Incoming Books: Week of June 7

I had a birthday this week -- I'm too old to make a big fuss about it, and also too old to specify just how old I am -- which meant I got some great stuff. (The newish Mountain Goats album, all three Uncharted games, another two-pack game for the PS3, and sundries.) Shockingly, I also got a book, and a promise for one more.

(I'll cover the promised one when it comes; I'm always buying books, so I always have an excuse to list them here.)

And the day before that, I hit a comics shop for what I thought was a mostly unsuccessful trip. I didn't find Pascal Girard's Petty Theft, or Louise Brooks: Detective by Rick Geary, or the new Dungeon Monstres book, or Exquisite Corpse from First Second, or Ed Hillyer's Room for Love. (I might not have bought all of them if I found them, of course, or things like Lulu Anew or Nimona that I wanted to see in person and poke through -- but I probably would have bought some of them.) And I missed the train I was aiming for, since I spent too much time in that comics shop. (And, because of that delay, I had time to stop at Krispy Kreme for a free donut for myself and a dozen to bring back home to the family -- truly, my life is full of woe.) But I did buy four books. And these are them.

The gift was The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, which I've been looking at and coveting for quite some time now. It's a handsome big book with classy two-color printing, and the only problem with that is that it's clearly too big to read on a train. The editor is Leslie S. Klinger, who I think is more of a Sherlockian -- but I've heard good things about his work here. And I don't think I've re-read a big wodge of Lovecraft in a decade, since I put together Black Seas of Infinity, so I'm definitely due.

And then on to the comics-shop purchases with Princess Decomposia and Count Spatula, the new book from Andi Watson. Watson is one of the most criminally underrated comics-makers in the world, with a long shelf of great naturalistic stories behind him, from Love Fights to Little Star to Dumped to Slow News Day. (He spent the first decade of this century making great romantic comedies in comics form, basically.) He turned to books for younger readers seven or eight years ago, and this is the latest piece of that part of his career, a longer book from First Second that follows a couple of short series from Walker.

I.N.J. Culbard has adapted a number of Lovecraft stories into comics form -- I reviewed his version of At the Mountains of Madness last year and really liked it -- and so I picked up another one of them, The Shadow Out of Time. This is from the small British house Self-Made Hero, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite comics imprints.

And then Ms. Marvel Vol. 2: Generation Why, from Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona, because I want to see where this is going (at least for now.) I did read, and mostly enjoyed, the first volume, though I still think the series is getting far too much attention just because the superheroine is brown.

Last is Zenith: Phase Two, reprinting the second story arc of the '80s revisionist superhero from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell. I'm toying with the idea of waiting to get all four volumes and reading them straight through, particularly since I'm planning to do a lot of bunches-of-graphic-novels reviews this year. We'll see if I can wait until Phase Four comes out to read any of them, though.

The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death by Todd Hignite

First we got to the point where the towering names of comics, dead for a decade or more, got big serious books about their art. And that was pretty nice. Now we've come another step along the road to legitimacy, when major creators in mid-career can get the same treatment, without any whiff of Bam! or Pow! And that's even better.

(I doubt we'll ever get to the last stop on that road, where hot newer creators get the same treatment. That happens in the fine-art world because those enfants terrible are selling their work for large piles of cash and getting a lot of fawning attention from highbrow media and rich people. The mechanisms and audience for comics are so different that the equivalent is a quickie paperback collection of the hot artist's pin-ups from SQP or someone like that. And those books, I think, are in decline since the rise of DeviantArt and similar free online mechanisms.)

Thus, we now -- "now" here meaning "in 2010," when this book was actually published -- get Todd Hignite's The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death which is firmly in the second category, since one of the greatest stories of Hernandez's career, "Browntown," was entirely created and published after this book. Anyway, Jaime Hernandez is a great artist and a deeply incisive maker of stories about people with real lives and emotions. Hignite's book nods in the direction of that second talent here and there, but the point of an art book is to show art, so the first talent is the one he really focuses on. The spine of Hignite's text is Hernandez's life -- there's a longish introductory chapter about his childhood, in a large, rambunctious family in a minor city in Southern California, and then the text rambles through his Love & Rockets and other work in phases basically chronologically up to about 2009, when the book went to press. But the point of a book like this is the pictures, and Hignite has a lot of good ones here. He has full comics pages, both as printed and in sketchier form, up to the full story "La Maggie La Loca," originally published in The New York Times Magazine's short-lived "Funny Pages" section and not otherwise reprinted.

