Book-A-Day 2010 # 248 (10/9) -- Me Write Book by Graham Roumieu

Seven or eight years ago, my brother gave me a book called In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot for a present -- an illustrated (in energetic, crude watercolors) memoir of Bigfoot, as if written by himself. It was rude, silly, random, and bizarre, and very funny. A year or two later, the man behind Bigfoot -- Graham Roumieu, a Toronto illustrator -- brought out a sequel to In Me Own Words, Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir. (And, I've just learned, in 2008 there was yet a third book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead, showing that if something can be done right once, contracts and funds will be forthcoming for it to be done repeatedly until everyone is sick of it.)

I stumbled across Me Write Book recently, and -- because I'd liked the first book so much -- I read it quickly. Sadly, in the way of so many sequels, it takes what was good from In Me Own Words and stretches that out to greater length and lesser effect. It's still funny, but only intermittently, and Roumieu's attempts to portray Bigfoot's violence humorously fall flat.

Roumieu doesn't try to impose a narrative on either of these two books; each page or spread has a separate thought or event -- Bigfoot remembering his days as a celebrity, or when he was bullied in high school by a squirrel, or describing his feelings on various issues, or attempting to seduce the imagined reader, or describing various unlikely things that happened to him -- and those don't come together in any coherent sequence. (In fact, some of the events will certainly contradict each other, particularly across the two books, if anyone put in a concerted effort to organize them all.) Bigfoot's voice is a constant -- grumpy, demanding, ungrammatical in a pseudo-Incredible-Hulk style, and faintly confused about the modern world.

If you want to read a book in which Bigfoot complains about his life, explains that he's nothing like Chewbacca, and recounts some unlikely stories about his adventures, you want In Me Own Words. If you've read that and want more, only then check out Me Write Book -- it's got some good stuff, but it's more uneven and not as original.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 247 (10/8) -- Sundome, Vol. 7 by Kazuto Okada

At this point in my writing about Sundome -- a manga about one teen boy who is far too focused on one girl and has fallen into a kind of dominance/submission relationship with her (without the usual whips-and-chains accouterments) -- I don't really have anything more to say that I didn't say about Volume One, or Two, or Three, or Four, or Five, Or Six. (And there's only one more, which is good for my lack-of-things-to-say problem.)

The mix of elements is the same here as in previous volumes: Hideo Aiba, the viewpoint character, has gained a bit of spine and self-regard, but he's still utterly in thrall to Kurumi Sahana, and is sexually obsessed with her to a degree unhealthy even in a teenage boy. (She said, early in the series, that she'd never have sex with him, but their relationship has progressed to the point where she allows him to masturbate -- sometimes in front of her -- and she becomes notably aroused by his arousal a couple of times here.) Hideo is also still president of their school's "Roman Club," which is ostensibly dedicated to all things "romantic," but actually is a Haruhi Suzumiya-style outlet for investigations of the paranormal...without the actual eruptions of the paranormal from Haruhi. The rest of the members of the club are nearly all geek stereotypes (the butt-obsessed ex-president, quiet Tatsuya Yatsu, and bespectacled Katsu Toshitsuku), except for random (and, I think, meant to be Western) hottie Kyouko, who joined the club way back in the beginning for contrived reasons I don't remember in detail.

And so the stories in Sundome mix Hideo and Kurumi's relationship (mostly moving towards honesty and openness at this point, if vastly more fetishized than many of us would be comfortable reading about with mid-teen protagonists) with the wacky, slapstick hijinks of the club's explorations (trying to remove a cockroach from the clubhouse, visiting Katsu in the hospital and praying at a shrine for his return to health, another camping trip) -- which is a good mix, actually, since they're very tonally different and either one all by itself would be far too much. (Although many readers would find both aspects far too much, and the whipsaw transitions from one to the other to be even more disconcerting.)

Sundome is taking too many pages to reach a conclusion -- as so many manga do -- but it's been one of the best depictions of obsessive love in comics (or any form), and the Hideo-Kurumi relationship is believable and real, even if it's often squirm-inducing. The next volume is the final one, and then, finally, we'll presumably learn the true secret of the mysterious man who keeps coming to Kurumi's apartment. But I wouldn't hold out much hope of a happy ending....


