The Pass by Katriona Chapman

Mea culpa: I put off reading this book for several months because I thought it would be heavy, wordy, "serious." It is not. Creator Katriona Chapman tells her story swiftly, lovingly, on full-bleed pages of softly painted color, and both shows rather than tells and has a positive story to present.

The reader does need to figure some details of that story out. Though, if you're paying close attention, the very first page, right before the title, gives it all away.

The Pass is about Claudia, a young chef in London. Her father ran a famous restaurant for years, so she grew up in the business - and she has a lot of expectations and demands related to that. (Mostly from her parents, who I think mean well but are sure they know best in every situation and are endlessly willing to give their advice increasingly forcefully until Claudia does what they say.)

She's a few years out of culinary school, and opened a restaurant, Alley, with her best friend from school, Lisa. We don't know the exact business arrangement, but it seems like they started out as partners but somehow - Lisa has a young child and a partner with medical issues; Claudia is focused entirely on the restaurant and her parents provided the seed money - Claudia is "chef" and Lisa is very much in a support role. The third major player is Ben, the bartender - he does a lot of the host's role in the dining room (calming unhappy customers, in particular) and is as inventive in his drinks as Claudia is with the food.

Alley seems to be fine dining but not fussy: the kind of restaurant that's been popular, especially in big cities, over the past decade or two. Claudia goes to the fish market early in the morning, obsesses about presentation, makes new dishes regularly: that kind of thing. It seems to be consistently busy, and making money - popular at least in the neighborhood, with a growing larger reputation.

And the big Pro Chef of the Year competition is coming up; a major food writer who visits Alley encourages Claudia to enter, and we think she's probably hearing the same thing from others as well.

Meanwhile, there are other stresses  - the bookkeeper for the restaurant, Lisa's brother Jack, is not particularly communicative; all three principals have complicated relationships with their families; and just the day-to-day of running a restaurant is grinding and demanding.

The Pass covers close to a year in the life of Alley, starting with the day before Christmas. We follow all of the main characters as they live their separate lives and come together at Alley, but Claudia is at the center of it. Chapman never directly tells us any of her thoughts. Instead we see her live through all of this, navigate it as best she can, until we start to wonder, along with her, if this is really what she wants. In the end, The Pass is about a decision Claudia makes - a decision hinted at by the title.

There's a lot of depth here, a lot of carefully-observed life, and a fairly large cast all seen honestly. Even Claudia's parents, in their domineering know-it-all-ness, are doing what they are sure is right, and trying to be helpful. And it's all presented lovingly on comics pages that tell this story unfussily, as much through gesture and things left unsaid as in its major scenes.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania by Doug Savage

First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly disappoints me.

That might be the only criticism I have of this book, so I'm putting it up front.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania is the fifth and most recent book in this middle-grade graphic-novel series, written and drawn by Doug Savage, who more adult readers might know from his online comic Savage Chickens.

Laser Moose is, yes, a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes (when he wants to) and Rabbit Boy is his best friend, a happy and slightly more reality-based fellow without any superpowers. They've previously appeared in the books Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, Disco Fever, Time Trout, and As the Deer Flies.

They have adventures, generally of the kind involving animal supervillains - well, animals with strange and unusual powers, but not necessarily bwah-ha-ha evil except for the villainous Cyborgupine - in their forest home. They have a supporting cast with a few named characters - Frank the deer, Doc the raccoon, Gus the wolf - and many more squirrels and eagles and other folks who fill out the crowd scenes. The tone is just a couple of clicks towards goofy: the danger is treated as actual danger, but these are the kind of books where we know everything will turn out right in the end. And our heroes have a somewhat different perspective on everything, being North American forest animals, than their readers do.

(There has been some light ecological content, especially in the end-of-book educational exercises Savage includes - mostly along the lines of "the McGuffin here is a weirdly polluting thing from those humans, who are always causing trouble.")

