After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is best-known for her "Kitty Norville" urban fantasy series -- about a radio talk-show host turned reluctant werewolf -- but she's also written other things. Just last year, for instance, she came out with After the Golden Age, a superhero novel about Celia West, the completely unpowered accountant daughter of the two most popular and powerful heroes of Commerce City.

So, the first question is: what comes after the Golden Age? Whether you're Hesiod or Jack Kirby, the obvious answer is "The Silver Age." And After the Golden Age is a quite Silver Age-y book, full of gangsters (organized into teams, with spiffy nicknames, and I would not be at all surprised if many of their gangs had dress codes) who politely kidnap Celia repeatedly in the vain hope of using her as a shield against her parents. (This is seen to never work, but -- in best Silver Age fashion -- the gangsters keep doing it, because they need to follow the essential Weisinger plots or else they are nothing.)

This is lucky for Celia; if this were an Iron Age story, she'd be in pieces in the fridge before page ten, and we wouldn't have much of a novel. But she does live in a more genteel age, with defined standards of behavior for both heroes and villains, and so her kidnappings tend to just disrupt her schedule and horribly frustrate her.

(Vaughn lampshades the inevitable question: Celia doesn't leave Commerce City because she doesn't want to -- sure, she has no relationship with her parents, and has a career that usually takes young public accountants through extensive travel around the country for the first few years of their careers, but, by gum! she's going to stay right there in Commerce City because the plot requires it no villains will drive her out!)

The rest of the book is agreeably muddle-headedly Silver-Agean like that: Celia starts dating a young police detective, Mark Paulson, whose father is the city's Mayor, with the usual obvious parallels between their parents. Celia's ur-kidnapping was by the Olympiad's (her parents' superteam) greatest foe, the Destructor, as a young teen, and she ran away to join the Destructor's gang not long afterward, in a fit of teenage pique at sixteen. (And this is endlessly brought back up throughout the novel, as though this was a superhero world in which no one had ever made a heel or face turn even once -- let alone dozens of times a year, as in the modern era.) Celia is given primary responsibility to build a forensic accounting case against the Destructor (even though he's old, possibly senile, and has been locked up in not-Arkham for a while now) as part of a major criminal case against him, for no obvious or specific crimes, and even though her multiple conflicts of interest would make any opposing counsel salivate at the thought. The whole plot, in fact, is entirely second-hand: it's all standard superhero furniture that seems to be in this novel because it belongs somewhere in a superhero story, and not because Vaughn had specific reasons for wanting any of it.

Vaughn keeps it all going with her narrative voice, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you spend any time thinking about it. But, remember: in the Silver Age, stories aren't supposed to make sense. Celia has more than the recommended level of angst, and is batted around by events -- she's supposedly driven and responsible, but her accountancy work isn't dramatic, so Vaughn just mentions it now and then, and it really doesn't add up to much.

Celia bounces off the supers of her hometown -- her parents, Captain Olympus and Spark; Arthur Mentis, the telepath who was a late addition to their team; Annalise, aka Typhoon, a water-powered hero her age -- as she slowly learns about the requisite sinister plot. And, of course, she gets kidnapped in the furtherance of that plot, but it all turns out all right in the end -- city saved, true love found, the whole nine yards.

After the Golden Age is a pleasant if slightly musty-feeling superhero story; it's based on several-decade-old tropes and doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what superhero stories look like these days. (Of course, superhero stories have looked horrible for much of the last two decades, so not looking like that isn't necessarily a bad thing.) Vaughn makes it entirely an enjoyable read, but this isn't a book to think too deeply about motivation or realism as you're running through the pages.

Costume Not Included by Matthew Hughes

It's not easy being a superhero in the best of circumstances, so pity the poor man whose powers derive from a demon -- and whose mother is dating one of the nation's leading evangelical preachers. And when that young unfortunate's name is Chesney Arnstruther, well...that's someone whom you would not want to switch places with.

