Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/11

There's only so many ways a man can call attention to the return of Monday, and I often feel like I've hit my limit. But, as long as we don't die -- and I think we'd all consider that the preferred outcome -- Mondays will accumulate, and return every seven days, whether we're ready for them or not.

One of the good things about Mondays is that they bring my "Reviewing the Mail" posts. Well, it's good for me, in that I have a usually-substantial post. And I hope it's good for you, since you find out about books you might want to seek our (or avoid, though I hope the former is more common). This, as you've probably guessed by now -- my readers are tremendously good at reading headlines and understanding them, which you don't necessarily share with the wider Internet audience -- is another one of those posts.

This week I have seven books to blather at you about. As of this very moment, I haven't read any of them, but I can tell you some things -- most of them almost certainly true -- about those books based on my keen powers of observation and a deep knowledge of other books that I will pretend is relevant in this situation. Everything this week came by itself, so those of you who are allergic to bullet points can relax.

Osamu Dazai's classic novel of self-obsession and damage, No Longer Human -- it looks to be the Sorrows of Young Werther of interwar Japan -- was adapted into a three-part manga series by Usamaru Furuya, and the third part is being published by Vertical at the end of February. I haven't read the first two volumes, but now, perhaps, I could run through the whole thing together, which would presumably be preferable.

Sometimes books can be more complicated than they at first appear to be. Take Higurashi When They Cry: Atonement Arc, Vol. 3, with story by Ryukishi07 and art by Karin Suzuragi. Would you be surprised to know that this is actually the penultimate volume of an eighteen-book storyline? I doubt Yen Press -- which publishes this book this month -- actually trying to hide that, but it's difficult to figure out which arc of Higurashi to start with. (And don't get me started on trying to work out exactly when it is they cry! Or who "they" are, come to think of it.) For those interested in finding the beginning of this story, I covered it when I looked at the early issues of Yen Plus magazine back in 2008, and I believe the first grouping is the "Abducted by Demons Arc."

I got a copy of Catherynne M. Valente's most recent novel Deathless last year -- by the way, I have to keep admitting that I'm desperately ill-read in Valente, despite my best intentions; I've only read her wonderful YA novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making so far -- and didn't manage to get to it. But now Deathless is in a more compact (and cheaper!) trade paperback form, giving me -- and many of you, I'm sure -- another chance to read this Russian-inflected fantasy novel retelling the story of Koschei the Deathless against Russia's very eventful twentieth century history.

And then back to the realm of words-and-pictures together with the graphic novel The Advance Team, written by Will Pfeifer with art by German Torres, coming from Tor in March. It's just your average everyday story: a twentysomething pizza delivery guy stumbles onto a vast alien conspiracy and has to turn celebrity stalker, killing his childhood idols one by one. Pfeifer's been writing comics for about a decade now, and has gotten a solid reputation as one of the better hand on the superhero ranch, so it will be interesting to see what he's done here when given free rein.

I believe Thief's Covenant -- the first in a projected medievalesque fantasy series about Widdershins, an orphan turned rich girl turned again into a top-rank thief -- is meant as a Young Adult book, given its price point ($16.95, nowhere on the actual book for mysterious reasons), the young age of its protagonist, and its length (shy of 300 pages). Author Ari Marmell has toiled in the content mines of D&D and World of Darkness -- forging novels as well as game material -- and has written an independent fantasy duology as well. This one officially hits stores tomorrow.

C.J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" series -- about the single ambassador from a small crash-landed human settlement on a far alien world, populated with tall humanoids with very different emotions and social structures -- continues with Intruder, the thirteenth novel. This is possibly a decent starting point -- Cherryh has written the series, at least as far as I've read in it, as semi-independent trilogies -- but dropping back to Foreigner itself is probably the best bet. This time out, Bren Cameron (that ambassador) is in even more trouble than ever before, once again torn between battling factions and trying to find a solution that will satisfy everyone and keep him alive. Intruder is coming from DAW in hardcover on March 6th.

And last for this week is one more graphic novel: an adaptation of Jonathan Kellerman's fourth "Alex Delaware" novel, Silent Partner. (I have no idea why they didn't begin with the beginning of the series, When the Bough Breaks.) The adaptation is by Ande Parks, and the art from Michael Gaydos. The Delaware books -- psychological thrillers set in LA with a forensic psychologist hero -- have been massive bestsellers for over twenty years, so you may have heard of them. The graphic novel of Silent Partner will be published by Villard on February 28th.

