Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/18

For the last four weeks, I've only gotten one book a week to write about, which has been oddly convenient for this post. This week, it looked like the streak would extend -- but then a big box from Yen Press arrived late in the week, so I have a bunch of books to tell you about.

But I'll start with what looked like that one book for a few days, just because, and then work my way towards the land of manga via a light novel that Yen is publishing this month. As always, these books just arrived on my doorstep, so I haven't yet read any of them. I'll tell you what I can but -- especially if any of you know more about a book or series or author -- please feel free to speak up in the comments.

The single SFF novel this week is Rex Regis by the always dapper L.E. Modesitt, Jr.. It's the eighth novel in the "Imager Portfolio" series, which -- as far as I can tell -- blends the typical epic fantasy elements of big magic and sweeping historical events with a more Age of Enlightenment level of technology and a magical system based on raw imagination. Rex Regis is a Tor hardcover which officially hit stores earlier this month. And, if the description is anything to go on, it's full of people and countries and conflicts that you should have read at least the last few books -- I believe the eight-book series falls into two major parts -- to understand.

Everything else I have this week is published by Yen Press -- the manga arm of the multifarious Hachette Book Group and corporate sister to the SFF imprint Orbit -- and reaches stores during the month of January. You should be able to find all of it available now at your favorite retailer.

First up is a light novel, Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 2, latest and last in the series by Mizuki Nomura about a tiny high school literature club, made up of one boy who wants to be a novelist and a female supernatural creature disguise as a girl, who lives by eating stories. This is the big finish, and the back cover promises the usual emotional rollercoaster of Japanese popular culture -- a whole bunch of names who all really, really strongly want radically different things, and probably a pile of plot complications to make it even worse. The first book is Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime; start there if the premise sounds interesting.

From here on, as usual, I'll tackle the manga more or less by volume number, so I'll start with things closest to the beginning of a story and end with the most convoluted and least new-reader-accessible stuff. I should also note, as a consumer guide, that Yen seems to have had a price rise recently: most of the standard-size manga volumes are now $13, and some of the fatter ones have hit $25. (I expect this is because of an unpleasant feedback effect from Amazon; I've seen that a lot professionally.)

And so here's Nico Tanigawa's No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 2, where the very Seussian lettering of the title is still confusing me. It's about a geeky highschool girl, Tomoko -- geeky in very specific Japanese-teen-girl ways, though, which is not at all what a random American would call "geeky" -- and her inevitably futile attempts to be more popular. (I haven't read this yet, but it's probably telling that she wants to "be popular," rather than to "have friends," or even just enjoy her life.)

Also a #2, and with its own odd title issues, is Shiro Amano's Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Vol. 2. (So...179 days, then?) It's set in the same world of the previous Kingdom Hearts games and manga, in which a force of transdimensional cops with Keyblades travel through the worlds of Disney movies to destroy bad guys, collect hearts, and (presumably) rack up high scores. In this series, young Keyblade-weilder Xion has lost her weapon, so she has to go on missions with compatriot Roxas until she can find it again. Look, I'm sure it makes sense in context.

Weird titles continue with Coco Fujiwara's Inu x Boku SS, Vol. 2, about a teenage girl going to a boarding school so elite that every student gets her own personal "secret service agent" -- and hers is, naturally, gorgeous and mysterious. Oh, and she's part demon because Japan.

Next up is the finale of a sub-story: Durarara!! Saika Arc, Vol. 3 is about the fifth book overall in the series about a large cast of odd-balls, low-lifes, ne'er-do-wells, and other hyphenated types in Tokyo's dangerous Ikebukuro district. This arc, from the back cover, is about a serial slasher whose mania is apparently infectious, which doesn't sound good for the un-slashed population of Tokyo. A major series character is apparently the final target of the slasher in this book, so expect high drama and flashing blades. Oh, and I should give you the credits: this comes from an anime, so it's art by Akiyo Satorigi, character design by Suzuhito Yasuda, and CREATOR Ryohgo Narita.

Yoshiki Tonogai's Survivor-meets-Battle Royale story continues in Judge, Vol. 3, in which the imprisoned young "sinners" continue to form alliances and back-stab as they decide which of them will die first to fulfill the whim of their mysterious captor. (I'm afraid I don't see the appeal at all of this, so I'm probably slandering it badly.)

