I'll Stand Down By The Door

We're coming into a very important and meaningful season in the Western world -- I'm referring, of course, to the frenzied shopping season that salvages the accounts of most major retailers, running for approximately the next five weeks.

The detached but reportedly benign intellects at Amazon want to get their piece of that huge retail pie, and so are promoting their very own "Black Friday" store. In keeping with the modern degradation of everything, it's not terribly black, nor is it restricted to Fridays. It begins on Monday, and runs for a week -- so at least it includes a Friday, even if it neither begins nor ends on one.

But they will be selling many things at quite low prices, and, if there are those among you who like things, this could be a good place and time to get them. You could either click here -- for those of you using the popular "ad blocking" software -- or use the glistening banner I will insert below:

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Listening to: Steely Dan - Black Friday
via FoxyTunes

Quote of the Week

"We can all agree that children are ugly. Their heads are to big, their legs are too thin, their fingers too fat and grasping -- they are a complete mess. But what's most shocking about them is that their greatest ugliness is on the inside. I speak, of course, of their bigotry. I shouldn't even have to mention this, because it is a natural extension of their stupidity, Stupid people are bigoted because they don't know any better. I am amused when goody-goodies proclaim, from the safety of their armchairs, that children are naturally prejudice-free, that they only learn to "hate" from listening to bigoted adults. Nonsense. Tolerance is a learned trait, like riding a bike or playing the piano. Those of us who actually live among children, who see them in their natural environment, know the truth: Left to their own devices, children will gang up on and abuse anyone who is even slighly different from the norm.

I happen to be slightly different from the norm."
- I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President, p.17
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Listening to: Math The Band - It's Gonna Be Awesome
via FoxyTunes

Man, I Am A Crappy Blogger This Week

And so I'll give you a sneak preview of the reviews I should be writing, in reverse chronological order as I read them:

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President by Josh Lieb -- It's published as YA (which means it's a really cheap hardcover) and it's exactly the kind of book I love: a first-person novel with a snarky, smart, very idiosyncratic voice. Oliver Watson is a genius of unspeakable evil -- though no one knows it, or that he's the 4th richest man in the world -- and he does want to be class president at Gale Sayers Middle School. It's one of those YAs that might read better as an adult, actually -- if the title makes you laugh, take a look at it.

Killing Castro by Lawrence Block -- a paperback quickie from 1961, reissued by the inimitable Hard Case Crime. It's very much of its time, but it's a fast noir-ish read, and it's a Block book most of us never suspected existed.

The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake -- one of Westlake's early serious crime thrillers under his own name; this was usually published as The Mercenaries. It's not as good as he got later, but it's a very solid piece of pulp from its era.

Replay by Ken Grimwood -- It won the World Fantasy Award back in 1988, and deserved it. If you've kicked around the SFF field at all, you probably know the premise -- a man dies of a heart attack at 43 (in 1986) and wakes up in his eighteen-year-old body (in 1961). Who wouldn't want to live again? Grimwood nearly exhausts the possibilities of his story without exhausting the reader; this is a book that says pretty much everything that can be said about its subject.

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg -- The copy I have was originally sent to somebody as a sample of paper stock -- it's marked "40# Stone Mando Supreme 300 PPI" on the first page -- which is incredibly appropriate for this inside-baseball look at possibly the greatest book editor of the 20th century.

Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder -- Just what it says on the tin; if you don't find New Yorker humor funny (hi, Sharyn!), stay far away. Even if you do like New Yorker humor, it's best in small doses -- I read this in dribs and drabs over the past five years, and then the second half on and off during my recent vacation. It's got all of the usual suspects doing all of the stuff you'd expect.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer -- There is an excellent fantasy/noir hybrid novel this year, but it's this book, not China Mieville's flawed and frustrating The City and the City. Go read it.

That's what I've read so far this month; there are also eleven books from earlier that I haven't gotten to, plus another dozen on the graphic novels already-read pile (which mostly turn into ComicMix reviews). I've been too busy with day-job and real-life stuff to get to them so far -- but the long Thanksgiving weekend is coming up, and I'm now nearly caught up on work e-mail, so I may have time for other things Real Soon Now.

The Hornswoggler Family's Middle-Earth Names

I'm back from my business trip, but I'm feeling grumpy, depressed, and uninterested in blogging -- partly because of the recent travel & vacation, partly because of how much work is piling up at the office (this is the busy season), and partly because of one particular e-mail I just saw today. I do hope to bounce back in the next couple of days, but, right now, if I could be bothered to write, there would be nothing but an epic level of doom-mongering.

But, luckily, I still have some old bits and bobs stored away for times just like this.

I'm not sure which name-generator this came from, but it happened in July of 2003, so that site is probably long gone by now. I posted this on a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board, at a time when many of us there were checking to see what our names would be as hobbits and elves:

First I tried my real name --

As a hobbit: Mungo Sandybanks ("Yessir, Mr. Frodo, sir, I'll get those floors washed right now sir...")

As an elf: Valandil Nenharma ("Oh, Valinor is just too crowded this season, darling! Why don't we visit your charming cousins in Lorien instead?")

Then I used "G.B.H. Hornswoggler" (which was also my screen name there):

hobbit -- Togo Toadfoot of Frogmorton ("Whilst I was ankling my way to the Drones Club of Byswater, who should I spot but young Pongo Proudfoot! And he was in a bit of a jam, as usual, so I surged about to buck him up...")

elf -- Haldamir Miriel ("Yes, I fought in the Dwarf wars -- damn proud of it! Someone's got to keep those rock-eaters in their place, and it won't be the younger generation! Why, when I was in the Guards, my commander once said to me...")

my wife is either Daisy Sandybanks or Idril Nenharma, and the boys are Bulbo/Elrond and Pimpernel/Olwe.