Goliath by Scott Westerfeld

There are two reasons I expect this review of Scott Westerfeld's new novel, Goliath, will be short and desultory:

1) I've already reviewed the first two books in this series -- Leviathan (Book-A-Day #107) and Behemoth (Book-A-Day #326) -- which means that I've already written a thousand words or so about the series.

2) My younger son -- the frighteningly large eleven-year-old I call Thing 2 here -- is midway through Behemoth right now, and will want to jump into Goliath as soon as he's done.

So you Gentle Readers can jump back to those earlier posts, if you haven't been reading the series. And, if you have been reading the series, then you probably know that this book came out nearly six months ago, and there's a fair chance that you've already read it yourselves.

But, for those still unconvinced: Goliath continues the story of Deryn "Dylan" Sharp, a young woman posing as a young man to serve aboard His Majesty's airwhale Leviathan, and Prince Aleksandar von Hohenberg, secret heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, as they make their way through a steampunky alternate World War I, where the Allies are "Darwinists," using gene-altered animals, and the Central powers are "Clankers," with gigantic steam-powered mechanical war machines. It's 1914, and those augmented armies are tearing at each other offstage, in what it probably an even bloodier first year of the war than in our timeline.

And Leviathan, after partially fomenting a successful revolution in Istanbul -- and consequently turning the Ottoman Empire from a neutral leaning towards entering the war on the Clanker side (as its equivalent did in our world) to a neutral favorably disposed towards England and her Darwinist allies -- is headed to the Far East, ostensibly to show the flag and aid allies Russia and Japan against local German colonist forces, but actually to make a secret rendezvous and pick up a very important Clanker scientist at a secret base deep in Siberia.

Because Nicola Tesla -- genius scientist, and, as a Serbian living in the US, a Clanker congenitally opposed to the German cause -- has created a massive death ray cannon called Goliath, which he claims can strike anywhere in the world. And so Leviathan picks him and his crew up near the Tunguska River, where, six years ago -- during a test of Goliath on the other side of the world -- something unexpected, and massively destructive, happened.

So the geopolitical questions of Goliath revolve around that event: did Goliath cause the Tunguska Event in this world? And will Tesla's plan to, essentially, blackmail the Clanker powers into peace by threatening their capital cities actually work?

But the more important questions concern our heroine and hero: will Deryn tell Alex who she really is? (After all, he told her his equivalent secret some time ago.) And can they help to make a world in which they can be safe...and, just possibly, together?

Westerfeld ends the trilogy as well as he started it, full of adventure and danger both high in the air on Leviathan and in the face-to-face confrontations among his diverse cast, all of whom have their own agendas and plans. (There's one point when a minor character offers what could have been a deus ex machina to Deryn -- but it's deeply contingent on the current situation, which is already falling apart.) It is written specifically for younger readers -- there's nothing I wouldn't want my eleven-year-old son to read, and I mean that utterly literally, since he will read it in a couple of days -- but that's no more of a limitation than writing in any other genre or style. Goliath ends this series excellently.

Although...I still think that a series like this should have a book called Juggernaut, set in India -- come on, wouldn't that be perfect? -- and so I can always hope Westerfeld will eventually decide that he's not quite done with this world.

Realityland by David Koenig

The world needs enthusiastic amateurs; there aren't enough professional anythings to get everything done. (Or, more importantly, there's never enough money to pay enough people professionally to get everything done.) David Koenig is incredibly enthusiastic, and I'd characterize him as an amateur historian -- though I don't know if he'd agree with either half of that characterization, since he's a professional journalist by day, and he might see his histories as growing out of that -- and he's contributed greatly to the body of unofficial knowledge surrounding Walt Disney and the companies bearing Walt's name over the past two decades.

Koenig is from Southern California, and apparently has the local's love for Disneyland; his book-writing career began with Mouse Tales (which I reviewed here four years ago), a generally positive behind-the-scenes look at the origin and day-to-day operations of that park, with an emphasis on quirky castmember stories and wacky hijinks. He followed that up with More Mouse Tales (more stories from Disneyland) and Mouse Under Glass (comparisons of source material and final films for the first 30 animated Disney movies, with other details on those films), and then finally moved on to what would have seemed to me (if I'd been his editor at the small California house Bonaventure Press that has published all of these books to date) to be the obvious second book: a look behind the scenes at the biggest Disney agglomeration of theme parks: Walt Disney World.

