Movie Log: Ghost Town

My current earworm: dis town is coming like a ghost town. It has nothing at all to do with the movie, and I can't even remember what reggae song it came from -- Google, hear my plea! Aha! I think it's the Specials -- but it's stuck in my head, and I remembered it because of this movie, so I'll pass it along to your head in hopes that helps.

So. Ghost Town. A Ricky Gervais vehicle, evidently not as successful in its first week as its makers had intended. I'd taken a day off on Friday (just because) and so The Wife and I had a middle-of-the-day "date" while the kids were in school, to see this movie and go out to lunch. It does have the requisite high concept, and follows the precise arc required for a commercial movie these days, but manages to carve out a space for itself through clever dialogue and (particularly) Gervais.

Gervais is a British dentist now living in New York, and a confirmed misanthrope. His job means that most of the people he deals with on a daily basis can't speak to him, and he prefers it that way. He's not a horrible man, but he is a prickly jerk, and there's no reason for him to change. But then he goes into the hospital for a colonoscopy -- and has complete anesthesia, since he says there's no way he's going to be awake while they do that -- and comes out of it the day afterward with a clean bill of health and the ability to see ghosts. (It turns out, a bit later, that he died for seven minutes during the procedure, which is evidently what triggered the ghost-seeing.)

New York is full of ghosts, all people who left something undone, and once they realize Gervais can see him, they besiege him with their demands. (Well, they besiege him in a quiet, respectful way, and are easily driven away when the plot requires it.) The lead ghost is played by Greg Kinnear, whose widow, Tea Leoni, lives downstairs from Gervais.

Kinnear thinks he needs to stop Leoni from marrying her new boyfriend, and tells Gervais that he can keep all of the other ghosts away if Gervais helps him. Gervais doesn't want to help anyone, and has a bad relationship with Leoni to the extent that he even knows she exists, but he finally agrees.

Gervais of course soon falls in love with Leoni -- can you blame him? -- and she comes to first stand him, then like him, and then, maybe, even care for him. But then the plot engines surge onward, into crises both false and real, and the inevitable significant montage. (Parenthetically, do you know the difference between sentiment and true emotion? Sentiment is cheap and tawdry and only affects those idiots. True emotion comes from the deep wellsprings of character and makes me mist up. I'm not going to tell you which description pertains to Ghost Town's significant montage, but it might blow my cover as a tough guy.)

Ghost Town is a romantic comedy, and I wouldn't dream of giving away the ending, but...you pretty much know what it is already, right? (One of the main reasons of going to a movie like this is to get that ending, as long as it's earned.)

I found Ghost Town very funny and quite charming; Gervais in particular is at least amusing every second he's on screen. And Kinnear is a good and subtle actor, though he does seem to play basically the same character all of the time now. Ghost Town doesn't seem to be doing a lot of business out in theaters, which is a shame -- it's a standard Hollywood entertainment, but it does everything right and is a fine example of its genre.

Movie Log: Mostly Martha

I never do things the easy way, so instead of seeing the American movie No Reservations (which apparently is decent), I tracked down the German movie it was a remake of, Mostly Martha.

The plot is familiar from the ads for the newer movie: Martha Klein is the chef at a fancy Hamburg restaurant, entirely focused on cooking to the exclusion of everything else in her life. (The restaurant's owner, Frida, even has ordered Martha to see a therapist, but Martha spends that time talking about food.) But then her sister dies in a car wreck on the way to visit her, and Martha's eight-year-old niece Lina, herself damaged by her mother's death, is left in Martha's care.

Frida, trying to help, hires another chef to help out Martha. (The kitchen may already be underhanded, and one of Martha's assistants is going out on maternity leave -- so this isn't entirely about Martha and Lina.) The new chef is Mario, a only mildly stereotypical Italian, who says he greatly admires Martha's cooking. She, of course, reacts as if he's her replacement, and goes frosty and reserved.

And then...well, the disc I had from Netflix was scratched, so I lost about ten minutes of the movie in the middle. But I suspect everyone can guess how this ends -- with a new family forming, and everybody becoming a bit happier and more human.

I hesitate to make a critical judgement on a movie that was missing its middle, so I won't. I enjoyed what I saw of Mostly Martha, and I expect the movie without missing pieces was even better than the way I saw it. (And now The Wife and I are contemplating seeing No Reservations to see how it measures up.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/27

Since I review books -- whatever I feel like here and various graphic novels and manga for ComicMix -- I get books to review in the mail. (It's what they call a virtuous circle.) But I do feel a bit guilty, since there's no way I could review everything I see in the mail. What I can do, though, is note everything that comes in, and say a little bit about it here. And so I do, every week.

This week, the mailbag brought me:

Neil Gaiman's new novel for young readers, The Graveyard Book. I have theories about many writers -- usually frivolous ones, based on slight evidence -- and my theory about Gaiman is that he gets bored easily. That comes from my observation, around 2002 or so, that every single Neil Gaiman novel was (reasonably) described by its publisher as the first something -- Good Omens was his first novel, Neverwhere his first solo, Stardust his first not based on something else, American Gods his first novel written solo as a novel to begin with, Coraline his first YA, Anansi Boys his first sequel (sort-of), and InterWorld his first co-written YA. Add onto that all of his film and comics work, and Gaiman looks like a guy who keeps himself interested by doing very different things regularly. Whether that's true or not, he's managed the difficult feat of building a devoted audience who will follow him no matter what he does (really, this is astonishing in publishing) and who does a lot of interesting, different stuff. I read one chapter of Graveyard Book as a story in the anthology Wizards a year or so back, and didn't think it entirely worked all by itself. But I expect to read this book as soon as possible, and I hope to love it. The Graveyard Book will be published by HarperCollins in October.

David Marusek -- author of the excellent but slightly flawed novel Counting Heads, which was also briefly famous as the target of David Itzkoff's first misguided SF review for The New York Times Book Review -- was also one of the best new short story writers of the '90s, with stories like "The Wedding Album," "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy," and "Getting to Know You." Subterranean Press collected his stories into a nice, expensive hardcover last year, under the title Getting to Know You, but I know that was too rich for my blood, so it may have been rich for yours as well. Del Rey is remedying that situation now, with a trade paperback edition of Getting to Know You coming on December 30th. You might say that, if you've been reading the various "Best of the Year" collections, you've already seen most of all of these stories. That may be true, but you don't have them all together in one book, do you? And they're certainly worth it.

Margo Lanagan has been writing tough, uncompromising stories for young readers for many years; they've been collected in the massively acclaimed books Black Juice, White Time, and Red Spikes (which I had mixed feelings about; probably because I read it too quickly). And now -- possibly for the first time; certainly for the first time that I know about -- she's written a novel. Tender Morsels, like so many of Lanagan's stories, is about a young woman damaged by the world -- a teenager with a baby daughter and an abusive father, who has been given the gift to flee the harsh real world into an imagined heaven where nothing bad will ever happen. Of course she can't stay there forever, of there would be no story; Tender Morsels seems to be the story of the collision of those two worlds (or, more broadly, of the collision of dreams with reality). Knopf will publish it on October 14th, and I expect it will be one of the major YA novels of the year.

Ghost Radio is the first novel of Leopoldo Gout, of whom I hadn't heard before this. (And I'd definitely remember that name.) The biography in the book describes him as a producer, director, graphic novelist, writer, and composer -- I'm surprised a guy that busy found time to sit down and write a whole book. Ghost Radio is the story of a late-night Mexican call-in radio show about supernatural creatures, and how its host (Joaquin) deals with sudden fame and the dark secrets of his past. (Does anyone else think it sound an awful lot like the male, "mainstream" version of Kitty and the Midnight Hour?) Ghost Radio will be published by William Morrow on October 14th, in hardcover.

I saw a few comics collections this week, including another one of those packages from Aurora (the only company currently sending me yaoi, for good or ill). I don't have much to say about any of these, so let me just bullet them:

• Kiss All The Boys, Vol. 3 by Shiuko Kano, from Aurora's Deux imprint for yaoi, finishes up the story, with lots and lots of cute boys having sex with each other, for the enjoyment of Japanese young women.
• Mister Mistress, Vol. 2 is by Rize Shinba, but otherwise is much the same, only the seductive guy in this one is an incubus.
• Oh, My God! Vol. 2 probably has less explicit sex -- it's rated for older teen rather than "mature," like the two books above -- but it's another yaoi story, this time by Natsuho Shino.
• And Hitohira, Vol. 1 is a more normal manga story, by Idumi Kirihara, about a timid freshman girl who is forced to join the drama club.
• Top Shelf Productions sent me their 2008 Seasonal Sampler -- and they'll throw it in for a penny if you buy books from their sale, as well.
• And Afro Samurai, Vol. 1 -- a dark, bloody manga series by Takashi Okazaki that was the basis of the animated series, and which I recently reviewed for ComicMix -- has been published by Tor/Seven Seas.

Kage Baker's new novel, The House of the Stag -- which I also might have mentioned before -- has also just been published, by Tor in hardcover. It's set in the same world as her novel The Anvil of the World, which I quite liked. (And so this is yet another book I'd like to read -- onto the pile it goes.)

From a small regional press -- my region, to be precise: the NYC-Jersey-Philly corridor -- called PS Books comes a rock 'n roll novel called Broad Street by Christine Weiser. It looks semi-autobiographical, since it's by a female Philly rocker and about one, and Weiser is the copublisher of Philadelphia Stories magazine, of which PS Books is an offshoot (and Broad Street is their first publication). On the positive side, I love the cover, which is bright and eye-catching and shows exactly what the book is about. This one isn't too long, so I might find time to get to it soon.

Last this week is Jo Walton's Half a Crown, the third (and aparrently last) in the powerful alternate history series that includes Farthing and Ha'penny. This one jumps quite a bit forward in time; it's set in 1960. But it again follows two storylines, one in first person from the POV of a young woman and the other in tight third following former police detective Carmichael, now head of Britain's secret police, the Watch. Half a Crown will be published in October by Tor, and this one I have to make time for. (Of course, I can generally read two, possibly three novels in a week -- and I got six this week that I'd be interested in reading if I can get to them.)

Movie Log: The Missionary

I've spent the last twenty-five years vaguely intending to see The Missionary someday (and A Private Function at approximately the same time), but that someday finally came last week.

The Missionary was one of the flurry of movies put out by George Harrison's production company Handmade Films in the early '80s. Handmade was formed to finance Monty Python's The Life of Brian when EMI pulled out, and Handmade's roster of films do have a decided Pythonian bent. The Missionary was early in their string, before the body blows of Shanghai Surprise and Nuns on the Run, when Handmade was a respectable, even highbrow, British film outfit.

Michael Palin is Rev. Charles Fortescue, an Anglican priest returning from a ten-year mission somewhere in Africa to 1906 London and hoping to get a nice village parish somewhere so he can marry his dim but frightfully organized fiancee Deborah (Phoebe Nicholls). Unfortunately, the Bishop instead gives him another mission: bringing the gospel to the "fallen women" of London.

Fortescue, with the financial aid of the randy and bored Lady Isabel Ames (Maggie Smith), sets up his mission, and attracts many young women of negotiable virtue via the unlikely stratagem of being friendly, non-judgmental, and sexually available. (Palin plays this a bit bashful, as if he's too British to object to a lady's request -- though he did object to Lady Isabel for quite a while.) As others have noted, the entire movie is essentially the Castle Anthrax bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail writ large, with a "aren't those religious people so hypocritical" subtext.

The plot doesn't entirely make sense, and wanders off in several directions somewhat aimlessly, though The Missionary maintains an even tone, which goes a long way to sell all of the odd and unlikely moments. However, the ending just collapses into a unearned, and hasty, happy ending that really doesn't follow from the immediately previous events. This many years later, I have no idea if the problems were funding, script, or editing -- or maybe all three -- but something went wrong, and the movie ends with a muffled, unfortunate thud.

I'll also note that the current DVD has a rotten old pan-and-scan transfer which is obnoxiously noticeable in several scenes. I don't expect this minor middle-aged movie is going to get a new transfer any time soon, but it's still a shame to see any movie so shabbily treated.

Move Log: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is a Wes Anderson movie, which means that it's odd. (It also means that Bill Murray will probably be involved somehow, and, as you can see, Murray plays the title character, a Couseau-esque documentarian and sea explorer.)

Life Aquatic has an odd, lumpy shape and never hits a consistent rhythm -- I'm not saying that it wanted to have a smooth shape or a rhythm, though, since it floats serenely along, like some bizarre denizen of the deep ocean, perfectly content to be what it is. Murray is at the center, and everything else revolves around him. It's all basically a comedy, though there's a lot of strife, danger, and real loss along the way.

It's the kind of movie that's best explained by listing the people in it, so...

