The Happy Isles of Oceana by Paul Theroux

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year. It's an odd sort of comfort, certainly, and it only works if some of them actually do get read and newer books also land on those shelves for seasoning, but people who like to read also like to have lots of choices, for all of the moods that they think they might have someday.

I've been reading Paul Theroux's travel books for probably thirty years - I think I started with The Kingdom by the Sea or The Great Railway Bazaar in the 90s, when I was reading for a living and hadn't yet developed children to steal my time and the Internet barely existed. I've covered a lot of his books here, and every time I read another one of his travel books I have to shamefully note that, even after thirty years, I still haven't touched a single one of his novels. (I intend to, absolutely. One of these days. They're on the shelf...)

The Happy Isles of Oceania is a big book from 1992, covering a series of journeys over what seems to have been at least all of 1991 - starting in late 1990 during the build-up to the first Gulf War - in which Theroux and his collapsible kayak paddled around and through something like fifty different islands across the Pacific.

Theroux's nonfiction books usually touch only lightly on his regular life, but this one is the divorce book - his marriage is breaking up in London in the first chapter, and he notes in the last that he didn't have the usual end-of-travel-book experience with this project, since he didn't return to his old life like he did with prior books because that old life was gone. (Speaking of how he comments on things archly, there is a reference to what might be his second wife in the very last line of this book: "I kissed the woman next to me, happy to be with her. Being happy was like being home.") I've noted before that his books focus on the specific journey - the places he's writing about - and usually not about how he got there, or what he was doing in-between. This time, he might actually have been bumming around the Pacific for a whole year or longer.

It started with a book-publicity tour in New Zealand and Australia. Theroux doesn't anatomize his motives in great detail, but clearly there was a sense of "Yes, let's get as far away as possible. And let's do as much as I can while I'm on the other side of the world. I wonder how many islands I could get to?" So this one is even more episodic than many of Theroux's books - there's no thread of a railway to connect these very separated places, each of them sitting in warm waters far from sight of any other land.

It's broken into four large sections - first Meganesia, covering New Zealand and Australia; then Melanesia, with a bunch of smaller islands to the east: the Trobriands, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and Fiji. The longest section, on Polynesia, covers another big group of small islands: Tonga, the Samoas Western and American, Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and Easter Island. And finally, there's a short section at the end about Hawaii, where Theroux has spent part of the year every year since.

Theroux has always been happiest and most positive about the poorest, most primitive people, and that theme comes out here, as he compares and contrasts a whole lot of different small island societies and sees how they have been affected by colonizers and missionaries and the modern world in general. (I don't want to say he's against all of that - there are small aspects here and there he is not quite as negative about - but it's a reasonable assumption.)

But every travel book is mostly about the traveler, and this one even more so than most of Theroux's work: he was going through a crisis at the time, and paddling around the biggest ocean on Earth was how he wanted to deal with that and find his way forward. He's still reticent, still protective of his privacy and that of his family - he doesn't even mention the name of the wife he's breaking up with, or give any details of their conflicts - but maybe more open emotionally, because this was such a huge transition in his life.

There's a good summing-up of his idea of travel - maybe explaining, sideways, why he does this, near the end of the book, on p.446:

A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "The American" or "The Foreigner" - the palangil, the popaa, as they said here in Rapa Nui. But there was no power in that.

A traveler was conspicuous for being a stranger, and consequently was vulnerable. But, traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. Generally I felt safer in a place like Anakena than I would have in an American city - or an American campsite, for that matter (mass murderers were known to lurk around campsites). I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. That was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

So he went to a lot of gorgeous, exotic, interesting places and wrote well and engagingly about the people and things he saw there. For all of us who will never have a year free to bum around the Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania is the next best thing.

Better Things: I Don't Like Mondays

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I didn't include this song in This Year, but it was close. One reason it dropped out is that posting it on a Monday seemed just a little too on-the-nose. But, two years later, why not?

This is the Boomtown Rats, with their most famous song, from the 1979 record The Fine Art of Surfacing.

I Don't Like Mondays is about a school shooting - it was shocking at the time, but there have been so many, more shocking or differently shocking, since then, that I doubt anyone not directly involved remembers this particular event, back in early 1979 in San Diego.

(Oh, of course it was in the US, for all that the Boomtown Rats are an Irish band. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens, as The Onion has put it, over and over again.)

