Portions for Foxes: Bess Rogers

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

A lot of the music in this series is from the years around 2010 - maybe 3-5 years to each side - when apparently I was paying a lot more attention to new music, or the ecosystem (new-music notifications in iTunes and elsewhere, a pre-streaming emphasis on buying songs, a robust network of blogs to highlight new stuff, and so on) was closer to the ways I like to discover new music.

I don't know if it's an failing-ecosystem thing or a you-can-only-chase-fame-so-long thing, but a lot of those artists seem to have quietly dropped out to do other things since then, and this is one example.

My song this week is Everything to Lose by Bess Rogers, who had a bunch of music - great music; I dithered between about four of her songs for this series - for about a decade, including this Travel Back EP in 2009, but seems to have gone quiet since 2016.

It's got a great shuffling, handclap-y beat to start off, with a first verse of Rogers' voice just over that percussion before the rest of the music kicks in for the chorus:

why so down baby?
why so glum honey?
if the only thing you want is money
then you've got everything to lose

I guess you could call it a message song, but it's one of those messages everyone agrees with - if you only care about money, you're gonna miss out on a lot. But we don't always come to music for unique or profound thought - we don't come to music for that most of the time. We come to music to tell us things we know but might have forgotten, and do it with a punch.

Rogers has a lovely, flexible voice and it serves this song well - it's a fast song, and a moderately loud one, but she's never straining, never pushing. It just all flows out - boom boom boom. Three minutes, in and out: says what it needs to, like any great pop song. And this is one.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 28, 2024

These books actually came in the door about a week ago, but I bumped them from last week's post because it was a huge box of remainders, and I didn't want to deal with typing up them all on vacation.

Tell you the truth: I still don't feel like it. So this will be roughly a third of the total, and the rest will come over the next two weeks.

These are the SFF books that I got in a big box of random remainders from HamiltonBook, a fine mail-order retailer relatively close to me (Connecticut) that I've been buying from for decades now. If you like books by the pound, and have wide enough interests to find stuff you like from a massive but quirky list, I recommend them highly. Many of the things I bought should still be available right now - though maybe not for long, since the deal with remainders is that they're only cheap as long as they remain.

Anthropocene Rag is a novella-as-a-book - it says so, though it's 250 pages long, which was enough for a full novel back in the Old Days - from 2020 by Alex Irvine. I read and liked several of Irvine's novels, but haven't seen anything from him for a while - quite likely because I wasn't looking in the right place at the right time. This one is a journey across some kind of post-apocalyptic USA (singularity model), with what looks like a quirky first-person narrator.

Lud-in-the-Mist is a moderately famous 1926 fantasy novel by Hope Mirrlees; it's the kind of book that everyone's favorite fantasy writers all seem to love, but has stayed off a lot of readers' radar for the past century. It's set on the borderlands of Faerie, with trade officially outlawed, which I gather starts the plot going. I've had it on my "should probably read some day" list for ages now.

Something More Than Night is a 2021 novel by Kim Newman - another writer I keep thinking I should read more of - featuring the dynamic detective duo of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff in 1930s Hollywood. Given that it's Newman, I'm pretty sure there's some fantasy or horror elements, not just mundane detection. But the book itself keeps that pretty close to its vest, so I guess it's to be discovered in the reading.

Season of Skulls is the third of the "New Management" trilogy from Charles Stross, which is set in the same world as his "Laundry Files" books but which he (if not his publisher) considers somewhat separate. (And he has a point: different casts, different timeframe, different core concerns.) That's vaguely annoying for me, since I missed the middle book, Quantum of Nightmares, perhaps vaguely thinking this one was #2. So I have one whole book to find and read before I can get to this. I did read the first book of the trilogy, Dead Lies Dreaming, at least.

Shriek: An Afterword is the second book in a typically odd Jeff Vandermeer trilogy about the city of Ambergris: I got it to replace a bound galley that I've had since before it was published in 2006. (Is that a humblebrag or a confession? I honestly don't know.) I read the third book in the trilogy, Finch, not long ago, and may get to this one as well.

Imperium Restored is another book in Walter Jon Williams' space opera Praxis series. I missed these when they came out, and have been getting them semi-randomly since - I believe the series has two trilogies and a couple of novellas, and I now have books one and two of trilogy one and books one and three of trilogy two. I have no idea when I would find the time to read six five-hundred-page books, even if I found the missing ones, but we all need goals, don't we?

And last in this batch is The Wolfe at the Door, which I thought was the inevitable "best short fiction of" published after Gene Wolfe's death. But it isn't - it seems to instead be a new collection of forty-ish random pieces of fiction and other short things, the also inevitable "collection of all the unpublished stuff" book. And I like the idea of that second book - the one this actually is - much better, in large part because it's primarily things I haven't read before. Wolfe was a writer of obsessions and crotchets, who got more like himself as he aged - not always in good ways - but was always worth reading.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Goes Without Saying

It is all very well to donate a group of females to the Academy of Motherhood, and one can only be commended for it, but if one of these creatures is wanted by the police as violent and dangerous, and another is under suspicion for intent to overthrow the civilized world, that is another story entirely. So what comes about is not quite what was expected.

 - Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog, p. 108

Quote of the Week: Wodehousian Impostors at Every Turn

That beard, he could swear, was a false one. It was so evidently hampering its proprietor. He was pushing bits of fish through it in the cautious manner of a explorer blazing a trail through a strong forest. In short, instead of being a man afflicted by nature with a beard, and as such more to be pitied than censured, he was a deliberated paster-on of beards, a self-bearder, a fellow who, for who knew what dark reasons, carried his own private jungle around with him, so that any moment he could dive into it and defy pursuit. It was childish to suppose than such a man could be up to any good.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money, p.65

Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller

This was Carol Emshwiller's first novel, originally published in 1988. She'd been writing for decades at that point, though, and publishing short fiction since the early 1950s. So my first question reading it was: how long was she working on it?