Bulbo and Pimpernel?! What kind of a family am I running, here? And since when is "Bulbo" the hobbit translation of "Elrond," hm?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/14

First comes the general disclaimer: these are the books that arrived in the mail last week. I intend to read many of them, but I haven't read any of them yet. (And, this week, I've barely even glanced at any of them.) So this is not a "review" in any real sense of the word: it's a collection of first thoughts and unformed prejudices about some books that I don't know much about. Please do not read too much into it.

Second is the specific disclaimer: I'm currently in San Francisco, twenty-five hundred miles away from this pile of books on my desk. I did scribble down the titles and authors before I ran off on this trip, but that's it. So this week's post, like last week's, will be a work in progress -- right now, there will be only that most minimal information, then (at some point) Amazon links and cover images will appear, and at some other point (perhaps earlier, perhaps later), comments on the items will also blossom.

Yes, it's a pretty useless post at this point. But what do you expect from a blogger, anyway?

(I will note that nearly all of these are manga this time around, with big packages from Yen Press and Tokyopop, and then two non-manga graphic novels at the end. It was not a good week, at least in my mailbox, for plain prose.)

Yokaiden 2 by Nina Matsumoto

Madness 1 by Kairi Shimotsuki (Blu)

.hack/Alcor by Amou Kanami and Izumibara Rena

World of Warcraft: Death Knight by Jolley and Zucchi

D.N.Angel 13 by Yukiru Sugisaki

This Ugly Yet Beautiful World 1 by Ashita Morimi

Maria Holic 2 by Minari Enou

.hack: Legend of the Twilight 1-3 omnibus by Rei Idumo and Tatsuya Hamazaki

Yotsuba&! 7 by Kiyohiko Azuma

Raiders 1 by JinJun Park

Pandora Hearts 1 by Jun Mochizuki

Ichiroh! 2 by Mikage

Pig Bride 3 by KookHwa Huh and SuJim Kim

Cynical Orange 9 by Yun JiUn

Comic 8 by Sa SiHyun

Spice & Wolf 1 by Isuna Hasekura

One Thousand and One Nights 9 by Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok

Moon Boy 7 by Lee YoungYou

Time and Again 1 by JiUn Yun

Azumanga Daioh Omnibus by Kiyohiko Azuma

The Year of Loving Dangerously by Rall and Callejo

Graphic Classics: Louisa May Alcott

For those of you who are obsessive, check back often for updates to this post. For the other 99.995% of the human race, next week should see me back on a normal schedule.

In Which I Post Just to Say, "What He Said"

I'd been saving this SF Signal post about "International Science Fiction Reshelving Day" -- coming up quickly on the calendar; it's next Wednesday -- because I wanted to rain scorn and bile on the idea.

But I don't need to, since the estimable Charles Tan has already done so.

So, to repeat: what Charles said. And in spades. It's a remarkably stupid idea on several levels, and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

Odds and Sods

Imprimus: I have just arrived in San Francisco (for the second time in two months) for the always-electrifying Business Valuation conference of the AICPA. (This one starts at 6:45 Monday and Tuesday, he said, shuddering visibly.) I expect to be chained to a booth for most of the forty-eight hours starting tomorrow morning, and then flying back to Newark the rest of Tuesday. So blogging may well be light or nonexistent. But, then, I say that a lot these days.

As a sidebar note, I'm expecting to show up at the SF in SF reading, which starts in a couple of hours -- wonder if I'll see anyone I know?

Secundus: It's been a long time since I read a novel and had to sit quietly afterward to let it sink in -- it's rare to find that level of involvement and power (particularly for a reader as demanding and opinionated as I am). But it happened on the flight over here. The bad news is that it's a twenty-three-year-old book that I should have read long before now: Ken Grimwood's Replay.

Tertius: No, actually, I think that's it for now.
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Now playing: The Rogers Sisters - Never Learn To Cry
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/7

Sometime this week, there will be my usual "Reviewing the Mail" post in this space, covering whatever books came in last week. But it's not here yet, because I'm still at Walt Disney World, and have been during every mail delivery this week. So I have no idea what books are waiting for me, though I will get to them just as soon as I can.

For now, you just get the disclaimer: I haven't read any of these books yet, so this isn't really a "review." Some of them I might never read, because of lack of time or interest. But I want to give some attention to all of them, since not everyone has my tastes, and because publicists sent them to me hoping for a little publicity, and I can do that "little," if nothing else.

So, the books I saw the first week of November 2009 are:

Kitchen Princess: Search for the Angel Cake, a light novel by Miyuki Kobayashi with illustrations by Natsumi Ando, which is aparrently related to a manga series also called "Kitchen Princess." It's being published by Del Rey Manga, and was available November 10th.
Night Head: Genesis, Vol. 1 is the first volume (obviously) in a manga series about psychic brothers, tormented and alone because of their powers -- proving once again that Claremont-isms cross all cultural boundaries. Actually, I think this is the brand extension of something that was in another form first -- maybe a movie or TV show. It's credited as "Story by George Iida, Manga by You Higuri," and Del Rey will be popping it into stores on November 24th.

Also from Del Rey is Moyasimon 1: Tales of Agriculture, the first in another manga series by Masayuki Ishikama. It's another one of those stories about a guy going off to college who just wants to be normal -- but, this time, he can see germs with his naked eyes. (It looks like they might talk to him as well.) This looks weird, and I appreciate that. It will also be available November 24th.