The current major "magical girl" series continues in the multiply titled Puella Magi Kazumi Magica: The Innocent Malice, Vol. 4. Since this, too, came from other media, it's credited as original story by Magica Quartet, story by Masaki Hiramatsu, and art by Takashi Tensugi. (And I appreciate the irony of crediting an original story and a plain, ordinary story.) This one has more revelations about the nature of these magical girls, and if one of them needs to be eliminated for the good of them all -- man, it's tough being a teenaged girl in Japan, even if you do have superpowers.

Then there's Yuuki Kodama's Blood Lad, Vol. 4, in which young okatu duke of hell Spaz and his dead plot-token human girlfriend Fuyumi continue to wander around, meeting more of Spaz's relatives and getting involved in the expected schemes and plots.

And the Haruhi Suzumiya spin-off machine continues as well, with The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Vol. 5, in which Yuki is no longer disappeared. This line extension credits art to Puyo, story to Nagaru Tanigawa, and characters to Noizi Ito.

I forget what Shouji Sato's series Triage X was about -- it's back for a fifth volume this month -- but I didn't think it was about idol singers, which seems to be the focus this time out. Digging into the Google, I see that this is the one about a secret team of crime-fighters -- mostly buxom young women, with the inevitable quiet boy at their center -- who operate out of a hospital and are mostly staff there. (Because doctors and nurses have so much free time that they need to fill up with vigilante activity.)

JinHo Ko's continuing story of massive supernatural violence for its own sake continues in Jack Frost, Vol. 9, in which Jack the Ripper -- or at least another guy with that name -- and other psychopaths posture and battle over geographically defined regions of the extradimensional city of Amityville and over the plot-token girl from the early volumes, known as the mirror image. Don't worry about any of that: it's just an excuse for the ultraviolence.

And the harem manga is alive and well, as Milan Matra's Omamori Himari, Vol. 11 arrives. I'm not sure who these people are, but Himari -- one of the many supernaturally-powered and well-endowed girls around our nebbishy hero -- is the one in trouble this time, because he drew too deeply on her demonic power, and that's never good.

The palace opera is also alive in Park SoHee's Goong, Vol. 14, in which the royal heir Shin -- yes, this is a mildly alternate history in which Korea still has a monarchy, because you can't have a princess without a prince, and you can't have a really high-drama palace opera without a princess -- begins to unravel the secrets of his divorce from the series heroine. (And if you don't think they'll get back together eventually, you have no idea how popular fiction works.)

Yana Toboso's Black Butler, Vol. 16 is here as well, with its particular take on Victorian England and its butlers and lords. This time out, the Earl has to win a cricket tournament to get an invitation to a secret banquet to talk to the head of secretive Weston College, of course.

We're getting into high numbers here, like Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater, Vol. 18. This is still a story of a cadre of demon-fighters and their sentient shape-shifting weapons (or perhaps vice versa), and, even more so, about the school for those demon-fighters, because every shonen series must be about school by the iron law of Japan. And I doubt anyone would want to dive in with this volume.

Even better is Jun Mochizuki's Pandora Hearts, Vol. 20. I'll just quote the back-cover copy and leave it at that:

These...are the "cursed words" I deliver to you.

The pathetic farce that has unfolded in earnest is no more than an absurd yarn spun by the man who caused the Tragedy of Sablier by following his heart's desires. The players in his tale begin dancing with abandon, their emotions bottled up inside, as though they are marionettes manipulated by a master puppeteer...

Got it? That's what this book is about.

The last two books are both deep into two related series, but may be more approachable. First up is Higurashi When They Cry: Festival Accompanying Arc, Vol. 3, with story by Ryukishi07 and art by Karin Suzuragi. Hirgurashi is a series of murder-mystery computer games, all set in the same time and place, with different plots. As usual with a popular Japanese property, the original games metastasized into light novels, manga, TV series (animated and live-action) and several other permutations. But each "Arc" of the manga adapts one game, and so each one should basically stand alone. This is still the third volume, and 23rd overall, but it's only three of eight in "Festival Accompanying," which is better than it could be.