The song is still shocking, I think, still that complex combination of anger and fear and surprise and sorrow. And it only alludes to the shooting until the third verse - I do wonder if someone, hearing the song for the first time now, would get the point before that point. I think so. I think the song itself, the sound of it, the ominous power of it, makes it clear. But we'd have to hear from new listeners to know.

Tell me why: I don't like Mondays,
I want to shoot the whole day down.

Quote of the Week: Not in My Name

Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But Aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.14

Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I've always been a fan of complication - especially if it's complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood...well, that's the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn't even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they're married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives - no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc's severance from the job he didn't want and Julia's recent grant - where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months - maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami is Cejas's first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer's eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have - Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean "meat" or "bread.")

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of - and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do - and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn't expect. That's a life, and the joy in reading about other people's lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas's careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer's eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

Space Junk by Julian Hanshaw

I suspected Julian Hanshaw was British - even in a SF story, there's details of phrasing and character interactions that are culturally distinct - and I see now I was right. I also see Hanshaw has been making graphic novels for more than a decade, and I've somehow completely failed to notice his work, so perhaps I shouldn't be lauding my amazing powers of perception here.

Space Junk was Hanshaw's new book this year; it came out a few months ago, from the excellent Top Shelf line (which is why I noticed it to begin with, actually). It follows about half a dozen solo books and some collaborative and shorter work, none of which (see above) I'm going to be able to contextualize or compare.

But this book is an interesting thing: the kind of soft SF that's more about the vibe than the world-building, with some frankly woo-woo fantastic elements and a world that doesn't actually make sense if you sit down and think about it in any detail.

We don't see anything like a government, just the Mondo Corp, which runs an extensive mining operation on this unnamed planet, sometime in the medium future. Mondo's operating plan is to hit a world, build what looks like a pretty extensive city, extract a bunch of minerals for a decade or so, and then pack the whole thing off to another planet. Even quirkier, the corporation seems to be organized generationally, with children explicitly part of the workforce but working under their own parents - and operations seem to leave from the top down, so we're now at the point where the population here is mostly unsupervised teenagers, with a few adults left.

This obviously doesn't make much sense in SFnal terms: to make only the first complaint, planets are big and one city-sized operation can no more exhaust the useful mineral wealth of an entire planet in a few years than a mosquito can drain the blood of an elephant. But of course, this is more of a metaphor than an actual world to be taken literally: Hanshaw wants all of that waste and pointlessness, alongside the forced conformity and infantilizing happy-talk of Mondo. This is late capitalism, as seen by alienated, troubled teens: stupid, pointless, broken, something to be ignored or escaped.

There are two main characters: Faith, who has a piece of metal in her head after a childhood accident that her gambling-obsessed parents were too cheap to fix correctly with something flesh-toned, and Hoshi, who has an anger-management problem and an obsession with chickens. Both of them are seeing their required counselor, Pieter Uzmaki, who seems to be trying his best to help them and to actually be decently good at his job and committed to it. There's also a horrible kid, Steve, leader of a group of bullies, who torments both of our heroes and generally causes trouble.

(For a satire of capitalism, Space Junk is surprisingly low-key and easy-going. Mondo is wasteful, but never seems evil, and even middle-management is entirely missing here. There's no company-town shenanigans to keep everyone indebted, invasive surveillance, obviously dangerous cost-cutting, or destruction of native life. The villainy comes from one person, another one of the kids.)

Everyone is obviously supposed to leave. They all have specific shuttles they're booked onto: Faith, Hoshi, and Pieter are all scheduled for the very last one. And, as these last few days are going on, more and more of their surroundings - movie theaters, convenience stores, and so on - are bodily picked up and shoved onto other ships to be sent off to the next planet.

(Again: super-wasteful and ridiculous from a cost-benefit perspective. But metaphorically resonant.)

Faith and Hoshi both don't want to leave, for slightly different reasons. Pieter, we think, is a solid company man, and will leave - he does seem to be trying to help them both come to terms with leaving, and accept the next steps in their lives.

But the reader knows they won't leave: that's the story. They'll meet each other, find common ground, evade the schemes of Steve, and stay behind in the ruins of their childhoods. The fantastic elements come into that, and I won't spoil them, but they are goofy and very soft-SF, while also amping up that central metaphor Hanshaw wants.