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 246 (10/7) -- Male Call by Milton Caniff

Memory leapfrogs backwards in ungainly jumps, bringing the past back to life suddenly and unexpectedly. WW II was over sixty-five years ago; most of the men who fought in it are dead now -- even the ones who made it out the other side in one piece. But Male Call -- a collection of Milton Caniff's war-time gag strip, a spin-off from his popular Terry and the Pirates of the same era -- was published in 1987, a generation ago, and so this book features Caniff and his great WWII cartooning compatriot Bill Mauldin, both hearty and still working, commenting on the strips and giving a retrospective look back.

So Male Call, being neither a new book nor one from the era of the strips themselves, has a valuable double perspective: it came late enough to look clearly backwards (and talk about issues with the syndicate and with Army censors, and to print the cartoons those Army censors wouldn't), but long enough ago, and close enough to the event, that the main characters were still around and able to speak for themselves. If there is a perfect window for a reprint project, Male Call helps to define the outer edges of it: a generation or so later than the originals, say 20-40 years, but not much more than that. (In fact, Caniff died less than a year after this book was published.)

"Male Call," the strip itself, is lightweight and limited; focused on mild titillation and an acceptable level of complaining about the lot of the American Fighting Man (with an emphasis on the infantry, since they have it the worst and do the most complaining, but the rest get an occasional mention). Each strip stands alone -- as Caniff writes in his introduction, "A continuity wouldn't work with guys moving around all the time" -- and is a single gag, generally based on 1) the sex appeal of Miss Lace, and 2) some piece of generally Army-culture minutia. (Sometimes just one or the other, but usually both.) It's still funny, a lot of the time, even now, but the jokes are receding into the background as the references become harder to follow. Eventually -- maybe in twenty or fifty years -- Male Call would have to be published with annotations to explain the jokes.

The strip is set somewhere in or near a fighting theater of operations -- vaguely in the Pacific, generally, since that's what Caniff knew from Terry -- but not anywhere specific. It's one of those fictional towns that has everything it might need for a gag -- an airbase, general staff, attacking Japanese, trenches, park benches and monuments, and even stateside civilians. (OK, so maybe it's not all set in the same place -- but it begins with Miss Lace coming "here," and Caniff avoids any place references to keep it all universal, so the impression is that it's all set in the same place.)

Of course, the main reason to read Male Call is for Caniff's art -- detailed and specific as always, one of the great masters from the grand age of newspaper strips, a draftsman from an era when he had enough space to really draw and the style to make things worth drawing. Even if the WWII references fly over the reader's head -- and, unless that reader is a centenarian or an expert on the period, plenty of them will -- Caniff's line, particularly when it encloses Miss Lace, is well worth lingering over.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: Masterclass Goldbricking

"I sensed no resentment on the part of my fellow bull pen artists, who came in every morning at nine, and punched a time clock to prove it, and left at five -- or after five --and punched the time clock again. I however, marched to the hands of a different time clock., It didn't seem to piss anyone off. Maybe it was assumed that I was a dead duck, and my office mates were simply waiting to see how much longer it took to see me shot down.

Titillated by the success of my hustle, I began to wonder what I could do to shorten the hours between my late arrival and early departure. This blatant bending of the rules has a secret intent, one that I had in mind from my very first days at Chartmakers. It was to get myself fired.

I had been with the company for over six months, much of it on good behavior. After six months on art studio jobs, I began figuring out how to get fired. If I got fired sooner than that, New York State law said I would not be eligible for unemployment insurance. However, if I ratcheted up my misbehavior one infraction at a time after six months, then even the most generous and forgiving employer would have no choice but to let me go.