Chesney is the superhero of Costume Not Included, second novel in a trilogy called "To Hell and Back" -- though it means that more puckishly than most fantasy books would -- and I'll direct you to my review of the first novel, The Damned Busters, for the precise details of how and why Chesney made that deal with the devil, how he did it without forfeiting his immortal soul, and why an actuary wanted to be a musclebound superhero in the first place.

There are two kinds of trilogy-middles: the ones that lose the energy of the first volume and mark time until the finale, and the ones that are happy to have gotten the scene-setting out of the way and leap into creating ever more complications to keep things interesting. Costume, luckily, is of the second type: the first book took a little while to get going, but this one hits its wry tone right up front and charges forward at exactly the right pace.

Really, how could you put down a novel that begins like this:

"I thought you weren't speaking to me," Chesney Arnstruther said into the phone.

"I'm not speaking to you," said his mother. "I'm telling you something for your own good, is what I'm doing."

I've spent the last several years haranguing anyone who wanders into Antick Musings about how essentially funny and entertaining a writer Matthew Hughes is -- see my other reviews of Hughes books, all of which you should buy, read, and love, in approximately that order: The Other, Hespira, Template, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Majestrum -- so I'll leave that part as read: Hughes came into the SFF field writing Vance-inspired far-future books, but his influences were always deeper than Vance (not that being able to write as smoothly and sardonically as the great Jack Vance isn't a monumental achievement to begin with), and he's since shown that his essential qualities shine through in a variety of subgenres.

So, anyway: Chesney is a superhero, and he's been doing well at it. Too well, actually: he's wiped out pretty much all of the Golden Age-style street crime (guys in suits and fedoras robbing banks, muggings, and so forth) in his city, and his deal only extends so far. He can't directly stop the sources of crime -- which, in best superhero fashion, lies with a shadowy cabal that secretly runs that city -- and his put-everything-into-the-right-boxes mind is not happy leaving a job undone. (His new girlfriend, Melda, is also pushing him in slightly different directions; she's like to see him have a higher media profile and perhaps make some money from being the Actionary.)

Adding to the complications is that his mother's new boyfriend -- that noted thriller writer turned TV evangelist, Reverend Hardacre -- has his own new, and very odd, theory about the secret cosmology of the world, and it's becoming more and more clear that Hardacre is right. And the Devil is not entirely happy with the deal with Chesney -- that lack of a soul coming his way vexes him, and the Devil's whole raison d'etre is to trick and twist and sneak -- and the Devil has deal with other folks who may help him cause trouble for Chesney.

So complications -- very idiosyncratic, unique complications, of the kind only Hughes could create -- proliferate, until Cheney finds himself chased closely by a smart police detective, meeting a Jesus Christ, (not the Jesus -- not the current one, at least -- but a prior, historical version) and having himself proclaimed as a new prophet by Hardacre. But Chesney still has Melda, and his demon Xaphan, on his side, plus his own inextinguishable drive for truth and justice. And there's still one book to come in this trilogy.

Not to sound like a broken record, but Matt Hughes is a great, wonderfully entertaining writer -- his dialogue pops, his people are quirky and real, and his situations could be written by no one else in the world. If you don't like his work, there's got to be something wrong with you.

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross

Charles Stross's fiction is never what you might call overly optimistic -- even when Earth-derived minds have spread throughout the solar system (as in Saturn's Children), they're all posthuman robots, since the original meat-based humanity has long since died out. And when he thinks of slapping a million iterations of our continents onto one gigantic plate-shaped world, as in the novella "Missile Gap," he doesn't make it a wide-screen panorama of continent-hopping adventure, but something vastly darker. Even his Amber-derived alternate-worlds caper series quickly devolves into nuclear blackmail and family backstabbing. So it's unnerving to note that his funniest, zippiest, and most consistently amusing series is the "The Laundry Files," a sequence of computer-science spy thrillers set in a deeply Lovecraftian world, explicitly set a few years before the stars will be right, and the Old Gods will return to at the very least kill most of humanity. He's clearly setting us up for a very big fall, and not making any mystery of it, either.

