The Great Amazon Squeeze, Once Again

This week, Jeff Bezos admitted what numerous teardown analyses have shown: that Amazon sells its Kindle devices at "cost" to drive content sales. There's no indication of how optimistic Amazon is when it determines its "cost," so the general suspicion in publishing that they actually sell devices at a slight loss is still entirely plausible.

And those with memories that stretch back more than a couple of years remember that the famous $9.99 Kindle price point was also, in the vast majority of cases, selling at a loss. Since the end of the great antitrust suit means that Amazon is free to once again discount major-publisher books below its own cost, is there anyone who doesn't believe that Amazon will do so again?


(The comparison in that Forbes article is with videogames, where Sony, Microsoft, etc, do take a small loss on each $300-$500 console...but then make that up by making hefty profits on each piece of $60 software for that console, plus the gravy of direct-to-consumer DLC. I don't need to point out the differences between that and the book market, do I?)


So, to review: Amazon sells hardware at what is at best a breakeven price to sell more content, and then sells content at a loss to maintain lock-in with their customers. It must be nice to have a pile of money so large that you can burn it off idly like that.

But, if I owned Amazon stock, I know I'd be screaming right now.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/6

Hey, kids! Books!

I get books in the mail because I review books on the Internet -- but, since I could never review everything I see, I also do these weekly posts, every Monday, to list what I've just seen and (I hope) describe them in such a way that people who will like them realize that and leap forward to clasp those books to their bosoms. But, to reiterate: I haven't actually read any of these books yet, and I might not manage to read any specific one of them. But that never stopped anyone else from pontificating about things they don't know, so here goes:

Leading off this week is The Hive, the middle volume of a graphic album trilogy from Charles Burns that began with X'ed Out (see my review). If you want to know how important a cartoonist Burns is, see his masterpiece Black Hole -- he's the best cartoonist we have now about the uneasy, everything's-changing side of adolescence, with its messy emphasis on the physical in all its horror and splendor. You probably don't want to read The Hive without finding X'ed Out first, but that's no hardship: both are short, with crisp, uneasy Burns art presented well on big pages -- the physical (and partially story) influence for this series is Tintin. The Hive is a hardcover from Pantheon, officially hitting stores tomorrow.

Vertical, the masters of publishing interesting manga, have sent me a stack of books this week, all of which I think are either publishing this month or came out recently:

• There are two volumes of GTO: The Early Years, which reprint pre-Great Teacher Onizuka stories by Toru Fujisawa (the series as originally published back in 1995 in Japan, before it turned into the GTO series proper), Volumes 14 and 15, which complete that series and bring it up to the "official" beginning of GTO.
• The Flowers of Evil, Volume 3 continues Shuzo Oshimi's creepy story of obsessed middle-schoolers and their unhealthy relationships
• And The Drops of God: New World jumps forward hugely in Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto's story of wine and filial duty to leap into a segment of the story set in the US and featuring lots of US wines. (This seems to be a bid to grab a larger American audience, but it seems odd: are there that many Americans who only drink American wine and also would be interested in a Japanese story about wine? It strikes me that cultural monomaniacs would retain that reflexive anti-foreigner sense in other areas as well.)

Noted New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts has turned to fiction with After the Fall, a heavily illustrated short novel about one very rich Upper East Side family who suddenly find their fortunes turn and have to live in Central Park. It looks to be more whimsical and fun than serious and dour, though -- in keeping with the rococo, faintly out-of-touch with reality air of Roberts's cartoons. After the Fall is a hardcover from Norton, coming November 12th.

Beth Revis's YA science-fiction trilogy "Across the Universe" -- which began in the novel of the same name -- concludes with Shades of Earth, coming from Razorbill in January. Our young protagonists, Amy and Elder, reach the target planet of their starship, to find new dangers and threats, as one usually does on far-flung alien worlds.