This is a thoughtful, interesting book, good at showing character and nuance and self-assured of its metaphorical material. As an old SF hand, I found parts of it difficult to take seriously, but that's on me: this is the kind of book where you grant the premises. And, if you can do that, it has a lot of depth and leaves you with a fine experience in the end.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid by Stan Sakai

Thirty-some years ago, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series ran bi-monthly, and these early collections each gathered six issues. (It looks like the late collections also tend to gather six issues, but I'm not there yet.) So each book is basically a year of samurai-rabbit action: this one has the issues that hit between December 1989 and September 1990, numbers 19-24.

Unlike the previous book (The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy), Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid doesn't have a single multi-part storyline. There is a two-parter, "Blood Wings," which features a clan of ninja bats, but the other four issues are mostly standalone.

Sakai tells all those stories well, and in different ways: he starts out with the straightforward moral-conflict story "Frost & Fire", with Usagi sent to retrieve a dead samurai's swords for that late samurai's haughty wife, only to find he had abandoned her for a lower-class woman. "A Kite Story" is a lighter story of cheating gamblers during a festival, told in multiple overlapping sections with different viewpoints. Then "Blood Wings" provides the major ninja action for this book - and some questions in the reader's minds about how this anthropomorphic world really works: if some of the races of people can fly, that should probably have made a lot of history different in this world than our, right? Right?

The last two stories are related, with Usagi first meeting an aged, dying hero put out to pasture as the administrator of a minor town (and convincing him to finish his work rather than trying to die in battle), and then fighting the semi-parody of the title as a consequence. (There's also the machinations of the usual Big Bads of the series behind that last fight, too - stories with ninjas and scheming feudal lords are really big on the "let's you and him fight" plot.)

The tone and level of the stories is consistent as before: Sakai is telling samurai stories, slightly sanded down, so they're appropriate for American middle-schoolers. I do find the sanding occasionally obvious, and sometimes regrettable, but it's the way he wanted to tell these stories and the audience he was aiming for. His art is crisp and fun, solid at storytelling, even if I don't spend a lot of time trying to decide what kind of animals everyone is.

For new or random readers: you can probably pick up any random Usagi volume, though you'll probably want to pick ones with multiple stories, like this one. He's a rabbit, he's a ronin, it's otherwise Edo-era Japan - that's all you need to know.

Bogart Creek, Vol. 1 by Derek Evernden

Names are not unique: I need to remind myself of that every so often. Today I have a book of comics from a small Canadian publisher called Renegade Arts Entertainment, and, at first I thought, "Renegade? Surely it's not the same one?"

It's not. The Renegade I was thinking of - Renegade Press, the mid-80s enterprise from Deni Loubert - shut down more than thirty years ago. This is a newer company, founded in 2008, that publishes comics, graphic novels and audiobooks out of Canmore, Alberta. So it's mildly amusing there were two comics publishers from Canada with sort-of the same name, but there was a good twenty years between them, and they were from close to opposite ends of that large country.

What I saw from Renegade Arts is the first collection of Derek Evernden's single-panel comic Bogart Creek - from looking at the Renegade site, I see there are two more collections.

The book isn't clear on where these comics originally appear - there is a Bogart Creek site that Evernden runs, but it's mostly a contact-me and buy-my-books operation; it's not a home for new comics. My guess is that possibly there's a newspaper or three where they occasionally appear, and/or that Evernden just posts them on Instagram. In any case: he's been doing this for a few years now, and has built up a body of work.

It's pretty consistent: dark humor with more gore than most of us would expect in a single panel, full of dark wordplay and distinctive ideas. I don't know if I'd say there's anything obviously Canadian about it, but it does seem like the work of someone likely to get stuck snowbound on a frozen dark prairie more than once in any given year.

I do mean dark humor, though: Evernden's jokes are about death, in one way or another, a good third of the time. It's often zippy, amusing moments before the inevitable death that he cartoons about, but, still: death. Lots of it. And plenty of big black splotches where something violent and final just happened.

Bogart Creek is one of the many single panels that follow Far Side - "weird" humor has tended to go that direction for the past two or three decades. It is distinctively its own thing while also sitting solidly in that tradition, if you know what I mean: it might not have existed without Far Side to show that this was a viable medium, but Evernden's ideas and jokes are very different from Larson's.

I hesitate to recommend Bogart Creek widely, but it is funny. Evernden has a distinctive point of view and makes good gags. He's also a working illustrator, and you can see that in his work: his style is mostly consistent, but he mixes up his look a bit to suit particular jokes. If you like dark humor, check out Bogart Creek.

