Book-A-Day 2010 # 338 (1/7) -- Side Jobs by Jim Butcher

One thing that all reviewers know deeply is that there are two sizes of books: the ones that are smaller than they are, and the ones that are bigger. A reviewer can seriously push a book that's smaller than he is, but all he can do is nudge one that's larger. It's a sliding scale, of course, since some reviewers are bigger than others, but there are plenty of books that are substantially bigger than even Michiko Kakutani, and we reviewers do need to keep that in mind if we want to avoid embarrassing ourselves. [1]

Jim Butcher's books are much bigger than I am. They're bigger than anyone writing primarily on the Internet, I suspect, unless "The Dresden Files" somehow catches the attention of Glenn Reynolds or Randall Munroe. And so my job is much different than it would be for a book that my audience would only vaguely recognize, or need to be convinced about. If you're reading this, you likely have a settled opinion on Butcher, one way or the other -- maybe you detest all urban fantasy without reading any of it, or maybe this is your favorite series of all time. But, still, you're looking for me to amuse you while writing about something about which your mind has already been made up.

That can be quite freeing for a critic, actually -- particularly when the book in question is a sidebar to begin with, and not really built to take a deep investigation. Side Jobs is a book that exists because the random "Dresden Files" stories have piled up almost tall enough to make a book of their own. So, following the accepted practice, Butcher wrote a new novella, "Aftermath," which brought this collection up to the size of one of his novels. The timing is excellent as well, since his series character, Harry Dresden (Chicago's only consulting wizard, etc.), suffered a severe cliffhanger at the end of last spring's novel Changes (see my review) and so Butcher fans are apprehensive and concerned -- the more so if they've noticed that the upcoming next novel is called Ghost Story.

Side Jobs, then, collects the ten existing "Dresden Files" stories -- one a very early bit written before the first novel in the series, another a short vignette for a publisher's teaser package, and the others from various anthologies of the past four years -- and adds "Aftermath," a story about Sgt. Murphy of the Chicago PD which I should say quickly takes place immediately after the end of Changes but does not explain at all what just happened to Dresden. For most readers, it will be a chance to revisit the fun Harry Dresden -- the one with a wisecrack on his lips and a blasting rod in his hands -- as he takes out a bunch of supernatural nasties without too much trouble or moral compromise in a series of stories that only mildly betray their origins as theme-anthology fodder.

Side Jobs isn't as good as the better novels of the series; Butcher is essentially a novelist to begin with, and a storyteller rather than a writer of fine prose. But it's solid meat-and-potatoes hardboiled modern fantasy with an engaging hero, and it's a fine way to spend some time while avoiding wondering if Harry Desden has really contracted a fatal case of lead poisoning (to the head, via high-caliber rifle).



[1] You may rightly ask why anyone would review books in public if they were worried about embarrassment; it's a good question, and I have no coherent answer.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: Categories

"Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it."
- Dave Barry

Book-A-Day 2010 # 337 (1/6) -- Miss Don't Touch Me, Vol. 2 by Herbert & Kerascoet

It's a sad but common thing to see a fine single story followed up by a piece of middle; many a novel, movie, or comic stood just fine on its own, but was far too popular not to be sequelized. And so the second piece comes along -- but the creators know they have a golden goose this time, so they make sure not to end the story, to be sure that they can continue to visit that goose as often as possible.

Miss Don't Touch Me (also see my review) was a standalone story; it didn't require any sequels and ended exactly where it should. (It was also a compilation of two French albums, which slightly muddies the waters, but it was still one story.) Miss Don't Touch Me, Volume 2 is what happened after the first book was massively successful; it begins with the first book as its foundation and ends in the air, presumably preparing for a Vol. 3.

The world-view, which was so much of the appeal of the original Miss Don't Touch Me, is the same in this second book: world-weary but clear-eyed, with a near-infinite knowledge of the horrible things that people do to each other. But the central character has changed, as Blanche got the revenge she was looking for (or, at least, as much revenge as she's ever going to get) and isn't driven, or angry, or coldly functional as she was in the first book. Instead, she's become just another unrealistic young woman, indulging her hopes and dreams when she should be looking at her life clearly and figuring out what to do next. (That's not unreasonable, or unbelievable, but we do miss the towering flame of rage Blanche from the first book.)

Blanche begins this book by fumbling, very badly, an attempt to leave the Pompadour brothel after discovering that it's yet another company town, carefully designed to drive its girls deeper and deeper in debt to the house. And that's almost the last strong and self-assertive action she takes in this book -- instead, Blanche is acted upon and manipulated and led around by her misled emotions, by a young man she thinks loves her, by her long-lost mother, and by a rival at the Pompadour.

The stakes seemingly aren't as high this time, since there's no serial killer running around and threatening to murder Blanche. But, actually, the stakes are higher, since Vol. 2 is all about Blanche's self-respect and ability to stand on her own -- and, unfortunately, she fails at almost every turn to hold onto either of those, and so reading Vol. 2 is an exercise in seeing a woman we used to respect and root for turn into a frightened doe without resources. Blanche might not be conventionally ruined by the end of Vol. 2, but she's lost sight of all of her strengths and aims, and so has lost everything that made her the Blanche we respected and rooted for in the first book.