The Sapphire Sirens is the latest book in John Zakour's detective-in-a-pulpy-future series -- the seventh overall, if I'm counting correctly. DAW publishes it in mass-market in December.

Also from DAW in December, and their obligatory original anthology for the month, is Spells of the City, edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg. There are eighteen new short urban fantasy stories from the usual DAW-anthology crowd, for those of you who want such a thing.

Also also from DAW in December is a new Valdemar anthology, Changing the World, edited by Mercedes Lackey (who else?). It has sixteen new stories, mostly by the people you'd expect, including one from Misty herself. I read nearly all of the Valdemar novels -- and enjoyed them, and even looked forward to a lot of them -- so no snarkiness from me this time.

The SFnal small press Fantastic Books sent me four of their recent publications:

First is Pennterra, a Judith Moffett novel about Quakers! In! Space! that is here copyrighted 2009, but which I vaguely remember was originally published in the early '90s, probably from Avon.

Secundus is Damien Broderick's The Judas Mandala, a 1982 novel that the back cover claims introduced the term "virtual reality." (Which I suppose is plausible.)

There's another Broderick novel, The Dreaming (originally published with ...Dragons at the end of the title), which has an "updated and revised" text. Oh, that's always a good sign....

Last from Fantastic is Wilson Roberts's The Serpent and the Hummingbird, a novel which appears to be new and an original publication and so about which I have little to say.

The Silver Skull is a novel of intrigue and spycraft in a cold-war-esque Elizabethan era (with Faerie here in the role of the dirty Commies, and our hero Will Swyfte as the James Bond of his time) by Mark Chadbourne; I'd already seen it in bound galleys and had it on the stack to read. Pyr is publishing it November 17th in trade paperback.

First Lord's Fury is the sixth of Jim Butcher's "Codex Alera" novels, of which I have, to date, read none. (I like his contemporary fantasies, but they haven't led me to want to read a secondary-world series by the same writer. It's very hard to interest me in a medievaloid secondary world these days, though -- I must admit.) Ace is publishing this in hardcover on November 24th.

And last for this week was the second collection of Jonathan Rosenberg's webcomic Goats -- The Corndog Imperative. Del Rey will publish this as a trade paperback on December 1st. (I reviewed the first Goats collection, Infinite Typewriters, for ComicMix this past summer, if you want an idea of what the strip is like. Or you could just go read the thing -- it is a webcomic, after all, and you're already on the web.)

Incoming Books: 13 November

I should be typing up the list of books that came in the mail last week, but this one is shorter, so I'll do it first in hopes it inspires me...

I went to my usual comic shop today after work, for the first time in about two months, and was more disorganized than usual. I've also fallen out of the habit of pre-ordering books (partially because I'd gotten for review a couple of books that I'd previously bought), which meant that several things I really wanted -- like Alec: The Years Have Pants, Popeye, Vol. 4: Plunder Island, and the paperback of Spectrum 16 -- did not come home with me, on account of I couldn't find them. (Not that my tastes are perfect or anything, but how can a self-respecting major-city graphic novel store not have The Years Have Pants in stock at this point? I ask you.)

The store was having a big sale in their upstairs porn section, which explains the first two books...

Tropical Blend by Bruno Poinsard looked like relatively classy nudes, and it was still wrapped in its protective classic coating, so I took a flyer on it.

The Best of Helmut Newton is more of a known quantity -- we all know Newton at this point in the history of the world, don't we? -- and is from a better-known, classier publisher to boot (Thunder's Mouth).

I did find the somewhat obscure Trotsky, a comics biography of the Russian revolutionary by Rick Geary. And it's probably clear by now that I would buy the San Diego phone book if it were adapted by Geary.

And last (except for a couple of floppies for my sons) was Jack of Fables Vol. 6: The Big Book of War, written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, with art by Tony Akins and others. I recently read volumes 4 and 5 of this series, and I guess I will stick with it for another little while. Jack is still a massive jerk, but that's the point, and Willingham & Sturges are keeping the focus away from his jerkiness and on the ever-growing supporting cast. Besides, I'm becoming very fond of the Babe the little blue ox.
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Listening to: Surfer Blood - Floating Vibes
via FoxyTunes

Quotes of the Week

Two from Nick Paumgarten's recent New Yorker article (from the 10/12/09 issue) The Secret Cycle, on Martin Armstrong and financial cycle theory:

In the Kondratiev waves and other commonly cited cycles -- the Kitchin (three to five years), the Kuznets (fifteen to twenty years) -- the time span is flexible. They are suggestions, not rules. Hard-core cyclists, on the other hand, often seek and find instances of periodicity as rigid and fixed as the laws of physics, which is why hardcore cyclists are often dismissed as mystics or freaks.

And

We tend to ascribe rising markets and an expanding economy, as long as they last, to our own ingenuity -- to progress, experience, rationality, a generational refinement in the ability of economists and central bankers to manage our affairs. Bull markets are seen to be incarnations of human perfectibility. (Home prices would rise forever, because we had invented a new kind of debt, one that didn't ever have to be repaid.) When things go to pieces, we shirk responsibility and seek other explanations. Fatalism creeps in. It can't be merely that we are, as ever, greedy, short-sighted creatures, prone to self-delusion, incapable of learning from the past. There must be something, or Something, else at work, beyond our understanding or control.

Matters Amazonian

That big online bookstore -- well, we still think of it as a bookstore (particularly when we are in the throes of planning our Co-Op for the first quarter of 2010), but they clearly see themselves as a general retail behemoth -- would like all those of you who wear clothes to know that they now have a "denim store."

Here, have a banner:


Said store also recently let me know that not only do they have a Twitter feed, as every forward-thinking person or organization on the planet is now required to do, but that they also have added functionality to their site that allows Associates (people like me) to Tweet about products, with a handy link, directly from their site.