Unemployment insurance in New York State lasted six months. That was six months at home to do my artwork. After that, I would have to look for another six-month art studio job, maneuver myself into getting fired, and start the process all over again. This, in a sense, became my own person Endowment for the Arts subsidy, awarded by myself to myself at six-month intervals for a period of three years."
- Jules Feiffer, Backing Into Forward, pp.195-196

Abandoned Books: Elsewhere, U.S.A. by Dalton Conley

It's been a while since I had to punt on a book, but it's that time again. I got almost a quarter of the way [1] into this look at the changes in private life over the past few decades, but I finally couldn't stand:

• Conley's relentless flood of tone-deaf neologisms, from intravidualism to weisure to convestment
• His insistence of making sweeping judgements about how vast swaths of the American public lives, based on the lives of himself and his fellow top 1/10th of 1%-ers
• A related misunderstanding that his hyper-scheduled, jet-setting New York elite life is not widely shared by more than a few thousand people
• A vast disinterest in talking honestly about class -- in the cultural, socio-economic sense -- signposted by a quick family history through his small-town lower-upper class grandparents, his bohemian upper-middle parents, and his own urban, supposedly meritocratic position in what I'm sure he'd call the upper middle class, at no point of which does he mention or even clearly think of class.
  

Elsewhere, U.S.A. may settle down to talking about issues of wider applicability, but, at the point at which I bailed out, it had a laser-like focus on the ennui and disappointment of a tiny sliver of vastly underprivileged whiners, and of trying to determine why they have all of the money in the USA and still aren't that happy. When my fingers started itching for a torch or pitchfork -- instead of finding myself sympathizing with these cretins, as Conley clearly intended -- it was time to go.

If you find that newspaper trend articles perfectly encapsulate your life, if you're affluent and urban and over-scheduled and a parent, if you're a "knowledge worker" who often doubts your own knowledge...then Elsewhere, U.S.A. will be right up your alley. If not, I'd go elsewhere.

[1] That sounds much more impressive than it is; it's not even 200 pages long.

Innovations and Innovations

So Amazon has a new Kindle reader for the web, which is nifty, and as part of that roll-out, they're also allowing first-chapter previews to be embedded on any webpage, which is doubly nifty.

Since I'm going to be encouraging my authors to use this, I figured I'd better test it out myself.

So here's a preview of one of my books, shipping this month, on a topic that's (I hope) of much wider interest than a lot of my controllership and fraud books. Let's see if this works as advertised. (Just click on the "full screen" icon to read it comfortably.)

(By the way, the book this chapter is from -- I really should tell you that, shouldn't I? -- is The Innovation Playbook by Nicholas J. Webb.)

Book-A-Day 2010 # 245 (10/6) -- Second Thoughts by Niklas Asker

Two professionally creative people -- novelist Jess and photographer John -- meet briefly in London's Stanstead airport, on their ways to other places. And Second Thoughts appears to be their two intertwined stories -- but it's not that simple, as the reader eventually learns.

Second Thoughts is the first graphic novel by Niklas Asker, a Swedish illustrator and painter. It plays with alternate paths, different lives, but it does so quietly, almost surreptitiously, palming cards and waiting to see if the reader will notice. (For example, parts of this book are narrated, and some are not. Some pages have a black background, and some do not.)

Jess is dating a woman named Chloe, an American musician, and waiting for her arrival from New York. John tells her that he's running away to New York -- on the return flight of the same plane Chloe is on -- but not why. When the flight is cancelled, they both head back to London, separately -- and two stories begin. But they're not equal stories, and the careful reader -- perhaps after taking a look at the cover to remind herself who the real central character of Second Thoughts is -- will begin to untangle the stories of Jess and Chloe, Andrew and Sofia, John and the nameless woman we see at the end.