And last for this week is Bowl of Heaven by SF heavyweights Gregory Benford and Larry Niven [1], coming as a Tor hardcover next week. It's big-idea hard SF -- a crewed interstellar expedition discovers a half-Dyson Sphere, surrounding a star and heading to the same target star as the human ship. Of course our heroes go to investigate the gigantic ship, and of course they encounter complications -- so many that the last page of this book teases Shipstar, the next book in the series.

[1] I nearly called them "twin" heavyweights, but then remembered Benford is a non-metaphorical twin himself, and decided that would be confusing.

A Flurry of Back-Dating

Yes, a bunch of posts just went live this afternoon, dated over the past week. No, I probably can't adequately explain why I did it that way, so I won't try. (It has to do with plans and expectations, and how they change over time -- real introspective crap that no one would care about.)

The point is that the books I read in September are now (mostly) covered here, with a few stragglers to come "soon." And I intend to work more forward than backward in the coming days -- but, as always, I make no guarantees.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

I've said before that one of my favorite kinds of books is the collection of occasional essays by a novelist -- preferably, collecting twenty or thirty years worth of random non-fiction from someone much more comfortable with fiction -- and so I was very happy to see Distrust That Particular Flavor, which is precisely that.

Gibson has written about two dozen pieces of journalism, speeches, introductions, and other odd lengths of string since about 1990, and they are collected here, in the kind of stylish package that adds a couple of pages between each piece to make the covers just that much farther apart. The essays and speeches here are all more or less dated, since what people ask SF writers to do is talk about the future, and nothing dates more quickly than non-fictional futures.

But these are all Gibsonian futures, with his spiky wit and wry viewpoint, which makes them at least as interesting as the actual future that we did receive. And, as is also usual for this form, he provides a short afterword to each piece, talking about when it was written or what has happened since or something similarly interesting. It's not Gibson fiction, but, for me -- and I'm at least three novels behind -- it apparently is better.

The Utterly Fantabulous Seventh Anniversary Hoe-Down!

Seven years ago today yesterday, Antick Musings shambled into existence, a training blog to get me in shape to write the official SFBC blog, which I then expected to start very soon thereafter. That official blog didn't start up as quickly as expected, and ended abruptly -- among other things that ended abruptly at exactly the same time -- but Antick Musings soldiers on, if much changed and altered over the years.

For the first few years, especially when I was working for the SFBC and, later, had hopes of getting back into the SFF field, I insisted that Antick Musings wasn't a book-review blog, and didn't post anything critical of any of the SFF books I read. (Of course, as we've seen, even things I think are positive are sometimes taken otherwise by some writers -- writers are of necessity thin-skinned, so I should have anticipated that.) Once it was clear that I was out, and not getting back in, Antick Musings slid in the other direction -- particularly during and after the year-long stint of Book-A-Day in 2010-2011 -- and became almost entirely a book-review blog.

None of that is what I intended or expected, but a blog -- like life -- is what actually happens day-to-day, not what anyone plans or controls. And so I don't want to say what Antick Musings will become, since I simply don't know: it becomes whatever it becomes because of what I think and write, and because of what happens to me in the meantime.

Before I go any further in my navel-gazing, let me give you the inevitable links back to prior anniversary posts: one, two, three, four, six. (Yes, I missed the only milestone anniversary this blog has had so far, which very well illustrates the way I operate: lots of thought and energy and activity, inevitably directed in an unproductive way.)

Post quantity dropped precipitously during Book-A-Day, and hasn't recovered since -- partially because I launched another blog, Editorial Explanations, immediately after Book-A-Day ended, and partially because I seem to have stopped writing lots of short posts the way I used to. I could also try to blame that drop in post count here on my increased Twitter presence -- except I post only sporadically there -- or the Hornswogglets Tumblr, except that's practically a ghost town, with just a few stray posts and lots of roaming tumbleweeds. Whatever the reasons, here are the numbers:

• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Since Antick Musings has turned into primarily a book-review blog, I should link to some of the ones I thought were most successful. This year, though, I'm going to do it with quotes, allowing me to quote myself, which is nearly as disreputable, and precisely as pleasant, as it sounds:

• "Some books need more explanation than others." -- Getting Off by Lawrence Block
• "I'm never entirely sure of my own motives, and instinctively distrust anyone who claims to completely know himself." -- The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux
• "As usual with a mysterious, hidden leader, there are factions that would be quite happy to replace him with a more visible face of Muscovy -- themselves, for example." -- Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick
• "Words are tricky, complicated things -- even the seemingly simple ones." -- Snuff by Terry Pratchett
• "And, when a songwriter comes to write a novel, you'd expect it to be precisely written, shining an intense spotlight on a few moments, a few people, a few carefully-chosen actions." -- Bright's Passage by Josh Ritter
• "It's not a memoir, exactly -- but it's not not a memoir, either, and that deeply Blockian ambivalence to the clean, straight, obvious answer makes this a wonderful book for Block fans." -- Afterthoughts by Lawrence Block
• "It's common to make excuses for the past, to assume that people who lived and died before we did are therefore lesser, limited beings, stunted by not having been born in the obvious high point of all civilization." -- Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley by Floyd Gottfredson
• "A serious story tries not to damage the known laws of physics too seriously; a frivolous one postulates whatever it needs to in order to keep moving forward." -- The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• "The magic in these books has the danger and threat of old fairy tales and worse: touching it once marks a person for life." -- Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly
• "But there's no vengeance to be found in V Is For Vengeance, and a reader may well suspect that Grafton is now just working from a list of Acceptable Mystery Title Words, and writing whatever book she feels like under that title." -- V Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton
• "Perhaps, like my father-in-law -- and like a million other fathers-in-law across this fine nation of ours -- O'Rourke has become one of those men with whom one must never discuss politics." -- Holidays in Heck by P.J. O'Rourke
• "So Boomerang is a quite entertaining, lively little book. But it's also very much like the story of a rape investigation that spends its entire time detailing the minutia of the victim's clothing and behavior on the night of the crime -- it is entirely beside the point." -- Boomerang by Michael Lewis
• "By my own lights, I'm still reading Peter Ackroyd's gigantic mosaic history London -- I have a bookmark in it and everything -- although I haven't touched that book for several years, so my "reading" it is mostly theoretical at this point." -- London Under by Peter Ackroyd
• "You actually are at risk of learning something from an Oatmeal cartoon, which is not the case for most webcomics." -- 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth by The Oatmeal
• "At times, I had the uneasy sense that not only did I know more about Internet porn than these authors, but that I knew more about romance novels than they did." -- A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas
• "And unhappy families breed unhappy people, who again fall into types -- the sullen teenage boy, the cold and controlling mother, the quietly alcoholic father, the introverted anorexic daughter." -- Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme
• "One could say all of those things and more." -- Joe the Barbarian by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy
• "Continuity, these days, is just the name of another dead comics company -- Marvel and DC tell you what the past is today, and they'll tell you differently tomorrow, and if you don't like it, well, where else can you get your stories of Superman and Spider-Man?" -- Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore and various artists
• "They grow up, they live their individual lives -- long or short, as it happens -- they make their ways in the world and think about what they want and need and feel." -- One Soul by Ray Fawkes
• "But don't we all have to provide some value to other people, whatever it is we do for a living?" -- A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz
• "Into every life some frivolity must come, or else we would slit our wrists at the sheer horror of it all." -- Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
• "But if anything could make a Clowes fictional world better, it wouldn't be a Clowes world -- and that is what Andy must learn, like all of Clowes's characters: nothing ever gets better, and the world is a passage of misery and pain, full of jerks, losers, criminals, and creeps." -- The Death-Ray by Dan Clowes
• "Mauldin was systematically dismantling all of his good will and success from the war years by doing the one thing an editorial cartoonist must: fearlessly telling the truth as he sees it, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted." -- Willie & Joe: Back Home by Bill Mauldin
• "That theory is amusing, and would be even more amusing at about 2 AM in some convention party, anytime in the past forty years." -- Redshirts by John Scalzi (which also spawned A Helpful Note) 
• "Fiction that aims at art bends events to fit its conceptions, but pulp doesn't have that luxury: pulp thrives on speed of production and speed of comprehension, so a pulp story can't be too specific or idiosyncratic; it needs to tell the story that the reader expects, and get out of the way." -- Strange Embrace/69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block
• "But it is possible, even within the boyish, flashy confines of historical fantasy, to write about real women leading period-appropriate lives -- and, even more importantly, to have those women both be true to themselves and show their real strength to modern readers." -- Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal
• "It is thoroughly enjoyable and entirely wonderful, and should under no circumstances be left only for teenagers to read." -- Flora's Fury by Ysabeau S. Wilce
• "The greatest test of a travel book is how much it makes the reader want to share that experience, and Theroux -- no matter how much he focuses on the grime, the delays, the petty bureaucratic annoyances, the horrible schedules, the often grinding boredom, the sheer waste of time -- still makes his travels into a hopeful journey of discovery." -- Ghost Train to the Evening Star by Paul Theroux
• "The working world, and the world in general, is not a wonderful, special place full of love and light and happiness, but work -- often unpleasant and always directed by someone else -- full of people that we don't get to choose." -- Freeway by Mark Kalesniko