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth novel in the series -- after The Atrocity Archive, The Jennifer Morgue, and The Fuller Memorandum (see my review), all of which I recommend as highly as possible for anyone who has ever loved James Bond, Lovecraft, Dilbert, or anything roughly contiguous with any of those things.

Since, as we all know from fantasists from Le Guin on down, the true names of things have a special power, all of the people working for the Laundry -- the super-secret agency of the British government tasked with defending its citizens from extradimensional threats -- use false names throughout. And so the series main character is called Bob Howard, his boss is Angleton, and his long-time girlfriend and colleague is Mo O'Brien -- as usual with Stross, there are multi-leveled allusions and wheels within wheels, so Apocalypse Codex could be read as a smart, snarky supernatural adventure novel set in a very dark world even by readers completely unfamiliar with Lovecraft. Though I do suppose that any reader needs to know something of the nature of modern bureaucracies to really enjoy these books.

Apocalypse Codex continues Bob's career momentum; each novel is set a year or two after the prior book, and Bob is rapidly climbing the career ladder at the Laundry -- not primarily because he's such a wonderful agent, but because that coming interdimensional apocalypse (aka CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN) will require as many trained agents in place as humanly possible; one assumes that there are at least a dozen Brits in similar situations, and untold numbers in their own nations' equivalent forces. In this case, it's ten months after the end of Fuller Memorandum, and Bob has almost stopped waking up screaming from the memories. Bob survived that prior mission, and the world did not end -- this counts as an unqualified success, in the world of the Laundry -- and so he's working on his next step up the org chart, which requires various soft-skills workshops dealing with how to manage people.

So he's sent off for a week of workshops and skills-building, out in some random suburb called Sunningdale Park, with a cross-section of up-and-coming British bureaucrats from much more banal organizations. And there he's quietly met by Gerald Lockhart, a high-level officer in his own organization, who tells Bob that he will be immediately seconded to Externalities, a portion of the organization he hadn't previously thought existed. In fact, Externalities should exist at all, as Bob understands the Laundry: it requires everyone who learns the One True Religion to join on pain of death for secrecy purposes. Externalities, on the other hand, is only loosely tied to the rest of the organization, and Lockhart leads Bob to believe that his mission will be to supervise a small team of outside operatives -- Externalities is for operations sensitive enough to require plausible deniability, cut-outs, and similar spycraft traditions.

In this particular case, it's because an American evangelical preacher -- Raymond Schiller of the heavily televised Golden Promise Ministries, purveyor of what seems to be the usual God-wants-you-to-be-rich gospel, though with undertones that worry the Laundry -- is meeting with the UK's Prime Minister, and is clearly seeking closer contact with several Cabinet officials. The Laundry cannot directly investigate the decision-making ranks of Her Majesty's Government, but they can put "external" assets to work looking at individuals who come in contact with those ranks. And so Lockhart introduces Bob to Persephone Hazard, a young woman of varied background and unusual skills, and to her assistant, Johnny McTavish, who was born into an unusual religious tradition (perhaps not unlike Golden Promise) and who escaped into the SAS and other activities.

Obviously, Ray Schiller turns out to be much more than an unctuous American trying to get favors from a foreign government, and so Bob, Persephone, and Johnny make their way, quietly, to Colorado, to do some more intensive surveillance on Golden Promise and to discover precisely what dangerous plans he is crafting. Those plans turn out to be even more dangerous, and more imminent, than anyone had suspected, and the three agents are left on the ground, unprotected, far behind enemy lines. (And "enemy," there, applies almost as much to the deeply frightening American counterpart of the Laundry, the Black Chamber, which relies much less on purely human operatives than the British do.)

