Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/12/00

Nothing in the mail again, no new books purchased. And I haven't been listing digital things when I get them - for example, last month I got Comfort Station by Donald Westlake from the library via Hoopla and slightly earlier I got Lawrence Block's new memoir A Writer Prepares directly from the publisher. (That is the tiniest of jokes: Block self-published.) I've already written reviews for both of those, but never said "hey, this is a new thing I am now reading."

And I'm currently digitally reading Kij Johnson's The River Bank - a sequel to The Wind in the Willows, somewhat authorized I think - which will turn up as a post here someday after I finish it. But I've mentioned my troubles keeping track of digital books before, so I'll keep them excluded until I actually read them.

So, instead, back to the random number generators of the Internet, and let's see what I was reading this week in the fabulous Year of the Future, 2000!

Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics (7/6)

This was the middle book of McCloud's "Comics" trilogy, after 1993's still-classic Understanding Comics and 2006's more meat-and-potatoes Making Comics. I suspect it's the most dated of the three now: either this or the third had a lot of material on possibilities for micropayments and new forms of comics on the web, which mostly turned out not to happen the way McCloud predicted. I haven't read it since then, and I'm neither a serious student of new kinds of comics or an actual maker of comics, so I could well be wrong. McCloud is always interesting about things he's enthusiastic about, and he's enthusiastic about comics in a way few other people can match.

Martin Amis, Experience (7/8)

I don't remember if he used the Wilde quote ("...the name everyone gives to their mistakes") as an epigraph; that might have been too on the nose, even for Amis. This was a general memoir of his life, up to that point. (It was published that year, when Amis was fifty.) My memory is that it felt deeply honest, full of emotions dredged up and explained clearly, out of a long, messy, tumultuous life - no one on the outside can ever say if a memoir is really honest, but we can say it feels that way. I always like Amis as a writer of prose, and I usually like him as a thinker of thoughts: he's smart and disciplined and usually unsentimental. As I recall, this is one of his better books.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Wheelers (bound galleys, 7/9)

This was a SF novel by the two British scientists who collaborated with Terry Pratchett on the "Science of Discworld" books, and who each wrote a shelf of popular science books separately. They later wrote a sequel, but I think that was the end of their SF career. This was a first contact novel, set in the solar system, of the imminent-danger-to-Earth subcategory: Jovian creatures nudged a comet so it wouldn't hit them, which unfortunately sent it towards a certain inner-system planet you and me hold dear. I think we did this in the club, so I must have liked it at the time and/or thought it was the kind of thing a lot of other people would like. But I don't have any independent memory of it.

Jerry Oltion, Abandon in Place (bound galleys, 7/10)

This was the expansion of a novella that I think I also read, so I will likely have only confused memories of the two versions twenty years later. It's also one of the burst of Space Nostalgia stories that popped up like fungus around the turn of the century: I disliked them at the time, and possibly dislike them even more in retrospect. This is the one with a phantom Saturn V taking off immediately after Neil Armstrong's death, and that makes me shudder just to think of it.

Robert Park, Voodoo Science (7/12)

This was a book of essays by a noted physicist (chairman of the department at U of Maryland, ran an office of the American Physical Society) about how science actually works, some recent potentially groundbreaking discoveries, and how to tell which new surprising scientific claims are likely to be true, which are likely to be exaggerated, and which are likely to be fraudulent. It was new at the time, and I think it was one of the better entries in that skeptical genre: sadly, we need new books to debunk the new frauds and exaggerated claims almost weekly these days.

Right before that week I finished Jo Walton's novel The King's Peace (the first of her Sulien books, more-or-less historical Arthurian works with, as I recall, only the tiniest bits of fantasy). And immediately after I read J.G. Ballard's Myths of the Near Future, his 1982 short-story collection.

I think of the days after my sons were born (the first in early 1998, the second at the end of 2000) as when I slowed down reading, but the evidence suggests I was still chugging along in mid-00, even with one toddler in hand and a new baby on the way. I guess it all went to hell slightly later.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/27/19

So I ordered books recently from the organization that doesn't seem to be called Edward R. Hamilton anymore. (I do wonder who was Hamilton, if he's still around, and who actually runs that business these days -- but I don't wonder all that much.)

Hamilton is a great remainder dealer; they have a wide and ever-changing stock at excellent prices. It's not a place to go buy one particular book, but they're wonderful if you feel like finding a bunch of books you vaguely want at great prices. That's what I felt like; that's what I did; those books arrived this past week.

