Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/22

For those of you who wouldn't be offended by it, best wishes for a Merry Christmas. (For those who would be offended by it, my heartiest wishes for a heaping pile of coal wherever it would be least pleasant.)

There was mail this week, and so I'll tell you about it -- as usual, these are all books that came compliments of their publishers, with the hope/expectation that I would review them. But I can't manage to review everything I see -- some week, it feels like I can't review any of them -- so I write about them all this way, to give whatever tiny bit of publicity I can muster to all of them. I haven't read any of these books yet, so what I'm going to tell you is probably, but not necessarily, entirely correct. Just assume anything that you don't like is a case of me getting it wrong -- all of these book are most likely the Platonic ideal of the book like that in your head, and so you should check them out right now.

Luck of the Draw is Piers Anthony's 36th Xanth novel, about an 80-year-old man who finds himself magically transported to Xanth and into a young body -- and I suppose one can take that as Anthony's own wish-fulfillment (he's 78, himself), if one wants to. It's a hardcover from Tor, officially on-sale today.

I also have three paperbacks from the fine folks at DAW, all publishing in January in the popular mass-market format:

•  Touch of the Demon, third in Diana Rowland's urban fantasy series about cop/demon summoner Kara Gillian -- who, this time, finds herself summoned by a demon.
• Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first novel by Saladin Ahmed, a secondary world fantasy novel set in an Arabian Nights-inspired world, which I've been planning to read for some time now. (So maybe this more portable edition will help get that done.)
• And Skirmish, the fourth book in Michelle West's epic fantasy "House War" series (which will, I note, be followed by Battle and War).

I have one lonely manga volume this week -- Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater, Vol. 12 -- but that's just fine, since this is a fun, energetic battling-witches series that my two sons are particularly enjoying. (I've reviewed the first and eighth volumes of this series.) It's coming from Yen Press in January.

Also from Yen in January is Book Girl and the Undine Who Bore a Moonflower, sixth in the light novel series by Mizuki Nomura about some kind of supernatural creature (head of a high school literature, she can only read stories by actually eating them) and the obligatory mousy boy who does whatever she wants. As I said, these are light novels -- short books with a lot of illustrations (in this case, by Miho Takeoka) rather than manga proper, but I expect people who like manga for the characters and Japanese cultural tropes will find a lot to enjoy here as well.

Farseed, the middle novel in Pamela Sargent's long-gestating "Seed" trilogy -- between 1982's Earthseed and 2010's Seed Seeker -- is getting re-released in a trade paperback edition, with a hopeful cover quote comparing it to Hunger Games. (Which, since it's from The Hollywood Reporter, is probably shorthand for "Hey! This is another SF novel for young readers, and it's really darn good!") The Seed trilogy seems to be in the manner of a generational saga, with each book taking up the story of a new (young) generation of settlers on a dangerous alien world. The new edition of Farseed will be coming from Tor on January 8th.

Also from Tor is the new novel from John C. Wright, The Hermetic Millennia, hitting stores in hardcover today. It continues the story from Wright's last novel, Count to a Trillion, focusing on "Menelaus Illation Montrose -- gunslinger, idealist, and posthuman genius" who puts himself into coldsleep because a nasty alien race will be coming to audit humanity in eight thousand years. (Some people might want to act ahead of that event; ol' Mene wants to be well-rested when it happens.)

And last for this week is a novel publishing today from Tor's fraternal twin, Forge -- Dinosaur Thunder by James F. David. It's the third in a series -- the first two are Footprints of Thunder and Thunder of Time -- in which the aftershocks from nuclear tests in the '50s and '60s hit earth with a "Time Quilt" that transported huge chunks of the Cretaceous to modern Earth (and, presumably, vice versa). This is a thriller rather than a SF novel, which means complaining about the plausibility of that premise is entirely besides the point -- there's also some backstory about ecoterrorists using orgonic energy to blast an Aztec temple to the moon in a failed attempt to make a more comprehensive 'Time Quilt," so clearly the point here is big stakes, crazy action, and not so much science that your friends at CalTech would like.

Dodger by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett has been many things over his long career, but he's never before been Charles Dickens. With Dodger, Pratchett tries to correct that, with an adventurous story set in a mildly fictionalized early-Victorian England (perhaps the homeland version of the world of Nation) about a young man of humble birth but incredible talents.

Pratchett still isn't all that much like Dickens -- for all of the talk about Dickens's sentimentality, he killed off plenty of sympathetic characters in his bloody 19th century way, and Pratchett could never be that cruel. And Dickens's characters were never as omnicompetent as the smart and sneaky eponymous hero is in Dodger. But, for a simulacrum of Dickens a hundred and fifty years later -- for a novel that tries to be to 2012 what Dickens was to the 1850s and '60s -- Dodger fits the bill closely.