My love-hate relationship with the status of Antick Musings as a book review blog was the undertone of much of what I wrote this year. (Yes, I do realize it -- it is that obvious.) Probably the most -- possibly only -- interesting bit of that was What a Pile of Books Demanding to Be Reviewed Looks Like.

I used to write about movies here -- hell, I used to see movies regularly, but I've been too busy or anxious or whatever to do more than one a month for a good year now -- but the only real remnant of that this past year is a lone Movie Log post called Catching Up Once Again.

At the end of 2011, as is now traditional, I picked the best books I'd read each month that year, as a pseudo-Top Ten of the year. It's a weird format, but I like weird formats.

Speaking of particular days of the year, I also continued my tradition of rounding up the very particular news announced on the first day of April.

I blogged about music intermittently, talking up songs by The Airborne Toxic Event, Local H, Fountains of Wayne, Mieka Pauley, Cloud Cult, Sleigh Bells, and The Indelicates.

I caved into peer pressure more than once, with such memes as Less Exciting Book Titles and The Weird Questionnaire. I also -- clearly misunderstanding how memes work, and why people do them -- tried to start my own, with the too complicated and smells-like-work Five Quotes.

In the aftermath of last year's flood, I wrote something closer to a real essay than I usually manage: What We Lose, What We Save. I'm still reasonably proud of it.

Every Monday, I had a Reviewing the Mail post to examine -- and, often, to supposedly-humorously interrogate -- the books that had arrived in the prior week's mail.

If you're concerned about your personal brand, I have some words for you. Many of them are unprintable.

I blogged about the various tempests-in-teapots of publishing much less this past year -- perhaps because they all start to look the same, after a while -- but I did write about What Publishers Don't Do, Street Dates and Sales Velocity, Amazon Drops a Big Shoe, Barry Eisler Continues to Shill for Amazon, Stating the Obvious,

I review comics, though I don't do much of the chin-scratching (or hair-tearing, or forked-tonguing) kind of blogging about comics that defines the form on the Internet. This year, my major think-piece in that area was The Myth of the Comics Creator,

Have I mentioned that I hate consultants? Let me point you towards In Which a Lying Liar Lies.

As my sons have grown up, I've spent much less time blogging about the cute little things they do -- partially because tweens don't do cute little things -- but I did actually put up a picture to go along with my thoughts about My Alarmingly Large and Increasingly Grown-Up Son. 

And those are the kinds of things I blogged about this past year -- plus lots and lots more posts listing books, whining about the books that were destroyed, and reviewing books I had semi-recently read. It's a rut, I admit it. And maybe admitting it will let me find a new rut to trample down for a while.

