The Least Likely Cookbook In The World

You probably don't want to click on this link: Natural Harvest.

No, really, you don't. All of the recipes in that book focus on one common, naturally-occurring animal product -- why, for half of you, there's some as close as your own hand. The comments are fun, though.

[via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books]

Abandoned Books: Jetpack Dreams by Mac Montandon

I've just made a new rule for myself, though I'll have to see how long it lasts: if I think about dropping a book in the middle more than twice, I'll just do it, and move on to something else. (If I find myself reading two chapters and then dropping everything, I'll have to reconsider the rule -- or my criteria for picking a book up in the first place.)

I obviously can't review Mac Montandon's Jetpack Dreams; I've only read about half of it. And I was mostly enjoying it as I was reading it, too.

But I came to think that Montandon was far, far more interested in jetpacks than I ever would be, and that I was becoming less interested as the book went on. (Obviously Montandon liked jetpacks -- he wrote a whole book about them! -- but I thought I did, too. It's weird to discover that some geeky thing that you assumed you liked is actually not all that compelling, once you get down to it.)

Jetpack Dreams was an interesting read as far as I went; Montandon has done both his historical research and his contemporary legwork. And I doubt there will be a better book about jetpacks in my lifetime -- there may never be another book about jetpacks in my lifetime.

If you like jetpacks as much as I thought I did -- or if you are just somewhat interested and less ambivalent than I seem to be this week -- you might well find a lot to like in Jetpack Dreams. But I'm going to pick something else up, and see if I can finish that.

Manga and Monsters at ComicMix

I did have three reviews up at ComicMix this week -- including the one on Monday I already told you folks about -- but I ran a bit later than usual this week.

Yesterday, of course, was Manga Friday, and my column reviewed Gantz, Gankutsuou, and Dorothea.

And then today I had a review covering two new Hellboy-related books: Abe Sapien: The Drowning and B.P.R.D.: 1946.

I assume I'll be back on a more regular schedule next week, but we all know what assumptions do...

Incoming Books: 24 November

I took a trip to the comics shop earlier this week, and haven't managed to blog about it since. (And if you want to take that as "too busy" rather than "too lazy," it's fine with me.) But, since I am obsessive, I will list them now, for the three people who are on the Internet instead of having something better to do:

Lawrence Block's One Night Stands and Lost Weekends, a collection of very early stories originally published as two small-press hardcovers, One Night Stands and The Lost Cases of Ed London. I've been vaguely thinking that I needed to track down those two books for the past few years -- and have been stopped by the price -- so it's great to see Harper putting out an economical edition. I don't expect these to be all that good, of course, but I've read a couple of very early Block novels recently -- Grifter's Game and A Diet of Treacle -- and found them decent noir thrillers, so I'm hoping the stories will have a similar kick.

Guy Delisle, I've learned, has published books other than his Asian travelogues Burma Chronicles, Shenzhen, and Pyongyang; he's also done a few books of wordless humorous comics. So I grabbed one of those, Aline and the Others -- it looks quite different from his travel books.

There's a new B.P.R.D. book -- part of the ever-expanding Hellboy universe -- called 1946, and I got a copy of that, even though I've already read it. (I need to write up my review of it and another Hellboy spinoff for ComicMix soon -- as in today soon.)

The eleventh volume of Fables also came out; it's called War and Pieces. I haven't read it yet, but I gather it's another object lesson in just how cruel Bill Willingham can be to his creations -- many writers flinch, but one of Willingham's great strengths is that he neither flinches nor pushes too far; he's precise and correct in his plot-driven cruelty.

And last was the big art annual, Spectrum 15. I used to buy these for the SFBC -- for thirteen years! -- but now I'm reduced to buying single copies for myself in a store. O tempora, O mores!

The Times's Notable Books of 2008

The New York Times has just listed their 100 "Notable" books of the year -- though they note that their year runs from Dec 2, 2007, when they did the list the last time, to November 26, 2008, which sounds like slightly less than a year to me. And, at this rate, the Times will have to have a Leap Notable Books in 2055.

Among their notable fiction books are Victor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in verse by Simon Armitage, Robert Bolano's 2666, and John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick.

(That Updike novel, by the way, almost won him the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award for this year, and did get him a special lifetime-achievement citation for passages such as this:
"She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin, God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea." That's how you have to write to be notable to the Times.)

On the nonfiction side, there are actually a couple of books I've read -- Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic -- along with one I keep thinking I should read, David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague.

But, as usual, nothing published explicitly in a fiction genre made it onto the list -- I'd bet that no books like that were even considered.

Sailing for Bourbon

On Monday, I reviewed the graphic novel Bourbon Island 1730, by Appollo and Lewis Trondheim, for ComicMix.

I was supposed to have another review today -- my aim is always to go Mon-Wed-Fri -- but I got too lazy/tired/out of time last night, and it didn't get written. Maybe later (though not tomorrow, since no one will be on the Internet then).

Manga Friday, though, I do expect will be on time.

Guardian Bad Sex Award: 2008

The British newspaper The Guardian (renowned in song and story as Teh Grauniad for their error-filled past) has an annual award for the worst sex scene -- grandly called the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

This year saw a strong group of nominees -- including Alastair Campbell, Paulo Coelho, Simon Montefiore, Isabel Fonseca, and perennial contender John Updike.

Samples from several of the nominated novels -- though not, sadly, either Updike or Coelho -- are also available, to potentially make you swear off sex for the rest of your life.

And, just yesterday, the winner was announced: Rachel Johnson, for her novel Shire Hell. A special lifetime achievement award was also presented to Updike, who has now been nominated for the award four years running.

Johnson won in large part due to her flood of animal metaphors, such as:

...his hands find my bush, and with light fingers he flutters about there, as if he is a moth caught inside a lampshade. ...puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me. I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance or whatever it is.

Moths, cats, Wagner and slugs, all in less than a page -- that's some good sex!

That Fine Old Clan, the Wheelers

My father, along with one of his older brothers, have been tracing the family genealogy back over the past few years. (As hobbies go, it's a relatively harmless one, and they don't seem to have found any major skeletons in any closets.)

I've just gotten another batch of their findings -- two big DVDs of family documents, photos, and miscellany, plus a CD-ROM biography of my great-great grandfather William Sippell Wheeler.

But the big news this year is that I can now trace my ancestry to Resolved White, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620 with his parents, William and Susanna (being only five years old at the time, he was presumably too small to make the journey alone).

So if there was ever any doubt about how much of a WASP I am, I hope this has laid that to rest.

Something To Remember

Whenever an author -- any author of fiction, and many who write primarily non-fiction as well -- pontificates about genre placement and markers, the borders between categories, the popularity of particular styles, or anything at all related to the categorization of books, what that author is thinking but not saying is:

My books are so wonderful that everyone in the whole wide world would love them, and so anything that keeps even one person from reading one of my books is bad.

Those writers are incorrect; there is no book that everyone would like, and no book that even all of the people who habitually read a particular genre would like. Tattoo this inside your eyelids: De gustibus non est disputandum.

Keep that in mind when you see writers talking about how books should be shelved or categorized.

Corporate Culture Shock

You really get to know more about a company when you work longer hours than usual. Today, I'm going to be running off to SFWA's annual Author-Editor Reception -- I think the name might actually be longer than that, now, but we all just call it the "Mill & Swill" -- so I'm lingering in the Wiley offices much later than I usually do.

I generally come in early and leave early -- just slightly earlier than the Wiley standard of 8:30 to 4:30 -- so I haven't really known what it's like here after I leave. (And I'm usually one of the first to leave, as I was at the bookclubs.)

But Wiley very quickly turns into a ghost town: the floor is mostly empty by 5. This is in strong distinction to the iron-woman culture of the clubs, where seeing daylight on leaving the office was considered a sign of weakness. There are people still working here, but I bet Wiley doesn't have the office hypermilers the clubs did, people who didn't get out before 8 even on a good day.

I much prefer this current culture, of course.

Your Moment of Zen

What do acquiring editors do when they're told not to acquire?

If you know an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, you could ask her...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/22

I review books, so I get books to review. And, inevitably, I don't manage to review all of them. But I want to mention them all -- so I do posts like this every week, to list the books I've just seen, but haven't yet read.

This week has a very short stack -- either because the fickle goddess Publicity has turned her face away from me, because the economic troubles are hitting publishing companies, or because it's the middle of the month. Other theories may be equally plausible, as well...

Peter F. Hamilton's new novel The Temporal Void is another one of his patented brick-like objects; well over seven hundred pages and, even as a bound galley, quite hefty enough to create a big welt if you fling it at someone. (Not that I suggest chucking it at anyone, or admit to doing so myself.) It's the sequel to The Dreaming Void, and the middle book of a trilogy (with, presumably, one more The {Adjective} Void book still to come). And I haven't read any Hamilton, so I can't give you any advice one way or the other on this. He's pretty popular, so if you like gigantic books and/or modern space opera -- preferably both -- you'd be in a large company if you tried this one. You'd probably want to start with Dreaming Void, which is just as well, since Temporal Void won't be published -- in hardcover, by Del Rey -- until March 24th.

My one comic-booky title is one my two sons would be thrilled to know about. Luckily for me, they don't read my blog, so it'll be a surprise to them whenever I do pass it along to them. It's Bakugan Battle Brawlers: The Battle Begins!, a comic made from screen shots of the animated TV show of the same name. (Is there a generic term for these? At least one publisher calls them "Cine-Manga," but I think that's their trademark. And they're not fumetti, since they're not using real photographs.) Bakugan is another in the long line of Japanese series about pre-teen boys with weird hair who fight evil (and each other) using trading cards -- which you the reader can buy yourself in a local toy shop! -- and, in this case, summoned monsters, which you can also sort-of do yourself. I can just about tell all of these things apart, but I don't claim to be any kind of an expert. I'm pretty sure no one reading this blog will want this book for personal enjoyment, but some of you may be interested (as I am) on behalf of young 'uns. This one is already published; it's also from Del Rey.

And last this week -- I told you it was a short list -- is a new edition of Robert Silverberg's 1971 novel A Time of Changes, from Tor's Orb imprint. It won the Nebula for Best Novel, is part of that amazing rush of great novels that Silverberg wrote in the late '60s and early '70s, and it's wonderful to see it back in print. (This is the one about the medium-future human colony world where referring to oneself in the first person is heavily taboo -- but the book's protagonist is determined to do it.) This new edition will be out in April. I couldn't find a cover for it online -- it is pretty early, after all -- but I'm pretty sure that I saw the cover art for this just this weekend. (I was at the Philcon science fiction convention, and I think the Artist Guest of Honor, John Picacio, had it in the art show.) I could be confused, though -- that happens more often than I'd like.

The Long Tail Is Dead

Sayeth The Register, quoting official Long Tail promoter Chris Anderson.

Money quote:

"I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail," Anderson wrote. "The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change."

This does not mean, of course, that no one can ever make money on something that isn't the very biggest thing ever. But most of the money to be made in any particular market has been pretty conclusively proven to be in the top cluster.

As many of us have said for a long time, the Long Tail may indeed be very long, but it's very, very thin...and so adds up to less than many people hoped. C'est la vie.

Explain Me This

How come I'm seeing a whole bunch of editorial cartoons about the possible car-makers' bailout including some reference to the UAW as some evil personage?

(Take this Lisa Benson cartoon, for example -- the UAW is a giant gorilla, and "Detroit" is a little man acting like his organ-grinder's monkey. The message seems to be that "Detroit" is utterly in thrall of the UAW, which would be a huge surprise to anyone who's followed the history of labor unions in the last fifty years.)

Didn't we use to think that well-paying blue-collar jobs were a good thing? I completely understand the resentment against investment bankers -- more so, enthusiastically share in it -- but I didn't think that we'd sunk so low as to hate relatively well-paid factory workers.

(There's another cartoon from a few days ago -- I can't find it now -- but it was basically blaming retirees for the carmakers' financial problems. As if, you know, if they'd just died like poor people are supposed to, then GM wouldn't have to pay for their meager old-age cottages.)

Oh, and, yes, I do remember American labor's long history of strong-arm tactics and ties to organized crime -- I'm from New Jersey, remember! -- but these cartoons seem to be about something else, as if paying assembly-line workers a high wage is a stupid, evil idea.

Update: And here's another one, from Glenn Foden. The UAW is a giant anchor holding back the stagecoach of the Big 3 automakers from being pulled by a single donkey (which I guess represents car-buyers; he's not labeled). Leaving aside the inadvertently painful precision of Foden's visual metaphor -- the cartoon itself begs one to ask if the Big 3 aren't in trouble because they're trying to drive a stagecoach -- one still has to ask why the similar stagecoaches of Toyota, Honda, and so for -- not shown in this picture -- aren't being similarly hampered.

Editorial cartoonists, everywhere: think about your metaphors before you dive into them.

Oh, and here's one from the other side, by David Horsey.

More Girly Girls and Dreamy Boys for Manga Friday

My "Manga Friday" column this week for ComicMix reviews the second volumes of the series Nephilim, Sunshine Sketch, and You're So Cool -- all pretty girly shojo stories, though of different kinds.

When You See "Amazon," Do You Think "Shoes"?

Amazon, in their continuing attempt to dominate all retail sales of everything, everywhere, have continued their inexorable assault on other retailers by expanding into footwear.