Better Things: The Passion of Lovers

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I've been listening to Bauhaus for almost forty years, I think. That sounds like a long time, but I came to them fairly late - probably in my college years in the late '80s, after they broke up.

That's the thing about the past: there's always more of it. No matter how old you are, there were thousands of years of past before you. And even something you took to fairly young might have surprising depths from before you got there. And Bauhaus - the real Bauhaus, the one that made the songs we still listen to - only existed from 1978 to 1983.

This is not their iconic song, or their most famous song. Many days, it might not even be my favorite Bauhaus song - Bela Lugosi's Dead is always up there, or Swing the Heartache, and I even get into moods now and then when it's Terror Couple Kill Colonel.

But I always come back to this deep, resonant song, and especially the distanced refrain:

The passion of lovers is for death, said she

"She" says it - the song doesn't say it. It's a viewpoint, an opinion. And is that the death of le petit mort - is it a play on words? - or does she mean it for real. It's dark, gloomy Goth music, so I wouldn't lay a bet on there being anything petit about it.

I can't say anything more: the passion of lovers is for death.

Quote of the Week: The Law Is the Law, and We Can't Change It

"But do you remember what my father said about the Law being man's substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats - delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion - the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart's content, and says 'If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I chose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it - the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies."

 - Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, p.173-74

Adulthood Is a Gift! by Sarah Andersen

So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen's comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth, Fangs, Big Mushy Happy Lump, Herding Cats, Cryptid Club, and Oddball. That's always fun - discovering a new creator and reading all the way out to the walls - but, unless the person you suddenly love is Wodehouse or Simenon, there's only going to be so many books, and you'll find the end.

And then you're in the same place as all of the older fans - waiting for the next book.

Andersen had a new book this fall, the confusingly-titled Adulthood Is a Gift! It is not, as I first thought, a gift-book edition of Myth; it's not a repackaging of Myth at all. It's two-thirds a brand-new "Sarah's Scribbles" collection and one-third prose-and-comics retrospective of her career to date. It's somewhere between a tenth and fifteenth anniversary celebration - the first book was in 2016, her first cartoon published online was in 2011. But why should we have to wait for round numbers?

(Parenthetically, as a Marketing Guy, I would have argued against having a book with a title so similar to an existing book, especially with the "crossed-out" title style. My bet is that sales on this one will be slightly disappointing, just because at least some people will be confused and think they already have this. On the other hand, creators typically hate Marketing Guy, and I do understand why.)

The new stuff is prime mature Andersen: goofy gags, largely about cats and introversion and how your body parts start to betray you much, much earlier in your life than you expect. There's about a hundred of those, in her precise minimalist style - seeing her older work later in the book really emphasizes how clean and funny her line has gotten over the years. (Down to the little things: her people's eyes are usually just a little off - too big, absolutely, and also just a hair wall-eyed all the time.)

The older material is presented as "essays and images" - Andersen shows an old comic, and then writes about it. Sometimes it's about who she was at the time, and what she was trying to do; sometimes it's about how the outside world caused trouble, as when she was attacked and harassed systematically by a group of online neo-Nazis in 2017.

So this is maybe for Andersen's fans more than her other books - at least for people who don't mind reading about process and thinking about how art is made. She's got impressive chops, and is insightful at writing about how she got to where she is now, too. So, if you like funny cartoons about Millennials, or hope to someday make your own funny online cartoons, Adulthood Is a Gift! could give you enjoyment and/or pointers.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlee's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist is a very British fantasy novel, set in a small, comfortable land with no major human neighbors and only trade by sea. Dorimare is bordered on two sides by impassible mountains, on one by the sea, and the last by the the almost equally impassable Fairyland. It's small and rural, with one substantial city (Lud itself) that feels more like a regional capital, a center of local commerce and minor maneuvering among the petit bourgeois leaders.

There was an aristocratic past, rule by a line of Dukes that terminated in the flamboyant and erratic Aubrey, but that ended a few hundred years ago, to be succeeded by those fat burghers taking it in turn to be, basically, Lord Mayor of this small nation. The revolution was presumably somewhat bloody, but Mirrlees tells it quietly in deep retrospect, and is more concerned with the myth of Aubrey and the legends of his return than with what he was actually like as a man ruling a nation. There are Laws, there is something of a police/military force, but this is a land ruled by convention - again, very British. Small shopkeepers, small farmers, supposedly important men who are in reality fairly small-scale proprietors of businesses. They venerate cheese, tell the same jokes over and over again, live in each other's pockets, each with their own nearly identical small lives of prosaic pleasure rolling down through the generations.

