Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK - it's the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that's the actual title.

I don't know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks' 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy. But it's the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She's big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she's been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years - and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn't focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don't know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could - wait, I mean should - lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix - how she's no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing - and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, - and they happened quite a lot - both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it's all Alix's fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and "where this violence came from." Um, one - hockey, and two - sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing...which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg - who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay's boyfriend, though this plot point doesn't really become important - through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and '80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he's never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn't have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra's friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he's only dated boys in high school. (He's actually one of these modern "I don't want to put labels on it" kind of person who is not "bisexual" even though he admits he's attracted to both boys and girls - and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it's impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to like and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There's also an undercurrent of "what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?" Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories - Alix's mom is a "Canadian-famous" sculptor who went strongly against her own parents' wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix's birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra's mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix's mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn't see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents' "it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!" arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother's boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the "he'd be more than happy to kiss her, too" thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there's too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there's not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient - such as Alix's father's location and the ease of contacting him - when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was - maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is - Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well - but there's more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

This book has a clever title that makes it difficult to search for; engines will assume you have made a typo and offer confidently incorrect results. Luckily, the author's last name is much less common, and less likely (in my searching) to be turned into something else.

Oliver Darkshire came into the august London antiquarian bookseller Sotheran's (founded 1761) as an apprentice about a decade ago. A few years later, he took over their Twitter feed - it sounds like he generally took responsibility for the company's social media and maybe website, in the way that very old and very settled companies tend to dump such things on the youngest and most junior employees - and made a notable success of it.

Because of that, he got a book deal. Some Twitter book deals were "the Twitter feed, in book form," but the Sotheran's feed was one part "here's a weird thing we have for sale in the store," one part "here's a weird interaction with a customer" and several parts sparking conversation among other bookstore people and readers - and a lot of that isn't book-able easily. So, instead, Darkshire wrote a memoir.

Once Upon a Tome is the story of his time at Sotheran's - I see from taking a quick peek at the account today that the shop recently moved locations after about eighty years in one place, and that Darkshire is leaving Sotheran's as well, so it's clearly the story of this one chapter in his life, beginning to almost end.

Darkshire is one of those bookish but not university-educated people that seem to be more common in the British Isles than on my side of the Atlantic, for reasons I always assume are class-related most of the time. (Darkshire, though, talks about his narcolepsy in this book, and blames that for his academic failures.) He's witty, and good with a turn of phrase, which is exactly what a reader is looking for in a book about working in a bookshop that sells old random books.

We have an image of such places, I mean. And of the people that work there. Darkshire doesn't make himself a caricature, but he clearly fits into this milieu, and gives us an entertaining and informative tour through the world of antiquarian bookselling, or at least how he experienced it for the past ten years or so.

Look, you probably knew if you wanted to read this book several paragraphs ago. If "witty memoir by a antiquarian bookseller in London" appeals to you, know that Darkshire hits every note of that well. If not, you've probably already moved on anyway.

Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, & various artists

Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns. I know why, they know why - we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I'm just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1 is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology, a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain't much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it - here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people - Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski - drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it's the modern world and we can't have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I'll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it's exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book, for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story - this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together - they're individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell's adaptations, it's very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like "exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns" as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That's entirely valid, too.)

Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall

This is much more of a Volume One than I expected, so I hope to set your expectations more accurately than mine were.

Everything Is Fine is a psychological horror webcomic by Mike Birchall, appearing weekly (during "seasons," three so far) on Webtoon. There have been ninety episodes since the series began in spring of 2021.

Everything Is Fine, Volume One collects the first sixteen episodes, gathered and possibly somewhat updated or rearranged into nine parts and a very brief comics Prologue. 

It's set in suburbia, somewhere - "neighborhood one-four-seven-D." Sam and Maggie are a married couple, living in a house. He goes off to work, she stays at home. They have gigantic cat heads that may be masks. They have a dog named Winston, or so they say to each other. The men in the neighborhood, we learn a bit later, have jobs with boxes - Sam handles paperwork, single neighbor Charlie moves boxes from point four to point five (of at least ten), and Bob works at the box incinerator.