They're quite keen for people to know that they now have ALDO shoes (whatever those are), and that there's free shipping on those ALDO shoes through 12/21.

If you know, or care, more about this than I do, then click away:

Quote of the Week

"[John Stuart] Mill had an allergy to dogma, including his own -- which makes him an occasional friend to the dogmatist. When someone says that proof of God's existence can be found in Nature, he doesn't say it's bosh. He asks what this would actually entail if it were true, and infers that such a creator would have to be limited, inept, well-meaning, forgetful, and in a daily contest with another power: 'A Being of great but limited power ... who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have some other motives of action which he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.' What natural theology, taken seriously, shows is not the great Watchmaker or the All-Seeing Jove but the absent-minded Landlord, a sort of eternal Lord Emsworth, who, though he helps the young lovers, cares mainly about his pig."
- Adam Gopnik, "Right Again," p.88 in the 10/6/08 New Yorker

Philcon Schedule

Even though I'll only be there a day and a half, as usual the programming folks have loaded me up with a lot of work. (And we'll see if that means that the move to Cherry Hill has accelerated the flight of pros from Philcon, or just that they really, really love me.)

Here are the appropriate links, if you're in the northeast and are likely to run off to a SF convention at the drop of a hat in mid-November: Philcon. The mighty Crowne Plaza Cherry Hill.

If you'll be at Philcon, and want to hear me blather in person, these are your best opportunities:
Sat 11:00 AM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour)
SCIENCE FICTION HAD A LOT MORE FREEDOM IN "THE GOOD OLD DAYS" (25)
[Panelists: Diane Weinstein (mod), Alexis Gilliland, Andrew Wheeler, Gardner Dozois, Ian Randal Strock]
Remember when it was possible to sell an Avram Davidson short story collection and a R. A. Lafferty novel in a mass market paperback, along with other strange stuff? In the quest for the next best seller, the Science Fiction field seems to have narrowed considerably in the last 30 years. Has Science Fiction become a victim of its own success?

Sat 1:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour)
THE BEST WEBCOMICS YOU'RE NOT READING! (128)
[Panelists: J. Andrew World (mod), Tony DiGerolamo, Scott Christian Sava, Andrew Wheeler, Phil Kahn]
Lots of fans are reading XKCD, PVP, and/or Questionable Content. But if you don't know what any of those are, you REALLY need to come to this panel! And even if you DO know, you STILL need to come to this panel, because there's still a LOT of great stuff out there you might be missing.

Sat 4:00 PM in Plaza V (Five) (1 hour)
NOT THE AMERICAN CENTURY (64)
[Panelists: Andrew Wheeler (mod), Andre Lieven, James Daniel Ross, Michael Swanwick, Catherine Asaro]
It seems increasingly likely that the 21st Century may not be dominated by the United States. Has there been much Science Fiction about this?

Sun 12:00 PM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour)
THE GREAT ROBERT E. HOWARD REVIVAL (23)
[Panelists: Andrew Wheeler (mod), Eric Avedissian, Victoria Janssen]
There are a tremendous number of Robert E. Howard new editions, repackaging and even a forthcoming Library of America edition. What makes him still relevant and vital?

Sun 2:00 PM in Plaza IV (Four) (1 hour)
MY COLLEGE MAJOR AND SF...HOW OUR OUTSIDE INTERESTS SHAPE THE SF WE LIKE (212)
[Panelists: Tobias Cabral (mod), Rebecca Marcus, Andrew Wheeler, Crystal Paul]
How do our college majors, jobs, and other outside interests effect the SF we read, watch and like?

Bonus points! If there's anything I should say (or not say) on any of those topics, let me know now, while I still have a chance to say, or not say, it.

Amazon Wishes You Would Spend Money

...as would all of us whose lives depend on selling things. (On the other hand, spending too much money is what got us all into the problem in the first place. It is a conundrum.)

But I have some pretty-pretty Amazon banners and links to take your minds off the financial turmoil, and maybe -- just maybe -- even to entice you to buy something.

First, there's a Sony Hi-Def Store, with Blu-Ray discs, PlayStation 3 systems and games, and related stuff -- at prices which might be somewhat discounted. (Amazon promises "incredible values," which is a bit nonspecific.)

Amazon also has 500 separate "stores" for various TV shows. There's a page of TV DVD deals that will be active through 11/28, and the horribly named The TV Holi-Daily Deal page, which will have different deals each day from 12/4 to 12/16. Then there's another page with DVDs of ABC TV shows for at least 42% off, and that one will be up from 12/2 to 12/15. Amazon sent me about ten more links to specific DVD/TV-ish deals in the same e-mail, but I'm tried of writing about them, and you're tired of reading. Suffice it to say that they'll have a bunch of DVD special offers over the next six weeks, so keep an eye out for ones on things you want for yourselves or for gift-giving. (Or for playing skeet with, or for baiting alligators -- neither Amazon nor I really cares what you do with the stuff once you buy it.)

How about a nice DVD banner to sum up the entire category?


Amazon also wanted me to know that they have a new, more powerful Deals Widget. (And you know I love widgets.)

Here's one for Books and one for "Gold Box" deals on all sorts of things, in three categories (mouse over the blue bars to expand each of the three categories, assuming you care):


(Both of those should change at least daily -- possibly even as you watch them!)

Amazon also has a Holiday Toy List, with video demonstrations of lots of goodies:


Something I'm not sarcastic about, for once: Amazon is leading the fight against those horrible hermetically sealed "clamshell" packages, for which they should definitely be commended. And, of course, they have a banner for that, too:


Like every other retailer, Amazon will have Black Friday deals. And, also like every other retailer, they won't tell us what those deals are ahead of time.

If you'll be cooking for your solstice holiday, you may need the Kitchen & Home Gift Guide. If you let other people's musical tastes dictate what you listen to -- list most of the radio-listening population of America -- you may enjoy Gift Ideas for Music Lovers. And if you need Christmas Holiday (goodness knows, we must be inclusive when we're talking about wreaths and ornaments and small decorative lights, since they all figure in the solstice celebrations of so many cultures) decorations, then hie thee to the Gift Ideas for Music Lovers.

I think that's more than enough shilling for one day. It's probably enough shilling for the rest of the month. Now I need to post something less nakedly commercial...

The Best Book Companies To Work For

Every year Book Business magazine -- which I have to admit I don't hear or think about any other time during the year, so grains of salt may be required -- publishes their annual survey of the best book-publishing companies to work for.

This year, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. -- the one, the only -- clocks in at #6.

(#1 is Hachette, the only big trade publisher on the list higher than Wiley -- most of the list is made up of small and/or very niche publishers. Random House is #9, and is the only publisher on the list to hire more people than Wiley this year. I also wonder how they determined this ranking, since Random House is often considered a pressure cooker -- it may be the six-month sabbatical that you can earn if you manage to last there long enough.)

So: I work for a darn good company.

Evan Dorkin Has the Best Con Report Ever

The slightest bit of context: Dorkin is not known for his sunny disposition in the first place.

Now go read it.

I Am So 21st Century It Scares Even Me

I just created two PowerPoint slides for a group presentation for Wiley's Sales Conference in two weeks -- from my hotel room in Charleston, yet -- and integrated them into the shared document housed on some server somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey.

Check me out: I've made it up to the bleeding edge of 2003!

Small Details

Subterranean Press put out a release about the mysterious author K.J. Parker the other day -- and, for what I think is the first time, one of Parker's publishers was not careful about avoiding personal pronouns.

I'm not sure if this is a change in policy or a mistake, but it's long been my theory that "Parker" is female (it's sort of an inversion of Silverberg's old "ineluctable masculinity" comment about Tiptree, at base), so I was quietly satisfied to see that Subterranean refers to Parker as "her."

(You see, this is one of the things you lose when you willy-nilly allow "they" as a singular third-person pronoun.)

Amazon Best Books of 2008

Over the last several days, Amazon has been doling out their "Best Books" lists, in a wide variety of categories. I won't run through all of them -- we'd be here all day -- but I did want to poke around a bit at the ones that interest me the most. (The full list is always available at Amazon.)

First, I'll note that their Top 10 Business & Investing books includes three from that mighty powerhouse of publishing, John Wiley & Sons. (Some of you might recall that I currently work as a marketing manager in Wiley's Business Group; all of these books are from that group, but none are from my particular line.) Those three are The Brand Bubble (from our Jossey-Bass imprint, out of San Francisco), The Gone Fishin' Portfolio, and The Contrarian Effect.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy list -- presumably by Omnivoracious contributor Jeff VanderMeer, though I don't see anywhere that explicitly says that -- includes only two books I've read so far, though there are a couple more that are on my shelf. (And there's only one book -- Neal Stephenson's Anathem -- that's both on the "Editor's Choice" list and the Top Ten of what Amazon customers actually bought.

The Comics & Graphic Novels list is quite eclectic -- starting with The Umbrella Academy and ending with The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard -- and I've either already read or expect to soon read nearly all of it. I'm not sure if I'll spring for Dilbert 2.0, since that strip isn't what it once was -- it's still funny, but I no longer feel any need to read the strips again in book form. And I have to admit that I've never really warmed up to Lynda Barry's work, so I won't be making a special effort to find What It Is.

And last (for me), is the Teens section, which has books most of us call "Young Adult." It's got both The Graveyard Book and Little Brother, amid other things I think I should read someday -- like the second book of Octavian Nothing -- and a lot of things that I'm not as familiar with.

Amazon, as usual, has many more lists than that, with both "Editor's Choice" (the highbrow stuff you should read) and "Customer Favorites" (the books people actually are buying and reading) in every category. I suggest bouncing back and forth between the two in the categories that interest you, and thinking up complicated theories to explain the differences.

Is This What They Call Southern Food?

In the month of October, I've been in grocery stores far away from home several times -- once each in a Publix, a Winn-Dixie, and (just tonight) a Piggly Wiggly.

Is there some particular reason why two out of the three of those have severely odd names? Up North, I'm used to supermarkets being named things like Stop & Shop, or ShopRite, or something daring and flashy like Foodtown. But simple and declarative just doesn't work Down South, I guess...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/15

Those of us who review books are cursed by our mail carriers: we're always getting packages, sometimes a giant pile in one day, and sometimes a constant trickle. I'm no different -- oh, I don't know for sure that my mailman hates me, but I certainly suspect it. And none of us ever get to review everything; there's just not enough hours in the day, or willpower to force us to look at some of the things we see.

But I always want to list and note books as I see them -- both because I'm an inveterate list-maker, and because every book has a reader -- so I post something like this every week. It's Monday morning, so here's what showed up on my doorstep last week:

I finally figured out how to get in touch with Fantagraphics -- I freely admit that webforms have been known to send me into an atavistic "Mongo smash!" mentality -- and they were kind enough to send me several things this week. (I expect some or all of them will be reviewed at ComicMix, as soon as I can get to them.) The one that made me let out a squeal of glee -- no, really; ask my wife, she'll back me up -- was Popeye Vol. 3: "Let's You and Him Fight!" by E.C. Segar, which Fantagraphics published in November as a very nice oversized hardcover. I read the first volume a few months back and thoroughly loved it, so I've been thinking that I should buy the second volume. Well, now I have to, because I have Vol. 3 waiting at the end of it. Don't wait for me to review the later volumes -- go back to see what I said about the first one, and, if that sounds at all interesting to you, go out and get it. Seriously -- E.C. Segar was a great cartoonist, and it's a damn shame how the corporate Popeye is a pale, emaciated shadow of his original creation.

Also from Fantagraphics, and only mildly less awesome (since it's a collection of a story I already have in at least one form) is the special tenth eleventh anniversary edition of Ghost World: the Special Edition. It's by Daniel Clowes, of course, and this new edition includes the original graphic novel, the screenplay for the 2001 movie based on it, a couple of pages of new Clowes comics, a rare strip created for the movie's soundtrack, and whatever other related stuff Clowes and Fantagraphics could find. The whole thing was published in hardcover in October.

The book I actually asked Fantagraphics about was Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button, which seems to be (so far, at least) the big graphic novel of 2008. (And, since I'm judging an award that includes various categories it might be eligible in, I thought I should check it out. Plus, you know, it's supposed to be really good.) It's some kind of huge family story, and it was originally published in trade paperback in June.

And also from Fantagraphics is the all-prose Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert by Bill Schelly, which they just brought out in trade paperback. I've only just looked at it for a couple of minutes, so I don't have any real opinion on it -- though I did wince a bit at a disclaimer on the copyright page that "Marvel" and "DC" are used throughout the book to describe the predecessor companies and administrations of the entities that currently bear those names. I'll withhold judgment until I read, since that may just be to simplify background details -- but, in general, when a narrative nonfiction book tells you up front "I'm not paying attention to these issues," it's not the best sign.

Moving on into a very different genre -- too-tightly defined fantasy anthologies -- we have Catopolis, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack. Catopolis contains "seventeen original tales about the "city of cats" that exists on the same plane with humans, yet is hidden from us." I think you and I both know the kind of people who are going to buy this book, right? So let's just snicker quietly and move on -- Catopolis will be published in the ever-popular mass-market format by DAW in the chilly month of December.

Also in mass market is Laura E. Reeve's Peacekeeper, the first in a new military SF series and -- I think -- the author's first novel. The heroine is an ex-war criminal (according to some people, at least) who gets dragged back into military affairs a decade later when her old compatriots start being assassinated by mysterious forces. Peacekeeper will be published by Roc in December.