So this time out we start with Cyborgupine being chased by an ominous spider, and then crashing a party at Doc's house, to celebrate Frank getting the casts off his legs this time. (A running joke is that Laser Moose keeps cutting off Frank's legs or otherwise injuring him, and Doc has to keep stitching him up.) Laser Moose is a bit sad, because he doesn't like parties: he'd prefer to be a "lone wolf," which concept Rabbit Boy has been quizzing him about.

Cyborgupine arrives, with an important piece of paper and saying the usual vague and portentous things, before his eyes turn purple, he starts spitting spider webs, and will only say "We are spider." In best zombie-movie fashion, he starts biting party-goers, who in turn also get purple eyes and declare themselves to be spider.

Our heroes flee, grabbing the paper, and head to Cyborgupine's VW microbus HQ. There, they learn that one of Cy's "father's" (a human scientist who had a lot of weird experiments, one of which produced Cyborgupine and several of which caused the plots of the previous books) notebooks details a plan to create a hive-mind among various animals. That's what happened: there's one spider who was mind-enhanced, and now can control anyone she bites, or who they bite.

The paper is a map to the spider's lair, and so they head there, hoping to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing spider hordes. They do, in the end, without killing the spider or squishing the eggs she thinks she's protecting. And everyone, of course, goes back to normal.

At the end, there's a short piece with Savage-as-himself talking about his fear of spiders, and how, during the creation of this book, he went through a desensitization process to lessen that fear, culminating in an encounter with a giant tarantula.

Again: these are silly, irreverent adventure stories with zippy dialogue and crisp cartooning for an audience of pre-teens. I find that kind of book a lot of fun when done well, and Savage does them very well. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

I saw the movie made from this book long before I actually read it. And I've read several other books by journalist Jon Ronson before getting to this one, finding him usually breezy and amusing but not always bringing as much depth as I might want. (See Them in particular, and also somewhat The Psychopath Test.)

So I wanted to see if the book The Men Who Stare at Goats was much like the movie, or like Ronson's other books. It was published in late 2004, and it's very much an Iraq-War-era book, a look at a particular wild-hair strain of thinking within the US military-industrial complex, which strain had become somewhat more relevant and visible at that point because the US MIC was flush with cash and taken off its leash and urged to Do Anything that would help in its not-particularly-well-defined mission to Make The World Safe For Americans Again.

The premise of Stare at Goats is: there's a group of US soldiers who have tried to use various psychic or paranormal powers, vaguely centered on Fort Bragg and led in the early Reagan years by a guy named General Stubblebine. Ronson talked to Stubblebine, and then to others that he found, to see what those psychic powers might be, if they were real, and what weird things this bunch of soldiers got up to.

Like Ronson's other books, it's very much a "I talked to This Guy, and this is what he said" book. I think Ronson is of the "don't question a good story" school of journalism, rather than the "if your mother says she loves you, check it out" school. That means there is a lot of material here where Ronson is presenting it somewhat skeptically, or at least wanting the reader to believe that he's not accepting it whole-heartedly, while still presenting the crazy idea, because it's zippy and fun and that's the material he has for this book. What I'm saying is: Stare at Goats would either be a lot shorter (leaving out everything dubious) or a lot longer (explaining why it's dubious) if Ronson had spent any substantial time in fact-checking.

Instead, this is full of those stories that are too good to question, which readers should believe exactly as much as they believe in similar stories. Ron's narrative does intersect with proven, journalistic history multiple times - a CIA agent's mysterious death in 1953, some verified details of interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, the Heaven's Gate death-cult, and other places - so those are clear facts.

But it also has several retired military leaders who solemnly tell Ronson that they personally witnessed someone stare a goat to death - well, OK, maybe it was a hamster, but still! - that by thinking really hard it's possible to walk through walls, and other patently stupid ideas. Many of those are Vietnam-era guys, and Ronson does note that war as a source of trauma for individuals and the larger US armed forces, so maybe that's his excuse for how delusional so many of them are.

