhaustion at my mother's house for our weekly dinner -- well, I wanted to collapse, but we ended up playing a complicated tag game with a Chinese Yo-yo, so we kept busy. Then we finally went home, and, as we were thinking about bed, The Wife and Thing 2 came home, having given up on a second night in the woods after the first one was just Too Damn Cold. So there was a flurry of laundry and showers -- me doing their laundry, to get the campfire smell and we-really-hope-not-bugs out of everything; them showering to warm up -- and then off to bed. Even The Wife collapsed early, since she hadn't slept the night before.

Then this morning was more laundry, more packing, trying to work on some ComicMix reviews (without much luck, though I hope there will be one tomorrow), and then running off to the airport. I have learned to park in the big structure right by the terminals instead of the "economy" lots out in Upper Lower Slobbovia, which made the whole process much nicer. I also managed to only have carry-ons this time, which somewhat mitigated the fact that I was in the back-row window seat, and hence almost precisely the last person off the plane.

I rode to the Ritz-Carlton in one of the designated Wiley cars with someone much more important in the company than I am, and made some light chatter on the way. Then I was overawed by the hotel, which is really too fancy for someone like me. But I'll take it.

Tomorrow is a light day, so I might get out into the city of Sarasota to poke around -- I've been in Florida many times, but never over on this coast. And then Tuesday is wall-to-wall meetings, with a somewhat saner schedule on Wednesday and Thursday.

So, if I'm posting long things this week, it's because I'm spending too damn much time up in my room, instead of enjoying a fancy hotel down in the sub-tropics. I hope not to.

Is This the Pill That Makes You Larger?

I've been quiet here all day -- I might have a what-I've-been-doing post tomorrow morning to explain that, if I have time -- but over at ComicMix I reviewed Frederik Peeters's graphic novel Blue Pills, which isn't about either Viagra or The Matrix.

Oh, I Know Something...

This week's "Manga Friday" at ComicMix features me (as always) going on and on about how amazing Yoshihiro Tatsumi is, in particular his upcoming book Good-Bye.

Small Favor by Jim Butcher

Small Favor is the tenth novel in Butcher's contemporary fantasy series "The Dresden Files," about Chicagoland's only consulting wizard. (Though the "consulting" part has been pushed far into the background for the last half-a-dozen books or so; I can't honestly remember if any of the books show him taking an walk-in case.) It was turned, briefly, into a bad TV show a couple of years back, and Small Favor is currently riding high on the New York Times bestseller list. So you might have heard of this.

Which is good, because explaining all of the backstory necessary for this book might be difficult. I bet it would all make sense if you actually read the book -- it's not like I have an encyclopedic memory; I'd forgotten most of the previous nine books long ago -- but cramming it all down into a paragraph or so is something else.

Oh, OK. Let's try. In Harry Dresden's world, like most Type II urban fantasy, every kind of supernatural entity you can think of is real, and a bewildering array of powers, entities, and factions have been introduced in the earlier books. (There are at least four kinds of vampires, for example -- Red Court, Black Court, White Court, and Jade Court.) In this book, the important supernatural players are the two courts of Faerie (Winter and Summer) -- each of which has a maiden-mother-crone queen system, to boot -- three knights who carry holy swords (each built around a nail from the crucifixion), and the knights' opposite number, an order of human-possessing demons each linked to one of Judas's thirty pieces of silver.

Harry's own White Council of Wizards is, by comparison, unimportant in Small Favor, and the local mafioso who's become aware of the supernatural world, Johnny Marcone, is little more than a Maguffin, just someone Harry is trying to find for most of the book. The werewolves are completely offstage, and the rumored "Black Council" doesn't show up, either. And the only vampire who shows up is Dresden's half-brother Thomas, who's a good guy at this point, anyway. (So it's not nearly as complicated as it could have been.)

Does any of that make sense?


Anyway, this is the kind of mystery where the events that drag the detective into the case don't necessarily have much to do with what's really going on -- Small Favor starts out looking like it'll be about a battle between the Winter and Summer courts of Faerie, as Summer sends increasingly-more-deadly assassins after Harry, and Harry is forced by Queen Mab of Winter to act as her emissary in the second of his three long-promised services to her. But Small Favor ends up being about the conflict between the Order of the Blackened Denarius (the demons in coins) and the Knights of the Cross (the sword-nail dudes).

In the grand urban fantasy style, it all ends up with a big battle scene, during which lots of things blow up, are shot at, or otherwise get knocked about. (None of which I'll actually describe here, since there's four hundred pages of other stuff to set it all up that I don't have the energy to go through in detail.)

I've seen people complaining that Dresden is getting too powerful, so the series should start winding down, but I don't see that, myself. He lost an important piece of power in the previous book, and his major magical strategy is, as he admits himself, just blasting away at things. His raw power is decent, but his finesse is horrible; he survives, like so many hardboiled heroes, on backtalk, attitude, and pure will rather than by any specific skills. The cliche to watch out for at this point is when the more powerful whoositzes keep saying "I won't kill you this time, because you're still useful to me." The way Dresden has been pissing off magical personages, he's going to need more than that to remain alive in the future.

Small Favor stands decently well on its own, but the meta-plot is becoming more and more important, and the usual fantasy escalation of danger is gripping ever more tightly. At this point, I'd prefer a book or three about cases that didn't involve Faerie or vampire Courts, that were just supernatural mystery stories. It's not so much that Dresden is becoming superpowerful as that he's saving the world far too much for a noir series. In noir, the world cannot be saved; it can only be endured. Dresden is getting too shiny and good-two-shoes; I'd like to see him have to make a decision between two unpleasant choices rather than winning all the time.


(But in general I'd like to see Type II urban fantasy move more towards mystery-novel structures and away from the swamps of high fantasy, so this is only a specific version of a general argument.)