I also have before me John Zakour's The Flaxen Femme Fatale, sixth in a series about the last private eye in a post-something world six decades in the future. (They don't seem to be entirely serious books, and I suspect there may be a Ron Goulart influence lurking in them.) The first three books in the series were co-written with Larry Ganem (who, long ago and when we both had other lives, used to sell books to me), but Larry's dropped out by this point. I also note that Zakour writes the daily single panel Working Daze (mostly I note this because I only recently realized it myself). Flaxen Femme Fatale is another mass-market paperback -- so much reading, so cheap! -- coming in December from DAW.

And I'm not done with the mass-markets yet! I also have Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey, which contains...well, tales of Valdemar, and you should have figured that out by yourselves. I won't pick on Valdemar -- though it it easily pickable for a cynical bastard like me -- since I've read nearly all of the books and liked most of them quite a bit. Call 'em guilty pleasures, if you must -- but they were certainly pleasures. This one will have only a tincture of pure Lackey, and so probably won't be as potent, but you take what you can get. It's coming from DAW in December.

The fourth in E.E. Knight's "Age of Fire" series is Dragon Strike, which indeed does have a striking dragon on the cover. But I don't really have anything more than that to say about it. Roc is publishing this one in trade paperback in December.

I've been trying to push the boundaries of the books I cover here at Antick Musings, outward from the realms of SFF (where I've got a thousand contacts from my SFBCdays) and comics (which usually feeds my ComicMix reviews). So I'm always happy when publishers come to me with things outside those areas -- particular with books that look as fascinating as Mac Motandon's Jetpack Dreams. Montandon has traced the history of the jetpack -- mostly in fact, but apparently a bit in fiction as well -- to explain why we all don't have them already, and who does have them. I've been reading a lot of narrative nonfiction lately anyway, so it's great when books I might otherwise miss come aimed right at my head. (Figuratively.) Jetpack Dreams was published in October by Da Capo, and it looks deeply awesome.

Harry Turtledove writes novels nearly as quickly as most men eat hot dinners -- I don't know how he does it, but I've seen his large array of daughters, and I suspect the financial strain of putting them all through college and saving for their presumptive nuptials has something to do with it. And maybe Harry just really does write that fast, and enjoys it -- I haven't been able to read Turtledove as quickly as he can write Turtledove, but the recent books of his I've read (like Beyond the Gap) have been fun and thoroughly entertaining. Anyway, the Great Turtledove Machine has brought forth another novel, The United States of Atlantis. This is an alternate history -- you guess that, didn't you? -- set in a world where the eastern seaboard of North America is a separate mid-Atlantic continent, and the sequel to Opening Atlantis. Roc is publishing it in hardcover in December.

Watermind is the first hardcover by M.M. Buckner, who won the Philip K. Dick award for her previous novel, War Surf. (The PKD is a self-destructive award these days; it tends to bring enough attention to its recipients that they're no longer published in paperback, and so no longer eligible for the PKD. I think Dick would appreciate that touch.) It's a near-future SF novel about a self-organizing intelligence born out of the flushed nanotech, genetically-modified organisms, and what-not that landed in the Mississippi Delta. (No word as to whether everyone that knows fear burns at its touch, or if it's merely a muck-encrusted mockery of a man.) Watermind will be published by Tor in November, and I hope they sell a Heap of them.

I seem to have gotten a high enough profile that people seek my reviews out, at least some of the time. That's gratifying, especially when those projects are as unique and interesting as Jobnik!, Miriam Libicki autobiographical comic about her two-year stint in the Israeli army. (She grew up in the US and currently lives in Canada, so she's even more "one of us" than a born-and-bred Israeli would be.) Libicki's own press, Real Gone Girl, will publish Jobnik! in December as a trade paperback. It'll be available through Amazon and, via Diamond, though more discerning comics shops. (But probably not through other standard book-industry sources.)

And last this week are two books by Scott Morse -- whom I've heard of, and read some work in anthologies, but whose books I'm not familiar with yet -- the creator of Magic Pickle and Southpaw, as well as being an animator and filmmaker. They're Tiger!Tiger!Tiger! and Notes Over Yonder; the first an album-sized collection of semi-autobiographical stories and the latter a wordless story of jazz, cats, ukuleles and beach bums told wordlessly in full-page panels. Both are published by Morse's Red Window imprint and distributed by AdHouse Books. Notes shipped in October; Tiger! will ship in December.

In Charleston

I'm here, I just finished my usual Monday-morning post, and I'm too tired to blog anything else.

So call this a mulligan. Maybe something bloggable will happen tomorrow.

Before It Disappears...

I did this for "Mount Gaiman," a couple of years ago, so here's this month's statistics for Antick Musings, mostly in the wake of "On Being Skipped." (The highest point is the Monday after the Friday night when I posed it -- again, you can see my fiendish plan for Internet domination is based on dumping soon-to-be-popular posts late in the evening at the end of the week.)

As you can see, the numbers are high only for me; even that spike didn't throw me into Making Light territory. That's to be expected, and there are many more people reading Antick Musings than I ever expected when I started it. I'm glad you're all finding something of interest here -- whatever that is.

The Economics of Jerry Seinfeld

So Jerry Seinfeld might be getting seven to eight million for his proposed new book -- at least that's what GalleyCat reported.

And Editorial Ass, whom I usually agree with, let out a shriek of anger.

But I don't think she's right in this case. Her objection -- and the objection of the commentors elsewhere -- seem to boil down to "Jerry Seinfeld already has enough money." That's true, but it has nothing to do with this particular case: an advance is based on the expected sales of a book, not some philanthropic idea of what a particular person "should" get.

Publishers throw large sums of money at authors for one reason: because they think those authors will sell large quantities of books. Sometimes that's because the author sells large numbers of books regularly, such as James Patterson or the late Michael Crichton -- both of whom I would not be surprised to hear made on the order of $7 million for a single book -- and sometimes it's because the author is very famous for doing something else (being President, winning a TV show, yelling a lot on the radio -- generally something in the media, though major business leaders also get in there).

The latter is more of a crapshoot -- it doesn't usually matter if the "author" can actually write a book (there are people to do that for them), but sometimes the audience won't follow that particular person enough to buy a book.

There was a big surge in books by comedians in the early to mid-'90s, led by Seinfeld's own SeinLanguage in 1993. That trend eventually cratered with Whoopi Goldberg's Book in 1997, which could be found on remainder tables from almost immediately afterward to just a year or two ago. The field has been more modest since then, but it's still there -- comedians have fans, and they actually do write, which makes them better bets to translate to book form than some celebrities (such as the young women in the UK who get major book deals for being young, pretty, on TV, not overly burdened with modesty and in possession of notable curves).

So: on the positive side, Seinfeld wrote one book, which was an immense success. On the negative side, it was fifteen years ago, when he was the titular star of a top-five TV show. (And top-five TV shows meant more back then, too.) Giving him a big advance for a new book looks like a no-brainer to me, but the question is whether this (rumored) advance is big but reasonable or far too big for plausibility.

Here's what we don't know:

• what SeinLanguage actually sold, back in 1993 and long before BookScan (my memory is that it was huge -- double digit millions in hardcover and probably more than that in mass)
• how this new book will perform in 2009 (long after his TV show went off the air -- but we never know how any new book will sell)
• what, precisely, is included in that seven or eight million -- it could be world rights in all languages, or it could be much less than that. If the publisher can turn around and sell the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and a fistful of translation rights, seven million might be earned back even before the presses run.

(Note that Seinfeld's agent -- and thus the people he's negotiating with -- know exactly what #1 and #3 are in this case. Nobody ever knows #2; this is no different from any other book deal.)

I'm going to assume the simplest, most pessimistic rights case: that the advances being talked about are for US hard/soft only. (But I'm also going to assume that Seinfeld's popularity is still strong, and that this new book will sell well -- a book that sells poorly was a bad decision, no matter how high or low the advance, so that scenario doesn't mean much.)

So let's say, using Moonrat's numbers, that Jerry Seinfeld's Book is published in hardcover in mid-2009 at $24.95, with a 15% flat royalty rate. (The latter won't be true, but it helps to simplify things, and will get us into the right ballpark.) And let's say that Jerry Seinfeld's Book sells a million copies, which is what the book by his missuz, Jessica (Deceptively Delicious) sold last year. I'm assuming a large part of the interest in Deceptively was because she was Mrs. Seinfeld.

Seinfeld will do a lot of media to promote a new book; he can get on any late-night or morning show pretty much by asking, and on nearly anything else almost as easily. (Publishers kill for authors with that kind of platform.)

With those assumptions, we've got $3,724,500 in earned royalties for the hardcover. That's a nice pile of change, but it's only about half of the rumored advance.

But, wait! We're assuming this is a hard-soft deal. (Hardcover-only deals have mostly gone the way of the dodo; you're not going to see them from a big New York house, if you see them anywhere.) So let's say there's a trade paperback of Jerry Seinfeld's Book in mid-2010, priced at $15.00 and with a 15% flat royalty rate as well (we're assuming the publisher throws this in -- it's pretty generous -- to help make the deal with Seinfeld and his agent), which sells about two million copies.

That's an additional $4,500,000 in earned royalties for the paperback, pushing the total earned to $8,224,500. (And that's actually above the numbers quoted -- probably because I'm using very rosy sales assumptions, but so will the publishers running P&Ls to justify buying this.)

And there will be a mass-market edition as well: let's assume that comes along in mid-2011, priced at $8.99, with a flat 10% royalty rate. I'm assuming that mass-market distribution hasn't completely collapsed by then -- which may be an unwarranted assumption -- so let's let that chill our numbers a bit, and only assume another million copies sold.

That will be another $899,000 in earned royalties, for a total of $9,123,500.

Voila! Jerry Seinfeld's Book more than earns out, in three editions. Using more pessimistic assumptions -- for a book at this level, most publishers do several P&L scenarios -- with sales at only about two-thirds of what I originally estimated, it would still earn over six million.

And the publisher's revenue?

Using my original rosy assumptions:

Hardcover: $24.95 list; average 55% discount (it'll be sold into the various outlets in truly epic quantities) for an income of $11.2275 per book and total revenue of $11,227,500. Let's assume the total in-print quantity was about a million and a half, with a pp&b (cost to produce the book) of about $2.00 (lots of special effects on this baby, but huge print runs and a short book), a media spend totaling a cool million dollars, and that remainder revenue covers miscellaneous costs. That's $4,000,000 in costs.

Trade paperback: $15.00 list; average 55% discount (same assumptions) for an income of $6.75 per book and total revenue of $13,500,000. Pp&b will be under a buck, so let's call it $1.00 even, and assume total in print is about two and a half million. Let's say they spend half a million this time around for media and publicity. Remainders should be negligible; this edition will backlist indefinitely. (SeinLanguage is available in both mass and trade even now; the trade is a new edition from this September.) So that's another $3,000,000 in costs.

Mass-market: $8.99 list; average 60% discount (I'm running high, since I have no idea how the mass-market is going these days) for an income of $3.596 per book and total revenue of $3,596,000. I'm just going to say additional costs will run about a million -- another strong (but smaller) ad spend, and cheap printing for a cheap book.


To add those up:
Hardcover revenue: $11,227,500
Trade pb revenue: $13,500,000
Mass pb revenue: $3,596,000
Total revenue: $28,323,500

Advance: $8,000,000
Hardcover costs: $4,000,000
Trade pb costs: $3,000,000
Mass pb costs: $1,000,000
Total costs: $16,000,000

Revenue minus costs; contribution to overhead and so forth: $12,323,500.

That's spread over three fiscal years, and it's based on my very loose and back-of-the-envelope numbers, but this is definitely a book that could be quite profitable for the right publisher.

So, yes -- it does make sense to spend seven or eight million on an advance for a new book by Jerry Seinfeld. I think so, anyway.

ComicMix Aten't Dead

Nobody has actually asked me, but I'll say anyway that ComicMix is still chugging along, and I'm chugging there with them. (See Heidi MacDonald's report for The Beat for the original doom 'n gloom report.)

Why, only today there's another installment of my Manga Friday column, covering the fourth volumes of Alice on Deadlines, Black God, and Zombie-Loan.

And I intend to keep reviewing books for them as long as they're willing to have me and publishers are willing to send books for review.

Anatomy of the Month from Hell

I am far, far too busy this month.

I spent the 1st and 2nd preparing for the big family vacation to Orlando, and the 3rd through the 10th actually down there.

Back at work on the 11th, with a major meeting on the morning of the 12th, a lunch date and book-launch party on the 13th, and an off-site meeting this morning.

Tomorrow, the 15th, I'm driving the boys to Brooklyn to see their "Unca Dan's" apartment for the first and probably only time before he moves to Portland, and then taking Dan and some of his stuff back to my mother's for his birthday dinner and storage. (Note to self: need to get present.)

On Sunday the 16th, I fly to Charleston for the Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits, and I'll be there through Wednesday afternoon.

On Thursday the 20th, I have an all-day mandatory HR training session.

Friday the 21st, so far, has nothing major. This must be a fluke.

On Saturday the 22st, I'll be driving down, as early in the morning as I can stand, to Philcon, where I will be until sometime Sunday afternoon. (And I'm currently light on dinner plans for Saturday night -- let me know if you'll be there and are free.)