As noted, Dodger himself is an urchin of the street, a tosher -- who mucks about in the sewers to find valuables -- and, unlike what Dickens might have done, he is not a boy of the upper or merchant classes fallen on hard times, but a boy born in the gutter but looking, now and then, out of it. Besides his individually plausible street-smarts, preternatural ability at finding worthwhile objects in the cloaca of London, fighting skill, and position as one of the best-known and respected lower-class men of the city, he's also living with a Jewish jeweler with his own secret depths and unlikely knowledge. (Though that, of course, is utterly Dickensian, and so entirely in character for a novel like Dodger.)

We meet Dodger in the first pages, as he leaps out of a sewer on a dark, rainy night to save a nameless young woman from thugs -- she has fled their cruel care, and Dodger thumps them and keeps her free. Miraculously, two gentlemen witness this feat, and they're both honest, liberal, and later famous -- Dickens himself and the reformer Henry Mayhew -- and so they take the nameless woman (later called Simplicity) in hand and deliver her to Mayhew's house to recuperate in secret.

Of course the forces that had Simplicity in durance vile will not rest, and of course they are powerful and well-connected -- though I won't explain further who she is or who they are -- which leads to the expected derring-do and adventures. (More than Dickens would have provided, actually -- Dodger is a high-speed novel, and Dickens's audience always wanted more about people and society, which young Dodger only interacts with, in his own brash way, intermittently, and without any real bite.)

Dodger, I have to say, is one of those heroes who can do no wrong and around whom events bend to create the happiest of all possibly happy endings. He and Simplicity do appear to be in danger, once in a while, but it's not a particularly convincing appearance; Dodger is simply too competent and too much loved by his Creator to come to any harm. And the novel that bears his name is not one of Pratchett's best, though it is compulsively readable and comprehensively entertaining, as we've come to expect from Pratchett.

The Complete Peanuts, 1983 to 1984 by Charles M. Schulz

It's pointless to wish for things to always stay the same, since they never have and never will. And the early '80s Peanuts cartoons are not the same as the the punchier strips of the '60s and early '70s, just as those high points were very different from the early days of Peanuts in the '50s. I've lamented that change in the past -- see my slew of posts about the previous dozen-plus books in this series -- but perhaps I've learned better, or just gotten used to the change.

There also was a shock-of-the-new effect going on, I expect: I was born in 1969, so my own Peanuts-reading days mostly started in the mid to late '70s, corresponding very closely with Schulz's gradual shift from sadness to sun during that period. Oh, Peanuts always had a lot of sadness to it -- more than anything else on the comics page -- but in the '70s, it changed fundamentally from being primarily a strip about a boy tormented by his failures to being mostly a strip about a dog's flights of fancy.

These are still good cartoons, here in The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984, this dispatch from the early '80s -- maybe not as good as the cartoons from fifteen years earlier, and certainly not good in the same way -- but they're reliably funny and occasionally moving. The deep sadness that used to manifest in Charlie Brown now comes up, less rawly, in Peppermint Patty's school troubles, which are usually just for laughs but sometimes still bring up that old sense of existential failure that was Peanuts's go-to emotion in those bleak late-60s days.

But who wants bleak all the time? Peanuts was never that; the difference between 1968 and 1983 is really the question of the emotional center of the strip. In the '60s and early '70s, Charlie Brown -- battered by baseball failure, his own kid sister, his bad penmanship, and Lucy in the days when she was a real force -- was that core, standing in for everything Schulz felt as a failure in his own life. By 1983, Snoopy (and his growing family) was that center, and Snoopy, for all of his occasional moments of worry, is the omnicompetent one of Peanuts, secure in his own ability to redefine himself for whatever he needs to be.

So these two years see a lot of Snoopy and Spike, a lot of Rerun (who is nearly impossible to tell apart from Linus, other than the situations he's in), and a lot of Charlie Brown being a straight man. They were the best thing on a whole lot of comics pages some of the days of those two years -- depending on what else a particular paper was carrying -- and they were good and entertaining comics then, and are still that now. For work done by the same one man, day after day, more than thirty years after he started that project, that's not just impressive, it's amazing.

Incoming Books: December 20

Today was the beginning of my holiday vacation, and that means one thing: last minute panicked shopping! I did manage to get a couple of things for The Wife, but the primary goal of today's big trip -- to hit the Union Square Holiday Market and buy artisanal something-or-others for various people that need gifts -- was only successful in a very minor way.

Luckily, there was a secondary goal for that big trip -- visiting Forbidden Planet and the Strand, both just down the block from Union Square -- and that was entirely successful; I found several books for my sons and the following towering stack for myself:

Spleenal by Nigel Auchterlounie -- a collection of comics from the blog of the same name (which is also the name of the title character, who is not nearly as autobiographical as he started out). Auchterlounie has a distinct, quirky cartoony art style and an amusingly slanted view, and I keep hoping he's going to get so famous that everyone will remember how to spell his name. This is, I think, his only book-really-printed-on-paper, and it's difficult to find in the US (Auchterlounie is British). But I saw Spleenal on a shelf for the first time ever today, and now It Is Mine.