• Anjelica Houston is Zissou's wife, Eleanor, whose rich parents originally bankrolled their expeditions and who, in what seems like a running joke, is always described as the brains of Team Zissou
• Jeff Goldblum is Zissou's greatest rival (and Eleanor's ex-husband), Alistair Hennessey
• Willem Defoe is Klaus Daimler, now Zissou's right-hand man (after his long-time best friend was eaten by a "jaguar shark" on his last outing)
• Owen Wilson is Ned Plimpton (aka Kingsley Zissou), who may be Zissou's long-lost illegitimate son, and who definitely is a Southern airline pilot and new member of Team Zissou
• Michael Gambon is Zissou's agent, Oseary Drakoulias (whose very name seems like a deeply inside joke that I didn't catch)
• and Cate Blanchett is the pregnant British journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson, who is probably going to write a cover story for a National Geographic-esque magazine on Zissou, but may turn it into a hatchet piece along the way (and who is also falling in love with Ned)

I didn't mention the pirates, which are thrown in for spice later in the film than you'd expect, and a series of stop-motion animated fish, all of which are too colorful and bizarre to be real.

In the end, the best was to describe The Life Aquatic is the way I did up top: it's a Wes Anderson film. If you've enjoyed his other pictures, you'll probably like this one. But if "indy"-style filmmaking annoys you, stay far away.

Banned Books Week

In case you were unaware, today begins Banned Books Week. (Which should probably be named Anti-Banned Books Week, but leave that aside for now.) Details are on the ALA's website, including all sorts of events.

If you can't make it to an event, but still want to celebrate, one of the best ways is to read a Banned Book -- since that's precisely what the people banning books want to stop. And so, below, I've popped in a list (from that very website) of the most challenged titles from last year. It's a good place to start.

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Throwing to ComicMix Twice More

I missed linking to my most recent two ComicMix posts on their day-of-posting, but here I am, just a little tardy:

• On Thursday, I reviewed David Heatley's new collection of comics, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down
• And yesterday, my Manga Friday column covered three books with more than a bit of sex in them: Sundome, Vol. 3, Make Love & Peace, and Future Lovers, Vol. 1.

Next week, I think you folks will see a Western and the usual manga on Friday, but I'm not sure what (if anything) else.

Not Even Wrong by Paul Collins

Collins is the author of The Trouble With Tom (about the posthumous adventures of Tom Paine's corpse and thoughts) and of Sixpence House (about moving from the US to Hay-on-Wye), among others. And I think he's becoming one of my favorite contemporary non-fiction writers: he has a mania for research, an ear for carefully precise and true sentences, and a specific, particular perspective on all that he writes about.

Not Even Wrong is subtitled "Adventures in Autism," and it has two main strands: first is the realization of Collins and his wife Jennifer that their son Morgan is autistic, and of their struggles to understand what that means and what they can do about it. The other side of the book is Collins's reaction to that diagnosis, and it's a typical one for Collins: he dives into the literature of autism, from Peter the Wild Boy of eighteenth century Hanover to the frauds of Bruno Bettelheim to the experts of today. It's a shock to realize how young the study of the autism spectrum is: Asperger himself worked just before WWII (and his work was forgotten, or untranslated into English, for decades), and many of the major "early" researchers in English are still alive and active.

Collins is a thoughtful writer, good at digging up original sources and doing research on site as well as strong in synthesis and just plain putting words into a pleasing order. He's worth reading no matter what he's writing about, because the fact that he thinks this subject is worth his time is in itself a validation of the topic. I will admit to being doubly interested in this book, though: as I said when I read Sixpence House, Collins seems to be nearly exactly my age, and his first son Morgan is close to the age of my first son (whom I've been calling Thing 1 here). Morgan, as Collins learns in this book, is autistic. And my older son also falls somewhere on that spectrum, with something milder that's been variously diagnosed as Asperger's, ADHD, and the shrugging catch-all PDD-NOS. I'm not equating the two at all, but obviously I have a strong interest these days in stories of other parents dealing with difficult boys who live in their own worlds.

Not Even Wrong is not only a book for men like Collins and myself, for men trying to understand their sons. It's a book for anyone who wonders how we communicate with each other, how the brain works and doesn't work, and what we've learned. And Collins, who has a knack for digging up obscure historical information, is just the one to tell this story.

Movie Log: Married Life

Married Life is a stylized, retro movie that aims for Big Truths, but doesn't quite close the deal. It's heavily narrated by Pierce Brosnan (in character), and Brosnan tells us what to think, what to expect, and what we're about to see.

It's not nearly as inventive and thought-provoking as it wants to be, and it ends up falling far short of the old noirs that are its inspiration. It's not a bad movie -- it's worth seeing for the performances and as an interesting failure -- but its twists aren't as unique and surprising as it seems to think they are.

Married Life is the story of a double love triangle in 1949, cleverly depicted on the DVD cover. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson are a long-time married couple; they have at least one son (grown up, married, with a young child of his own) and Cooper works at some unspecified but important office job in whatever city this is. Cooper is also having an affair with young Rachel McAdams, and he wants to leave his wife for her...but he can't stand to see his wife hurt, so he decides to kill her instead. (This could be exciting, but it doesn't happen until halfway through the movie.)

Brosnan is Cooper's bachelor friend, a man who has never been ready to be tied down by a woman. And so of course he falls for McAdams as well, and starts trying to maneuver events so that Cooper doesn't kills Clarkson and so that he can end up with McAdams. The movie, then, is the story of these people's relationships over the course of a month or so, as they all pursue their own romantic stratagems and feints.

There is a twist at the end, but not a particularly shocking one; as I said, any genre director handed this project in 1949 would have made a stronger movie of it. Again, Married Life is a pleasant misfire; the ending falls quite flat. If you don't go into it expecting greatness, though, you may be reasonably happy with it.

More Commercial Messages

Oops, I missed one. Amazon is also excited about the fall TV season, and is selling downloads of many shows right now!

I don't watch much TV -- especially fiction TV -- these days, and I have a DVR (which means I can save those TV shows myself for free, if I wanted to), so this service does not speak to me very strongly. But Amazon has got movies, too, and that could be good for people who like watching movies on their computer. (I've done it on my laptop on business trips, which was better than I expected, but I don't see why I'd bother at home, when a real TV is available.)

(Oops, I see from the banner that, through some technical whoozits that I won't be able to explain to you, Amazon can actually download its videos on demand right to a TiVo DVR. So it's more convenient than I thought it was.)

Anyway, here's another banner. Click this one if you want to buy yourself some downloadable video. I hear the Chuck is particularly good right now.

Today's Commercial Message from Amazon

Amazon would really, really like me to encourage people to sign up for Amazon Prime -- the program that gives unlimited two-day shipping. (I don't buy enough from Amazon to make it worthwhile for me, personally, so I can't speak to how much it costs or how useful the benefit really is. But Amazon is very hot on it right now.)

Anyway, have a banner!



Click on it if you want to know more, If not, I think there's a quote immediately below this...

Quote of the Week

"Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior."
- Steven Brust, Jhegaala, p.251

Movie Log: Then She Found Me

As I try to catch back up on the movies I've seen recently, I find I remember some of them better than others. Then She Found Me, for example, is mostly a blur.

It's directed by Helen Hunt from a script she co-wrote based on an Elinor Lipman novel, and Hunt also stars (looking thin, wan, and old -- not what you'd expect a director to do for herself) as a NYC schoolteacher whose new husband (Matthew Broderick) turns out to be an sadly overgrown boy who runs away from her.

The newly divorced father of one of her students -- Colin Firth -- is interested in her, so the two of them dance around the fact that it's really much too soon for both of them, and they both know that.

And then Bette Midler sashays in, as Hunt's long-lost birthmother, who is also a very Midleresque local talk-show host.

Oh, and it's all wrapped up in Hunt's desire both to have a child -- which has to be hers biologically -- and to know what its like to be a "real" biological child, not adopted. (Since she is consumed by the fact that she herself was adopted and always has thought her brother, the "real" son, had it all better.)

There's too much plot for one movie here; it shows all the signs of being adapted from a novel by someone who loved that novel too much, and couldn't bear to get rid of any of the best parts. Then She Found Me would have been better served jettisoning some of the ungainly bits and streamlining itself. It's a pleasant movie with solid performances, but it feels like the highlights reel of a film that's several hours longer.

Oddly, I've now seen Colin Firth in a romantic comedy about schoolteachers (this and Fever Pitch) twice in a few months. Seems an odd niche.

If you like the performers, you'll enjoy Then She Found Me. And if you don't expect too much, you won't be disappointed -- it's a good movie, but not much more than that.

Still on the Dark Side

One year ago today, I started my new job as a Marketing Manager...which makes this, I guess, my Wiley-versary.

I've been in marketing one whole year, and I still haven't grown horns. Come to think of it, nobody's taught me the secret handshake or invited me to join the world-wrecker club, either. (Perhaps I've been blackballed?) That's terribly discouraging.

But the job itself has been great, and I'm coming to enjoy accounting books. (OK, that might be a slight overstatement.) I've always liked making books...but I think I've always liked getting books to readers even more.

Movie Log: The Savages

I saw The Savages in large part because the preview made it look enough like a comedy that The Wife said, "Let's see that." I'd read some reviews, and hadn't quite decided whether I was interested, but that was fine with me.

It does have funny moments, but it's not essentially a comedy, in case you've seen the same preview. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play middle-aged siblings -- Wendy and Jon Savage -- who have to care for their aged and deteriorating father Lenny (played by Peter Bosco) after Lenny's girlfriend dies and her kids kick Lenny out of her house in a sub-baked western retirement community.

All head back to Buffalo, where Jon is a professor of drama. (Wendy is an office temp-cum-struggling playwright in New York, though she's doing well enough economically to runaway up to Buffalo for a few months and not have her apartment sealed when she returns.) Lenny goes into a nursing home, and Wendy & Jon cope.

That's the whole movie: it's about how two adult children -- and I use that oxymoronic term deliberately -- live with the knowledge that their father is much closer to death then they thought, and how they live with each other. They both do end up making changes in their lives, by the end, but those are small, reasonable changes, not the usual Hollywood "everything is different" whirlwind.

It's an easier movie to watch than I might be making it sound: it's not about death, it's about how to go on living even though there is death. And both Linney and Hoffman are excellent in it. This is what a small, script-driven movie is supposed to be like; it's a gem.

A Not-At-All Snarky Question

Hasn't Jonathan McCalmont quit blogging and gone home at least once already?

Ah, yes. He did.

I wonder if this time will stick?

Movie Log: Outsourced

I often say that I like romantic comedies, but what passes for a Hollywood romantic comedy is usually utter crap. What I mean is that I like movies like Outsourced -- only mildly manipulative, and with reasonable facsimiles of human emotion and motivation driving the plot.

Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is a mid-level worker bee in the Seattle call center of a tchotchke catalog when he gets the bad news: his entire department is being outsourced to India. The only bit of good news: he gets to train the new staff, and then his weasely boss, Dave (Matt Smith) will transfer him to a new, stable job back in the US.

The movie doesn't waste much time on this, which is smart -- it's the premise, and we knew that's what it was about from the poster. Todd lands in a small Indian city -- picturesque and backwards as the places cosmopolitans like Todd end up in to learn better always are -- and begins training both the new local head of the call center, Purohit (Asif Basra) and the rest of the staff.

The actual romance plot -- with Asha (Ayesha Dharker) -- takes a long time to get started, so Outsourced seems more like a pleasant fish-out-of-water comedy for most of its length. It does have several of the obvious jokes -- diarrhea more than once -- but isn't too obvious about them.

Outsourced is a nice movie that doesn't try too hard; it might annoy viewers from more cosmopolitan parts of India (and India's immense, so it certainly has tens of millions of people more cosmopolitan than me), but otherwise it's just the thing for a night when you want to see a movie about people who are mostly positive and adult.

Obscure Book Meme

What ten books do you own that you think no one else on your friends list does?

• Anthony Trollope, The Land-Leaguers
  His last, unfinished novel. I've got a lot of Trollope (most of it still unread), but this is about the least likely one.
• Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
  From the shelf of poetry that I hope to get to someday.
• Matt Feazell, Ert!
  A collection of Cynicalman and other minicomics.
• Jeremy Pascal (the Holy Ghostwriter), God: The Ultimate Autobiography
  We sold a ton of these over many years at the SFBC, so they must exist somewhere in the wild, but I've never seen hide nor hair of them.
• S.J. Perelman, That Old Gang of Mine: The Early and Essential
  A collection of Perelman's very first (and not very good) magazine pieces.
• Wilson Sherman, illustrated by Newell Dean, Steering Locks!
  A bizarre little cartoon book that came into the bookclubs in the mid-90s, devoted to the cause of eliminating steering locks in cars -- it was published by the Automobile Safety Foundation of La Jolla. If I believed less in copyright, I'd scan the thing and post it; it's a marvel of its type.
• Benjamin R. Doolittle, The Grundilini
  Ben Doolittle is the son of one of my mother's oldest friends, and was one of those kids who was always doing something better than I was. (Nice guy, but that's still annoying.) Since then, he became both a doctor and a medical missionary. So I was surprised to see this book come in to the SFBC about six years ago...and even happier to see that it didn't seem to be all that good. (I still haven't read it, just in case it's wonderful.)
• A.J. Dunning, Extremes: Reflections on Human Behavior
  Essays about various historical topics by a Dutch cardiologist and polymath.
• Calvin Trillin, Barnet Frummer Is An Unbloomed Flower
  His first novel, assembled in 1969 from New Yorker stories that are now awfully late-60s.
• Bruce Thomas, The Big Wheel
  A rock 'n roll novel by Elvis Costello's bass player.