Monday the 24th sees the fabled annual "Mill & Swill," a party hosted by SFWA. (Ditto on pre-party dinner plans.)

I'll then have the 25th and 26th to get done pretty much all of my work for the month, unless meetings start getting scheduled then as well.

The 27th is Thanksgiving, so I'll be at my mother-in-law's most of the day, eating myself into a coma.

The Wife is working the 28th and 29th, but I don't think I'm otherwise busy. Maybe the boys and I will go see a movie. Or maybe I'll let them run around the house randomly while I get other things done.

And on the 30th, we have tickets for Cirque Mechanics at the New Victory Theater.

(Normally, we'd go cut down our Christmas tree that weekend, but I don't see when we'll get to do that.)

And then the first week of December is the thrice-yearly Sales Meeting, which means I'll be in a hotel in Jersey City for several days straight. (And means I need to get a lot of preparation done before that.)

Ye gods! If you see me blogging over the rest of the month, I probably should be doing something more constructive instead...

Quote of the Week

"On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith."
- Malcolm Gladwell, "Late Bloomers," p.42 of the 10/20/08 New Yorker

Bloglines Is Down, Too

I guess the universe wants me to get work done this afternoon...

Two Things I Couldn't Tweet Because Twitter Is Down

1) I'm in Wiley's stump New York office for the afternoon, and was briefly the only one here. (Three people -- oddly enough, my boss, one of the editors she works with and his assistant -- came in not long after I did.)

2) I'm still trying to dig through the emails from my vacation, and one struck me as funny. A rep is asking my help to get a book to a professor, but it's not easy.

What makes it funny is that the book is Accounting for Managers. Of course! There's no accounting for managers!

Cheerleader Vampire-Slayer Mega Fun Comics!

That's what I think the Buffy tie-ins would be called, if she'd been created in '70s Japan.

If that makes no sense, just move on to my review for ComicMix of the new collection, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate, by Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard, and Georges Jeanty.

Thought for the Day

What too many Science Fiction readers want is a book that will make them feel the way they felt when they were ten years old and just discovering SF. They look for that book in different ways: some want more adventures of the same people, some want neat-o keen-o new extrapolation, and some just want to wallow.

Being ten is nice, when you're ten. But it's good to set your sights a bit higher from that point on.

(Inspired by this Paul Kincaid column at Bookslut.)

Hey, Authors!

Do you agree with Seth Godin?

"Authors don't care about units sold. They care about ideas spread."

I publish entirely non-fiction these days, and I'm not sure my authors would consistently agree with him -- and I think the mostly fiction-writing folks who read this blog will be even more dubious.

Neil Gaiman News

I like to joke that every single Neil Gaiman book is completely different from the ones before it, and that every new Gaiman title is the first something-or-other that he's done -- and he just keeps giving me more ammunition!

Publishers Weekly reported last week that Gaiman has signed a deal with his longtime US publisher, William Morrow, for three nonfiction books -- the first will be titled Monkey and Me, be published in fall 2009, and combine Gaiman's love for the Chinese classic Journey to the West with his recent long trip to China.

The other two books are unspecified, but, if book one is a travel memoir, I expect the ever-new Gaiman will follow it up with a diet/exercise book, and then the story of his new dog. (And I'm only half joking.)

Eisner Award Judges for 2009

You might have heard elsewhere -- if you follow comics news, which I bet a whole lot of you don't -- that I'm one of the judges for next year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

I had such a great time as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards a few years back that I just couldn't say no when I was asked this time. (Even though the Eisners have a vast and bewildering array of categories.) The good thing about the Eisners -- or maybe it's the weird thing about the Eisners; I'll see once deliberations start -- is that the judges don't pick the final winners. The judges narrow the whole field down to the nominees in every category, and then comics-industry voters pick the winners.

Anyway, here's the full press release, for the terminally curious:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jackie Estrada
jackie@comic-con.org


JUDGES ANNOUNCED FOR
2009 WILL EISNER COMIC INDUSTRY AWARDS


SAN DIEGO - The judging panel has been selected for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. This blue-ribbon committee will choose the nominees to appear on the Eisner Awards ballot. This year's judges are:

Amanda Emmert (formerly Fisher) has worked in comics retailing since she was 16. She owns Muse Comics & Games in Missoula, MT, which opened originally as The Splash Page in 1996. Amanda is currently the Communications Coordinator for ComicsPRO, the trade association for comic book retailers, which she helped to incorporate in 2004. Amanda also serves on the Free Comic Book Day Retailer Committee

Mike Pawuk has been a teen services public librarian for the Cuyahoga County Public Library for over 12 years. A lifelong fan of comic books and graphic novels, he's been recognized as one of the leading librarians in the country on this medium. Mike was the chair for the 2002 YALSA all-day preconference on graphic novels, and he regularly does presentations for libraries on building graphic novel collections. He is the author of Graphic Novels: A Genre Guide to Comic Books, Manga, and More, published by Libraries Unlimited. Currently, Pawuk does graphic novels reviews for the IVC2.com popular culture website and is serving on the American Library Association's Great Graphic Novels for Young Adults book selection committee.

John Shableski works for Diamond Book Distributors as a sales manager with a focus on the independent bookstore market and on public and school libraries. He's been a moderator and panelist at Book Expo and other trade shows, a guest speaker at library events and regional book shows, and a symposium coordinator. He is currently collaborating on several graphic novel symposiums across the country. After a career in radio broadcasting and in marketing and advertising, he landed at book distributor Brodart Co., where, with librarian Kat Kan he worked to develop their graphic novel program. He has been with Diamond since 2007. He is a regular contributing writer on the blog “Buzz, Balls and Hype,” where he posts columns on his perspective of the publishing world as “The Graphic Novels Guy.”

Ben Towle is a cartoonist and educator living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He's known primarily for his work with SLG Publishing, including the recent historical fiction graphic novel Midnight Sun as well as his earlier volume of comics folk tales, Farewell, Georgia. He's taught cartooning and comics classes at schools and workshops across the country and is the co-founder of the National Association of Comics Art Educators. Ben is currently hard at work on a creator-owned story about turn of the century Chesapeake Bay oystermen and also on a biographical graphic novel about Amelia Earhart for Hyperion Books.

Andrew Wheeler went almost directly from Vassar College to the Science Fiction Book Club, in an attempt to avoid the real world entirely. He worked at the SFBC for 16 years, rejuvenating the moribund graphic novel program there and eventually overseeing the Altiverse program, which featured comics, media tie-ins, and similar books. After rising to senior editor at the parent company of the SFBC he moved on to become a marketing manager at the 200-year old publishing firm John Wiley & Sons. His reviews of comics and manga have appeared at ComicMix.com.

The judges will meet in San Diego in late March to select the nominees that will appear on the Eisner Awards ballot. The nominees will then be voted on by professionals in the comic book industry, and the results will be announced in a gala awards ceremony on Friday, July 24, in Ballroom 20 at Comic-Con International: San Diego.

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (named for the comics and graphic novel pioneer) are presented under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and are considered the “Oscars” of the industry. This will be the awards program’s 21st year.

More information on the Eisner Awards can be found at www. comic-con.org/cci/cci_eisners_main.shtml.

Journey to the Sinking City

Today I reviewed a sketchbook graphic novel by Enrico Casarosa, The Venice Chronicles, for ComicMix.

Oh, and By the Way...

I'm back from vacation.

I've gotten through my home e-mails (less than 200! it only took a couple of hours!), but I dread seeing what's in my work in-box tomorrow morning.

And I've got over 3500 unread items in Bloglines, so if there's anything I should know about, please tell me here.

I may write about the Disney trip in the next couple of days, but here's the super-capsule version for Antick Musings purposes: I got absolutely no reading done, was utterly out of electronic touch for seven days, and had a great time.

Now back to the real world.

Bat-Manga Kerfuffle

My review of Bat-Manga! looks like the first pebble of complaint about that book's lack of credit to Jiro Kuwata -- the writer and artist of the Japanese comics reprinted there, and so creator of 75% or more of the book.

The actual controversy, though, seems to have been sparked by this post by Laura Hudson and not by me; I wasn't mentioned much in the ensuing pile-on and counter-attack.

If anyone's interested, here are the relevant documents:

• Hipsterdad's LJ post, with a good overview
• Jog -- the Blog
• Leigh Walton (of Top Shelf) -- number one
• Comics Worth Reading
• the Newsarama blog, with a grumpy comeback from Chip Kidd, Bat-Manga!'s designer and editor
• Comics 212, also following up the Kidd reply
• Leigh Walton -- number two

Kidd and co-compiler (and '60s Batman memorabilia collector) Saul Ferris also commented on my review, to which I've responded there.

Win a Chain-Mail T-Shirt

Orbit (the US version) is giving away one short-sleeve chain-mail shirt to celebrate their publication of K.J. Parker's first stand-alone novel, The Company. Click on the first link to find out more, and get to the entry instructions.

(I haven't read The Company myself, but I was very impressed by Parker's earlier "Scavenger Trilogy" -- Shadow, Pattern, and Memory -- which are some of the darkest fantasy novels I've ever encountered, but also damn good.)

Dirty Money by Richard Stark

If you don't know by now that Richard Stark is a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake...well, you just haven't been paying attention. But where Westlake is clever and sprightly -- even funny, a lot of the time -- Stark is stripped-down and straightforward.

Westlake writes comic crime novels; Stark writes serious, old-fashioned crime novels -- the kind that would have come out in garish paperback fifty years ago. (And some of them did -- the series started in paperback, with 1962's The Hunter.) They both do excellent work, but expecting one and picking up the other isn't recommended.

Dirty Money is the finale of a trilogy of novels about Stark's main series character, Parker, after Nobody Runs Forever and Ask the Parrot. (Parker is a professional thief: amoral and almost completely unflappable. He's close to the Platonic ideal of a crime-novel hero; nothing distracts him from what he wants to do.)

In Nobody Runs Forever, Parker was part of a bank robbery that went wrong, and left him on the run. Ask the Parrot was set in the immediate aftermath of that failure, and included a second, smaller, heist -- which also had its problems. As Dirty Money starts, Parker has gotten away for the scene, but it's still only about a week since the beginning of Nobody. The money is still stashed, but the local law -- Massachusetts state troopers, as it happens -- are still manning roadblocks all through that area.

Parker works up a plan to get to the money and get it out, working with one of his original two partners on that deal. But the third partner is still in the area -- angry and desperate after being captured and killing a cop during an escape -- and the police cordon is tightening. And a female bounty hunter is pushing her way into the situation.

Parker's plans are always smart and cover contingencies, but things never go easily in a Parker novel. For instance, that third partner? You know that he's going to show up, at the worst possible time. And so will the cops.

Does Parker get out with the money? And what else happens along the way? Well, those are the things you read a Richard Stark novel to find out. If you haven't read him before, drop back to Nobody Runs Forever and start there. (Or get the recent reprint of the first novel in the series, The Hunter.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/8

This is a place-holder post; I'm still in Florida, so I have no idea what's in my mailbox. I'll update this post with an actual list soon after I get back -- if I'm lucky, and the pile is short, it might be for Tuesday morning, but later in the week is a better bet.

But I'm sure there were books in my mail, so they'll be here...soon.

Update: And here they are, at the end of the working week instead of the beginning --

It's usually a bad sign when a SFF author starts writing books to fill up the chinks and holes left by his previous books -- think of Asimov, or some aspects of late Heinlein. (Though late Heinlein, of course, had other issues as well.) So the look I'm throwing in the direction of Ender in Exile, which is now, by internal chronology, the second of the main sequence of Orson Scott Card's "Ender" books (there's also a subsidiary sequence -- another not-entirely-positive sign), has something of the gimlet to it. But Card does have a three thousand year gap he can slot books into, which leave him room for an awful lot of "Ender wandering around" novels, if we wants to write them. (I think so, at least -- as I've admitted before, to my shame I've never read any of the Ender books.) Ender in Exile will be published in hardcover at the beginning of December by Tor, and I expect a lot of people -- people who actually have read the series -- are much more excited about it than I am.

Dark Nights, Dark Dreams is part of the "Sisterhood of the Sight" series by Savannah Russe -- from internal evidence, it might actually be the first of that series, but I have to say that I'm not deeply informed on Russe's work. It's on the romance side of the paranormal romance/urban fantasy spectrum -- for whatever that means this week -- and is about one of four psychic women who solve really unpleasant, nasty crimes. (And I bet that means that this series will have four books, one for each woman -- that's one of the signs that a book comes down on the romance side: a couple's story is done when they get their Happily Ever After at the end of their book.) Dark Nights comes from the Penguin imprint Signet Eclipse -- which I hadn't previously noticed -- and will be in stores at the beginning of December.

Deborah Chester -- or her editors at Ace -- know that readers often are distracted, so they're making it easy: her series "The Pearls and the Crown" is made up of two novels. I haven't seen The Pearls, which is being published on November 25th, but I did just see book two, The Crown, which is being published on...November 25th. (See? I told you they were making it easy for readers.) I expect all of the people who whine on the Internet about unfinished series and their contractual rights to run out on November 25th and buy both of these books, to support this experiment and show that they'd like to see more of it. The rest of you might find it worth reading, as well.

New Tricks is the second in an urban fantasy series about a magical dog -- and other stuff, I'm sure, but it's more fun to lead with the dog -- by John Levitt, after Dog Days. It's coming from Ace as a November mass market paperback.