Bob and his team must again stop an apocalypse -- keep gates from being opened, Sleepers awoken, and souls from being eaten wholesale. And, along the way, Stross provides a nightmare version of an American church -- one assumes he is not particularly fond of evangelical Christianity, from the evidence here -- and an impressive parade of horrors for Bob and Persephone to confront.

Stross is more and more comfortable with his magical apocalypses as this series goes on; Fuller Memorandum had a major set-piece conclusion, and Apocalypse Codex laps that -- while also being told in a technically more difficult manner. (This time out, Bob is writing his report in both first person and third, covering both the events he personally witnessed and those that Persephone and others engaged in while he was occupied elsewhere.) Apocalypse Codex is darkly funny as well as thrilling, and Persephone Hazard is a great character, continuing Stross's tendency to make his most dangerous agents women.Apocalypse Codex is a great novel in a great series, tightening the screws even tighter as Stross's world shambles ever closer to the abyss -- and these books have the best whistling-past-the-graveyard humor I've ever read.

Take That, Piles of Books!

As of this moment, I am entirely caught up on writing about the books I've read, for what is probably the first time since the end of Book-a-Day last February.

Which means it must be time to get back to reading, so if you'll excuse me....

Hugo Winners 2012

I was not at Worldcon this year, which partially explains why I'm nearly a day late with these. But the Hugos are still the most important and prestigious awards in SFF, so here are the winners, with all of my congratulations, and a few of my annotations:

BEST NOVEL: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

It was my favorite, but I have to admit it was exactly the kind of book that the current SFF field loves to honor: a loving, thoughtful, well-written look backwards.

BEST NOVELLA: "The Man Who Bridged the Mist", Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 10-11/11)

BEST NOVELETTE: "Six Months, Three Days", Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com 6/8/11)

BEST SHORT STORY: "The Paper Menagerie", Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)

BEST RELATED WORK: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls & Graham Sleight, eds. (Gollancz)

Is ESF officially official yet? I thought it was still in beta, and so I haven't been poking at it much yet. 

BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Digger, Ursula Vernon (www.diggercomic.com)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – LONG: Game of Thrones: Season 1

George lost the "Big One," but I hope this was at least a consolation prize. (Still haven't seen it myself, since I don't have HBO.)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – SHORT: Doctor Who: "The Doctor’s Wife"

Doctor Who continues to dominate this category, and Neil Gaiman continues to win Hugos almost at will -- the world is still as we expect it to be.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR LONG FORM: Betsy Wollheim

Absolutely right; she should have had one of these a long, long time ago. I'm still not entirely happy with the idea of using this category to honor work done over the past couple of decades (while a very few short-fiction editors were dominating the predecessor category), but, if that's what Hugo voters are doing (and maybe Betsy did edit a bunch of absolutely top-rank novels published in 2011; I haven't looked at it that closely), they're doing it well.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR SHORT FORM: Sheila Williams

Again, I've thought this was long-deserved: Asimov's under her tenure has had more Hugo nominations for stories than any other outlet, and yet the editor who chose, edited, and bought those stories didn't have her own Hugo until last year. (Of course, this may mean that she'll now get a dozen in a row -- Hugo voters are inordinately fond of streaks -- but there's time to worry about that later.)

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: John Picacio

This is his first Hugo, which surprises me; he's been doing such great work for the past fifteen years that I thought he'd gotten one already.

BEST SEMIPROZINE: Locus

Locus has 22 of the 29 awards ever given in this category -- solid 76%. That, to me, indicates a broken category.

BEST FANZINE: SF Signal

Congrats to them, though I'm sure the "not really a fanzine" grumbling has already begun.

BEST FANCAST: SF Squeecast

I don't like the idea of this category to begin with -- "fan publication" is already wide enough; we don't need to limit it by technology -- but that may be in part because I hate listening to people talking at me in the first place.