Without being blatant about it, Second Thoughts is a story about creation -- about creating art, and about creating your own life, and how the same pieces can go into both creations but end up with very different products. It may be a shade too subtle for its own good -- Publishers Weekly's review seems to have missed the central conceit entirely, and I expect many readers, even careful ones, will miss it unless they're particularly careful and are expecting Second Thoughts to go in an unexpected direction. Still, for a first graphic novel, it's impressive -- thoughtful and assured, with images that repeat as motifs and a strong sense of these doubled lives. If this is what Asker can do his first time out, he's definitely a talent to keep an eye out for.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 244 (10/5) -- The Adventures of Sock Monkey by Tony Millionaire

Tony Millionaire's work was never sweeter than in the first Sock Monkey collection -- which is to say that there's only a mild flavor of sourness and bile here, since Millionaire was never particularly sweet. His early 20th century newspaper engraving style was fully-formed and mature, even in these ten-year-old stories, and those stories were the usual Millionaire mix of whimsy and cruelty. But his characters were not nearly as alcoholic as they would later become, or were elsewhere -- one notable personage here is known just as "Mr. Crow."

The Adventures of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey was published in 2000, collecting the first four issues (in two series) of the Sock Monkey comic. Sock Monkey saw Millionaire toning down his scabrous, gleeful nihilism of his daily Maakies strip into something milder -- though, even then, it's a mild, happier nihilism and nastiness.

The two main characters are a sock monkey and his friend, a stuffed crow (Mr. Crow), who live in neighboring Victorian houses in what's probably a ritzy neighborhood near the Brooklyn Heights waterfront. Their adventures start from the toys-come-to-life genre, at least sometimes -- a tea party with the daughter of the house features at the beginning of one story, a dollhouse and its inhabitants in another -- but inevitably turn darker, with manic shrunken heads, fiery death, violent bats, and deluded bluejays. As usual with Millionaire, there's often a death at the end of a story, but the status quo ante is reset at the beginning of each new adventure.

Millionaire's dialogue is less filled with invective and insult here than in Maakies, giving his ear for rococo and antiquated locution more scope -- the comics page also gives him more room for larger word balloons than Maakies's strip. But this is still Millionaire: it might not offend quite as many people as a random Maakies strip would, and it may superficially resemble a childrens' book, but it's still a window into Millionaire's brawling, argumentative, casually bizarre world...and thank Drinky Crow for that!

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/2

This is one of those small weeks -- where the mail is a trickle, leaving me little to talk about -- but it's also a week in which I have to fly out to Kansas City (of all places!) tonight for business meetings tomorrow. So don't get the idea that I'm complaining, buster -- a short list is perfect today.

I've got two books to mention to you this week -- very different from each other, which is convenient -- and I haven't read either of them. (Nor have I read their immediate predecessors, to be honest.) But here's what I can tell you about them from a quick glance and some deep thought:

Salute the Dark is the fourth novel in the epic fantasy series "Shadows of the Apt" by British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky [1]. (The first in the series is Empire in Black and Gold, which is where I'd suggest intrigued new readers begin.) Like the previous three books, it has a stunning, crackling cover by Jon Sullivan and over three hundred large pages of not-overly large type for the price of a trade paperback, making it a great bargain in these parlous times. I can tell you less about the plot: the back cover does say that "the vampiric sorcerer Uctebri has at last got his hands on the Shadow Box," which can't be good, though there's also talk about "spymaster Stenwold" and "Tisamon the Weaponsmaster," one or the other of whom, I hope, can do something about it. Salute the Dark was published by Pyr on September 21st.

I'm amused to see that with the publication of Betrayer of Worlds (by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, like its three predecessors), there are now as many novels described as "preludes to Ringworld" as there are books in the main series. I have to imagine that this book will be of primary interest to readers who not only know the Niven classic Ringworld, but have also read the three previous Niven/Lerner "of Worlds" books (Fleet, Juggler, and Destroyer), since this whole series is billed as "what happened to lead to the events of Ringworld." (And I do have to admit that I wonder if this series was planned in advance to be however many novels long -- there's no sign that this is the last one -- or if this is becoming the SF-novel equivalent of Smallville.) Either way, it's a new novel of Known Space, with Louis Wu, Puppeteers, and the rest, and it'll be published by Tor in hardcover on October 12th.


[1] I always want to believe that he's one of the recent burst of Russian fantasists now getting translated into English, but he isn't -- just a guy from Lincolnshire with a cool name.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 243 (10/4) -- Gray Horses by Hope Larson

Artists who are comfortable with their muses can do anything: rename major cities, mix a slice-of-life story and highly symbolic dreams without ever overtly linking them, create an entire graphic novel out of everyday life, subtext, and implication. Gray Horses was Hope Larson's second graphic novel, back in 2006, but she clearly was entirely clear-eyed about what she could do and the stories she wanted to tell, even then.

