Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/9

It's another week full of mail! As usual, these are all books that have arrived at my house over the past week -- and, also as usual, I haven't read any of them yet. So, below I'll tell you what I can about them given that handicap -- my hope is to be both accurate and entertaining.

Vertical launches a new manga series this month with Tsutomu Nihei's Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 1. It's a far-future story, set aboard the seed ship Sidonia on its long mission to escape the nearly-ubiquitous, barely-sentient aliens that have destroyed most of the human race. The hero is a young recluse, an unmodified human male in a society dominated by new genders and where most people can photosynthesize, who is sent out to battle those hideous aliens (in, I'm going to guess, a giant robot mecha suit, because Japan). Nihei is known for dark, brooding stories, so I wouldn't expect too much slapstick or panty shots in this one -- it looks to be a more adult, serious look at some genre tropes, perhaps the manga equivalent of Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars.

Also from Vertical this month is a continuation: Toru Fujisawa's GTO: 14 Days in Shonan, Vol. 7. The "great teacher" Eikichi Onizuka, on vacation in his hometown after events in the main GTO series, finds himself a "father" one afternoon, according to the back-cover copy -- though the early pages of the book see him burn down a group home to stick some girl with an arson-murder rap. (If that's what passes for "great teaching" in Japan, I'm happy to have grown up on this side of the Pacific!)

Switching gears to books without pictures briefly, I also have here Brandon Sanderson's first novel for young readers, The Rithmatist, coming from Tor Teen in May. It seems to be set in a fantasy version of America, where dangerous Wild Chalklings threaten civilization, held back only by the magical power of the Rithmatists and the controlled Chalklings they can create. The novel follows one teen boy who desperately wants to be a Rithmatist -- and I'll bet that this isn't the one YA fantasy about a protagonist who isn't magically special.

This week I also got a big box of Yen Press's February books, which will fill up the rest of this week's post. This time out, I'm not organizing them in any particular order -- we'll see what I can figure out about them as I go.

Triage X, Vol. 2 comes from Shouji Sato (artist of Highschool of the Dead), and seems to be about a group of hyper-violent nurses from Mochizuki Hospital -- though I think they're only hyper-violent against some gang lord, or something like that. It's rated M-for-Mature and comes shrinkwrapped, so I expect there's quite a bit of fanservice along with the blood.

Launching this month is Junya Inoue's BTOOOM!, with a first volume that has the word "Games" prominently displayed even though it doesn't seem to be part of the title or subtitle. My guess is that it's either a story arc or a Yen sub-imprint, though the book doesn't explain it either way. The story follows an addicted gamer, who gets kidnapped away to an uninhabited island, where he has to play a real-life game almost exactly like the one he's really really good at online in the usual death matches against colorful adversaries. Once again, Japan has really weird wish-fulfillment fantasies.

The Haruhi Suzumiya juggernaut rolls on with another side volume, The Misfortune of Kyon and Koizumi, a collection of short stories about the two male members of the "SOS Brigade" from a dozen-plus manga-ka. The book doesn't credit an editor, but it looks like all of the stories were written by Haruhi creator Nagaru Tanigawa. If you have only a slight familiarity with Haruhi, this is nowhere near the place to start; this is serious otaku territory.

Yuhki Kamatani's Nabari No Ou -- some kind of ninja-in-the-modern-world story -- returns with a thirteenth volume, which seems to focus on the mother of the series main character.

Pandora Hearts -- a vaguely Alice in Wonderland-inspired manga series by Jun Mochizuki, whose first volume I reviewed a few years back -- has a fourteenth volume this month, in which things like "the tragedy of Sablier," "the sinister blade of the Headhunter," "and "the mysteries of Fianna's House and Humpty Dumpty" are all of utmost importance.

Umineko When They Cry -- a series that's a sister (I think) to the longer Higurashi: When They Cry series, and similarly based on a series of computer games -- comes back fora second volume, again from Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi. This one is about a powerful family gathering on a remote island (of course), where they start being killed off one by one by either one of their own or a mysterious extra person on the island. Either way, the survivors want to stop it quickly.