Also from Ace, but in the sometimes-controversial trade paperback format, is the new anthology Unusual Suspects, which gathers a dozen fantasy/mystery hybrid stories. It's edited by Dana Stabenow, who contributes a story of her own, and also features the work of Sharon Shinn, Simon R. Green, Carole Nelson Douglas, Michael A. Stackpole, and -- the big draw -- bestseller Charlaine Harris. It's a semi-sequel to Powers of Detection -- as much as any anthology can be a "sequel" to another one -- and it'll be on shelves in early December.

The more manga I see, the more difficult they make my life. For example, Gankutsuou 1: The Count of Monte Cristo provides both many opportunities to mis-spell the title, and a weird list of credits to bewilder me: Manga by Mahiro Maeda, Scenario by Yura Ariwara, Planning by Mahiro Maeda and GONZO. Surely it isn't the Muppet Show Gonzo? And what does "Planning" entail for a manga? I frankly admit that this item puzzles me, and the fact that the first phrase of the back cover copy is "While vacationing on the moon" only adds to the mystery and wonder. I'll have to read this one, I guess. It's published by Del Rey Manga, and hit stores this week.

Aurora keeps trying to embarrass me by sending me yaoi books from the Deux line, but I am unembarrassable (on the Internet, at least). So I'll note that I saw FreshMen by Yuuya, about a freshman who faints into the arms of a sophomore during their school's entrance ceremony. (I went to Vassar, so the idea of "gay for college" is something I'm quite familiar -- a lot of people I knew seemed to go bisexual for the duration. Of course, that was the '80s.)

Lovers And Souls is another Aurora Deux yaoi title, this time by Kano Miyamoto. It's another college story, in which a straight boy agrees to first model nude for a photography student, and then sleep with him for pay. Now that I can't say I ever saw at Vassar.

And then there's Koreaki Kamuro's Hanky Panky, also from Aurora/Deux. It's yet another college story -- hey, does anyone else suspect that, in Japan, these were all originally set in high school and had to be translated older to avoid the vice laws? -- about a club owner/college student and the boy he -- well, we'll call it "loves," but I bet it's more physical than that.

Aurora also publishes books in which pretty, pretty young men have sex with women -- they're equal opportunity that way -- and one of the books from that "LuvLuv" line is Sounds Of Love, Vol. 1 by Rin Tanaka. He's an overbearing, arrogant genius pianist! She's his manager/lover! Their relationship is about to hit the rocks!

I know I've read James Blaylock short stories, but I can't remember if I've ever read one of his novels. (I know people have told me that I should, and I know I have one or more of them somewhere around here, and I know that I have every intention of reading a Blaylock novel someday, but...I'm just not sure if I ever have.) I now have another chance, since Ace is publishing Blaylock's new novel The Knights of the Cornerstone in December. It's another contemporary fantasy -- of the older, quieter strain, without so many werewolves and spunky heroines -- about a man who learns he has some connection to the Knights Templar.

I really liked Eric Nylund's Dry Water (which I think was his first novel, a Tim Powsers-y tale of myth in the Southwest), but I'd somewhat lost track of him since then, as he wrote some SF novels that I don't think found their audience, and then a few Halo novels. But he's back to contemporary fantasy with Mortal Coils, the first of what promises to be a big new series. Tor will publish it in February. (And I'm going to stop promising, or hoping, to read particular books -- since I've already got too many to get through -- but I would like to get back to Nylund one of these days.)

I'm still not sure what a "xxxHolic" is, not having read the manga series of that name. (Apparently, despite the name, it's not someone addicted to porn.) But the manga series -- by the CLAMP collective -- is very popular, and now a novel based on it, Nisioisin's xxxHOLiC: AnotherHOLiC has been translated into English and will be published by Del Rey as a hardcover in October. (Oops, October is now over, so that should be past tense.) Actually, this is a light novel, so it has fewer calories than a normal novel. (I don't know what the dividing line between light and heavy novel is, or if it's like beer and you can have a medium dark amber novel and a stout novel.)

Since my to-be-read shelves are so large, I get to be capricious with my reading tastes. Take, for example, the case of Jim Butcher. I'm very fond of his "Dresden Files" contemporary fantasy series. And he's said, several times, that he only wrote that because it's what was selling -- that what he really wants to do is direct write epic fantasy. And he got the chance to do epic fantasy with the "Codex Alrea" series, of which Princeps' Fury is the fifth. And the reviews for the Codex Alera books have been pretty good. Nope. I'm still avoiding it. It takes an awful lot to get me to pick up a series with a title like "Codex Alera," and I still haven't hit that point. Sorry, Jim: I prefer books whose descriptions don't include phrases like "the dreaded Vord" and "no choice but to fight shoulder to shoulder if they are to survive." But I'm weird, and a lot of people will be happy to know that Princeps' Fury is coming from Ace in hardcover this month.

Probably also because of those groaning shelves, I tend to pile up reasons to read any specific book until it finally overwhelms me. Let's take L.E. Modesitt's The Lord-Protector's Daughter as an example. I've only read one of Modesitt's books, over a decade ago, and I mostly liked it -- so I've been thinking I should read something else by him. And he was very entertaining over dinner at the World Fantasy Banquet last year -- not to mention being one of the few people whose mode of convention dress can outshine David Hartwell, who was also at the table. And this book was copy-edited by my ex-boss Ellen Asher, who told me that it's all about accounting in a secondary-world fantasy realm. (As you know, Bob, my day job heavily features accounting, so finding it in SFF amuses me to no end.) So this one is moiving up the pile by the second. Tor will publish it in November between two sturdy boards and behind a very nicely creepy Raymond Swanland cover.

I read Batton Lash's Supernatural Law comics series for a long time -- it's an entertaining blend of horror tropes and courtroom parody -- but I eventually drifted away when it seemed like the same stories were being told over and over. But it's been a while since I read any of those stories, so I was happy to see the second volume in a new series reprinting the whole run of the comic, The Soddyssey and Other Tales of Supernatural Law, Vol. 2. I think I probably read these stories when they appeared in the comic -- heck, I probably have the comics themselves in the longboxes back on the other side of the basement -- but that's no reason not to re-read them. The Soddyssey was published in October by Exhibit A Press.

And last this week is a picture book for kids: Blueberry Girl, which was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess. According to the publisher's letter, Gaiman originally wrote this as a poem for an unnamed friend when she was pregnant with a dughter, and has copied it out for other friends since. (Vess has apparently adapted the poem somewhat to make it work as a picture book.) What that story doesn't say, since Gaiman is never the type to name-drop, is that friend is Tori Amos. (Insert a Paul Harvey-esque "And now you know...the rest of the story" to taste here.) I think my boys are too old and too boyish for me to read this to them now, but that's OK; I like picture books myself. Blueberry Girl will be published by Harper in February, but remember to look for it with the picture books, not the YA novels and certainly not in any of those sections for grown-ups.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

You know that a non-fiction book is meant to be taken seriously when it has ninety pages of detailed notes after less than three hundred pages of text. Traffic is that kind of book; it reads easily and covers a lot of ground, but Vanderbilt has done a lot of research to get to that point, and it's all here for those who want to check him.

If you read The New York Times Book Review, you're familiar with Traffic -- it was cover-featured in the August 20th issue. (And it took this long for me to get hold of my library's copy; I -- and thousands of others -- have been looking for it ever since.)

Vanderbilt is a strong researcher and a clear writer -- he's clearly dug into his subject very deeply, talked to the top people in the field, and thought about it himself a good deal -- and his conclusions come with gravity behind them.

But I should back up, first (looking carefully over my shoulder, and keeping my speed slow), and explain what this book is about in the first place. The subtitle -- possibly the most important thing about a nonfiction book, as I've learned over this past year -- is "Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us"; this is a book about the ways Americans live and drive in their cars (and somewhat about the rest of the world along the way).

Vanderbilt looks at commuting, parking, merging when lanes disappear, the role of governments and societies in creating local driving cultures, which kinds of drivers are more dangerous than others, and how everyone thinks they drive better than the average driver. If there's one big lesson to take away from Traffic, it's that people make the individual choices that seem best for themselves at the time, even when those choices make things worse for everyone -- and, sometimes, even are bad choices for that particular person.

Books about complex systems fascinate me, particularly emergent systems, and traffic is certainly that -- there is an element of design to the flow of traffic, but that design is nearly always in response to the needs and demands of a myriad distinct and different users. Traffic is a good book on a complex subject: readable, coherent, authoritative, with a point of view but not an axe to grind.

Just Do It by Douglas Brown

Over the summer, there were two similar-sounding books published -- both were about long-time married couples who decided to rejuvenate their marriages by having sex every day for an extended period of time. (I think I saw them reviewed together at least once -- it was an obvious hook.)

One was Charla Muller's 365 Nights, by a woman who decided to strengthen her marriage by giving her husband a "Gift" every night for an entire year. I'd normally be more interested in the woman's view of this situation -- I am a man; I've got that side covered -- but 365 Nights sounded aggressively Red State: capital-C Christian, sex as a chore and a burden for women, and a lurking assumption of patriarchal authority. So I went the other way, and read Just Do It.

Doug Brown is a journalist, on the sex beat for the Denver Post as this book opens -- a few years ago, as far as I can tell. He's just come back home from a business trip, and, during one of those late-night just-before-going-to-sleep conversations that are secretly one of the best things about a long-term marriage, he mentioned groups of men who had bonded over not having any sex for a hundred days. Brown's wife Annie agreed that was sad, paused, and then suggested that they do the opposite: have sex every day for a hundred days straight.

What man could say no to that? Annie and Doug obviously did some pre-planning, which Brown elides in the book, since that fateful conversation took place some time before the sex marathon. They then started their marathon on New Year's Day of whatever year this was. (Given publishing schedules, it wasn't 2007, and it might not even have been 2006.)

Just Do It is then the story of their hundred days of sex -- a hundred and one, actually, for good luck -- and how it changed and strengthened their relationship. As Brown portrays them, they're not particularly experimental; the farthest out they go is sex on one of those big exercise balls (which was great), sex in a fancy Las Vegas hotel (who wouldn't like that?), and sex outdoors once (something Brown says they like but have only done a handful of times -- a description that applies to so many things, not necessarily sexual, about the lives of parents with small children).

Doug does try Viagra and the other similar medications, with mixed results. Annie uses some vibrators during the marathon, but they go away afterward. And Doug tries a cock ring, against his own instincts, and wants to never talk about it again. There's no bondage, no additional parties, no exhibitionism -- look, just run down the alt.sex hierarchy if you want a full list of the things they don't do; they stay on the vanilla side of the street. (Hey, they live in Denver -- just having that much sex makes them crazy perverts for that neighborhood.)

So they're very middle America, which will only help the book -- most of America is middle America, after all. They only count old-fashioned intercourse as sex -- and Brown doesn't get too descriptive there, mostly vaguely talking about foreplay, saying "she invited him in," and then (sometimes) declaring that they orgasmed -- so the variety is really only in the places they do it. (And they don't go too wild there, either -- the exercise ball; the one time outside; a few hotels, B&Bs, and ashrams; a chair; and a whole lot of times in their own bed.)

But, really, Just Do It isn't about the sex -- the sex was a way to make their relationship stronger; to spend more time with each other and thinking about each other. So it's not a book to read for tips and techniques -- unless the tip you need is "pay more attention to your partner." Come to think of it, we probably all need that tip pretty often. Just Do It is a book about a marriage: how it became stronger and more loving over a period of a few months. And Brown shows clearly how his marriage went from ho-hum to special. If you don't expect swinging from the chandeliers, you'll find a lot to think about in Just Do It -- especially if you're at the ten-year or later mark of your own relationship.

You May Leave High School, But High School Never Leaves You

At least when it comes to stories in the popular media!

This week's Manga Friday column for ComicMix reviews three stories set in high schools very unlike the one I attended: Inukami! Vol. 1by Mari Matsuzawa and Mamizu Arisawa, Vampire Kisses: Blood Relatives, Vol. 2 by Ellen Schreiber and Rem, and Hayate X Blade, Vol. 1 by Shizuru Hayashiya.

Quote of the Week

Otter: I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.
- Animal House, script by Harold Ramis & Doug Kenney & Chris Miller

A Futile and Stupid Gesture by Josh Karp

I'm from the second or third generation of kids -- I'll be honest, boys -- who imprinted on National Lampoon as the epitome of humor when I was young. The magazine itself started when I was only one year old, in 1970, and it's best years are variously considered to have continued through 1975, or some later date in the '70s, but not much beyond that. By the time I knew it existed and started reading it, National Lampoon was a thinner, less "dangerous" magazine than it had started off as.

Of course, "danger" is often highly overrated -- particularly by adolescent boys.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture is a paired biography, of the National Lampoon itself and of Doug Kenney, one of its founding writer/editors. Karp starts off with Kenney, obviously -- he was born first -- and spends the first fifty pages of Stupid Gesture running through his early life and his years at Harvard, professionally but a bit mechanically. Karp clearly isn't interested in the usual stuff of biography -- interviewing the neighbors and school chums, digging out obscure facts and making connections to his subject's personal life -- and Futile and Stupid ambles along until Kenney gets to Harvard, joins the Harvard Lampoon, and meets Henry Beard. (Beard and Kinney were the two editorial founders of the NatLamp, and its early creative dynamos. Before that, at Harvard, they edited a famous parody of Playboy as well as co-writing Bored of the Rings.)