It's a short book, something like an allegory or a fable. And some elements feel very New Wave or classic-SF - there's a scientist with a major research project in his basement; that kind of thing - while the style and concerns are more modern and feminist. (Though, given the timing, clearly second-wave feminist, which could be important to understanding it.)

Emshwiller was mostly a writer of short fiction, and she writes this novel like a short-story writer: quickly, tightly, without extra details, explaining only as much as she has to and moving on to the next moment immediately.

The main character of Carmen Dog is not named that, though she is a dog, and she does have an unquenchable desire to sing Carmen, to be an opera diva.

But let me get to the premise first. This is a fantasy novel written in a SF style, about a massive unexpected and unexplained transformation in the world. Well, I say "world," but the book takes place in the US - the New York area, more precisely - and its viewpoint is both expansive and tight, so I would not be quick to assume the transformation is happening everywhere in the same way.

But here, in the US, women are turning into animals. And female animals are turning into women. Emshwiller does not want to treat these as two different phenomena; they are the same thing. All female beings who live closely with human men - I think that's the point; this is happening to pets, mostly, not to wild animals far off in the wilderness - are "moving up and down the evolutionary scale," as if that scale has suddenly become a game of Chutes and Ladders.

And, in the one house where we start the novel, the wife - never named, never a speaking role - is turning into a snapping turtle. At the same time, their beloved pedigreed golden retriever, Pooch, is having to take on care for the three children, starting to talk, and forming more complex thoughts and desires. She's our heroine: she wants to sing opera. (But she also still wants, at least at first, the things she wanted before: to be helpful and loyal and faithful, to care for and protect her family and master.)

The narrative mostly follows Pooch, as she travels, Candide-like, through the rapidly changing society, as "females" are all thrown into one category - with about as many rights as the half of them who were originally animals - and the men from Institutes of Motherhood and other big, "logical" edifices to understand and contain - and, most of all control - both this transformation and "females" in general.

The metaphor is not particularly subtle, obviously. Women are treated like animals by men, or maybe "no better than." And Emshwiller's tendency to be general keeps the metaphor strongly in the foreground: major characters here are only "the doctor" and "the master." Only a couple of the men even get names, though all of the women do - some of them, more than one name, as they transform and change and take on new roles.

And, centrally, all of the "females" are in roughly the same position: all somewhere in the middle, with elements of animal and human mixed and mingled. They can talk and have feathers; they want to sing opera but can only bark at the moment. They are sexy and passionate women while still being king snakes. Again, this is not a story about individuals moving up or down, or any contrast between individuals - it is entirely about the mass of "females" - the word Emshwiller uses most consistently; these are not necessarily "women" - and both what they are becoming and what the society around them is doing in response.

This is a sequence of moments rather than a complex narrative - events do follow each other, but there's a random, stochastic element to the book that I'm sure Emshwiller intended: this is an unknown event that transforms everything, which means it's all unexpected and contingent. It's not random, but it does hop and skip and jump through odd moments as it traces Pooch's travails in this transformed Manhattan.

The log-line would be "quirky feminist fable," and Emshwiller strongly hits all three words of that: it's an imaginative, distinctive, utterly original book that a reader might have some minor questions about while reading but should find compelling and fascinating.

The Great British Bump-Off by John Allison and Max Sarin

John Allison's fictional world - well, mostly a fictional UK, and even there heavily mostly-Yorkshire (does that count as Midlands or the North? I'm never sure where the line is) - is big and complex, especially after thirty years of stories.

The fictional town of Tackleford was central to his webcomics from Bobbins to Scarygoround to Bad Machinery, but the last decade has seen that world expand to include a fictionalized version of Sheffield in Giant Days (with first Lissa Treiman and then Max Sarin on art), a fictional town in Cornwall in Steeple, and (less successfully to my mind, and perhaps not really in the same world) a small US town in By Night.

Allison started in that halcyon early-Internet era when you could just do a webcomic and (as I understand it) basically live on the proceeds, but that time seems to have passed: the market power of Google has driven the revenue flow of ads down massively and the subscription model for individual strips that aren't primarily about tab-a-into-slot-b never really worked. So my sense is that the Bad Machinery books were relatively successful, and Giant Days definitely a hit, but both of those stories hit their natural end. Allison has been poking around with other concepts since them - I've already mentioned Steeple, which was awesome but seems to have ended due to lack of publishing support, and By Night, which was an interesting experiment. His cast already has mixed and reshuffled across properties - one of the main characters of Giant Days had been important in Scarygoround as a teen - so several of those ideas are largely "what comes next for This Person?"

So Charlotte Grote, from Bad Machinery and a few guest turns in Giant Days, had a Wicked Things miniseries and turns up in occasional Solver stories on Allison's site. And now her compatriot in supernatural detection, Shauna Wickle, does what every young person worldwide seems to want to do these days: goes on a TV reality show.

The show is UK Bakery Tent, and the story of her time there is The Great British Bump-Off, written by Allison and drawn by Max Sarin. It was a four-issue miniseries from Dark Horse about eighteen months ago, and then collected into this one volume late in 2023.

As you can guess from the title, the show here is a version of "The Great British Bake-Off," and there is...a murder! Well, an attempted murder, at least. And The Show Must Go On, so someone has to solve the murder - and that will be Shauna, if she has anything to say about it. (With the aid of two of her fellow contestants - the nana and the quirky guy.)

There's a fairly large cast - a dozen contestants/suspects, the hosts of the show, and a couple of production people as well - and all of them except Shauna are new Allisonian creations. Even though Shauna is officially "the quirky one," I have to say they're all quirky, in amusing and entertaining ways - each, as I've implied, cast by this show to be a "type" and to fill a specific role.

(One member of the cast, who works in IT, has a complex model of all of the types with detailed predictions about how long each will last in the competition.)

Shauna runs around, trying to balance high-pressure baking competition with also high-pressure  snooping, hindered by the fact that most of the contestants don't know the truth about "the accident." But she is a John Allison heroine, with endless reserves of energy (and sass, though that seems too American a word in this context) and so of course she does solve the mystery in the end, and succeeds in not being eliminated in the first week.