(I've previously looked at Larson's Mercury here and her Chiggers for ComicMix; those are both books she did after Gray Horses, but they're more conventionally genre works in form and scope.)

Gray Horses is the story of Noemie, a young woman from Dijon, France attending school -- I assume this is a semester abroad, though the back cover copy calls her an "exchange student" -- in the American metropolis of Onion City. (You know the one -- the large city in northern Illinois, fronting on Lake Michigan, the city of the big shoulders.) Noemie makes friends with a fellow student, Anna, who lives and works in a bakery across the street. She has a minor flirtation with a shy young man, a fellow student who photographs her but doesn't want to talk. She remembers her ex-boyfriend, Luc, back home.

And she has continuing, long dreams about a girl named Marcy and the talking horse who takes her up into the mountains -- to hide something precious to her -- and then back down to her home. Marcy looks nothing like Noemie, but her story is the counterpoint to Noemie's -- another girl with a memory to put away, with a past to both return to and transcend.

Gray Horses is a quiet, literary graphic novel; there aren't many actions, and none of them are large or grandiose. Larson tells her story in soft, rounded panels -- they don't quite melt into each other, but they're not the usual hard-edged windowpanes of most comics. Instead, her panels enfold and reveal what's within them, snuggling up to each other in a cozy parade of quotidian life and clean dreamscapes. This isn't a story with a moral, or even any major epiphany -- just some things that happened to one young woman, one season, far from home, and what went on in her head at that same time. It's lovely and evocative, and -- if I'd paid just a bit more attention -- I bet it would have taught me a bit of French as well.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 242 (10/3) -- Wally Gropius by Tim Hensley

Some satirists leave no doubt as to their targets, and pin them to the board in great detail. But others give more of a general sense of the neighborhood of their attack, perhaps thinking that it's jejune to be too "on the nose" with their complaints. Tim Hensley's work has always felt like the second category to me -- I'm pretty sure he's against something (inherited wealth, perhaps, or maybe bland comics for young readers, or even the romantic impulse in general), but I'm never quite clear as to what it is he detests.

Wally Gropius collects a bunch of semi-independent strips, many of which have appeared previously, which together assemble to tell an almost coherent story. (The ways in which it is incoherent, though -- almost entirely due to Hensley's elliptical dialogue -- are entirely planned and absolutely part of his strategy. And it may be more coherent to those who can follow his satire.)

Wally, our main character, is a teenaged millionaire -- drawn in a modified Dan DeCarlo '60s Archie style, though the details of his wealth is more Richie Rich -- who has various semi-coherent attributes and adventures:

• he's the lead singer of a band of moptops, whose lack of ability would be punk if the story weren't so aggressively '60s
• he's ordered by his father to marry the "saddest girl in the world," though seemingly, for many pages, left to his own devices as to the determination of the holder of that title
• he's obsessed with Huey Lewis, mostly for jokey purposes
• and is pursued by gold-digger Jillian Banks, who snares him with her preternatural knowledge of the national anthems of the world.

Vast swaths of Wally Gropius appear -- at least to my eye -- to be visual homages to images that Hensley particularly loves. (The alternative is that he lays his panels out in his static, staccato rhythm just for that feeling, which is close to the same impulse.) It's all very loud and manic and bright and bizarre, veering towards and away from coherence often within the same panel.

It may be that Hensley has specific satirical targets, and that I just failed to perceive them. But it seems to me that his attitude towards satire is the same as that toward rebellion of Marlon Brando in The Wild One: he'll take whatever he can hit, and so he builds his story by punching as many hot buttons and tossing out as many artistic references as quickly as he can. The end result has that go-go energy and restless heat of the authentic products of the era Hensley sets his story in, but loses something in coherence and precision along the way.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 241 (10/2) -- I'm With Stupid by Weinstein & Barreca

Stereotypes are pernicious, self-replicating and confining, dragging our thoughts into the same old channels and frustrating attempts to break free or do something new. But they're funny!