Karp is clearly a huge fan of the Lampoon style of comedy -- he refers to a good dozen of the early writers for the magazine as "geniuses" -- and the book wanders away from Kenney as soon as the National Lampoon is founded. Part of that is inevitable; if Karp is going to tell the story of the magazine, he has to give us thumbnail sketches of all of the important people who worked there, which takes space and time. He's clearly interviewed nearly everyone still alive and willing to talk about those days -- he has a lot of quotes from this person about that person, and a lot of detail on the various office feuds. What he doesn't have is a strong sense of what the story is, other than "NatLamp was really, really great, and then it gradually slid downhill."

The bulk of the book is organized in chapters by year -- one each for 1970 through 1980 -- which Karp lurches into, each time, with an amateurish "you are there"-style listing of important events that happened that year. Kenney's personal life gets complicated, as does that of many Lampoon regulars, and Karp reports the facts quickly and then gets back to listing the contents of the magazine issues (and talking about other media, like the radio and stage shows, once they get started). Karp tells us who was feuding, and over what, but he never gets into anyone's head -- we don't really know Doug Kenney by the time A Futile and Stupid Gesture is done, let alone any of the others. He's interviewed all of these people, and found out what happened, but he doesn't seem to have pressed them about why it happened, or what any of them really felt at the time.

Nearly all of the surviving Lampooners spoke to Karp -- the major exception is Beard, who apparently has never spoken to any reporter about that part of his life at all. If Karp had been more detailed in his interviews with the others, then Henry Beard would be the unknowable black hole around which the book revolved -- and there's some evidence that Karp was trying to structure it that way -- but so many of the NatLamp names are random and inscrutable in their actions -- from Kenney to Tony Hendra to Mike O'Donoghue -- that Beard only seems more grounded and focused on work than his drunken, druggy co-workers.

So A Futile and Stupid Gesture skims over the '70s and over what really was a revolution in comedy. Karp does think that the NatLamp crowd were geniuses, and that they changed comedy forever (that's his subtitle, after all), but he's less clear on how they did that. Sure, he runs through the theater and radio shows, and through them introduces as side characters Belushi, Chase, Murray, and others that will go on (under head writer O'Donoghue) to Saturday Night Live and thus bring a very similar comedy sensibility to a broader audience...but what was the difference between that NatLamp comedy and what came before? What else was going on in the comedy world at that time? Karp is silent on the broader issues; he's got too much to handle already with the large cast of the NatLamp, constantly fracturing and collapsing and re-forming.

Stupid Gesture is well worth reading as an oral history of NatLamp. But don't expect anything like a conventional biography of Doug Kenney -- and, in particular, don't expect any new answers to the question of his puzzling death. (There may never be any real answers there, of course.) But, this is a book entitled A Futile and Stupid Gesture, after all -- how useful and positive can you expect it to be?

Jhegaala by Steven Brust

I realized, when I was just starting to read Jhegaala, that I'd managed to miss the book just prior to it, Dzur. (And I remembered how, as well: Dzur was on my "possible omnibus" shelf, back at the SFBC, waiting for another book to come around for a 2-in-1. I always avoided reading potential omnibus books until I had all of the parts in hand -- because I wanted to read it the way a member would, and find out if the books worked that way -- so I hadn't had a chance to get to it before I was shown the door.)

Luckily, all of Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" novels are independent stories. You'll get more out of them if you start from Jhereg and work your way forward, as Brust wrote them, but there's no reason a new reader couldn't pick up Jhegaala to get a feeling for the series, and go back if she felt like it.

The Vlad Taltos novels have been mostly moving forward in time, with flashback novels every third book or so. Jhegaala is one of the flashbacks, but -- since the series has been running for twenty years now -- it's actually, for the first time, a flashback to a period in between two of the previous books (Phoenix and Athyra), rather than to Vlad's life before the first book, Jhereg.

Before I get into this book's plot, here's the two-bit version of the backstory: the Vlad Taltos novels are set on an alien world, probably in the far future. Humans came to that world either under their own power or were brought by more powerful aliens; in either case, that was long ago and essentially forgotten. Those aliens genetically manipulated both local creatures and those from Earth (including humans) to create a hybrid ecology. The manipulations on humans (now called "Easterners") created Dragaerans (which some humans call "elfs," and who call themselves "humans"), who are ridiculously long-lived and have a semi-typical Byzantine political structure of Houses and a not-precisely-typical fantasy Empire.

Vlad is thus a human (shorter, less magical, dying sooner, hairier) in a society of tall aristocrats; he's also an assassin and capo (ex-capo, at this point) in the official criminal organization of the Jhereg. (With the Dragaerans, everything has an official version; they're organized into seventeen Houses, each of which eventually gets its turn to rule the Empire.) After some unpleasant events in the novels Teckla and Phoenix, Vlad's marriage broke up and his employment with the Jhereg is at an end. Seeking to avoid assassins, Vlad headed East, out of the Empire and into the lands of humans.

And so Jhegaala starts with Vlad entering the kingdom of Fenario, looking for his mother's family in the paper-making town of Burz. But the mere mention of their family name, Merss, causes all of the local powers -- and there are several, from the lord outside town to the Guild of merchants and a secret coven of witches -- to assume that he's working for one of the others.

Jhegaala is a corrupt-town novel, similar in structure to many Westerns, though Vlad doesn't quite realize what's going on before he gets himself in too deep. Obviously, he comes through in the end -- it's a flashback, remember? -- but fans of the series know that something had happened to him around this time, and Jhegaala is that story.

The series is mostly about Vlad as a human in a society of Dragaerans, so Jhegaala is a departure from that, and it's not as distinctive as most of the series. Vlad is still an outsider in a strange society, but he's one human wanderer in a corrupt town. There's some magic, which makes it a fantasy novel, but otherwise very similar plots are familiar from many genres -- Westerns, of course, but also mysteries like Red Harvest and even samurai movies. In Jhegaala, we don't learn anything more about the Dragaerans or their world, and we really don't learn anything about the human kingdoms, either -- this is a backwater town, out in the middle of nowhere -- so all we're learning is specifically how some unpleasant things happened to Vlad.

Jhegaala is a pleasure to read; Vlad's voice is as engaging as ever. But Jhegaala ends up as one of the minor books in the series -- it's written to explain how something already mentioned happened to Vlad, so there's an air of getting from Point A to Point B about it. I wouldn't recommend anyone start the series here; it doesn't show Brust's (or Vlad's) best strengths. But it should satisfy those of us who have been reading about Vlad, and tide us over to the next book (which Brust is reportedly already working on).

Conan and Nergal, Sittin' in a Tree...

Today's review for ComicMix: Conan Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal, the latest collection of the ongoing Dark Horse series, by Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

I've read Vowell before -- I was very taken by her book-length meditation on Presidential death, Assassination Vacation, and also greatly enjoyed her essay collections The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Take the Cannoli. And I think I'd still steer first-time readers of Vowell to one of those books -- Assassination, by preference.

The Wordy Shipmates is a personal reflection-cum-history of the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, starting with its founding in 1630. Vowell does mention most of the major events of the first half-century or so of that colony (and its offshoot in Rhode Island, and the later other offshoot in Connecticut). but she's really interested in Puritan ideology and the schisms it created. Vowell almost turns Wordy Shipmates into the story of the battle between John Winthrop (founder of the Massachusetts colony) and Roger Williams (exiled to form the Rhode Island colony), but she gets sidetracked into other nooks and crannies of the story of Puritans in early America, and never develops a strong through-line.

There are no chapters in Wordy Shipmates; the entire book is structured as a single very long essay. That's unfortunate, since the story and the book could have stood for some more structure -- as it is, it encourages Vowell to wander around her topic instead of engaging with it. She says several times that she likes the Puritans, despite -- or perhaps because of -- their stubborn obsessiveness and religiousness -- but she never quite explains why and how. Vowell would have been deeply unhappy living in that period -- intellectually unhappy -- and she doesn't examine why she's so fascinated with people whom she would loathe in the present-day world.

So Wordy Shipmates is a pleasure to read, filled with the fruits of Vowell's research and with her own thoughts, but it comes off a bit thin in the end. Vowell's voice works best when she's directly engaging with something; she needs to keep the parallels with the modern day in her mind and in her work, and that fell away a bit in this book. It's still tremendously readable, but it's not what it could have been.

Caine Black Knife by Matthew Stover

I spent the late '90s trying to sell Stover's books to SFBC members -- and mostly failing, the ingrates -- putting together an omnibus of his first two novels, Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon, and then making a full-court press on Heroes Die. It didn't work -- club members stayed away in such droves that I couldn't even justify getting the club to offer the second Caine novel, Blade of Tyshalle, though it was even better than Heroes Die.

(And I think his trade publisher, Del Rey, had a similar experience, since he spent much of the time since then writing Star Wars books for them: Traitor, the dark fulcrum of the "New Jedi Order" series and one of the few visions of Jedi Knights as warriors; Shatterpoint, a fine reimagining of The Heart of Darkness in science-fictional dress; and the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, which Stover managed to turn into the story of power and temptation it was supposed to be.)

After those three Star Wars books, Stover's back to original fiction, and back to Caine, with Caine Black Knife.

Now, I bet most of you have never read Heroes Die or Blade of Tyshalle. I bet you don't know who Caine is. Both of those novels have been out of print for some years, and Tyshalle in particular is expensive and hard to find these days. (You should have listened to me back in 1998!)

The Caine novels are gritty and tough-minded, in a way uncommon in genre fantasy ten years ago. Glen Cook wrote about mercenaries, but didn't get as detailed, and David Gemmell's heroes were generally, well, heroes, even if they did some nasty things. Since then, though, there's been a surge in nasty, tough fantasy, led by George R.R. Martin and including such disparate writers as Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erikson, and R. Scott Bakker. So maybe the audience is ready, now, for the Acts of Caine. ("Acts of Caine" is the new series title; once any series hits three books it needs a name of its own.)

The Caine books are slyly doubly-generic, set both in a dystopian near-future Earth and a gaming-flavored high fantasy world. On Earth, a ubiquitous caste system is enforced by both the stick of casual brutality and the carrot of full-sensory bread-and-circuses entertainments. Those entertainments -- those "Adventures" -- are recorded through the senses of Actors, who travel through interdimensional gateways to the fantasy Otherworld. On Otherworld, magic works, and humanity is only one of many species -- it's a lot like your cousin's random D&D game, actually. (Both of those vaguely generic settings, of course, were very deliberate on Stover's part -- and both of them become very specific in Stover's hands.)

Humans from our world -- mostly scrambling kids from the lower classes -- fight their way through long, complicated training in all the skills necessary to adventure and survive in Otherworld, and the best of them get their chances to send back their telemetried life-stories from the other side of the gate. If they succeed in their quests and adventures, they come back stars. If they don't succeed, they're probably already dead. (The beasties and magic spells are real, and only stars get yanked out of danger; it's not worth it for a newbie.)

One of the greatest stars is Caine, who's at the height of his career in Heroes Die. He's an assassin and a dirty fighter, a guy who never saw a boss -- of any kind -- that he didn't want to knife in the back. In Heroes Die, he saves his wife and helps to topple an evil emperor, and in Blade of Tyshalle, he does something very similar all over again, but in a more difficult, and even more jaw-droppingly widescreen, way. (Blade of Tyshalle also has the absolutely best climactic fight scene I have ever read, in any novel -- it's only one of many aspects of that book that still live clearly in my mind ten years later.)

After the climax of Blade of Tyshalle, Caine and many other Actors were stuck on Otherworld permanently, and the truth of their work -- that they're "demons" from another world who bring death and mayhem for the entertainment of others -- had started to leak out a bit. Caine Black Knife is set a few years later -- Caine has settled into a quieter life in the empire he saved, and kills people only very, very rarely.

But he's gotten word that his blood brother Orbek -- of the orcish ogrillo race, who he met during one of the more gruesome events of Blade of Tyshalle -- is in trouble in the Boedecken, and so he goes to see what he can do. He doesn't intend to cause trouble, but -- even under another name, even trying not to make waves -- trouble follows Caine like stink follows shit.

Half of Caine Black Knife is set at that time, with Caine about fifty-five. The other half, in interleaved chapters, is the story of Caine's first great Adventure from thirty years before -- the one where he became a legend and a huge star. The one where he was responsible for the near-total-destruction of the ogrillo tribe of Black Knives. (Did I mention that Orbek is the closest thing to the head of the remnant of the Black Knives?)

Both halves of the novel are set in that same place, separated by thirty years and a lot of history. The antagonists are very different in the two strands of Caine Black Knife, but the stakes are the same, as they always are for Caine: win or die.

The Caine novels are massively violent, curse-filled excursions into the dark corners of conflict, glimpses of what war was like for warriors, before it was systematized and pushed to a distance. They're nasty and brutal and horrifying. And I fucking love them.

One thing, though: Caine Black Knife does have a satisfying conclusion, but the story isn't over. (Unlike Heroes Die or Blade of Tyshalle.) It's billed as the first part of "Act of Atonement," which will conclude in one more novel, to be called His Father's Fist.

(I also wish Stover hadn't buried the final confrontation of the thirty-years-ago section of Caine Black Knife; it deserved to be fleshed out more, and narrated as fully as the other important scenes of that half of the novel.)