Hignite also showcases art for album covers, flyers, merchandise, random covers, and other ephemera -- but the point here is the sequential art, and he smartly focuses on that most of the time, with full pages and longer sequences. The only downside of that approach is that it makes the reader want to read more Jaime Hernandez stories right away -- and that, honestly, is no bad thing. This is clearly a book for fans of Love & Rockets and Jaime, but if you read comics even vaguely about real lives and people, that should describe you.

Helene Hanff and the Bookish Life

It's probably not true anymore that any person who loves reading has even heard of 84, Charing Cross Road. Even the movie is more than twenty-five years old, and the book almost twenty years older than that. Even worse, the idea of writing letters is anachronistic enough, but writing letters to buy books? And having those books show up several months later? That's clearly not a world we live in anymore.

But that was Helene Hanff's world: she lived to 1997, but, if I can judge her at all from her books, she never touched the Internet and probably loathed personal computers. She was always grumpy and opinionated and much more comfortable looking backward than forward.

Perhaps I should explain, since I led off by saying I don't expect you to know what I'm talking about. Hanff was a jobbing New York writer -- a failed career as a playwright in the late '30s and '40s, somewhat more success writing for TV in the '50s, various mostly work-for-hire projects through the '60s, and then an unlikely late-life flourishing with a few slim books about books. [1] She was never particularly famous, and writing slim books-about-books once or twice a decade is no way to get rich -- and barely a way to keep the rent paid and the larder full. But she epitomized a certain relationship to books and the bookish life -- yearning, demanding, thoughtful, searching, inquisitive -- that a lot of us saw ourselves in.

And the book that made her famous -- well, as famous as she ever was -- was 84, Charing Cross Road. Hanff was an autodidact, as grumpy literary types often are, and so there were books she wanted that she couldn't find easily where she was. (This is the part that will be the most alien to the modern reader.) So she wrote to a random antiquarian bookstore in London, Marks & Co., because she happened to see their ad.

That was in 1949; Hanff kept writing to buy books for the next twenty years, interspersed with her nosy New Yorker's questions about the lives of the staffers and complaints about translations and random care packages of things rationed in England at the time. [2] She mostly corresponded with Frank Doel, who ran the mail-order side of the business, but also was in touch with Doel's wife and several other staffers over that period. And the Marks & Co. folks kept asking when Hanff would come to visit London, and the answer was always as soon as the money was there -- and Hanff had enough small crises over the year (mostly medical, I think) that the money was never quite there and always looked like it would be there next year.

And then Frank Doel died, suddenly, in late December of 1968. That galvanized Hanff to -- well, not to go to London, because the money still wasn't there. But it got her to assemble a lot of those letters from twenty years -- clearly not all of them; there are obvious gaps and probably twice as many unobvious ones -- from Doel and Hanff and all of the others. Hanff edited the lot, adding nothing to them, and the result was 84, Charing Cross Road, published in 1971 by Andre Deutsch in London.

Because of the book, though, she got that first trip to London, for six weeks in the summer of 1971, just missing her own publication date but arriving to publicize and to finally meet the people and see the places she had been thinking about for so long. And, having figured out how this book business works, Hanff turned the London trip into its own book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

The two books haven't been published together, as far as I've seen, which strikes me as a lost opportunity. Duchess is so clearly a sequel to and elaboration of Road that the two belong together. And they're both short enough that the resulting book wouldn't come close to breaking three hundred pages.

The best pleasures of both books are in Hanff's voice, brash and pushy and neurotic and self-deprecating. (For all that she was raised in Philadelphia, Hanff was the epitome of a New Yorker.) These are books-about-books by courtesy, since she doesn't write too much about the books -- Road does have some quick embedded critical judgements, as she scorns this writer or demands more of that one, but Duchess is entirely about people and places in and about London. They're both books deeply steeped in the literary life, and it's more of a hard-knock, scrabbling literary life than we usually see. Again, Hanff was successful in the sense that she made her own career and lived by herself and never gave in, but she never hit bestseller lists or made piles of money.

But that describes nine hundred and ninety nine published writers out of a thousand, and most of those aren't being read avidly forty years later. Hanff still is, and will be as long as the gap between wanting a book and getting it still exists -- there are software chappies continually trying to shrink and eliminate that gap, true, but it's still there. And, for her sake, I hope it stays for a long time.


[1] Hanff's first book, Underfoot in Show Business, covers the first two careers.

[2] And this is what stunned this particular reader: that a good decade after WWII ended, the UK was puttering along with horrible import restrictions and punitive rations. This was clearly a time before the gospel of the free market was preached quite as loudly.