Memory has fuzzed out the details of the recommendations I saw that aimed me at I'm with Stupid -- probably all for the good -- but I do remember that it was supposed to be really, really funny, a clever and entertaining new look at the gender divide. Perhaps that "new" is the problem, and I just took far too long to get to I'm With Stupid [1]; it's a book published in 2004 that collects a series of newspaper columns (rewritten and presented along with new material) that themselves appeared over a two year period prior to the book's text being finalized. So, using standard publishing schedules and counting backwards, that implies that many of these discussions are from the 2000-2001 period.

Should that matter with a book about something as supposedly eternal as men vs. women? Probably not, but when an example of male incompetence involves co-author Weingarten only being allowed one check at a time, the reader starts asking "this guy still uses checks for his purchases?" instead of chortling with recognition. Other examples also founder on the shoals of the modern world, particularly broad generalizations that anyone who's spent much time on the Internet will know aren't close to true for huge swaths of the population of whatever sex is being misrepresented. (For example, did you know that no woman in the history of civilization has ever liked porn?)

Anyway, Gene Weingarten was a humor columnist for the Washington Post Magazine -- still is, by the way, close to a decade later -- and, one week, while casting about for a topic to be funny about, discovered that a feminist academic (Gina Barreca) had just published a book about feminism and humor, which he thought would be easy to make fun of for the length of a column. (I'm With Stupid never names that book -- it might be The Signet Book of American Humor, which Barreca edited, from late 1999.) Barreca was smarter and funnier than Weingarten expected, and he kept coming back to her for further columns -- the earliest one I could find in the Post archives is from February of 2001, and it's clearly not the first -- all about the supposedly intractable differences between men and women.

I'm With Stupid collects a couple dozen of those columns -- all in a he-said, she-said back-and-forth dialogue format that's zippy and engaging -- somewhat edited to read more smoothly as a book, and supplemented by some amount of new material. (Only a devoted fan of Weingarten's column, or the authors themselves, could say for sure which is which.) As is typical with humor of this sort, Weingarten, representing men, plays up his uncouth, dirty, messy, too-confused-to-live-in-this-modern-world-without-the-help-of-a-good-woman, anti-intellectual side, and Barreca must, in between being the feminist intellectual, occasionally wax rhapsodic about the joys of shopping, crying, and long discussions of everyone's feelings. It is all undeniably funny, which is the point of the exercise, but it's also all very superficial and standard; it's exactly what you'd expect from a moderately funny he-said, she-said dialogue from two professional writers not aiming to engage too deeply with the material.

Both of them are prone to make sweeping overstatements, which are untrue in the way that all sweeping overstatements are. (Many of them are statistically more true than not, though.) As is typical of this kind of book, Barreca -- representing femininity, civilization, and the goddess of the hearth -- is allowed to win most of the arguments, but Weingarten gets to have most of the best lines and to appear to have the most fun -- this is what passes for gender equality these days. I'm With Stupid is quite funny, but, like most collections of newspaper columns, it reads better in small doses than all at once.


[1] Or perhaps it's the more usual problem of expectations: hardly anything is "really, really funny," if you're told ahead of time that it's going to be.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 240 (10/1) -- Walt Disney World Guides, Take Three

Yes, I'm still reading books about the many attractions of central Florida -- as previously chronicled in Book-A-Day entries # 192, 214, and 224. And I'm still not done; I have two "Unofficial" guides that will be my main on-hand references and that I might write up for one last post to bulk up Book-A-Day. I'll just say, in my defense, that planning a vacation can be just as much fun -- and vastly cheaper -- than actually taking it. I'm not sure any readers of this blog will care about these books, but, then again, I've long suspected that most of you don't care about the majority of the books I mention here. (But I still have hopes that you don't all disdain the same majority of books.)