Miss Don't Touch Me, Vol. 2 is just as lush and visually enticing as the first volume, and the world is clearly the same -- it's just that Blanche, between books, has lost the edge that gave her a chance in that hard world. If there is a third volume, I hope she can find that edge once again; it's no fun watching her get kicked while she's down.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 336 (1/5) -- The Story of Lee by Wilson and Kutsuwada

First impressions are often wrong. For example, if you had in your hand a new graphic novel written by a man whom you know as the editor of AX: Alternative Manga, a collection of underground and independent comics stories from Japan, what kind of story would you expect it to be?

If you answer wasn't "a sweet, low-key intercultural love story set in Hong Kong, between a local young woman and a Scottish man," then I'm afraid that you are as misled by first impressions as I was. If that was your answer, I frankly suspect chicanery.

The Story of Lee, Volume One is written by that co-editor of AX, Sean Michael Wilson, but there's nothing underground or alternative about it: it's a solidly entertaining, quiet story of possible love and family entanglements. The title character is twenty-four, a dentistry school dropout working at her father's small Hong Kong grocery and dreaming of moving to London. She's got a somewhat obvious family around her: controlling, demanding father; loving, quietly understanding mother; wise, dying grandmother; no siblings; and a favorite uncle, her father's older, widowed idle older brother. Her father is ungently trying to match her up with Wang, "a young handsome man with a good job" in a bank, but Lee has, as the book opens, just met and started flirting very slightly with a blonde man from Scotland, Matthew, who works as an English teacher in the area.

Lee and Matthew's relationship follows pretty much the expected, slow course from that point, with some side-plots having to do with Lee's family, until they reach the end of this volume a hundred and fifty pages later. It's, again, a sweet little romance story, without much in the way of serious complications or reversals, a warm relaxing bath of a genre exercise. Chie Kutsuwada's art has a clear manga influence, but doesn't commit deeply to a serious shojo style (which Lee's mostly Western readers may appreciate). It's not a book that will set any worlds on fire, but it's cute and lovable -- and there's nothing wrong with that.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 335 (1/4) -- Salvatore, Vol. 1 by Nicolas De Crecy

There's an image in the American mind of a certain kind of Euro-comic: the characters are animals, more grotesque than cute (but still at least a little cute). The narration is discursive and philosophical, more concerned with showing off how world-weary it is than with directly advancing the story. The plot unfolds in several directions rather than following an expected linear path, and many aspects of it don't make all that much sense. The characters are never quite likable enough for the reader to warm up to them. And unpleasant things happen to those characters offhandedly, with at most a Gallic shrug from that philosophical narrative voice.

Nicholas De Crecy's new graphic novel Salvatore, Vol. 1: Transports of Love fits that stereotype very closely -- possibly because I made up the details above to fit the book, but nevertheless. It's set in a world much like our own, populated by various animals and the usual unlikely architecture and machinery that cartoonists can so rarely keep from drawing. The title character is a little dog, one of the best auto mechanics in the world. Salvatore works far away from Paris, to keep demands on his time to a minimum. And, when he does have customers, he steals parts (of "secondary importance") from their cars, so he can finally build the contraption on the cover, with which he intends to travel to South America to see Julie, a female dog he knew and loved for six months in his youth and hasn't been in touch with since.

(One can hardly complain about all of that from a thematic or dramatic standpoint, but the more practical reader might wonder if an easier-to-reach garage and an airline frequent-flyer card might not have accomplished his travel plans vastly more quickly -- and one blushes to mention the possibility of purchasing the parts he needs.)

Salvatore has a wee man who works for him -- called "the tiny thing" -- and the narrative also follows the customer whose car we see him fixing in the early pages: Amandine, a severely near-sighted pig with a dead husband (downsized and immediately turned into dinner at the slaughterhouse where he worked) and a litter of twelve piglets who are born in the middle of this book. (One of those piglets, Frank, will have adventures of his own, needless to say.) All of these characters, plus a few more, wander through the pages of Salvatore, flying down ski slopes in cars and getting blown up in train stations, braving the dangers of the sewer and trying to steal a rare adaptor.

It's all very odd, and would be rollicking, if it weren't so understatedly French. De Crecy's art has a loose, lazy line, which makes his characters all look lumpy and lived-in. His colors are similarly understated, mostly in earth tones, brightening up to yellowy browns and greens in places. Salvatore is agreeable and quite amusing as long as the reader doesn't invest too much mental energy trying to care too deeply about any of this -- the point is to shrug, sip your cup of very black coffee, puff on a Gauloise, and flip the page idly.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 334 (1/3) -- Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

"Don't bother with the local girls," a wise man once said, "don't bother with them, they don't bother me." But what about the girls who stay on the road -- the ones who rack up a dozen cities by the end of their twenties? Well, those might be the girls to stay even further away from....

Megan McKeenan -- whose first name we don't find out until page fifteen of the second issue of Local -- is that not-local girl, tracing a complicated path from Portland, Oregon in 1994 to rural Vermont in 2005, each of those years represented by a different city and a different issue of the original series of Local. The original plan -- as explained by writer Brian Wood in the afterwords from the issues, included in the backmatter -- was for the twelve issues to each tell essentially separate stories in different distinctive cities, with Megan being a thin connecting thread, a minor shared element. But, along the way, Local turned into Megan's story, and even the issues that move away from her story -- such as one about her skate-punk cousin Nicky, and another about her drunk and violent younger brother Matthew -- are essentially about her, in the end.