The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford

Spufford is a noted English writer and critic, and The Child That Books Built was the story of his young reading life, originally published in 2002 when Spufford was in his early thirties. So he's my close contemporary, and presumably had a similar reading program to mine, since I learned about him through mostly SFnal-adjacent circles. And this book has been highly praised as a guide to what it's like to be a young bookish kid, the nonfictional equivalent of Jo Walton's Among Others.

Perhaps my problem is that I expected to adore it, and only mildly liked it, but I found Spufford too wrapped up in theory and self-psychoanalysis and too little invested in writing about books.

He divides the book into four long chapters, after one more introductory "Confessions of an English Fiction Eater," each one covering one major phase of that young life (from six up to about eighteen) as seen through the lens of one exemplary series or work or genre. "The Forest" is about the books read by or to young children -- mostly left unnamed -- but more about Piaget's theories of child development and various ideas about fairy tales. "The Island" starts out about The Hobbit -- the first book Spufford claims he read, at the age of six, which I find really puzzling, though I believe that he believes it -- and moves on to be mostly about Narnia. "The Town" is about Louisa May Alcott, and about the desire for community. (Though not a community of other people reading the same books, or even different books -- Spufford keeps the reading rigidly separate from the sociology.) And "The Hole" is about adolescence and horror and looking around for something new to read in the same way that one's body is changing into something new. Spufford writes that he floundered around for a while -- trying some classics but not connecting strongly, reading some thrillers but realizing they were too thin for him, consuming prose pornography even as a budding feminist sensibility told him it was Very Bad For Him -- before he dove into classic SF and found the next chapter of his reading life.

Some of that matches what I was reading at similar ages -- though the family lore is that I was reading substantially younger, discovered at Christmas when I was about two and a half, so I had a head start on Spufford. And I didn't re-read much, so I dug more widely -- I was reading from the "adult" section of the library for about eleven or twelve, mostly to get to the SF and mystery sections over on that side of the building. But Spufford, particularly in the earlier chapters, is writing about the reasons he now thinks he liked the books he read then, and focusing quite tightly on a very few books. That doesn't match my experience of a young reader: my experience was of reading a lot, of diving into different things, reading a dozen books, and then deciding I didn't quite like that, but how about this other thing right next to it? To be frank, The Child That Books Built smells too much of the lamp to me: the story of analysis rather than love.

If I wrote a similar book, I'd want to talk about reading Raymond Chandler at thirteen, sitting beside a pool in a Florida summer that I could squint and pretend was LA in the hot '30s. I'd want to admit to reading piles and piles of junky SF and fantasy in the early '80s, Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker and many more -- and to turn and argue that Thieves' World, coming right out of the middle of that milieu, was actually something much stronger and more exciting. I'd want to talk about discovering Gene Wolfe and "The Book of the new Sun," and how I'm sure I still haven't gotten to the bottom of those wondrous books. I'd want to mention Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny and Kurt Vonnegut and the early cyberpunks and boatloads of private-eye novels, Lawrence Block in both noir and funny modes, Donald E. Westlake in ditto, dozens of Hugo and Nebula and Asimov and Silverberg anthologies. I'd probably want to write about books I was forced to read -- discovering the wondrous language of Shakespeare and the joy of saying it out loud from memory, the corny charms of Our Town, the depth and breadth of Huckleberry Finn, how three or four books would be dull misfires and then one would be perfect, the precise right book at the right time, like Trollope's The Warden. I'd have to mention The Science Fiction Book Club, obviously, but because it introduced me to Mikhail Bulgakov and Haruki Murakami. I don't see how I could possibly condense down a decade or more of reading into a few small examples, and hang so much development and thought and reading on barely a dozen books.

Spufford could; Spufford did. We're different people, with different lives and interests. This book may speak to you in a way it didn't to me: the back cover has glowing quotes from people like Penelope Lively and Peter Ackroyd and Kim Stanley Robinson and Sven Birkerts to say it did speak to them. And I love the fact that it's a major, lauded book all about growing up reading: there need to be more books like this. But I couldn't really love this one the way I wanted to.

Early 2015 Round-Up: Non-Fiction

These three books have nothing in common except the fact that I've read them all recently. And, perhaps, that I don't have a full post's worth of words to say about any of them.

How to Speak Money

by John Lanchester

Lanchester wrote the excellent I.O.U. in the depths of the financial crisis: he was a novelist working on a book about finance at the time, and his research took on a life of its own and spun off into an independent look at what went wrong and who was responsible. Clearly, he hasn't managed to break away from that world in the few years since. How to Speak Money is primarily a glossary of finance terms for laymen, with a novella-length introduction about how Lanchester fell into this world and how finance people use the words he's about to define for us.

