Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/10

..will be delayed this week.

I got back from a week-long family vacation in sunny Cal-i-forn-i-a (possibly the subject of its own post, if I get around to it in time) late Sunday night, just in time to see that there are boxes, but not to open them.

So the current hope is that I will update this Monday evening to adequately describe the splendor and wonder that are in those boxes. Let's see if I get to it that quickly -- Monday is also the first day that I try to commute to work in Hoboken post-Sandy, which I expect will evoke a reaction such as the below.

 

Update, 11/18: Well, that took longer than expected, but here's what was waiting for me when I got back from vacation:

First up is a book I got through the auspices of Amazon's "Vine" program for reviewers, which is another attempt by that retail behemoth to take over and control every last aspect of book publishing and distributing that it can. (Not that I seem to mind that much, as far as it affects my actual behavior and not my online complaining.) Julian Barnes's new book is Through the Window, a collection of essays about writers and books, published as a trade paperback original from Vintage on October 30th (during that big storm you may have heard about). Barnes is an excellent, smart novelist -- I particularly liked his puckish A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and recently reviewed here the short novel The Sense of an Ending -- and possibly an even better writer of nonfiction, with books like the lovely journalism collection Letters from London and the recent Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Sure, he's a "literary" writer, which we grubby genre types are supposed to despise, but he's a great, wonderful writer who has dabbled in non-realistic stuff several times, and I've been reading him with great pleasure for twenty years or so now.

I also have two paperbacks from the fine folks at DAW Books, both publishing in December:

• Elemental Magic is an anthology of new stories set in Mercedes Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series (the retold fairy tales in more-or-less-modern day series, starting with The Serpent's Shadow), edited and with a new story by Lackey. Other contributors include the usual DAW crew: Rosemary Edghill, Diana L. Paxson, Elisabeth Waters, Jody Lynn Nye, Tanya Huff, and almost a dozen more.
• Alien Vs. Alien is the sixth book in Gini Koch's series of contemporary SF novels (they look a lot like urban fantasy -- heroine with massive levels of spunk and a silly name, romantic tension turning into soap operatic series-length plots, long-running conflicts with powerful enemies -- in a SFnal setting), and, in this one, our heroine's husband goes missing and that's the least of her worries.

Everything else I have -- and it's quite a bit -- is from one big shipment from Yen Press, the manga/graphic novel sister of the SFnal imprint Orbit Books. All of 'em seem to be publishing in November. 

The novel Zoo -- by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, one of those hot-weather thrillers about ridiculous implausibilities causing mass death and devastation (in this case, that pretty much all animals in the world start attacking humans at every opportunity) -- has been turned into a graphic novel by Andy MacDonald. If you like to see lions and gorillas taking bites of out people's heads, this is the book for you.

The rest of the Yen Press box is made up of series books -- most, but not all, of them originally from Japan -- and so I'll organize them my usual way, from lowest volume number to highest, so you can see me getting more and more confused by accumulating backstory.

Mari Yamazaki's Thermae Romae, Vol. 1 is an attractive, large-sized hardcover with a plastic jacket that is both appealing to the eye and severs to cover the naughty bits of the statue on the front cover. Romae has one of those goofy premises that are so wonderful when they work right: harried Roman architect (and bath-house designer) Lucius accidentally gets sucked through the bottom of a bath and somehow finds himself in modern Tokyo, among the only other society in history as bath-obsessed as his own. I think, from poking through this book, that he goes back and forth between the two worlds (presumably through that magic plughole), so that Romae isn't just a fish-out-of-water comedy. Whatever it is, it looks very different, and worth a look.

Also a first volume, but somewhat more conventional, is Misun Kim's Aron's Absurd Armada, a silly, mostly 4-koma (with some longer, conventionally-formatted stories interspersed) series about ne'er-do-well pirates in a very vaguely 18th century Atlantic Ocean kind of world.

Officially a first volume is Umineko: When They Cry: Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch (by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi), though it's actually somehow related to the Higurashi: When They Cry series. (Though, after checking the Internet a bit, I suspect the only real connection is that both "Cry" series are based on computer games in the same solve-the-murder genre from the same Japanese developer.) The rich Ushiromya family is gathering for their annual festivities on an isolated island, and an estranged young man, Battler -- Battler?!? -- is rejoining for the first time in several years. And, as Agatha Christie fans would expect, once the island is cut off from the world, the bodies start falling.