Realityland takes about a third of its three-hundred page length to get to opening day of The Magic Kingdom (the first park down there in Florida; the one that's a semi-copy of Disneyland), with details of the land deals, construction headaches, staffing problems, and other big-business concerns of a major construction project. Koenig is a journalist, and he's good at the shoe-leather stuff: he's clearly interviewed everyone he could track down that's still alive from those early days, and got great quotes and details of that troubled construction -- the stuff that Disney kept carefully out of its press materials.

The rest of the book mostly alternates between themed operational chapters -- about cast members, security, safety, competition, and so on -- and chapters that move the story forward in time, covering the construction of EPCOT and then Disney-MGM Studios and the various boardroom conflicts and shakeups along the way. This portion of the book is less well organized than the straightforwardly chronological beginning, and Koenig could have used a stronger editor (or another draft or two) to really pull this all into clearer focus -- he does drop some threads entirely, or for chapters at a time. Still, Koenig had a lot of material to organize: just that security chapter, for example, seems to cover in some detail every single death, major injury, and mishap that took place during the first thirty years of Walt Disney World. And he does keep it all lively and comprehensive at the same time.

Realityland also rushes through the last decade or so that it covers -- it was originally published in 2007 -- so there's not as much detail on the fourth Disney Florida park, Animal Kingdom, and the end of the Eisner years. (I suspect this has to do with the fact that the people involved with those decisions are mostly still in the middle of their careers, and many of them still at Disney: it's difficult to write corporate history while it's still happening, even if you're willing to take things off the record.) So it might have been better if Realityland covered just the first twenty years of WDW, running to the early '90s and leaving room for a second book, but I don't expect Koenig is done with Disney in any case, so there may yet be another book of more WDW stories, or maybe even one about those exotic foreign parks.

Realityland is both more amateur (in the sense of being enthusiastic, engaged, and connected) and more ground-level than a a more "serious" corporate history book like James Stewart's DisneyWar (which I read six months before this blog began, and so did not review), which are both strengths and weaknesses: Koenig has a partisan's interest not just in Disney as a corporation, but in a certain conception of Disney as an organization with a purpose, and that colors every bit of his reporting, but it also drives his interest in the details of park-level employees' jobs and the day-to-day operations of the parks, which can sound like minutia but directly affect the experiences of the millions of people who crowd those gates every year.

So this is primarily a book for Disney fans, for people interested in those theme parks in particular, rather than in general business readers wanting a story of success despite setbacks that they can underline and highlight for insights that they'll pretend to apply to their own careers. And if I think that we're the more authentic and meaningful audience, that may just mean that I'm another enthusiastic amateur myself!

Quote of the Week: Creative Destruction

"[P]rivate-equity firms are increasingly able to profit even if the companies they run go under -- an outcome made much likelier by all the extra borrowing -- and many companies have been getting picked clean. In 2004, for instance, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving mail-order fruit retailer Harry and David. The following year, Wasserstein and other investors took out more than a hundred million in dividends, paid for with borrowed money -- covering their original investment plus a twenty-three per cent profit -- and charged Harry and David millions in "management fees." Last year, Harry and David defaulted on its debt and dumped its pension obligations. In other words, Wasserstein failed to improve the company's performance, failed to meet its obligations to creditors, screwed its workers, and still made a profit. That's not how capitalism is supposed to work."
 - James Surowiecki, "Private Inequity," p.21 of the January 30, 2012 New Yorker

5 Very Good Reasons To Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides) by "The Oatmeal"

I don't know what deep trauma would make a man want to appear in public under the name "The Oatmeal" -- particularly when he already has a perfectly good name, like Matthew Inman -- but it's probably enough to just note that such trauma must exist, quietly hope that he's healing comfortably, and move on.

Inman has been making comics, and things that aren't exactly comics but certainly aren't prose, either, on the Internet since mid-2009, and is now reasonably famous for doing so. (That makes me feel terribly, terribly old, but never mind that for now.) And so, like all things of reasonable popularity on the Internet [1], the comics of The Oatmeal have been collected into a bound sheaf of thin slices of dead trees, under the name 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides).