First, and easier to deal with, is Frommer's Walt Disney World & Orlando with Kids. (There's a new edition this year, but I read the 2008 edition, since that's what the library had.) It's very similar in scope and approach to the regular Frommer's WDW book (which I read last month, and covered in Book-A-Day # 224, linked above) -- down to some phrases and sentences that seemed very familiar -- with the addition of information on maximizing the enjoyment of The Mouse for families with kids of various ages. This book isn't an annual like the main Frommer's WDW guide, but it does appear to be updated every other year, which is good enough for most purposes -- theme parks change, but not radically, and not overnight.

It has all of the strengths of the Frommer's brand -- comprehensive, serious views of all of the options, from lodging to attractions to dining; a layout jam-packed with information that uses sidebars and icons to keep it all from becoming too much to navigate; and copious references to contact information (generally phone numbers) offered in-line rather than relegated to a section at the back -- along with more focus than the main book on what children of various ages will likely be interested in. The author, Laura Lea Miller, uses the opinions and reactions of her own five kids when evaluating rides, which is good as far as it goes, but they only appear on about half of the rides, which can make comparisons lopsided. (I also never quite remembered which kid was which age, which could be a problem -- I don't want to recommend changing those kinds of call-outs to "a nine-year-old boy thinks," since that loses the personal flavor, but getting the age of the child right at the point of recommendation would be very helpful.)

If you're going to Disney World with kids, particularly if it's not your first trip, this could easily be the only guidebook you use. It's wide-ranging without being gigantic, and fact-filled without being dull. I still like the Unofficial books better, but that's partly because their "big book" is so big (and I always like more information) and partly because the Unofficial books have an irreverent, zippy tone unlike the traditional guidebook style.

The Complete Walt Disney World 2010, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal: a full-color, heavily illustrated (with gorgeous photos) guide to WDW created and published by a wide-and-husband team (she writes, he photographs). It does spectacularly well what the DK guidebook I looked at in Book-A-Day # 214 tried to do, but didn't entirely succeed -- integrate lots of photographs of the actual rides, parks, and resorts into the guidebook format so that the reader doesn't just read about what's available, but actually sees them directly. All of the photos are professional-quality, chosen and arranged exceptionally well; they're great aides memoire for those who have already been to WDW and will be very useful planning/dreaming fodder for those who haven't yet made the schlep to The Mouse. The layout is also very impressive, and doubly so when you remember that this is a self-published book (and triply so when this reader remembers how well it stacks up in comparison to the DK book, from one of the premier illustrated-book publishers in the world): it's very browsable, integrates the photos clearly with the text descriptions, and effectively uses color in the text for added usefulness.

The scope of Complete is pretty much the same as all of its competitors -- it skimps on planning and other resources (especially compared to Frommer's or the Unofficial books), but makes up for that with better maps and really top-notch photography, particularly in the central sections about the four parks. (Complete is about 350 pages long, and just over 200 of those pages are devoted to the theme parks; about 75 pages to the Magic Kingdom alone.) Complete's sidebars focus on Hidden Mickeys (shapes of Mickey's head hidden in various ways) and interesting trivia about the attractions and their surroundings; this is a book by Disney experts/aficionados for readers who notice and appreciate the little touches.

The scope given to the photos in this book do mean that it's a bit more expensive than much of the competition ($24.95 vs. mostly $19.95), and that it has less detailed or nonexistent text descriptions of non-Disney aspects of your vacation. (Complete covers only a few "outside" resorts, doesn't touch the question of transportation to Orlando, and has no coverage of Universal Orlando or other area attractions.) But it does have the best treatment of Animal Kingdom that I've seen in any guidebook, including details of all of the animals that can be spotted in the park and a thoughtful appreciation for AK's role as a world-class zoo. And the photographs -- I really can't say this enough -- are stunning, wonderful in themselves as well as adding immensely to Complete's usefulness.