Megan starts out about seventeen, already apparently far from home -- the full details of her adolescence are never completely clear, but one theme Wood hammers on is that Megan's mother gave her a lot of freedom, practically shoving her out the door to be on her own -- and being pressured by her nameless then-boyfriend to be part of a really badly planned prescription-drug fraud scheme. That first issue has a stop-and-start structure that repeatedly replays the same situation in different ways -- unlike any of the later issues -- presumably of Megan running through various scenarios in her head before deciding on what to actually do. But, in the end, she hits the road, since that's the premise of the book.

From there on, each issue is a different city and a different year -- though the changing years is only explained in the afterwords by Wood and artist Ryan Kelly; it's not clear in the stories themselves. (And nearly every issue ends with Megan moving on, which makes the reader wonder if she's racking up dozens of cities in between the ones we see.) Megan is young, not just chronologically, but in that stereotypical heart-on-her-sleeve, always-ready-to-hurt-or-be-hurt way, which leads to many of her travails. She also has bad luck or bad judgment (or both), besides having a family that gets more dysfunctional the more we learn about it. Even though she's nearly thirty in the last story, she doesn't seem substantially older than she was when we met her on the first page.

Each issue is a solid story, but they don't add up to a journey for Megan -- though the twelfth issue wraps up a lot of elements from earlier in the series, Megan herself doesn't seem to be changed by her experiences. (And if Wood hadn't told me that she was getting a year older with each issues, I wouldn't have believed it -- though her job in issue #11 was surprising, based on her earlier life.) And I'm afraid I don't have as much sympathy for aimless youth as some people do, either -- Wood writes "does anyone have it all figured out at age 26?" in one of his back essays, but I found Megan to be vastly more confused than just not "having it all figured out." (And I was married before I turned 24, and owned a home eighteen months later -- maybe I didn't have it all figured out, but I had a trajectory, and everyone I knew was on a trajectory as well, for good or bad, mostly right out of college to jobs that turned into careers either on purpose or by accident, and with the other parts of life falling into place, more or less, along the way.)

Kelly's art, though, goes a long way to selling Local -- it's specific, with great photo-referenced backgrounds that always look drawn, and wonderful expressive faces that all look different from each other. I may have had less patience with Megan than Wood wanted me to, but I always believed her: there are thousands of aimless young people just like her, in one city or another this week, trying to find the place where they can settle, and finally become one of the locals.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/31

This post appears in 2011, but records the last few books that arrived in my mailbox at the tail end of 2010 -- and, as with most of this past month, that wasn't much mail, since we all had much better things to do than send books to bloggers in December. (I know my company wasn't doing a whole lot of blogger outreach this past month, so I'm surprised and happy that I saw anything this past month.)

As always, these are books that have just arrived -- I haven't read any of them -- but I'll tell you what I can from looking at them and applying the vast powers of my mind. This week, there were two books in the mail:

Story of Lee, Volume One begins a cross-cultural love story in comics form -- it's written by Sean Michael Wilson (a Scotsman living in Japan) and illustrated by Chie Kutsuwada (a Japanese woman living in London), so they both know a bit about living in a different culture. Lee is a young woman working in her father's shop in Hong Kong, and Matt is a young Scot she meets -- I gather that her father doesn't approve, and that there are other complications. Wilson was also the co-editor of AX: Alternative Manga, which I haven't gotten to yet, but has been reviewed very well (and very widely). The Story of Lee is being published in trade paperback this month by NBM -- the art is somewhat reminiscent of manga, but it reads left-to-right, like a Western comic.

And the other book I saw this week was the fifth (and, I think, last) in the "Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie" series, written by David Lubar for middle-graders, Enter the Zombie. (I particularly like the use of "enter" in the title of the last book in a series; it's surprising and funny.) I haven't read any of these books yet, though they sound like fun -- they're about a kid who became a zombie and then was recruited for a super-secret organization; how can you go wrong? -- and I keep chucking them at my own tween sons. I'll attempt to get one of them to read this, and report back. Enter the Zombie is officially published by Tor tomorrow, which means that you can buy it anywhere you get books today...but only if you ask nicely.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 333 (1/2) -- Alec: "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell

All lives are worth living; all lives are worth celebrating; all lives are worth turning into art. Not all lives will become art, of course -- but they all could be, if the circumstances were right. The person living the life doesn't have to be the one to do it, either -- though that certainly helps.

Comics have been leading the drive into autobiographical realms for two generations of cartoonists now, from the unfettered id of R. Crumb to the sublimated family sagas of Will Eisner, from the exquisitely transformed historical drama of Art Spiegelman to the quotidian life of Harvey Pekar. That would be surprising to many people, even now -- since comics are still often seen as a genre, and an obvious, debased one at that, instead of a medium -- but it is true: comics have a stronger tradition of real autobiography than nearly any other form. Even the prose memoir, though a far larger area, is much more in thrall to sensationalism and shock than the supposedly "comic-booky" comics.