Soulless, Vol. 2 continues the adaptation of Gail Carriger's "Parasol Protectorate" series (under the title of the first book in that series), with art by an entity credited as REM. Since the first book adapted the first novel (Soulless) in the series, my assumption -- though we all know what happens we one assumes -- is that this book, more-or-less-adapts book two, Changeless, into comics. See my review of the novel Soulless for more details, if such be necessary.

The third volume of Satoko Kiyuduki's Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro has finally come around -- I reviewed the first two volumes, back when I was reviewing regularly for ComicMix -- after a delay I have no idea what caused. But this quirky, and quietly dark series is back, and I'm happy to pick it back up -- it's not like anything else I've read.

Now we're getting into the realms of real confusion, with the sixth volume of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan, a parody spinoff of the main Haruhi Suzumiya comic, which itself is a brand extension of the series of light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa. Supply lines are getting pretty long, and we're deep into otaku territory here. This book is written by Tanigawa, with art by Puyo.

Also this month is the seventh volume of Yumi Unita's Bunny Drop, which was originally about a confirmed bachelor raising a little girl, but turned into a romance story mid-way through, when the time jumped to make that little girl a teenager. As I understand it, there are parallel romances for both the girl and her grumpy, now-middle-aged guardian, but I'll admit that I haven't read the series at all.

Milan Matara's Omamori Himari is a family-of-demon-slayers story (incorporating the standard hot girl who is also a powerful spirit and defends the "regular guy" hero with all of the power and the very few clothes at her disposal) with added fanservice -- as seen by the M-rating on this ninth volume in front of me.

I read the first volume of Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater and enjoyed it -- and enjoyed Soul Eater again when I wandered back in, several volumes later, though I was a bit more confused then -- but I haven't made a habit of reading it. However, my older son is now getting into this zippy, very shonen story of demon-hunters and their sentient, shape-shifting weapons, so I may have to read more of it to have another topic of conversation with him. (How horrible! Having to read comics to communicate with one's own offspring! I do have a nice life.) This month sees the eleventh volume, in which our heroes are attached by someone (or something) called Arachnophobia.

And last for this week is the twelfth volume of Yuhki Kamatani's Nabari No Ou, which I have to admit that I haven't read at all. I'm sure this has fighting in it, but I have no idea who is doing the fighting, or about what. So I'm afraid you'll need to find a more reliable guide if that cover looks intriguing.

An Avalanche of Books from the Top Shelf

Top Shelf Productions is one of my favorite comics companies -- not least because they have periodic awesome sales like the one I blogged about in early September. And the aftermath of a great comics sale is a big pile of comics, and the aftermath of that is a bunch of books to review.

So let me dive right in....

Gingerbread Girl was originally a free webcomic -- in fact, it's still up, so you can read part or all of it before buying if you like -- by husband-and-wife team Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. (I knew Coover from her sweetly sexy comic Small Favors, and Tobin has been writing comics for some time as well.)

It's the story of perky young twentysomething Annah Billips -- and that name is so self-indulgent that she just might have chosen it for herself -- who is one of those oh-so-cute girls who can skate along on charm, winsomeness, and a twinkly smile for the first thirty or so years of their lives. (It can be even easier if you're both bisexual, like our Annah, and living in a forgiving, liberal city like Portland.) Her story is told -- directly to the reader, with surprising regularity -- by Annah, by the people she knows and meets, by random passers-by, by pigeons and dogs, and covers the course of one long evening and one (of two potential) dates she had. It also circles the question of Annah herself: she deeply believes she have a twin, created by her scientist father from the Penfield homunculus in her brain, and either this is true or Annah is seriously mentally ill.

Gingerbread Girl will not tell you which is true. But it will circle around an interesting, very quirky character for a hundred pages, with cute art from Coover and some very thoughtfully entertaining words from Tobin.

As long as I'm talking about what things aren't, I should say that Ed Piskor's graphic novel Wizzywig is definitely not the true story of famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. The central character of Wizzywig is Kevin Phenicle, who just happened to do nearly all of the things that Mitnick was famous for, in pretty much the same order and in the same places, for basically the same reasons, and went to jail the same way with a very similar controversy surrounding him.

I have no idea why Piskor decided to fictionalize Mitnick's story, or -- after that decision -- why he then stuck so very close to the real facts for most of the book. Perhaps he felt it necessary to give Mitnick's life a more conventionally novelistic arc -- Phenicle's life in prison is more eventful, and the telling of it more cathartic, than Mitnick's actual life would have been. But, still: Wizzywig is basically Mitnick's story up until Phenicle's arrest, and then diverges.