One of my favorite titles that I don't understand at all is The Betrayal Knows My Name, which always sounds to me like a piece of particularly arch, over-the-top dialogue from a really juicy soap opera. I have no real idea what Hotaru Odagiri's story is actually about, I'm sorry to say, but this 5th volume features a visit to the Hidden Springs of the Giou, which has got to be good.

And last for this week is the third volume of Until Death Do Us Part, the story of a blind swordsman and a precognitive girl battling the evil forces that want to enslave her (and probably do much more than that, since evil forces rarely have small plans). It's by Hiroshi Takashige and DOUBLE-S.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Note: I read this about four months ago, so you may notice a certain lack of specificity below. In case it doesn't come through, I really enjoyed this book when I read it, and put it aside to "do it right." And we all know which road good intentions lead to, right?

The fantasy genre is not generally known as being friendly to legal thrillers, but Three Parts Dead has as much Scott Turow in its DNA as it does J.R.R. Tolkien -- and that's much to its advantage. Max Gladstone's heroine Tara isn't a lawyer, exactly -- she's a very young necromancer, just expelled precipitously from the Hidden Schools and newly installed at the internationally renowned firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao -- but she's thrown into the deep end of complicated deals and maneuverings just as quickly as her legal equivalent.

The god Kos has just died, and his city of Alt Coulumb doesn't know yet -- and it's up to Tara (and even more so her boss Elayne Kevarian) to untangle the power transfers and contracts that led to his death and to bring him back before Alt Coulumb falls apart without him. But they certainly don't work for free -- internationally renowned firms never do. And there are forces that don't want to see Kos resurrected -- the ones who forced him into the divine equivalent of bankruptcy in the first place, ready to continue their assault through methods legal, necromantic and even more direct. As it happens, the opposing counsel -- or the closest equivalent in Three Parts Dead -- is Professor Denovo of the Hidden Schools, who had a very direct hand in Tara's so-abrupt end of her studies there.

The only real ally Tara has in Alt Coulumb is Abelard, the chain-smoking priest who witnessed Kos's death (and is consequently having his own crisis of faith). And magic has real consequences and dangers in Gladstone's intricately-invented world; failing to resurrect Kos would have severe consequences for both of them -- fatal, or worse.

Three Parts Dead is a quick-moving, smart fantasy novel with a tough, believable heroine -- it sets out to do a lot, and does all of it well. I hope to see more stories of Tara's necromantic engagements, and to learn more about this world -- or just to see what Gladstone writes next.

Calvin & Hobbes IRL

An entity calling itself nite4awk -- I like to pretend that bizarre Internet names aren't just leet teenagers in Gdansk, but could potentially be self-aware software, or alien civilizations, or a fiendish ant hive mind -- has posted a gallery on imgur, placing our favorite cartoon boy and tiger into real (and very pretty) photography.

Check out the whole gallery.

(via one of those high-traffic "lookie this!" blogs that I don't want to bother to link back to)

My New Look

Since all of the cool kids are jumping off a bridge this week, I was compelled to do the same. You can generate your own fake pulp cover here -- it's one of the really good generators, with lots of controls to fiddle around with things.

Najafi Sells Bookspan to Pride Tree

Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that the Najafi Companies, the mysterious holding company that bought the book- and music-club assets known by a bewildering array of names (Yes Solutions, Direct Brands, Doubleday Entertainment, Direct Group North America, Bertelsmann Direct, Bookspan, "the entity") from Bertelsmann back in 2008, has sold those assets to what seems to be an even more mysterious entity called Pride Tree Holdings.

Good luck to my old compatriots still working at the clubs, though this certainly doesn't look like a good sign from the outside. PW notes that the operation has been "steadily downsized in recent years," but all of the major clubs seem to still be running and Direct Brands is claiming 8 million members, which ain't chicken feed. Najafi is privately held, so no revenue or sales figures (or details on the Pride Tree deal) are or will be forthcoming.