Fairyland is the potential breaking point of that, always lurking on the horizon. You could say all the Doirmareites cling more tightly to their normalcy because Fairyland, and the Debatable Hills that are its marches, are always visible to the west, always available as an option.

Hope Mirrlees has a somewhat different vision of fairies than most writers, though. These are not small woodland sprites, or Tolkienian sages living through aeons. They are not part of the normal natural world of Dorimare at all. The fairies themselves barely appear in the book at all: they are more of an option, or a metaphor, or a different way of looking at life. The fairies are the dead, at least some of the time - or dead humans are legendarily said to be spirited away and reanimated by the fairies to serve them as slaves in their land. And those former friends and family members are the fairies the Dorimareites think about - their supposed ruler is Aubrey. Were there any "original" fairies? Is it all dead humans all the way down?

This is not meant to be a clear or precise metaphor. Fairyland is the lands of death, but also the wilds of art, the freeing of the human spirit, and several other things all mixed together. And it's not anyone's choice of what Fairyland will be for them: it is, and continues, and will always be.

The main product of Fairyland - again, so typical for a nation of shopkeepers - is fairy fruit. Some kind of sweet product of those far lands, smuggled in at large effort, eaten largely by the lower classes in secret, giving visions and dreams and sometimes unstoppable desires to go bodily to Fairyland. The burghers, we are told, never eat fairy fruit, but it seems to be endemic among the lower classes - you can see that as yet another British touchpoint, that the "better" people will be affected much more strongly and immediately by the touch of the ineffable, and need to guard themselves against it in ways the rougher "simple" people do not.

Mirrlees tells us this story in a wry, distanced tone, writing about a land far away in space and possibly in time. It's not quite a fable, but it is a story, rather than something we're experiencing right now.

So Lud and Dorimare has gotten out of touch with its fairy side, swung too far in the direction of stolidity and mercantile life. Lud-in-the-Mist is how it swings back, and who is caught up in that. There is a villain, but he, in the end, was not at the core of the larger changes - no one is, or could be. Mirrlees means us to understand this is how the world is, and a swing in one direction will bring a return swing inevitably.

The leader of Dorimare is Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, a self-satisfied middle-aged man who runs a business in what seems to be almost his spare time and has read deeply in the Law. He's better than he might be, as we learn eventually. His tween son Ranulph eats fairy fruit - like many things in the book, the details aren't always entirely clear, but it seems to have been secretly fed to him, as a jest or a stratagem. That disorders the boy's mind, which sets in motion much of the rest of the plot.

Somewhat simultaneously, the major finishing school for the young ladies of the burgher class is also fed fairy fruit, and they all simultaneously hare off to Fairyland, including Ranulph's sister. This is not as important to the novel as Ranulph, which is puzzling. Mirrlees' own father died while she was writing this book, and I wonder if there's some element of working out her own feelings and concerns in this tale of fatherly love purely for a son.

This is a fantasy, but not heavily so. There is no magic, there are no wizards or monsters. Just people, and fairy fruit, and a mysterious land of the dead or the inhuman, close enough to see, close enough to visit, but famously not close enough to be returned from. (That will change by the end of Lud-in-the-Mist, like so much else.)

The plot is largely concerned with the Law, and Mirlees repeatedly makes direct comparisons between the things of fairy (visionary, transformative, changing) and those of men's Law (equally all of those things, made up of legal fictions and pretenses to twist the world into whatever shapes the creators want). Nathaniel tries to help his son, then chases a villain, then, in the end, has to make the trip to fairyland to save his son (and, oh, by the way, also his daughter and all of the other girls, though that is clearly not as important).

Lud-in-the-Mist is a writer's book: it's intensely written and narrated, in ways that editors and writers love to trace and anatomize and try to follow in their own work. It's deep and quirky and often opaque, so those writers and readers can make varying interpretations, within a moderately wide framework, that all seem plausible. It's written in rich, complex prose that rewards close reading and deep thought. And it is ambiguous enough that most readers will find something they agree with in the ending.

It is a minor book, of course. But it's the kind of minor book that generations of new writers keep coming back to, and using as a touchpoint, one with wells of interest that seem, after nearly a century, to be close to inexhaustible. And that's pretty good for a minor book.