Piskor tells that story in a complicated round-robin style derived (possibly) from Dan Clowes. (His art, too, is somewhere in the broad region defined by Clowes, Bob Fingerman, and the later Drew Friedman.) There's a Greek chorus of random people who regularly chime in about Phenicle -- or, more often, his mysterious hacker alias "Boingthump" -- plus stories about Phenicle, his childhood best friend and later strongest defender Winston Smith (nudge nudge, wink wink!), and the crusading newsman Ron Shumway, who made Boingthump one of his major bugbears.

It's fun and energetic and thrilling, but it's glossier and more fictional than it needed to be -- Mitnick's real story is at least as interesting as this one, and remains behind the story Piskor does tell like a shadow on every page. Wizzywig is a fine graphic novel, but it could have been better if it had decided to either tell Mitnick's story for real or to tell an entirely fictional story.

The Lovely Horrible Stuff is the newest book from Eddie Campbell, telling another semi-autobiographical tale to follow up the long series of "Alec" stories he's produced for about thirty years. (The bulk of them are included in the recent, and absolutely essential, compendium Alec: "The Years Have Pants", and I point you at my review of that book to explain what's so good about it.) Campbell transmuted the often barely fictional Alec MacGarry into the slightly more factual Eddie Campbell at the end of The Years Have Pants, and Lovely continues in the same vein: the Eddie Campbell character here is Eddie Campbell himself, and the style and tone of the stories continues as before.

This time out, though, Campbell is working in color, as he has in his recent books (The Fate of the Artist, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, The Playwright), which gives these stories a subtly different texture than the black-and-white-and-tone work that most of the Alec work had.

Campbell's work is as puckish as ever -- after an abandoned project on the history of humor, Lovely is an examination of the world of money. Campbell, as always, isn't interested in a complete picture, so Lovely covers two things in its two chapters: his own history with money (mostly as a freelancer trying to get money out of the people who hired him), and the story of the Pacific island of Yap, where giant circular stones (quarried on a different island, quite some way away) are the most valuable and important kind of money.

It really doesn't matter what Campbell's ostensible subject is, though: the joy is in seeing him wander around and through it, thinking about this bit and then complaining about that bit and then digressing into a bar full of literary figures all complaining about their unpaid bills. Campbell is an artist in full control of his impressive talents; his pages are smart and funny and interesting and the stories they make up are equally so.

But comics don't need to be serious and thoughtful; comics can also be rip-snorting adventure. And a great example of that is Kevin Cannon's Far Arden, the tale of hard-living, hard-drinking Army Shanks, late of the Royal Canadian Arctic Navy, and his adventures in the far north of Canada.

Shanks gets caught up in the search for the fabled island of Far Arden -- by legend, a tropical paradise in the far north. Along the way, he encounters boys dressed as wolves, semi-friendly bears, creepy circuses, femmes fatales both out of his past and new, clean-cut college students, professors with mysterious plots, scheming local politicians, RCAN sailors both honest and not, secret messages, hidden maps, lecture tours, bar fights, long voyages in open boats -- not precisely "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles," but a very similar list.

Shanks's world is cold and dangerous, though; Far Arden has many of the characteristics of a romp, but it's not entirely one. But it's a fat book (in a small, fits-neatly-in-the-hand size) with a quirky sensibility and a plot that charges forward in unexpected directions on every page, and the voyage is well worth the price of admission. It's not quite pure adventure, but it's only diluted very slightly with regret and mystery and tragedy, which makes a heady drink.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/3

I am writing this from an undisclosed location, far from the storm-wracked wilds of New Jersey. To assuage the fears that I'm sure none of you actually have: no, I did not flee because of weather (or any other threats). This was a long-planned trip.

But, nevertheless, I am far away and my mail (if any) is at my home. Now, I can say with 100% confidence that no packages arrived up through Friday, since I saw them not-arrive my my own eyes. But I do have to admit that there is a small (though non-zero) chance that some book, or books, crept in through the devastation and despite the gas shortages to make their way to my doorstep on Saturday.

It's possible. It's plausible. It's unlikely, but it could still have happened. And, so, since I'm the kind of person who always tries to be as accurate as possible, I have to say that the set of books received this week is actually indeterminate -- like Schrodinger's cat, it may exist or have perished quietly in a box somewhere far away.

Either way, this post is pretty useless, isn't it?