Last, there's Umineko When They Cry Episode 3: Banquet of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1, which adapts a different series of murder-mystery games -- which were also turned into manga, movies, chew-toys for dogs, support girdles, saltwater taffy, and other random products -- of which Banquet of the Golden Witch is the third. (That Golden Witch previously had a Legend and a Turn, and subsequently had an Alliance, an End, a Dawn, a Requiem, a Twilight, and one further adventure that Wikipedia only has in its Japanese name.) That witch apparently maneuvered the rich and far-flung Ushiromiya clan into having their reunion on a remote island, which reunion plays out somewhat differently -- though still full of murder and mayhem -- in each version of the game and manga. This huge brick -- it's over 600 pages of comics, seriously -- has story by Ryukishi07 and art by Kei Natsumi, and, like the rest of the above items, is available right now.

Book-A-Day 2014 #19: Pink by Kyoko Okazaki

It's important to remember that the story now is not the story that always was. Today, China is the surging Asian country with a swiftly growing economy and opaque government, the one that's going to overtake the US and dominate the world any day now. But, twenty-five years ago, that country was Japan.

Pink is a story of that Japan, from the inside: a manga very unlike most of what we see here in the West. It's a complete story in one volume, like a traditional novel. It's not tightly tied to a specific demographic marketing category. It has an honesty and frankness about sex that's rare in any medium. And, even though most manga are credited to a single individual, this one really is the creation of that one woman, Kyoko Okazaki, not a herd of assistants and dominating editors behind that one figurehead.

Pink centers on two young people: Yumi and Haruo. Yumi is an office lady by day -- one of the herd of similar young women stuck in entry-level jobs in paternalistic Japanese corporations, from which they will never be promoted and where marriage is the expected career path -- and a high-priced call girl by night, to pay for the massive appetite of her unusual pet, Croc. (The subtext comes very close to being text here, particularly since Yumi's father -- never seen in the book -- is paying for her apartment, so it doesn't seem as if one crocodile could eat that much to make prostitution necessary.)

Haruo is a man of about the same age, a wanna-be novelist who's being kept by an older woman. His sugar mommy" -- her name may be Sazae; it's never mentioned in the text but that name is in one chapter title -- is also Yumi's hated stepmother. Inevitably, Yumi and Haruo meet and start their own relationship.

That's most of the main cast: girl and boy and older woman, in their love triangle. There's also Yumi's younger half-sister Keiko -- the bratty daughter of the selfish step-mother -- who spends a lot of time in Yumi's apartment and also loves Croc. And, of course, the succession of Yumi's clients, who tie her up or steal from her or otherwise demand and impose on her; they're also usually rich, powerful, and/or famous, appearing on TV soon after their trysts. Pink probably does not rise to the level of a formal allegory, but the characters are types as well as individuals; they stand for more than themselves and encode what Okazaki saw in Japanese society at the time.

Now, Pink looks like a snapshot of the "Bubble Economy" at its most inflated and wispy: the moment where valuation was untethered from value and image vastly outperformed substance. Yumi and Haruo are trying to make their way through that world, following their own instincts and the herd alternatively. And they succeed hugely, as one does in a bubble, but the end of the bubble looms.

Okazaki tells this story with a lovely, loose line, full of energy and verve. Her characters are similarly open-hearted, even the cool stepmother: their whims and loves and demands and desires drive Pink's plot. This is a book about what it's like to want things in an environment that tells you that you can and should get everything you want; that insists that wanting things enough will make them happen.

When Pink was published in 1989, Okazaki couldn't have known what would happen to Japan a year later -- but she knew the bubble couldn't last. And Pink is the perfect expression of that bubble -- and of all the similar bubbles, that go on every day, all over the world, everywhere young people are told they can do anything and be anyone that they want. If you are one of those young people, you might not heed Pink. But it's still a good thing to read it, to see what a bubble looks like and feel the moment when it pops.



Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #18: Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis

There are a lot of autobiographical cartoonists these days, it's true -- but they're doing very different things (art spiegelman vs. Joe Matt! Julie Doucet vs. Julia Wertz!), so that's about as useful as saying there are a lot of romance novels published.