All in all, Small Favor is a dependably entertaining entry in a quite enjoyable series. And Harry's whining about "people" possibly getting "hurt" has almost entirely disappeared, of which I completely approve.

The Difference Between Mysteries and SFF

Well, one of the differences, as I noticed when looking at the various reports about the Edgar Banquet last night. (Here's one from PW for you to chew on.)

The outgoing and incoming Mystery Writers of America Presidents: massive bestsellers Nelson DeMille and Harlan Coben.

The outgoing and incoming SFWA Presidents: Michael Capobianco and Russell Davis.

No offense to Capobianco or Davis, but there's just no comparison. And there was a day when the DeMille and Coben-level writers in our field were routinely serving SFWA as Presidents and other officers. I'm not a member, so I don't know what went wrong, but it's very clear something did.

Nick Mamatas Sets the Record Straight

I read Richard K. Morgan's recent call for more happiness and hand-holding in SFF (among writers, I mean -- he still apparently wants the books to be all dreary sad slogs), scoffed at his claim that "crime writers" never fight with each other, but instead sing Kumbaya together around the campfires of their discarded low-denomination bills.

And I knew he was wrong -- badly, ridiculously wrong, as anyone who's ever heard of the cozy-hardboiled split would know -- but other things got in the way, and I didn't climb into high dudgeon to lambaste him.

And it's a good thing, since Nick Mamatas has just done it for me, and for all of us. Better than I probably would have, too.

On the Subject of Negative Reviews

Have I linked to OH JOHN RINGO NO yet? It's a great -- if very long -- review of a series of books by John Ringo that are repellently fascinating. It's a wonderful example of how to review something that has aspects you absolutely can't stand without attacking the author or backing down from your criticisms.

No Pants Day Is Back Again!

I'm not celebrating myself -- and my colleagues at Wiley, I'm sure, thank me for that -- but don't let that stop the rest of you.

Remember: the first Friday of May is always No Pants Day!

Quote of the Week

"A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land -- an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For though it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at times seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations."
- Daniel Mendelsohn, p.78 of the 4/28/08 New Yorker, describing the Persian Wars in the course of reviewing a new edition of Herodotus's Histories

Poor Widdle "Jim" Patterson

He "doesn’t like it when you tease him about his success, or suggest that many of his books are written by assistants (they’re not, he insists: he deals with absolutely every plot twist and detail, even if he doesn’t write every word)," says Publishers Weekly's Sara Nelson.

Not to be pedantic about it, but writing every word is what writers do. Someone who "deals with absolutely every plot twist and detail" is generally called an editor.

Suck it up, Patterson. If your books are actually written by your assistants, it's crazy to be annoyed that people believe that they are. Either write every word, or take that time to count your money, but don't whine about it. If you want to write more, there's nobody stopping you.

Read in April

April was another big month for me; I was trying to read a graphic novel (comic, manga -- whatever the heck you call something with words and pictures and a binding) every day, and succeeded most of the time. In fact, I probably read more books this month (47) than any time in the past ten years. And what did I read? Well...

• Lewis Trondheim with Eric Cartier, Kaput & Zosky (4/1)
• Charles Dickens, adapted by Rick Geary, Great Expectations (4/2)
• Greg Keyes, The Born Queen (4/3)
• Brian K. Vaughan, et. al., Ex Machina, Vol. 6: Power Down (4/3)
• Osamu Tezuka, Dororo, Vol. 1 (4/3)
• Greg Rucka & Chris Samnee, Queen & Country, Vol. 8: Operation: Red Panda (4/4)
• Michel Rabagliati, Paul Goes Fishing (4/5)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 6 (4/6)
  School days are tough when you're a ninja, and tests doubly so -- this volume is right in the middle of a long storyline about the series of tests Naruto and his friends (along with a large cast of other young ninjas) are taking in their attempt to progress from apprentices to journeymen. This particular part of the test is what you might call the practical section: running around a large, dangerous, fenced-in forest, fighting the other teams for scrolls. It's a pretty nasty case of grading on a curve -- at best, only one-half of the teams can pass. Naruto is demonstrably better than the other manga series in the same, post-Toriyama style; Kishimoto has not just a great sense of story and character (I can usually remember and tell apart his cast of dozens), but also a expressive style that's just Westernized enough to read easily around the world. Guess I'll keep reading these.
• Bob Burden, Rick Geary, & Steve Oliff, Gumby Collected #1 (4/6)
• Emmanuel Guibert, Sardine in Outer Space 5: My Cousin Manga and Other Stories (4/7)
• P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (4/7)
• Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 7: Garden of Souls (4/7)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 7 (4/7)
  See above; only at the very end of this volume do Naruto and his teammates get out of the Forest of Death. (Manga rivals epic fantasy in its portentious names, but Kishimoto generally makes his places live up to their monikers.)
• Joann Sfar, Little Vampire (4/8)
• Yukako Kabei & Shiori Teshirogi, Kieli, Vol. 1 (4/9)
• Kyo Shirodaira & Eta Mizuno, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 3 (4/10)
• Paul Melko, Singularity's Ring (4/10)
• Heather McHugh & David Lehman, editors, The Best American Poetry: 2007 (4/11)
• Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, & Warren Pleece, Life Sucks (4/11)
• Rick Geary, J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography (4/12)
• Ushio Mizta & Akiyoshi Ohta, Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1 (4/14)
• Jim Steinmeyer, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (4/16)
• Tom Pomplun, editor, Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15 (4/16)
• Jim Salicrup, editor, Tales from the Crypt, No. 1: Ghouls Gone Wild (4/16)
• Ai Morinaga, My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 3 (4/17)
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 8: Legends (4/18)
• Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (4/18)
• Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18 (4/19)