Everything is totally normal, they say to each other in chipper voices. 

But we see surveillance all over, and the local policeman, Officer Tom, is oddly insistent in his questions. And there are clearly teeth in this world, as we see hints as these chapters go on - everything is only fine for those who can follow the rules, of action and demeanor and correct thinking. If you fall out of that, you might as well not exist at all.

This is clearly a constructed society of some kind, but we don't know how or why. Are they being tested, or pitted against each other to see who comes out on top? Is this meant to be permanent - a "perfect life" constructed according to some plan - or is it something that will end?

Most importantly: what happened in the past that they shouldn't think about? The telling line of dialogue is "We need to forget - you know as well as I do." Birchall doesn't explain all of the things they need to forget in these chapters, but it's clear there's a lot: other people, other ways of living, any other possibilities.

Birchall's art is all thin lines, instantly clear, almost generic-looking, like some Flash game. It looks fine, like a world you've seen a million times before, a world that wants to slide away from your eyeballs and hide in the background. It looks like the suburbs of a million other stories, in comics and animation and film. And his dialogue is subtly creepy, full of those insistences that everything is completely normal, that nothing is at all strange ever.

There's no answers here. There are probably something like answers, or at least next steps, in the seventy-plus episodes Birchall has made since these. But there's no end in sight yet. Every reader will have to decide if they're interested in creepy psychological horror with no end in sight - I have to admit it makes me less interested in continuing. But this is really good at the building-horror phase, and people who like that should check it out.

Better Things: All Her Favorite Fruit

"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.

And here's where the series makes its first left-turn into the very idiosyncratic. (At least I think so: the first three songs strike me as solidly reasonable choices, big famous songs by fairly famous bands. But this is all my taste, so you may disagree.)

Camper Van Beethoven had a lot of great songs in a lot of modes - more awesome covers than most bands, with Pictures of Matchstick Men and One of These Days and Interstellar Overdrive, silly songs like Take the Skinheads Bowling and stark powerful late songs like Civil Disobedience, great instrumentals like Skinhead Stomp - but the song of theirs I come back to is a slow, loping, string-drenched monologue of longing.

It's All Her Favorite Fruit, from the 1989 record Key Lime Pie, which for a long time looked like the end of their work as a band. (It wasn't; everyone has a reunion, eventually, if there's any money at all to be had.)

The narrator is thinking about a woman - he's not named, she's not named, the "he" she's currently with isn't named, either. We don't know why they're not together, but the song is this man's vision of what their lives together could be. We don't know if she agrees. We don't know much of anything, frankly: it's all his viewpoint, this one line of thought.

I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay

The song has a languid pace that matches the vision this man has of his potential life with this woman - somewhere "in the colonies," far away from the metropolis they live in. And everything is allusive, fleeting - nothing is said clearly or concretely. There's probably danger of some kind - even in the vision of their life together there's a hint of that:

We'd play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention's distance of the embassy

This is a song of mood and emotion and feeling, I can believe the whole thing takes place in this man's head as he drives home from work, as he says in the first lines. It's a song of nuance and deep emotion, which I love about it.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Difference Between a Mook and a Palooka

Matty Pierce, the acting student who'd had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It's all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath it all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they'd had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy "rugged" good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There's no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who've never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.

 - Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death, p.217

Quote of the Week: The Turtle Manifesto

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind, and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.27 

The Fourth Dimension Is Death by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I didn't expect to re-read the whole "Sam Holt" series in 2024, but I guess I just did. (I am writing this the morning of December 14th, though you are reading it in the future. Hello, future!) It's a four-book series, written by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym in the mid-80s: Westlake wanted to see if he could have a successful new launch that wasn't tied to his existing career, but "Holt" was revealed to be Westlake pretty much immediately, which soured him on the project. He'd already written the first three books - Westlake was always prolific and productive - and cranked out this fourth one to finish up the contract. He'd originally hoped to write more, but the reveal put him off that idea, and so that was it.