This would be very useful if I were in the business of shameless promotion of random goods. Unfortunately, I'm too prickly and WASPy for that, so I won't be Tweeting about the great deals on auto parts or thigh-high boots. I'm sure you're all heaving a great sigh of relief at that.
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Listening to: They Might Be Giants - How Many Planets?
via FoxyTunes

I Got Nothing

Work is really busy this week -- particularly since it's a short four-day week sandwiched between the big family vacation and a business trip (starting Saturday morning, no less) to San Francisco -- and so I haven't had two brain cells to rub together to do any blogging.

Tomorrow is less meeting-intensive, so I may make it through the working day somewhat less fatigued. (And, if so, I might actually make a stab at writing about some of the books stacked up on my desk here, or actually doing the mulligan for this week's Reviewing the Mail" post.) No promises, though.

All I can say definitely is that I'm still here, and I will blog again...at some point.

World Fantasy Awards -- Only a Week Late!

I was deep in the wilds of Disney when this was announced, and I'm still thousands of posts behind (in two separate feed readers, no less), but I did catch up far enough to see the winners of the 2009 World Fantasy Awards were...

• Lifetime Achievement: Ellen Asher & Jane Yolen
• Best Novel (tie): The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow) & Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
• Best Novella: “If Angels Fight”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)
• Best Short Story: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)
• Best Anthology: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)
• Best Collection: The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)
• Best Artist: Shaun Tan
• Special Award – Professional: Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)
• Special Award – Non-Professional: Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

(via Science Fiction Awards Watch)

Congratulations to all of the winners, but particularly to Jeff Ford (two awards for books in one year!) and to the incredibly deserving, for ages now, Ellen Asher and Michael Walsh.

This year's judges were Jenny Blackford, Peter Heck, Ellen Klages, Chris Roberson & Delia Sherman, and I wish them all a pleasant time getting back to reading what they want to read.

Next in the barrel, for the 2010 awards, are new judges Greg Ketter, Kelly Link, Jim Minz, Jurgen Snoeren and Gary K. Wolfe. This is pretty early for the whole judging panel to be announced (I think), which I hope means they'll have more time to read all of the worthwhile stuff and not have a mad rush at the end. (However, that hope runs entirely counter to my personal experience as a WFC judge a few years back; the flood of stuff that looks at least half-decent is so large, and so relentless, that it takes all five judges just to winnow it down to a reasonable list of works that they all then need to read.) Anyway, best wishes to them as they embark on this reading adventure, and my hopes that none of them turn out to be the Crazy One.

It's Got a Great Beat, But I Don't Think You Can Strip To It

Right at this moment, I'm still at Disney World, and the last thing on my mind is blogging. Luckily, I have emergency posts stored up in the attic for just such situations as this.

The Internet, as always, feeds on spare time and produces odd thoughts. This was true even back in 2004, when a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board was started about the most inappropriate songs to strip to. I got to it more than a hundred posts later, with many of the best ideas taken, so I went in a more conceptual direction:

Since practically every song that has been mentioned as completely unsuitable seems to have been used by some stripper, I thought I'd create some unsuitable and bizarre scenarios. I wouldn't be surprised if any of these have happened, but I haven't witnessed any of them (though some would be fun...and others would be appalling).

Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat, either as a lap dance or (for bonus points) on stage, with the dancer using a chair as a prop.

Fishbone's Lyin' Ass Bitch, probably dedicated to some other dancer in the establishment. (Leading to a cat-fight, I expect.)

Hell, as long as we're doing Fishbone, I'd love to see someone try to shake it to It's a Wonderful Life (Gonna Have a Good Time). The lyrics are pretty inappropriate, and it has a tempo like a frog on a hotplate.

Aimee Mann has probably never done a song that's danceable, but I'd vote Wise Up as her least stripper-friendly tune. Even for a slow floor number, it's way too quiet and slow. Maybe it could work for Mindy, the Clinically Depressed Ecdysiast.

And how about a two-girl act, coming out in a pantomime horse costume, to America's Horse With No Name?

Bob Dylan's as bad for stripping to as Neil Young, but how about Subterranean Homesick Blues, as performed by a woman in bell-bottoms, dashiki and granny glasses? (not for long, of course)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays yet -- it's very depressing, probably undanceable, and is about a young woman deciding to kill a whole lot of people...

I could see a stripper using some of Bruce Springsteen's songs -- I'm Goin' Down is pretty obvious -- but how about doing Johnny 99 in a fake prison outfit?

Pink Floyd's early long space-rock songs could be good for some of the more theatrical strippers (the kind with lots of dry ice, occasional live animals, and more props than you can shimmy a hip at). But I still think One of These Days would be a mood-killer.

In the category of You Could Dance To It, But You Wouldn't Want To, I give you In The Coliseum by Tom Waits. The opening lines are "The women all control the men/With razors and with wrists..."

And, finally, They Might Be Giants have been mentioned, but I would love to see a good act built around their live version of Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas).

Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley

It's a miracle that Christopher Buckley came out halfway normal, with two such attention-grabbing parents as Patricia (socialite among socialites) and William (prime mover of the conservative movement, writer at immense length about nearly everything, and premiere stuffed shirt of the 20th century) Buckley. Losing Mum and Pup is not the story of how he managed to do that, though there are hints around the edges. Instead, this is the book of how he coped during the year between their two deaths -- a more focused memoir, about a particular period of time, one that he can encompass more easily and get down into words.