From what I've heard, the downsizing has been the usual corporate type: get rid of half of the people and insist on running the same level of business. And we all know how well that usually works.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/2

I usually try to have a quirky opening for this weekly post, mostly to keep myself amused, but this week, I'll just be straightforward for once: these are all books that showed up on my doorstep, sent by publishers, with the plan that I will read and review them here. I probably won't get to all of them -- there are 9 books, all novel-length fiction, this week, and even at my best I can't read that many books in a week. But I can tell you about these books, even without having read them, and maybe something here will look amazingly wonderful to you:

First up is a fake-nonfiction book -- and I have to admit that I have a huge soft spot for fiction that cleverly pretends to be something else -- the pseudo-memoir A Natural History of Dragons, written in-world by Lady Trent, her world's preeminent dragon naturalist, and in our world by Marie Brennan, author of a bunch of fantasy novels I've heard of but not yet read. Obviously, it's the story of Lady Trent's discovery of dragons -- in her cod-Victorian world -- and it has a bunch of Todd Lockwood illustrations as well. I suspect it won't be as quirky and odd as my favorite book in this subgenre, Pamela Whatron Blanpied's Dragons: The Modern Infestation, but if Natural History is half as engaging and fun as that cover, it will be well worth reading. Tor is publishing this in hardcover on February 5th.

I also have here DAW's three mass-market paperbacks for March (though it seems like I just saw their books for February -- is time passing more quickly all of a sudden?), and those are:

Seanan McGuire returns to her InCryptid series (after Discount Armageddon) with Midnight Blue-Light Special, and I'm happy to see that at least one of the monster-fighters on the front cover is somewhat sensibly dressed this time. (The first book had a very distinctive hotsy-cheerleader-on-a-rooftop cover that may perhaps have not been 100% serious.)

C.J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" series returns with the paperback of Intruder, the thirteenth book (and thus the beginning of the fifth trilogy). This series was really compelling for a long time, though I lost track of it after my fall from grace a few years back -- as far as I know it's still as compelling.

And the third DAW paperback this month is an omnibus of Mickey Zucker Reichert's The Books of Barakhai series, bringing together Barakhai's Beasts and Lost Dragons, which were originally separate novels.

British horror writer Adam Nevill has a big new novel, Last Days, about a modern "guerrilla documentary maker" working on a project about a '70s cult, the Temple of the Last Days, that met an violent end thirty years before -- but this is not the cult you're thinking of, since this one had a female head and its death site was in the Arizona desert. And, of course, the new investigations was something up, leading to new horrors. Last Days is a trade paperback from St. Martin's Griffin imprint, hitting stores February 26th.

John Joseph Adams, the premier anthologist of his generation, is back with a new original assemblage, The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, featuring 22 new stories from Jeffrey Ford, Mary Robinette Kowal, Laird Barron, Naomi Novik, Carrie Vaughn, Harry Turtledove, Alan Dean Foster, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Austin Grossman, and plenty more. The title explains it perfectly: these are all stories of mad science and the perpetrators thereof, tales of evil geniuses and plans to SHOW THEM ALL!!!! And you can get them all as a Tor trade paperback on February 19th.

Paul Cornell, best known as a writer of television and particularly for his work on the Doctor Who revival, launches a contemporary dark fantasy series with his third novel, London Falling. In it, four ordinary London policemen accidentally develop the Sight during a murder case, and can see true monsters haunting their streets. And, of course, they can't just leave them be, can they? London Falling is a Tor hardcover, coming in April.

Melanie Rawn continues the epic fantasy series that started in Touchstone with Elsewhens. I believe this is a lower-key alternate-world fantasy than usual, focusing on a traveling theatrical troupe (with magic, of course) and not saving the world at all. Elsewhens is a Tor hardcover, coming February 19th.

And last for this week is The Arena Man, fourth in the fantasy-adventure series by legendary comics writer Steve Englehart. The title character -- of all books so far in the series; they're all The {Foo} Man -- is a Timeless alchemist and Nam vet, dedicated to battling the near-ubiquitous conspiracy that rules politics and the media and nearly controls the world. Arena Man is also a Tor hardcover hitting stores February 19th.