I've been vaguely in the finance world for most of the past decade, in a position not unlike Lanchester's -- looking at that world regularly but not of it. And he's one of the smartest and clearest explainers of that world to the rest of us. He understands not just what's being said, but the buried assumptions in those words, and uses this book to unearth those assumptions and present them clearly. Given what those people did to the world economy, it would be very good if more of us understood what they mean when they talk about their specialty, and if more of us could push back against them the next time their zeal for rent-seeking starts trending towards a global financial catastrophe. So this book should be read as widely as possible.

American Cornball

by Christopher Miller

This great encyclopedic guide -- subtitled "A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny" -- is something I knew I'd want to read the moment I learned it existed, and which I started reading almost as soon as I got a copy for myself. Miller has dug through sixty years or so of cultural detritus, from comic strips to comedy movies to novelty postcards, to examine the things that people in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century thought were funny. Most of those are things we now don't think are all that funny, or funny at all -- so Miller is also building a cultural history of what's acceptable to laugh at, and what kinds of things are funny at different times to different people.

He's a breezy, effortlessly amusing writer with expertise across a broad range of ephemera and junk culture, and particularly strong on early comic strips. (Though I do vaguely remember a few places where I would disagree with him, at least in part.) This is clearly not a book to read straight through -- no encyclopedia is -- but I ran through it quite quickly, over three or four weeks at bedtime -- and enjoyed it thoroughly. If you have any interest in thinking about humor rather than just laughing at things, American Cornball is a great achievement and a milestone in the history of Humor Studies.

The Inner Man: The Life of J. G. Ballard

by John Baxter

We think we know Ballard from his own stories. Not just Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, but all of those Ballardian men over five decades, in the middle of a whirl of charismatic strangers, predatory women, drained swimming pools, low-flying aircraft, feral children, and inexplicable ecological collapses. It's all of a piece, all clearly proceeding from the same small set of obsessions and neuroses, and at least gave us an outline, an absence, into which we could fit the presumed actual man himself.

Baxter, who was a jobbing SF short-story writer in '60s London alongside a young Ballard before wandering off to write mostly biographies of film directors, tries to fill in that absence, to show us the actual "inner man" of Ballard. This was doomed to failure, of course -- if even Ballard couldn't manage to explain himself to the world, how could a lesser writer, or any writer outside of that very hermetic head, hope to do so? But, along the way, Baxter tells the story of Ballard's life cleanly and efficiently, and links his private life to his work at the time in a crisp, believable way that doesn't ever rely on that old biographer's crutch, the "he must have" formulation.

Baxter is smart enough to know that there's nothing Ballard "must have" done or thought; his entire career was spent thinking and writing things that shocked and surprised the world. But he's written a quite good conventional biography of a somewhat unconventional man. He doesn't dig into Ballard's sex life as doggedly as one might hope -- there clearly is meat there, but, if the women involved won't talk about it, there's only supposition and hearsay to go on.

There will someday be a great biography of Ballard; he's too interesting and distinctive a writer not to attract that level of attention eventually. This is not that great biography, but no biography emerging soon after its subjects death is that. Baxter has done an excellent job for this generation, and laid the ground work for some inspired writer, in thirty or fifty years, to deeply enter Ballard's mind and give us a clearer picture.

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

I didn't take any specific pledges for my reading this year -- I'm allergic to the things -- but I am trying to read more women and people not like me in various ways. And Bear has been one of the big holes in my SFnal reading for a decade now: something like a dozen of her books have looked very interesting, right back to the beginning of her career, but I've never quite managed to pick up one of her novels and read it, until now.

Karen Memery (ha, ha) is a "seamstress," in the Terry Pratchett sense, in the bustling and growing steampunky metropolis of Rapid City, somewhere vaguely Pacific Northwest-ish in around 1890. She doesn't mind the work too much, though she prefers women in her private life. And she tells her story in a compelling first-person voice, broad and strong as the American frontier, which is what attracted me to Karen Memory.

The plot itself is a bit thin and standard: Karen and her friends work for the good brothel in town, run by Madame Damnable, while there's an evil brothel-keeper, Peter Bantle, who runs horrible houses full of trafficked Asian women for the lower-level demand in town. (Unusually for a book that's mostly quite lefty and progressive -- one of Karen's co-workers is biologically male, and there's some nuanced comparative-religion talk -- Bear completely ignores the class issues here: the good whores are the ones who service rich men, and thus partake in the benefits of their wealth, and poor men are universally seen as vicious and degrading and dirty.) One night, the obligatory Robin Hood of the whores (feisty, female, Asian, deadly) shows up with a runaway, setting up the immediate conflict between Bantle and Damnable's girls.