Via Nancy Leibovitz

Three Yen Plus One Journey Equals ComicMix

On Friday, my "Manga Friday" column was longer than usual as I covered the first three issues of Yen Press's new Yen+ magazine.

Today, I reviewed William Messner-Loebs's Journey Volume 1, which I'd managed to miss the first time around.

I'm working on another book right now -- with luck, for Wednesday, but I make no promises.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/20

Since I review books, I get mail -- that's how it works. But since I can't review everything, some of that mail would be left unmentioned. I didn't like that idea, so, instead, I post a "Reviewing the Mail" round-up every Monday morning, to at least mention the books that came in the mail the previous week.

I haven't read these yet, but that doesn't mean I won't, or that I don't want to -- and this will also be more timely than those (often very much later) reviews.

So, this week I saw:

Steven Erikson's newest novel -- and the eighth in his massive "Malazan Book of the Fallen" epic fantasy series -- is Toll the Hounds. This book marks an important point in the publishing history of the series; US publication (which started off five years behind the UK) has finally caught up. (The UK edition was out in July; this US edition is September -- that's the same season for most publishers, and counts as essentially simultaneous when compared with five years later.) I'm both very impressed by and hugely enjoying this series; it's one of the few things I was regularly reading at the old job that I'm keeping up with on my own time. (I reviewed the previous book in the series, Reaper's Gale, about a month ago; reviews and other things about earlier books in the series are linked from that post.) Tor has published Toll the Hounds in both trade paperback and hardcover (the latter mostly for libraries and rabid collectors), on September 16th. I do recommend the series; I don't recommend starting here.

That's all well and good, you say, but do you have a manga about a lawyer based on a videogame? As a matter of fact, I do -- and you can probably guess what it's called. There's a book in front of me that seems to have the ungainly title of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Official Casebook: Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files, and the stories (eleven of them) are each credited to a different manga-ka, from Tamako Yamaguchi to Seventh Gear to Naruzo to DIAGO. The whole thing was translated and adapted by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley -- I have a sneaking suspicion that those two are related somehow -- and will be published by Del Rey Manga on September 23rd (tomorrow, in other words). I haven't played the game -- the list of things I haven't done is huge, I know -- but I'm sure reading a manga is just like playing that game.

Shifting gears wildly again, here's Starfist: Wings of Hell, the thirteenth in the military SF series by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. It's coming from Del Rey on December 30th -- one of the very last books to be published this year, if there's anyone out there who collects such things -- in hardcover. I don't have much to say about this series, only that I'm flabbergasted to realize that it's made it up to book 13 while my attention was elsewhere.

Vertical continues to mine the backlist of Japan's godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka -- and it's a massive backlist, so they could be at it for decades -- with the launch of his Black Jack series in the US. The first volume -- of the projected seventeen it'll take to reprint the whole series as it exists in Japan -- is coming September 23rd, and another one will be coming every other month for the next three years. Black Jack is a medical drama Tezuka-style, which means that the hero is an enigmatic, mysterious scarred figure who swoops in and out of the stories, performing medical miracles gruffly, and never letting outsiders learn his true secrets. Vertical says that Black Jack is Tezuka's most popular series for adults in Japan, so I'm looking forward to this -- Tezuka is energetic and odd, with a compellingly clean line and unexpected characterizations.

Speaking of series that keep going forever, I also have here a novel entitled Paul of Dune, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Herbert and Anderson, apparently willing to chronicle every stray second in the Dune universe (and with a fanbase that's as equally eager to read ever more Dunebooks), have shoehorned this novel, the first of a trilogy, in between Dune and Dune Messiah. The next two books will be Jessica of Dune and Irulan of Dune -- and look for more novels to follow, one each year, as long as people keep buying them. This one was published September 16th.

Last this week is the new "Merry Gentry" novel from Laurell K. Hamilton, Swallowing Darkness. (She knows what we all think of when we read that title, right? Oh, and as long as I'm asking rhetorical questions, does anyone else think of this as the "Elfin Lays" series? Credit to Josepha Sherman for that one.) Speaking of impertinent questions about titles, I don't think I've ever mentioned in public that the first few books in this series -- A Kiss of Shadows, A Caress of Twilight, Seduced by Moonlight, and A Stroke of Midnight -- had such an obvious continuity that I was really hoping that book five would be Fucked Until Dawn. Sadly, it wasn't to be. But the series has run on a few books since then, and Merry has gotten herself pregnant -- with twins, each of which has three different fathers, if I believe what I've read on the Internet -- which might mean that this book has somewhat less sex than the previous ones. Anyway, this series is what it is -- and that's a hugely bestselling and popular sequence by one of the biggest names of modern fantasy -- and the new one will be available in hardcover on November 4th.

A "Controversial" Meme

With the caveat that apparently this was made up by a moron with very little grasp of how anything works in the real world -- probably a junior at one of our more expensive private colleges -- I give you the oh-so-dangerous Controversy Questionnaire:

[01] Do you have the guts to answe​r these​ questions and re-​​post as The Contr​overs​ial Surve​y?​​
Make up your mind: is this a "Survey" or a "Questionnaire"? And this is an intensely stupid question, since no one will actually answer "no."

[02] Would​ you do meth if it was legal​ized?​​
I greatly doubt it.

[03] Abort​ion:​​ for or again​st it?
How many people in this world are actually for abortion? I think the Roe v. Wade decision laid out a decent framework for balancing the various interests, though the numbers of abortions are very troubling. I don't know what the answer is, and I don't trust anyone who claims to know.

[04] Do you think​ the world​ would​ fail with a femal​e presi​dent?​
Fail?!? {laughs} No, at worst we'd get a Sad Mac, and have to update the firmware.

[05] Do you belie​ve in the death​ penal​ty?​​
I believe it exists, yes. I'm not at all sure it does any good.

[06] Do you wish marij​uana would​ be legal​ized alrea​dy?​​
Wish, no -- that would imply that I was smoking the stuff myself and lived in fear of The Man. I think the criminalization of marijuana leads to the waste of a lot of resources, but it doesn't affect me personally.

[07] Are you for or again​st prema​rital​ sex?
Again, I'm married, so it doesn't effect me personally. (I used to be very strongly in favor of it, in my particular case.) Like any other sex, it depends on the people involved -- marriage isn't a magic wand to make everything better.

[08] Do you belie​ve in God?
Christ, no. {grin}

[09] Do you think​ same sex marri​age shoul​d be legal​ized?​​
Yes. And not just so my sister-in-law could get married.

[10] Do you think​ it's wrong​ that so many Hispanics are illeg​ally movin​g to the USA?
"Illegal" is usually meant as an approximation to "wrong," but I don't think it's a moral failing to want to better oneself, even if that means breaking technical laws like those. On the other hand, I don't feel guilty about the plight of the Latin American masses, despite the best efforts of the administration of Vassar in the '80s. I think masses of illegal immigration are a bad sign, and implies a deeper systemic problem that needs to be addressed.

[11] A twelv​e year old girl has a baby,​​ shoul​d she keep it?
"Has" in that she's pregnant or "has" in that it's just popped out? Either way, I don't think it's my decision. If she's Lady Margaret Beaufort, I hope she keeps it, since otherwise it would screw up the timeline.

[12] Shoul​d the alcoh​ol age be lower​ed to eighteen?​
Do you mean the "drinking" age? I like consistency, so I'm generally in favor of that -- the arguments for keeping it at twenty-one are actually stronger in favor of raising it to twenty-five.

[13] Shoul​d the war in Iraq be calle​d off?
Um... 1) Wars are not "called off" like soccer matches. 2) The actual war ended several years ago; what's going on now is an occupation.

[14] Assis​ted suici​de is illeg​al:​​ do you agree​?​​
It's not illegal everywhere, so I disagree. Assisted suicide is a huge can of worms, since the degree of assistance can vary immensely. I don't think people should be forced to continuing living in great, unending pain if they can have made a coherent, conscious, reasonable decision to die.

[15] Do you belie​ve in spank​ing your child​ren?​​
In principle, yes. In practice, not so far.

[16] Would​ you burn an Ameri​can flag for a million dolla​rs?​​
There are very, very few inanimate objects I wouldn't, and those few have personal sentimental value. Pass the torch.

[17] Who do you think​ would​ make a bette​r president?​​ McCai​n or Obama​?​​
Obama -- he's showed more thought and nuance. I was for McCain in 2000, but he's not who he was then -- are any of us?

[18] Are you afrai​d other​s will judge​ you from readi​ng some of your answe​rs?​​
Are you proud of your ballsiness, Mr. List-Maker? Is everyone in your residence hall in awe of your iconoclasm? Feh.


Via Keith R.A. DeCandio

Other New Waves

It's late on a Sunday night, and I spent the day at the Jersey shore with The Wife, the boys, and my mother-in-law. (And then spent the last two hours writing a review for ComicMix and my "Reviewing the Mail" post for tomorrow morning.) So my brain has just shut down, and coherent thought is not on the table. However, I do have these old bits of string from other places, so I'll lay this one out for you now.

A fellow named Ted Nolan asked the assembled minds of rec.arts.sf.written if any other written fiction genres had a "New Wave," and this was my brainstorm:

Mysteries had their big split much earlier: hardboiled and cozies started spitting at each other when Black Mask started in 1920, and in earnest as the "Black Mask school" got larger and more prominent.

Thus Black Mask is New Worlds, Ngaio Marsh is Hal Clement, and Raymond Chandler is J.G. Ballard.

It was a split about content more than about "literary" style, though many on the hardboiled side did consciously try to write well, and to write about real life, as opposed to tea-time with vicars.

--
Andrew Wheeler
finding the parallels striking

James Crumley, 1939-2008

James Crumley, one of the best writers of the American detective story and author of several books I expect will be read with pleasure and profit in a hundred years, died Wednesday of accumulating health problems and the simple weight of age. He was sixty-eight.

If you want the facts, go to the New York Times obit; it hits the high points and is both fair and honest.

But if you want to know why Crumley will be remembered, pick up The Last Good Kiss (or possibly Dancing Bear, or The Wrong Case), and read the man that took the Chandler hero and tarnished him out of all recognition, who sent that hero across a vaster and less forgiving landscape that Chandler ever expected, and who knew damn well what kind of world this was, and who peopled it.

His later novels are lesser, and I've never managed to find time for his early Vietnam novel, One to Count Cadence. But those three detective novels, from the '70s and early '80s, are as good as anyone's novels of America get. If you haven't read them, now is a good time.

And I'll hoist a glass in memory of him, the next time I'm drinking more than one.

Out of Print

Once again, I found myself Publishing's Speaker-To-RASFW, and explained what "OOP" meant. The following is abstracted from several rec.arts.sf.written posts from mid-August, and appears here in lieu of new thought on my part:

1: What It Is!
It's a technical publishing term, meaning that the publisher of that edition -- a "book" is not out of print, an "edition" is, since a book can appear in an infinite number of editions -- has declared that it is out of print. It means that publisher does not intend to print or distribute that edition in the future.

It's kind of like declaring oneself a semiprozine; an edition is OOP because the publisher says so. There are many books that are not OOP, but the publisher doesn't have any copies in stock and doesn't plan to print any more -- those are OSI (Out of Stock Indefinitely) instead.

Many publishing contracts have clauses, particularly those concerned with reversion of rights to the author, that are triggered by an edition being OOP -- and that's one reason why some books are never declared OOP.

Editions have been known to come back from being OOP; there's no reason why they can't.

As a consumer, it's difficult to find out if a book is OOP, and it generally doesn't matter -- if a book is hard to find and/or expensive, its precise in-print status isn't important.

If you're looking to publish a book, the best way to find out what editions are in print (and thus what rights are available) is to query the author or (preferably) that author's agent.

2: Does "not being produced" mean that the publisher prints these books directly otherwise?
No, but there are commercial printers that do have printing plants which run pretty much all the time, printing books.

And the publishers have contracts with those plants, generally saying that the publisher will be using so much press time on these particular days, and their rates will be.

Some publishers do, or used to, have their own "captive" printing plants, but that's generally not the most efficient way to operate, so it doesn't happen much anymore.

3: What about public domain books -- the kind Dover does?
Dover doesn't exclusively do public domain books, but they do prefer books that they don't have to pay for.

Public domain law is thorny and complicated. Here's a chart of the law in the US. To be very, very general, anything from before 1923 is in PD, anything published after 1978 is solidly in copyright for several more decades, and the stuff in the middle is a mess.

iTunes Wordle Meme

I got this from Scott Westerfeld, who I think invented it.

The instructions:

1) In iTunes, select View Options under the View menu.
2) Turn off everything but “Artist.”
3) Select all and copy.
4) Search and Replace the word “track” with nothing.
5) Paste the results into the Wordle.net Create page.