Eddie Campbell has been turning his life into art for thirty years now -- alongside other comics projects, such as the monumental Alan Moore-written graphic novel From Hell, and a long sequence called Bacchus that started off to bring the Greek gods into the '80s superhero idiom, but became a collection of stories about storytelling and the varieties of human experience along the way -- starting with a group of stories called Alec, then The Complete Alec, and then Alec: The King Canute Crowd. Those stories are all collected here again -- along with the later related graphic novels [1] How to Be an Artist, After the Snooter, Graffiti Kitchen, Little Italy, and The Dance of Lifey Death, plus a few smaller bits and a new thirty-page story, "The Years Have Pants."

In fact, Alec: "The Years Have Pants" is "The Complete Alec," or nearly so -- the most recent autobiographical book, 2006's The Fate of the Artist, remains separate -- much more so than the book of that name from twenty years ago. The stories here take Campbell -- usually thinly veiled as "Alec MacGarry" -- from a young man deliberately working a dead-end job (bending sheet metal for ducts) through early small-press success in London, off to Australia with a wife and (eventually) three children, in and out of various projects (such as the ones I mentioned above), and just getting on with life as he turns, step by step, into a man in his fifties. Or, as Campbell has put it, it's about the journey from beer to wine: from drinking in pubs and sleeping on random floors in search of even-more-random adventures to that Australian family life and a bottle of interest to finish the day.

But, much more importantly, Campbell has done it brilliantly. Even more than From Hell, even more than the best of the Bacchus stories, these are his masterworks: stories of life in all its complexities, with odd digressions and sidebars, stories that aren't content to just tell what happened to Eddie Campbell (or Alec MacGarry), but that open up to encompass the whole world, with all of the things Eddie/Alec has cared about, the people he has known and the places he's been. Alec isn't a whole life between covers -- Campbell isn't that old, and is going on living, and telling stories about that life -- but it has the depth and warmth and joy of a great life, told in a thousand smaller pieces in a thousand different ways.

This book is one of the towering achievements of modern comics, almost certainly the best of the autobiographical comics of the past generation -- and it's a delight to read. You'll wish you were Eddie Campbell as you read it, both the callow hero-worshipping 1977 Eddie who knew he could be an artist someday and the thoughtful homebody 1995 Eddie running a publishing company out of his front room and contemplating the spectre of his own mortality. This is a life as it can be, and should be -- with joys and sorrows, but many more of the former than the latter.


[1] Campbell now doesn't like to use this term himself, for various reasons, but it's a handy one, and I hope he won't mind others using it to describe his book-length comics.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

2010: Hornswoggling the Year Away

Several years ago, there was a brief fad for posts like this, with the first and last sentences of blogs/journals for each month. Since I'm incapable of letting go of anything, I've made it a tradition here at Antick Musings. And so, here's the Reader's Digest version of 2010 around these parts, with my 651 posts boiled down into one page of disconnected thoughts. (Note: my standard posts have been silently ignored where necessary to have non-boilerplate sentences.)

January
Soulless wasn't quite the book I hoped it would be, and I nearly put it down several times.

Farewell, Kage Baker. You did a hell of a good job while you were here.


February
The question of pricing for electronic books has been very contentious lately, erupting this past weekend into unilateral action by one of the major booksellers in the US against one of the major publishers.

Alternatively, if you want to avoid me, the above schedule will also help suit your purposes.


March
I started this round of Book-A-Day with an ulterior motive: I wanted to clear out the clotted artery of my already-read stack, to get myself to write quickly and succinctly about books soon after I read them, instead of letting them simmer to do them "right"...and then, often, forgetting what I wanted to say and just tossing out something anyway.

I just hope he doesn't realize that, and start adding commentary and extra features to the smaller books, so we all feel compelled to buy them as well!


April
Comics, as a medium, is absolutely loaded with insane premises, genre books more than anything else.

And this is a great book for younger readers -- though they'll be even more eager to pick it up if you can manage to hide how educational it is!


May
This will be quick and possibly desultory; I want to get done so I can watch Sherlock Holmes with The Wife.

So this may be an offshoot and a sidebar, but it's a pretty good one.


June
If Ignorance Is Bliss is an apparently well-researched (there are no actual notes, but many references about certain quotes or names being difficult to run to ground) book of quotes, edited by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson.

I can think of half-a-dozen writers who should have this phrase tattooed on the inside of their eyeballs.


July
Reality can be a slippery, tricky thing -- particularly in fiction.

Or maybe something else unexpected will happen in the next volume; I wouldn’t be at all surprised.


August
I felt like presenting the author credits in the title as if they were a law firm -- since so many comics credits feel that way, particularly with the long list of random suits in the front matter of corporate comics collections -- but, to be nice, I'll untangle them before there's any confusion.

At this point, I'm not going to give up on Ex Machina -- I still remember how good it was in the early days, back in 2004 -- but I'm not as hopeful as I'd like to be.


September
Everything has its time; we all know that.

Good for them, I suppose.


October
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 we probably won't, either, unless one of us is a huge Ghost fan.


November
Strange Tales credits four series editors, one collection editor, two editorial assistants, an assistant editor, an "editor, special projects," a "senior editor, special projects," an editor in chief, a publisher, an executive producer [1], and a Senior Vice President of Sales (for no obvious reason, unless everyone thinks that David Gabriel would have made a really good editor, if his life had gone differently) -- not to mention a partridge in a pear tree and at least ten ever-lovin' lords a-leaping -- so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't spend any more time trying to figure out who did what to make this these stories exist in the first place or turn them into a book.