The book ends with the equivalent of the credits sequence explaining everyone's fate in later life - "later life" here meaning "the rest of the competition." Like everything else Allisonian, it is quirky and specific and a lot of fun.

I don't know if we're going to get more Shauna Wickle stories - this seems awfully like a one-off, unless she turns into the kind of "influencer" whose career is going on reality shows - but it's an amusing Allison romp with great energetic Sarin art, so anyone jonesing for more Giant Days (or something not too far from it) should be very happy.

Big Money by P.G. Wodehouse

Sometimes I think the difference between a great Wodehouse book and a merely good one is that the great book doesn't waste time or space. It bounces from high point to high point, and closes out quickly even if a reader could argue everything isn't completely solved yet. The standard comparison is to a soufflé: whip it up high, set it in front of the reader, and be done.

Big Money, a 1931 standalone set in London, is one of the better Wodehouse books, from his prime period, and it does all of that - particularly wrapping up its ending quickly and cleanly, choosing a perfect moment rather than trying to tie off every last plot thread.

As usual with Wodehouse, the plot is driven by two engines: the drive of love and the need for some money to make that love feasible.

Ann Moon, an American heiress, is visiting her uncle, the millionaire T. Paterson Frisby, who has hired the genteelly impoverished Lady Vera Mace to chaperone the young lady and, with luck, find her a suitable young man with a good title to replace the unsuitable chap in the USA she was just shipped away from. Lady Vera has a nephew, "Biscuit" Biskerton, who she thinks would be very suitable for Ann. The Biscuit is also close chums with his old schoolmate Berry Conway, who yearns for adventure in the West of the USA but works as Frisby's secretary after his family money was entirely spent by his guardian aunt.

There's a secondary young lady, Kitchie Valentine, necessary so both of the young men can have a happy ending. There's a supposedly-worthless mine, far out in those Western US badlands, owned by Conway, and a decidedly not-cricket secret plan by Frisby to buy that (actually valuable to him) mine through two shady characters, Captain Kelly and Mr, Hoke.

And Lady Vera herself has hopes of capturing Frisby, who was widowed quite some time ago.

This is one of Wodehouse's "suburban" books - I've noticed a few novels of this era set a bunch of their action in new residential areas on the then-outskirts of London, and use them as a new exciting middle ground between bucolic splendor and the sophistication of city streets. The Biscuit has huge debts, and is being hounded by a phalanx of commercial enterprises who provided him with boots and shirts and so forth, all of whom would like to be paid for those things. To avoid potentially messy legal entanglements, particularly at a point when he's trying to get married to a heiress, he hides in a suburban semi-detached house under an assumed name - and, of course, that house is right next door to where Conway already lives.

The plot is a succession of the usual Wodehouse scenes: talking in offices, scheming for money or love, amusing collisions of interesting characters, leaping through conveniently open windows into strange houses, being bothered by the radical anti-aristocratic element so common in the new suburbs, and so forth. There's no official impostors, though one character does pretend to be a Secret Service agent for quite a long time. As I said up top, it comes together swiftly at the end and closes out in a great moment rather than wasting time anatomizing everyone's happy endings - at his best, Wodehouse was confident enough to imply and be done with it.

Final Cut by Charles Burns

I don't want to claim that Charles Burns has a formula: let me start there. But his books tend to start with a diffident young man, usually in the 1970s, who has deep passions and a difficulty talking to women - especially the woman - and who has a stereotypically artistic temperament and bent. And then the creepy things happen to him, or because of him, or around him.

Final Cut is Burns's new book, and his first major work of comics since, I think, the odd Tintin-inspired trilogy a decade ago, which started with X'ed Out. And it's very much in the spirit of his older works: the characters are young, maybe college-age though with no obvious school or jobs or other concerns to complicate their schedules. The world they live in is probably the early 1970s - our hero sees The Last Picture Show in a theater; it might not be first-run but it's playing - and they are making a movie.

The point of view alternates between Brian - he's the uneasy young man this time out, possibly manic-depressive and always sketching strange things - and Laurie, the girl he's obsessed with and who is going to be the star of the short horror movie this group is making. Brian and his best friend Jimmy have been making short silent movies with a personal film camera for maybe a decade, starting when they were about twelve: grisly murders, alien invasions, pulpy violence and startling danger. That kind of thing. The things that pop-culture-steeped young Boomer men would gravitate to, derivative versions of '50s monster movies.

They're doing this, I think, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. One member of the group has a family cabin, out in the woods, they they can use. And the book takes place partially in their home city - whatever that is - but mostly on a few camping trips, to that cabin and elsewhere in the woods, to film this movie. And, along the way, to drink and goof off and fool around - Brian is super-serious about this movie, but no one else is, and all the others are more typical twenty-somethings, mostly happy and looking for a good time.

The publisher's description calls this a book about the creative impulse, but I'm not sure if I agree. Brian, we see as the book goes on, has some level of ambition - like a "real" filmmaker, he has a vision of what he wants this movie to look like already in his head, and we think it might be decent. (It's still a silly derivative horror movie - let me be honest - full of second-hand ideas and random shocks, but perhaps his imagery and artistic eye would have made that something compelling.) Laurie, though, is not part of that impulse at all. She's not a would-be actress: she's just the pretty girl dragged into this by her friends. For her, this is something fun to do, she hopes, or something at least interesting to look back on later. And Laurie is at least half of the story here. Calling this a story about creativity reduces her to a role in Brian's movie, rather than a real person with her own concerns and issues.

Like many other Burns protagonists, both Brian and Laurie are mostly passive here: Laurie is directed to gesture at supposed alien ships in the sky or to struggle out of a pod. She trails along with this group because they're her friends, and they have plans and ideas. Brian is more central, but it still feels like Jimmy is the energetic one, the one who makes things happen, the man with enthusiasms who convinces everyone else to go along. Brian has the ideas, but would end up sitting by himself just drawing them without someone like Jimmy.