And an occurrence-weighted word cloud of favorite musical artistes will appear.

(Note from Andy -- I have iTunes 8, which doesn't allow the name of the track to be turned off. So, instead, I just copied and pasted the whole thing -- you can also do it for a playlist -- into a spreadsheet program, highlighted the column of artists, which is what I really wanted, and re-pasted that into Worldle. It's a slightly longer, more cumbersome process, but you don't have to turn off and back on all of the data in iTunes to do it that way.)

As I've done for other iTunes memes, here's also the cloud of what I'm listening to right now. (I have a huge iTunes library, and most of it just sits there. I've been buying and listening to new music -- well, it's all new to me, though some of it isn't all that "new" -- a whole lot in the last year or so. So this is more of an accurate representation of what's going into my ears these days. Some things, though, remain.)

FX: muted roistering in BG with an occasional "Arrrrgh!"

Today is the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, an event we all thought was fun and new and exciting about three years ago. Now, it's dull and bland and another indication that each day only brings us that much closer to the sweet, sweet release of death.

(I'm getting less enthusiastic about TLaPD every year, I see.)

Shiver your own goddamn timbers, is what I say.

Quote of the Week

"You cannot trust the state: you cannot trust your friends: you cannot trust the goodness of humanity, which great though it can be is terribly spotty in its delivery. Spouses can divorce, friends can drift, parents die a generation before you -- siblings are the only people bound together for an entire lifetime. They are the only remotely sure thing."
- Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong, pp.227-228

I Don't Intend To Pick On io9 All The Time

Because, sometimes, io9 is quite thoughtful and intelligent (which here means "agrees with me").

There was a post yesterday about "literature" and SF, which made some very smart points.

I'd have been even more nuanced, myself -- because I'm all about the picky little distinctions -- for example, by pointing out that the "literary establishment" is, more often than not, embroiled in nasty fights among themselves (just like any other genre community) and so talking about them as a monolith can be misleading.

I also think there are a lot of literary SF novels, though not in the high-New Yorker post-Raymond Carver style that io9 is calling all of literary fiction.

And they could have usefully brought up Delany's theory of figurative language and concretized metaphor in SF -- compare and contrast "her world exploded" in a literary novel and a SF novel -- to explain why figurative language must be handled very carefully in SF, to keep it from being taken literally or from confusing everyone.

But, in general, it's a good post that points out some of the important boundary-markers for a certain type of critically popular mainstream fiction, and asks if we'd really want more of that in our ghetto. Possibly not, possibly not -- but the mainstream does still have things to teach us. (And, of course, vice versa.)

ComicMix Doings

Yesterday: a review of a book called Holy Sh*t!: The World's Weirdest Comic Books by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury.

Today: writing a 2000-word-plus epic "Manga Friday" column looking at the new magazine Yen+.

Tomorrow: see above, and look for it.

Say It Ain't So, Joe

Ripped straight from the Publishers Lunch free e-mail newsletter:

Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer will write a new installment in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

In the history of bad ideas, this is certainly up there -- and I say that not having read any of Mr. Colfer's books. But Mammon will have his sacrifice.

Art Director Speaks!

The SFBC's current art director, Matthew Kalamidas, has been interviewed by Irene Gallo for Tor.com.

Matt's a good guy and a fine art director, though I never worked directly with him. (The 2007 event was breathtaking in its scope.) And I'm always interested in seeing behind-the-scenes publishing pros talk about what they do; there are a lot of agents and editors out there, but not many people doing other things.

However, I was surprised to see that the club did a new cover for Charles Stross's newest novel Saturn's Children (Here's the SFBC page, and here's the Ace cover at Amazon.) Perhaps things have changed -- have I mentioned that a lot of people who used to work there are now gone? -- but the long-time opinion of the legal folks used to be that if you gave a book a new cover, you couldn't compare it to the publisher's edition -- because it wasn't really comparable anymore.

(I probably can still remember that because it's one of the very few obvious and reasonable things a lawyer ever told me.)

I'm also amused that someone at the SFBC hated that cover so much that the club went to all that time, effort, and expense of making a new cover when there already was one ready-made. But that's the thing about covers: no matter what you do, there's always going to be somebody who hates it.

Yet Another iTunes Meme

I got this one from Keith R.A. DeCandido; as usual, when I'm feeling lazy, I can go over to his LJ and find that he's posted a dozen times -- and at least one of those has something I can steal appropriate for my own purposes.

First Ten Songs playing on iTunes after hitting "shuffle":

1. "Kronos Unveiled" by Michael Giacchino, from The Incredibles soundtrack
2. "I Remember California" by R.E.M.
3. "I'm That!" by The Mendoza Line
4. "Horn Intro" by Modest Mouse
5. "All The Love" by Kate Bush
6. "Badman" by Psychedelic Furs
7. "Jealous Guy" by Roxy Music
8. "Mister Pleasant" by The Kinks
9. "Hey You" by Pink Floyd
10. "Seal My Fate" by Belly

(If I did it on the playlist I'm actually listening to most of the time now, the songs would be:

1. "Tourists In Our Hometown" by We Are Soldiers We Have Guns
2. "Teen Angst (Live)" by Cracker
3. "Matadora" by Cordero
4. "It's Hard To Run Uphill On Stilts" by The Deathray Davies
5. "Totale Paranoia" by Prototypes
6. "Sun A.M." by Moonbabies
7. "I Used To Complain Now I Don't" by White Rabbits
8. "Fly Trapped In a Jar" by Modest Mouse
9. "Helix Nebula" by Anamaguchi
10. "Sonic Boom" by Andy Partridge

On my iTunes can be found:
17,694 songs -- 48 days, 5 hours, 33 minutes and 58 seconds of continuous music.

Most represented artist: Elvis Costello, with 747 songs and about 41 hours (plus another 116 songs from seven artists, each "Elvis Costello & {foo}")

Second most represented artist: Tom Waits, with 396 songs -- one day and twelve minutes. (Third is The Kinks, then Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson, and They Might Be Giants.)

Top 10 most played songs: (Since my sons have been on a huge Fountains of Wayne kick for about the past two years, all of their play counts are skewed. I'll list the #1 song, and then ignore them -- otherwise, FoW has the top eleven...and 17 out of the top 20...and 24 out of the top 30...and so on.)

1. "Maureen" by Fountains of Wayne
2. "To the Dogs Or Whoever" by Josh Ritter
3. "My Rights Versus Yours" by The New Pornographers
4. "Wall of Death" by R.E.M.
5. "Satin In a Coffin" by Modest Mouse
6. "Easy" by The Arrogants
7. "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)" by R.E.M.
8. "Don't Drop the Baby" by The Judybats
9. "Nothing Burns Like Bridges" by Penny Century
10. "Authenticity" by Harvey Danger

The Least Likely Connection

Both my old (SFBC) job and my current (Wiley) job involve a surprising amount of dealing with e-mails from customers about the same things over and over again.

At the SFBC, the members wanted particular books and complained that the prices were not discounted quite as low as they might like.

At Wiley, I get a lot of very specific questions about various CPA Review books, audios and CD-ROMs -- down to the level of "who's the narrator on that audio?"

On the whole, Wiley customers -- who are spending often an order of magnitude more money for products that are vital to their future career success -- are more polite. I'm not sure what the lesson is there.

Oh, What a Jackanapes Am I!

I've got Back-to-school night tonight, plus a review I should write for ComicMix, so I doubt I'll get anything done requiring thought for this blog.

Luckily, the world includes memes, and so I'll do one or three of them to keep myself entertained (and, with any luck, other people as well). First up is this "Who Would You Be in 1400" quiz, and I would be...

Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test...

The Harlequin

You are a mystery, a jack-of-all-trades. You have the king's ear, but also listen to murmurings of the common folk. You believe in the value of force and also literature. Truly you are the puzzlement of the age.

Take The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test at HelloQuizzy

ComicMix Makes Good Neighbors

Today for ComicMix, I reviewed a graphic novel written by noted YA writer (and Andre Norton Award-winner) Holly Black and illustrated by Ted Naifeh -- The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin.

Amazon Sales & Stuff

Amazon has two things they'd like me -- well, not "me" in particular, "me" as in "a guy who can send people there to buy stuff, maybe" -- to mention, so I'll throw them together and get it over with.

First, for those of you (like me) still buying you music in the oh-so-20th-century CD format, there's a Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale currently running (through October 2nd). Click on this banner and you can see what's available -- from Amazon's coy descriptions, I don't think it's everything, and it may be of the most interest to those of you who like "classic rock."


Amazon also would like people to know that they sell Halloween costumes; if you're interested in those, click the banner below:


(I hope to fiddle with some of the more interesting Amazon widgets -- particularly the ones for MP3s, which allow previews of songs -- but that will take time, so it won't be today.)

This exercise in naked commerce was brought to you by Andy's raw desire to make a couple of bucks off this blog without actually changing anything or making much effort. Thanks you for your patience.

CauseWired

Late last week, I got in bound galleys for a book I've been excited about all year: Tom Watson's CauseWired. I market a lot of books in a year, and all of them have something interesting about them -- though you'll probably run away from me if I get into the GAAP vs. IFRS debate, or the impact of the new IRS Form 990 -- but only a very few have much to say to a broader audience.

CauseWired doesn't just have something to say, it has a real, direct connection to what we're both doing right now, and what we're (all of us) doing more and more every day in the 21st century: connecting electronically about the things that matter to us. So this is a book I'm excited about, and want to see spread as widely as possible.

And that's why I want to give away as many of those bound galleys as possible, to bloggers and podcasters, to forum junkies and Facebook super-users, to LiveJournal mavens and MySpace eyeball-destroyers, to people who live in the wired world and who want to know what's going on there. If you want to read this book before it's published, and you have somewhere (preferably online) to talk to people about it afterwards, I'd like to send you a copy. Also, if you work at a bookstore and think your customers might want to know about CauseWired, you qualify as well.

(I've got a few hundred in total, but some of those have to go to the old-fashioned media, and a bunch have already been claimed by bloggers who saw the author's similar request yesterday. Let's say that there's at least a hundred for people who reply to this, and possibly more.)

Here's how I've been pitching it to the big blogs and online media:

CauseWired is the first book to examine how today’s online social networks are changing the charitable, political and consumer landscapes – making businesses and charities more transparent and responsive, making governments more accountable, raising money for and electing candidates, and connecting people to each other and to their causes more strongly than ever before. There have been many books on the techniques and effects of digital media, but none that mapped the explosion of the social web and its effect on the political and charitable worlds. From Barack Obama raising millions through small Internet donations to anti-globalization flash mobs to the vocabulary quiz of FreeRice.com, we now live in a world intensely wired, and utterly connected.

CauseWired is written by Tom Watson, who knows the philanthropic and wired worlds like no one else. He’s been inside Internet start-ups and reported on them, and has been Chief Strategy Officer for the leading philanthropic consultancy Changing Our World for eight years. He’s worked at the confluence of media technology and social change for the past decade, and there’s no one better than him to tell this story.

For more information on CauseWired and Tom Watson, you could check out the Amazon page for the book, or Tom's Author page on the CauseWired blog, or the most recent posts on that blog.

If you're interested, you can comment here, but the best thing to do is to e-mail me at work (where the galleys actually are) -- awheeler at wiley dot com. I'll be sending them out as long as they last.

Thanks for your time; I'll go back to ranting about science fiction really soon -- I promise. (Anybody do anything appalling over the weekend that I should be complaining about?)

Edit, two hours later: I should mention that I also have CauseWired as a PDF -- it's what we made the galleys from -- if there's anyone, for whatever reason, would prefer to have it in that form. (Particularly if you're outside North America, I guess.)

Long Tail Is Long, But It's Also Very Thin

Shelf Awareness, an e-mail newsletter for bookstores and others in the business, reports this morning on a paper by Anita Elberse from the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. (Elberse also presented her findings at the Book Industry Study Group's annual meeting on Friday.)

Basically, what she found is that there is indeed a "long tail" of low-selling products in a market -- she studied both books and music -- but that most of those long tail products sell too poorly to make any profit, that consumers (and particularly casual consumers) still mostly want the big hits, and that niche products work best if they are cost-free until an actual sale pops up.

Some quotes:

• though "online channels have significantly broadened customer access to niche products, hits still dominate. Even the people most interested in niche products still like hits."
• "resist the temptation to direct customers to the Long Tail because too often they'll like those products less."

Of course, there's the question of how you define the long tail -- Elberse talks about people who buy one book are probably buying James Patterson, and so the second book they buy should be something very similar to Patterson. But not all elements of the rest of the publishing world are a substitute for a big mainstream thriller, and the audience for anything is not an undifferentiated mass. (Some people, even many bookbuyers, won't want Patterson no matter what -- and a sizable chunk of them are the ones who buy only one book from, say, J.K. Rowling in a year. That, of course, is mostly quibbling about elements of the "Big Head" rather than the long tail.)