BEST FAN WRITER: Jim C. Hines

Oh, noes! Another filthy pro winning this category! It's almost like it goes to popular, enjoyable writers with large followings regularly, like Scalzi, Langford, Pohl, Geis, Shaw, Carr, White, and Panshin!

BEST FAN ARTIST: Maurine Starkey

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER [NOT A HUGO AWARD]: E. Lily Yu


Despite any seeming snark, I do not have it in for any winners this year -- perhaps because, unlike last year, I did not read for or vote for the Hugos this year; I have much stronger opinions when I do that -- and so I do give all of the winners my heartfelt congratulations.

(via Locus Online)

The Disneyland Encyclopedia by Chris Strodder

I recognize that most people are not like me; most people don't read encyclopedias -- even encyclopedias about theme parks -- for enjoyment, and don't embark on reading a dozen books for a family vacation. But I am me, and I do do those things.

And I can tell you that The Disneyland Encyclopedia is a really swell way to waste a dozen hours or so, if you have any interest at all in Disneyland, theme-park history, or just the ways that American icons morph and adapt over the course of a couple of generations of continuous operation. Chris Strodder's book contains over 500 entries, covering every element of the Disneyland park -- people, attractions, stores, lands, restaurants, events, TV shows, promotions, and less definable stuff -- with details of what it was (or still is), how it's changed, and what's interesting about it. Upfront, there are maps of the park as a whole and the various lands, with buildings and areas keyed to a list of the various things that have been there over the years -- this is sometimes a bit vague, due to major renovations, but generally is usefully precise. And the back of the book has an extensive index, a solid bibliography, and an appendix listing the entries by land and type (attraction, person, restaurant, store, etc.). Strodder also has included his own black-and-white photos of every element that's still in existence, though those those photos tend to be small in the book -- there are a few photos in color on Strodder's website, but it would have been nice to have had them all accessible there.

So this is absolutely the book for anyone interested in the history of Disneyland; I've never seen or heard of anything half as comprehensive or detailed. (I also note that I read the 2008 first edition, which has a blue cover; a second edition came out this summer and has an orange cover -- I assume, but do not know for sure, that the updates are primarily about changes since 2008 and not new archival information.)

The only major negative is that Strodder deliberately did not ask any questions of Disney officials; he hasn't interviewed anyone or done any original research, just read the primary documents and the already-existing books about Disneyland. (Readers will note that he relies very heavily on souvenir books as primary sources: he seems to be someone who started off as a souvenir-book collector and only afterward decided he wanted an encyclopedia of Disneyland, so wrote it himself when no one else did.) It would have been nice if he'd done some journalistic digging -- but, then again, the scope of Disneyland Encyclopedia is so large that he could be researching just Adventureland attractions for a decade or more. So that's something of a missed opportunity; I have to assume that Strodder has a list of questions he'd like to have answered, and there are certainly people still alive who could answer some of those questions, if he wanted to track them down and ask.

But that is a quibble: Disneyland Encyclopedia is now and is likely to remain the most comprehensive book on the park -- unless the Disney company follows Strodder's lead, opens their vaults, and does a similar book based on official archival materials -- and so is of strong interest to serious Disney fans, anyone interested in 20th century pop and cultural history, and Californiana.

David Koresh Superstar

Right this very second, I'm listening to "I Am Koresh," from the excellent rock opera David Koresh Superstar by the indispensable UK band The Indelicates.

There's the cover, which gives you an idea of the puckish spirit behind it. And let's see if I can embed any of it, so you can hear it -- it's actually a real rock opera, and a very good one, about Koresh, the siege at Waco, and related matters. (The only serious criticism I could have is that the British accents make it all slightly surreal.)

This below Amazon widget should let you preview all of the songs on the record; you can also go to The Indelicates' Audio page for previews of several David Koresh Superstar songs and some others from their earlier records -- including "Savages," which is utterly wonderful:
Five stars. Hornswoggler says check it out.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/1

According to the inflexible calendar of American expectations, summer ends today -- even though, by other calendrical measures, there are three more weeks of hot weather before the equinox hits. So I hope you've all had as much summer-time fun as you can stand, since that is now all over.