Meanwhile, someone connected to Bantle -- maybe him, maybe not -- has been murdering low-level whores across the West like a roadshow Jack the Ripper. And that brings the semi-historical Marshall Bass Reeves -- tall, handsome, dark-skinned -- into town, to bring back that criminal, dead or alive. Meanwhile,  Bantle is running for mayor, hoping to unseat the current incumbent, who has a long-term arrangement with one of Damnable's girls. To top it all off, Bantle also has some mysterious new technology, to bend people to his will and do other dastardly things.

The story goes along as you'd expect: things get bad, and worse, and then even worse for Karen and her friends, until they finally win through in the end. It's popular fiction, and does what it sets out to do. There's very little that's surprising here, though Karen's voice is fun and appealing throughout.

I will say this: Karen Memory is close to the Platonic Ideal of a book the Puppies would hate: the main character is a strapping, tough lesbian; most of the important characters are women and/or minorities; and specific white men are the source of all of the evil and nastiness. It may perhaps have greater worth in that struggle, in the way that a cross is useful when confronting a vampire.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/30

Welcome to June! You're now one month closer to death.

With that cheery thought -- don't worry; I'm full of 'em! -- let's dive into the books that turned up on my doorstep over the past week. I haven't read any of these, but here's some impressions based on a quick glance and a long history of quickly judging literary works on little evidence.

The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering looks like one of those satires that borrow SFnal ideas to do other things with them; it's from Jeffrey Rotter, who is so literary he not only lives in Brooklyn, he's also published in the Oxford American. So meat-and-potatoes SF fans should probably stay far away from this medium future story of an America that sank back into anti-science barbarism, until an ancient rocket is rediscovered and one family decides to fly the thing themselves. It's a hardcover from Henry Holt's Metropolitan imprint, and came out in early April.

Infinity Lost is a book so far in the future that it doesn't even have a cover yet. (Or, at least, I wasn't able to find one online.) And it's about a spunky seventeen-year-old girl, in a future where everything seems to be perfect: she's the only daughter and heir to the reclusive billionaire whose company has reshaped the world. Of course, that's when the machine-designed-to-kill-teenagers portion of the plot kicks in. Infinity Lost seems to be a first novel, from New Zealander S. Harrison, and it will be available in various format's from Amazon's Skyscape imprint this November, if you haven't burned out on YA dystopias by then. (Oh, and, just so you know: "Infinity" is the main character's name. Yes.)

Jon Sprunk's Storm and Steel is the second book in his "Book of the Black Earth" epic fantasy trilogy, after Blood and Iron. This follows in the wake of the slave rebellion of the first book, continuing the stories of Sprunk's three viewpoint characters against the usual background of intrigues and war and treachery and sudden violent death and nasty sorcery. It's a Pyr trade paperback, hitting stores tomorrow.

And last for this week is Illuminae, helpfully subtitled "The Illuminae Files_01," as if it came from a world where DOS naming conventions were still in force, but only at the ends of phrases. It's from Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, and it's a YA novel made up of redacted documents and other ephemera from its fictional medium-future universe. (Normally, that would make me really excited, but the copy I have is also encrusted with aggressively annoying marketing cruft, and it's being presented as awfully generic: a teen couple thought they were just breaking up, but now they must run for their lives and Save the Galaxy!) I must repeat my mantra: never blame the author for the marketing. If you're looking for teen space/soap opera with killer AIs and fiendishly complex viruses, this is the book for you. It's coming from Knopf's young readers division on October 20.

Read in May

This was the month I got back to work, and it definitely shows: I crammed February through April into one post, since I'd only read eighteen books that whole time. But in May, back to regular commuting, I read twenty-five books. Some of them will get thumbnail notes below, since I have just declared review bankruptcy, but I'm also trying to read chunks of graphic-novel series at a time and turn those into posts (as I did some last year during Book-a-Day), so those will be links, now or later.

And here's what I read:

James Turner, Rex Libris, Vol. 2: Book of Monsters (5/4)

George A. Walker, editor, Graphic Witness (5/5)

Ray Fawkes, Possessions Vol. 4: The Final Tantrum (5/6)

Despite the implications of the title, this is clearly not the last book in the series: there will be at least one more. And the tone, as I expected in my review of The Better House Trap (aka Book Three), has indeed changed. Gurgazon the Unclean, who was so funny and amusing when his insistence that he will kill and eat all of mankind was kept in check by confinement, is somewhat more worrying now that he can kill and eat all of mankind. So this book is in a more epic mode, though the dialogue is still cracklingly smart, and the reader half wants Gurgazon to destroy the world -- or at least a significant part of it -- just because he's so much fun.

