Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/10

Yet another slow week; it may be time to wonder if the publicists have abandoned me for younger, hipper, flashier bloggers. But I will soldier on with what I have, and drag in some other stuff to fill out this column as well...

Both of the books that came in the mail this week were from the mighty Ballantine group (of the far-flung Random House empire) -- first was Daryl Gregory's first novel Pandemonium. Pandemonium is coming in trade paperback in September, and it sounds like an odd contemporary fantasy -- for the last fifty years or so, random people have been possessed by "pop-cultural avatars that some call demons." One possessee -- former possessee, or so he thought -- is the main character of the book. That seems odd enough, but the back cover copy also promises that the novel contains Philip K. Dick and a group called the Human League. So Pandemonium is clearly something out of the ordinary -- and I remember Gregory from his fine story "Second Person, Present Tense" of a couple years back, so he can be very good when he's on top of his game.

The other actual submission this week was Jennifer Stevenson's The Brass Bed, which has a very paperback-romance cover. I won't say that I was about to ignore it, but it didn't look like any of the things I usually read -- until I realized the author's name was oddly familiar. Stevenson's first novel was Trash Sex Magic, which Small Beer published back in 2004 and which is still sitting on my gosh-I'd-like-to-read-these-someday pile. So suddenly Brass Bed became an object lesson in the different ways of packaging (or maybe even of writing) fantasy novels set in the modern world and featuring a lot of sex -- Trash was aimed at the "classy" end of the market, in trade paperback from a small press and with a subdued cover design. Brass Bed, on the other hand, screams mass-market, from its bright colors to the reading line quote: "More fun than pillow fighting naked!" And sometimes we assume "not published in a classy way" equals "trashy book," but that is only an assumption. Brass Bed is the first in what will be a paranormal romance series about Jewel Heiss, a consumer investigator in a Chicago filled with odd, inexplicable magic. I might just have to read this one -- I don't think I've read anything explicitly published as paranormal romance before, and I'd like to see how the romance genre accommodates a series in which the heroine (apparently) deals with some kind of sex magic in each book. Brass Bed was published on April 29th.

I also made a trip to the library this week, so I'll stretch this post (and give you a preview of some other things I hope to review soon) by listing some of the books I picked up there.

Mary Roach's Bonk has been a bestseller recently, but I really picked it up because one of my colleagues just read it and really enjoyed it -- and her highest praise is that Bonk is a book all about sex, but she didn't find any of it creepy. (I suspect I have a much higher tolerance for creepiness than she does, so I might find it a bit tame.) Roach is the author of Stiff (about dead bodies) and Spook (about ideas of the afterlife), both of which have sounded interesting but neither of which I've read. It takes sex, I guess, to drag people like me in the front door. Bonk is all about the scientific investigation of sex, rather than being a sociological look at different sexual "weirdos" (like so many book in this same general publishing area), so I hope to learn something.

Vampire Loves is a graphic novel by Joann Sfar; I've read his Little Vampire and some of his work on the Dungeon series. This is also published by First Second, who have been bringing out a lot of good work lately. I grabbed it partly for those two reasons, and partly because I think I need to be better-read in French cartoonists in general.

I know I read about Shinjuku Shark (by Arimasa Osawa) somewhere recently, but I can't remember where. This is the first novel in a Japanese hard-boiled police procedural series about a tough detective in a seamy Tokyo district -- the series has been wildly popular over there, and this book won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, which looks like the Japanese equivalent of the Edgar. Shark is from 1990, but it only made it into English sometime late last year. And it's published by Vertical -- I've been impressed by their publishing choices in manga, so I figured I should see what they're doing in fiction.

And last is Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, which I first got three weeks ago and just renewed, since I still want to find time to read it. It's a modern werewolf novel set in L.A. and told in verse, with great quotes from Michael Moorcock, Gregory Maguire, David Mamet, and Nick Hornby. How could I not read a book like that?

Another Meme Coming

This one came via the Barbarienne:

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Prowling across the cliffs, carrying a jeweled meat hammer, cometh G.B.H. Hornswoggler! And he gives an ominous bellow: "I'm going to bludgeon you into the fast lane, then make toast!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys

Get a Life by Dupuy and Berberian

The flap copy does reveal the first names of this French graphic novel's two creators -- Philippe and Charles -- but they're credited as simply "Dupuy & Berberian" here.