(And don't expect much more in the way of blogging for the next week, since I'll still be in that very same undisclosed location, taking part in undisclosed activities and having a classifed level of enjoayment. I have been authorized, though, to say that I'll see you next week.)

Women on the Outside: Two Memoirs

Pretty much by accident, I happened to read these two books back-to-back recently: two memoirs by women of their lives tangentially connected to the arts, both about their youth and ideals and how those ran into the actual circumstances of life. One is from a woman who worked as a receptionist for a classy magazine for a long time after wanting to write; the other from a woman who wanted to be a rock star and spent a number of years not quite getting there. One is a highly lauded bestseller; the other is little-known and obscure.

One of these books is smart and incisive and clear-eyed; the other is gauzy and vague and platitudinous. And I think you've probably been around the block enough to have figured out which is which.

Janet Groth spent over twenty years as the receptionist of the eighteenth floor of The New Yorker's offices -- "the writers' floor," she was told when she was hired. Those years were 1957 to 1978, and twenty more years later -- after an entire second career as an academic that clearly progressed more satisfactorily than did the New Yorker gig -- she wrote The Receptionist about those years, to join that long shelf of books about the fabled New Yorker offices. One would assume that a book based on twenty years would be filled with juicy, interesting stories of the writers she worked with (or at least in front of), but one would be mistaken: The Receptionist only devotes a few introductory chapters to the famous denizens of that eighteenth floor (all of whom were amazingly nice and kind and special) in her early years, and then instead devotes the bulk of its space to a look at the young Groth's neurotic love-life. (And that could have been an engrossing book: she was on the front lines of the sexual revolution, as a young professional woman from the sticks in big bad New York in the high Mad Men years.)

The Receptionist is a slim book, but don't let that fool you: it's even slighter than it looks. It masquerades as an insider's look at the New Yorker in its golden years under William Shawn, but Groth was never an insider -- in fact, the buried message of The Receptionist, the one Groth doesn't seem to have realized herself, is that she remained on the outside that entire time, ushering people into offices but then leaving herself for a seat by the elevator. (And that book, had she realized it, could also have been something really worth reading.) Though, perhaps, I might be too hard on Groth: it's possible that she wrote a passionate, deeply felt, wart-and-all look at the men of the '50s and '60s New Yorker, and that the folks at Algonquin edited that all out, for fear of lawsuit or unpleasantness. That's very unlikely, though: Groth's writing in The Receptionist shows an essential timidity (yes, the very thing that American society tried its hardest to inculcate in her entire generation, but that's an explanation, not an excuse) and instinctive turning away from any kind of conflict, so I very much doubt that version of The Receptionist ever did, or could, exist.

Groth simply doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, or reputation, so The Receptionist is maddeningly non-specific, as she refuses to even name the boyfriends she had fifty years ago for fear something utterly unspecified might happen. Groth writes, in her early chapters, about how a few New Yorker types pursued her -- she only includes the ones that did so gracefully and as gentlemen, like John Berryman and Joe Mitchell, leaving the reader to wonder if there were any real wolves on the premises -- without ever quite making the connection to why they did so: she was blonde and young and (apparently) available. She never makes the case that they liked her for her she's too busy talking about what geniuses they all were. But surely there must have been more steel in the twenty-something Groth than she tells us, because, according to her, she didn't succumb to the advances of any of those eighteenth-floor geniuses, over a course of many years and what must have been many (genteel, gentlemanly) attempts to get into her pants.

She did, though, succumb to the advances of others, starting with a cartoonist she calls "Evan Simm" and leading through a small group of mostly young men over the next few years -- and this makes up the bulk of the book, the story of how one young woman went from thinking she'd marry the first man she slept with, to thinking it would be the second, to finally realizing (a few years later) that her relationships with men were not healthy. But Groth tells us this -- and tells it to us, too often, at secondhand or by hiding the names of her boyfriends -- rather than making it immediate and real. Maybe she's just too far from that mixed-up twentyish girl to empathize with her anymore, but the young Janet Groth is unknowable in The Receptionist, and the older Groth not much better: it's never clear why she does any of the things she does (or doesn't do), or even that Groth realizes that she's being that opaque.

So The Receptionist combines a tepid whitewashed look at the New Yorker fifty years ago with a bland veiled story of one woman's sexual coming of age in the same era (minus the actual coming of age and learning anything) into one mediocre package. It is a bestseller, but, then, I've already said "mediocre" once, so I'm repeating myself.