For the reader who can do that, Transition is a high-powered story engine, driven by one of the best writers in the business -- and he comes closer to a happy ending than he's done recently, which may help win over those more traditional SF fans that like stories of body- and universe-hopping.


December
Sword and sorcery books rely on journeys for much of their plots -- not quests, precisely (or not too much of the time), but important journeys, for treasure or work, to find something or save someone or get away from somewhere, usually with more than a bit of urgency.

And if you just really like any of those areas, you'll probably find a lot to love here as well.

My Favorite Books of the Year: 2010

I continue to be grumpy on this subject: it may be possible to do a list of the best or most notable books published in a given year before that year is complete -- as long as one has absolute knowledge of publishing schedules, and nothing unexpected happens [1] -- but one's favorite books of a year cannot be known until the very end of that year, as long as one continues reading.

So, once again, I declare all of the media outlets with their "Best of 2010" lists popping up as early as October -- I'm looking at you, Amazon, and it's not an approving glance -- to be severely missing the point, as usual.

On the other hand, my own choices are idiosyncratic as usual, given my rules:

• These are "favorites" rather than "best," which is important.
  
• I don't break books down by category, but pit them all against each other.
• I do try to gravitate towards new books as much as possible, but not always.
• I pick one favorite book for each month, so this is a Top Twelve.

(The terminally curious may want to glance back at the books I liked best in previous years: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)

As usual, there is some commentary, and there are some runners-up; those who want just the list should skip to the end. There are links to individual reviews of the books, where available (pretty much all here, this year); those of you who are trying to waste a lot of time might also poke your head into my Book-A-Day 2010 Index, which includes everything I reviewed (and nearly everything I read) from February 4th onward.

But perhaps most important is the fact that although I read 361 books last year, there were several orders of magnitude more books than that published, plus gigantic tottering piles of books published in earlier years (both on my specific to-be-read shelves and in general in the world). I make no claim that these books below are better than anything else -- I'm sure I missed vastly more good books than I read -- but these are good ones, worth reading.


January:
I saw three excellent graphic novels to begin 2010 -- not all of them new -- in Dash Shaw's formalist collection The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., Nick Bertozzi's energetic The Salon, and Paul Hornschemeier's devastating Mother, Come Home. Notable on the nonfiction side was the amusing How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein and the thoughtful The Book of William by Paul Collins. But the best thing I read in January was Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, a novel that saw him take his amusing concepts and quicksilver wit and wrap them into a deeper, stronger, more resonant story, without the easy escapes and reader-nudges of his earlier series.


February:
There were two very enjoyable collections of miscellaneous writings from two fine American writers of very different centuries: Michael Chabon's rambling and capacious Manhood for Amateurs and the intriguing bits-of-string compilation Who Is Mark Twain? Kage Baker's Not Less Than Gods was a suitable send-off for her "Company" universe -- we all wish it didn't happen so quickly, but that book will stand as a placeholder for all of the future related books she didn't get to write. Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw collected some of his better short pieces, in which I detected a growing preference for complexity over easy answers. C. Tyler's You'll Never Know was a strong addition to the growing shelves of graphic memoirs. And the best thing I read is, sadly for the rest of you, the hardest for people on this side of he Pacific to find: the third volume of a great urban fantasy graphic novel series from Philippine creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese: Mass Murders.


March:
The most entertaining book I read this month was Sexually, I'm More of a Switzerland, the second collection of personal ads from the London Review of Books edited by David Rose. It was also a month for books about other books, with the Kerouac-Lovecraft mash-up Move Under Ground from Nick Mamatas and the secret history of comics in Dylan Horrock's Hicksville. Joe Hill's second horror novel, Horns, almost lived up to the promise of his first book and best short stories. Hans Rickheit's The Squirrel Machine was an impressive clanking contraption that I didn't really understand. Brooke A. Allen's debut graphic novel A Home for Mr. Easter was incredibly impressive, not just for a first book but in general. But my favorite book had to be the third Hengis Hapthorn novel from Matthew Hughes, Hespira.


April:
The best thing I read this month, by far, was Ian Tregillis's debut novel Bitter Seeds, an alternate-history WWII novel that managed the difficult feat of not trivializing one of the most deadly conflicts the world has ever known through its fictions, but, instead, found new avenues to explore the real-world horrors through invented ones. Also notable were Gene Wolfe's typically thorny novel The Sorcerer's House; Megan Kelso's saga of families and wars, Artichoke Tales; James Kochalka's everyday epiphanies in American Elf, Book Three; and John Lanchester's clear-eyed layman's explication of the financial crisis in I.O.U.. On the pure entertainment (and raw jealousy) front, it was hard to beat Stephen Fry in America, the record of extensive trips through all fifty states.


May:
There were a number of interesting nonfiction books this month: the amusing and inspirational Causing a Scene by Charlie Todd and Alex Scordalis; the purely amusing Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi; Michael Lewis's sidelong glance at the big winners of the market crash, The Big Short; and the thoughtful and (I hope) deeply useful The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan began a fine steampunky alternate-history series. But the best book of the month was an amazing collection of silent comics from a Philippine creator, Manix Abrera, 12 -- not just the best of the month, but one of the best comics I've ever seen.