Nexus Archives, Vol. 5 by Mike Baron and Steve Rude -- one of my favorite people-took-great-pains-to-point-out-the-vanishingly-tiny-ways-it-wasn't-a-superhero comics from the '80s and '90s, which has been reprinted in a series of classy hardcovers that I keep thinking I need to collect and read. This one was shopworn and cheap, and now I have three of the series, which is a start.

The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell -- Bell is one of the best of the current crop of autobio cartoonists; she does stories on her own website and for various publications. This is her new book, full of comics stories I haven't read yet.

Heavy Liquid by Paul Pope -- I had mostly forgotten that I already read this (during my Eisner-judging frenzy in early 2009), but I haven't kept up with Pope's work the way I wanted to. (I started reading THB, his big Martian series, about the first time it went on extended hiatus.)

The Infinite Wait by Julia Wertz -- Wertz is another autobio cartoonist, much rawer and down in the muck than Bell -- more solidly in that ol' Crumb tradition, in other words -- who originally published her work online under the title The Fart Party. (She's since moved away from that title, and the perceived juvenility of it.) This book has three stories from Wertz's life, in her usual loose, almost primitivist style. (Wertz is probably the only autobio cartoonist to draw herself less attractive than she actually is.)

Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 -- This is part of a massive Library of America series that looks to reprint all of Roth's work in those wonderful little green cloth books in their matching tan slipcases. I already have a couple of them, and I have periodic wishes to read all of Roth, so I'd better have as many of his books on hand as possible. Besides, this has The Great American Novel in it, and I've got at least three reasons to want to read that.

The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves -- One of the great bawdy, crazy, supernatural, bizarre classics, as translated by one of the best writers of the 20th century; I think I had a copy of this before the flood, so it's time to replenish.

Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company by Roy Morris, Jr. -- This is the standard biography of Bierce for this generation, and Bierce is probably my favorite American writer. (I had an older Bierce bio sitting on the shelves unread at the time of the flood -- I think Richard O'Connor's late-60s take.)

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum -- I might have heard of this in passing before, but I picked it up because of the title and cover (yes, all of those people who claim that covers do not influence their decisions are lying -- possibly to themselves, but definitely lying). It's the non-fictional tale of how poisoning stopped being such an easy way to kill people around 1920 in New York when science (and some particular forensic scientists) caught up to human ingenuity, not for the first or last time.

Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins -- The first major non-fiction book by the author of Not Even Wrong, The Trouble With Tom, The Book of William, and Sixpence House, which I finally found in person after years of looking vaguely for it. (I also see that Collins had a new book last year, The Murder of the Century, which I missed entirely.) It consists of biographical portraits of thirteen men and women, all of whom failed at the great work of their lives.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household -- I'm pretty sure I've been recommended this book several times (though I also keep mixing it up with Rogue Herries, which other than one word is apparently nothing like it): it's a thriller from just before WWII, told in what seems to be a very cold and distanced manner by a first-person narrator who nearly dies on page 2.

Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz -- I had this book before the flood; in fact, I had this very edition (trade paperback with all the eyeballs) before the flood. And, since I finally read the first book (and really liked it), I might just get to this one sometime soon.

Worst Laid Plans edited by Alexandra Lydon & Laura Kindred -- A collection of short, funny stories about bad sex, which originated as a comedy show, by a whole bunch of people (mostly women, and mostly using what seems to be their real names). If I didn't have two teen/tween boys in the house, this would be an awesome bathroom book, but I guess I'll find some other way to read it.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Maculay -- I have the sense that every literary person two generations older than me has read this book, and hardly anyone at all since then. That's an interesting phenomenon, no matter the actual merits of the book, so I snatched up this nice New York Review Books edition.

Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman -- I was a big fan of the original Anno Dracula (an alternate-historical vampire novel in which pretty much every 19th century fictional vampire appeared -- it's from 1992, and so predated both the ongoing vampire boom and Alan Moore's multiple projects doing pretty much exactly the same thing), but I somehow missed this third book in the series the first time around (in 1998). But the wonderful thing about books is that it's never too late to read any of them.

Wish You Were Here by Stewart O'Nan -- I had a copy of this pre-flood, and I want to read it before I read O'Nan's Emily, Alone (which is a sequel to WYWH), so I clearly had to buy it today.

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike -- Somehow, someday, I will read some Updike; I feel weird admitting that I still haven't touched any of his work yet. Maybe this smallish omnibus of four books about a Rothian literary writer will do it.

Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett -- This is supposed to be very funny, and very inside-publishing, and I had a copy of it before the flood (which, I think, I got free, back in those halcyon bookclub days when the books flowed like water).

The Girl in Blue and Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse -- I had about three shelves full of the Overlook editions of Wodehouse pre-flood, and I definitely need to replace and complete that set. So I buy a couple whenever I get a chance. These are two minor Wodehouse books, true, but they're also two Wodehouse books I've never read, which is pretty good.