Vanessa Davis is a relatively young (well, she's 35 now, but anyone younger than me still counts) cartoonist who works, as far as I've seen, exclusively with her own life as material. She hasn't tackled any big, book-length stories yet -- though her mother insists that's her long-term plan about halfway through this collection -- so Make Me a Woman collects a whole bunch of work (some color and some black & white; some sketchbook pages and some strips telling specific stories, up to maybe ten pages long) from 2004 through 2010, and the only thing it all has in common is that it's by and about Vanessa Davis.

That's enough: Davis has a talented eye for what moments will make good stories, and her color work in particular is supple, with a smooth, flowing line. (A lot of the black & white work here is from her sketchbook -- and the book also covers a six-year period -- so comparing the linework of b&w to color isn't terribly useful.)

There's a bit of the hanging-out-with-fellow-cartoonists here, but not a lot -- and none of the semi-obligatory stories about comics conventions, which are not missed. Instead, Davis tells stories of her everyday life -- a summer at fat camp as a teen, what it was like to go to a tiny all-Jewish school in West Palm Beach, parties and working and subway rides and long-term boyfriends and friends and her relationship with R. Crumb's work. And, of course, Davis cartoons about her family -- primarily her mother and older sister -- as they visit for holidays, squabble, remember childhood, go for spa visits, and just bounce off each other.

I know I'm making a bad case for this book: I'm discombobulated right now and can't focus correctly. (And you should see how many typos I'm making as I go -- the page is a sea of little red squiggles.) But Vanessa Davis really is a talented, interesting, neat cartoonist who tells great stories. They might be mostly stories about being young, Jewish, and female, but they reach far beyond that: after all, I'm none of those things.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #17: The Initiates by Etienne Davodeau

This is the mildest of criticisms -- certainly nothing that substantially damages a lovely book about art and work and life -- but the subtitle of The Initiates is not really correct. That subtitle is "A Comic Artist and a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs."

Now, it's true that Etienne Davodeau, the author of this book and a cartoonist of no little fame in France, did work very closely with Richard Leroy, the wine-maker of the title. The two of them spent a year doing the hard work of vineyard and winery: pruning, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, preparing and filling and moving barrels. So Davodeau did Leroy's work. But Leroy only read comics over that year, though he did read a lot of them. Leroy isn't co-credited on this book; he didn't lay out pages or craft dialogue or even spot blacks.

So Leroy was introduced to an artform new to him as a consumer, whereas Davodeau began to learn a complicated art -- assuming "art" and not "craft" is the right word to describe the work of wine-making -- as a producer. Certainly, Davodeau ended the year nowhere near Leroy's level -- he became a competent assistant, not a leader -- but he did the work of wine, while Leroy didn't do the work of comics.

I'm harping on this point because I think it illustrates exactly the difference between "artist" and "artisan:" there's art in both of them, but you can't teach anyone to be an artist. You can teach someone to appreciate art, and maybe that will lead them to want to make it. And you can teach the skills needed to do a skillful craft -- though, again, you can't teach the spark of inspiration or the love of that work that leads to great art.

Anyway, Davodeau thought it would be interesting if he found a really good winemaker -- one who worked close to the land, on a small plot, to be as close as possible to the way a cartoonist creates his pages with his own hands -- and the two of them spent a year learning about each other's lives and skills and crafts and arts. So they did, and The Initiates is the record of that time: of 2010 and, mostly, the grapes growing in Leroy's fields that year and the books and comics festivals Davodeau had Leroy experience.

So The Initiates is a book about appreciating wine and books -- about what goes into the making of each of them, about the people who make each of them, and about what makes them special. It's the kind of book that makes you want to drink a lot of wine -- or whatever food/drink you love the most -- and read a lot of good books. It's a positive, loving, deep look at the world of making art. You probably do have to have some love for comics to read it -- it's in comics form, after all -- but The Initiates doesn't require any knowledge or love of wine; just a willingness to watch and learn and care.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index
 

Book-A-Day 2014 #16: Sandcastle by Peeters & Levy

I toyed with the idea of leaving a single, blurb-like line here, and calling it done: "a masterful graphic novel, in which one day at the beach encompasses all of society and all of life," perhaps, or "the waves may knock down every sand castle on the beach, but time will not wither the subtle beauty and deep human knowledge of this Sandcastle." Who knows: I may yet end this "review" without saying anything more about the book.

