Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/24/20

This irregular post lists all of the new books I get, however I get them -- it started out to catalog review copies, but expanded, when that first source started drying up, to cover books I bought, got from the library, or that were handed down to me on sheets of gold from celestial beings.

I've never had any from that last category, but I live in hope.

I do have two kinds of books this week: ones I bought and ones that came from the library. (I've been reading a tiny bit more recently, and any uptick in reading always leads me to buy more books, as if I'd suddenly run out of things on the three bookshelves behind me. You may have a similar tropism yourself, for books or whatever else.)

I'll start with the library books; there's only three of them and I need to read them quickly and send them back. (I've read one already, actually)

Library:

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block -- A novella about his series character Matt Scudder, published by Subterranean, a publishing house I always think has impeccable taste. (Which here means that I want to read nearly everything they publish, or at last am intrigued by those books.) Block seems to have stopped publishing novels through big NYC houses this past decade, but he hasn't stopped writing, or writing good stuff -- my guess (or hope) is that he's past the point where he cares about the market, and is now just writing what he wants to.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone -- I've read Gladstone before, but not El-Mohtar. I'm a big fan of twisty time-travel stories, of first-person narration, and of books built around tricky premises -- so this one, which is all that, sounded great when it was published last year. I also want to read more contemporary SFF, especially books not written by the same guys I've been reading for thirty years. (And most of them are guys, I notice.) Plus I think it's officially a novella, too, and I really like short books these days.

Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol -- A somewhat autobiographical graphic novel about a girl named Vera going to a camp that she expected to love but very much did not. Brosgol's previous book was Anya's Ghost, and I'm afraid I can't link you to me gushing about it, since I reviewed it for Realms of Fantasy, during the brief period I was writing stuff that appeared on actual pieces of paper. But trust me that Brosgol is good; this is also from First Second, who have curated a great list of graphic novels loosely aimed at teens (and people who remember being teens) over the past decade or so.

Bought:

Obligatory plug: I got all of these from the awesome remainder dealer HamiltonBook, and if any of them look interesting, you should check there first before you use the Big River links (which, as I should say more often, gives me a couple of pennies if you actually buy them from those links).

Time Pieces by John Banville -- A memoir focused on the city of Dublin. Banville grew up in the Irish countryside, went elsewhere for a while, and moved back to live in Dublin as an adult. He's a fine writer who I haven't entirely kept up with, and I have a long-noted tropism for reading the random nonfiction of novelists. This is also fairly short, and (I think) somewhat bulked up even to that shortness by a bunch of arty photographs by someone else. I've never been to Dublin, but I'm happy to let a literary chap tell me about it and an artsy photographer chap show me his snaps.

Cox's Fragmenta edited by Simon Murphy -- So this guy, Francis Cox, filled ninety-four big books of random newspaper clippings and related reportage (all by other people; he wasn't a reporter) from roughly 1759 to 1832. Then he willed it to the British Library, where those books have sat, mostly unread, on a shelf ever since. This is a bunch of excerpts from that mass -- presumably, some of the most interesting and quirky news stories from a seventy-year stretch about two hundred years ago. It is probably not as crazy as I am imagining, but I'm hoping for weird angles on How We Lived Then.

Americana by Ray Davies -- His second volume of memoirs, after the metafictional X-Ray. This one looks to be somewhat more standard -- Davies writes it in the actual first person, for one thing, and it seems to be set in our actual continuity, not a SFnal near future -- and it came out a good two decades later, covering what I think are the big crowd-pleasing years of the late '70s and '80s. I'm not expecting anything as interesting as X-Ray, since the stadium years were less interesting than the early years of the Kinks to begin with, but Davies is a smart, deeply quirky guy, and I'm sure there will be plenty of good bits.

Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys -- The sequel to Winter Tide, a Lovecraftian reconfiguring set in the 1940s. I still haven't read the first one, but I have it on the shelf, and this was super-cheap for a hardcover.

I notice that the new Blogger interface, like so many new things on the Internet, has made laying out blog posts more cumbersome and difficult -- I used to be able to yank images around, WYSIWIG-style, so that the text would flow around them. Now each image needs its own space, possibly for complicated behind-the-scenes responsive design. So I am adding some text, here and there, in this post to help avoid big chunks of ugly white background. This is the most obvious such addition.

Fifty Shades of Dumb by Leland Gregory -- My stash of books suitable for reading in the smallest room has dwindled, so I've been on the lookout for book of dumb facts or other snippets I can buy cheaply. This is a collection of supposedly true stories (from news media and so forth) about people doing dumb things during and/or in pursuit of sex.