Rick Geary, The True Death of Billy the Kid (5/7)

This is another book that Geary produced through Kickstarter, so it's unlikely anybody who doesn't already have it now will find it easy to dig up a copy. (I could be wrong; maybe tomorrow Geary will be acclaimed as the greatest graphic novelist of his time and every last thing he ever did will be reprinted in million-copy printings. That would be awesome, but it is unlikely.)

Like last years' The Elwell Enigma, this is a sidebar to his long-running series of books about famous murder cases. The main books in the series go into depth into cases that are still unsettled or have open questions; Elwell was about a murder that's still entirely a mystery and this book the opposite: we all know exactly what happened and how. But it does give Geary a chance to do what he does best: draw 19th century people in all of their complicated clothes and facial hair, and make schematics of buildings and towns to show exactly where things are in relation to each other, and how events precisely happened. This is a smaller book that most of Geary's recent input, covering a case mostly without subtleties, but it's still fine Geary work, lovely in its art and crisp and precise in its writing.

Hunt Emerson, Calculus Cat (5/8)

Back when TV was the hegemonic media outlet that was twisting our minds and presenting a deliberately distorted view of the real world -- remember those days? -- one of the major counter-attacks was from the pen of Hunt Emerson. (In fact, the prior major collection of this material, more than twenty-five years ago, was under the tile Death to Television!) This new edition collects all of that old material, about the cat who spends his day grinning and running away while people chuck things at him and his nights trying to watch old TV shows while the pitchman on his set instead tries to hard-sell him on Skweeky Weets. There's also some odds and ends that were missed in the earlier book, and a few newer pages -- but this is essentially '80s work, from back when we thought that marketers trying to sell us all exactly the same thing was the horrible thing. (As opposed to know, when we know that marketers micro-targeting exactly our fears and desires to sell us each very particular things is the really horrible thing.)

Dylan Horrocks, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (5/9)

Cameron Stewart, Sin Titulo (5/11)

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, Sex Criminals, Vol. 2: Two Worlds, One Cop (5/14)

See my review of the first volume if you're not familiar with the series -- which is possible, I guess, but pretty much anyone who reads comics has probably heard about it by now. The stories in this clump focus more on the male half of the time-stoppingly orgasmic couple, Jon, who is not nearly as happy and well-adjusted as Suzie (who had most of the viewpoint stuff in the first few issues) is. That actually understates it quite a bit: Fraction never actually gives Jon a specific diagnosis, but he clearly has a mood disorder of one kind or another, and it seriously interferes with his life. (And the medication he's supposed to take to deal with it interferes with his life in its own way, and possibly a worse one.) As expected at the end of the first collection, Jon and Suzie have realized that they're not the only ones who can stop time, and they're coming more and more into conflict with the people they call the "Sex Police," who have major financial backing and seem to primarily want to keep their secret very secret. Like any series, it's settling down and getting less aggressively new and live-wire, but it's still smart and interesting and adult.

Christopher Miller, American Cornball (5/14)

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, Vol. 4 (5/15)

I'm now trade-caught-up with this series -- not the same thing as floppy-caught-up, but I haven't bought floppies since my flood, and I don't plan to start up again ever -- and it's still as precise and thoughtful and encompassing as it started. (See my reviews of the first and second volumes for more details.) Vaughan has an admirable willingness to keep shaking things up and move his timeline forward aggressively, and Staples has an incredible storytelling ability: she doesn't get nearly enough credit for the success of this book, but her work is deeply expressive and has a masterful control of body language and pose. This is more middle of a long, detailed series -- and I'm coming around to a tentative hope that Vaughan will stick the landing better than he did with Ex Machina -- but it's middle that moves forward, and changes up major things, and is clearly heading towards a specific end. And that's the good kind of middle.

John Baxter, The Inner Man (5/15)

Manix Abrera, 14 (5/18)

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (5/19)

You don't need me to tell you about this book. I read it because I'm trying to read short books right now -- to jumpstart that reading life again -- and because I'm also trying to read really well-written books, for the same reason. This qualifies on both counts, and it packs a wallop.

(Do you need me to mention that it's a memoir of the year between the death of her husband and the death of their only daughter? And that the daughter had been critically ill even before the husband died? Are you that cut off from literary culture?)