Camp Spirit by Axelle Lenoir

Elodie is a seventeen-year-old Quebecois on her way to college, the kind of dark, brooding teen we've seen a lot of in media (and may have been, ourselves, if we're the kind of people who consume a lot of media). She likes dark, loud music: this is 1994, so it seems to be largely the louder side of grunge, but there's plenty of metal in the mix, too.

She has plans for this last summer before college, none of which involve being a camp counselor somewhere out in the woods - Elodie is a solidly urban teen, preferring sidewalks and buildings to trees and lakes and canoes. But her mother has other plans, and one of the core experiences of being a teen is doing things you really don't want to do because your parents make you.

So Camp Spirit opens with Elodie first telling her best friend at school about the camp, and then being driven there by her mother: we know there was rebellion, but creator Axelle Lenoir leapfrogs over all of that to get right to the story. It's divided into eight chapters, each the same length - I don't think this was serialized in the English language, but the original French version (Lenoir is herself from Quebec, like her heroine) might have been.

This is a slightly earlier work than Secret Passages, which I saw a few months ago. It's more clearly a work in a genre - stories for teens or tweens, a little romance and more than a little fantasy & thriller, relatable and grounded. (I have to imagine the pitch had the word "Lumberjanes" in it at least once.) It's not quite transmuted autobiography the way Secret Passages was, but Lenoir was a teen in 1994, and she may well have been a camp counsellor.

The fantasy stuff has got to be fictionalized, though. I'm sure of that.

Elodie, of course, has an epically bad mood, and starts off with a massively unhelpful attitude. (I've already mentioned she was a teenager: it's a characteristic of teens that they get in their own way too much of the time.) She gets the bunch of kids - six assorted redheaded hellions in mid to late elementary school - that is the most unruly and challenging. She doesn't want to hang out with the other counselors at the campfire in the evening; she doesn't want to do anything to make this easier, just to seethe and grump and write nasty things in her diary.

That's where she starts: obviously things happen from there. And we get it: this is nothing like what she wanted. But she does sort-of make a friend of another counselor, Catherine, who goes out of her way to help and support Elodie. And she turns out to be a good counselor for the hellions: they love and respect her in the way only a pack of semi-feral girls can care for a sharp-tongued goth teen.

Oh, but also: this camp is weird. The "Chief" is hugely enthusiastic about everything - that's not the weird bit; that's expected - but seems to have secrets, is way too invested in a violent First Nations camp-specific myth he dramatizes to the assembled camp at the beginning of each season, and leads the singalongs with dark, Satanic lyrics. (One might think Elodie would approve that the Chief has similar musical tastes, but he's just so energetically odd that he creeps her out from the jump, and every time she sees him after that.)

I've mentioned there's a supernatural element: the Chief is part of that. Elodie has suspicions and fears as she goes on - she becomes a good camp counselor, worried about her charges, without noticing it - which I won't detail. And I won't explain the supernatural, or how it all comes out.

Because it does all come out: that's the genre we're in. It's the story of a summer, and how it transformed Elodie (and, maybe, almost as much, other people I will not specify). She is a good counselor, at least for this particular group of feral redheads. She learns secrets of the camp. She learns secrets of other people. She learns to be close to other people, one in particular. And she goes off to college at the end, not quite the same person as before but better and more interesting and more grown up.

This is not as pyrotechnic or ambitious as Secret Passages is: it's a bit more than a genre exercise, but it fits comfortably into a genre and does fun things with the outlines and tropes of that genre. I'm still deeply impressed at the colloquial English-language writing - it all sounds crisp and specific, with distinctive voices for the characters, and that can't be easy to accomplish in a second language. Her art is supple, good at story-telling and ready to be weird for the intrusions of the fantastic. Lenoir is a real talent, and I hope to see a lot more of her comics over the coming years.

Nancy Wins at Friendship by Olivia Jaimes

Nancy Wins at Friendship is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy, came out less than a year later - in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things "the kids" buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that "kids these days" are different. So that's not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk deeper into its own dull mix of sappy sentimentalism and incongruous good-girl art, and there was no serious hope that a legacy strip - especially one so closely identified with its creator, Ernie Bushmiller, and his mania for simple, precise gags - would break out of the straitjacket of the syndicate's hand and ever do anything interesting.