The junior Buckley has never written with the stentorian seriousness of his father; his novels are cutting satires of contemporary politics (at their best, such as the scalpel-sharp Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley rivals Waugh for clear-eyed nastiness), and he's written little nonfiction before this. (There is one previous memoir-like object, his first published book: Steaming to Bamboola, which tells the story of one year that he spent as a merchant seaman, without ever explaining how William F. Buckley's son came to be a merchant seaman or connecting that year with anything before or after in his life. Losing Mum and Pup is a bit more expansive than Steaming, but the younger Buckley is still mostly a private person; he's willing to write about his very public parents clearly, but keeps offstage the parts of his life that don't directly relate to those dying parents.)

Losing Mum and Pup is thus not the story of what it was like to grow up with those two larger-than-life figures as parents -- which is probably the story that most of us would be most interested in -- but what it was like to realize that they were going away. Buckley reflects on "orphanhood" in the first chapter, after a number of people refer to him as an orphan (and he wryly notes that becoming an orphan at fifty-five is rather different than having it happen when a child), but comes to realize that the moment when you understand that you are part of the older generation does have unexpected power.

Buckley does give some medical details -- thankfully, not all of them, but enough to give the reader the shape of the situation, and have him share in the feelings of unease and powerlessness. But Losing Mum and Pup is primarily a book about coming to terms with one's dying father. Every man has a complicated relationship with his father, and the more alpha-male that father is, the more complications. William Buckley wasn't physically dominating, true, but imagine growing up in that household and hoping to win just one argument, once!

Grief and sadness are not in Christopher Buckley's usual emotional register; Losing Mum and Pup is thus not a book steeped in sadness and melancholy. It's not light-hearted or cynical, either, but it's an essentially clear-eyed look at an event that has to come to all of us that live long enough ourselves. Given the alternative, I know I'd prefer to be the one outliving my older relatives, and it is the natural order of things. Christopher Buckley has moved far from the high-church Catholicism of his father, but it's clear that "the natural order of things" is still a concept that has power to help him make peace with the world.

So Losing Mum and Pup is not as funny as the usual Christopher Buckley book -- thankfully -- but it is as incisive and insightful as we've come to expect from him. I probably wouldn't recommend it to a reader currently mourning her own parents -- one doesn't want to get into comparisons over the dead, and it's hard to compete with the Buckleys -- but, otherwise, it's a fine meditation on loss and all the kinds of separation a child needs to make.

Quote of the Week (Slight Return)

"'And I myself,' continued Ford in a voice so superior it would have caused single-cell life forms to accelerate their evolution so that they could use their fab new opposable thumbs to pick up a rock and beat him to death. 'I myself base most of my calculations on emotions.'"
-And Another Thing..., p.48, showing the strengths and weaknesses of Eoin Colfer's aping of Douglas Adams

Quote of the Week

"Since masturbation is what erotic writing so often leads to, that was reason enough to make [D.H.] Lawrence's novel [Lady Chatterly's Lover] controversial; but in addition, through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological attachment that man often feels towards his penis -- it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls them, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man's life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man's most honest organ."
- Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife, pp. 115-116

Six GNs That Won't Get a Full-Fledged Review

Because all I have to say about them can be said more succinctly:

Things Undone by Shane White (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $12.95)

This is White's second graphic novel, after North Country, which I didn't see. His hero, Rick Watt, is a mopey twentysomething who moves jobs from Philadelphia to Seattle -- and, in flashbacks, moves from one girlfriend to a prettier model -- but is still mopey and depressed. White shows the mopiness and depression by having Watt slowly turn into a zombie, complete with body parts falling off -- and that's a great visual metaphor...except that it doesn't make up for the fact that Watt has no real reason to be mopey and annoying. His new job isn't going as well as he'd like it to, but he's also just being a jerk, particularly to his girlfriend, Natalie.

White is going for existential ennui, or maybe a quarterlife crisis, but, really, it's just that Rick is a passive-aggressive jerk who can't communicate effectively with either his girlfriend or his co-workers. He gets a happy ending of sorts by learning to have "backbone," which is precisely the wrong lesson -- Rick needed to be able to talk, not to fight and pretend to kill himself.

The zombie motif is artistically interesting, but the moments of greater zombification aren't consistently related to Rick being more beaten down and dehumanized; more often, they're a product of his own anger or lack of attention. There's nothing wrong with Rick that a but of slowing down and paying attention wouldn't cure; he's not a zombie, just a self-absorbed guy who thinks he deserves to get better than he gives.

Joe & Azat by Jesse Lonergan (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $10.95)

Lonergan spent time in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan; the "Joe" of this graphic novel is a young man in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. (And "Azat" is his driver/guide/best friend there, the usual super-energetic, vaguely entrepreneurial young man in backward or developing countries, always on the hunt for the next big thing, cheerfully forward-looking, and hugely outgoing.) But Joe and Azat is not autobiographical; it's only based loosely on Lonergan's own experiences.

That means, I suppose, that life didn't neatly turn itself into a story for Lonergan during his time in Turkmenistan, but, then, it never does. The story here is episodic and without much overall shape; the episodes are individually interesting, but they tend to turn into "look at these colorful people, so unlike bland American Joe! My, aren't people in the less-known parts of the world so much more ethnic than we are!" in the aggregate.

Lonergan does have a great eye for black; he has huge areas of inky black throughout Joe and Azat. His faces are also very expressive; his people really come to life on the page. (His body language is equally good; the cover is a good example of that.)

Joe and Azat is very enjoyable, but it's a pretty standard me-and-my-wacky-ethnic-friend comedy (crossed with here-I-am-in-this-weird-foreign-country). I have to think that Lonergan could have put together a stronger piece if he's kept closer to his own actual experiences; I doubt there was a "real" Azat -- and the people that he put together to make Azat would probably have been more interesting in their complexities.