There really isn't that much more to say about this book, so it's particularly difficult to fill this big chunk of ugly white background. I hope you don't mind.

None of My Business by P.J. O'Rourke -- I used to love O'Rourke's work, even when I couldn't entirely agree with him. He was a cutting, smart writer who both did the tough work of reportage -- talking to people who knew things and asking them serious questions -- and could construct nutty humorous flights of fancy. But he curdled with age, retreating to a rural holdfast in New Hampshire and emerging only to hurl tediously boilerplate right-wing jeremiads at whatever everyone else in the Republican party were hating that year. This was his new book for 2018, and I expect I'll hate-read it, mourning the writer he used to be -- but at least I got it cheaply.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson -- Ronson is a good, fairly serious writer of meaty nonfiction books, and I'm surprised to see that I only seem to have read his The Psychopath Test. This one was published in 2015, when we thought that white people being taken to account online for their failings was a horribly bad thing -- it will be interesting to see how it has aged.

Again, just adding a few words here, to make it less obvious that the current Blogger interface is horrible at handling images. Why does tech have to relentlessly move backwards so much?

Figures in a Landscape by Paul Theroux -- A collection of travel essays by the grouchy master of the form; his third book collecting magazine-length pieces. I like Theroux's travel books, and I'm still a few behind (I've had a bookmark in his previous travel collection, Fresh Air Fiend, for at least five years, and it doesn't move very often), but it will be nice to have this one waiting for me.

I only actually need about three lines here, to fill in this gap. Should I list all of the Theroux books I plan to read? I can also see Happy Isles of Oceana from here, and there seems to be a mass-market paperback too far back to be made out.

Double Feature by Donald E. Westlake -- A new edition from Hard Case of two unrelated Westlake pieces, in a package previously titled Enough, when it was originally published in the deep 1970s. There's an editor's note about the title change -- Westlake's previous book, the first time around, was Two Much, so it was a minor ha-ha -- but for Westlake fans who have read Enough, and think this might be something different, it's still deeply annoying. I have read Enough, and I suspected this was Enough once again (without having clear memories of the library copy of Enough I read fifteen years ago), and I am still annoyed. Let me set this in bold: Books Should Not Change Their Titles Without Clear Notification.

Elektra: The Ultimate Collection by (in huge type) Greg Rucka and (much smaller) Chuck Austen, Joe Bennett, Carlo Pagulayan, Carlos Meglia, and Greg Horn -- Many years ago, in a magical land called Vassar, I was friendly with Rucka; we were on a student security force together. (That sounds weird, and it's probably even weirder in the context of such a feminist school as Vassar. It was really just another work-study job, putting people at random spots on campus to ostensibly keep an eye out for problems and actually to let them do some homework while getting paid badly.) I've tried intermittently to keep up with his writing since then; I really liked his early novels, but haven't kept track of most of his Big Comics work. So, when I saw this book cheap, I decided I owed it to my old compadre to spend far too little money in a way that meant none of it would get back to him.

This looks...interesting, with art that I would not generally characterize as "good," particularly the glossy stiff Horn covers. I'm hoping Rucka's writing makes it all work, since we want our old friends to be accomplished and awesome in all things.

Peter Bagge's Other Stuff -- A collection of random comics by Bagge, many of them with various collaborators. It is the obligatory "odds & sods" collection that anyone who does a lot of different things will eventually have.

Collaborators here include R. Crumb, Alan Moore, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes, Johnny Ryan, Danny Hellman, the Hernandez Brothers , and a few more -- and it seems to be pretty evenly divided between Bagge-written and Bagge-drawn stuff, which makes for a diverse mix.

Blitt by Barry Blitt -- This is a 2017 collection of cartoons and covers, mostly (entirely?) from the New Yorker, with some commentary from Blitt. Blitt is a political cartoonist (two words) without having ever been a political cartoonist (phrase), which is an interesting position. And this is an attractive, large book of his work.

If you don't know who Blitt is, and the cover doesn't help place him, he did the Obama/Michele fist-bump cover for the New Yorker, back in the day. And a whole bunch of others -- hence, this book.

Love and Rockets: The Covers by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez -- It's what it says it is: a large-format hardcover book collecting the covers from the original magazine-size run of L&R, along with some trade paperback covers of the same era. There's probably as many more covers since that era, but no one has nostalgia for middle-age, so we'll never see that book.

Man, that's a lot of books. Hope I actually keep reading at my current pace.