But the general lesson seems clear: the blockbuster business is not going to go away; that's where the big money is and will stay. In other news, the sky is blue and the grass is green. Watch this space for breaking news about the Pope's religious views and ursine evacuation habits.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/13, Part Two: Comics

Every week I list the books that came in for review on Monday -- but, some weeks, there's so much that I chop it into smaller pieces to make the posts more manageable. This is one of those weeks; the first half was posted previously, and this half will list the comics, manga, graphic novels, or whatever we're calling these things today.

And now that we're back from that brief commercial break, let's go right into...

Holy Sh*t!: The World's Weirdest Comic Books is pretty much what it says it is: a collection of some of the oddest covers in comics history (plus some interior panels), arranged one to a spread with commentary and background by the authors, Paul Gravette and Peter Stansbury. It leads off with double-entendre-filled issue of Teen-Age Romance from the '50s and ends up with the sublimely ridiculous Reagan's Raiders. St. Martin's Press will publish this on October 19th -- though the book itself says it publishes in February, which implies that its press time got moved up, or something else interesting happened. I have a finished book, so it might be getting into some sales channels even quicker than that.

My friends at Aurora have sent along their most recent yaoi manga (sex-filled boy-boy romances for a female readership), for my intense embarrassment. All three of these have just published, and are from Aurora's yaoi imprint, Deux:

• Future Lovers, by Saika Kunieda, in which a man who thinks he's "normal" falls in love with a gay man after a night of wild sex. (In a culture where people drink as much as Japan, this is totally plausible.)
  
• Yakuza In Love, Vol. 3, continuing the yaoi series with one of my favorite titles ever, as always by Shiuko Kano. I reviewed the first one for ComicMix, and came away confused. This is the big conclusion; if you're interested in a gay romance among Japanese gangsters, you only need to grab three volumes to get the whole story -- how often can you say that about any manga story?
  
• And then there's I Shall Never Return, Vol. 4, which features a cover in which the male lovers appear to be trying to stab each other with the pointy parts of their faces. It's by Kazuna Uchida, and apparently it's a yaoi classic, five volumes in all. (So #5 will be coming along soon.)

Aurora also sent me a book from their LuvLuv imprint, which is also for sexy adult romance stories -- but LuvLuv features heterosexual couples. (From what I've seen, these are much less popular among young female readers -- both here in the States and back in Japan -- than yaoi is. Ah, the power of fantasy!) This month's book is Make Love & Peace, by Takane Yunetani, which doesn't have a volume number on it, so I'm assuming it's a stand-alone.

Also on the sexy side is the third volume of Kazuto Okada's Sundome, which Yen Press will publish on September 30th. (I reviewed the first and second volumes for ComicMix.) It's a story of high school sexual torment -- so much is universal -- but it's quite Japanese in its particulars.

Continuing with Yen Press titles, there's the fifth and final book of Park KangHo and Lee HaNa's Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo. The art is often stylized and has less of the smooth finish I've come to expect from manga -- perhaps because this is actually manwha, from Korea. Otherwise, it looks like a book with a lot of fighting, and it seems to be historical -- obviously, by volume five of a series, the back cover copy isn't all that helpful, since it's talking about the established characters and what they're doing. This is another September book.

Also from Yen in September is Moon Boy, Vol. 4, a series I haven't seen before and which immediately confuses me by having a girl in a school uniform on the cover. (Surely she's not the Moon Boy?) It's by Lee YoungYou, and the back cover makes it sound like some kind of high-school drama -- except with fighting and alternate worlds. (There's also something about the battle between the not-quite human Rabbit and Fox tribes for control of the entire universe, or the high school, or something.)

Another Yen Press title from September is Han SeungHee & Jeon JinSeok's One Thousand and One Nights, which hits its fifth volume. It's set in the Muslim world -- probably about a thousand years ago -- and the overarching story looks to be a male-male romance. But there also seems to be a Sheherezade-esque sense of stories within stories here.

I also have here the second volume of You're So Cool by YoungHee Lee -- I reviewed the first volume for ComicMix -- a high-school story from Korea about a girl who gets to date the most popular, best-looking boy in the school and only then learns that he's actually, secretly, an utter bastard. Presumably, things get worse for her in this book.

And then there's Chocolat, Vol. 6, which is by Shin JiSang and Geo, another high school story from Korea. I find it hard to take seriously any story whose description includes the phrase "her former nemesis Barbie," but I'm sure this series has its fans. (Coming soon from Mattel! Nemesis Barbie! With kung-fu action grip and the skills to kill a man silently in thirty-seven different ways!)

Yen Press is publishing the second volume of Satoko Kiyuduki's Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro in October, and I have to admit that the first volume confused me a bit. (Partly because of the format -- 4-panel with a lot of color sections and many half-page panels interspersed -- and partly because the premise was still obscure by the end of that book.) The girl dressed as a boy carrying a coffin and traveling with a talking bat is back, so I hope this one will make more sense to me. (Though it seems that, just as I've figured out how to read "normal" right-to-left manga, the world throws curveballs like Korean left-to-right manwha and these 4-panel stories at me.)

Last from Yen is the third issue of their monthly manga magazine, Yen+. This is the October issue -- I somehow missed September, though I have August. (And I think this will be my "Manga Friday" column this week -- I haven't covered any magazines yet, and it'll be something different.

Last overall is a big collection of comics by David Heatley, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. (It's subtitled "A Graphic Memoir," but I think that's marketing-speak for "a whole bunch of mostly previously published comics put into a single volume and organized into several thematic categories.") I've only seen Heatley's work once or twice before, and it hasn't entirely worked for me -- but maybe a bigger dose will be the trick. And I'm favorably disposed towards anyone who uses a Ramones reference for his title. My Brain will be published as a large-format hardcover by Pantheon on September 30th.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/13, Part One: Prose

Every week, I get books in the mail. Some of them I review, and nearly all of them I hope to review, but there are only so many hours in a day, so inevitably some get missed. But I also list all of those books as they come in, so that they'll get at least that bit of notice.

This week --either because it's still basically the beginning of the month or because everyone was energized by the long Labor Day weekend -- I got a lot of things, and so I'm breaking the usual weekly post in twain. This first post lists the prose I got: which is all fiction, as it happens, and all SFF genre fiction at that. A second post, going up shortly after this one, will list the comics, manga, graphic novels, and other combinations of words and pictures in panels.

It's mostly the monthly wave of books from the Penguin imprints and affiliates -- Ace, Roc, and DAW; 375 Hudson Street has been very nice to me -- but let me lead off with the book I was happiest to see, and which I hope to start within a day or two. It's Steven Brust's new "Vlad Taltos" novel, Jhegaala, which Tor published in July. It's the eleventh in the series, which makes me feel old -- I think I started reading this series way back in the early '80s, when the second or third book was new. I obviously haven't read this one yet, but if you read SFF at all, and haven't tried this series, you're missing out on one of the slyest and most fun fantasy series out there.

Ace will publish Talia Gryphon's Key to Redemption, third in her contemporary fantasy series on September 30th. If I'm reading the materials right, Gryphon's series hero Gillian Key is an ex-Marine and psychologist for Paramortals (mostly vampires, it seems). The acknowledgements also imply that some of her practice is as a sex therapist. (Somehow I doubt that this series is full of thrilling tales of erectile dysfunction among vamps -- though, come to think of it, don't most vampires need human blood to power their own systems? That could cause serious erection complications, I guess. Wonder if any writer has done anything with that idea yet.)

DAW is responsible for the Denise Little-edited Witch High, which includes fourteen original stories about teenage witches and warlocks at school. I'm frankly flabbergasted that it's taken the Marty Greenberg Anthology Machine (this is copyright Tekno Books, Greenberg's operation) ten years to get to such an obvious Harry Potter rip-off idea -- though maybe they've done similar anthologies before. Anyway, this one has stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Laura Resnick, Sarah Zettel, Esther M. Friesner, Diane Duane, Sarah A. Hoyt, Jody Lynn Nye, and others. It will be published on October 7th in the handy mass-market format.

I always wonder when writing teams separate, so I'm intrigued to know the story behind Blood Memories, the first solo novel by Barb Hendee. Hendee has written a six-book series, the "Noble Dead Saga," with her husband J.C., and those books have been quite popular. But now she's writing alone, and has turned from secondary-world fantasy to contemporary -- though Blood Memories still has vampires to lure in her existing fans. This is a Roc trade paperback, coming October 7th.

There's a new Mercedes Lackey "Valdemar" novel for the first time since 2003's Exile's Valor, and it's coming in hardcover from DAW on October 7th. The new one is called Foundation, and it starts a new sub-series, set right in the middle of her timeline. I've read nearly all of the earlier books in this series -- the only ones I've missed were the original "Last Herald-Mage" trilogy, since those were in print at the SFBC when I got there -- and they were one of my major "guilty pleasure" reads for a good decade. So now I have to figure out if I want to go back, and what I'd be expecting if I did. Even if I don't read this, I'm sure a lot of people will: it's a popular series, and it's been away for five years. Oh, and I really really hope that this is a trilogy and that the succeeding books are titled Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation.

Dennis L. McKiernan's new novel is City of Jade, yet another story set in his usual fantasy world of Mithgar. This is yet another book coming on October 7th -- this one from Roc in hardcover. I haven't read any of McKiernan's books, I'm afraid -- the fantasy field is immense, and it's impossibly to know it all unless you're willing to not know anything else -- but he's always been a gentleman and a real class act, so I can say that about him.

A new company called Underland Press -- out of darkest Oregon -- sent me two bound galleys this past week, bound up in a black ribbon. And now, as I'm typing this, I'll open the ribbon and take a closer look...first is Brian Evenson's Last Days, a detective story with supernatural elements that's an expansion of the author's 2003 novella-as-a-book The Brotherhood of Mutilation. It's coming in February 2009 in trade paperback.

The other Underland book I've seen is Will Elliott's The Pilo Family Circus, which won five awards in Australia and was short-listed for the International Horror Guild's Best Novel award. It's about an evil circus, as you'd expect, and features three psychotic clowns. I'm not sure I could take this book entirely seriously, but -- given the praise it's gotten -- maybe I ought to try. Pilo Family Circus is a March 2009 trade paperback.

Underland in general -- they have a web site that I've been poking through as I looked at their books -- is either a strong new horror publisher, or the first-ever New Weird publisher, or something in the borderlands in between. They look exceptionally serious and professional -- for one thing, these two books have introductions by Peter Straub and Katherine Dunn, respectively -- and I hope they're successful.

I don't think there are very many people who have ever wondered "What does a werewolf do at Christmas?", but Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner are two of them, and they sold an anthology based on the idea. The resulting book is Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, a hardcover from Ace on October 7th. Besides contributions from the editors, there are also stories from Patricia Briggs, Keri Arthus, Carrie Vaughan, Kat Richardson, Simon R. green, and more -- careful readers might note a large number of Ace/Roc writers. And why not?

The second book in the military sideways-in-time series "Destroyermen" is Crusade, and it comes barely four months after the first book, Into the Storm. The series is by Taylor Anderson and published by Roc -- it's about two U.S. destroyers ripped from the Pacific Theater of WWII and dropped into the middle of a different war on another world. In Crusade, the crew of that destroyer find that theirs is not the only ship that came through the rift. Crusade will be in stores October 7th.

The Chosen Sin is from a Penguin imprint I haven't seen much -- it's called Heat, which I assume means that it's mostly for erotica, or sexed-up versions of whatever it publishes. Chosen Sin is a contemporary vampire novel by Anya Bast, and, from a quick flick-through of the pages, there's quite a bit of sex in it. Since sex can't wait, it's publishing one day earlier than most of the books I saw this week, on October 6th. Wouldn't want to make the readers wait for it!

William C. Dietz's new novel is another in his "Legion of the Damned" series, and it's called When Duty Calls (I think every military-themed fiction writer is required to write a novel called When Duty Calls if he lasts long enough -- as well as By Force of Arms and at least one pun on "Honor.") The list of previous books isn't terribly helpful, but I think Dietz usually writes in duologies. I'm not sure if that applies to the "Legion of the Damned" books, though, nor whether this would be a part one or a part two. Whichever it is, it's out on October 7th. (See? No sex means you have to wait a day longer.)

And last this week -- for this post, at least -- is the fourth in the "Joe Pitt Casebooks" series, Charlie Huston's Every Last Drop. Pitt is something like the vampire-world equivalent of Richard Stark's Parker: a tough guy who does what he needs to and doesn't have much in the way of moral qualms or standards. Pitt is much worse at keeping allies than Parker, though, and doesn't have Parker's freedom of movement. Pitt's a Vampyre, and Vampyres form into highly territorial gangs -- so straying from one's home turf is usually a very bad idea. However, by this point Pitt has enraged nearly every Vampyre group he's ever met, so he's self-exiled to the Bronx in an attempt to keep himself alive undead. (For more details, you could see my review of the second book in the series, No Dominion, back in February.)

And that's the SFF half of last week's mail; I'll be back after a break for station identification with the comics.

Incoming Book: September 14

I had to run out for some errands this afternoon -- it was my mother's birthday, and I needed to obtain a cake -- so I stopped off in my local Borders store on my way. The primary reason was to get a copy of the September issue of Yen Press's Yen+ magazine (for this week's Manga Friday column), and the secondary reason was to get the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book for Thing 1 (which I promised I'd get him the next time I was in a book store -- and that promise was probably six months ago).