I picked up Sand Castle at a library five days ago. There's no description on the outside: the back cover continues the image on the front, all sea and sky. And the book inside contains no descriptive copy or illuminating review quotes -- it dives right into the narrative after the usual front matter. So I read this knowing only one thing about it: it was, in some way, the work of Frederik Peeters, whose Blue Pills I read (and reviewed for ComicMix) back in 2008. After reading the graphic novel proper, I hit the biographies of the authors, and learned that Peeters was the illustrator here, working for a script by documentary filmmaker Pierre Oscar Levy -- Levy's first work for comics.

It's set on a secluded beach, just inland from the cliffs of a seaside, where erosion and luck have created a perfect little bowl of water and sand and air and life. And, one day, a number of people go there: first a mysterious young woman, observed skinny-dipping by a serious Algerian man passing through. Then two families arrive: parents, children, one aged grandmother. A young couple join them -- all coming separately, none knowing each other. They squabble, and the reader expects one type of story.

But Sandcastle is not the expected story. It moves into genre in a way I wouldn't dream of revealing -- not even which genre -- and is remorseless as time itself in working out the details of that genre element. This is not a happy book, but it's a strong one, full of thought and humanity and love and fear and death. If you find it on a shelf, as I did, pick it up and read it. It's worth the time and space in your head.


Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #15: How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff

I'll avoid my usual joking around and elliptical introductions and just be blunt: this is one of the short list of books that every adult should read. How to Lie with Statistics is a classic -- originally published in 1954 -- and the examples and (occasionally) the buried assumptions of Huff make that very clear, but it's still one of the clearest and best examinations of what numbers can do and what people can make numbers do.

Huff, interestingly, was not a professor of math, but a jobbing writer, who fell into a profitable line of "how to" articles and books, of which Lie With Statistics is the most famous. (The others seems to be more serious, and to actually teach their readers how to do the things they promise.) He also lived to the age of 87, and only died in mid-2001; sixty-year-old works of art are often startlingly close to the modern day.

How to Lie With Statistics does, in a sly way, exactly what it promises to do: explain how elementary statistics works and how various statistical concepts -- mean vs. median vs. mode "averages," biased samples, probable error -- can be misused or deliberately skewed. He also cover the abuses of graphs and charts, and the importance of choosing the right frame of reference and sample in getting exactly the numbers you want.

Some of Huff's assumptions are quaint, and a few may even be offensive to some audiences. But his reasoning and examples are as good today as they were in 1954, and there's no other book -- particularly not one so short, pointed, and perfectly titled -- that can do what How to Lie With Statistics does.

If it does nothing else, it'll make you start asking that core question of journalism: who is telling me this, and what does he want to convince me of? Again, this is a book everyone should read and take to heart: it contains an essential toolkit for living in the modern world of advertising, politics, and marketing.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #14: Lost Cat by Jason

You don't have to stare at a graphic novel by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, but its characters will always stare at you. His blank-faced animal-men and -women never blink; their large, empty eyes are always exactly the same size, no matter what they're looking at. That's one of the markers of death in a Jason comic: closed eyes.

Their emotional reactions are equally dampened: the apocalypse could happen in a Jason book -- has happened, several times, in a number of Jason books, not excluding this one -- and people might run from it, to save themselves, but they don't scream or fall down or show anything other than mild surprise.

Lost Cat is a large, major Jason story, stretching to two hundred pages, but, as always, it's put together from off-the-shelf genre materials: the hardboiled detective, the mysterious femme fatale, the secret plot, the rich old man who wants one more thing before he dies. And, of course, the lost cat that sets the whole plot in motion.

As always with Jason, Lost Cat is driven equally by dialogue and by silences -- by panels of characters talking, usually inconsequentially, or of them doing things without narration. And those genre elements won't quite turn out the way you expect -- or there's one more genre reveal still to come to turn everything on its head.

So the detective finds a cat, and then searches for a lost woman. In parallel, he gets a case to find and retrieve a painting. Meanwhile, the world goes on -- as it does in a Jason story, which is not the way it ever does in the real world. The detective is perhaps not as sane or balanced as he appears -- but that's all right, since the world is equally deranged.

That counts for a happy ending in a Jason book, I suppose: that we are only as crazy as the world itself. It's not all that satisfying, but it's not really meant to be. This is a Jason book, about things lost and gone and irretrievable. Don't expect happy.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Another Radical New Scheme for Publishing!