It actually is more useful than the standard book of cartoons, since Inman's standard operating procedure is to research something (punctuation, coffee, obscure and frightening animals) and then write up actual facts about that thing, in humorous form, almost half of the time. The other half, as required by Internet Law, is made up of things like "the 10 Types of Crappy Interviewees," "7 Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine," and "The 8 Phases of Flying." [2] The result is usually crude, almost always crass, typically profane, and often very funny for people (like much of the traditional Internet) who either prefer or can tolerate those first three traits.

There's a lot of cute animals doing horrible things, and creepy/frightening animals doing silly things here, plus the grammar lessons. You actually are at risk of learning something from an Oatmeal cartoon, which is not the case for most webcomics. (Although, just today, I did learn that Restless Leg Syndrome is a STD in one particular fictional universe.)

Inman's site isn't well designed for browsing; it's much more of a traditional '90s-style personal site than a blog or webcomic, making this book, oddly, a more user-friendly experience. (His minimalist RSS feed is also annoying, as long as I'm already being persnickety about tiny points about my medium.) So this is a swell book to leave on your coffee table to poke through or to read (as I did) during quiet moments in the smallest room in the house.


[1] I've said this a thousand times before, but it bears repeating: this is not a new effect. Before the Internet, there was still a flood of silly little humor books, but they had to be based on magazine articles and vague unformed concepts and the so-called "sense of humor" of people in big leather chairs at New York publishing companies. Nowadays, the Internet serves as a farm team for such silliness, so, presumably, the books picked up from blogs are more likely to be successful, and that actually does look like progress if you squint at it correctly.

[2] Note a pattern? Inman is no dummy; lists of all kinds are more frequently shared than other kinds of content. The Oatmeal is actually very well designed for Internet popularity, whether deliberately or just because Inman's interests resonate with the general audience.

The Complete Peanuts, 1981 to 1982 by Charles Schulz

I've come to believe, recently, that having each book I read have its own post here is the most efficient and convenient thing. I mean, it's definitely efficient and convenient for me, and my fervent hope is that it also helps the audience by making things easier to find (and for me to link to, later on).

Thus, the latest volume of Fantagraphics's wonderful reprinting of Charles Schulz's Peanuts strip -- The Complete Peanuts, 1981 to 1982, ask for it by name at your favorite purveyor of bound printed matter -- gets a post all to itself here, even though I have hardly anything to say about it. I've reviewed most of the other volumes, over the years -- 1957-1958, 1959-1960, 1961-1962, 1963-1964, 1965-1966, 1967-1968, 1969-1970, 1971-1972, 1973-1974, 1975-1976, 1977-1978, and 1979-1980 -- and the reprint project is now solidly into Schulz's later, less interesting years.

Peanuts was funny and entertaining at this point, of course -- amusing and laugh-out-loud and wry by turns -- but it hadn't been surprising for nearly a decade, and most of its characters had first hardened into caricatures, and then into a collection of standard mannerisms. The Peanuts of 1981 was an utterly professional entertainment machine, and still the pure product of Charles Schulz's own pen and mind. But its pleasures in the '80s were like those of watching a late-season baseball game between two teams out of contention: it doesn't mean anything, and won't have any real effect on anything, but it's a quite agreeable way to spend a few hours.

If Schulz had been born later, or had a different temperament -- well, let's say it straight: if the world had been substantially different than it actually was -- then, maybe, he could have hung up the Peanuts hat, walked away from the massive pot of money Snoopy generated every year, and moved on to some new creation. No, honestly, that never would have happened; not in any plausible version of the past century. And even if it had, would whatever new thing the 58-year-old Schulz made been as interesting and fresh as what the 28-year-old Schulz had done? So that's just windy talk, and not worth pursuing.

What Schulz did was Peanuts, and he did it for a hair shy of fifty years. Not all of them are works of genius -- not all of anything by anyone is. And there are only occasional flashes of that genius here -- Sally's beanbag camp, a few moments with Peppermint Pattie -- but this is still an important part of the larger work that is Peanuts, and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/4

It's difficult to find a new and fresh way to introduce these posts every week -- particularly since I've been doing them for more years than I want to count, and since I don't want to just copy-and-paste a block of Standard Disclaimer [1] -- so I should warn you that I might descend, any week now, into the realms of movie parodies and other bottom-scrapings.