I hope you'll stick around for Year Eight.

15-Love by Andi Watson & Tommy Ohtsuka

Watson is a great maker of comics, from this early work in the rough but charming Samurai Jam through a series of mostly romantic slice-of-life stories like Slow News Day and Breakfast After Noon, and possibly best known for the sweet multiversal coming-of-age story Skeleton Key. However, he appears to have turned to writing more workaday comics to pay the bills recently -- not that I'm complaining, since I do quite boring things to pay my own bills -- and one of them is this tennis soap opera.

15-Love is deeply manga-flavored, from the sports milieu to the sad-sack heroine who rapidly gets better under the correct training to the art by Tommy Ohtsuka. But this three-issue series was

too short to develop the depth, character, and idiosyncrasies of the best manga, which means it focused entirely on the main story: how Mill Collins, the worst student at Wayde Tennis Academy, found a new coach (who is large, loud, and drunk, naturally), and saved herself from expulsion. That's not a bad story, and Watson and Ohtsuka tell it with flair, but it is a predictable story, and a very, very old one, which they don't do much to mitigate.

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank

Reading polemical books is a guilty pleasure -- I don't trust anyone who can read books like this and not feel guilty about having one's biases and received ideas so carefully stroked and petted -- so I try not to do it very much.

I haven't read Frank before, though he's quite well-known in lefty to moderate circles for such what's-wrong-with-those-people books as What's the Matter With Kansas? Pity the Billionaire was his new book at the beginning of this year, chronicling, as he put it, how the biggest market failure in seventy years almost immediately created a right-wing backlash that demanded the elimination of all government oversight that's supposed to keep such failures from happening.

I wish he was a bit better at detailing the fiendishly sneaky jujitsu that the Tea Party performed in turning anti-banker anger towards the kind of people who wanted a tighter rein on bankers. And I suppose someone in his position can't drill down to the underlying cause, which is that most people are bone-stupid and easily led. But this is a book that looks at what already seems to be the rear-view mirror -- the heyday of Glen Beck two years ago -- with a clear eye and a position informed by actual facts, and that's fairly useful. When the time comes to write the history of our era, this book will be cited in the footnotes several times.

Quiet by Susan Cain

The kinds of nonfiction that hit major bestseller lists run to a type: serious but friendly explanations about how the whole world is explained by X. Sometimes they're diet books, sometimes exercise -- quite often they're political -- and very regularly, they're things like this, talking about people by tossing them into a few very large buckets, making vast generalizations and almost equally wide-ranging prescriptions for society, and making the reader feel both smart and special in the end.

For Susan Cain and Quiet, the big explanation is the gap between introverts and extroverts, and, from the title, you can guess that she comes down on the side of the shy and unassuming. (You might not be able to tell from the Internet, but I'm a huge introvert myself -- most of us who read lots of books are, for obvious reasons -- which is why I grabbed this particular bus to begin with.)

It's a book that someone like me wants to believe -- that I'm special and wonderful and would be a massively productive and awesome member of society if only I could find just the right niche -- and I'm sure it will help some people. (It got me thinking about some aspects of my own life, which might lead to useful changes, or it might not.) It's reductive and middlebrow, though: you might feel smart and connected while reading it, but, afterward, you're likely to wish that you'd tackled something with some heft instead.

Cardboard by Doug TenNapel

TenNapel is a successful and accomplished maker of cartoon images -- he created Earthworm Jim, and has spent the last decade or so making excellent graphic novels like Ghostopolis (see my review) and Bad Island (also see my review) -- who I never see discussed among the usual comics circles. This is, as far as I can tell, because his books are all for younger readers and mostly published by companies like Scholastic (which has an impressive getting-comics-into-the-hands-of-kids operation, benefiting Kazu Kibuishi and Raina Telgemeier as well as TenNapel), and because they are very slightly formulaic and young-adult-ish in the best way: they're about kids old enough to take responsibility and do serious things who start to do just that. They're also very energetic and full of wild inventive energy -- so far, Ghostopolis is the best of the ones I've read, but Cardboard, which has the wonderful McGuffin of magical cardboard which can be worked into any object, person, or thing, is coming up close behind it. Like Fat Albert, if you're not careful, you just might learn something -- but TenNapel's enthusiasm for his characters and stories is worth that risk.