A new reader could pick Caine Black Knife and dive right in, and I recommend you buy Caine Black Knife, even if you hope to drop back and start with Heroes Die. Check out the prices for a used copy of Blade of Tyshalle; if this sounds like your kind of thing, you're going to want to help convince Del Rey to republish that in a form that's a little lighter on your wallet.

And, maybe, after you work your way through the Acts of Caine, you'll go back to Stover's first two novels -- Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon aren't quite as good, and have more of the feel of novelized gaming sessions to them, but they're similarly gritty fantasy adventures, and have the advantage of being set in a very different world: a few centuries BC, in the Middle East. Jericho Moon even has a nasty local deity who doesn't want his name spoken...though his initials are YHVH.

Two Abrams Cartoon Books, by Shanahan and Ziegler

I recently "read" two books of single-panel cartoons, both published by Abrams -- one was by Danny Shanahan and one by Jack Ziegler. Since it would be silly to give them each a separate post, here they are together:

Bad Sex! by Danny Shanahan: The pages aren't numbered, but I'd say that there are more than a hundred cartoons here -- let's say that this is probably 128 pages, with a single cartoon on each small, square (about 6" x 6") page. Shanahan gets a lot of mileage out of standard situations -- there are a lot of creatures (dogs, bulls, birds, and humans in various combinations) lying in bed post-coitally, a lot of bar scenes, and a number of office scenes.

Shanahan is good at New Yorker-style zinger captions, and this book has a lot of good ones that ring changes on the traditions -- like a bartender who says "If it's your wife, I'm not here" to a patron pulling out a cellphone, or one doe saying to another "What I couldn't do with a million bucks." In the best New Yorker fashion, the captions are nearly always a single line of dialogue.

How's the Squid? by Jack Ziegler: Ziegler is less conventional than Shanahan, with a looser line and stranger flights of fancy. (Such as the logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Macaroni, with the famous lion replaced with...you guessed it.) Shanahan is funny and good, but he does cartoons that you could see several other cartoonist coming up with. Ziegler, though: he has an odd, askew sensibility, and many of his cartoons couldn't have come from anyone else.

(He's perhaps the closest we have to a new George Booth -- he's not exactly like Booth, but they're both different from the usual New Yorker cartoonist along a similar axis.)

The cover cartoon shows Ziegler's style pretty well -- it's New Yorker deadpan, but stretches that deadpan well into Sam Gross or Gahan Wilson territory. The cartoons in How's the Squid also vary much more than those in Bad Sex! do -- Ziegler includes cartoons that have anything at all to do with eating, from the usual diner and restaurant cartoons to such surreal pieces as "The Empire State Building and a Side of Fries" and one of a man sitting in a gallery, looking at "The Scream" and eating popcorn with a large "Munch Munch Munch."

So Shanahan is funny, but -- purely on the evidence of these two collections -- Ziegler is just as funny, and across a wider spectrum, with more idiosyncratic cartoons to boot. (That might, of course, have something to do with the choice of cartoons for each book, or with the breadth of the two themes. But I call 'em as I see 'em.)

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's second official novel for Young Adults, after Coraline. Well, it is if you don't count Odd and the Frost Giants -- which I don't because I haven't seen it, so I'm not sure if it qualifies. But that's the thing about Gaiman: every new project is something unexpectedly new, somehow. If I were to make a list of the prose writers I'd be least surprised to see put out a sonnet sequence, or an opera, or suddenly turn to composing music for the Andean grass-harp, Gaiman would be at the top of the list, simply because he does always seem to be starting something new and different.

And, in typically untypical Gaiman fashion, he started writing The Graveyard Book in the middle -- with the fourth chapter, "The Witch's Headstone," originally published as a novella in the anthology Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois -- and then worked out to both ends.

In a city that could be anywhere, but feels English (even in the American version of the novel), a murderer -- "the man Jack" -- slaughters nearly an entire family as part of a mysterious mission. But the toddler son of the family wanders out of the house in the middle of the deaths, and makes his way to a local graveyard. And, there, the ghosts -- and one other inhabitant, neither dead nor living -- argue over what to do, but eventually decide to take him in.

The boy is given the name Nobody Owens, and called "Bod" for short. A 19th century ghost couple take on his day-to-day care, and that undead gentleman, named Silas, becomes his guardian and his one source of contact with the modern, living world.

That all happens in the first chapter, "How Nobody Came to the Graveyard." Later chapters -- there are eight in all, plus an "interlude" concerning doings elsewhere -- each see Bod a year or two older. The Graveyard Book is inescapably episodic; each episode is its own story, with Bod at a different point in his journey to becoming a man -- much like Kipling's The Jungle Book, which Gaiman admits was a great inspiration.

Bod starts young and innocent, with the freedom of the graveyard and not much else, but gains (and then loses) a friend, and learns much along the way. Gaiman, as usual, doesn't sugar-coat his worlds when he's writing for children; this may be a graveyard with friendly, helpful ghosts, but it's still a world with much nastiness in it. Gaiman's cosmology is influenced by Lovecraft here, as it has been before, so there are real horrors in this world, who would kill Bod -- or do much worse to him -- if he's not smart and tricky and thoughtful and brave.

Luckily for Bod, he is all of those things.

The Graveyard Book -- at least the US edition that I read; I understand that it varies quite a bit from the US to the UK -- also contains extensive illustrations by Gaiman's frequent collaborator Dave McKean. McKean provides the equivalent of three-to-five pages of art -- all grey wash and black ink -- for each chapter, bunched at the beginnings and ends. It's very atmospheric, and quite appropriate for the book.

Gaiman's novels have gotten very assured lately, through Coraline and Anansi Boys to Graveyard Book. I know there are those who think American Gods is his great, defining book, but he's actually been doing much better work since then, in smaller, tighter, more careful and precise novels. Graveyard Book continues that string of excellent work, and I hope Gaiman doesn't entirely abandon long-form prose for more exotic forms of storytelling -- he's a damn good novelist, these days, and I'd like to see him write one a year for a good long time. (That's not too greedy, is it?)

Into the Smoke

Today for ComicMix, I reviewed the second collection of Jason Lutes' current trilogy: Berlin: City of Smoke.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/1, Part One: Not Yen

And this is the second half of this week's list of books received in the mail -- everything published by companies that aren't called "Yen Press."

(Quicker-than-quick recap of the point of this exercise: I review, so books come in the mail. But I can't review them all. Oh, the sadness! So I mention them all as they come in.)

I have to lead off with Laurell Hamilton's new elf-sex book, just to get that cover up top. If I were Boing Boing -- and we all know that I am not -- I would right now be comparing that cover image to a well-known, but not well-liked, image known on the Internet by a six-letter name. Luckily, since I'm not Boing Boing, I won't be doing that.

The book in question is called Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K. Hamilton and it will be published by Ballantine in hardcover on November 4th. I've made enough fun of it -- now and when I saw the galley a few weeks ago -- so I'll leave it at that.

Coming from Vertical on November 18th is Black Jack, Volume 2 by Osamu Tezuka, the second of what's planned to be a seventeen-volume series reprinting nearly all -- excluding only a few controversial stories that aren't included in the standard Japanese series -- of Tezuka's most popular series with adults. (I reviewed the first volume recently for ComicMix.)

I saw a bound galley of Grady Klein's The Lost Colony, Book Three: Last Rights a few months ago, but still haven't read it -- partially because I haven't read the first two books, partially because the to-read stack of comics (excluding manga, which has its own pile) is nearly as tall as I am. Now that it's a real book -- it was published by First Second in October -- maybe I'll be able to find time for it.

I've read a number of graphic novels by Lewis Trondheim this year -- he's one of the stars of the French scene, and a number of publishers here are translating at top speed to get caught up on his stuff -- but I haven't before seen the work of Appollo (which the back flap of the book I'm about to name tells me is the thin pseudonym of Olivier Appollodorus). They worked together on Bourbon Island 1730 -- co-writing, with art by Trondheim -- a historical graphic novel with pirates, ornithology, and Trondheim's signature duck-headed people. First Second published this in October as well, but this is the first that I knew about it.

I saw Gus & His Gang (by Chris Blain) in bound galleys, and reviewed it for ComicMix a few weeks ago), so I'll just direct you to my review for further details. It's now available, yet another October book from First Second. (They have quickly become one of the most dependable graphic novel publishers around -- nearly everything they publish is wonderful, and all of it is interesting.)

Next is a tie-in I probably won't read for a game I'll probably never play: Gears of War: Aspho Fields. The novel is by Karen Traviss, who's very good at this kind of thing. (So if you do play Gears of War, you'll probably want this: Traviss is one of the better tie-in writers out there now.) It was published by Del Rey in trade paperback on October 28th.

Another book I saw in galleys but haven't managed to read yet -- though I still do intend to read it -- is Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert, a graphic novel based on the WWII experiences of an American GI Guibert knew well. It's another book from the suddenly ubiquitous First Second, and will be published in November.

Gene Wolfe's new novel is An Evil Guest, which I'm greatly looking forward to reading. However, looking at it as a marketer, it's confusing me a little. It has a stylish, enticing cover, and some great quotes on the back -- about this particular book, by strong names, starting off with Neil Gaiman -- which generally means that the publisher (Tor, in this case) thinks they have something special and want to call more attention to it. (Special, in this case, would mean even by the standards of Gene Wolfe, and that's saying something.) But the flap copy is a bit dull and meandering -- starting off "An Evil Guest is a stand-alone supernatural horror novel in the Lovecraftian tradition with a 1930s noir atmosphere," like a particularly bland Library Journal review. I'm sure all the writers out there know the rule "Show, don't tell" -- but the editors, marketers and copywriters need to remember it as well. An Evil Guest was published in hardcover on September 23.

Also from Tor is the first book in a new contemporary fantasy series: Thirteen Orphans by Jane Lindskold. This one has its basis in Chinese lore -- there were thirteen exiles from the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice, one each for the Cat and all of the signs of the Chinese Zodiac, and their powers were passed down through the generations. But now, in the modern day, many have forgotten their powers -- right when a new attack from their great enemies looms. (I'm sure we've all seen something similar at least a dozen times, but it's all in the execution, as always.) Thirteen Orphans will be published on November 11 in hardcover.

I also made my monthly trip to the comic-book shop this week, spending some of my own money on comics and related stuff. I'll be reviewing a lot of them, here or at ComicMix, so I might as well list them as well:

The second of Gilbert Hernandez's stories from inside the world of his "Palomar" stories -- they're supposedly graphic novel adaptations of low-budget movies one of the characters appeared in -- is Speak of the Devil, just published by Fantagraphics. (The first was Chance in Hell, which I reviewed for ComicMix.) These stories are a weird experiment, but "Beto" often gets very experimental, and it's usually exciting, even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Sealed in plastic, so that the tidal wave of existential despair can be contained, at least briefly, there's Chris Ware's new annual hardcover issue, #19, of ACME Novelty Library. Drawn & Quarterly distributes it, and the razor-blade and rat-poison industries thank them for it.

Also sealed in plastic -- though, I hope, for a different reason -- is Jonatham Ames's debut graphic novel, The Alcoholic. Ames is a novelist (I read his novel Wake Up, Sir!, which is also about an alcoholic writer not unlike Ames himself), and he's joined on this book by Dean Haspiel, who handles the art chores. (I love that phrase, with its connotations of kids cleaning their rooms or farm hands feeding chickens.) The Alcoholic is about an alcoholic writer named Jonathan A., though -- since this is being billed as a graphic novel rather than a graphic memoir -- it's apparently somewhat less directly autobiographical than it appears. DC Comics has just published The Alcoholic for your delectation.

The new collection of the best current SF comic (and one of the few good ones, ever) is Ex Machina, Vol. 7: Ex Cathedra, by the usual team of Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. It's also published by DC.

And the first miniseries about a key member of Hellboy's B.P.R.D. team -- part of the ever-burgeoning Hellboy empire, growing like kudzu over the new-comics shelves -- has been collected as Abe Sapien: The Drowning. It's by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Jason Shawn Alexander, and was just published by Dark Horse.

And last for this week is Powers Vol. 10: Cosmic (or "Cosimic," as the spine says) by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I'm almost caught up with this series -- the twelfth volume will be published in December or so -- even though I enjoyed the "cops in a world with superheros" angle of the early issues better than the "cops get caught up in sidebar stories to what would be a major crossover if this was a real superhero universe" hoo-ha that it's gotten into recently. But I've come this far, so I might as well catch up; I am still enjoying most of this. Powers is published by Marvel/Icon, and this one came out just about exactly a year before I got it, in October of 2007.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/1, Part One: Yen

As you read this -- assuming you're reading it soon after I posted it and not, say, in the year 2679 as part of some dreary archival studies -- I'm on an airplane to sunny Florida, and so I'm not expecting to respond to comments, answer e-mails, or interact with anyone electronically for a solid week.

But the show must go on, so here are the latest week's collection of books in the mail. I review books, which means books come in the mail to review -- unfortunately (or fortunately, since I'm an acquisitive and inquisitive sort), more of them than I could ever manage to read. So I post every Monday morning, so all of the books are at least noted and mildly celebrated -- even the ones that I'll end up not managing to read.