June:
Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt's sexy and rollicking graphic novel Scarlett Takes Manhattan was a hoot. John Scalzi's novella The God Engines was unexpectedly dark, and almost entirely successful. Taiyo Masumoto's Gogo Monster was a subtle, engrossing look at perception, outsiderdom, and growing up. But the best of what was admittedly a weak month was Ian McEwan's almost SFnal Solar, a novel that wasn't quite as humorous as its author thought it was but still had major strengths.


July:
William Poundstone's Priceless didn't quite do what it seemed about to do, but it did cover a lot of ground and excellently explained modern pricing theory and practice (which is much more interesting, and important, than it sounds). Matt Kindt's 2 Sisters was a typically dark and spy-obsessed graphic novel from a great creator. The anthology Swords & Dark Magic -- edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders -- provided exactly the kind of stories I love, done very well by some of the best in the business. Dash Shaw's second major graphic novel BodyWorld married the formalism and SFnal impulses of his shorter stories to the sweep of his first book, Bottomless Belly Button. And I nearly made the winner this month Jason Shiga's muliplex book of wonders Meanwhile -- which was published as a graphic novel for young readers, but is so much more than that -- until I realized I'd missed something. The real book of the month was in three huge slipcased volumes, presenting the fiendishly awesome work of several decades: Gahan Wilson's Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons.


August:
Tom Rachman's novel of parts, The Imperfectionists, was just as good, and as capacious, as the literary critics said it was -- and that was very good indeed. Tom Bissell's examination of videogames, Extra Lives, didn't touch on my own experience of gaming except tangentially, but it was still a great explication of the form and defense of what games can do. Raina Telgemeier's Smile was a nearly perfect graphic memoir, turning personal experience into a story for all of us. Simon Rich's Free-Range Chickens was wickedly funny. But the best of the month was Charles Stross's third "Laundry Files" novel, the darkly funny and edge-of-apocalpytically thrilling The Fuller Memorandum.


September:
China Mieville produced my choice for the best novel yet of his career in the groundedly fantastic Kraken. Aaron Renier's rollicking, full-of-wonders graphic novel The Unsinkable Walker Bean gets better the more I think about it. Jeff Lemire's graphic novel The Nobody took an old story and retold it well in a new place. Jen Wang's luminous first graphic novel Koko Be Good appropriated the energy and vivaciousness of romantic comedy to tell a story about people finding themselves, instead of each other. Gabrielle Bell turned her own everyday life into art in the comics stories of Lucky. And the best of the month was Harry Connolly's unflinching, tense second novel Game of Cages, an urban fantasy that short-circuts miles of the standard justifications and romanticizations of the genre.


October:
Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio's big anthology Stories, like the world itself, had a lot of good stories, and a few that weren't so good. Jason's new graphic novel, Werewolves of Montpelier, slotted in right next to his other excellent books, with the same usual descriptors: wry, understated, deadpan. Charles Burns began a big new story with his graphic novel X'ed Out, though there's no sign of an ending any time soon. Kage Baker's coming-of-age fantasy novel The Bird of the River was an unexpected last word from a writer who died, much too early, at the beginning of the year. Miles Kington's How Shall I Tell the Dog? was a surprisingly funny look at impending death from the inside. But Darwyn Cooke's second adaptation from the writer usually known as Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit, was uniquely remarkable, with Cooke pulling out all of his neo-Sixties chops and stylistic tricks to make a timeless thriller of a graphic novel.


November:
James Enge's This Crooked Way was a really good sword & sorcery fix-up, the kind of book that I thought died out in 1982 but was thrilled to see return. Reading Ambrose Bierce's A Cynic Looks at Life reminded me to pull my eyes away from the relentless churn of contemporary publishing more often. The Hernandez Brothers proved again that they're the masters of contemporary comics with Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3, featuring a devastating new Jaime story, "Browntown." I finally caught up with Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's understated, clear-eyed Demo, a collection of comics stories about young people different in unlikely and unwanted ways. But the best of the month was Larry Gonick's capstone to three decades of work: The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part II, which explains everything about everything from the past two centuries.


December:
I was thrilled to see a big yellow collection of David Boswell's meanly funny comics as Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, Volume One. Terry Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight was another vital and thoughtful novel from one of the masters of modern fantasy. Denys Wortman's New York was an amazing rediscovery -- from James Sturm and Brandon Elston of the Center for Cartoon Studies -- of an incredibly vital, but now forgotten, cartoonist of the mid-20th century. I might wish that Bill Bryson would write slightly different books, but his At Home was still a joy to read from beginning to end. The latest translation from Osamu Tezuka's vast backlist of incredible graphic novels was the dark family saga Ayako. And the book of the month, I'm afraid, is a slight cheat: I'm not quite done with Eddie Campbell's Alec: "The Years Have Pants", a massive compendium of his autobiographical comics from the past thirty years, but that's entirely because I spent most of today (the last of 2010) typing the words you see above. Alec can't wait for my best of 2011 list; even if I don't manage to finish it by midnight tonight (and I might!), It's on this year's list.