(Antick Musings notes the generosity of the Thing 2 Foundation in lending its own precious copy of Cardboard to Antick Musings for the purpose of this review.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/29

This opening paragraph will seem more superfluous than usual this week, since I only have one book to write about. (But, hey, why should this book not be worthy? Why shouldn't it get the same treatment as everything else?) And so I need to tell you that these books this book came in my mail this past week, that they it might just be your next favorite book in the whole wide world, and that I haven't yet read them it, but here's what I can tell you anyway:

Only Superhuman is the first "original" novel from Christopher L. Bennett, whose stories have appeared in Analog and whose novels have previously featured sharecropped adventures of folks in jumpsuits connected with starships named Enterprise. It looks like a combination of a "those independent, libertarian, inventive Belters" novel and a "with science, we can create the superman" book -- about a hundred years on, cybernetic modifications are outlawed in near-Earth space but more common out in the wild-and-wooly Belt, where our heroine, Emerald Blair, is inspired by old superhero comics to bring justice to her  lawless home. Of course, she's not the only superhuman, and some of the others have quite different ideas of what is best for their society. Only Superhuman comes as a Tor hardcover on October 16th.

Tune in again next week for more books I haven't read!

Read in September

Before I get into the list, let me backtrack. When I started Antick Musings, I edited SFF professionally, and so didn't write much about genre fiction -- certainly not in a critical way. And I insisted that I didn't do reviews or criticism; I did write about books I read, but not in a systematic way.

Well, that SFF-editing job ended abruptly, and my subsequent job was in a different part of publishing entirely. (Though I still try to keep to the same general rule: I don't shit where I eat, so I only talk briefly and mostly positively about business books, except for occasional potshots at those evil, money-grubbing bastards, the consultants.)

Gradually -- in the manner of a frog being boiled -- Antick Musings moved from being a general blog by someone who worked in book publishing into a book blog, and then into almost exclusively a book-review blog, in which I covered every last book I read in an essay-like post. (The year-long Book-A-Day stretch of 2010 and early 2011 mostly accomplished this.) This isn't what I intended, and -- though it's taken a while to realize it -- isn't what I want, either.

So I'm going to try to go back to something I've said several times and never quite lived up to: covering all of the books I read in a given month by (approximately) the end of that month, and tossing them quickly into a month-end post if need be. Yes, it's more elegant to have an essay, each with its own post, for every book I read, but I don't think many of you care about most of these books and it's a huge commitment of time and energy when my day-job is sucking ever more of both out of me every day.

(I'm happy to write essay-like posts on occasion when someone else wants to pay me for them -- and I'm open to offers of egoboo, traffic, and other non-convertible currencies -- but doing them for everything here strikes me as overkill.)

Those quick takes might still end up being separate posts, if they're long enough (I have a vague longer-than-the-book-cover metric that I use), and they have for a lot of the books below. Even when I proclaim I've got a new, specific, organized way of doing things, I still manage to overcomplicate things; I've sat on this post for a week, trying to get the missing reviews "done" before I posted it. Finally, with enough sleep and free time on a Saturday, I'm closing it up and backdating it to where it belongs -- there will be some edits for links (and maybe to add short reviews here) later, but there always is, anyway.

