Reading Into the Past: Week of February 22, 2006

This is what happens here on Mondays where I don't have any new books: instead I dive into a random old year in my reading notebook to see what I can remember about some old books.

This week, the RNG gave me 2006. So here's what I was reading from February 16-22 of that year, most of which I covered only glancingly at the time:

Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (2/16, read to the boys)

In February of 2006, my older son was about to turn eight, and my younger son had just turned five. So they could read things themselves, and were -- but it was still the prime years for bedtime reading. Thing 1 was an and out of the nighttime reading in this years, but back in for this stretch, as I went back and forth between picture books, especially a shelf or three of big favorites, and reading longer books over multiple nights. (We did at least one Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and I forget what else - maybe The Hobbit?) But what they loved more than anything else, since they were boys of that age, were Dav Pilkey's massively popular Captain Underpants books, and here we see the beginning. I read them over about three nights each. There's one more later in the week; I'm pretty sure I bought that at a B&N in the city one of the nights in between to jump right into it - and I read more of the series to them, finishing books on Feb 24, Feb 27, Mar 2, Mar 5, and Mar 9, so I definitely bought a bunch of these quickly. This is a very silly series, not quite comics - heavily illustrated, but prose with pictures - about two wacky kids and their nasty principal, who also turns into a superlatively goofy superhero. I don't actually recommend these to read for adults for their own pleasure, but if you have young boys in your life - and possibly some girls with the right sensibility - this are a joy to read to together. They are dumb and silly and juvenile in all the best ways, and Dav Pilkey is a national treasure.

Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? (2/17)

I liked Powers as long as it kept the courage of its convictions: cops, without powers, in a world of superheroes, with real death and pain and danger. It lost those convictions somewhere along the way, with both of the main characters getting superpowers and the danger of the early volumes somehow never quite affecting the main characters quite as strongly as the secondary personages. And Bendis's very affected pseudo-Mamet dialogue often got to me: see my parody on Vol. 3 for my take on it. Powers did start out well, and Oeming delivered strong art the whole time. But, like all "real world with superheroes" books, it started off more "real world" and eventually saw itself dragged all the way to "superheroes." Nothing avoids the Great Attractor of American Comics: all will be assimilated if they come anywhere near it. It's best to just studiously avoid superheroes from the beginning and avoid heartbreak later.

Greg Rucka et. al., Queen and County, Vol. 7: Operation: Saddlebags (2/18)

Last week I tried to remember the second collection of this gritty comics series about British spies, Operation: Morningstar. This one was the seventh, with art by Mike Norton, and I can't remember which was which at this point. But I'm pretty sure the heroine, Tara Chace, was getting pretty battered and damaged by this point, since that's what Rucka does. Nothing else has stayed in memory.

Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (2/19)

Briggs' love story to his parents, or maybe their love story, if you prefer: the story of nearly fifty years of their lives (from their meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971), in a quiet undemonstrative British way. Briggs made this graphic novel more than twenty-five years after their deaths, in his own sixties, so it's very much a book looking backwards nostalgically. It's a national treasure in the UK, at least among a certain kind of people much like Briggs and his family - and I don't intend to characterize them any closer than that, since I don't really know - but not as well known in the US. It was turned into a movie that I never saw. As I recall, it's very small and quiet and British: all about making do and getting on with things.

David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, editors, Years's Best SF 11 (2/20)

That decade, there were two major American Year's Best books covering science fiction: Gardner Dozois had the gigantic bug-crusher, in trade paperback and hardcover, which was about twenty years into its life by 2006 and came out from St. Martin's Press. (Not its sister Tor, as some might have thought.) Hartwell, by this time joined by his wife and regular co-anthologist Cramer, edited a smaller mass-market paperback series for Harper, more specifically focused on science fiction - not always Analog-style flying slip-stick stories, but avoiding the more literary stories Dozois often included. It was a good choice to have, and they gave different views of the field -- I tended to like Dozois's book best each year, since I'm a literary guy, but Hartwell/Cramer always dependably dug out more sciency stories, and the stories that were pushing the ideas of SF the furthest. I have no memories of the stories in this particular one, but there's the ISFDB list.

Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets (2/21, read to the boys)

See above; this was the second book in the series.

George R.R. Martin, A Feast For Crows (2/22)

This I read for work, which may not be obvious -- most of the rest above was personal reading. (Not the Hartwell/Cramer, but everything else.) And I would not try to have any opinion about it on the internet fourteen years later, not having re-read it since then. I liked it, but thought Martin was losing control of his story -- well, I thought that more with Feast, but had thought that for portions of the book or two before this. This is not a wild or unusual take by any means. After fourteen years, I remember that it was about sixteen hundred manuscript pages of middle -- generally well-written middle, with interesting things happening on most of those pages, but all middle, and much of it middle that the larger story didn't actually need.