While I was there, I of course had to browse for books for myself. (How could I not?) I also had a Borders coupon that expired today, so I wanted to find something relatively expensive to make it worthwhile.

And, now that I'm not following forthcoming books as closely as I used to, books can be published and surprise me. So I was very happy to see that Julian Barnes had a new book that I didn't expect -- Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a memoir and meditation on mortality, agnosticism, and similar stuff -- and I grabbed it.

So I now have yet another book to read.

What Lawrence Person Should Read This Year

I've spent about two hours today working on the first of two "Reviewing the Mail" posts for Monday, so I'm not terribly inclined to blog activity that requires actual thinking. (Such as reviewing any of the four books and four movies that I'm behind right now. Maybe tomorrow.)

On the other hand, here's something I wrote on rec.arts.sf.written on January 2nd, in response to Lawrence Person, who wanted many opinions on the books that he might be reading this year. The actual Usenet post is also archived here, for anyone who wants to check me, or see what other people thought about these books:

> Kelly Link: Stranger Things Happen

I think it's actually better than Magic for Beginners; it's certainly more diverse. And Link is clearly one of the best short-story writers currently active.

> Alistair Reynolds: Chasm City

Still Reynolds's most ambitious novel, and one of my favorites of his. Well worth reading.

> Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor

I read this ages ago, and it fled from memory almost immediately. My general lasting impression is that its not as great as it's considered.

> Charles Stross: Halting State or Missile Gap

A vote for "Missile Gap," or for "Missile Gap" first. But Halting State is awfully good, too.

> J. G. Ballard: The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard

You have to read this.

> John Barnes: Kaleidoscope Century or Mother of Storms

I have problems with the protagonist of Kaleidoscope (mostly in that I think Barnes means the reader to identify with him, and I think that is vile), but it's compulsively readable and interesting. I haven't read Mother.

> Lois McMaster Bujold: Mirror Dance

One of the best novels in a fine sequence; I'd personally put this at about the bottom of the upper third of the reading pile.

> Jonathan Carroll: A Child Across the Sky or Outside the Dog Museum

All Carroll novels are basically the same; Child is probably a bit better than Dog, so if you're reading one this year, I'd suggest going that way.

> Philip K. Dick: Collected Stories Volume II or Confessions of a Crap Artist

Confessions is incredibly dull; Dick's prose isn't all that great (it never was), and his plots are plodding and bland without the eruptions of abnormality. I'd avoid it.

> George Alec Effinger: What Entropy Means to Me

I haven't read this in more than a decade, but I loved it when I did read it. It may be awfully "'70s" now.

> Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

Don't read them straight through -- only a teenager can read a bunch of Harlan stories in a row -- but make time to read them.

> John M. Ford: The Dragon Waiting

I never found this all that wonderful. It's slow-moving and also doesn't go anywhere.

> Neil Gaiman: Snow Glass Apples

It's very short (not even a novellette, I think), and one of the best fantasy stories of the past twenty years. Read it.

> Chris Genoa: Foop!

Is this the "fluid's running out of my brakes" book? If so, you MUST read it, and report on it here. I've never known anyone else who's seen a copy of it, and I didn't get the chance to read it myself.

> Nalo Hopkinson: Brown Girl in the Ring or The Salt Roads

Haven't read Salt; Brown is OK but very much the first-novel-as-sublimated-autobiography thing.

> Fritz Leiber: Rime Isle

Late F&GM, and short -- if you've made it this far, you might as well read it. (And I think putting on a list like this that you own a first edition consisitutes bragging, as well.)

> Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn

It's a very quick read, but it isn't as great as people were saying. It's certainly worth reading; it's just not transcendently wonderful or anything.

> Gregory Maguire: Wicked

Very disappointing, in a very first-novel way. Maguire shows very little knowledge or understanding of even Baum's first novel, and misremembers the movie as well. It's a muddled mess. Unless you have a reason to read it, avoid it.

> David Marusek: Counting Heads

It has massive structural problems (the ending is a mess, and the novella doesn't belong bolted onto the front), but what's in between is excellent. If you don't expect it to have the shape of a novel, it's wonderful.

> Maureen McHugh: Mission Child or Nekropolis

I think I've read most of the pieces of Mission Child when they were being published as novellas, and I read Nekropolis. I find McHugh a terribly dull, spinach sort of writer: the kind that people tell me I should read for my own good. And life's too short for that.

> China Mieville: King Rat or Looking for Jake

Avoid Looking for Jake; Mieville will do a "Best Short Stories" collection in about twenty years, which will be the one to have. King Rat isn't as good as his later novels but is still worth reading.

> Michael Moorcock: Gloriana

One of the great fantasy novels of the 20th century. Read it ASAP.

> Richard Morgan: Broken Angels

Eh. Morgan wrote one very good SFnal mystery, and then fell to blander, more cookie-cutter leftist MilSF. There are plenty of better books than this to read.

> Naomi Novik: Temeraire

Best for those of us who wish Patrick O'Brian weren't dead; a nice piece of worldbuilding and evocation of a different time. Plus, you know, battles with dragons and tall ships.

> H. Beam Piper: Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

It holds up OK, but it was always a minor classic.

> Tim Powers: Three Days to Never or Pilot Light

Three Days isn't top-rank Powers, but it's still quite good. I haven't read Pilot Light.

> Rudy Rucker: Master of Time & Space or The Secret of Life or White Light

The last time I purged, the one I kept myself is White Light. But Master is probably the most gonzo-entertaining.

> John Scalzi: The Ghost Brigades

As others have said, this trilogy gets more interesting as it goes, but I think Ghost Brigades is the best novel of the three. It's not a must-read, but it's good modern SF; I recommend it.

> Michael Shea: A Quest for Simbilis

I don't remember it all that well, but I liked it when I read it.

> Robert Sladek: Roderick

You haven't read Roderick yet? OK, then this goes right after Gloriana. (Though it may be dated at this point.)

> Neal Stephenson: Zodiac or The Big U

They'e both minor, but I found The Big U more interesting, though less obviously a Stephenson book.

> Martha Wells: The Element of Fire

Liked it when I read it fifteen years ago; but that was fifteen years ago.

> Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog

As funny and pleasant as SF gets. Save it for right after something worthy and depressing (like a Peter Watts novel).

> Gene Wolfe: Pirate Freedom

It's wonderful and tricky; I just made it one of my favorite books of 2007. It should be on your shortlist.

> Roger Zelazny: Wilderness or DonnerJack

Never read Wilderness, which is very odd Zelazny. Donnerjack is minor and goes on much too long; I think Lindskold finished it up by writing more, when Zelazny would have finished it by cutting it down.

--
Andrew Wheeler
who spent the '90s reading a lot of this junk

Shuddering in My Boots

I am currently holding (no, really, I'm typing with one hand just so I can say that) an absolutely gigantic comics collection, one which has made stronger reviewers than me (well, one in particular) toss it aside with great force. It's an appalling object to contemplate, from several points of view.

It's a book I'll be reviewing for another website, and I think I'll keep everything mysterious until that's all done. But there may be periodic screams of agony as I work my way through this hideous object.

Just wanted to warn you.

My Week at ComicMix

I've had another one of those too-lazy-to-post-three-times weeks, so I get to round up all of my ComicMix links at once:

• On Tuesday, I reviewed Rick Geary's The Lindbergh Child
• On Thursday, I reviewed a quite good anthology called Scrambled Ink
• And, today, I had my usual "Manga Friday" column, reviewing the second volumes in the series Goong, Forest of Gray City, and Legend.

Next week, look for a review of a new contemporary fantasy graphic novel written by Holly Black, probably the massive first collection of William Messner-Loebs's Journey, and something manga-ish on Friday.

Douglas Adams Meme

The rules: if you see this post, you're supposed to reply with a post of DA quotes of your own.

I saw Keith R.A. DeCandido, which means we're now in for six more weeks of summer these quotes:

So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, prologue

...one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is her story.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 3:

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul:

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

The Salmon of Doubt:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Cluelessness

Does io9 know anything about science fiction in book form?

They had a post yesterday about HarperCollins UK's new Angry Robot imprint, which, in two short paragraphs (one of them mostly quoted) manages to:

• forget to mention what country this publishing program is operating in
• be impressed that "big publishers" have "imprints"
• consider "2-3 books per month" to be "a hell of a lot of scifi writing"

On that last point, the US currently supports at least the canonical nine hells (Ace, Roc, DAW, Eos, Del Rey, Bantam Spectra, Baen, Night Shade, Orbit), plus Tor, which publishes most months three or four hells worth of SFF books.

The UK is a slightly smaller market, so they might not be up to nine hells yet. But I'm sure they're working on it!

io9 is the David Itzkoff of the Internet.

Quote of the Week

"When Morgan's diagnosis first came in, all I could think of was: How do I fix him? How do I make him normal again? But there was no again, not really, because there never was a before. He has always been this way: it is who he is."
- Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong, p. 224, about his autistic son

Congratulations, Marc Gascoigne!

I learned from LinkedIn earlier today that Marc -- the former Publisher of Solaris and related imprints -- had been hired as a Publishing Director by HarperCollins. It seemed like another shoe was about to drop, so I didn't say anything.

Then Publishers Lunch (a free e-mail newsletter of the business) had this to say an hour or so ago:

Harper UK is starting a new science fiction imprint, Angry Robot, launching in July 2009. Former publisher of Games Workshop's Solaris and Black Library imprints Marc Gascoigne is running the new line, reporting to managing director Amanda Ridout. Taking a place alongside Harper's Voyager imprint, the new label "will be building the next wave of authors," Gascoigne says. They plan to sell print and digital versions directly from their website in addition to standard retail channels.

Congratulations, Marc!

Oprah Watching

A new selection of Oprah's Book Club will be announced on September 19th, and that means that people are trying to guess what it will be.

There's an Amazon page for the mystery book -- identified, for now, only as "Oprah Book Club #62 (Hardcover)."

We know that this book was published by HarperCollins, and that it's a $25.95 hardcover. Given that it's only in hardcover, that implies that it's a quite recent book...or that Harper hasn't gotten their paperback ISBN onto Amazon yet.

Using Amazon's search function, I pulled up a list of $25.95 Harper hardcovers that could possibly be the Oprah pick:

• Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily
• Matilde Ansensi's Everything Under the Sky
• Frances DePontes Peebles's The Seamstress
• Jennifer Haigh's The Condition
• Sichan Siv's Golden Bones
• Philip Margolin's Executive Privilege
• Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves
• William Dietrich's The Rosetta Key
• Lisa Scottoline's Lady Killer
• Elizabeth Peters's Laughter of Dead Kings
• Faye Kellerman's The Mercedes Coffin
• J.A. Jance's Damage Control
• David Giffels's All the Way Home
• Dale Brown's Shadow Command
• Andrew Gross's The Dark Tide
• James Morrow's The Philosopher's Apprentice (would that we all could be so lucky)
• Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year (ditto)

(James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, sadly, is $26.95. It would have been nice to have pretended that it had a chance. Similarly, Toby Barlow's wonderful Sharp Teeth -- the werewolf novel in verse -- is $22.95. And the book I'm reading right now -- Lawrence Block's Hit and Run -- is from a Harper imprint, but it's $24.95.)

Several Eos books -- Wrath of a Mad God, The Twisted Citadel, Passage, The Divine Talisman, Hunter's Run -- fit the criteria, but I won't even pretend that they could be "#62."

But it's most likely The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, since that's already a runaway bestseller, and Oprah has been playing it safe with her recent picks.

Weird Search Terms

I haven't done one of these in a while, so I'll keep track of some and then unload this all at once.

As usual, I'm only tracking people who don't seem to be looking for me or what I'm writing about -- there are also some odd combinations of terms that got people here, but seem to be what they wanted.

Starting August 21st, we have:

• S.L. Viehl asian fetish
• glasgow antick
• manga sex
• penny gent
• tentaro hentai
• mary ann eckels, mystery guild (are you out there, Mary Ann?)
• chevy "ten million volts"
• antick sex
• romulan male and human female romance
• low budget movie 90's mask changes him into superhero giver
• hair extension gent
• alexander memeing
• gentmanga
• keys on a keychain illustration un lun dun
• cory manager hastings bookstore lawrence

And I haven't had any other post today, so I'll stop keeping track and drop this in here. It's a bit disappointing -- I used to get weirder search terms a year or so ago. Now, it looks like all of my visitors were actually looking for me, which isn't any fun at all.

Why You're Not Going on a Book Tour

Colleen Lindsay lays out the cold, hard economic facts of the bookstore signing.

In the business, authors get toured either because they're superstars who draw huge crowds (a few "real" writers are in this category, but it's mostly celebrities who got famous doing other things) or because they demand it and the cost is reasonable compared to what their books earn.

And, from what I've seen from writer's blogs, the book tour is a cruel, hard slog as well. So why do new writers still dream of it?