Distributed Egosurfing

Hey, you know what I haven't done in a long time? Checked in on the world of Andrew Wheelers, to see what my (devastatingly handsome, astonishingly accomplished, and penetratingly intelligent) compatriots are doing, around the world, to make the world more like us.

Diving gingerly into the world of Google results -- and trying to strip out personalized results as much as possible (since I know who I am) -- reveals the following amazing individuals:

• Andrew Wheeler, the photographer based in Paris and owner of the fabled andrewwheeler.com domain, leads the charge, with a homepage that hasn't changed in years (not that the keeper of this blog has any reason to complain on that score!) and a great photoshelter site full of awesome pictures that only an Andrew Wheeler could take.
• The other photographic Andrew Wheeler -- the American with a focus on racing photography -- is still there as well, with pictures equally awesome and usually more viscerally exciting.
• The actor Andrew Wheeler has recently worked in a bunch of TV movies, including the forthcoming Skye & Chang.
• This very blog and my LinkedIn page come up next, making me, as far as I can tell, the fourth most famous Andrew Wheeler in the entire world.
• The Andrew Wheeler who writes for ComicsAlliance -- the one most likely to be confused for me, and vice versa -- is a strong fifth. This comics-reviewing Andrew Wheeler is more likely to write long learned posts about X-Men than I am, and also has written books on food. He's also English, which I haven't been for a good two hundred years, at least. His Twitter handle also ranks highly in the world of Wheelers.
• The lawyer Andrew Wheeler -- focusing on criminal law, particularly (as far as I can see) DUI cases, in the great state of Washington -- has a suspiciously tooth grin for an Andrew Wheeler, but he is a lawyer, after all. He's also the first-named partner in his law firm, once again proving how awesome all Andrew Wheelers are.
• The only Andrew Wheeler in Wikipedia leads off the second page of Google's results; he's a professional basketballer in New Zealand, and only seems to be in Wikipedia because he hit a guy in the face with a beer bottle two years ago. (Since all Andrew Wheelers are entirely fine and upstanding citizens, I have to conclude that the other guy must have deserved it.)
• In Washington, Andrew R. Wheeler is the one you want on your side to lobby about energy and environmental policy. (If he's the one who kept getting quoted in the news during the Bush years, I believe he's against pretty much all of those policies.)
• Dr. Andrew Wheeler, the Irish marine geologist, is currently Vice Head of University College Cork, proving Andrew Wheelers are just as strong in academia as they are in the private sector.
• There's a cinematographer Andrew Wheeler in LA -- his credits look to be mostly music videos and commercials so far, but it's only a matter of time before his name is splashed across the beginning of a big summer movie.
• The architect Andrew Wheeler focuses exclusively on healthcare organizations, and I'm sure he's a wonderful person despite leading his bio with his proclivity for golf.
• And there is, of course, an accountant Andrew Wheeler, as there must be -- he turns up in Australia, having become a partner in PwC there back in 2004.
• The closest Andrew Wheeler physically to me is the Liberty Mutual sales rep in Connecticut. If you're looking for auto, home, or life insurance in the Nutmeg state, there couldn't be anyone better.
• The SEO expert Andrew Wheeler shows up next, since he concentrates his efforts on his clients, instead of using his powers to pump up his own image.
• An Andrew Wheeler is a sculptor in Oregon.
• The other online marketing expert Andrew Wheeler -- this one based in the Midwest -- has an impressive array of expertise and responsibilities.
• There's another Dr. Andrew Wheeler -- this one's a Lecturer in Experimental Aerodynamics at the University of Southampton, which sounds deeply cool.
• Another Andrew Wheeler whose areas of professional interest slightly overlaps mine is the barrister of London, with a focus on fraud, compliance, and money laundering cases.
• There an Andrew Wheeler who is Intranet Managing Editor for the company so recently named Research in Motion, who will prove to be instrumental (I'm sure) as the Blackberry 10 saves that company.
• I wonder if this Andrew C. Wheeler -- a digital marketer for a Gannett company -- is the one I met ten-fifteen years back? (That one was married to a Mary Wheeler, whom I did business with in the large-print books line.)
• And there are always new Andrew Wheelers coming up -- why, here's a twenty-year-old photographer.
• Around about this point in the Google rankings, there's a whole bunch of Twitter handles and some LinkedIn profiles (and some Facebook results, but those are mostly searches). These are almost all from the fine men we've already met.
• The Andrew Wheeler who is a fine art and paper conservator in the UK comes up next, and I'm always happy to see him -- the world needs more people who lavish attention on paper.
• Andrew Wheeler is also Mission Pastor for St. Savior's, Guildford -- and, if anyone is up to that mission, it'll be an Andrew Wheeler.
• I think the Andrew Wheeler at Google Ventures is the one with a bunch of patents when he was still an MIT student a few years back -- he's clearly a mover and shaker.
• Andrew Wheeler should be your first choice if you ever need electrical work in Kings Langley, New South Wales, Australia.
• There must be an Andrew Wheeler who is a professional bagpiper, and you may find him in Dumfries (or nearby, on his many gigs).
• There is clearly something about the name Andrew Wheeler that makes great photographers -- here's another one, concentrating on family photos and based in Vancouver, BC.