(Offer void in the Southern Hemisphere and where prohibited by law. Residents of Iowa will need to complete a test of skill.)

But, like every other week, this last week of Official American Summer brought books to my doorstep -- dropped off there by delivery-folks, and sent by publicists from some of the many fine publishing organizations still sticking words on paper -- and those books may be of interest to you good people. I haven't read any of these books yet, since they just arrived, but here's what I can tell you about them:

Pocket Los Angeles is a nicely portable guide from the folks at Lonely Planet -- this particular one was written by Adam Skolnik, who gets no cover credit but a smouldering pseudo-romance-novel-cover author photo at the back to (presumably) make up for it. As the title implies, it's pocket-sized, with a lot of color photography among the icon-filled, heavily-designed pages -- a good travel book packs a lot of details onto each page, and this is a good-looking example of that model. There's also a map stuck into the back. What I have is the third edition, which just came out in May.

I get a strong yaoi vibe from Hyouta Fujitama's Tale of the Waning Moon, Vol. 3 -- and you might, too, just from looking at that cover. From the back cover, I gather that the main characters are Ryuka and Ixto, the former of which is under a spell that makes him irresistible to the same sex, but I have no idea what else they are, what kind of culture those names (or outfits) would come from, or anything other than the fact that this book features cute boys getting busy for the enjoyment of a female audience. (Though perhaps that will be enough.) It's from Yen Press, and publishes this month.

Also from Yen this month is GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class, Vol. 4, from Satoko Kiyuduki. (I reviewed the first volume a few years back for ComicMix, and thought it was a little too in-jokey for me; but you may be further in those jokes that I am to begin with.)

James Enge begins a new series of novels about his character Morlock Ambrosius (son of Merlin, complicated antihero, and so forth) with A Guile of Dragons, the opening of "A Tournament of Shadows." This is a prequel to the previous Morlock novels; I see from the opening chapters that he hasn't even been born yet as the book begins. The main action of Guile concerns a war between dwarves and dragons, which seems to be in the secondary world Morlock travels in the prior novels -- so readers should not be worried that Guile is entirely about an infant Morlock. This novel was published by Pyr on August 21st.

I mentioned The Rapture of the Nerds -- a collaborative fix-up novel by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, adding a new section and some corrections to their previously-published novellas "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court" -- when I saw it as a bound galley, and now I mention it again now that it's a real finished book. It's a Tor hardcover, officially on sale tomorrow.

And last for this week is another big Osamu Tezuka project from Vertical -- the folks who have reprinted his Buddha, MW, Ode to Kirihito, Dororo, and several others -- with the first half of Message to Adolf. This was one of his last major works, serialized in the 1980s, and, starting in the 1930s, tells the story of three men named Adolf: Nazi official's son Kaufmann, Jewish baker's son Kamil, and Hitler. This first volume was just published in late August; the second half will come out in November.

Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California With Kids by Michael and Trisa Knight

Words can have very specific meanings within particular contexts -- for example, in the title Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California with Kids, the word "kids" means particularly small children: definitely those under the age of ten, and mostly those up to the age of six or seven.

Now, I have two children myself, but those sons are now fourteen and eleven, which means I have one "teen," one "tween" and no so-called "kids." So this book is not as closely tailored to my interests as it might have seemed. Luckily, I knew that going in, so I was able to triangulate as I went.

(And authors Michael and Trisa Knight do talk about the interests of older children along the way, somewhat -- but little kids are tyrants that can ruin an entire vacation without trying, so they need to be catered to, and their needs much more carefully scrutinized, than my older and more self-sufficient guys.)