Say Hello to Stinky Chucklebuns

My two sons have been huge fans of Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books for many years now -- and I've enjoyed reading them out loud a lot myself.

But, until just five minutes ago, I wasn't aware that the Name-Change-O-Chart 2000 from Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants (*) was available online, for immediately third-grade snickering fun. (I learned this from Alison Morris, who blogs about children's books for Publishers Weekly.)

Anyway, I'm now declaring this a meme, if anyone wants to follow me.

My Captain Underpants name is...Stinky Chucklebuns!

What's yours?


(*) Professor Pippy P. Poopypants, to you.

Happy Boring Company News

My employer, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., just released its results for the first quarter of fiscal 09. (We're on a May-to-April year here.) Highlights include a 3% increase in revenue and 19% increase in earnings per diluted share -- though the part of the company I work for (the Professional/Trade group) had a 3% decrease in revenue from the first quarter of FY08 (which was very strong).

I know only me and my reader at Wiley Australia care about this, but it's very nice to be working for a company I can say is profitable, stable, and happy. (And I haven't posted yet today, so it's cheap filler.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/6

Every week, I get stuff in the mail. A lot of it is books and embryonic books, to be reviewed or noted (here or elsewhere). And I then list them all, with some mostly serious commentary, every Monday morning for people who might be interested.

(This week, I'll also list some graphic novels that didn't come in the mail, but which I do expect to be reviewing for ComicMix in the next couple of weeks. I'll add those at the end.)

But, first, the mail!

American Quest is the first publication from a new press called The Story Plant, founded by two long-term publishing guys (Peter Miller and Lou Aronica). It's an absolutely professional-looking hardcover, as I'd expect, and they've real trade distribution through Perseus -- so you could find this book just about anywhere you find any books. The author is billed as "Sienna Skyy," which sounds like a pseudonym because it is -- "Skyy" is actually a supernatural romance writer from the New York area using a new name for a new project. American Quest is a contemporary fantasy -- the first in a four-book series -- which sounds like it has strong romantic threads and possibly a cosmology similar to Terry Brooks's "The Word & the Void" trilogy. It's officially published on September 16th, which means books should be hitting stores this week.

The next Star Wars hardcover is the latest in Karen Traviss's "Republic Commando" sub-series, Order 66, which Del Rey will publish September 16th. (On a side note, I've never actually looked, but I'm sure that there are a pile of fanfics out there somewhere with the title "Order 69" depicting various steamy goings-on between the unlikeliest of characters.) Traviss's Internet persona is grumpy and opinionated, so I've always liked her -- and her Star Wars novels have had some authentically gritty military SF without the usual ideological baggage that often comes with MilSF.

Then there's the the book with the longest title I've seen in a while: Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. It's a collection of stories from the online magazine of the same name, and was edited by Edmund R. Schubert and Orson Scott Card. (I don't envy anyone being the co-editor on a book with someone whose name is in the title, so kudos to Schubert.) The book was published August 12th, and has four stories by Card (all set in the "Ender-verse," I believe), as well as work from Tim Pratt, David Farland, James Maxey, and David Lubar.

The graphic novel based on the video game series Prince of Persia has just been published by First Second -- the official date was September 2nd. It's credited to Jordan Mechner (creator of the original game), A.B. Sina (who wrote this graphic novel), and LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (who did the art). I reviewed it a few weeks back for ComicMix, but it's now hitting stores.

Last from the mailbag this week is the third book in Joe Abercrombie's big fat (and acclaimed) debut fantasy trilogy, "The First Law," has made its way to the US -- it's called The Last Argument of Kings, and Pyr are publishing it September 2nd. I haven't read any of these, I'm afraid, so I have no personal recommendation either for or against. But it's been compared to writers I like and respect, such as George R.R. Martin and Steven Erikson, so, if you like them, you might want to check out Abercrombie. (For those of you who wait until series are complete before diving in at all, the first book is The Blade Itself.

Moving on to comics/graphic novels/illustrated prose/whatever we call stories with words and pictures all smooshed together on the page, I have a few books to mention:

Scrambled Ink is another book of short stories in comics form by animators; this one is from a group who work at DreamWorks, and (as is common with this kind of book), there's no editor credited. It's in an odd format -- 9" x 6", like a book of newspaper strip-cartoon reprints -- and has an oddly black-and-white cover. I'm hoping all that quirkiness will spill over into the stories as well; similar projects like Out of Picture and Flight have been visually gorgeous, but not all that inventive on the level of story. Scrambled Ink was published earlier this summer by Dark Horse.

The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin is the first in a series of graphic novels for teens from Scholastic's Graphix imprint. It's written by Holly Black -- co-author of the "Spiderwick Chronicles" series and author of a series of dark and impressive contemporary YA fantasy novels starting with Tithe -- and illustrated by Ted Naifeh, known for a number of Goth-tinged comics projects. This book has something to do with the fairy realm intersecting with our world -- and, if you know Black at all, you know her fairies are more Puck than Tinkerbell. Good Neighbors was published in September.

William Messner-Loebs's classic Journey series is being brought back into print twenty years later by IDW -- they've just published a collection of the first sixteen issues of the series, the hefty Journey, Volume 1. Messner-Loebs has had some health problems lately, which seems to have broken him back into the comics business, after he was sidelined at the turn of the century. I have to admit that I've never read Journey -- it was one of those things that I always thought I'd get to, sooner or later, but I never quite did -- so now I've got a chance to catch up.

And last of everything this week is the new book from Rick Geary, which I've been waiting for all summer. It's somewhat of a continuation of his "Treasury of Victorian Murder" series, but he's moved into the Twentieth Century, and chosen a crime that didn't start out to be a murder. The book is The Lindbergh Child, and it bears the subtitle "A Treasury of XXth Century Crime" -- which I hopes we'll continue to see many more books from Geary for years to come. (Maybe Bonnie & Clyde? Or Al Capone? He'd do a great job on thirties gangsters -- his art style could do great things with pinstripes.) The Lindbergh Child was just published by NBM's ComicsLit imprint.

Movie Log: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

I had high hopes for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, since I remembered the critics' reactions being strongly positive. (It's at 78% at RottenTomatoes, for example.) I'd also gotten the impression that it was a comedy, or at least had strong comedy elements.

But I found it more disappointing than successful, and didn't see much humor in it.

Confessions is the movie adaptation of Chuck Barris's autobiography of the same name; it was also George Clooney's first movie as a director. Barris was a major game-show producer through the sixties and seventies, creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game and becoming best known as creator and host of The Gong Show. All that would presumably provide enough material for any normal bio-pic.

But Barris also claimed, in his autobiography, to have been a CIA assassin for many years -- the same years when he was a busy working producer. And so the movie has to address that, which it does by at first seeming to stage the CIA scenes in a less realistic, more cartoony way. But that doesn't follow through, and, by the end, the movie is taking the CIA-assassin material completely seriously, which turns it into just another melodrama.

I've seen speculation that the assassin material was Barris's weird metaphor for drug addiction, and the movie could have worked much better if it had maintained some disbelief in Barris's double life. His claims are frankly ridiculous, and buying into them so readily turns Confessions of a Dangerous Mind into a historical thriller. (It's a stylish thriller, yes, with good performances from Sam Rockwell as Barris, from Clooney as his CIA handler, and from Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts as the major women in the two sides of his life, but it should have been more than that.)

Also: there's a lot of narration in Barris's voice early on, which then mostly disappears, and the early scenes set up that the movie will be about Barris's string of women, and that also drops out. The script was by Charlie Kaufman, and apparently was rewritten by Clooney on set. This might be just the usual sour-grapes, but I have to wonder if Kaufman's original version was more coherent and had more of a point of view.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is entertaining precisely to the degree that you can believe that Chuck Barris really was a CIA assassin. The larger your screen, and the higher your suspension of disbelief, the more you'll enjoy this movie.

All Life Is a Blur of Swords and Psychics

...as Zippy the Pinhead didn't quite say.

This week's "Manga Friday" column, from Yr. Humble Correspondent, was entitled Swords and Psychics, and in it I reviewed Dororo, Vol. 3, Afro Samurai, Vol. 1, and E'S, Vol. 1.

If I Do It, That Means It's Normal

I've been struck recently by two animated TV shows that my sons have been watching a lot. I'm probably reading too much into this -- I always do -- but let me sketch it out.

Phineas and Ferb is a show about two boys, who are scientifically-oriented and who get into various odd troubles. They have a nagging, unpleasant older sister who doesn't like them and their science-y stuff.

Johnny Test (which has been around for longer, but which my kids started watching more recently) is about a boy who gets into various odd troubles, usually because of things created by his two scientifically-oriented older sisters (who don't much like him).

(And, yes, they're both the bastard stepchildren of Dexter's Laboratory, with a small genetic contribution from Jimmy Neutron.)

They seem like the same premise turned backwards, except for one thing: in both cases, it's the boys that are the audience-identification characters. One's message is that science is fun, and one's is that science is boring junk that girls do -- and both have the usual kids-show message that everything will come out fine in the end, no matter what stupid stunts you try -- but both shows know that what really matters is what boys do. What boys do is cool; what girls do isn't.

Even as a father of only boys, I'm uncomfortable with that.

Two Notes on the Times

The New York Times deals with the threat to traditional print media from the ever-growing digital age by having a search engine that seems to work, but which is no good at finding anything specific or recent. Thus -- I assume this is their hope -- readers will give up in disgust at trying to find anything useful on the Times's website, and go back to reading the paper the way they're supposed to.

Today's example: I want to note two pieces I read in this morning's print Times -- to send traffic to the paper; to increase, if only very slightly, its visibility. But finding those articles is never easy. Searching by author or by date is nearly always useless; if you want to find something, you need to dig through the recycling bag and get the exact title.

But these minor problems couldn't stop me long, and so:

1) It's been longer than I can remember since I read something by a self-identified Republican and actually agreed with it. But David Frum's "The Vanishing Republican Voter" is smart about economics -- and how economics is actually affecting real people -- in a way that I haven't seen recently. If there was a presidential candidate talking like Frum, I wouldn't be leaning towards a Democrat for the first time in my adult life.

2) But I generally can't manage to finish reading an edition of the Times without wanting to bop someone on the head, and today was no exception. The culprit this time was Gregory Cowles's always-arch "Inside the List" column, which led off with wide-eyed wonder at the #1 placement of a mere tie-in novel, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, along with some snarky comments about the various Star Wars books on other lists. It's no surprise that the Times is once again dismissive of the books that people actually read and like -- they continually gerrymander their lists in fruitless attempts to root out any books like that -- but Cowles also manages to completely misunderstand what gaming has become over the last two decades. It's an impressive bit of complete cultural illiteracy in a few paragraphs, and I recommend it to any fans of mandarin stupidity.

(And, on the other side, congratulations to Sean Williams and the Del Rey/Lucasbooks team for getting a #1 Times bestseller. I know the first Timothy Zahn book hit #1 -- way back when from Bantam -- and I think one or two of the movie novels did as well, but it's an uncommon, impressive feat.)

Spell: Summon External Memory

Someone, very recently, posted about a giveaway of a decent quantity of ARCs/bound galleys to bloggers who would agree to write about it. I have one of my very rare cool books coming up -- no, really, it's all about social networking and organizing online and bloggy kind of stuff; no accounting at all -- and I wanted to do something similar, but my Google skills are failing me this afternoon.

Does anyone out there remember, and could point me at, a similar recent declaration of "Bloggers! Free advance copies for all those who will write about it!"

Update: Thanks, folks! It probably was Little Brother that I was thinking about. (I had the vague sense that John Scalzi was involved, but Patrick is Scalzi's editor as well as Doctorow's, and just the kind of connection I'd expect my mind to make.) If anyone has any other recent examples, though, please let me know.

(Though, I seem to remember another recent book that was a "repost this message on your own blog to spread the word wider" -- that obviously wasn't Little Brother, because the combined force of Boing Boing and Making Light already threaten to swamp the Internet...)

Imprinting on a Publisher

This may be too much "inside baseball" for many of you, but Sarah Weinman (crime fiction writer and reviewer, and former editor of GalleyCat) is in the middle of a series of excellent posts examining the various imprints of some of the major American publishers.

They're quite detailed, and get into the details of what a particular imprint is known for, and how well it's currently maintaining its brand.

She's done three so far:
Vol. 1 is on Macmillan
Vol. 2 is on Simon & Schuster
and Vol. 3, just posted today, takes on Hachette

Commentors on the first post have wondered what the purpose of an imprint is, which is a fair question. An imprint done correctly focuses attention, both inside that house, with a devoted, professional team of editors, marketers, publicists, and so on, and outside the house, among readers, reviewers, authors, and agents. Small houses tend to be focused just by virtue of being small; larger houses need to organize themselves to focus well.

It's possible to have coherent publishing programs and strong teams without imprints -- my employer, Wiley, has a lot of closely defined internal "product lines" without having many consumer-facing imprints -- but a publisher does need to be organized in some way so that readers come to trust that publisher in their area of interest and so that the people within the house develop expertise in a particular area.