Prison Pit: Book One by Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $12.99)

I've only seen short Johnny Ryan strips before, so I wasn't adequately prepared for the apocalyptic, WWF-meets-a-disturbed-seventh-grader's-notebook quality of Prison Pit. There's no narration or scene-setting; a prisoner is about to be dumped on some hell-hole planet when the book begins, and it goes on from there, through ultra-violence and even less expected and palatable events.

It's a good thing for Ryan that comics don't have rating like movies do, that's all I can say -- the little box explaining the elements that went into the rating would be pages long ("decapitations, pervasive verbal obscenities, copious sadistic violence,..., disturbing imagery,....").

Prison Pit is un-reviewable; it is what it is, and most readers will loathe it. A few will actually enjoy it, and more will claim to like it, because they think they should like something as "transgressive" as this. Ryan is one crazy motherfucker, man -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2 by The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $14.99)

Love and Rockets is difficult to review for the opposite reason that Prison Pit is: there so much here -- on the page, and in the backstory -- that just finding a place to begin is difficult. This particular yearly "issue" has a hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.

Jaime's half comes in two parts, but they're continuing the same story -- the story that began in last year's first issue in this new format, "Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34," as if all hundred pages of this story was a superhero comic from a more female-friendly (and multicultural) universe than any of the ones we know. It's also a sideways version of his main, generally realistic continuity, in which some minor characters from his Locas stories are superheroines and the ubiquitous Maggie makes a brief appearance. Jamie's view of superheroes owes more to wrestling (particularly the masked wrestling of Mexico) than is usual for American comics, and it's also a surprise to see his all-female casts beating up on each other as strongly (and with as few consequences) as the spandex-clad men of Marvel and DC. I didn't find this story as successful as Jaime's work usually is; it's too in-jokey and hermetic, as if the superhero comics of the world he's invoking are nearly as tedious and inbred as our own.

Gilbert also provides two stories, which fill up the middle of the book. But his are unrelated to each other, though "Sad Girl" seems to be set on the fringes of his Palomar continuity (in the more recent incarnation, with the current-generation characters relocated to southern California) and the main character of the literally nightmarish "Hypotwist" looks like, and may indeed be, Fritzi. The first is more of an episode than a complete story, and the latter is another one of Gilbert's periodic experiments with the comics form -- interesting and evocative, but difficult to describe, since it relies entirely on that dream-like atmosphere and imagery.

So this is a decent Hernandez Bros. book, but a horrible starting point for anyone who hasn't read them; thus, practically speaking, a unreviewable book.

Sky Doll by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa (Marvel/Soleil, November 2008, $24.99)

This tale of a female android -- sexy but utterly innocent, sweet and loving and searching for love and her place -- in a galaxy-spanning medium-future civilization under mildly corrupt theocratic rule reads like as pure a distillation of the essence of Heavy Metal as is possible. And so it only makes sense that it would be published over here by marvel, which has been in the business of triple-distilling superhero comics, like some mad purveyor of punch-em-up Scotch, into ever more esoteric and self-involved forms.

There's not a single page in Sky Doll that's less than stunning, and not a single word or idea in it that any reader with the slightest knowledge of vaguely smutty commercial French comics (shall I just say "Heavy Metal" again?) will find the least bit surprising. In the alternate world that is France, this is Marvel Comics. And now it's so here as well.

Universal War One, Vol. 1 by Denis Bajram (Marvel/Soleil, January 2009, $24.99)

This book is pretty generic as well -- hard-bitten soldiers in space, in the midst of the usual inner system vs. outer system civil war, dealing with a suddenly-appearing black wall in space. Even more generically, they're a "purgatory squadron" -- made up of court-martialed officers (each for some very distinct failing that serves as each one's only personality trait), led by the un-respected daughter of a great (tough, hard-bitten, unbending...add your cliche here) military leader, who is also nearby.

There's the usual adventure-SF mix of tough-talking, vaguely enigmatic alien artifacts, punch-em-ups, and fighters banking in space as they dogfight. If you're the kind of person who can take any of that seriously, it could be a rousing story; it all looks very shiny and dramatic, and the dialogue only induces actual cringes a couple of times.

Abandoned Books: And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

It would be unfair, and arguably wrong, to say that Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series went straight downhill from the beginning. Even the most crazed fan has to admit that the records were just as good as the original radio show, and that the Infocom game is possibly even better. But, if the conversation is restricted to the books, then there would be much less argument. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the funniest and best of the lot, both The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe, and Everything have real strengths, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is only faintly embarrassing. (We don't talk about Mostly Harmless, the book reportedly finished on a flight into Los Angeles for a major book trade show, because it's not nice to speak ill of the dead.)

There is no sign at all that And Another Thing..., the unnecessary but inevitable continuation of Adams's series by Eoin Colfer, is anywhere near as bad as Mostly Harmless. In fact, it's probably, by all objective standards, a better book than So Long. But it's not by Douglas Adams, and that becomes apparent in a thousand small ways as the book goes on -- the characters speak in un-Adamsly ways, are overly emotional (and the wrong kind of emotional), and the plot shows suspicious signs of actually having been thought through and kept organized. Another Thing is at least a half-decent humorous SF novel featuring characters named "Arthur Dent" and "Ford Prefect," but it doesn't succeed at raising the ghost of Douglas Adams. It couldn't have done that, of course. But all those of us who try to read it are hoping for that. Another Thing also has the usual fault of a continuation by other hands: it relies too heavily on the reader's memory of the original Douglas Adams jokes (lots of bits supposedly from the Guide itself, the return of Vogons, the Heart of Gold, and so on -- I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that Marvin shows up before the end, too) instead of doing the same sort of thing in a new way.