The first three are One Of Us Is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, and What I Tell You Three Times Is False. Sam Holt himself, the character supposedly writing and narrating these mysteries, is the former star of a TV action/mystery, Packard, which I like to describe as "what if Magnum, P.I. was Quincy, M.E.?" Holt got rich from the show, which ran five years and is still syndicated now, a few years later. He has semi-palatial houses in New York and LA, with supporting casts in both places, and no worries in life...except that he'd really like to keep acting, for busyness and doing-things-with-his-life reasons, but the entertainment world has comprehensively typecast him as Packard, and he can't get any jobs to save his life. Meanwhile, in the way of the amateur sleuth, murders happen around him now and then.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death has the title least connected with the story of the entire series; perhaps Westlake was already sour at this point. (Westlake was good at souring on things; check out his kiss-off to the SF field from the late '60s for an earlier, even sourer, example - it's available in the fanzine collection The Best of Xero.) This is also the most amateur-sleuth of the four books, though it takes a while to get going.

You see, a regional supermarket chain ran a series of ads featuring a "parody" of Packard, which Holt and the owners and syndicators of the actual show took objection to, and some unpleasant litigation ensued. The actor who played the parody, Dale Wormley, was a hothead who was offended by what he saw as an attack on him and his ability to work, and ran into Holt twice in New York threatening violence but was quickly shut down by ex-cop Holt.

And then Wormley turns up dead, stuffed into a doorway down the street from Holt's New York home. Holt is an obvious suspect...except that he doesn't really have a motive, and has a decent alibi, and we the readers know he didn't do it. Soon after, there's a second, oddly related murder, which doesn't help but doesn't really put Holt in more jeopardy, either.

It all looks like the whole thing will just move to the back burner and never be actually solved - until Wormley's mother hits Holt with a civil-rights lawsuit for depriving her of her son by killing him. (I don't know the legislative or litigation history, though I am dubious about this plot: I suspect there wasn't generally a private cause of action for civil rights lawsuits - it was always something the federal government could bring on a prosecutorial level.) Anyway, the burden of proof for a civil suit is lower than that for criminal, so Holt faces the possibility he might have to settle, or could even lose the case and be tarred in the public's mind as the famous TV actor who got away with murder. (This is about fifteen years before Robert Blake, to be clear.)

So Holt decides he has to investigate the case himself, and dresses up in a goofy disguise to do so. Does he find the real killer? Is this a series mystery? Yes and yes. There's a rushed ending that leaves Holt battered but alive, and the series could have continued, but, obviously, didn't. This is also probably the least successful of the four books, for all the obvious reasons. If Westlake had stayed energized, it could have been better, and he could have written more, but those are solidly counterfactual at this point. So "Samuel Holt" is a short, mostly fun, clearly minor series by Westlake, most interesting for a look at the entertainment biz of the '80s by a writer who did a fair bit of scriptwriting in the '70s and '80s and was writing under a pseudonym to use some of his unkinder ideas and not be tied to them.

Why Are You Like This? by Meg Adams

One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things - single-panels, mostly disconnected from each other - sold them individually to magazines or other outlets, but cartoonists all wanted to come up with a concept they could turn into a strip: a concept that supported a stream of stories, with new entries regularly, probably multi-panel. And some larger organization would back that strip, push it out into the world, gather the money, and keep the whole engine running for decades.

But, these days, even the most successful recent new strips of the 21st century - aside from a very few newspaper launches like Crabgrass - are all webcomics. On the positive side, that means the creator owns it all. On the negative side, the creator has to do it all: build a website, design and source merchandise and reprint books, run fundraisers, set up advertising, and everything else that actually brings in revenue on top of just creating the work.