Apparently, D&B have created a long sequence of stories, of which Get a Life is a collection of (some? all?) of the earliest. All the stories are about "Mr. Jean," a young French novelist whose life borrows bits from D&B's own careers (translated from comics to prose, of course).

So this is yet more semi-autobiography, but it's less specific than most -- D&B are really just taking the usual events in the life of a young, reasonably successful artist -- concerns about his work, contacts, and lots and lots of stories about dating and sex.

It's all done in a fairly slick French style, with some true warmth and expression to it but also clearly aimed at a wide audience rather than trying to dig into personal experience for really detailed particulars. It's not the overwhelming surprise Three Shadows was, but it's pretty good. And semi-light comedies about dating and finding one's place in the world will never get old.

Rex Libris, Vol. 1: I, Librarian by James Turner

Rex Libris is a very talky, computer-drawn black-and-white comic (it looks like nothing else so much as Chris Ware's very early Floyd Farland strips) about a semi-immortal, two-fisted librarian. I, Librarian collects the first five issues of the series, in which Rex retrieves an overdue Principia Mathematica from Space Warlord Vaglox amid other crises. Think of L-space by way of Raymond Chandler, and you'll be in the ballpark.

I expected to love it, but I found it a real slog -- it's relentlessly wordy, never giving the art space to carry the story and just not as tightly and crisply written as it needed to be to bring the concept off. For example, when you open this book up, on the first page of art are the Five Laws of Librarians:

1. Books are to be read.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

Flat, bland, and tepid. That "his or her" could be eliminated with a bit of thought and rewriting, and #s 4 and 5 are frankly lousy. All of the dialogue and captions in Rex Libris are on that level -- not bad, not substandard, just long-winded and ungraceful. It made reading the book -- which has a lot of captions and dialogue, many of them in Rex's on-and-off tough-guy voice -- something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

I'm hoping that the great librarian-action comic is still out there to be found; perhaps it's Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, which I'm still looking for.

Penny Arcade Vol. 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots by Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik

Penny Arcade is the most hermetic of the gaming webcomics, tightly wrapped in a ball of references to itself and to whatever geek passion blazed highest on the day that particular cartoon was made. I'm only a mild gamer, and on the "wrong" platforms, so I often don't really know what PA is about. I can usually translate it, though it sometimes takes a bit of thought and work.

So, even though I do enjoy reading Penny Arcade every day, I'm not in the target demographic, and I figured it wasn't a good idea to spend my own money on the collections. Luckily, a library near me had this first volume -- though no libraries I can get books from have any of the later books -- so I at least got to see the beginnings for free.

Attack of the Bacon Robots collects the PA strips from the beginning (11/18/98) through the end of 2000, with commentary by writer Jerry "Tycho" Holkins. (Holkins's preferred essayistic style is a variation of the overly-clotted, snarkier-than-thou, random-pop-culture-reference style beloved of his and my generation...and I'm not that far off the template myself, so I shouldn't talk.) The commentary does help to put the strips into context, such as it is -- except when Holkins has completely forgotten the context, which happens pretty often.

If you were a huge computer/console gamer in those years, these strips will bring back memories of your own gaming times. If you read the strip now, it'll be interesting to see how far they've come, though they were intermittently quite good all the way in the beginning. And if you're me, you'll be confused by the lack of any actual Bacon Robots.

Quote of the Week

"Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain."
- Nick Paumgarten, "Up and Then Down," p.111 of the 4/21/08 New Yorker

Onion Editorial Cartoonist Try-Outs

Glenn McCoy seems to be gunning for the job with today's totally awesome cartoon.

McCoy is an interesting editorial cartoonist: his style is wonderful, very fluid and loose, and he has a true gift for caricature. He also has the meanness that a lot of the best editorialists have had; he digs in his heels and really lays into the same people, over and over. (In particular, he seems to loathe Al Gore, and spends an awful lot of ammo attacking someone who lost an election eight years ago and then made a movie.)