We were wrong. Unlike so many things this last decade or so, we we actually wrong by being too pessimistic, so Nancy is one small hopeful lesson for the world. Nancy was rejuvenated by a younger, female, pseudonymous creator - we still don't know who "Olivia Jaimes" really is, though it mostly doesn't matter; whatever she did before, this Nancy is her best-known and probably most-sustained work - first as a big signpost to say "this is going to be different now."

But the "Sluggo Is Lit" era - awesome as it was - settled down. That wasn't what Jaimes was planning to do, long-term: it was more of a clean break from the Gilchrist years, a way to grab attention and draw a line in the sand, to say her Nancy would be over here from now on.

This book shows what Jaimes wanted to focus Nancy on: still smart gags every day - she's enough of a fan of Bushmiller that isn't negotiable - but embedded in a more realistic modern world, with the phones and tech (and, yes, some language from the kids) that the early strips made such a point of. But Jaimes also added a new supporting cast around Nancy in school - friends, teachers supportive and struggling, a rival - to widen out this world.

It's a more grounded strip, as odd as that might seem from the first few months. More grounded than Gilchrist, more grounded than Bushmiller, frankly: Bushmiller was always a minimalist, paring everything down to a single focused gag in each individual strip, and happy to throw away all continuity and consistency to make that day's gag better. Jaimes's aims are slightly different: she still has Nancy as a self-centered, appetite-driven little kid, but the fact that she's smart and clever and good at working out quirky ideas - all traits core to her since the beginning - are more important, and connect to this mostly normal school life.

So Nancy, improbably, became largely a kids-in-school strip, about lessons and robotics club and rivalries with the other elementary schools. This is the book collecting the strips where that largely happened: this is the middle of that twist. It's a good strip, still full of fun gags, though Jaimes is much fonder of the ironic verbal reversal than Bushmiller's more visual eye.

I hope there are more books of Nancy; a lot has happened since the strips collected here. This one is largely a how-do-we-do-school-during-pandemic time-capsule at this point; I wonder why that was the book Andrews McMeel put out in 2023, but I suppose they figured they need to stay in order or the pandemic strips will just be too disjoint to ever use. But there are two Olivia Jaimes collections, which is pretty good: I recommend both of them, in the right order.

Better Things: Welcome to Your Wedding Day

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

We start the year with a dark, ominous, swirling song - a protest song more than a decade old, about things we've mostly forgot that we were protesting then. Back when war was the worst thing we were worried about, war on the other side of the world, and what we - that extensible, all-encompassing national "we" - were responsible for.

I hope we're still angry at blowing up weddings in foreign countries. At least some of us. There's a fair number of Americans who I think would cheer. 

This is Welcome to Your Wedding Day by The Airborne Toxic Event - a band named after a dark, ominous element of a great Don DeLillo novel. It's a 2011 song about a news story: this happened at least once, maybe multiple times. During the early war in Afghanistan, the US bombed a wedding party, killing many civilians, including the bride.

The song is full of cold anger, with a near-apocalyptic tone and wall-of-sound effect.

Well it's another fine day of nation building
Let's have. A. Parade.
You can dance on the graves and the bones of the children
If you know what to say

I would have liked to begin the year with something happier, but this is the luck of the alphabet. It won't always be this dark. (That's a good mantra in general, I think.)

Books Read: December 2024

These are the books I read the last month of the year. Links will follow, once posts go live, to make this semi-useful (at least for Future Me).

Julia Cejas, Hanami: You, Me & 200 Sq. Ft. in Japan (12/1, digital)

Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania (12/6)

Samir Dahmani, Seoul Before Sunrise (12/7, digital)

Meg Adams, Why Are You Like This? (12/8, digital)

Donald Westlake Writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death (12/8)

Mike Birchall, Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 (12/14)

Neul Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and various artists, Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 (12/15)

Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome (12/15)

Faith Erin Hicks, Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy (12/21)

John McPherson, The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury (12/22, digital)

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (12/22, in Stories & Early Novels)

Guy Colwell, Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch (12/24, digital)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard (12/25, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie (12/25)

Drew Friedman, Schtick Figures (12/26)

Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight (12/27)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.5: The Happy Prince (12/28, sigital)

Tom Holt, Barking (12/28)

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer (12/29, digital)

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter (12/29)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (12/30, digital)

John Scalzi, Starter Villain (12/30)

Alan Grant and Jon Haward, Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) (12/31, digital)

In the new year, I'm pretty sure I will continue to read books.