If you're going to be visiting the Anaheim branch of Disney Uber Alles, and doing so with some rug-rats in tow, this is probably the most targeted, specific book you can get for that trip: it covers not just the two Disney parks and their ancillary leisure opportunities, but several other tourist traps in the close vicinity: Universal Studios Hollywood, Knott's Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Sea World San Diego, LEGOland, and even some quick tips about zoos and other "educational" stuff. The Knights cover all of the rides and shows, plus restaurants, lodging choices (in much less detail) and general tips.

This book is much less designed than you'd expect from such a big name as Fodor's: the "maps" of the parks are very rudimentary and practically useless, there are no photos, and the text just flows in big sections broken up by call-outs for "Insider's Secrets," "Fun Facts," and "The Scare Factor." Also, Michael and Trista Knight may have gone to these parks many times with their many children, but Fodor's Disneyland is purely based on their own experiences and preferences: there's no larger survey or data-collection effort behind this book. (Unlike, for example, the Unofficial guides.)

The Knights are good guides, if limited in their expertise: their recommendations are solid and defensible, but reading Fodor's Disneyland is more like having a long conversation with a family that really likes Disneyland than like getting tips from an expert. If you prepare for vacations through overwhelming preparation, as I do, this may be substantially less than you want and need -- but, if you're less obsessive, it'll probably be just right.

Incoming Books: Week of September 1

I was on vacation this past week, so of course I had to find time to get over to the Montclair Book Center (an excellent used/new bookstore near me in the wilds of Jersey) and buy some books. There also was a sale from the Library of America, so I got a few things from them. And then there were some books from a certain online seller named after a massive, all-encompassing onrush of water. These, then, are the new books this week that I paid money for:

First, from a mighty river of South America:
Paterson by William Carlos Williams -- it's one of the great poems in the English language, and I needed to read it again. (And my last copy got lost in the flood.) I'm already one Part in as I type.

Disneyland's Hidden Mickeys by Steven M. Barrett -- my younger son (Thing 2) is rather competitive and something of a completionist (not unlike his father, yes). So this is to give him a task for this year's vacation -- finding stuff while we're in the World of Walt.

To The Ends Of The Earth is a Paul Theroux travel book that I thought collected short pieces -- like Fresh Air Fiend, which I've been reading slowly for several years now. I was wrong; it's selections from several longer books. I don't know why anyone would want to read chunks of Great Railway Bazaar, Old Patagonian Express, Kingdom by the Sea, Riding the Iron Rooster and Sunrise with Seamonsters instead of just picking one of them, but some people are just weird, I suppose. And I now have a disposable Theroux book to press on someone if ever the need arises.

Then from the equally mighty Library of America:
The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs by Ambrose Bierce -- I've been complaining for several years that the LoA needed to do Bierce, so I was very happy to see that they did. This book contains what looks to be all of Bierce's short stories -- which fall into three rough categories: ghost stories, Civil War stories, and tall tales; all of which are dark, gory and cynical -- plus The Devil's Dictionary and the writings Bierce collected as Bits of Autobiography for his 1909-12 Collected Works. I'd have preferred at least two volumes of Bierce -- adding in Write It Right and selections of his journalism and letters -- but this is the core of his work. Bierce is, to my mind, the greatest half-unknown American writer. (But the greatest half-unknown American work is Frank Norris's amazing novel McTeague.)

Kurt Vonnegut's Novels & Stories 1963-1973: the LoA has done two Vonnegut volumes so far (though I do wonder if they'll continue and do his later, lesser books) -- this one and another collecting novels and stories from 1950 through '62. This one has both Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five in it, and I intermittently think I should re-read some Vonnegut (particularly since I don't think I've read any of his major novels as an adult).

And, since I was buying stuff from LoA already, I also got A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science and Other Writings -- I had a copy of Just Enough Libeling pre-Deluge, and I have a feeling there will come a day when I suddenly want to read some Liebling.