And it may be a cliché, but cartoonists are not generally known for their organizational skill, entrepreneurial zeal, and eagerness to sell their work to other people. On the other hand, we have been getting a lot of interesting strips from good cartoonists, so the system seems to be working...but I suspect there's an element of "young cartoonist has enough energy and gumption to set it up and run it for a few years, then gets ground down by the lack of stable cash flow and aforementioned late-stage capitalism."

Because I want to see cartoonist have long, complex, interesting careers. If they can do that in high-profile ways, so I don't have to take a lot of time and effort to chase their work down, that would be even better, because I am lazy.

These thoughts are brought to you today by What Are You Like This?, the first collection of the ArtbyMoga online strip by Meg Adams, a talented younger cartoonist from the Pacific Northwest. The book is from Andrews McMeel, the book-publishing arm of one of the surviving major comics syndicators, so she's somewhat plugged into what used to be the big engine of comics success. But ArtbyMoga strips originally appear on Adams's social media, cast out for free into the world in hopes that will lead to engagement and clicks and eyeballs and merch sales and Ko-Fi tips and so forth. (There is something inherently Underpants Gnomes-esque about modern webcomics, particularly those that live on Instagram. To editorialize briefly, it's what happens when you let your economy be dominated by techbros who are really good at making sure most of the potential money in any system comes to them and them alone.)

But I'm supposed to be writing here about Meg Adams comics! She's got a energetic, expressive cartoony style, with big fat confident lines and great faces. Her work is in the roughly autobio area - I won't assume how much the "Meg" and "Carson" in her strips really map to her real self and husband; comic exaggeration is a thing that exists - and her strips are pretty domestic, grounded in the lives of this couple and their various animals (I think two dogs and three cats).

I particularly like how Adams draws herself. She has a conventionally pretty version of her face she does some of the time, for quieter, more normal moments. But she also has a more distorted, cartoony self that pops up a lot - see the cover, with that weird thin nose, distorted eyes, and unsettling mouth. I'm always impressed by humorists (in comics or out of it) who are confident enough to throw a Gookie and make themselves the butt of the joke, and Adams does that really well.

So I want you to support Meg Adams, and cartoonists like her. Read their comics, buy and read their books, buy T-shirts if you can, buy sketches or whatever if it strikes your fancy. Click like and subscribe, as they say. You can start with this book: it's out now, it's very funny, and it's pretty cheap, too. Thank me later.

Seoul Before Sunrise by Samir Dahmani

It's a bit quirky for a book about a young Korean woman to be by a Frenchman and translated into English, but we live in a big, quirky world. And creator Samir Dahmani lived in South Korea for several years, so this is a world he knows - well, he clearly didn't grow up as a girl there and move to Seoul for university, but you know what I mean. (The translator is Nanette McGuinness, for the record.)

Seoul Before Sunrise is a moody, quiet story - told in what looks like watercolors, mostly soft and muted, with lots of deep blues and blacks for this mostly-nighttime story. It's Seong-ji's story: she came from a provincial city, did well enough on her standard tests to get into a good accounting program in a Seoul university. But her best friend, Ji-won, got into a slightly better university, and now the two of them will not be as inseparable as they were before.

This is a big deal for Seong-ji. The reader realizes, fairly quickly, that it's not that way for Ji-won: she's fine with moving on, going on to the next thing in her life, while Seong-ji is mourning her past, unsure and tentative and at sea in the new big impersonal city.

Seong-ji works overnight at a convenience store to help pay for her school: it's quiet and slow, with just a few random customers over the course of a shift. One customer in particular, a woman in her thirties, forms a weird friendship with Seong-ji - the older woman is quirkily bohemian, not concerned with any of the things Seong-ji has been taught are most important (looks, popularity, career), and spends her nights breaking into random people's apartments just to be there and experience their lives.

(She talks in vague generalities, I'm afraid: like a lot of similar characters in a lot of media, she's meant to be the voice of passion and art and mystery, so her creator keeps everything muddy and nonspecific and applicable to everything in the world even when that's not as useful as more specificity would be.)