Stare at Goats is a meandering, discursive book. Ronson picks up successive threads, gets told fantastic things by people with axes to grind, does not make any serious efforts to prove those things actually happened, follows up some minor leads until the trail inevitably quickly grows cold, and then moves on to another old military hand with a somewhat different nutty story. There's a vague through-line with Colonel Jim Shannon and his '70s-era manifesto about the First Earth Battalion, a catalog of a whole lot of those nutty ideas that others later developed (or didn't), but Ronson also drops back late in the book to hit MK-ULTRA, the CIA program in the '50s and '60s that dosed scientists with LSD and did other, equally useful and deeply scientific things.

And the lens for every section is whatever guy Ronson talked to: this is the collective story of a bunch of self-aggrandizing folks, many of whom were at the time (just post-911, early Iraq War, when the military contracts were flowing like the oil would be at Rumaila once the fires were put out) trying to get lucrative government contracts to do whatever they claimed they could do and who used Ronson as a way to publicize their amazing powers.

It's a vague, incomplete, and confusingly organized catalog of various "unconventional warfare" ideas that various aspects of the US military and related agencies had in the fifty or so years up to 2004, without any attempt to put any of it into serious historical context, get comments from any then-current government people, or fact-check it. On the other hand, it is funny throughout, it features some absolutely fascinating oddball characters, and there are more than a few actual facts within it for careful readers. And anyone inclined to think large militaries are full of idiots who make bad decisions for venial and self-serving reasons will find much to love.

(The movie turned some this material into a fictionalized, and, as I recall, somewhat more straightforward narrative, in which at least a few of the unconventional warfare tricks actually worked and there was something of a thriller plot in Iraq.)

All of This and Nothing: Quit While You're Ahead

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week it's another Obscure choice: a 2007 single from a band with at least this one good record, about whom I don't know much else.

Quit While You're Ahead is from Southeast Engine, who were big enough to have a Wikipedia page listing their seven records. But, on that page, the most recent record listed is from 2012, and the first outside link is to MySpace, so I suspect they're solidly defunct at this point.

But a song, once recorded, lives on. And this is a good one.

The singer is talking to someone: someone who's trying to convince him of something, and has almost succeeded.

So tell me what I believe
tell what it is I need
tell me you'll provide it for me yes
and I will do anything for you
I'll do anything you tell me to
I'll mistake the lies you sell me for the truth

But that other person hasn't quite closed the deal yet.

Say it, say it like it is
you got thirty seconds kid
you got all the time you need

It's all in a straightforward rock presentation, big and impressive and driving, with strong drumming and guitar work to support that compelling voice. What more do I need to say?

Books Read: July 2026

I'm slightly back-dating this; I'm writing in the late morning of August 2, and setting the post-time to be a few hours ago, mostly for tidiness reasons. (I don't remember why I set posts for 8:30 AM in my time zone, but, by Gum! it's my standard and a man has got to have standards.)

Here's what I read this past month:

Ana Oncina, Planeta (digital, 7/3)

Kristen Radtke, Seek You (7/4)

Gene Wolfe, Interlibrary Loan (7/4)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child (digital, 7/5)

Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, The Cartoonists Club (digital, 7/6)

P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves (7/6)

Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics (7/7)

Guy Delisle, Muybridge (7/8)

Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (7/8)

John Porcellino, Perfect Example (7/9)

Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You (7/10)

John Cuneo's Good Intentions (7/11)

Shinji Kaijo and Kenji Tsuruta, Emanon, Vol. 1 (digital, 7/12)

Martha Wells, Witch King (7/12)

Mike Dawson, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James (7/18)

David Small, The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories (7/19)

Joe Sacco, The Once and Future Riot (7/25)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 11: Seasons (digital, 7/26)

Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (7/28)

Next month I'll be back with another one of these.

Quote of the Week: On That We Can All Agree

Ugh. I hate these kind of decisions. Any decisions, actually. Decisions suck.

 - Martha Wells, Platform Decay. pp.70