This week, there was a big package from Yen, containing a lot of manga and manwha that they're publishing in November. In fact, it was so big that it's getting its own post. Everything else will be in a separate post, going up in a couple of hours. But, for now, it's all Yen all the time:

There's a "final" plastered below the issue number on the cover of Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 4 by Yi DongEun and Yu Chung, which I gather means that this is the epic conclusion of the story. However, when I reviewed the last volume for ComicMix, I didn't have much context, so I doubt I'll be able to explain much better this time. However, the back cover copy does say that, in this one, the Nonblonds head to the seaside to locate "the tears of the mermaid" -- so it's got that going for it.

I liked Shiro Ihara's Alice on Deadlines a lot to begin with -- as a guilty pleasure, very much so, but a silly, light one -- but I liked Vol. 2 less well than Vol. 1, and Vol. 3 even less well than that, as the characters multiply beyond my ability to place them and silly drama began to outweigh silly comedy. This one looks like it's getting even more dramatic, with amazing revelations about the true tragic past of the lecherous death-angel Lapan, and nasty machinations by his bureaucratic masters. So it may be more of interest to those whose tastes differ from mine -- I was perfectly happy with this as a silly, smutty, sexist little creampuff of a comic.

I've read several installments of Higurashi When They Cry in Yen's Yen+ magazine (and reviewed the first three issues of that magazine about six weeks ago), but it's now making the leap to tankubon form. (First of any of the serials in Yen+, I believe.) The series is by Ryukishi07 and Karin Suzuragi, and this volume collects the three installments that I reviewed in Yen+ -- which means that this series is still at the point of explaining itself; I found it had a lot of strengths, but I wasn't sure at all where it was going to go. (On the other hand, so many manga are so obvious that not knowing is a big plus.) One last thing, which may mean something to some of you: this volume is subtitled "Abducted by Demons Arc."

Yen dives in yaoi for the first time with the Mature-rated Love Quest by Lily Hoshino -- I think this is only their second M-rated book, after the Sundome series. Love Quest doesn't have a volume number on it, so I think it's complete in this book. It's a fantasy story, in which two high-school enemies find themselves in a "magical realm" where "the key to [their] survival is...the exchange of their bodily fluids." (The copy immediately mentions "swapping spit," so I suspect "fluids" is meant as titillation, and it's not super-explicit. On the other hand, I haven't opened the shrink-wrap yet, so I could be wrong....)

Another series I've seen before: Black God, Vol. 4 by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park. (I reviewed Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.) It's another shonen series with a lot of violence -- well-executed, in a crisp, clear style -- and the usual superpowered good and bad guys battling for control of various things.

And here's another one I've read -- Sunshine Sketch, Vol. 2 by Ume Aoki -- so I can kick you to my review of the first volume. It's a light, cute 4-panel series about high school girls, much more down-to-earth and realistic than most high school manga, and I liked the first one quite a bit.

I also read and reviewed the last volume of Goong: The Royal Palace, Vol. 3 by Park SoHee, a romantic manwha series set in a slightly alternate world where Korea still has a monarchy, and our heroine has just married the heir for dynastic rather than love reasons.

But I've never read any of the earlier volumes of Moon Boy, Vol. 5 by Lee YoungYou, which is some kind of supernatural story about battling (human, or humanoid) Rabbits and Foxes.

And then there's Comic, Vol. 4 by Ha SiHyun, the latest in a series about romances at a manwha school.

I also saw and reviewed the first volume of Very! Very! Sweet, Vol. 2 by JiSang Shin and Geo, about an arrogant rich Japanese boy transplanted to Korea and the Korean girl (our viewpoint character, generally) he's going to be in love with eventually.

And last from Yen is Hissing, Vol. 5 by Kang EunYoung. It's another romance story, with back cover copy describing the tensions among Sun-Nam, Da-Eh, Da-Hwa, and others -- which is doubly confusing to me, because I really don't know the gender markers in Korean names. (Poor me.)

I'm Going to Disney World!

As I've mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I'm heading off for a family vacation to Walt Disney World early tomorrow morning, and I'll be gone for a week.

I will be taking my laptop -- mostly to use it as a DVD player to entertain the kids in the evening -- but I don't expect to be online much, if at all. So I'm probably going to be completely out of electronic contact for an extended period for the first time since I got e-mail in about 1994. (I hope the cold-turkey shakes aren't too bad.)

I've already written and scheduled at least one substantial Antick Musings post for every day that I'll be gone -- mostly reviews of books like Steven Brust's Jhegaala, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and many others, in many different genres -- so this site will not be dark. I've also sent through my usual posts to ComicMix, so expect to see reviews from me there Monday-Wednesday-Manga Friday, as I always try (but don't always succeed) to do.

And I'll be back here live, to dive into accumulated e-mails and whatever else, sometime on Monday the 10th.

See you all on the other side.

Movie Log: The Royal Tenenbaums

And the last movie I need to write about before I can go on vacation is The Royal Tenenbaums. (With this post, I will be officially All Caught Up, having written about all of the books I've read and movies I've seen, with five ComicMix reviews sitting in their queue and nineteen Antick Musings posts poised to drop at specified times over the next eight days. I've been damn busy this last week, even if hardly any of it has shown from outside.)

This is the middle Wes Anderson movie, between Rushmore and Life Aquatic; I'm now caught back up on his work. (Not hard to do with a guy who's only directed five full-length movies, but we have to take our wins where we find them.) It's a Wes Anderson movie, so it's a bit off-kilter and has both Bill Murray and a surfeit of Wilson brothers in it. And everyone else who cares probably saw it seven years ago, when it came out.

The Wife and I watched it about a week ago, and we had a buggy Netflix disc with some scratches at the beginning and end. It did mean that we got through the movie fifteen minutes faster than we should have, but I'm not sure if I can honestly claim to have seen the whole thing. So I'll avoid making any sweeping judgments about it.

I'd like to see Royal Tenenbaums again some day, and watch the whole thing -- but probably not for a few years. It felt like a tighter, more constricted, and darker movie than the other Wes Anderson films -- it is about a family of huge failures (all after early, massive successes), after all. (And was that Anderson making a pre-emptive stab at his own career? So that, no matter what happens to him from this point, he can point to Royal Tenenbaums and say, "At least I never got that bad.")

Should I say anything about the plot? Gene Hackman is Royal Tenenbaum, a lawyer in a city that's never actually (in the parts I saw, at least) specified as New York, but seems to be. He and his wife Etheline (Anjelica Houston) pushed their three children to succeed hugely: Chas (Ben Stiller) as a pre-teen business tycoon, Richie (Luke Wilson) as a tennis star, and the adopted Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) as an acclaimed playwright. But all that is prologue -- literally -- and seems to have been over well before any of them turned twenty. Now, fifteen or twenty years later, Royal is disbarred and broke, Chas a paranoid widower, Margot a secretive introvert married to a famous psychologist, and Richie seemingly normal, for a guy who never shaves or takes his sunglasses off.

It's a family story, so what happens from there is how the family members -- in odd, abnormal, Wes Anderson ways -- get on each others nerves and deal with each other. It's not really a happy movie, but family life isn't always happy, either. Again, I'd have to see it again -- see it all the way through -- to say anything I could stand behind. But it's definitely a movie worth seeing, even the way I saw it.

World Fantasy Award Winners, 2008

Grabbed from SF Awards Watch and presented without commentary:

• Novel: Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada/Penguin Roc)
• Novella: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
• Short Story: “Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra)
• Anthology: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
• Collection: Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
• Artist: Edward Miller
• Special Award, Professional: Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
• Special Award, Non-Professional: Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

Movie Log: Train Man

Another day, another romantic comedy -- I guess I've seen a lot of them recently. (I tend to prefer comedies to dramas, and also mildly prefer independent films to Hollywood ones...and "independent drama" is code for "soul-crushingly depressing story of absolutely horrible things happening to unpleasant people.")

This one is Train Man: Densha Otoko -- the latter is "Train Man" in Japanese, I believe. It's the story of a young yutz (called "Train Man," played by Takayuki Yamada) who meets a cute girl (played by Miki Nakatani -- a small in-joke, since the character in the light novel the movie is based on is described as looking just like Nakatani) on a train by vaguely attempting to protect her from an annoying drunk -- he doesn't really do much, but he is the only person on a crowded train who even tried to stand up to the plastered salaryman.

In typical Japanese fashion, she sends him an expensive thank-you gift: a Hermes tea set (which leads him to start calling her Hermes), and he's not sure what to do.

So he does what he's always done: turns to the Internet for answers. He starts a chat room or message board thread -- if I could read Japanese, I could probably even tell you what site, since the movie shows the computer screens large and clear enough to read many of the characters. And a motley group of others -- a nurse, a young guy alone in a room with his rabbit, a thirtyish salaryman, a thirtyish woman in her kitchen, and three similarly young and confused guys on one computer in a manga cafe -- start to give him advice, and to encourage him.

Under their guidance, Train Man changes his image and pursues this romance -- in fits and starts and with an almost fatal lack of confidence -- entirely on the basis of the advice of his Internet brain trust. And things generally go well -- the main obstacle to overcome is Train Man's own crippling shyness. (I gather such a person is not at all unusual in Japan.)

And then the movie throws a huge curve ball at the very end, which I won't describe, since it would ruin the movie. I want to know what other people think about that curve ball -- it's a continuation of a motif seen a few times earlier in the movie, but there could be very different interpretations of it -- so I'm going to encourage everyone to see this movie.

And, honestly, if you can stand to read subtitles, Train Man is a lot of fun: it's funny, cute, and even heartwarming. Train Man's cheering section become characters in their own right as it goes along, and there's even a small sub-plot involving them. But I'm not sure what to make of that ending -- I can tell it's deliberate, and it's a bold choice, but it does leave me wondering.

Read in October

And that's another month down. Here's what I read this time around, with links to my reviews (in the cases where I've managed to finish those reviews).

• Osamu Tezuka, Black Jack, Vol. 1 (10/1/08)
  
• Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney Official Casebook, Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files (10/2/08)
  
• Josh Karp, A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (10/3/08)
  
• Mitch Clem, Nothing Nice to Say, Vol. 2 (10/5/08)
  
• Scott Meyer, Help Is On the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions (10/5/08)
  
• Miwa Ueda, Papillon, Vol. 1 (10/6/08)
  
• Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (10/6/08)
  
• Jim Butcher & Ardian Syaf, The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle (10/6/08)
  
• Gaku Tsugano, Nagaru Tanigawa, & Noizi Ito, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Vol. 1 (10/7/08)
  
• Idumi Kirihara, Hitohira, Vol. 1 (10/8/08)
  
• Richard Stark, Dirty Money (10/8/08)
  
• Rutu Modan, Jamilti and Other Stories (10/9/08)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 26 (10/10/08)
  Naruto and Sasuke have a fight, nobody wins, Triangle Man.
  
• Jim Davis & Dan Walsh, Garfield Minus Garfield (10/11/08)
  
• Danny Shanahan, Bad Sex! (10/12/08)
  
• Jim Davis, Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs & Lasagna (10/12/08)
  
• Atsuhi Ohkubo, B.Ichi, Vol. 1 (10/13/08)
  
• Song Yang, Wild Animals, Vol. 1: Key Trafficker (10/14/08)
  
• Douglas Brown, Just Do It (10/14/08)
  
• Jack Ziegler, How's the Squid? (10/14/08)
  
• Ken Akamatsu & Ran, Mao-Chan, Vol. 1 (10/15/08)
  
• Guy Delisle, Burma Chronicles (10/16/08)
  
• Glenn Dakin, Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons (10/17/08)
  
• Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (10/17/08)
  
• Paul Gravett, editor, The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (10/20/08)
  
• Yukako Kabei & Shiori Teshirogi, Kieli, Vol. 2 (10/21/08)
  
• KwangHyun Seo & JinHo Ko, Croquis Pop, Vol. 2 (10/22/08)
  
• Satoko Kiyuduki, Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 2 (10/23/08)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 27 (10/24/08)
  The end of "Book One" has about a hundred page of denouement, with all of the characters heading off into the hiatus on their own paths. And then there's a hundred-page adventure of Naruto's sensei Kakashi, telling the story of how he got his sharingan eye.
  
• Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) (10/25/08)
  
• Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie, Aya of Yop City (10/25)
• Jessie Reklaw, The Night of Your Life (10/26)
  
• Mari Matsuzawa & Mamizu Arisawa, Inukami!, Vol. 1 (10/27/08)
  
• Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke (10/28/08)
  
• Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear, Saul Ferris, Anne Ishii, & Jiro Kuwata, Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan (10/29/08)
  
• Timothy Truman & Tomas Giorello, Conan, Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal (10/30/08)
  
• Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife (10/30/08)
  
• Enrico Casarosa, The Venice Chronicles (10/31/08)
  
• Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*! (10/31/08)
  A reprint -- oversized like the original -- of Spiegelman's 1978 Breakdowns album, with all of his '70s experimental (very experimental, very formalist) comics, along with a long introduction in comics form and a pretty long prose afterword as well. I don't think the center of Breakdowns has aged very well -- it's artiness for the sake of itself, which works better on a wall in a gallery than on a printed page -- but it's interesting to see, and the new material is more conventionally accessible. (The old stuff deliberately avoids linearity and other story virtues, so it's silly to complain that it does so...but it is tough to read, and one wonders whether the effort is worth it.)
  

Reviews of a lot of those books -- to fill in the so-far-missing links -- will be coming over the next ten days, while I'm off on vacation. I wouldn't leave you folks without content for a whole week!