On the other side is the fact that McCoy's cartoons are politically blinkered to a level that I've never seen from anyone else. Even the purest "liberal" cartoonists like Herblock or Tom Toles will beat up on the other side when that's what's going on in the news, but McCoy maintains a frighteningly obsessive focus on the evils of liberals.

And I mean that literally -- many, many McCoy cartoons try to make the point that Liberal Policy X will immediately lead to Godless Commies tapping our Precious Bodily Fluids.

I don't know where McCoy's cartoons originally appear, since I see them on the Internet. But he's managed, as far as I can tell, the astounding feat of working as an editorial cartoonist for the past 10 years without drawing a single cartoon criticizing the current president.

Anyway, there have been a lot of cartoons about the fuel-food crisis, but McCoy manages to make petroleum look humanitarian with this one -- and that's a real gift.

Before I go, let me link to another one: this cartoon has great pacing and made me laugh out loud...even though I don't think it's true.

Movie Log: Hogfather

So the British TV miniseries of Hogfather finally dribbled out to the great American public; it was originally supposed to show up on a US cable station for Christmas of 2006 (when it aired in the UK,) but that fell through, and if it was shown for Xmas '07 here, I missed hearing about it entirely. But now it's on video, though April is a weird time to release a Christmas story.

I saw the two parts separated by a week, like an old-fashioned mini-series was meant to be. (That wasn't on purpose; life has just been busy lately.)

It's nice but seems quite British, and some of the Pratchettisms get a bit smug when filmed, or don't quite work as well. Hogfather feels like a very faithful adaptation -- though I didn't sit with my copy of the book to make sure -- so that happens every now and then.

For example: to get that authentic DEATH voice, the actor speaks...slowly...and...distinctly, which keeps his dialogue from having all that much energy. And the line about a "pune, or play on words" falls very heavily when the "e" in "pune" is pronounced -- not that it was all that funny on the page to begin with. There are other things like that, enough to make Hogfather just a step slower than it might have been. (The fact that it's over three hours long doesn't help, either -- zippy satire isn't at its best at great length.)

So Hogfather is pretty much exactly what the conventional wisdom would expect: a pleasant realization of a mediocre novel by a writer who's done much better, and a movie of maximum interest to really serious Pratchett fans. I can easily see why it didn't end up on US television; if it had been my decision, I'd possibly have gone the same way.

In Which I Am Neither Sexy Nor Sensible

Things that look like reviews have been scarce this week, both here and at ComicMix, and I expect that to continue. (You see, the pile of books that I read recently and which I need to write about is sitting on my printer, about a thousand miles north of here in lovely Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. So even my usual desultory fact-checking and looking-up of references is currently impossible.)

But I did send one review into the ether before I flew off to sunny Florida, and ComicMix published that review on Monday. The book in question is Sex and Sensibility, a collection of 200 cartoons by female cartoonists edited by Liza Donnelly.

Wiley Road Show 3.0

Inspired by a walk into town this afternoon:

the world desperately needs a topless tapas bar.

Just try to say that out loud without smiling -- I dare you!

In Lieu of a Comment Elsewhere

GalleyCat doesn't have comments, so I couldn't reply to the following lede there:

In 2005, 31% of the roughly 1.5 billion books printed in the US were returned to publishers. Guess what: that not only doesn't make sense for anyone's bottom line -- people don't buy more books because they see big luxuriant stacks of books on offer, it seems!-- it's bad for the environment!

First of all, this is what the Scottish courts call "not proven." It may be so that big piles of books don't induce more sales than merely having one copy always available -- though I tend to doubt that so many publishers would pile books so high for so long if there was no evidence that it worked -- but no evidence has been given to support that assertion.

And that attitude, which is very common among publishing observers (though less often among those who sell books into accounts and track title sales) ignores a simple fact: if there are three books on a shelf, and two customers come looking for it, two sales will result. If there is one book on a shelf, and two customers come, one of them is out of luck -- and so is the bookseller.