And that's more than twenty-five Andrew Wheelers, which is probably far too many for a Saturday night. I'm sorry to see that the composer/conductor seems to have disappeared -- he was one of the top-ranking Andrew Wheelers in the early days of this blog, had what sounded like an awesome life, and was the owner of a highly impressive head of hair. But, like all Andrew Wheelers, I'm sure he's still out there, being the best at whatever it is he's doing now.

To all of the rest of you: it's true that you will never be an Andrew Wheeler, but don't despair: it is still possible to be happy in life even under that handicap. I'm sure you can do it.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente's first book for teens, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, came about almost by accident, sparked by Valente's adult novels, financial need, and a swell of fan support. Circumnavigated was also written in public, 19th-century-style, and was inevitably episodic because of that.

But the resulting product won the Andre Norton award for 2010, and (as far as I can tell) has been by far her bestselling book to date, so Valente returned to September and to Fairyland with a second novel, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, written and published all at once in physical form, like most books. Fell Beneath has a clearer arc than Circumnavigated, but it's still a novel of episodes -- Valente has a joy in discovery and storytelling, and sends her heroine through another series of strange situations and characters in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and a thousand other books of wonders.

This time, the title doesn't really refer to September herself -- or not necessarily so. When September returns to Fairyland, after a year away and countless wishes to go back, she finds that her shadow, so roughly taken from her in the first book, has become Halloween, the Queen of Fairyland-Below -- the dark image of regular Fairyland, as Fairyland is of our world (and, as Valente implies, so on and so on). Halloween has conjured a creature, the Alleyman, to steal the shadows of Fairyland's inhabitants to bolster her own kingdom's population and magic and energy and power, making her revels ever bigger and fancier and wilder.

It's a situation that can't go on -- Fairyland-Below's depredation will soon deracinate Fairyland so much that the latter will become just another bland district of the real world -- and Fairyland-Below, no matter what Halloween thinks, can't survive after that for very long itself. Clearly, someone needs to fix things -- some smart, determined girl, a little older and wiser than last time, and, most importantly, having grown up just enough that she is no longer quite heartless, as children are. [1]

So September goes beneath, to find and confront her shadow-self and to make things right again. Along the way, she is joined by the shadows of two of her old compatriots from the first book -- and she welcomes them as anyone welcomes seeing old friends in a dangerous new place. But these shadows are not her old friends -- or, to be more precise, are not exactly her old friends, but the hidden and unexpressed parts of them set free -- and Halloween doesn't want to become September's shadow again, and the problems of Fairyland-Below will not be solved that easily. September must undertake a new quest, to go to the bottom of the bottom of the world beneath to find a mythical sleeping prince and wake him up.