Of course Brian is obsessed with Laurie in a complicated artistic and personal way. He wants her to be his girlfriend, but also his muse - or, rather, she already is his muse, for this project at least, and he desperately wants her to live up to his unrealistic constructed vision of the woman-who-looks-like-Laurie in his planned movie.

They don't talk about the personal stuff, just the movie. If Brian were the kind of person who could explain things in words, it would be a very different story: it wouldn't be a Charles Burns story, I think. Brian does not get what he wants, obviously. Laurie...does, as much as she wanted anything specific. 

They do make a movie. It is something like Brian's vision. But his vision would be a completely believable, Hollywood-quality production. Anything Brian does with this group, in this amateur way, will inevitably fall short. (There may be a deeply buried, implied "and so the Brians of the world grow up to be Charles Burns" - that they move to a similar artform that does let one person control everything, where budget is not as important as time and craft and focus.)

Final Cut looks gorgeous as well - as we expect from Burns - with inky blacks and his deep shadowing over colors that often are a bit brighter than we remember. 

There's one way Final Cut differs from earlier Burns stories: the creepy horror-movie iconography and worries are all confined to the movie-in-the-book. This is not a genre story; it's about making genre stories. So it uses that imagery, but only in the service of creating art: we get some of Brian's dreams and visions, but no sense that they are real, unlike books like Black Hole, which are more centrally unsettling.

So this is a quieter, subtler story than we've seen before from Burns - most of the same elements, but with the realism mixed higher and the supernatural very low, as a background touch. And I'm impressed with the way he treats Laurie, and keeps her central as a character - not just the imaginary version of her Brian has created. In the end, it is her story as much as his: she's not just a viewpoint to illuminate his ideas, but an entirely separate way of seeing, a different way of thinking about this impulse.

Portions for Foxes: Amy Ray

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Some songs are more "message-y" than others; some are really specific and direct. This is one of those.

My song for this week is Amy Ray's Put It Out for Good, the lead song from her 2005 record Prom. (I've never heard the rest of that album; I got a sampler of her music around 2012 with this song on it and bought a couple of other things - like so many artists in this series, I am a pure dilettante here, just saying "I really love this one song," and not claiming any deep knowledge or expertise.)

It's a song about growing up an outsider, a nonconformer - someone who doesn't fit into the boxes of what's expected.

All the punks and the queers and the freaks and the smokers
Feel like they’ll be waiting for the rest of their lives

This is very clearly in a high school context - some big dance or pep rally at the school, all spirit and togetherness and tradition and how-it's-always-been. And the singer wants to do things, but not the way they're telling her to.

Alright I hear what you’re saying to me
Alright I hear what I just can’t do
But I got this spark I got to feed it something
Or put it out for good

For so many of the songs I love, I'm deeply ambivalent about what they're saying - I'm attracted to songs about mixed love and loathing, about sadness and depression, about unhealthy emotions (because those are the big fun ones!). But this song is just true - clean and tight and ringing like a bell. It's been out in the world for twenty years now, and I hope has been randomly heard to help and support however many punks and queers and freaks and smokers needed to hear it, needed to know that there is a place for them, and that there's plenty that will feed their sparks, that nothing ever needs to put it out.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 21, 2024

One book came in the mail from a publisher this week, so it takes over this slot entirely. (I also got a big box of books I ordered - those will get parceled out into later weeks for workload and more-posts reasons.)

It's the new collection of short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, coming in trade paper and electronic versions on October 29th from Tachyon.

Included are fifteen recent stories - all of them first published since her last collection, 2015's Falling in Love with Hominids - along with story notes and an introduction by Hopkinson and a foreword by her sometime collaborator Nisi Shawl.

I'm very out of date on Hopkinson's writing - I think I read her first two novels, maybe the third, and then lost track - but she's an interesting, specific writer, and it's great to see a new book from her.

Quote of the Week: How To Tell a Story

In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He'll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can't figure out whether the hero's laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff - a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I'm not lazy, whatever else I am. I'll tell you everything.

But I want to get everything in the right order.

I want you to understand how it was.

 - Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.118 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrörer

I often find I'm thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I'm reading - that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on.

For example in Julia Gfrörer's short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color, the story opens on a wooden ship, far out in the ocean, several hundred years ago. One of the leaders - not the captain, maybe the first mate or owner - tells two sailors that they are, unfortunately, running lower on provisions than expected. So he's going to kick the two of them off the ship, into a small open boat, to die in the middle of the sea.

And my first thought was: was that a thing? I've heard of crews going on half-rations, or even less - stretching their food farther and farther. And I know that a merchant ship, which this one appears to be, had a small, tight crew to begin with - especially compared to a warship, which would be swarming with gunhands and marines and others. So it didn't quite make sense that they could or would just kill two of a very limited crew at the first sign of trouble.

But that's how Gfrörer gets to the story she wants to tell: this is about two men, in that open boat, and what happens to them. So the setup almost doesn't matter: it's plausible, it's quick, it gets them out there, under a baking sun, with no food or water.

And then the mermaids come out to investigate.

Black is the story of one of those two men: Warren. He lasts longer. He's...befriended? made a pet? visited? by a mermaid, Eulalia. We see him alone in the boat, slowly dying. We see him with her, being comforted or having sex or being a new object of interest. We see her down in the depths, among her people, callous and self-centered and flighty. We see that she and all her people view humans as amusing distractions, as entertainment - interesting in the moment, maybe, but nothing more important or significant than that.

Gfrörer's art is detailed and organic, her lines dark black and usually thin, her borders in this six-panel grid just slightly irregular, her people with sharp defined faces, her seas a mass of lines rippling and undulating, endlessly. This is a book that's black in multiple ways: story, theme, characters, often visually. Black is the color here.

Cruising Through the Louvre by David Prudhomme

I've always been fond of oddball publishing projects and quirky series - maybe because when you've worked in an industry, you're familiar with how it's supposed to work, and so get fascinated when someone deliberately does things a different way.

And so I keep coming back to the Louvre collection, a multi-year project of the actual world-famous museum, in which random cartoonists - mostly French, with a couple of Japanese thrown in just to be confusing - each make a completely different bande desinée that takes place, in one way or other, at that museum.