Alina Simone isn't famous. She possibly never will be famous. She has never worked for people that are famous. (Though her childhood best friend is Amanda Palmer, who became exactly the kind of rock star that Simone burns to become.) She has, however, been a recording and touring musician -- not as successful as she'd like, but working at what she wants to do -- for the past decade, releasing three full-length records. She might not have done exactly what she wanted to do, but she's nobody's receptionist. And, last year, a collection of autobiographical essays -- it's not quite a single narrative, though the book does have an arc as a whole -- called You Must Go and Win was released, at about the same time as her most recent record, Make Your Own Danger.

And, in sixteen months, You Must Go and Win has sold about 13% of what The Receptionist has done in four. (Who says that rock 'n roll is more popular than the written word?) Once again, there is no justice in the world.

Simone is smart, authentic and entirely honest -- a good part of You Must Go and Win is taken up with her struggles with her own dreams. How does she know what she really wants? Does she want what she really wants? But even more of You Must Go and Win is concerned with the essential meat of the memoir: who am I? where did I come from? how did I end up here?

And when "here" is a flea-infested (and tiny) sublet in Brooklyn, there's an immediate tension there. Even better, "where did I come from" has an equally interesting, specific story: Simone was born in Kharkov, which is currently in Ukrane but was part of the Soviet Union when her parents got permission to leave. (She's a little older than you might expect, from a would-be rock star, and her voice is all the better and richer for it.)

You Must Go and Win is partially about rock 'n' roll, and about dreams thereof, but it's just as much about Russia and Ukrane and weird parts of the world, about punk rock in the old Soviet Union and Simone's love for the dead punk icon Yanka Dyagileva, about her fears and loves and the non-profit day job that kept sending her to Siberia, about traveling the country with Amanda Fucking Palmer, about the Russian Orthodox church and the heretical Doukhbors. Simone is an interesting person, with passions for odd bits of intellectual and social history, depressive in that old Russian way, but always clear about who she is and what she can do. And she writes with the energy of punk rock and the intellectual intricacy of an Orthodox icon.

I read You Must Go and Win because I knew Simone's music, but that's completely unnecessary. She's a great chronicler of her own life, and has lived enough interesting moments to fill many more books like this. This is the book you should be reading.

Quote of the Week: Burn!

"If you’ve ever actually been burned, for instance — like, if your skin has come in contact with something really, really hot, I think that’s a way worse feeling than experiencing a piece of culture that you find unsatisfying."
 - Daniel Handler, on being presented with a commentator who was "burned" because A Series of Unfortunate Events had "more questions than answers"

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

If I'd read this closer to Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor (see my post last month), I'd have combined them into one post, since they're very much the same kind of thing: complete (or nearly so) collections of the occasional nonfiction by major writers who started off solidly in the SF camp but have since drifted in somewhat different directions, but remained solidly in favor of SF and regularly define what they do as SF. (And my personal relationship to the two writers is also very similar: I last read Stephenson with Cryptonomicon, since I fell out of the habit with his massive historical trilogy and was out of the SF field professionally when he came back to it.)

In Some Remarks, Stephenson, non-fictionally, is as we've always suspected: geeky in the most interesting ways, deeply private and protective of that privacy, quirky and particular about his working and living arrangements as only a very successful novelist can be, and intellectually fascinated by a series of shiny new ideas in the way of so many other SF writers. Stephenson, though, could get funding from magazines like Wired to chase those shiny ideas, resulting in pieces like the epic "Mother Earth, Mother Board," a nearly-novel-length tracing of the state of subsea telecommunications cables as of 1996.

Most of the pieces in Some Remarks bear the hallmark of one geeky obsession or other -- Stephenson, for example, is one of the very many SFnally-oriented men of his generation who are still struggling with the fact that they all didn't get to go to space -- though all also bear Stephenson's very particular obsessive focus on specific minutia.

Stephenson fans will be most interested to know that Some Remarks contains two of his very few short stories -- "Spew" and "The Great Simoleon Caper" -- as well as the first sentence of another story that will never be continued. That's not a lot of short fiction, but Stephenson isn't, temperamentally, a short fiction writer at all; he only has another story or two existent at all.

Some Remarks could not be other than a random collection of now mostly-superseded thoughts -- when SF writers are invited to perform journalism, there's always an element of "tell us what THE FUTURE will be like," and that dates very quickly -- but Stephenson's thoughts are the product of deep cogitation and a very particular angle of attack, which makes them worth revisiting even a decade or two later.