There's one every year, and 2014 gets its entry early from self-publishing superstar Hugh Howey.

As usual, he thinks that everything that has actually worked for many multi-million dollar companies, in the US and around the world -- and continues to work, year after year, producing products and paying thousands of salaries -- is completely wrong, but he, one guy in his basement, has The One True Solution which will be vastly better.

This post may expand, if I have time to dig into his list later on. And not all of his suggestions are completely stupid. But they represent the usual profound misunderstanding of what publishing is and does -- and, more importantly, what Amazon is and what kind of market it represents -- that we always see from self-published authors.

Just to whet your whistle, I'll note that his #6 is actually about "most favored nation" clauses, not "escalator clauses." And it would require a publisher to renegotiate all of its existing contracts to change language in a way that would be unfavorable to the authors and agents. Yes, that is likely to happen. Not even Chris Christie can strongarm people that much.

Speaking of Stupid iTunes Things...

Another one that's been baffling me since the "upgrade" to version 11:

Previously, when you had a playlist set to shuffle, and clicked on the sequence column -- the one with numbers; usually all the way to the left -- it would re-sort that list in the order that it was going to be played.

Now, if you click on sequence, it puts the tracks into no order that can be discerned by the mind of man -- it's not the order they did play or will play, not the order of title or album or artist or year, not ranked by stars or alphabetized by comments.

No, as far as I've been able to guess, those tracks are now ranked by how much Jonny Ive likes them. I have no other theory.

It's yet another way that Apple deliberately removed useful features in moving from iTunes 10 to 11, because, I suppose, we jumped on the furniture so we no longer get nice things.

Book-A-Day 2014 #13: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Someday, some academic will write a really interesting paper comparing Neil Gaiman's 2002 novel for young readers Coraline with The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a novel of similar length from a decade later and definitely aimed at adults. The two books aren't tightly parallel -- Coraline is a portal fantasy with a young heroine getting what she thinks she wants and then having to get free of that, while Ocean deals with fantastic elements erupting into our world in a story told entirely in flashback by a now-adult man remembering his own childhood. But the attitudes towards parents and responsibility and family and imagination are much more similar, and the two works vibrate interestingly with each other, even against the backdrop of Gaiman's full career -- which has many other works digging into similar territory.

Ocean is a slim book, but not a slight one: it's precise and focused and taut, like a great novella, and has the control of tone and scope that only a short book can maintain.

The main character is a man of around Gaiman's age, from England but now resident elsewhere, engaged in "making art" in some way he doesn't specify, with grown children and a broken marriage behind him. We never learn his name. He has one younger sister, always called "my sister," and parents whose names are used once or twice in the book -- in the way that parents' names are mysterious and rare in the life of a young child. He is not Neil Gaiman.

But he's not not Neil Gaiman, either.

In the frame story, the man is about fifty, returning to his area of his childhood for the first time in a long time. There's a funeral, and he's on his way from the service to the reception afterward at that sister's house when he sidetracks down the lane where he used to live. The house of his childhood is long gone: torn down and its lands divided to make a dozen or more smaller identical houses. But, at the end of the lane is a farmhouse that he remembers.

When he was seven, he met the family at that farmhouse -- eleven-year-old Lettie Hempstock, her mother Ginnie, and her grandmother, Old Mrs. Hempstock. And the bulk of Ocean is what the middle-aged man remembers of that time, when he returns to that farm and sits down to look at a small pond -- which Lettie, back then, told him was an ocean that her family traveled through to get there.

He remembers it all, in precise detail, all of the things that happened to that seven-year-old boy. And he remembered absolutely none of that before he returned to that pond, that ocean. He remembers the dead body in his father's car, his dead kitten, a new live-in baby-sitter that called herself Ursula Monkton, and what she really was. He remembers what his father did, and what he had to do, and what happened to Lettie.

But he never says, or thinks about, who the Hempstocks are -- though we readers, knowing Gaiman's penchant for mythology, can make our guesses. And we're probably partially correct.