Her new friend drags Seong-ji along on various break-ins - which are totally fine, since she works for a property-management company, so she has keys and codes to get in anywhere she wants, and, anyway, she never takes or breaks anything. Seong-ji is too much of a mouse to argue against this, and, besides, is intrigued with this new world she discovers - the world of strangers' lives at night.

There are experiences which don't seem to be in normal default reality, but Dahmani doesn't want to pin these down to being a real intrusion of fantasy into the night world, or an altered psychological state, or anything else - again, he's keeping things vague to cover all of the possibilities.

Well, there's one possibility a close reader will have realized really early: Seong-ji likes girls. She really liked her friend Ji-won, and finally realizes that. She catches up with her old friend to let her know, which does not go well at all.

And then the book ends confusingly, with Seong-ji disappearing for the last section, even though this is entirely her story. Dahmani leaves it vague - yes, again - about what actually happened - and lets the reader guess or speculate what happens next for Seong-ji. It's a frustrating ending, but in character with the earlier vagueness.

Seoul After Sunrise is a book of mood and vibes and feelings, carried by strong art that makes that mood live and true. I would have preferred if the words were a bit more pointed, but that's not the book this creator wanted to make.

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.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 4, 2025

Over the holidays, I thought I'd want to read some books - some particular books. So I put some things on hold at the library, forgetting that the wheels of librarianship turn more slowly, as do all of our wheels, during the holidays. So they're not all here yet, even a week later, but some of them are, and I'm listing what has arrived so far today.

I also got a couple of books in the mail this week, and I'll list those below as well.

The Wood at Midwinter is a very small book by Susanna Clarke, set in the same world as her very big debut book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (It's so short, I think it's actually a novelette, not even a novella.) It's also illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, which means the sixty small pages here aren't even all filled with words. I don't mind short books, of course, but this one seems to test the limits of how short something can be and still be bound between two covers. That's exactly the kind of book a library is best for, though: don't spend your own money on it, get it quickly, get it back quickly so others can have a go as well.

Starter Villain was John Scalzi's new novel last year; it's a humorous SF book set in the present day, I think. I read a bunch of Scalzi when I was at the SFBC and soon afterward, which led me to mildly grump about how he wasn't using his talents in the cause of seriousness once or twice - it was a silly complaint, I admit, but between God Engines and Ghost Brigades, it felt like early Scalzi had at least one Big Serious Book in him itching to get out, and I guess I thought I was being encouraging - but I have gotten better since. I missed a big swath of his space opera from the past decade or so, which I may come back to someday. But his quick breezy standalones are just the kind of thing I like reading these days, when time is tight - I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society right around this time last year.

Odin is the first of what I think is a four-book series by George O'Connor, following up his twelve-book Olympians series from the past decade. (Links to my Olympians posts: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares/Apollo/Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, Dionysos.) Like the previous series, this is officially for young readers, but I found O'Connor's Greek mythology deeply researched (with text features in the back), engrossing as stories, and drawn with a great adventure-comics style. So it might be officially for tweens, but there's a lot for adults to enjoy in his work.

And here's what came in the mail:

The Book of Atrix Wolfe, a Patricia A. McKillip novel in a new 30th Anniversary edition from Tachyon. I haven't read this one - I keep saying I should read more McKillip, but she wrote so many novels, and all of them seem to be both pretty good and standalone, that it's difficult to figure out where to start. Having a book drop right into my lap, though, could be a sign from the world that this is the one; let's see if I can get to it. This edition publishes on February 25th in trade paper and electronic formats, but if you had a burning desire to read the book before that, it is thirty years old, so...you know, you probably could.

Egyptian Motherlode is a fantasy novel - I think - set in the musical world, by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman and published by Fairwood Press in October. The main character is called The Prophet, who has, as the back cover puts it, "the ability to warp reality through his music." The book seems to be a Zelig-esque trip through the 20th century in the company of The Prophet, as he meets everybody the authors loved and gets caught up in various plots, schemes, musical movements, and what-not.