Read in October

This month I'm trying an experiment, to see if I can trick myself. I'll list all of the books I read here, and start writing about them here. If I'm like I have been recently -- and I hope that phrase makes sense outside of my head -- I'll end up with things of actual real-post length, which I can then harvest, extract, and turn into separate posts.

In any case, this is what I was reading this past month:

Kevin Huizenga, Gloriana (10/1)

Adam Skolnick, Lonely Planet: Pocket Los Angeles (10/1)

Paul Tobin & Colleen Coover, Gingerbread Girl (10/3)

Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes (10/4)

Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead (10/4)

Ed Piskor, Wizzywig (10/5)

Marc Hartzman, God Made Me Do It (10/8) -- You know how some people keep claiming that the dumb and/or insane things they do are really because of Yahweh? (And that probably bugs you as much as it does me, if you've noticed it.) Well, freelance writer Marc Hartzman is annoyed by those things as well, but he did something about it: he got a contract to write a book collecting all of those idiot's explanations, since they do become funnier the more of them you pile up together. And that book is God Made Me Do It: a compendium of the same bad excuse for an incredibly wide swath of bad behavior, insane ideas, and bone-deep stupidity. It does have a tropism for the modern day, since these idiots are sadly very common nowadays, but Hartzman has not shied away from digging into the archives to find the feebs, poltroons, and liars of the past when they've claimed divine reasons for their own earthly actions. This is not a deep book, or a scholarly one, but it does exactly what it claims to do, and will make any of us who are less than insanely religious feel quietly superior, which is a damn good thing for a book to do.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks (10/11)

Eddie Campbell, The Lovely Horrible Stuff (10/11)

Kevin Cannon, Far Arden (10/12)

E.C. Segar, Popeye, Vol. 6: "Me Li'l Swee'Pea" (10/12) -- Thimble Theatre was a great comic strip in its day, and "its day" precisely tracked the working life of its creator, Elzie Crisler Segar. This volume finishes up his run -- he died in early fall of 1938, after fighting leukemia (and taking time off from the strip to do so) over the previous year and a half. This book also reprints a few non-Segar Thimble Theatres to finish up stories and show the later work, but there's no comparison. If you haven't been listening to me -- I've reviewed volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 here with paeans of praise -- I don't know what else to say here now. Popeye, as Segar made him, is one of the great American characters: cunning but soft-hearted, brawling but a great friend, deeply knowledgeable about his own work but a good-natured naif in the larger world, and always looking out for the little guy, widows, and "orphinks." More than that, he's an icon of America itself in all of those things, a vision of what we want to be and can be, if we only eat our spinach and always do the right thing. Don't start with this book -- it's all middles and endings, though there's some great Wimpy stuff in the Sundays -- but do find that first book, subtitled "I Yam What I Yam!", and see what great American comics looks like.

Janet Groth, The Receptionist (10/16)

Alina Simone, You Must Go and Win (10/18)

Steve Martin, The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten. (10/29) -- Steve Martin has a Twitter handle (@SteveMartinToGo), and he's funny there, as he's been funny pretty consistently in most of his efforts for the last thirty-some years. Since he is Steve Martin, he can even get his Tweets collected into a book -- along with some responses and riffs by his followers, which he notes are often funnier than he is. (One of the never-fail signs of a great comedian is a generosity with praise for other funny people: the best comedians want laughs to happen -- they'd prefer to be completely responsible for those laughs, if they can, but, if not, they're happy to get an assist and make the laugh.) So, anyway, this book doesn't have much of a through-line, but it's witty and funny and shows a fine established comedian trying a new medium and doing a pretty good job at it.

Jeff Lemire, The Underwater Welder (10/19)

Jeffrey Brown, Darth Vader and Son (10/20) -- Absolutely any idea can become a book -- and I don't even need to say "these days," since I remember the fake-catalog and silly-lifestyle-guides of the '80s (remember The Preppy Handbook? Real Men Don't Eat Quiche?) -- and this is one of the perfect examples of that process. Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown started work on a "Google Doodle" -- their day-specific logos, which used to be rare but probably now are controlled by a gigantic spreadsheet and an epic series of meetings in Mountain View -- for Father's Day in 2010, involving Darth Vader and his son Luke Skywalker. Brown's own son was four years old at the time, so his ideas stayed in that realm: what if Darth was a "normal" dad, raising an energetic young boy? The Doodle itself never quite happened, but -- with LucasFilm's eventual blessing -- the idea did turn into this book, with about sixty single-panel cartoons (most of them riffing on well-known Star Wars lines, scenes, or characters) featuring those two. It's a cute little book and a great little impulse buy for the Star Wars lover (and/or newish dad) that you know.