But that day is not this day! This day we fight!

Oops, sorry, there. Anyway, where was I?

Right -- the point of "Reviewing the Mail." This weekly post lists the books that arrived in my mail the previous week, annotated with whatever I know or can quickly dig up about those books, with the aim of connecting them with you (the readers), so that you can find new, presumably entertaining works that you will buy and love and clamp to your bosoms for ever after. I have not yet read any of these particular books, and I may not read any specific one of them -- but that doesn't stop me from letting you know about them.

Most of the mail this week falls into clumps, so I'll start off with two manga collections coming from Vertical, beginning with the 8th volume of Chi's Sweet Home by Konami Kanata. Vol. 7 showed up in my house a couple of months back, and my two sons immediately glommed it, which I'll take as a recommendation. The series is a semi-realistic -- the title cat "speaks" to the audience, but lives an extremely cat-like life, unlike a Garfield -- full-color look at the life of a Japanese kitten, suitable for, as far as I can tell, kids down to too young to actually read the words. This volume will hit stores at the end of the month.

Already out from Vertical is the first volume of Toru Fujisawa's GTO: 14 Days in Shonan, the sequel series to the original Great Teacher Onizuka. This series takes place in the middle of the main GTO, during a fortnight when the main character was supposedly recuperating from being shot -- but actually had run off to the "surfer's paradise" Shonan. And, of course, a series hero always ends up doing the thing he's famous for -- so I'm sure this series sees Onizuka teaching.

I also have DAW's three mass market paperbacks for March:

• Seanan McGuire launches a new series, "InCryptid," with Discount Armageddon, in which Buffy Jr. there on the cover (Verity Price, runaway scion of a clan that's been hunting/studying mythological monsters for generations, but who would prefer to be a professional ballroom dancer [2]) is dragged back into her family's business and, I am morally certain, begins the usual love-hate relationship with her opposite number (Dominic De Luca, of the Covenant of St. George, whom I will predict is haughty, self-centered, devastatingly handsome, and utterly infuriating in the usual panty-melting urban fantasy manner).
• The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity is the latest anthology from the Tekno Books factory, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray and featuring fourteen stories about secret elves in the modern world. Contributors include Elizabeth Bear, Jim C. Hines, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, Kristine Smith, Juliet E. McKenna, and the ubiquitous Seanan McGuire.
• And the twelfth book in C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series, Betrayer, is also hitting paperback. I liked the first nine or so of this series, but lost touch with it when I left the clubs -- they're generally very good clenched-teeth cultural-conflict-with-aliens books, in the inimitable Cherryh manner.

Similarly, I've got a bunch of manga all being published by Yen Press in February, all later volumes in series -- so I apologize in advance if my impressions of them are mistaken:

• The sixth volume of Milan Matra's Omamori Himari, a harem manga with a plethora of panty shots (giving this a mature rating, though I didn't see anything worse than panty shots inside this volume) and a "typical high school student" hero who is also the heir to a demon-fighting family -- the harem is made up of several human and transformed-creature (cats, teacups [?!], who knows what else) girls.
• The eighth volume of Soul Eater, by Atsuhi Ohkubo continues the story of the minions of the death-god and their quests to collect the souls of the evil. (I reviewed the first book back in early 2010, but lost track of the series since then.)
• The ninth volume of Nabari No Ou by Yuhki Kamatami, which I think is about secret ninja societies in the modern world -- the back cover copy, which talks about Grey Wolves and "the world of shinobi," tends to agree with that memory.
• The eleventh volume of the very popular The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya -- art by Gaku Tsugano, story by Nagaru Tanigawa, and characters by Noizi Ito -- continues the story, though it seems to have moved pretty far from what I remember as the premise (uberperky Haruhi gathers a group of secretly paranormal teens -- all still secret from her -- to investigate paranormal things exactly like them), since a cast that seems to be more harem-like (one boy and three busty girls who keep falling over him) is here trapped in a mountain resort by a storm possibly created by a supernatural entity. I will admit to being more than slightly confused.
• And then there's the eleventh volume of Sumomomo, Momomo, by Shinobu Ohtaka. I loved the first volume of this two years ago, and liked the second volume quite a bit (though I was worried that it was slipping inexorably towards being yet another diffident high-school-boy-and-his-quirky-harem story), but, once again, lost track of it. At this point, the entire cast seems to have relocated into the middle of a jungle, for what I trust were good and sufficient reasons. I believe I'll have to read this soon, to see what's become of it.