That's it: that's all they have in common. The characters in the story spend time in the Louvre. Now, so far the museum has been central to every book I've seen, but perhaps it doesn't have to be. The series has ranged from the post-apocalyptic SF of Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period to the slice-of-life An Enchantment by Christian Durieux. According to a Goodreads list, the series started in 2005, and the 22nd book appeared in 2022, so it may not be done even now.

David Prudhomme's Cruising Through the Louvre was published in French in 2012, and this Joe Johnson translation came to the US in 2016. This is probably the most down-to-earth - I don't want to say obvious - book in the series. It's about a man: Prodhomme. He's walking through the Louvre, looking at the art but almost more so looking at the people, and seeing the art reflected in them. He's talking to his partner (wife, girlfriend, the book isn't clear) on the phone, and talking about his plans for this very book that we're reading.

The effect could be '90s alt-cartoonist - the "it's all about me!" style - but it really isn't. Prudhomme is central here, but mostly as a viewpoint to see the art and the people, more of a camera than a voice. Cruising is about what he sees rather than what he thinks - it's a quick read, with relatively few words, driven by large panels with Prudhomme's soft blacks and colors - I think he works in art crayon or some kind of tones/pencils; his work is full of shades and tones, more in the black/grey spectrum than anywhere else.

We see people who match the art they're looking at, or reflect it, or just stare at it. People of all kinds: young, old, men, women, various races and sizes and clothing types and expressions. All here, in this museum, to look at art and feel something because of it.

This is one of the more successful of the books in the series, I think. It captures - in a puckish way; there's a fantasy element towards the end I haven't mentioned - the feeling of actually wandering through a good museum in a way the other books haven't. There's a randomness to it, and a sense that the experience is partially formed by the crowd, not just the works. Pruddhomme has a great eye for odd, specific faces - faces that are cartoons, since he is a cartoonist - and makes them all come to life, even as he shows them all, generally, only once.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprinted all of Jim Thompson's novels - that's my memory; they may have missed an oddball or two along the way - in the '90s, in a stylish series that changed design just enough over the years to annoy completists like me. I read all of them in those days, and had a big Thompson shelf that went beneath the waves in my 2011 flood.

But I haven't read him in at least twenty years. So I thought I might as well get back to his most famous book, The Killer Inside Me - not least because I happened to already have it in a Library of America omnibus, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s - and see what I thought this time.

First is that I'd completely misremembered the ending. To be somewhat elliptical, my general rule of thumb is that noir books end fatally for the protagonist, usually because he is a murderer but occasionally because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (The latter kind of protagonist sometimes makes it out alive, but that's an iffy thing.) I thought this one, about a corrupt and murderous sheriff's deputy in a small Texas town in the '50s, was an exception to that rule, because the hero was a cop and corrupt and able to cover for himself.

Reader, that is not how Killer Inside Me ends. I'll leave it at that.

The main character and narrator is Lou Ford, that deputy I just mentioned. He pretends to be dull, always spouting clichés, but is actually very smart - almost as smart as he thinks he is. He's also a sadistic, sociopathic murderer who was sexually abused by a babysitter in his childhood and (consequently? everything is a consequence in a noir) his relationships with women are the usual pseudo-S&M of the era.

Ford has an official girlfriend, the local schoolteacher Amy Stanton - who sneaks into his bed at night and pesters him to marry her - but has also been carrying on with the local prostitute Joyce Lakeland. Joyce has also been seeing Elmer Conway, the feckless son of the local hard-bitten building magnate Chester Conway. Lou wants to hurt Chester: Lou's older stepbrother Mike, who went to prison to protect him in childhood, died under mysterious circumstances a few years back in a way that Lou is sure Chester caused.

Lou tells this story, in the way of post-war noir. The town is lightly corrupt, run mostly by Chester. The people are upright, officially, and conversation sometimes is elliptical - there's quite a bit of "shut your mouth! we don't say things like that out loud" here - to keep officially quiet about the things everyone knows and won't admit. (Such as: the corruption, the local prostitute, the fact that men and women have sex with each other on occasion, various other minor criminal enterprises, and so on.)

Lou has a plan: to get rid of Joyce, hurt Chester, get a bunch of money and, he thinks, get out of town and away to the real life as a smart person he thinks he's due. It starts out working reasonably well; the first few deaths go mostly as planned. But - again, this is a noir, the kind of story in which things go wrong and fate destroys wrong-doers - it gets worse from there.

This is Thompson's most famous novel because of its psychological complexity and depth: Lou Ford is a vivid, real character, and a reader will sympathize with him much more of the time than that reader is comfortable with. Thompson has enough psychology - I think it's all hugely superseded now, but it was roughly current in 1952 - to make his people plausible. Ford is a mesmerizing narrator, and Thompson does a great job of keeping the reader invested in him while clearly showing how much of a monster he is - and, at the same time, hinting in that noir way, that it was never his fault, that he was doomed from the start.

The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña

This graphic novel says it's based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it's an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell...there I do wonder a bit.

It's such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña's illustrative, pattern-filled pages. It's open-ended, with a clear beginning that turns into multiple possibilities - which also feeds the style she uses to tell this story, switching from storybook-style big images with captions for the pure folktale into comics-style grids (mostly three tiers) with speech balloons for the complications, the portions that are clearly and entirely Peña's.

It doesn't really matter whether she found a folktale she could adapt so well or made it up, but it does make me think about the creative impulse, and wonder which of the two it was.

The Cat from the Kimono was published in 2020 in France - Peña is French; she works in that language - and translated into English by Montana Kane for this 2023 edition.

The legend goes that, sometime long ago in Japan - I would guess after unification, during the Edo period, but time is rarely specific in folktales - there was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the owner of a silk mill. The best weaver in the mill was in love with her; she did not reciprocate. He made her various beautiful kimonos to show his love; she only loved the very first one he made, printed all over with cats. He got angry; things went bad, somewhat supernaturally, on the kimonos. And one cat from that first kimono ran off the silk and out into the real world.