So I gave up on Another Thing about ninety pages in, roughly a third of the way through. It's not Adams, and I'm no longer the ten-year-old who first read Hitchhiker. You can't go home again, death is final, but commerce is eternal.

But I just might try one of Colfer's own novels; he's funny pretty consistently here, though the Adams-isms are sometimes too florid and overworked. (Not to say that Adams didn't get that way himself, because he did. Again, this is better than about half of the writing Adams did in this milieu.) I wish this book didn't exist, but the world doesn't exist to please me. I can only hope that most readers of Another Thing are happier with the beating-So Long part of it than they are disappointed with the Colfer-isn't-Adams part. Don't let me stop you from reading Another Thing -- but go into it with reasonable expectations, please.

Chemistry for Beginners by Anthony Strong

What is science fiction? Chemistry for Beginners is not a novel most of us would fit under that umbrella, even though it's all about working scientists doing cutting-edge research on the frontiers of biological science in what may be the very near future. But that research is into female sexual response -- Female Sexual Dysfunction, to be even more clinical about it -- and Chemistry for Beginners turns out to be a romantic comedy in the end. (Though it's more Shakespearean in both its romance and comedy than the usual slapsticky modern style.)

So not even the fact that it's written in the form of a scientific paper -- with footnotes and references at the end and everything -- can save it from the taint of un-seriousness and girlyness. SF is about Big Men doing Big Things: shiny phallic rockets thrusting into the void and penetrating alien worlds, giant machines probing deeply into the inner recesses of the universe, wars and fighting and death. Getting an anorgasmic woman to achieve bliss is much too yonic for the True World of Skiffy.

Strong's hero is Dr. Steven J. Fisher, a brilliant young biochemist at Oxford working on a chemical treatment for FSD as head of a team comprising the usual hot-to-trot female sexologist and bevvy of young and eager post-docs. (Eager for each other in particular, as the reader learns bit by bit as Chemistry for Beginners goes on.) Strong has a weakness for the cliche in his characters; Fisher is implausibly innocent for a researcher into sex, and fits far too closely the typical media stereotype of the science nerd. He is our first person narrator, so we get inside his head, the better to learn how carefully organized, disciplined and regimented it really is. We're told that Steven is brilliant, but he never exhibits the quirky, random interests that the truly brilliant acquire; he's focused entirely on his work to an unlikely degree.

The other half of the sexual equation is provided by Ms. G. (Annie Gluck), a late addition to the study. She's goaded into it by her thesis advisor/boyfriend -- she's reading for a doctorate in English -- who gotten annoyed by her lack of response. She's attracted to Steven almost immediately, but denies it for a very long time; we read her locked blog entries interspersed throughout Chemistry for Beginners, so we can see that she's lying to herself as well. Strong isn't quite as clear about the results of the study -- since Annie is lying about it, and Steven is, of course, clueless -- but it seems as if she's quickly become orgasmic because of the sound of Steven's voice during the treatments, but lies about it for personal emotional reasons that never become entirely clear.

Steven and his team are preparing a major paper on his treatment, KXC79, which will be a showpiece of a major conference presented by Trock Pharmaceuticals, the sponsor of his research. Steven is working hard, in the way that only monomaniacal fictional scientists can, to iron out the last few discrepancies -- which are nearly all relating to Annie's continued lying to him and the other researchers about the orgasms that their test equipment keeps recording her as having.

Chemistry doesn't turn into anything like a conventional romance until very near the end, since Annie is trying to deny her feelings for Steven and he's written to be as obtuse as a 179-degree angle. Strong does maneuver them into a position where it makes sense for them to have sex for the good of the experiment, but never plays up the comedy as much as he could.

And, in the end, Chemistry does rely heavily on the expected morals and endings -- there are betrayals, but True Love cannot be defeated, and that nasty reductionist science-y stuff is swept away by feeling. It's a pleasant novel that doesn't aim all that high: it wants to be an amusing novel with some romantic and comedic elements without ever committing to being either a comedy or a romance. Strong is witty, and makes up in novelty and cultural references what he leaves out in gripping plotting. (There is a flurry of plot near the end, to set up the required confrontations and reverses, but most of the book is an amble through a few months of these people's lives.) Chemistry finally is neither a SF novel nor a romance, and is closest to a chick-lit book, with its clueless protagonist documenting everything happening to him. If he'd been actually as smart as he's supposed to be, Chemistry for Beginners could have really been something. But, as it is, its a decent diversion, with characters that came too directly from Central Casting to be entirely believable.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/31

The actual list will begin after the ritual disclaimer: These are books that came in my mail last week, sent by various publicists in the hope that I'll review them. I get more books than I could ever review -- leaving aside the currently-large pile of books I read intending to review that I haven't managed to write about yet -- and so these will not all be covered in depth. So, to make sure I do mention everything, I run these posts every Monday morning.

Or, in bullet-point form:

• I haven't read these books.
• I might never read these books.
• This is not a "review."

But here's what I saw this week:

Nightchild is the third book in James Barclay's "Chronicles of the Raven" fantasy series, which has been confusing me for several months now. Pyr is publishing the books of this series -- originally published in the UK about a decade ago -- in quick succession, but have also been sending me both finished book and bound galleys...so I've been seeing each of these books at least twice, and not necessarily in order. But this one has a big "3" on the spine, which I am entirely in favor of. And this book will hit stores on November 10th. I haven't read these books, but they're the kind of fantasy that's not quite epic -- though definitely secondary-world -- that I always faintly assume has a gaming basis, somewhere far in the background. (Though I could easily be wrong.)