Joe Ollmann, Mid-Life (5/19)

This is a critically acclaimed graphic novel from 2010 that I had a hard time getting into or connecting with -- despite the obvious parallels with my own life. It's the kind of semi-autobiographical story where the author has to specifically declare that it's fiction: both Ollmann and his main character are fortyish design professionals with twentyish daughters from a very early marriage and a new kid with (substantially younger) Wife Number Two. It's clearly a mid-life crisis book, and I should be exactly in the psychographic for that: I'm in my mid-years, my life hasn't gone the way I expected (just like everyone else's), and I'm just as prone to over-analyzing and obsessing about everything as Ollmann's John.

But I found this talky and something of a slog to get through: John is just so much of a sad sack, and so self-loathingly miserable, that it just wasn't pleasant to spend time with him. And Ollmann doesn't let him really go whole-hog into a mid-life crisis; this is the story of thinking and whining, and complaining, and almost doing things, rather than actually doing them. I suspect Ollmann should have gone more fictional and thrown his hero into the deep end, and that he instead stuck a bit too closely with the details of his real life. Mid-Life is ambitious and interesting, but it's hard to love.

Richard Sala, In A Glass Grotesquely (5/20)

This most recent book by the dependably grotesque and creepy Sala collects his web serial Super-Enigmatix, along with a few shorter pieces. It's not great Sala, since he's generally better with longer stories (his short stuff can sometimes seem like a list of his tics and standard furniture), but it's good Sala, and his art is lovely and sinuous here.

Sala's last major book was The Hidden, which is a better place to go for new readers. Although, I think you can read Super-Enigmatix from the link above without paying anyone anything, and a free sample usually beats any other kind of sample handily. But, if you like that, I'd suggest picking up one of Sala's longer works -- the two Peculia books are also good, as is Delphine and The Chuckling Whatzit.

Helene Hanff, 84. Charing Cross Road (5/20)

Nico Tanigawa, No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 6 (5/21)

Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (5/21)

Nico Tanigawa, No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 7 (5/22)

P.G. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (5/26)

The last, and one of the least, of the Jeeves-Wooster books, originally published in 1974 and preceding Wodehouse's knighthood and death (at age ninety-three) by barely a year. Wodehouse is one of the great comic writers of all time, and the world he created is as solid and self-consistent as any secondary creation ever devised.

I wrote about another late Wodehouse book last year -- Galahad at Blandings, from a decade previous and a different series -- which I think still covers well both the inherent appeal of Wodehouse as a writer and the ways that his late works are slightly lesser than his prime period. (Though it's really only a matter of degree: at his best, Wodehouse constructed plots like cunning clockwork devices, driving out all possible quibbles about ways the real world works or potential escape routes for his hapless heroes. What he lost in his later years was an ability to sustain that pitch of fevered invention, but his language was as sunny and supple as ever and his characters precisely as three-dimensional as they had ever been. A minor Wodehouse book is defined as one where you can poke holes in the sublimely silly plot.)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Tyler Crook and James Harren, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 4: The Devil's Engine and the Long Death (5/26)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Jason Latour, Max Fiumara and James Harren, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 5: The Pickens County Horror and Others (5/27)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Tyler Crook, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 6: The Return of the Master (5/28)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Laurence Campbell and Peter Snejbjerg, B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 7: A Cold Day in Hell (5/29)

Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (5/29)



Next month might not be quite as long a list -- or maybe it will be longer, who can say? I'm back on the horse and using a system for picking books that's worked for me a lot over the years: pick one book from the first shelf, then one from the next shelf, and so forth. (I find that reduces the sense of choice when looking at a vast array of unread stuff.)

The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell

Campbell is Gaiman's "scary goddaughter" and the daughter of cartoonist Eddie Campbell; she's now a journalist in London and one of the few sensible writers about comics for UK papers. And The Art of Neil Gaiman is a slightly oversized, heavily illustrated book about all things Gaiman, including a thumbnail biography and focusing mostly on loving examinations of all of the various writings he's done for various media. (It is, therefore, much like Gaiman's own very early book, Don't Panic!, about Douglas Adams. The rhythms of the creative life are strangely consistent over the decades.)

I've been a Gaiman reader and aficionado for a long time -- I hesitate to call myself a "fan," since he's attracted some very devoted sorts who would find my zeal insufficient -- all the way back to Black Orchid and Don't Panic!, and I found this pleasant and complete, if hagiographic and unsurprising. The point of a book like this is to celebrate rather than criticize, of course, but Campbell has a non-nonsense, journalistic tone rather than the pose of a breathless acolyte, so it comes across as more-or-less honest and balanced. Campbell also, since she's already part of the Gaiman circle, got unmatched access to Gaiman and his various collaborators -- she already knew a lot of the people she had to interview for this book, and spent a lot of time rooting around in Gaiman's attic and basement for artifacts from his long, twisting career. It's very clear that no one other than Gaiman himself would have had that level of access, and Gaiman has too many other projects to write his own book-length bibliography.