Note: I'm providing links to that other online bookseller, in hopes that you click on those for more details or other people's reviews, set a cookie, and so I get a few pennies the next time you buy something there. But if you're actually interested in just buying any of these books, the link to Hamilton above is your best bet.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard -- one of his earliest novels, from that initial cluster of early-60s disaster stories. This is a fiftieth anniversary edition, in hardcover, with an introduction by Martin Amis.

The Skill of Our Hands by Steven Brust and Skyler White -- the sequel to their earlier novel The Incrementalists, which I managed to miss when it came out in 2017. The first one is a story about the immortals who secretly guide the world -- and I do mean "guide," since they nudge it oh-so-gently and not all that often -- and this looks to be another story of the same people, and still not about controlling the world all that much.

Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys -- a recent (2017) Lovecraftian novel about the survivors of a government prison camp, what the government demands of them years later, and the potential end of the world. So not topical at all.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre -- a memoir by the well-known (and now aged) author of spy thrillers: probably mostly about his research and how that intersected the short time he actually spent in the intelligence world, rather than a how-I-write book.

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville -- a slim 2016 novel by a writer I feel like I should be much further behind on than I actually am. (I think he's been doing other things than writing novels a lot this past decade, as I've been doing other things than reading his novels: I'm not sure if that's comforting or sad, a statement on that decade as a whole or just how life goes.)

Thesis: Oh, Florida! by Craig Pittman -- an examination of that interesting character "Florida Man," and how he has made his home state such an odd place, in the typical "this one thing explains everything" non-fictional style.

Antithesis: Best. State. Ever. by Dave Barry -- in which the transplant from Philadelphia explains why his adopted state is actually totally awesome, though he seems to do so by examining the same kind of weird things that Pittman does in his above "Florida is weird" book.

It is possible these two authors are loudly in agreement.

The Liberation by Ian Tregillis -- finale of the "Alchemy Wars" trilogy; I read The Mechanical soon after it came out and still have The Rising on the shelves of things I really want to get to as soon as I feel up to reading a four-hundred-page-plus book. (Which hasn't been a lot, lately.)

Last is a new expanded edition of Calvin Trillin's 1984 journalism collection Killings. This one has an introduction and author's note that don't say if they're from the old edition or new now, and what seems to be six stories that were originally published (in The New Yorker, like all of these pieces) in 1985 or later. I don't recall the old Killings being particularly short, so some of the old pieces may have been removed for this new edition. As usual, the book makes none of that clear.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/20/19

Every summer that I have summer hours -- which is been most of them since I got out of actual fiction book publishing (confusingly counter-intuitive but good for me) -- I end up taking at least one Friday afternoon to go book shopping. This summer I also still had the remnants of my Book-A-Day reading to get rid of: stacks and boxes and bags of books still sitting around what I sometimes call my office.

So I packed up some of those books this past Friday and took them to a local used-book store to see if they'd buy them. I've been selling books there for ages, since I long ago had access to the fabled Giveaway Shelves of Doubleday, and was getting review copies for a years after that. Those things are all in the past now, and my book-selling trips have dwindled to barely yearly, and each one is more feeble than the last.

This probably was the last; there's a Goodwill nearer to me that takes books, which much less hassle. I'll miss the swap aspect -- I like getting new books for my old books -- but it's not the '90s anymore, and I can accept that.

Anyway, here's what I found, at two different stores (one general used & new books, one a comics shop) where I had some credit to spend:

The Rub of Time by Martin Amis -- a big essay collection by an interesting and intermittently great British writer (son of Kingsley, champion of Ballard, once briefly scandalous for getting a big advance and using much of it to fix his very British teeth), who I've been reading for twenty-some years now...though I slowed down once I hit Night Train, which I still insist is a horrible book. This is the "sequel" to The War Against Cliche, I think: another whomping slab of Amis essays, meant to be a Big Serious Non-Fiction Book.

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks -- It took nearly forty years after Wodehouse's death for this estate to allow a sharecropped book, and another six for me to give in and buy it. (Hey, Wodehouse wrote nearly a hundred books in his career, so the argument that we need more of that but not as good is pretty thin.) I'm keeping my expectations as low as possible, and hoping to be mildly surprised...but I tend to be a curmudgeon in this area. (See: my dismissive post on the first ninety pages of And Another Thing....)

Hogs Wild by Ian Frazier -- a big new collection of reported pieces by the New Yorker mainstay. This is Frazier in serious mode, as opposed to the Dating Your Mom zany Frazier.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- I recently started thinking that I should read this again. And I didn't have a copy, after that flood in 2011 I keep mentioning. So I picked up this 50th anniversary edition, with an introduction by Christopher Buckley that I have now already read. (So when I pick this up for real, I can jump right into the novel -- I'm one of those weird people who feels compelled to read all of the front matter in every book.)