I don't actually have a copy of Fairies Art Studio by David Riche, since it won't be published (by Watson-Guptill) until March of 2010. But I do have a letter and color photocopies of sample pages, which reminds me of my days back in the book clubs. (This is exactly what I would see for art books in those days -- though I'd have wanted to see it much earlier than this; I bet the print run has already been set, for one thing.) It's a book about drawing fairies digitally -- as far as I can tell, there's nothing about drawing using the implements traditionally associated with that term -- and contains art by Myrean Pettit and Yishan Li. I'm not an artist, and I only have a small sample, but I'm not massively impressed so far. But, if you want to draw fairies with your computer, I doubt you have many choices in book tutorials -- and this one looks very professional and detailed.

Vatican Hustle is the first graphic novel from Greg Houston, a new cartoonist from Baltimore. (No word on whether there's a similar Young Turk from Houston called Greg Baltimore.) The art is highly stylized, drawing a bit from Munoz (perhaps via Giffen) as well as from Wolverton and the '80s RAW crowd. The story looks to be equally stylized; it's a '70s Blaxpoitation movie in comics form. That's an awful lot of style for one book.... This will be published by NBM in December.

And last for this week is the eighth collection of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack stories, coming November 17th from Vertical. (I reviewed the first and second volumes of the series for ComicMix, and I expect this book is broadly similar to those flamboyantly entertaining pieces of pulp craziness.)

Read in October

I do these monthly lists mostly for my own benefit, and to serve as an index of my reviews (either here or elsewhere). I do scatter a few new capsule reviews into each one, of books that I didn't write about at greater length elsewhere. Links are mostly to those reviews, with a few (the capsule reviews) jumping straight to a certain online bookseller for immediate gratification.

This time out, you'll find short reviews of Top Shelf Under the Big Top, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe, Sundome, Vol. 5, and Naruto, Vol. 37 within the trackless waste of links below.

• P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (10/1)
  
• Brett Warnock, editor, Top Shelf Under the Big Top (10/2)
  This was both older (from 1999) and more generically indy-comics (deliberately crude and often low-life short stories) than I expected, with a lot of stories that I respected rather than liked and even more that I couldn't bring myself to respect. It does have work by K. Thor Jensen, Dylan Horrocks, Matt Madden, Josh Simmons, and Craig Thompson, but there are no lost gems here -- just decent early comics from people who were still learning the ropes and would later do better work. It's a shame, since I was hoping to be led from this book to cartoonists I haven't read before, but that didn't happen.
  
• Leland Gregory, Idiots at Work (10/2)
  
• Joshua Glenn & Mark Kingwell, The Idler's Glossary (10/3)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe (10/4)
  After five months of reading these incredibly entertaining twentysomething-life-as-a-videogame graphic novels, I'm finally caught up...and that means I'll have to wait for the sixth (and last?) book like everyone else. This one only came out in February, so I'd expect at least a six-month wait -- hmm, I probably should have spaced these out more. If you've been avoiding this series because you thought it looked too juvenile, I'd recommend taking another look: I'm about the worst person in the world when it comes to tolerance of dumb behavior by child-men protagonists, and Pilgrim didn't come across that way to me at all -- he's immature, yes, but he's a sweet, realistic kind of immature rather than the usual full-of-himself media-product immature guy. (If that makes any sense.)
  
• Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife (10/6)
  
• Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 5 (10/7)
  I reviewed the first four volumes of this series for ComicMix -- here's a link to the most recent one, and you can track backwards from there -- but I didn't have anything new to say this time, so I bumped it down to a mention here. It's still a creepy, disconcerting look at obsessive teenage sexuality -- alternately horrifyingly broad in that stylized, templated manga way and cuttingly precise and true -- and just as compulsively readable as ever.
  
• Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (10/7)
  
• Susumu Katsumoto, Red Snow (bound galleys) (10/8)
  
• Shane White, Things Undone (10/9)
  
• Jesse Lonergan, Joe and Azat (10/12)
  
• Matthew Hughes, Template (10/12)
  
• Arvid Nelson, Will Conrad, & Jose Villarrubia, Kull: The Shadow Kingdom (10/13)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (10/14)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• Anthony Strong, Chemistry for Beginners (10/15)
  
• David Small, Stitches (10/15)
  
• Lewis Trondheim & Fabrice Parme, Tiny Tyrant, Vol. One: The Ethelbertosaurus (10/16)
  
• James Strurm, Andrew Arnold, & Alexis Frederick-Frost, Adventures in Cartooning (10/19)
  
• Edgar Allan Poe & Gahan Wilson, The Raven and Other Poems (10/20)
  
• Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship (10/20)
  
• Shinobu Ohtaka, Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 2 (10/21)
  
• JinHo Ko, Jack Frost, Vol. 2 (10/22)
  
• Svetlana Chmakova, Nightschool: The Weirn Books (10/23)
  
• Richard Sala, Cat Burglar Black (10/26)
  
• Jeff VanderMeer, Finch (10/26)
  
• Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost (10/27)
  
• Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 4: Americana (10/28)
  
• Peter Greenberg, Don't Go There! (10/28)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 37 (10/29)
  At this point in a series -- that would be roughly 7400 pages in to a complicated story with a cast of dozens and nearly as many factions, martial arts styles, and secret ninja villages to keep track of as well -- there's really no point in trying to give a synopsis or review; it would only be for the people who are at roughly the same point in reading the series. So I'll just say: after a long time, I finally found the next volume at the library, and I am still trying to keep up with this one. Make of that what you will.
  
• Bill Willimgham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 5: Turning Pages (10/30)