There's sometimes a sense that short books are less impressive than long ones, as if words get better the more of them you stack together. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is one of the strongest arguments for the opposite theory: it's keen-edged and devastating, with every word chosen as carefully as a short story. It's already won an award or two, and I could see it winning more: this is a major book by a writer I wish had more time to write novels.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/11

This is beginning to get eerie: for what I think is the fourth week in a row, I have precisely one book to write about this week. (I don't mind getting one book for free in a week, just as I don't mind getting any number of books free -- getting books free is glorious whenever it happens. But when it's so precisely measured for a long time, I begin to suspect Sinister Forces are at play.)

My vague paranoia aside, the book this week is Alex Bledsoe's He Drank, and Saw the Spider, which I believe is the fifth in his Eddie LaCrosse series, about a hard-boiled detective in an epic fantasy world. I've got a small shelf of Bledsoe books staring at me -- all of his books sound like exactly the thing I would love, and so I've been piling them up -- but I still haven't managed to read any of them, for reasons I really can't explain. This time out, Bledsoe pulls a Ross Macdonald and has Eddie return to a place where he once saved a baby girl from a bear, to see how she's grown up in the fifteen years since then. Of course, things are complicated and dangerous, and Eddie finds himself right in the middle of that as soon as he arrives. He Drank, and Saw the Spider is a Tor hardcover, hitting stores this Tuesday.

I also got two books from a major online bookseller on Friday, so I'll mention them as well. Both of these are things I paid my own good money for, if that helps anyone prioritize them.

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons is the eleventh in Lawrence Block's series about Bernie Rhodenbarr, gentleman burglar, following a bunch of bestsellers from the past four decades. (I started reading this series, back when there were only two or three of them, in one of my first journeys upstairs to Adult Fiction in my local library, back longer ago than I care to mention.) Block self-published this one -- for reasons unknown to me, whether they have to do with lack of interest from his publishers, a desire to keep all of the money, a sense of experimentation, or something completely different -- though it has a cover design very reminiscent of the early books in the series (from Doubleday, if I remember right). This is out now, and you might miss it if you're not careful -- one potential problem with self-publishing is that an individual author usually doesn't have the outreach ability (publicity, marketing, getting books into stores) that a company does.

And I've been looking for Daryl Cunningham's How to Fake a Moon Landing for so long -- it was published last April, and my copy in the box was the first time I saw one in person -- that I'd forgotten that one of the reason I was interested in it in the first place was that it was in comics form. So: comics, skepticism, and real science in one package. If my audience is anything like I think it is, many of you will want this book.

iTunes 11 Is Even Worse Than I Thought

I'm having an annoying problem with iTunes, and my attempts to connect with Apple about this have been less than useless -- I just sent an email to their official support address and got a message back that mailbox is "not monitored."

(Really? You don't even look at the requests to support your expensive products? That's remarkably dumb for a company making multi-billions of dollars a year.)

So here's what I wrote to them, in hopes either some Apple social media drone will see it or one of you folks will have an idea:

1: I went to your site to report a problem in iTunes: I recently upgraded to iTunes 11.1.3 (and, subsequently, to OS 10.9.1, but this problem seems to have begun with the iTunes upgrade).

Now, sometimes when I’m playing music, some of the “comments” field on a track will disappear within 2-3 seconds after that track starts playing.

Since most of my playlists are driven by comments, this is a huge problem for me.

As far as I can tell, the comments are deleted right as the track begins to play — and then, usually, the track drops out of that playlist and so stops playing. (The track is still in my library, though.)

This does not happen all of the time, and I’ve never seen it delete all comments — but it does delete the last phrase or word regularly, and sometimes more than that. I have not been able to determine what triggers the deletion, but if I go back into the comments field and re-add the missing comments, they seem to stay at that point.

(Or, at least, those new comments aren’t instantly deleted with the next play. I have no idea what’s triggering the deletions.)


2: And the second problem has to do with reporting.

I wanted to search Apple Support Communities to see if others had experienced this problem.

But, when I went to log in with my Apple ID, it directed me to this page: https://appleid.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyAppleId.woa/157/wo/wIQeioRlXPjtX5BCZMeyXg/0.0.69.17.5.

I was asked to pick a username, and then — when I did — I got an error that said "An account utilizing this email address already exists. Only one account per email address is allowed on Apple Support Communities.”

But it gave no way to log into that existing account — even though I was ostensibly already logged into it.