Because I Said So! by Ken Jennings -- this is a collection of debunkings, or possibly re-bunkings if they turn out to be true, of standard Parental Advice of the mid-American, mid-20th century sort, from famed Jeopardy champion Jennings. I got it as fodder for the smallest room in the house, and it looks to be admirably well-suited for that use.

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words by Erin McKean -- This is another book for the same usage as the Jennings immediately above, a lexicon of oddball words that I will try to remember but probably fail.

Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson -- every book-shopping trip should find something completely unexpected, and this was mine this time. This is some kind of sarcastic, cynical travel book, made up of the stories that Thompson couldn't sell to the magazines in his normal career for the usual sordid reasons. (In that the stories are about sordid things, not that the making of travel magazines is sordid. Or maybe both ways -- I'll have to see.)

To Have & To Hold by Graham Chaffee -- a graphic novel from 2017, by a creator I don't think I've read before. Chaffee, and this book, were the subject of a review post on TCJ a few weeks ago, I think -- the title and cover stuck in my mind. I deliberately didn't read that review carefully, since the book sounded interesting -- it's some kind of mildly noirish crime-and-bad-marriage story set in the early '60s.

Mind MGMT, Vol. 5: The Eraser by Matt Kindt -- I read the first two collections of this series earlier this decade, and plan to finish it up, though it seems to be mildly out of print at the moment. So I grabbed this one for half-price even though I don't have volumes three and four, since I expect I'll want it eventually.

Beanworld Omnibus, Vol. 2 by Larry Marder -- I came to Beanworld really late. (Like, last December late -- thirty-some years after Marder started.) But as I always say: I may be slow but I am trainable. And so I'm here for the second go-round.

Mage: The Hero Denied, Vol. 6 (or possibly 2) by Matt Wagner -- This is the grand ending of Wagner's most personal, and long-running, work. See my posts on Hero Discovered (the original '80s series), Hero Defined (the return fifteen years later) and the first half of Hero Denied, all from last year, for more details.

And that's what I got!

Pulse by Julian Barnes

I discovered Barnes, and burned through all of his books to that point, before I started this blog, so I don't have links for the novels of his that I love best -- A History of the World in 9 1/2 Chapters or Flaubert's Parrot or Talking It Over or England, England. He's a literary writer, in the sense of being both deeply concerned with real people living real lives and having a strong ear for language and clean writing. His books occasionally have semi-flashy organizing principles -- and he's written novels about love triangles at least three times I can think of -- but his work isn't flashy or shocking in itself, unlike his contemporaries Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. I guess he's an old-fashioned post-modernist, if that makes any sense. But I've been reading his novels and story collections, mostly as soon as I know they exist, for nearly three decades now.

And, as I get older, I gravitate to nonfiction by novelists, and maybe novelists do that, too -- so Barnes had a collection of essays for Americans about the UK a decade ago, Letters from London, and has followed that up more recently with a pair of spare books about death and aging and facing the inevitable (and ballooning, because that's the way Barnes works), in Nothing to be Frightened Of and Levels of Life. I could also mention the essay collection Through the Window, mostly about writer.

Anyway, that partially explains why his story collection Pulse has sat neglected on my shelves since 2011. (Two successive copies of his 2005 novel Arthur & George have done so for even longer.) Short stories, at least for me, seem to take more mental energy to read than a novel of the same length -- so much stopping and starting, so many endings to process. But I did grab this book, eventually, probably because it was short and I appreciate short books a lot these days.

Pulse contains fourteen stories -- nine in one section, five in another. I'm not really sure what the difference is, or why Barnes didn't just arrange them all in one list, but I'm sure he had his reasons. All of the stories are short -- the title story, at the end, tops out at nearly thirty pages -- all of them are about regular people in the real world (the UK portion of the real world), entirely mimetic and entirely low-key. Barnes shows rather than tells: he's in some of the character's heads, some of the time, but he's mostly showing us what they do and how they interact with each other.

This is exactly the kind of literary fiction, to be precise, that genre readers complain about. No detectives, no time-travel devices, no sexy redheads, no intrigue, no unicorns, nothing numinous or flashy or pulse-pounding. The pulse of Pulse is a measured one, a seasoned runner going at pace and knowing well the distance he's going to cover.

So most anyone who could conceivably be reading this blog is not going to be interested in this book. That's fine: thousands of books are published each year, and each of us would enjoy far more of those than we'll ever have the chance to read anyway. It's good to know our limits. If this is outside yours, good for you.