This is the story of that cat's adventures - perhaps somewhat later in time, perhaps meant to be right after running away. Again: folktales don't say "and then, three days later, on the fifth of March" or anything like that.

In Peña's story, the cat stowed away on a ship and made its way to London, where he weaved through the stories of a few Victorian-era people - a girl named Alice, a brilliant consulting detective, and a few less-obvious characters. Peña tells her story in alternating sections - first the folktale, then some comics pages, then usually a blackout page, and back to the folktale. Sometimes we get multiple comics scenes, with one set of characters and then another, and sometimes we just get one group, and then back to the folktale.

Peña tells the main folktale in full at the beginning - up to the cat running away. When she returns to it, it's for a series of variations and questions: where could the cat have gone? what are the versions of the story? how many endings does this story have? And she closes with the folktale as well, giving - in that very fabulistic manner - mostly questions and options, before ending with a slender thread of "well, there is one version of the story that says thus."

Peña's folktale pages are lush and ornate; her comics pages are precise and detailed. She moves from one format into the other effortlessly, back and forth, to tell one story in both modes. Cat from the Kimono is a wonderful expansion of a fable, no matter its origins.

Portions for Foxes: Elis Paprika

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I've said before I'm no expert here - I'm highlighting songs I like a lot, not things I'm deeply knowledgeable about. Here's another example: I think this singer has had a serious career almost entirely in places I have very little visibility. But this one song popped out, and it's quick and punchy and loud and awesome.

This week, my song is No Me Vas A Callar, a 2007 single by the Mexican singer/songwriter Elis Paprika.

It is mostly in Spanish, so I'm not going to quote it much. (I found this lyrics site with a translation, but make no promises about its accuracy.) 

The one thing I absolutely do know is what the title means: you are not going to shut me up.

The lyrics, from what I can tell, are mostly repeating that: this is a song that wants to say one thing, and to say it loud and clear.

And it does that brilliantly, with a keening guitar line under the singer's just slightly harsh singing tone - she's serious, and committed, and she is going to say this so that no one will misunderstand. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 14, 2024

This is actually the third weekly post listing things I got in various ways the last week of August; I was on vacation then and did a lot of book-accumulating. (And I'm stretching out the telling of it, because I can and to make it slightly more interesting.)

These are books I got from a local library, mostly because it was right after a trip to a used bookstore. I love used bookstores, and nearly always find interesting things in them - but I never find just what I'm looking for. That's pretty much the deal with used bookstores, of course: you find what you find, and it is surprising and interesting. But, sometimes, you then need to go find the thing you just realized you really want to read next - or just do some more poking around serendipitously - and that was the reason for the library run.

Here's what I grabbed while I was there:

White Cat, Black Dog was Kelly Link's new short-story collection last year, her first in quite a while. (I want to say around a decade, but I think it's not quite that long; I read Get in Trouble in 2017, I think fairly soon after publication.) I wanted to get to it "soon" - like so many other things - but thought she was a slow, careful enough writer that I had some time...and then she dropped a long novel earlier this year. I'm thrilled to have more to read, but starting to get worried I'm falling behind - so it's time to read more Kelly Link stories.

Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of non-fictional writings about writing by the novelist Haruki Murakami; it's about two years old now. I've been reading his books since the mid-80s, and have mostly kept up - I still have his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, on the to-be-read shelf, since I haven't been up to a book that length for a while - and I've also mentioned many times that I, for whatever odd reason, really enjoy reading the random nonfiction of fiction writers.

Fly By Night is a standalone graphic novel set in New Jersey by Tara O'Connor, whose work I've never seen before. I found it randomly browsing the YA graphic novel shelves, another big benefit of poking your head into a library now and then. This seems to have monsters in it - real monsters, the kind that live in Pine Barrens - but I bet it also has some of the human kind as well.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is, I think, the second book with that title - there might be a discrete "2" on the spine, covered with library stickers, but I'm not seeing any other indication in the book that there was a previous Haruki Murakami Manga Stories (but there was). This one has three adaptations, by the same crew as last time (writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL), of Murakami short stories of various vintage.

And last was another random find: Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir, the book that makes me say "if your name has an unusual spelling, it would behoove you to make sure it's clear and easily readable on your book cover." (No one listens to me.) I think this might have been a webcomic or something, but I found it on the shelf as a book, noticed Top Shelf published it, and figured that was good enough to give it a whirl. It seems to be some kind of semi-autobio thing, but that's about all I know.

Quote of the Week, Bonus: Shoemaker's Children

Bridget had once been a fashion buyer for a department-store chain, although you would never have guessed it to look at her. She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, pp.159-160

Quote of the Week: The Day or the Hour

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going - "Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?" Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, "A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while."

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p.99

The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

I have to admit I read this book almost entirely because it was in an omnibus with two other books I'd already read. I bought the omnibus to have a copy of Hard Landing - still, I think, one of the great under-appreciated SF books of the '90s - and then read Michaelmas because I'd been hearing good things about it for decades.

The Iron Thorn is the third book in the omnibus - actually physically first in the book, since it was a 1967 novel, earlier in Algis Budrys's career. I came into it with no preconceptions or expectations: Budrys wasn't particularly prolific, and his career never had any central theme or even periods that I could discern.

It's an iris-out novel, that traditional SF form that starts in a tight, specific situation - as seen from the people in it, with no spoilers or outside explanations - and focuses on a character who is smart enough and travels enough to go further than any previous members of his group and learns the true secrets of his world.

I'll spoil some of those secrets, inevitably, in writing about it. If you care, I'll keep the spoilers in one discrete paragraph below. Our main character is first called Honor White Jackson - his people, we later learn, have a complex naming scheme that embeds their social rank and specific achievements, so that name changes somewhat as he goes along. We join him during his first hunt in a dangerous desert landscape, out beyond the perimeter of his people's settlement, protected by a "cap" from the hostile environment there and seeking to kill an Amsir, a member of another humanoid intelligent race. The title Iron Thorn is the central spire of his people's settlement, which sits in a deep depression - some readers may realize a crater - and clearly is some kind of technological artifact, probably not entirely understood by these now quite primitive, subsistence-level people.