I couldn’t get to any Support Communities page, because I couldn’t create a new username (since one already existed) and the site wouldn’t let me use that old username (whatever it is).

That’s a huge catch-22: can’t create a new account and can’t use the old one.


Please let me know what steps I can take to correct these problems — or what steps Apple is taking to fix them directly.

The ironic thing is that I was thinking about posting about how much easier it's been to play games on this Mac under Mac OS vs. Windows -- no drivers or other bumf, just push the button on a PS3 controller and it works -- when Apple decides to fuck up something that's much closer to their USP.

So I don't think I'll be writing any "Apple stuff is really KEWL" posts until they figure out this thing and fix it.

I've given up on getting multiple windows in iTunes 11, though just having that would have made dealing with this problem massively easier. I wonder if Apple knows just how difficult they're making things for people who have been supporting and promoting them for years (two decades, in may case) to keep doing so?

Book-A-Day 2014 #12: The Elwell Enigma by Rick Geary

Rick Geary's major project for the last couple of decades has been a long series of graphic novels, each about a particular famous murder case from American history -- he began with the "Treasury of Victorian Murder" in eight volumes from 1995 to 2007, and has since moved slightly forward in time with the "Treasury of XXth Century Murder," with six books so far. The Elwell Enigma stands next to that series: it's not part of it, officially, but it's the same kind of story and sees Geary using the same skills and techniques.

We could speculate why Elwell Enigma is not part of the main series: it's a bit shorter than the series standard -- 48 pages vs. 80 -- and the case was not solved at all (though many of the other cases Geary has covered have serious mysteries remaining, or questions of whether the right people were punished). But that really doesn't matter: this is the kind of thing Geary does well, and it's a fine package telling an enticing story.

Unfortunately, this won't be widely available: it was a Kickstarter campaign last year, and the book doesn't seem to be available to anyone who didn't back that campaign. And, if I'm adding things up correctly, that means there are only about 250 copies of this floating around, unless Geary printed up a bunch of them for other purposes and will release those later. (Which would be very nice for Geary fans.)

In any case, this is the story of the murder of the wealthy bridge expert Joseph B. Elwell, who was shot to death in the early morning of June 11, 1920 in his Upper West Side home. Geary doesn't have as much to work with here as in some of his previous books: Elwell was a womanizer (something he had in common with several other murder victims and perpetrators in the series), but didn't have any single really scandalous affair. And it looks like the police might even have been honest this time: they searched diligently for a lead, but none of Elwell's paramours or bridge students could have killed him. (The alternative there is that the real killer was quietly hushed up for whatever reason, but Geary doesn't even give that as a possibility, so presumably there was no gossip at the time that he was able to turn up.)

So the case in Elwell Enigma is very much an enigma: Elwell was shot by someone he let into his home soon after the milkman did his rounds that morning -- in bare feet and pyjamas, without hairpiece or dentures -- and that person got away completely. This was all nearly a hundred years ago, though, so -- unless the perpetrator was very young then and very old now -- everyone involved is now dead. Because of that enigmatic aspect, Elwell Enigma is not as satisfying as many of Geary's similar books: he just didn't have enough material to work with here (or he left out a lot of blind alleys the police followed to keep the book to this size, perhaps).

Backers of Elwell Enigma also got a 24-page PDF of older Geary crime comics, called "Digital Murder," which collected a bunch of his very first murder stories from the early '80s -- mostly set in middle America of the time, and presented as true, though they might actually be fictional. (It also includes a 2007 story, "Blood on My Hands," in a similar style.) I'm a fan of those early Geary comics -- their matter-of-fact laconic narration, the quick panel transitions, the dispassionate narrators, the casual bloodsheet, the deeply amusing juxtaposition of the early Geary's round, lumpy, cartoony characters with the dark deeds narrated. But, as far as I remember, "Digital Murder" was an unexpected bonus; I can't find any reference to it on the Kickstarter page.

But, maybe, if Geary was digging through his files to collect these, that means there's a chance that a larger collection of those old strips -- maybe even the ones that aren't about murders -- could surface, something to replace those old copies of At Home with Rick Geary and Housebound with Rick Geary. I can only hope.

My apologies if I've made this book sound too enticing, since I imagine it would be very difficult to find. Maybe you know a Geary fan who can lend it to you?


Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index