Two ComicMix Reviews

I've reviewed two books for ComicMix so far this week (and the first one has got a lively discussion thread going, too):

• On Tuesday I reviewed Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!
• And today I reviewed American Widow by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

Tomorrow should see a Manga Friday column, unless something falls on my head before I write and post it.

More Things That Amuse Only Me

At lunch, I often check my personal e-mail. (Who doesn't?)

I also often e-mail myself things -- video links to look at once I'm home, new bookmarks, etc.

And my company recently changed e-mail systems, so now our names appear as "Lastname, Firstname -- Location." (And I work in Hoboken.)

That gets truncated in the web inbox of my personal e-mail, so that I have just received mail from:

Wheeler, Andrew -- Hobo

I find this inordinately amusing.

The Conspiracy Theory of Publishing

Oh, dear. Jonathan McCalmont is ranting again.

Responding in depth would be time-consuming, and probably pointless. So let me just say that McCalmont is very little understanding of the economics of publishing -- not to mention an overly developed sense of his own persecution -- and leave it at that.

Or, in other words: The way he thinks publishing works? No.

Massive Savings on the Top Shelf

Top Shelf, one of the many fine smaller operations engaged in comics publishing today, is having a big sale, and -- well, let me just quote Chris Staros, the man behind (or maybe below) the Top Shelf:

To celebrate The Surrogates movie wrapping principal photography, surviving San Diego, and all the cool new summer and fall releases, for the next ten days -- thru Friday September 12th -- Top Shelf is having a giant $3 graphic novel web sale. When you visit the site, you'll find over 125 graphic novels and comics on sale -- with 90 titles marked down to just $3 (!) and a slew of other key titles just slashed!

They've got books I reviewed like That Salty Air and Super Spy, a lot of Eddie Campbell and James Kochalka books, and all three parts of Jeff Lemire's "Essex County" trilogy. If you like smart comics that tell stories about real people, you'll find something good there.

(And I say this having placed an order for six things myself, just this morning.)

Tie Me In! Tie Me Out!

The latest "Mind Meld" column from SF Signal is about that perennial subject of discussion, the humble tie-in. Their blunt question was: "How do you think media tie-in novels affect the genre of sf/f?"

SF Signal asked a bunch of people who actually write tie-ins (which I thought was a nice touch, and one that doesn't often happen when this subject arises), like Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Sean Williams, Kevin J. Anderson, Walter Jon Williams, and David Gerrold for their views on this burning issue. They also asked critics (Paul Raven), booksellers (Alan Beatts), and general layabouts (that would be me) for their opinions as well. And then the crack SF Signal staff collated all of those replies and shoved them into one single blog post for your delectation.

What do you think, sirs?

Who Needs an Agent?

You do, insists Editorial Ass.

She does say that her advice applies doubly to fiction writers -- which is absolutely true -- but I would just add, mildly, that this isn't as true for markets that aren't aimed at a broad general audience. If you're writing for a professional audience, of psychologists, accountants, engineers, software developers or what-have-you, agents can be useful in some cases but aren't as necessary.

If you've written a novel (or a non-fiction book aimed at a mass audience), though, she's 100% on the money: don't try to submit it to publishers without signing up an agent first. And if you can't get an agent for that project, it says something very strong about the marketability of your current work.

The Rising Tide

A couple of weeks ago, Larry (of OF Blog of the Fallen) counted up that he'd gotten 232 new books in the first 231 days of the year, which inspired me to do a similar count myself.

But sometimes inspiration has to wait a while for free time to catch up.

Tonight I finally had the time and the inclination to run through my "Incoming Books" and "Reviewing the Mail" posts for the year so far, and here are the rough totals for the first 246 days of the year:

Books for review: 275
Books purchased for myself: at least 63 (I may have missed some)
Books from the library: approximately 30

Round that all off and it's around 370-380 books so far this year, and it's only September. Luckily, I spent sixteen years working in an office where I'd routinely see a dozen or more new books in a day, so this all still looks like a trickle.

(And, as I always say when I count up impressive numbers of books, half or more of those are comics, which means they read much faster than prose.)

Cory Doctorow Wants Covers to Roam Free

If you blog about books (or write about them online in any other form), you've run into the problem of finding useful cover images to illustrate your posts. Google Image Search is usually pretty good, but throws up a lot of noise with the signal (especially if the book or author name contain common words). The various Amazons are OK, but lots of their cover images have their "Search Inside" graphic pasted on top, and even those that don't usually have a white border added to the actual cover, which can be ugly and noticeable when you stick it on your blog post. (Yes, you can edit it out -- and I have, a number of times -- but that's yet one more step, which takes time and effort.)

I personally use BN.com -- they don't have extra stuff pasted on their bookshots, or borders I need to delete -- but they don't have everything. (Old books are the biggest problem, though I don't imagine most bookbloggers are reviewing old paperbacks the way I do.)

Cory Doctorow has been thinking about this problem, and he has a solution. It's simple, elegant, and could be implemented immediately: every publisher that wants to could create a "/covers" directory at the top level of their sites, stick high-rez PNGs (or JPGs) of their cover art there, in files named with the books' ISBNs, and make sure the metadata flows out to search engines.

The comments on his post are also interesting, though some of the objections seem trivially wrong to me. (For example, if the publisher is already providing an ONIX feed to online bookstores, there's already a web-ready version of the cover being disseminated -- I very much doubt any sizable publisher is failing to buy the rights to do what all publishers are already doing.)

And, of course, those images don't need to be in precisely the directory Doctorow suggests -- the important thing is that they're posted, publicly accessible, and indexed by major searchers. The possible existence of a worldwide database of all covers, or a dedicated cover-search function, would be nice but isn't necessary.

Really, I bet these images are nearly all already on the web somewhere -- it's really just a question of linking or spidering them, so that they can be found more easily.

The Coming of Chrome

The big news today -- in the techy world, at least -- is that Google's ongoing takeover of the entire wired world continues on track with their new, shiny webbrowser, Google Chrome.

Chrome will only be available for PCs at launch, though Mac support is promised very soon.

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that Chrome is explained by a thirty-eight-page online comic book. And guess who illustrated that comic? As soon as I saw the first page, I was pretty sure it was Scott McCloud -- and I was right.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/30

Every Monday morning, I post an annotated list of the books that came in the mail to me for review (and occasionally books that came through other channels). Since I review comics for ComicMix and spent sixteen years editing The Science Fiction Book Club, those books tend to be comics and SF/Fantasy -- but, if there are any publicists for other genres lurking out there, I've been reviewing lots of other things (mysteries, business books, books of words or odd facts, etc.), so please do consider me for similar works that you're promoting.

What I saw this past week (a slow time, as everyone in publishing spent their last summer vacation days at the Hamptons or elsewhere) was:

Tobias S. Buckell's third novel, Sly Mongoose, which was published by Tor in hardcover earlier this month. The cover is great, Buckell is a nice guy and a good writer, but I'm already a book behind on him, with Ragamuffin still sitting on my shelf a year later. (That was one of the last books that I could have read for the SFBC, but my boss Ellen got to it first -- largely because I'd read Buckell's first novel, Crystal Rain, and told her how good it was. No good deed goes unpunished.)

Probably the most unexpected book I saw last week was Alan's War, a big graphic novel by French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert based on the life of an American G.I. It's the first of a projected series, with this book covering Alan Cope's service in WW II and a second book (Alan's Youth) expected to fill in his life up to that point. It's being published as a trade paperback (with French flaps and similar bells and whistles) by First Second in November. I've enjoyed what I've seen of Guibert's work so far (such as The Professor's Daughter, with Joann Sfar), and there's been an interesting surge of good non-fiction comics over the past few years, so I hope the combination is doubly good.

American Widow was written by 9/11 widow Alissa Torres and illustrated by Sungyoon Choi; it's Torres's own story and that of her late husband, Eddie. Villard is publishing it in hardcover on September 9th. I expect to review it for ComicMix next week, so I'll avoid prejudging it before I actually read it.

Faust 1 is the first American edition of a Japanese anthology series that mixes fiction, non-fictional prose, and manga. The Japanese edition is edited by Katsushi Ota, who also provides an introduction to this American version, but the American book itself doesn't credit an editor. Del Rey published it in mid-August. It's hard to tell from looking at it if this book exists because there really is a huge, pent-up demand (from all of those manga-reading teenagers) for more prose from Japan in the US, or if Kodansha is using its relationship with Del Rey to push what looks like one of their major current projects in Japan. I suppose the sales will show which is true. But the name is weirdly specific and culturally tied -- not in a good way, either -- for an broad anthology. Why would anyone call a book like this Faust?

Danica Novgorodoff's debut full-length graphic novel Slow Storm will be published tomorrow by First Second; I reviewed it at ComicMix some weeks back.

And last for this week is the new "Wild Cards" book, edited as always by George R.R. Martin with assists from Melinda M. Snodgrass. This one is Busted Flush, and it's the nineteenth in the series. I read the first eight or ten of these -- the original series, when Bantam published them -- but I have to admit that I jumped off when, like so many shared worlds, each volume got gloomier and gloomier, as each writer played "Can you top this?!" with their nasty mind-controlling and head-hopping villains. I missed the Baen run entirely, and I haven't caught up with the current series, either. Has anyone been reading them lately? (This one will be published in hardcover by Tor in December.)

Read in August

It's coming to be a pattern: after a month with a huge number of books (like July), there's a month with a more modest total (like August). I'm reading so much comic-book-y stuff that even the "small" number might look big, but, really, there's an awful lot of pictures embedded in that number. So this month was 33, after last month's 47. And I don't think it was because my "real" books were longer one, either; I think August was a big pile of comics and a lot of slacking off -- which sounds about right for the end of summer.

What I did read this past month was:

• Kyo Shirodaira & Eita Mizuno, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 4 (8/1)
  
• Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom (8/1)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 20 (8/3)
  I believe this volume set up the storyline of the next seven or eight volumes, with Naruto's friend/rival/teammate Sasuke agreeing to run off to see the big bad villain, Orochimaru, and have his power increased vastly (by turning to evil -- that always does it). Naruto and four others set off after Sasuke (currently dead, though not for tax reasons) and the four evil ninjas who are transporting him. I think.
  
• Julia Wertz, The Fart Party (8/4)
  
• Peter S. Beagle, I See By My Outfit (8/5)
  
• "Samuel Holt" (pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake), What I Tell You Three Times Is False (8/7)
  
• Timothy Truman, Scout, Vol. 2 (8/9)
  
• Katsu Aki, Manga Sutra, Vol. 1 (8/10)
  
• Yutta Narukami, Pretty Poison (8/12)
  
• J.R. "Yellow Kid" Weil & W.T. Brannon, Con Man: A Master Swindler's Own Story (8/13)
  
• Shikuo Kano, Yakuza in Love, Vol. 1 (8/13)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 21 (8/14)
  More chasing and fighting; the pattern of this series is set: one of Naruto's young allies squares off against one of the evil Sound Ninja Four, while the rest of the cast continues chasing each other. Then the good guy and the bad guy battle until they both appear to be dying, and the curtain falls.
  
• Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China (8/15)
  
• Kazu Kibuishi, Flight, Volume Five (8/17)
  
• Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (8/17)
  
• Seiichi Hayashi, Red Colored Elegy (8/17)
  
• Mia Ikumi, Koi Cupid, Vol. 1 (8/18)
  
• P.G. Wodehouse, Plum Pie (8/18)
  
• Shoko Hamadi, Flock of Angels, Vol. 1 (8/19)
  
• Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (8/19)
  
• Nari Kusakawa, Two Flowers for the Dragon, Vol. 2 (8/20)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 22 (8/21)
  See above; a second good ninja and a second evil ninja battle to what looks like their collapse and at least near-death. Meanwhile, the remnants of both sides are racing to the main villain, Orochimaru.
  
• Larry McMurtry, Books: A Memoir (8/21)
  
• Jodi Picoult, et. al., Wonder Woman: Love and Murder (8/22)
  
• Janet Chui & Jason Erik Lundberg, editors, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (8/23)
  
• Mitchell Symons, The Other Book...of the Most Perfectly Useless Information (8/24)
  This was the book I read bits of at bedtime over the summer, and it's not worth having its own entry. It's the third in a series of entertaining but obviously shallow books of random facts (This Book... was part of my Book-A-Day pace last year). I know enough random information to catch Symons out now and then on a fact he got wrong, which makes me worry about the truth of the surrounding material. But these books are pleasant and probably mostly accurate, so I'm happy enough with them.
  
• Scott McCloud, Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection (8/26)
  
• Kaoru Ohashi, Nightmares for Sale, Vol. 1 (8/26)
  
• Negi Banno, S.S. Astro: Asashio Sogo Teachers Room, Vol. 1 (8/28)
• Chaco Abeno, Naoki Hisaya, & Naru Nanao, Sola, Vol. 1 (8/28)
• Michael Bell, editor, Scouts in Bondage and Other Violations of Literary Propriety (8/29)
• Neil Gaiman & Gris Grimly, The Dangerous Alphabet (8/29)
• Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine: The Crass Menagerie (8/30)
  

And that's what I read this last month. Coming in September: probably more of the same...