And the compiled Favorite Books of 2010, arranged alphabetically:

• 12 by Manix Abrera
• Alec: "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell
  
• Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis
• The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part II by Larry Gonick
  
• Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons by Gahan Wilson
• The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
• Game of Cages by Hary Connolly
  
• Hespira by Matthew Hughes
• Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke
  
• Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
• Solar by Ian McEwan
  
• Trese: Mass Murders by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo
  

[1] These two conditions, of course, apply exactly never.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 332 (1/1) -- The ACME Novelty Library, No. 20 by Chris Ware

If you're looking for bleakness and misery in your comics, for lives that lead only to sadness and despair, for broken hearts and thrown-away lives and the bone-deep pointlessness of life in an uncaring universe, then Chris Ware is the creator you need. For more than two decades, he's been chronicling -- in surgically precise drawings collected into devastating stories -- the lives of people who can never and will never find any kind of happiness; his most famous (and largest) work is Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which sweeps across three generations of horrible and miserable men to show that the world is nothing but a backdrop to stories of woe and despondency.

Ware has been working on two long stories for most of the past decade -- "Rusty Brown," the story of a stereotypical middle-aged comics fan, which has been precisely what one would expect from a story of that description from Ware -- and "Building Stories," an equally depressing but slightly less typical tale, so far about a crippled young woman with no friends or lovers, a dead-end job and self-esteem issues. He tends to present new sections of whatever stories he's working on currently in annual book-sized issues of "The ACME Novelty Library" -- one of the few vestiges of the once-burgeoning serialized alt-comics scene of the '80s and '90 -- before collecting them, in their final form, as full graphic novels. (And so I've reviewed the issues from the past three years -- 17, 18, and 19 -- here and elsewhere.)

This year's entry is Number 20, which tells what seems to be a self-contained story -- the life of Jordan Wellington Lint, from his birth in 1958 to his death in 2023, with mostly each page showing one moment, or scene, from a separate year. But Lint meets Brown very briefly, midway through his story, implying that "Lint" will somehow be subsumed into "Rusty Brown" in the fullness of time.

But "Lint" doesn't need to be part of any larger story: it already tells one very Warean life from beginning to end. A boy is born, has an unhappy youth (potty training, dead mother, remarried father, trouble in school, kills best friend in car crash as teen, failed career as a musician), returns home to take over the (unnamed) family business and toil through what bits of happiness he can find (first wife and two sons, sobriety, an affair that ends the marriage and the sobriety, eventually a second marriage with a stepdaughter and another son), and then loses everything before finally dying alone and hallucinating.

What's more, most of that story is outlined on the inside front cover, where a family tree explains exactly when Lint's mother dies, his sons are born, and so forth -- Ware gives us the roadmap, and then takes us on a trip, pointing out the sights already marked on our itinerary. And, for connoisseurs of Warean stories, "Lint" has a slightly different flavor: Jordan does find happiness, at various points in his life, but can't hold onto it. (Because of both his own bad choices and the inevitability of death.) Still, a major Ware story with moments of happiness is a huge leap forward -- his previous works were unrelieved bleakness from beginning to end, whose heroes were emotionally stunted man-children who could never have a functional marriage (or any strong interpersonal relationship). He's still fond of that Midwestern staple, the overbearing father and his subservient son, but "Lint" sees that dynamic move into a more realistic mode.

So we learn in this volume that Ware characters can feel happiness -- that had previously been only a theory, unsupported by any evidence. Who knows? Perhaps in another ten or dozen years, there might even be a Ware story with an ambiguous ending -- one that's only potentially bleak? We can only speculate, and wait.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Read in December

I'm nearly to the end of Book-A-Day -- it's now thirty-five days to the one-year mark, where I'll stop -- which means that this is yet another month with a long list of links, and nothing else. Since I'm pretty sure no one but me ever looks at posts like these, and I'm just happy using them as indices, that's fine with me.

And here's what I was reading during a very cold and snowy month:

• Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 14: King of Fear (12/1)
  
• Kevin Baker & Daniel Zezelj, Luna Park (12/2)
  
• Bryan Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour (12/3)
  
• Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight (12/3)
  
• Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts: 1977 to 1978 (12/4)
  
• Nathaniel Marunas & Erik Craddock, Manga Claus: The Blade of Kringle (12/5)
  
• James Sturm& Brandon Elston, eds., Denys Wortman's New York (12/6)
  
• Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon, Pride of Badgad (12/7)
  
• Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman, Vol. 1 (12/8)
  
• Aristophane, The Zabime Sisters (12/9)
  
• S., A., & R. Crumb, eds., Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist (12/10)
  
• Matt Phelan, The Storm in the Barn (12/12)
  
• Ian Rankin & Werther Dell'edera, Dark Entries (12/13)
  
• David Axe & Matt Bors, War Is Boring (12/14)
  
• G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Perker, Cairo (12/15)
  
• Bill Bryson, At Home (12/15)
  
• Joseph Bruchac & Will Davis, Dawn Land (12/16)
  
• Belle Yang, Forget Sorrow (12/19)
  
• David Petersen, Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 (12/19)
  
• Eric Hobbs & Noel Tuazon, The Broadcast (12/20)
  
• James Kochalka, American Elf, Book Two (12/20)
  
• Jimmy Gownley, Amelia Rules!: True Things (Adults Don't Want Kids to Know) (12/21)
  