Jackson is smart, in the way of classic-SF protagonists, and restless as well. His hunt is a success, but he learns things during that hunt that surprise him. His interview with the head of the Honors - the top-caste of his people, the hunters he has just joined - is not as fruitful as he hoped. And so he runs away, with a vague plan the reader is not told, and ends up captured, deliberately, by the Amsirs, who live in another crater with another Iron Thorn.

This is still only about a third of the way into this short novel, and Jackson has one more, massively longer, journey to take and yet another society to be surprised by.

So here's the spoiler: all of this takes place on Mars, possibly slightly terraformed, at least a thousand years in the future. Jackson's people are unaltered humans; the Amsirs were bioengineered from human stock; the whole thing was some kind of experiment that has overrun its protocols and not delivered any solid results to the American Midwestern research institution that originally set it up, so long ago. Jackson accesses a spaceship, and flies off to Earth - his people's fabled paradise - along with a crippled, mentally-damaged Amsir. Since he's of original human stock, the ship's computer makes him its new captain and gives him the usual classic-SF implanted education, giving him the memories and knowledge of an undergraduate career at Ohio State and various post-graduate specializations suitable to spaceship-captaining. On Earth, he finds the usual diminished population of decadents, playing at interpersonal relationships and casually cruel to each other - Budrys never says they're immortal, but they otherwise tick all of the boxes for "decadent far-future immortals" - and they are fascinated by his novelty and primitive vigor. They live under the control - not quite smothering, but tending in that direction - of an omnipresent Computer. In the end, Jackson's even less happy with this world than with his own, and lights out for the territory. But this world is entirely tamed and controlled by that Computer, so we know it's just getting away from the decadent maybe-immortals.

All of Budrys's books that I've read are quick and taut and sparse: they don't waste time or words, and imply a lot more than they ever say. This one possibly even more so, since it's more of a genre exercise to begin with. The ending is a bit unsatisfying, though I think that's on purpose: Jackson wanted to learn the truths of his world, and did - but ended up in a situation where he fits even less well than he did at the beginning of his journey.

Poetry Comics by Grant Snider

Grant Snider is a thoughtful, positive, lovely cartoonist. And I think I've now come to the end of his work, and have to wait for him to generate some new books so I can read them.

That's as close to sad or negative as you get with Snider's work, and in our current hellscape world - gestures vaguely all around - that kind of honest positivity and care and creativity is hugely welcome.

Poetry Comics was his new book this year. It's not as tightly themed as some of his other collections - I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelves, for example, was entirely about books, and The Shape of Ideas was supposedly creativity-inducing - but there are clusters of comics here specifically about poetry, and the whole thing has that standard sweet Snider vibe. The central character, most of the time, is the dark-haired kid character; I tend to think of her as a tween Black girl, but Snider works in Everypeople, so that's mostly my (not entirely warranted) assumption.

I don't think this is pitched specifically at younger readers: Snider has done picture books as well, so he's made books for that audience. The characters are mostly kids - or at least, small and inquisitive and energetic and playful, which is nearly the same thing - and Snider's work is generally in a tone of cheerleading for its activities, which is very appropriate for a younger, inexperienced audience. I think, though, that most of his stuff is the sort of all-ages that works for tweens on up without being limited to the younger set.

Most, or maybe even all of Snider's work appears first as individual strips, typically at his website Incidental Comics, and this book is the same. It contains not quite a hundred pages of comics, mostly single-pagers, with loose running themes of creativity (especially making, or thinking about making, poems), play, and exploring the world. It's organized into four big sections by the seasons of the year, in the way that his books are generally loosely organized with some general schema.

Snider draws like R.O. Blechman (at least to my eye - no idea if anyone else agrees). He writes like no one but himself: down-to-earth, quietly honest, positive without being Pollyanna-ish, and just supportive at all times. His work is the kind of thing that gives you hope that humanity isn't doomed, and that, just maybe, at least some of us are actually good people.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

I'm still amused and fascinated at the ways that the Jackson Brodie books aren't a mystery series, but function as one well enough for a large chunk of the mystery audience to grab onto them. I don't think anything similar would ever happen in SFF; we're too insular, too fond of our shibboleths, too ready to denounce outsiders and shun them.

But mystery readers - or thriller readers, or crime-fiction readers, however you want to characterize them - aren't a community the same way the SFF readership is. They haven't been patronized by the literary world (more than in a minor, barely-noticeable way) for two or three generations - you have to stretch back to the 1920s to get anything really juicy and nasty - and sometimes I think the self-image of the field is "regular novels, only with a death or two in them to keep from being boring."

I'm reading these books slowly and tardily - 2004's Case Histories in 2012, 2006's One Good Turn in 2013, and now, a whole decade later, 2008's When Will There Be Good News? There are three more already; one just came out this year. I'm getting further behind.

Jackson Brodie is a central character in all of the books, but they're - so far, at least - multi-viewpoint novels (Good News has four) in which Brodie is just one of the viewpoints, and not the most important or central one. He's ex-army, ex-police, working, at this point, intermittently as a private detective. The first three books are all set in and around Edinburgh; the second and third both take place in a short, compressed period of time - three to four days.

Brodie is nothing like the cliché of a fictional detective. He's not trying to solve murders, and he generally doesn't. He's neither the coldly ratiocinative expert who connects strands unexpectedly or the bull-headed wrecking machine who forces his way through events to shape them the way he wants them. He's just a guy, stuck in his own head like all Atkinson's characters, trying to do what he can where he is and unsure of what he should be doing a lot of the time.

One of the other viewpoints of Good News also returns from previous books, and looks like the kind of person you'd find in a genre mystery, if you squint enough: Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, of the local police, who almost had a relationship with Brodie in the previous book. (But both of them have since married quickly - and we know what happens afterwards at leisure when you do something in haste.)