You end up with returns because it's impossible to always have precisely one book for every purchaser in the right place at the right time. I've been tracking sales of one particular book closely lately, and watching various branches of one chain place single-copy orders with my employer when there's stock of that book in at least one of that chain's own distribution center. Does that annoy me? Hell, no -- those are books running right back out onto shelves to refill space after sales, and I want to see them get back in stock as quickly as possible.

Sure, online sellers don't have this problem in precisely the same way -- they can have books drop-shipped from a distributor or printed on demand -- but, for a physical person in a physical location, a book can only be in one of two states: available or not.

I look at the 31% figure for returns, and I first wonder where it came from and what's included in it. And then I say that's pretty low, unless it includes a lot of nonreturnable sales. If the universe of returnable books had a 31% return rate, then a lot of potential sales were lost due to lack of books.

Like most things, book publishing has two failure modes. The first is when would-be buyers find an empty shelf: let's call that a "false negative." The other is when books sit idle at retail without would-be buyers: that would be a "false positive." You can manage a business to minimize one of those, but doing that, either way, is dangerous. The smart way is to keep an eye on both measures, and balance them out across a publishing line.


I could go on and on about this, but...I need to get dressed for the Wiley "Prom." Honest to Ghu. So that'll be it for me for today.

Wiley Road Show, Mark 2

In one of my many meetings today, a colleague from my marketing group handed out a flyer of Wiley titles of particular interest in our parlous economic times.

At the top of that flyer were printed the words "Don't Panic."

I am certain that I'm the only one in the room who noted (quietly, to myself) that those words were in large, friendly letters.

Movie Log: Paris, Je T'aime

Take sixteen filmmakers. Ask them each to make a movie about love in Paris -- any kind of love. The only thing is, each movie has to be about five minutes long. Mix, stir, and bake at 350. Two hours later, what you have is Paris, Je T'aime.

It's impossibly to review a movie like this without doing a mini-review of each section, and I wouldn't be up for that even if I hadn't sent it back more than a week ago.

The Wife and I enjoyed this: not all of the pieces are equally good (or equally to anyone's particular tastes), but they're all professional and have their good points. Nothing is substandard or particularly pretentious, and they're not allowed to overstay their welcome.

A couple of the stories are over the top in one way or another -- the vampire one and Oscar Wilde in the graveyard, in particular, were a bit silly. But even those were entertaining. Really, if you take a bunch of pros and don't let them go too long, the results are bound to be worth watching once, at least.

So don't expect any structure, and don't expect to love everything equally. But Paris, Je T'aime should have pieces that anyone willing to see a movie with French words in the title will love.

My Attitude

For no particular reason, other than to reinforce my reputation as a grumpy bastard, here are the refrains from what are probably my two current favorite songs. (In other words, these are the things I'm yelling along with in the car these days, when I'm alone.)

The Mendoza Line, from the song "We're All in This Alone" on Lost in Revelry

Everybody thinks that "we're in this together"
And everybody wishes "always be together"
But we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone
And the world is all alone

Harley Poe, from "Corrupting My Better Half" on The Dead and the Naked

Now Jesus died for them, it's true
But what's a poor devil to do?

Oh when the saints go marchin' in
I won't be there, 'cause I love my sin
Am I so bad that you hate me?
There was a time when I could see
My hopes and dreams, they are no more
I'm not a rich man, but blessed are the poor
Old man forgive me, I've turned away
I won't come back, so I'll have to pay

And now I've got to get some sleep, since I have wall-to-wall meeting tomorrow.

Edit, the next day: The Harley Poe song lyrics above may actually be from a song called "What's a Poor Devil to Do?" ("Corrupting My Better Half" being a different Harley Poe song, with different lyrics.) This would make sense, but it doesn't explain how I originally got the song with the wrong name attached. All research from this end has been fruitless; if I still care when I get home, I may learn the truth.

Your Jaw-Dropping News of the Day

Bad News: JP Morgan is reported to have plans to lay off 10,000 of Bear Sterns's 14,000 employees. (And 1,500 of their own.)

Good News: Those canned will get nine months of full pay and an immediate cash payment equal to a third of their bonuses last year.

Both pieces of news via Financial News.

You know, I thought I'd done OK when I got laid off last year, but, in this as in everything, we're all pikers compared to the big swinging dicks.