• Linda Medley, Castle Waiting, Vol. II (12/23)
  
• Scott Westerfeld, Behemoth (12/23)
  
• Sarah Glidden, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (12/24)
  
• Roger Langridge & Amy Mebberson, The Muppet Show Comic Book: Family Reunion (12/27)
  
• Osamu Tezuka, Ayako (12/28)
  
• David Boswell, Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, Volume One (12/29)
  
• Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds., Spectrum 17: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (12/30)
  
• F.C. Ware, The ACME Novelty Library, Number 20 (12/31)
  

And that closes out the year -- see you in 2011.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 331 (12/31) -- Spectrum 17 edited by Cathy & Arnie Fenner

There are people who can write coherently for long stretches about art, making intriguing comparisons and speaking knowledgeably about techniques and influences, but I'm not one of them. When I used to have to talk about art regularly, back in my book-club days, I often resorted to waving my hands about wildly, a small store of stock phrases, and, most dependably, pointing at things in the indispensable Spectrum series of art annuals.

So that leads to two points: first, that I'll try to be brief here, so I don't stray out of my depth entirely. And second, that this series is wonderful if you want to know about the fantastic art field for any reason (professional or personal). The current volume is Spectrum 17, collecting great art created in 2009. (I've burbled about this series here for the past few years: 13, 14, 15, 16 -- so you can take everything I said in those places as read about this book as well, since it follows excellently in their footsteps.)

Once again, the "Unpublished" section is the largest, and the most likely to confuse me, but I've come to believe that the Spectrum process allows submitters to decide on the final category for a work, without changes from the judges, and so I just shrug. (Similarly, I saw illustrations from Tor.com under both "Editorial" and "Institutional" sections -- even relatively simple definitions can have edge cases.) But, once again, the real point is that there are about 260 pages of great art here: chosen carefully by a panel of excellent artists and designers, organized and labeled by the Fenners, and presented in a fine book on good paper.

(The "Unpublished" section used to occasionally vex me, since it was not unknown at my old job to troll that section for works that might be suitable for upcoming projects -- though it always seemed to turn out than any specific "unpublished" work had found a real home by the time we asked about it.)

If you work in any of the fields strongly connected to fantasy art -- comics, books, games, or related areas -- you really should be paying attention to the Spectrum books. And if you just really like any of those areas, you'll probably find a lot to love here as well.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: With Teeth

"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves."
- August Strindberg

Book-A-Day 2010 # 330 (12/30) -- Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, Volume One by David Boswell

Sometimes it's just not possible to be dispassionate about a work of art. At those times, the honest critic must disclose his true feelings up front, to come clean entirely to his audience. And so I have to admit: I love David Boswell's Reid Fleming stories on a level with only a very few other comics (Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, the best Giffen/Fleming/Oskner Ambush Bug stories, The Cowboy Wally Show, some of Evan Dorkin's work), as one of the pinnacles that the form is capable of.

So I was thrilled to see Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, Volume One appear from IDW last week; this big, bright volume reprints the original 1980 Reid Fleming one-shot (later reprinted as a special from Eclipse and the first issue of the 1990s Deep Sea run), the subsequent five-issue story "Rogue to Riches" (originally published by Eclipse, reprinted in issue form and then as a trade paperback by Deep Sea), and the sidebar one-shot Heartbreak Comics (out of print for decades, though I still have my copy, deep in the files). Nothing in this book has been widely available for a decade, which is a damn shame: Reid Fleming is a great comic creation (in both senses of the word "comic"), and Boswell's stories combine laugh-out-loud moments with lovingly precise drawings of mayhem and rascality.

The title explains the premise perfectly: Reid Fleming is the world's toughest milkman, a hard-drinking, improbably womanizing, scruffy, ridiculously strong, aggressive-to-a-fault man, a man with a milk truck under his feet, a bottle of rye in his hands, a trail of slapstick destruction behind him, and a street full of Caspar Milquetoasts (of both sexes) ahead of him to be terrorized. He has the cruel, obnoxious boss we've all had at least once in Mr. Crabbe, and the scattered, ineffectual over-boss we all equally recognize in the dairy's president, Mr. O'Clock. Boswell perfectly negotiates the rough edges of Reid's personality; in other hands, Reid Fleming would be a villain, or a bore, or a crank. But Boswell keeps the reader always on Reid's side -- he's living the life we wish we could, calling out the fools and morons and idiots in life and doing just what he wants at all times.

Boswell's art is scratchy and organic in the one-shot; one part classic adventure strip and one part '70s undergrounds. But he was rapidly gaining in detail and maturity; Heartbreak Comics sees his precise crosshatching and dots in all their glory, and the later Reid issues show him loosen that style up a bit to suit the more anarchic proceedings of a Reid Fleming story -- the lines are still as precise and perfect as they were in Heartbreak, but the panels are often larger and the scene-setting is stronger as Boswell focuses on exactly the elements he needs to tell his story right.

Reid Fleming's stories are full of both the energy of youth and the anger of middle age; they take place in a world that's as like today or the suburbs of thirty years ago as it is like a silent comedy. They're damn good comics, and having them back in print is something to celebrate. And the "Volume One" in the title of this book gives hope that more will be forthcoming in less than another decade, which would be even more to celebrate.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index