Complete might not have enough depth to function as the only guidebook for a first trip to Disney World -- particularly if there's extensive travel down to Florida to be planned, or one's vacation includes substantial time outside of The Mouse -- but it's a wonderful book for the seasoned Disneyite (particularly those interested in history, Imagineering, and Hidden Mickeys) and, so far, the best-illustrated book I've seen on WDW.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: Baggage

"Saggy-bottomed and stained from sitting around in puddles of beer, the knapsack is -- along with its sober older brother the briefcase -- one of a limited number of stealth purse strategies by which men routinely attempt to circumvent, elude, or transcend the cruel code of the pocket. The advent of the laptop computer has led to a renaissance in the category of luggage formerly occupied by the satchel, an all but forgotten item just a few years ago, now more commonly designated a messenger bag and hybridized in leather, nylon, and plastic, leading to all kinds of knapsack-cum-attaches and tote-cum-briefcases. And there are the gym bag, and the paratroop bad, and the flight bag, and those other hopeful attempts to provide a man with a rugged GI Joe kind of place to carry around his Walther PPK, his cyanide pills, his safe cracking tools, and his Kiehl's lip balm. But check your pockets, or the pockets of the man standing next to you, the one with the commando kit-cum-road warrior carryall. I will bet you a cyanide pill that he's still packing his wallet, keys, and spare change in his pants. Otherwise that rugged satchel becomes, by definition, nothing but a purse."
- Michael Chabon, "I Feel Good About My Murse," p. 153 of Manhood for Amateurs

Read in September

This was the seventh full month of Book-A-Day, which means, once again, that there are only links for you below. But here's what I did read this month, for my own reference six years from now, or for those secret government agents in the white florist van. (Hey, guys, what's up!)

• Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean (9/2)
  
• Paul Hornschemeier, All and Sundry (PDFs) (9/2)
  
• Kelly Monaghan, Universal Orlando 2008 (9/2)
  
• Jeff Lemire, The Nobody (9/3)
  
• Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson, Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites (9/4)
  
• Editors of The Smoking Gun, The Dog Dialed 911 (9/5)
  
• Michael Quinion, Gallimaufry (9/6)
  
• Jen Wang, Koko Be Good (9/7)
  
• Hubert & Kerascoet, Miss Don't Touch Me (9/8)
  
• Donald E. Westlake, Memory (9/8)
  
• Tim Hensley, Wally Gropius (PDFs) (9/8)
  
• Frommer's Walt Disney World & Orlando 2010 (9/8)
  
• Greg Houston, Elephant Man # 1 (9/9)
  
• Scott Kurtz, PvP, Vol. 6: Silent But Deadly (9/10)
  
• Yoshitsugu Katagiri, Red Hot Chili Samurai, Vol. 1 (9/13)
  
• Soumei Hoshino & Quinrose, Alice in the Country of Hearts, Vol. 1 (9/14)
  
• Sesuna Mikabe, Tena on S-String, Vol. 1 (9/15)
  
• Keith R.A. DeCandido & Fernando Heinz Furukawa, StarCraft: Ghost Academy, Vol. 1 (9/16)
  
• Majiko!, Mikansei No. 1 (9/17)
  
• China Mieville, Kraken (9/17)
  
• Anders Henriksson, College in a Nutskull (9/18)
  
• Peyo, The Purple Smurfs (9/18)
  
• Julie & Mike Neal, The Complete Walt Disney World 2010 (9/19)
  
• Peyo, The Smurfs and the Magic Flute (9/19)
  
• Nobuaki Tadano, 7 Billion Needles, Vol. 1 (9/20)
  
• Kris, Rob, Matt, & Dave, Ice Cream & Sadness (9/21)
  
• Chester Brown, The Playboy (9/22)
  
• Harry Connolly, Game of Cages (9/22)
  
• Gabrielle Bell, Lucky (9/23)
  
• Frommer's Walt Disney World & Orlando with Kids (9/25)
  
• Jeffrey Brown, Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations (9/25)
  
• Gene Weingarten & Gina Barreca, I'm With Stupid (9/26)
  
• Hope Larson, Gray Horses (9/27)
  
• Tony Millionaire, The Adventures of Sock Monkey (9/28)
  
• Niklas Asker, Second Thoughts (9/29)
  
• Milton Caniff, Male Call (9/30)
  

And that was that. How's by you?