Kazu Kibuishi, Explorer: The Mystery Boxes (9/4)

Laura Lee Gulledge, Paige by Paige (9/4)

Seymour Chwast, Dante's Divine Comedy (9/6)

William Carlos Williams, Paterson (9/6) -- It's one of the great long poems in the English language, and (I think) one of the most purely American great poems. It's also about the closest large city to me -- but, mostly, it's about how a man is a city, or a city is a man, or a river is a life, or how poetry can encompass absolutely everything in a life or a mind. It's difficult to describe, though I've never found it difficult to read. And I've now read it once a decade for the last three, getting a new copy each time, though not on purpose. If you only know Williams from the wheelbarrow or the plums in the icebox, you're missing a lot. No ideas but in things!

(The cover above is the prior edition -- the one I read 5 or 7 or 10 years ago -- not the current one, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere online.)

Mark Kalasniko, Freeway (9/7)

Daniel Pinkwater, Bushman Lives! (9/10) -- This one deserves a real essay, and will get one. The short form: Pinkwater's novels are all good, but some are magnificent. This is one of the magnificent ones.

David Malki!, Dapper Caps and Pedal-Copters (9/17)

Doug TenNapel, Cardboard (9/18)

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book 5: Prince of the Elves (bound galleys) (9/19) -- I've covered all four previous books in reasonable depth: one, two, three, four. And this volume is more middle, like the last book but even more so. It's an entertaining graphic novel series for tweens, but not much more than that -- any comparisons with Jeff Smith's Bone are quite strained. Still, Kibuishi tells a good story, and I still have hopes that he'll hit a point when he stops complicating it and starts knitting it back together for a big finish. But, for now, it's enough to note that it exists, it's very popular, and it's pretty good for what it is.

Susan Cain, Quiet (9/20)

Raina Telgemeier, Drama (bound galleys) (9/21)

Garth Mueller, Frommer's Los Angeles Day by Day (9/22) -- I'm holding this one to review it with a similar book from the Lonely Planet folks. Honestly, I should probably wait until after my big vacation to review all of the travel books, since only then will I be able to really say how useful they were. But I won't.

Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire (9/25)

Andi Watson & Tommy Ohtuska, 15-Love (9/26)

William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor (9/27)

Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark's Parker: Book Three: The Score (9/28)


I do plan to keep writing essay-like posts for books that I think deserve them, or that will be of greater interest to the people I think are reading this blog. (I look at traffic figures every so often, and continue to be amazed that people actually are reading this blog.) That probably means SFF, most of the time, but I've learned by this point not to make promises.

In Which Robots Are Not As Effective As They Think They Are

Inspired by James Nicoll, I ran my two blogs through two sophisticated analysis engines of the Internet -- aw, who am I kidding? They're both probably hack-jobs put together by a couple of geeks in their spare time, like everything else on the 'net. But it's amusing anyway.

Antick Musings:

• GenderAnalyzer: I am a woman, or at least 51% female
• AgeAnalyzer: I am somewhere between 36 and 50

Editorial Explanations:

• GenderAnalyzer: 88% -- as close to "ineluctably" as you can get -- masculine
• AgeAnalyzer: I am still between ages 36 and 50

That's a huge gap in my gender between two things I write regularly -- 39% of difference. Is it because EE is mostly made up of short posts and dripping in sarcasm? Or is it the stench of politics that drives women away?

Interestingly, the collective wisdom of the crowd is that AgeAnalyzer is less correct -- 59% of the votes are currently "no" -- even though that's not my experience, and it has some wide bands (though still not as binary as male/female).

Does this mean anything at all? No, of course not. But it's yet another tool to poke through things that look like data, which I suppose is moderately useful, at the very least as a way to waste time.

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Top Shelf Sale Extravaganza Aftermath!

Hey, remember a couple of weeks ago, when I told you Top Shelf was having a big sale, with lots of great books cheap? Well, the package I ordered -- that very day, for I am one to put my money onto the place where my mouth already is -- has just arrived, and you can see a picture of the awesome treasures it contained off to the left.

These amazing riches of comics cost well under a single C-note, which is a damn fine deal.