My limits follow a more complicated set of markers, which can be frustrating: the things I look for in books don't track cleanly to genres or styles, and sometimes I think there's nothing coherent in those limits at all. (And that might be true: what any of us wants to read today will be a bit different from what we wanted to read yesterday, and could be vastly different from what we'll want to read in ten years.) But, when I do want to read fiction, I want to care about the people -- I want to believe in them.

And I have always believed in Barnes's people. Even when he's avoiding writing about his own grief by telling stories of 18th century ballooning, or when he's sketching a whimsical history of the entire earth in short vignettes that barely have characters in them, each individual is real and round. So I keep coming back. And I was happy to meet the people in these fourteen stories, and to live alongside their lives for a while. What more can you ask from fiction?

Incoming Books: May 23

This past Friday, there was a land-rush to get out of the office ahead of the long weekend...but I didn't have a train home for two hours. Well, that's never stopped me before: as usual, I went the opposite way, into NYC, to eventually grab a bus heading homeward.

And if I somehow found myself in the Strand along the way, well -- that's just good planning, isn't it?

The Strand is one of the world's great used bookstores -- well, it's more than that, but I treat it like a used bookstore, and don't bother with the new stuff up front -- and the great rule of a used bookstore is that you can't be looking for anything specific. Oh, certainly: come in with a list, on paper or electronically or just swirling in your head. But make sure it's a long list, and be on the lookout for other things as well. Because the point of a used bookstore, unlike one with new stuff, is that you have no idea what you'll find, and you have to be open to serendipity.

(Parenthetically, I had another realization that I'm getting older and crankier by the moment: the Strand had a major renovation a number of years ago, which made the place more open and airier and cleaner and easier to navigate, with better signage, an improved entrance and cash/wrap, and a great internal staircase. And I keep thinking that I hate it: I want the old crowded place back with massive rows of half-price hardcovers in the basement. I am self-aware enough to realize that at least half of what I want back is the pre-e-book publishing world, and much of the other half is my own youth. But, still: it is new and I don't like it.)

And here's what I found, with the graphic novels/comics first and then the straight prose afterward (since I already have them piled up according to where they'll be shelved):

Welcome to the Dahl House, which seems to be a collection of loosely related strips (though maybe it's one continuous story) by Ken Dahl, who is also the author of the graphic novel Monsters.

I'm Pretty Sure I've Got My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere! a collection of the incredibly obscure but great strip cartoon Eyebeam by Sam Hurt. There were five or so collections of this strip through the '80s (and at least one of its successor Queen of the Universe in the early '90s), and I had collected most of them after discovering the strip about twenty years ago. (They're very hard to find, especially thirty years later -- I think they're the kind of books that turn up used only when someone dies.) I was just missing one collection -- Our Eyebeams Twisted -- when the flood hit, but now I'm back from zero. And, googling to write this, I see Sam Hurt has come back to Eyebeam in the past decade and his style is amazingly still consistent.

I've been reading a lot of Roger Langridge lately -- he'd been on my "you'll probably like him" mental list for a long time, but I really clicked with the Muppet Show books he did for a stretch a few years back -- so I was happy to see Zoot Suite, another collaboration with his brother Andrew from the late '90s. (And I hope this isn't entirely work that's also included in Art d'Ecco, which I just read.)

I read the massive and vital Willie & Joe: The WWII Years collection by Bill Mauldin when I was an Eisner judge a few years back, and I do have a copy of the follow-up, Willie & Joe: Back Home (which is almost as important to comics history and, in its buried way, perhaps even a more impressive achievement). And now I have a copy of the WWII book in the cheaper single-volume paperback edition -- it doesn't seem to be designed quite as wonderfully as the slipcased hardcovers were, but all of the Mauldin cartoons are here, which is the central thing.

Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 collects most of Scott McCloud's first major comics work -- everything but the first ten issues, which were originally in color and can be found in a Kitchen Sink trade paperback reprint if you hunt -- and now I have a copy of it again.

And another book I had to re-buy after the flood is Cyril Pedrosa's Three Shadows, which I reviewed for ComicMix in 2008 when I first saw it. It's not well-known here, though it won a major prize at Angouleme when originally published in French, and I stand by what I said about it then: "This book will break your heart; I warn you now."

And then to prose:

I read and loved Martin Amis's London Fields back in about 1991 -- I might have even bought the iconic Vintage International edition, all yellow and black -- and that set me off buying and reading backwards and forwards in Amis's career, until that lousy book about "a police" stopped me, for at least a while. And then the floods destroyed all of the Vintage International editions, lined up carefully. But I heard that there's a film of London Fields coming -- someone (and I forget who) was on Craig Ferguson's talk show recently talking about it --and so that seemed like a good excuse to get the same edition again and try to find time to re-read the book.