The other two viewpoints are a doctor with a nearly year-old baby and her "mother's helper" - Dr. Joanna Hunter and Regina "Reggie" Chase. Hunter was the sole survivor of a shocking crime in her childhood; Reggie is a smart, inquisitive teen burdened with a criminal older brother and a life full of tragic deaths.

Central to this book are two events: a disappearance and a train crash. Dr. Hunter is the one that disappears; Brodie is one of the victims of the train crash, and his life is saved afterward by Reggie. But both of those things happen a solid third of the way into the book - Good News, again, is not structured at all like a standard mystery. It's a literary novel about people's lives, in a moment of tension and danger and destruction, and it starts by setting the scenes for all four, including a lot of background and details - psychological and environmental - that I don't have the space or time (or, frankly, ability) to detail clearly here.

It is brilliant and gripping and amazing. I read it much faster than I expected, dog-earing nearly half-a-dozen pages with particularly incisive bits of writing. (I could have done that a dozen more times: Atkinson is a wondrous writer, both in her specific sentences and her larger construction.) 

The best thing I can say to recommend this book is that it made me look at my shelves (where I have three other unread Atkinson books) and then look at Atkinson's website, to add everything else she's written to my "look for these books" list. I haven't done that for any author for ages. But Atkinson is fantastic, and I'm ready to read anything she writes - everything, I hope, if I can.

The Incredible Story of Cooking by Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay

The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don't want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that's hugely important for everybody - we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades - centuries, actually - and there's no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact - in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like - in a graphic novel, that's built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I'm happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking: serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don't want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I'm all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer - he previously did a big book on wine, which has also been translated into English - and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who's been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn't seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn't need to be "translated," but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I'm not sure that counts as cooking, but I don't have a solid mental definition of what's required to "count" as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity - Sumer and Egypt and China and India - then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail - there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back - livened up by Douay's crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world - the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example - which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn't French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details - starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front - that I wasn't expecting at all. It's a book that's both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Portions for Foxes: Marykate O'Neil

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Here's another obscure one, another song that spoke to me really strongly at the time and that holds up all these years later. I don't know what else this singer/songwriter did - I have this one 2008 EP, and nothing else by her.

(One quick Google later: she's still out there, making both music and paintings. I'm so happy to see that.)

This week, the song I want to champion is Happy by Marykate O'Neil.

The title is ironic.

I used to have dreams to accomplish great things
Now all I wanna be is happy
I used to dig deep, never get any sleep
Now all I wanna be is happy

The lyrics could be sarcastic, with a different presentation. (It was co-written by Jill Sobule and Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, two people who know sarcastic well.) But it doesn't come across that way at all: it's stark and honest, from the point of view of a person who used to have dreams and hopes and goals...and lost all that, for reasons she won't or can't say.

All I wanna be is happy is the repeated line - basically every other line, the whole song. It comes across as a plea, the singer running through all the things she's changed, all the ways her life has contracted. It doesn't come across as saying she is happy now- just that's all that matters now, the only thing she can still aim for.

You can take that as a lesson, however you want. And decide how much you want to be - or can be - happy, yourself.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 7, 2024

This is actually a belated sequel; I got these books in a used bookstore the last week of  August, when I was on vacation. But I had something else already in the "Reviewing the Mail" slot for that Sunday, so these books got bumped.

Used bookstores are always random and serendipitous, but I find I'm grabbing fewer things each visit as I get older - there are so many books that I'm pretty sure I already read, or have a copy of, and so I skip over them if they're not on my list (which is probably not as accurate as I'd like). But I did find a few book-shaped objects, and I'll read them eventually. This is what jumped out at me:

Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel; it won the Whitbread Prize back in the mid-90s. I've read three of her Jackson Brodie novels - they're not really mysteries, though Brodie is a private detective, and the the mystery audience has embraced them- one of them very recently (so recently, in fact, the post about it going live later this week), and found she has a great novelist's power and vision. When a writer hits you like that, it's time to go back to the beginning and make a project of it - so here I am, at the beginning.

The Midnight Library is, I think, Matt Haig's most famous and/or popular book. I read his Dead Father's Club (a contemporary riff on Hamlet) way back in my SFBC days, and liked it a lot...and then didn't think of his work for a decade or more. I thought about Haig again, for reasons I can't now recall, a couple of years ago, and found his nonfiction book Notes on a Nervous Planet. But Haig is mostly a novelist, and seems to be usually somewhere in the hinterlands of fantastika, so I both feel like I should read his books and that I'll like them. So now I can at least read this one when the mood takes me.

Vacationland is what I still think of as "that new John Hodgman book." But it was published in 2017, and what I now have is a decent condition but still clearly used trade paperback. As far as I can tell, Hodgman hasn't published a book since, so I'm still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. This purports to be a book of stories about travel; I don't know if it's really that or if it gets more Hodgmanian, in the ways of his very quirky earlier books. (Either way, I'm interested.)

Barking is a random Tom Holt book I found on the shelves; it was his new novel in 2007. I recently read his When It's a Jar, and enjoyed that book - and it looks like his books are mostly all the same sort of thing, with a few very vague, very loose "series" recently - so I figured I might as well grab another, to have it on hand. I gather this one has werewolves in it, from the title.

And last is Snow Angels, a Stewart O'Nan novel I didn't have. I've been reading O'Nan's books - more slowly than he writes them, I think - for years, and have always been impressed. He's a fine novelist who does something different each time out, while still keeping a core psychological focus and knack for precisely true phrasing. What I found, randomly, was a 2007 movie tie-in edition (I had no idea there was a movie, nor do I really care) of this 1994 novel.

Quote of the Week: Because He Can

From Life, Volume I, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey:

The evil man is a source of fascination; ordinary persons wonder what impels such extremes of conduct. A lust for wealth? A common motive, undoubtedly. A craving for power? Revenge against society? Let us grant these as well. But when wealth has been gained, power achieved and society brought down to a state of groveling submission, what then? Why does he continue?

The response must be: the love of evil for its own sake.

 - Jack Vance, The Face (p.46 in The Demon Princes, Vol. 2)