Normally, I would include links to Amazon for all of my new books, to make a few pennies for myself, but, this time, I want you to go to Top Shelf and buy comics from them. Quick -- the sale ends on Friday.

Tell 'em Hornswoggler sent you, and they'll just look at you funny!

Freeway by Mark Kalesniko

No matter how hard storyboard artists and other animation types try, a graphic novel is not the same as a movie, and limiting a comics page to entirely film-derived effects is just as crippling as any other unnecessary artistic limitation. (Writing a novel without the letter 'e," or an opera without the key of C, or trying to tape a live-to-tape sitcom with only one camera -- they can be interesting experiments, but the focus will always be on that live-wire act of the experiment, not the resulting product.)

Freeway is a graphic novel that feels like it desperately wants to be an animated movie, full of camera moves and pans and dissolves, caught up in an entirely film-derived visual vocabulary that denies the physical, tactile possibilities of page-turns and transitions. Mark Kalesniko does use varied panel sizes and placements, but those feel like camera motions -- zooming in and out, changing scenes with establishing shots, making very visual transitions into flashbacks or alternate possibilities -- rather than like pure comics. (Although I may think that because I know Kalesniko is an animator; an actual animator could disagree with me.)

Freeway is the story of both one day -- one morning commute, to be more precise -- and of the whole failed and shattered career of Alex Kalienka, who (like his creator) came to southern California as a young man to work in animation. Alex drives his AMC Pacer to his job as a layout artist at Walt Disney Studios Babbitt Jones Productions, a job that was his dream as a child but which is soul-destroying now for both personal and artistic reasons. Kalesniko doesn't explain anything, and I wasn't always sure what was a flashback, what was real, what was an alternate version of Alex's life, and what was pure fantasy. But Freeway dips in and out of all of those things, showing Alex's arrival in LA in 1979 as the requisite dewy-eyed Canadian youngster, how he got his job at Babbitt Jones -- and how his artistically-driven but politically unwise choices of friendships slowly got him into trouble -- how he met his girlfriend, and how their relationship suffered from the onslaught of her large Chinese family, and other events in his working life. But it also shows what seem to be entirely fantasy sequences -- as when Alex imagines his own death on the highway several times -- as well as a perfect version of his own life, lived in the late '40s, in which his girlfriend and work are both perfect and he's always happy. And the end of Freeway jumps ever-more-quickly among these different levels of reality -- often panel-to-panel -- leaving the reader confused about what "really" happened.

More frustrating is the timeline of Freeway. Both the fantasy life and Alex's first visit to LA are closely fixed in time -- in the late '40s and 1979, respectively -- but his Babbitt Jones career is fuzzier. He clearly didn't start working there until some time after that first trip -- but is "some time" one year? Five? A dozen? Any of those are plausible. And his career at Babbitt Jones doesn't seem to have lasted more than a handful of years -- so does that mean that the "now" of Freeway is set in the late '80s? Or the mid '90s? Or really "now"? (How old and decrepit are we meant to take that AMC Pacer?) My impression is that Freeway is meant to take place only about a decade or so after that first visit, that Alex is having his first crisis about the value of his work and the purpose of his life, some time in his early '30s. But the book never says that, and never makes it clear -- this is a book published in 2011, so the default reader assumption is that it's happening "now".

So Freeway is a frustrating book: lovely and thoughtful, but one that keeps the reader thinking about technical and story considerations (when is this taking place? is this scene real or memory or fantasy?) when he should be falling into Alex's life and experiencing his crisis directly. Freeway is very ambitious, but perhaps a little too much so: a little more clarity, and a little less flashy camera-work, would have made it flow better and punch harder. (And its lesson is unfortunately banal for anyone Alex's age or older: the working world, and the world in general, is not a wonderful, special place full of love and light and happiness, but work -- often unpleasant and always directed by someone else -- full of people that we don't get to choose.) Read Freeway for those masterful shifts of focus, from reality to fantasy to flashback, but keep your eye on it and all of your attention, so that it doesn't get away from you.