Valente's vision of Fairy is focused on women -- quietly, in a way that girls might not notice but some boys and older readers will, used to fairy worlds populated primarily by male creatures -- and on the lives and choices of women. Valente's narrative voice is not dismissive of Halloween's desires and concerns; it knows that being someone else's shadow forever is nothing to look forward to. So there's a tension in September's quest -- it needs to be done; this land needs to be saved -- to do with the cost of the saving and the free choices of the people being saved. What do the shadows want -- what does the sleeping prince want? Will they act out the roles of the old story, or can they be what they really want to be -- the way September could be free in Fairyland and Halloween could create a realm of shadows to live and rule and revel in? What kind of Fairyland will September create or save?

So Fell Beneath is not deep and thoughtful and fraught with moral consequences for a young-readers novel; it's deep and thoughtful and fraught with moral consequences because it's a young-readers novel; it's a story about what is right and possible and true for readers who are dealing with that day by day themselves. And it's at least as deep and sharp-eyed as Circumnavigated is, with an added sense of growing up and taken on responsibilities that will not go away, no matter how much one wants to run away to Fairyland. Fell Beneath is a great fantasy novel, rich and witty and full of wonders, told by a master storyteller with some important things to say.


[1] Valente has a sharp-eyed take on that old saw -- I know it from Peter Pan, where Barrie used it to broadly similar ends -- that children are free and happy and heartless, mixing it into an implicit theory of adolescence that she allows to bubble up in the narrative voice several times in Fell Beneath. Children are indeed heartless, but September is beginning to become a young woman, and so she has a heart -- a not-entirely-formed, rough, raw thing, but one that has started to beat and feel and affect her actions. The plot of Fell Beneath could not happen without that heart, and without September having grown up that much -- the whole book is, along with so much else, a quiet rebuke there to the Problem of Susan.

Hey Kids, Comics!

I've probably used that post title before, I'm afraid. (The old Blogger interface had predictive thingummy, so if you started typing a post-title that you'd used before, it would show you. Yet another way that the world is inevitably falling into rack and ruin, obviously.)

These are comics which I have read recently, and which I'm tossing into one post, since that seems to get me to finish things these days. They really don't belong together, but what the hell.

Pearls Freaks the #*%# Out by Stephan Pastis

This would be the sixth "treasury-sized" -- as big as a European comics album (or a smallish coffee table book), around 250 pages, with Sunday strips in color -- collection of the reasonably popular syndicated comic strip Pearls Before Swine, with strips originally appearing in newspapers (remember them?) from late August of 2009 through almost the last day of February in 2011.

I've given some collections of this strip full posts (without having too much to say about them) and demoted the last one, Pearls Blows Up, to the end of a round-up post. This one gets to go first in a round-up post...but there's still little to say about Pearls: it's quite dark for a mainstream newspaper strip, full of cartoony death and anger and bile and spleen, but it's been the same kind of dark since it started. I find that a quite appealing variety of darkness, myself, but opinions on such things do vary.

The treasuries, as I've mentioned before, also have annotations from cartoonist Pastis on quite a lot of the strips, and those are amusing in themselves and as a peek backstage at the comics factory as well as being what a marketer like me is required to call a "value-add" at least once a year. If you like a comic strip, I figure you should buy a collection once in a while, so you're actually pushing money in the direction of the creator. This is a good one for a solid strip.

Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown

It's a real sign of the rise of the place of the graphic novel (or, as Brown styles it here, graphic-novel) that this edition -- a classy hardcover by Drawn & Quarterly of a dark and quirky early work by a difficult and not overly commercial cartoonist -- exists at all, and that it was accessible in my local library, close-up pictures of an alternate-world Ronald Reagan as the head of a man's penis and all.

(I don't want to call attention to the particular library, since actual pictures of penises have been dangerous for librarians since at least In the Night Kitchen. But big props to them for buying this and putting it in their graphic novel collection; my local library's similar shelves are almost all junky Spider-Man and Batman books.)

This was Brown's first major work, and first long work -- in fact, like so many cartoonists, what's collected here as one story began as individual short strips, originally published in his Yummy Fur mini-comic in the early '80s, and only coalesced into one story over time. It's only partly the story of Ed the Happy Clown -- and, remember, this is an '80s comic, so he is a clown, and he's named Ed, but he is never ever happy, nor, really, is anyone else in the story -- and partly the story of hospital janitor Chet Dooley and his adulterous love Josie, but mostly just Brown experimenting with storylines and narrative drive, moving towards one plot.