I read Lawrence Block's smutty thriller Getting Off-- transparently published with a small writing as Jill Emerson" credit -- from the library when it was published a few years back, but didn't have my own copy of it until today. Block is one of my favorite writers, though, so I do intermittently think about trying again to collect all of his books.

I do have nearly all of Steven Brust's books -- the flood was damaging, but authors at the beginning of the alphabet in hardcover weren't touched -- with a few exceptions, and Sethra Lavode was one. I also intermittently think I might re-read all of his Dumas pastiches, and now I actually have all of them.

I originally read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita back in the '80s -- I got it from the SFBC, in whatever the standard translation was in those days -- and have vaguely thought about re-reading it since. That desire picked up when there was a major new translation a few years back, and I had a copy of that new translation sitting on the shelf when the flood hit. So, today, when I saw a Penguin Classics edition -- translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the standard famous translators of Russian novels for this generation -- I figured that was it. But after a little research, I think the acclaimed translation was by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, and came out a year before the Pevear/Volokhonsky. As I understand it, both of the '90s translations are from the rediscovered uncensored original text of the novel -- unlike the '60s translation I originally read -- so either one is good that way. I doubt I'll have time to read both translations, but who knows?

I've seen several British writers -- Martin Amis, I think, and others I can't recall right now -- praising the short novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, who started her novel career in 1977 at the age of sixty-one. So when I saw an inexpensive edition of her novels Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Springin a nice Everyman's Library edition, I snapped it up. Particularly since I'm doing Book-A-Day this year, short novels look appealing to me.

I've had St. Clair McKelway's Reporting at Wit's End -- a colleection of his journalism from The New Yorker of the '30s through the '60s -- on my "look for it" list for several years, and I finally found a cheap trade paperback copy today.

I've had a vague interest in re-reading J.D. Salinger for years, so I also grabbed The Catcher in the Rye in mass-market. If I manage to get to it, and like it, I might dive into all of the Glass stories after that -- but that would be the next thing.

And last was The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux -- though, as I remember the shopping trip, I think this was actually the first book I picked up and decided to buy, which is nicely circular -- which seems to be a bunch of quotes and passages about travel and various specific places by the travel writers Theroux himself likes. I've liked Theroux's own travel books, so it wasn't a stretch to think I might like the things he liked.

Through the Window by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes always feels like a writer insufficiently lauded -- even after winning the Man Booker Prize for his last novel, The Sense of an Ending, a couple of years back, he's never had the attention of his flashier contemporaries like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. And yet Barnes has been more formally interesting than any of those contemporaries, from brilliant and formally complex novels of his early career like Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters to less flashy but equally incisive later novels like Love, etc. through his books of stories like The Lemon Table -- he's kept writing books of short stories long after most writers abandon them for novels -- and a thread of serious non-fiction, from his Letters from London for The New Yorker to the precise mediation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Perhaps it is that very facility, the breadth of his work, that has kept him from those literary-bestseller heights -- the next Julian Barnes book is guaranteed to be very different from the last one.

Through the Window keeps up that streak; it follows a collection of stories, Pulse, with a very different collection: these seventeen essays (and one closely related short story) are all about writers and writing, mostly from the prior decade and mostly from the Guardian. There are three pieces from the late '90s, but it's all relatively recent Barnes; Through the Window collects the thoughts of the mature Barnes on what we presume are the writers most important to him, or the ones he had the most to say about. (That's likely more of a presumption than we should make; Barnes was writing, in all of these cases, for a specific editorial purpose and time, rather than planning the book from scratch -- it's possible that several writers he considers even more vital just didn't come up.)

Barnes is mostly writing about his predecessors here, Orwell and Ford Madox Ford, Kipling and Johnson, Wharton and Arthur Clough, though he does write about some influences whose careers overlapped his, Penelope Fitzgerald and Lorie Moore and John Updike. And what Barnes has to say about each of those writers is measured and thoughtful and based on long experience -- the impetus for many of these pieces may have been an immediate news hook (a new edition, new scholarship, an anniversary), but Barnes's critical opinion exists already -- he's examining it in print on those occasions, but there's nothing quick or haphazard here.

So Through the Window is a quiet and bookish book; the result of long hours sat reading and thinking and arguing in one's own head about books and writers. And Barnes's head is a pleasant and well-ordered one to spend a few hours in, particularly if your favorite writers overlap somewhat with his, or if you suspect he'll lead you to new discoveries.