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1983 to 1984 (10/20) 

James Kochalka, Pinky & Stinky (10/22)

Rick Geary, Lovers' Lane (10/23)

Michel Rabagliati, The Song of Roland (10/24)

Ken Dahl, Monsters (10/25)

Well, I didn't fool myself quite as much as I hoped, but I did manage to break off a few pieces to post separately. The missing links should appear over the next few days, in some cases, or somewhat longer than that, for the things I haven't written yet. I could blame this month's problems on Hurricane Sandy, but I'd be lying: it did get me to waste most of a weekend in preparation, but it also gave me several work-at-home days with no commuting to suck up my time. (And complaining about something that hit several million people much worse than it did me would be epic Bad Form.)

Daniel Handler Gives the Best Quotes Ever

I've already set one quote from this interview to run as "Quote of the Week" this Friday, and here's another wonderful thing that works perfectly well out of context:

So my best job that I had before I was published was when I was an executive assistant to a man that was dying in the hospital. So I had absolutely nothing to do but sit in an office, and occasionally the phone would ring from increasingly distant business acquaintances, and I would have to explain to them in muted tones that he was sick and not likely to come back to the office at all. But the rest of the time I worked on my novel. And I actually think the kind of aura of doom that hung over it was very helpful to me as a beginning novelist as well. So I guess I could suggest: Try to work for someone who’s dying. You get a lot of time.

Honestly, you should just go read the whole thing. (Says the man who plans to both read "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" and re-read The Basic Eight on his upcoming vacation.)

Like a Hurricane

To make this short and sweet: the Wheeler household came through Hurricane Sandy vastly better than we got through Hurricane Irene last year. The basement is still bone-dry (even after we took almost everything out of it Sat/Sun), and we only lost power for a few hours Monday night.

In fact, if I can believe the newspaper, we're now -- for the first time in our lives -- part of the 1%, since JCP&L, our electricity company, says that 99% of their customers are down right now.

I'm actually getting more work done at home this week than I expected -- I don't have access to a lot of my company's systems, so I can only do some things, but I'm trying to power through as many of those as I can.

Much of the rest of New Jersey is a huge mess, though -- even up in my area, where we didn't flood this time, there are plenty of big trees down and other problems. (And I have no idea when Hoboken will be un-flooded enough for me to actually go to the office and get some desperately needed stuff done before my looming vacation.)

But, if there's anyone out there worried about me, don't. Worry about those other people, like the ones in Little Ferry who got walloped when a tidal surge took out levees in the Meadowlands and swamped the first floors of their houses in minutes. Or most of the Shore, too. They've got it tough this time around.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot

Mary Talbot is a professor and scholar with a long list of academic publications; she's also the daughter of noted Joyce scholar (author of The Books at the Wake, still a standard reference to Finnegans Wake) and general unpleasant person James Atherton. Bryan Talbot is the noted graphic novelist and comics-maker behind the Grandville books, Luther Arkwright, Alice in Sunderland, and others.

With Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, they team up for the first time -- as will inevitably happen in the world of comics, though these two didn't, as far as I can tell, fight each other first -- to tell the intertwined story of young Mary Atherton (mostly before she met Talbot, though his long-haired hippie self does show up in the later parts of the book) and of Joyce's daughter Lucia, frustrated dancer and eventual mental patient. The clear connection is their cold, obsessive fathers -- "my cold mad feary father," to put it, as the Talbots do, in Joyce's own words -- and Mary Talbot makes use of that in this heavily narrated book (presented in a typewriter font, as if it were the manuscript the elder Atherton was banging away at for most of Mary's childhood), switching regularly from past to present, from Joyce to Atherton, and around again.

The Talbots don't deliberately try to aggrandize Mary's troubles with her father, and they can't help but seem trivial compared to what Joyce did to his daughter: stifled her career, and any chance at an independent life, and drove her into an asylum for the rest of her life. James Atherton might have been a cold British mid-20th century father, but he wasn't the self-obsessed monster Joyce was -- or, perhaps, Mary Atherton had opportunities in the '60s in England that weren't available in the same way to Lucia Joyce in the '30s. Either way, Mary Talbot makes Mary Atherton look like the lightweight side of the comparison, which isn't good for the book -- Dotter could have been stronger if it had focused entirely on Lucia, whose life provides more than enough drama for a story twice the length.