There's nothing like a linear plot -- those disparate strips come together, and then events just follow events, in a sequence that always seems plausible even if it's never realistic. Brown's world is a nightmare vision, full of random violence, casually cruel authority, and pointless brutality. Even worse -- for some readers, at least -- is that Brown has a kind of morality animating this story -- a secondhand, half-understood Catholicism without salvation or Jesus, consisting only of evil and punishment and everlasting damnation. (I'm coming to think that the unquestioning acceptance of some kind of tormented morality is Brown's unconscious central theme; it certainly was important in his The Playboy, which I reviewed a few years back.)

Ed the Happy Clown is an important graphic novel, and an interesting one, but it's also black as night and not fully formed -- Brown realized, after the fact, that was telling a specific story and had overrun the ending rather than being in the middle of a long string of picaresque adventures of Ed, and so cut off the meandering last few issues of Ed's story and added a few pages to close up his other narrative threads. But it's powerful and compelling in its view of evil mankind, and this edition has extensive notes by Brown in the backmatter, making it the best reading experience for this material.

Her Permanent Record by Jimmy Gownley

I believe this is the last Amelia Rules! graphic novel, and not just the newest one, though the book itself doesn't actually say that. Amelia is eleven years old, growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and the previous seven books covered her arrival there and several cartoonily eventful years in her life (see my reviews for more details).

The tone of the series is still smack in that deeply American territory of mixed madcap and sentimental, but Gownley is fully in control of his material, and keeps it working. It's the kind of sentiment that shouldn't work -- particularly on old, grizzled grumpy men like myself -- but it does keep working, no matter how much I might argue with myself that it's obvious and at least a bit facile. These books are best for tweens (or slightly younger kids), obviously, but there's enough smart dialogue and childhood-seen-in-retrospect to make them interesting and worthwhile reading for adults as well.

This book doesn't have as much funny stuff as the earlier ones -- Gownley can be laugh-out-loud when he's going that way, and hitting on all cylinders -- but it does have a seriously teary moment near the end, nearly as touching as the highest points in the series. In fact, if I had to criticize Her Permanent Record, it would be that this book is more mid-level than the best parts of the series -- the funny bits aren't as big and funny, and the touching bits aren't as big and teary. Still, it's a fine ending, and I'll miss Amelia Louise McBride if I never see her again. (But I'm secretly sure Gownley will come back, ten or twenty years from now, to show us Amelia grown up, once her audience has grown up to match her.)

Worries Assuaged

It's a complicated, fast-moving world -- particularly for someone trying to do marketing. And I worry constantly that I'm not doing things I really desperately need to do.

But then I get a big, professional-looking e-mail with the subject line "Are you using email marketing?" and suddenly I realize that lots of people are doing vastly worse than I am, and that there are people making money teaching 1996-level marketing strategies.

And I'm just the kind of guy that feels better because of that.


Edit: Yes, the first time I did spend so much time making sure I spelled "assuaged" correctly that I misspelled "worries" with one R. Luckily, I'm no longer an editor, so that's not ironic.

Read in January

It's been a dark and cold month, but that's the way January usually is. I keep finding things other than books to distract me -- I spent much of this month playing Lego Lord of the Rings on the new Wii U, for example, which was usually entertaining and only occasionally frustrating -- but books are not the only thing in life. (At least, that's what people keep telling me.)

Here's what I did read this month:

Walter Mosley, The Long Fall (1/2) -- The first book in a new mystery series (new as of 2009) by the author of the excellent Easy Rawlins novels (and of the smutty, odd Killing Johnny Fry), set in New York, with a deeply morally conflicted hero. Mosley is a great writer -- not just a good crime novelist, but one of our best today period -- and particularly interesting for white guys like me to read, with his thoughtful, deep takes on American racial divides. It doesn't do to talk too much about the plot of a mystery, but this book has a good 'un.