This is also a heavily designed book, with art integrated on every page, from notebook scraps to comics panels to movie stills and snapshots. And it all reads very cleanly, even with lightly tinted paper and slightly fussy caption styles. I believe this is primarily due to Art Director Julie Weir, credited as part of a larger team of The Ilex Press, which owns the copyright. (They look like a book-packaging firm to my eye, though the name isn't familiar.) The art is also generally well-chosen -- though Gaiman's scrawl makes the many examples of his handwritten notes difficult to decipher -- and doesn't focus on just the big obvious pictures (though there are plenty of those as well).

So this is about as good as a project like this could ever be: it's inherently celebratory rather than critical, obviously, but it covers all of Gaiman's various activities (comics, novels, movies, odder things) in appropriate depth and detail and even really devoted fans will likely learn some new trivia. If you like, say, 60% or more of things Gaimanesque, you will likely enjoy reading this.

Declaration of Review Bankruptcy

Right at this very second, I have twenty-seven books sitting stacked on the corner of my desk. I've read all of them and reviewed none of them.

I've repeatedly said here that my goal is to put each book I read into its own post -- maybe short, maybe long, maybe half-assed in some cases -- because I like things tidy and because that helps me find them later. (I'm under no illusions that this blog is primarily for anything but my own amusement and external memory.)

But I'm also very fond of saying "the best is the enemy of the good," and this is one of those cases. By the time this weekend is over, and the month of May with it, at least half of those books will be off my desk and will have at least a couple of words attached to them here. (If I get really ambitious, some of those words will be scheduled to post later in the week.) If there was anyone hoping that I'd do a long, thorough post on, say, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen or The Inner Man: The Life of J.G. Ballard (both of which, among several others, deserve it), I apologize for having let you down once again.

Regular service will probably not resume after this; I am reading quickly again, but my blogging time is severely limited with the new-job schedule. (Out the door at 6:40 AM, back home after 8 PM, and a faint hope to do other things with my free time in my exhausted evenings.) We'll see how this shakes out over time: I have a couple of reading projects I'd planned to do this year, but I'll need to be back on the regular-blogging horse before that can happen.

Anyway, the good news is that there will be at least a post or two with some words in them. I may even say something that intrigues you about a book you might love. Stranger things have happened.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 23

I suspect most of my readers for these "Reviewing the Mail" posts are Americans -- because the books I get in the mail are about 99 44/100% American-published, because of shipping costs and territorial rights and other boring things -- so you're probably out enjoying the holiday.

(If, like one of my my new colleagues at TR, you're not American and aren't sure what "Memorial Day" is all about, it's the general patriotic holiday vaguely focused on veterans and/or "the troops." More or less the US-specific version of Armistice Day, but with more focus on soldiers/sailors/aviators/marines who didn't necessarily buy the farm Over There.)

But I do this anyway, because I want to get the books off my desk and because I love consistency. So here's what I've got this week: three books in the tune of skiffy, as a counterpoint to all of the Souza marches being played elsewhere today.

Oathkeeper is the second novel in the epic fantasy trilogy named after the first novel, Grudgebearer, by J.F. Lewis. (I was surprised to look at the author bio and see that J.F. is clearly a guy named Jeremy; I guess he just isn't that fond of his first name.) (Also, I would love if the concluding book was named Nitpicker, but I'd bet money that it won't be.) It's got a redheaded elf girl in sensible armor and a friendly-ish dragon on the cover, which pegs its appeal pretty closely. And it's a Pyr trade paperback, available June 9.

I have not read The Banished of Muirwood-- nor have I read any of the author's previous six novels with "Muirwood" in the title -- but I can say it must be absolutely fabulous, because it's author is Jeff Wheeler, and everything done by a Wheeler must be assumed to be world-class. It's epic fantasy in the usual medievaloid secondary world, with a spunky young princess whose been Cinderella-ized and a social setup that seems even more hostile to women than usual. Amazon's 47North imprint will bring this one out in the usual paper and electronic formats in August.

And then there's Kevin J. Anderson's Blood of the Cosmos, the second book in the series that began with the currently Hugo-nominated Dark Between the Stars. It's meat-and-potatoes space opera, with somewhat less tech-porn than the average Baen book but plenty of intrigue and complication and physics that is not precisely accurate. This Tor hardcover is available on June 2nd.