If you're tired of novels that are only novels, Zack Parsons's Liminal States may be what you're looking for: the book itself doesn't publish until April (in trade paperback from Kensington), but  alternate reality games related to the book started to come out last October, and the book itself is "part of a revolutionary multimedia project, which includes video, music, and artwork, as well as blogs and personal web pages of the characters from the world of the novel, including links to external sites." So: very post-modern and cutting edge. Parsons wrote the nonfiction look-at-what-these-stupid-generals-did book My Tank Is Fight! and the exploration of Internet subcultures Your Next Door Neighbor Is a Dragon, but this appears to be his first work of fiction. I suppose I should note that this particular blog has an independent existence, and is not merely part of the Liminal States hype-rsphere.

And last for this week is a graphic novel for younger readers -- and probably for some of us no longer young; I asked for it myself, for instance -- Giants Beware!, by Rafael Rosado (who has written for a lot of popular children's TV shows, says his bio from the publisher, though it's coy about which ones) and Jorge Aguirre (storyboard artist for Warner, Disney, and Cartoon Network). It's about a girl who wants to fight giants, her best friend (who wants to be a princess) and her brother (who wants to be a pasty chef). And First Second will publish it in paperback on April 10th.

[1] The marketer in me knows that would be horrible SEO, and the perfectionist in me is horrified at the thought of not hand-crafting any particular blog post.

[2] In case the whole existence-of-monsters thing didn't convince you this was an entirely fictional world...

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers

Tim Powers is not the most prolific of writers, which makes it slightly odd to note that The Bible Repairman and Other Stories is his third collection in barely a decade (following the complete lack of collections in his first two-and-a-half decades of writing). But it's not really as odd as it may seem: Night Moves and Other Stories started it off in early 2001, pulling together six stories from the '80s and '90s, and then 2005's Strange Itineraries expanded Night Moves, adding three more stories Powers had published in the intervening years.

Still, Bible Repairman came along only six years later, and contains six stories written since Strange Itineraries -- and, as far as I can tell, Powers has never written six stories in six years before this. I could quibble and say that I want more novels from Powers, but, the truth is, Powers is one of our very best and most exacting fantasy writers, and I'll take whatever he wants to write. [1]

As is common with story collections by major writers these days, several of the stories in Bible Repairman first appeared as expensive limited editions -- the title story and "A Soul in a Bottle" from Subterranean, and "A Time to Cast Away Stones" from Charnel House -- and one of the remaining three stories, "A Journey of Only Two Paces," only appeared in shorter form in the program book for the British national SF convention. So most readers, except for the most well-heeled and attentive Powers fans, will only have had the opportunity to see, at most, two of these stories. 

And so, to those stories:

"The Bible Repairman" begins in deeply Powersian territory: the darker, low-rent side of Los Angeles, with a premise that is equally Powersian in its religious magic: a middle-aged man, Torrez, has spent his life editing out difficult passages from personal bibles (prohibitions on divorce, or adultery, or demands for charity) for his clients and losing pieces of his soul, bit by bit, selling them to ransom ghosts back for other clients. And then the ghost of his own daughter comes back into his life, and he has to make a decision on one more ransom -- the one that might take enough of his soul to destroy  him.

"A Soul in a Bottle" is another LA story -- much of his short work, and several of his novels, stay close to home -- with another ghost, two sisters who are both writers and rivals, a mysterious death forty years before, and a man who survives by scrounging rare books.

"The Hour of Babel" might be science fiction or fantasy -- depending on how you squint at it -- with time travel and a uniquely shattering experience in a bar, thirty years before.

I'd read "Parallel Lines" before -- it was in the Stories anthology a few years back, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio -- and greatly enjoyed it again. I can't improve on what I wrote then: "An aged woman learns that her recently dead twin sister is still trying to control her life, but takes steps to finally correct this."

"A Journey of Only Two Paces" is another Powersian story about death, redemption, and (most importantly) the kind of people who cannot accept death (the original sin of so many Powers antagonists). It also has cats in it, and a quirky building in the LA area that Powers insists actually exists in his short afterword.