Last, books I picked up by hand in a real bookstore, like an old-fashioned person: 

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis -- it's his new novel, it's been getting good reviews, and there was a time when I fanatically read everything Amis wrote. (I think the horrible Night Train cured me of that, but House of Meetings was strong, so he's half-won me back.)

The Garden State by Gary Krist -- I still have vague thoughts about collecting the '80s Vintage Contemporaries, and this is a collection of stories I've heard about for twenty-plus years without ever actually reading. (I also keep misremembering that it was the source of the movie of the same name, but I don't think it actually was.)

The Receptionist by Janet Groth -- Groth was the receptionist at the New Yorker offices for 21 years -- 1957-78, so not recent years -- and this is her memoir of that time, with the expected focus on vaguely thrilling and/or titillating stories about the boldfaced names of the literary world. 

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan -- Thing 2 asked for this, since it's the new book in a series he's been reading. (He's still on a tear through mostly YA fantasy -- just read The Phantom Tollbooth without even my forcing it on him, and working through the "Dark Is Rising" books as well.

Railsea by China Mieville -- this is also officially a YA book, but it's for me. Yes, I still haven't read last year's Embassytown, maybe because it looked more "worthy" -- i.e., like spinach -- but it's on the shelf. And this one might well lap it.

The Pornographers by Akiyuki Nosaka -- I have to admit it:  I picked this one up entirely because of the title (which means it did its job). It's a Japanese novel from the late '60s, which is about a pornographic film company -- and what I have is a Tuttle edition, printed in 2006, only for sale in Japan.

The Afterlife Diet by Daniel Pinkwater -- This is Pinkwater's only novel for adults, and I got to thinking about Pinkwater recently. In particular, I was thinking that I don't have any of his books anymore (they were all lost in the flood), and so I'm going to correct that as quickly as possible.

And one of the biggest losses from last year's flood was about three shelves of P.G. Wodehouse books, in the wonderful Overlook Press editions. I'm rebuilding those as I can, and I got four more this time out: Cocktail Time (an Uncle Fred novel from 1958), Big Money (a standalone 1931 novel), Quick Service (a 1940 novel about ham and marriage, which I read a year before I began this blog), and Heavy Weather (the classic 1933 Blandings novel about Gallahad's memoirs).

Read in August

As the summer wound down -- quite obviously so, since there was almost autumn-like weather in my area for most of the month -- I got myself caught back up on writing about the books I read, since I'm obsessive. (If anyone out there wants to harness my powers of reading SF/fantasy/comics for truth and righteousness, give me a buzz.) Here's what did pass in front of my eyeballs over the past thirty-one days:

Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex (8/6)

Rachel Klein, editor, Fodor's Los Angeles, 25th Edition (8/6)

Leonard Kinsey, The Dark Side of Disney (8/7)

Matthew Hughes, Costume Not Included (8/9)

Joe Daly, Dungeon Quest, Book Three (8/10)

Rick Steves, Travel As a Political Act (8/15)

Ray Fawkes, Possessions, Book Three: The Better House Trap (8/17)

Carrie Vaughn, After the Golden Age (8/20)

Dave Roman & Justin Green, Teen Boat! (8/20)

Derf Backderf, My Friend Dahmer (8/21)

Matthew Loux, Salt Water Taffy: Caldera's Revenge, Book 2 (8/22)

Lawrence Block writing as Ben Christopher, Strange Embrace (8/22)

Lawrence Block writing as Sheldon Lord, 69 Barrow Street (8/23)

Doug Lansky, The Titanic Awards (8/24)

Chris Strodder, The Disneyland Encyclopedia (8/29)

Michael and Trista Knight, Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California With Kids, 10th Edition (8/31)

I'm almost caught up right now -- with five books to write about, which I can (with any luck) get to over this long weekend. 

Next up: September, when both of my sons go back to school. (Actually, both of them are going to new schools: Thing 1 is a high school freshman, and Thing 2 hits middle school with 6th grade.) I've been warned that I may have to become the homework parent, so we'll see how busy my evenings get.