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts 1985-1986 (1/4) -- I've covered this series -- and Schulz's amazing fifty-year run on Peanuts -- in extensive detail before, and there isn't much I could say about these two years in the mid '80s that I didn't say about the previous two years in the mid '80s. Yes, this isn't Schulz's best work -- so it's A Winter's Tale rather than Macbeth, The Cat-Nappers rather than The Code of the Woosters. It's only disappointing in comparison with those heights, which isn't entirely Schulz's fault.

S. Gross, Your Mother Is a Remarkable Woman (1/6)

Lisa Lutz, Curse of the Spellmans (1/7) -- Second in the humorous mystery series, after The Spellman Files. These books are fast-moving, deeply enjoyable, regularly funny, decent mysteries, and even seem to have real character development going on. (The publisher compares them to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books, which is a huge slander on Lutz's heroine Izzy Spellman -- Izzy is smart and competent and has real skills, albeit also an intensely compulsive nature and a hatred of self-reflection. If Izzy is still unable to control herself in another five books, I'll admit the comparison, but not before that -- and I don't expect it to happen; Lutz is clearly moving her characters and situations forward.) Again, talking about the plot of a mystery is not a good idea -- but these books both go quickly and stick with you.

Nigel Auchterlounie, Spleenal (1/7)

Julia Wertz, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (1/13)

Nare Silver, The Signal and the Noise (1/17)

Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing (1/22) -- Susan Hill may be a dark, cutting novelist, telling stories full of nasty doings and the horrors that mankind can get up to -- I've never read her novels, so it may be so. But, on the basis of this book, I highly doubt it. Hill spent a year reading only books that she already had in her (apparently large and wonderful, thoroughly English country) home, and wrote this book about the experience. There's quite a bit about the books she loves, about writers now forgotten, about the Great Books, about the joys of re-reading, and various other booky topics. There's also a few bits of autobiography, mostly concerned with Hill's very early days in the literary world -- her first novel was published in the early '60s, when she was a 19-year-old college student, and I'm afraid she does talk about how nice all of those older literary gentlemen were to poor young her without seeming to realize why they were so nice -- but she does stick to her topic most of the time. And she's entertaining about it, if quite English in an old-fashioned sense: country, Anglican, serious, pull-up-your-socks kind of English. This is exactly the kind of book you'd expect from a sixtyish British female novelist writing about the books she likes to read, and, as long as that's something you're likely to enjoy, Howards End Is on the Landing is delightful.

Lisa Lutz, Revenge of the Spellmans (1/24) -- Third in the series; see above for my spiel. I'm now two books behind, and I hope that the status will not remain quo when I catch up with the series in another month or three. (There's one sure way for a mystery series to kill itself: flash-freeze the background and characters, so that nothing ever changes or grows, no one seems to get any older, and the same comedy bits can get trotted out like clockwork in each book. So far, Lutz does not seem to be falling into that trap, which is especially keen for funny writers -- the audience wants the same old stuff over and over, since they liked it the first time, and writers must be cruel and sure, like a shark, and always move forward.)

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (1/29)

Chester Brown, Ed the Happy Clown (1/30)

Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan, Demo, Vol. II (1/31) -- Ten years after the first series of Demo stories, more or less,Wood & Cloonan came back for six more stories of unusual young people and their travails. (See my review of the first collection.) This clutch is even further from superheroism than the first one -- only two of the protagonists here have anything I'd call a power of any kind, and the others are different from regular humanity in only neurological ways as far as I can see -- but they're still well-observed stories about odd people trying to live around or with their oddnesses, and Cloonan's art is still lovely, particular, and expressive, with excellent use of blacks and lots of specific faces for these very specific people. The stories are all separate, like the first grouping, and the getalt is still a weird combination of real-folks characterization and high-tension superhero storytelling, as if Demo is trying to straddle the divide between Spider-Man and R. Crumb all by itself.


I may need to dive into a reading project soon, to shake the doldrums off. Since I have three candidates in my head (and in various degrees of readiness on my shelves), I may need to put that up to a vote here. And if I say "I may need" a few more times, I'll become completely vague and unable to make a decision, so I'll quit there.