Of course, that would be a sadder and drearier Dotter, which clearly wasn't the Talbots' intention -- comparing Mary with Lucia allows Mary's life to be a positive example and a potential escape. Still, it does feel unbalanced: Lucia's is clearly the deeper, more dramatic story, and Mary's life, in this context, is interesting mostly due to the parallels, which isn't entirely fair to the writer telling the story of her own life.

Two Small Guidebooks to the City of Angels

My family will be spending some time in Southern California in the near future -- mostly for theme-park activities in the Anaheim area, but with side trips elsewhere -- so I've been reading up on the various tourist traps in the vicinity. Along the way, I read two directly competitive pocket guides to Los Angeles, and thought that I might as well look at them together.

Frommer's Los Angeles Day by Day was written by Garth Mueller, and -- at the time it was published, last year -- came out from a venerable publishing house with which I am also associated. (Said venerable publishing house has since sold off that piece of its operations to the not nearly as venerable but vastly cash-rich data octopus Google.) It's pocket-sized -- slim but taller than a mass-market book, with a large fold-out map in a pocket inside the back cover and several other maps of specific areas in a three-panel fold-out from the front cover.

It's organized by interest rather than geographically, with chapters on shopping, dining, lodging, nightlife, outdoor activities, and arts & entertainment. But it opens with the author's curated "best of" recommendations -- first, suggested itineraries for one-, two-, or three-day trips, and then a half-dozen specialized day trips for particular interests (fans of movies, architecture, rock music, art, shopping, eating, or those traveling with kids). Assuming that Mueller's expertise is what it should be -- which I can't evaluate at this point since I haven't made the trip yet (and I don't expect to follow any of these suggested tours explicitly, anyway) -- this is the most useful part of Day by Day, giving travelers a template to start from when they plan their days in LA.

It has a crisp, authoritative look, with "tabs" for each section embedded in a color bar to make thumbing through easier, and there's a lot of color photos, though many of them are presented postage-stamp-size. The two-column layout presents a lot of data in a way that keeps it all easy to follow, and occasional sidebars give more detail on specific points.

The bulk of the book is written in capsule-review style, like listings in Time Out -- entirely useful, highly factual, but a bit dry to read straight through. The day-trips are more lively, with more anecdotes and factoids to spice them up. But this isn't a book to be read straight through to begin with; it's meant to be a reference and a guide, with each reader gravitating to the sections that she is most interested in. And, for that, it's very usable, with good maps embedded in the text to show where various places are in relation to each other. This book would be a bit bulky for a pants pocket, but it could easily go into a jacket, purse, or glove compartment for a trip around the city. Between the maps and the curated tours, it's an excellent (and clearly opinionated) guide to LA.

Lonely Planet Pocket Los Angeles has a similar form-factor: it's shorter (closer to the height of a mass-market), and both slightly thicker and deeper, with marginally thicker paper than Frommer's. Its inside-back-cover fold-out map has more density -- one side is mostly taken up by a listing of places, so it can function semi-independently from the book -- but lacks the large area maps Frommer's does. (Lonely Planet's map is also paper, and tears out from the book, while Frommer's is plasticized and sits in a clear plastic pocket in the back of that book.)

Lonely Planet is also clearly hipper than Frommer's is, from the open-shirted author photo of Adam Skolnick to its focus on neighborhoods (the trendier the better). It does have a quick "do this each day" section up front, possibly to compete with Frommer's, but the book is primarily organized geographically rather than by interest, starting with Hollywood and circling around to hit Beverly Hills, Downtown, Santa Monica, Burbank, and excursions to points further away.

Lonely Planet feels like it gives more space to shopping and nightlife -- again, aiming at a hipper crowd than Frommer's -- so visitors with those items high on their agenda will want to gravitate in this direction. It also is quite thorough in differentiating between the different strands of nightlife: old Hollywood, new Hollywood, LGBT, and so on -- to give the reader the best guidance as to exactly which trendy club she will be most comfortable in. But all that hip trendiness can make an older, stodgier, less shopping-obsessed reader -- your humble correspondent, for one example -- feel bored and out of place; this is not a guide for those who don't intend to make hitting boutiques and/or nightclubs a major part of their LA itinerary.

The design is bright and modern, with pastel headers and sidebars to organize sections, and lots of color photography -- as expected from Lonely Planet, it's entirely up-to-date in both tone and style. For readers who are equally up-to-date, this is the perfect guide to LA. (The rest of us may want something a bit more sedate.)