Last is the longest, strongest, and most major story, a novella named "A Time to Cast Away Stones." In a way, it's the link between The Stress of Her Regard and the upcoming Hide Me Among the Graves, telling the story of Stress's minor character (and actual historical personage, and massively interesting romanticizer of his own life) Edward John Trelawney, and his eventful encounter with the siliconari in Greece in 1825, soon after the death of Byron. As with most of Power's best work, it intertwines real, documented events -- Trelawney was in Greece fighting with a warlord at the time, and was shot by another Englishman on Mount Parnassus -- with his own carefully constructed mythology, producing that uniquely Powersian frisson: the story that is clearly fantastic but also fits with all known history.

I wouldn't recommend that new readers begin Powers here -- his slow accretion of detail and attention to nuance is best displayed in his novels, so any of the ones I mentioned below, plus the didn't-really-inspire-the-Disney-movie-more-than-glancingly On Stranger Tides, would be better choices -- but this is a fine collection of deeply Tim Powers stories, and just saying that should be enough for the knowledgeable.


[1] Speaking of novels, I have high hopes for his upcoming book, Hide Me Among the Graves, for very Powersian superstitious reasons: his first novels for the previous decades have been 1983's The Anubis Gates (a Philip K. Dick Award winner), 1992's Last Call (a World Fantasy Award winner), and 2000's Declare (a World Fantasy Award winner), which I'd call three of his four best novels -- and the fourth novel I'd put in their company is The Stress of Her Regard, to which Hide Me is a distant sequel. No pressure, Tim, but all indications show that you're going to hit this one out of the park.

Quote of the Week: Inherently Broken

"This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don't."
 - Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," pp.75 in the January 30, 2012 New Yorker

Amazon Quarterly Results Bring Price Drop, Analyst Deep Thoughts

The NY Times has the standard story on the results, announced yesterday, and the consequent stock price slippage and analyst beard-stroking.

But we should all have expected this. Amazon has been telling everyone -- loudly, with both their actual announcements and their actions -- that they do not intend to reach a position of market power and then increase margins, which is what all of the analysts and outsiders still expect. Instead, Amazon is following a Wal-Mart strategy: relentlessly push for lower costs and lower prices all the time, in all ways.

Amazon is not trying to dominate markets so that they can they reap larger profits; they're trying to dominate markets so that they can then continue on to enter new markets and dominate those as well. They are not Apple; they will never throw off vast quantities of cash. And expecting them to do so will only lead to misery, heartbreak, and bad investment decisions.

Read in January

The reading project of the last eight months or so has been entirely absent from these monthly lists; I was about half a year behind on reading The New Yorker when I hit convention season last June, and I've been catching up ever since. (As I type this, ten days before the end of the month, I'm down to two issues unread, and one of them came in the mail yesterday.) So it's entirely possible that book-reading will pick back up, but perhaps it won't -- as my sons keep getting older, life gets more and more complicated and busy, so I try not to make guesses that vague.

It maybe time for another reading project in the next couple of months, though -- I have three in mind right now (more along the lines of HELP than Book-A-Day), but I need to get the books to do any of them. (I had nearly everything for one of them, and lost it all in the flood, but #2 is just as ready now as it was then, and #3 is a new idea entirely.) Anyway, that's the future, and this post is about the past.

Here's what I read this month:

• Lynne Kelly, The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal (1/2)
  
• Juan Diaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido, Blacksad (1/2)
• Floyd Gottfredson, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, Vol. 1: "Race to Death Valley" (1/10)
  
• Roz Chast, Proof of Life on Earth (1/11)
  
• Lynn Johnston & Beth Cruikshank, Farley Follows His Nose (1/15)
  
• Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess, Blueberry Girl (1/15)
  
• Mac Barnett & Adam Rex, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem (1/15)
  
• Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (1/23)
  
• Josh Ritter, Bright's Passage (1/25)
  
• Tim Powers, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (1/27)
  
• Paul Hornschmeier, Life With Mr. Dangerous (1/27)
  
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (1/31)
  
• Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1981 to 1982 (1/31)
• The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman), 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides) (1/31)

Coming up next: February. A dark, cold month, which is excellent for staying inside and reading.