Incoming Books: sometime around 8/20

I bought books twice last week -- a shipment of graphic novels came in from my long-time buds at Midtown Comics, who had a 40% off sale (always a good way to get me to put in a big order), and then I made it to the Strand on Friday after realizing that was my last possible Friday to do so [1]. I'm not going to get to all of that in this post, but I think I can run through the box of comics-related stuff. So I'll do that, and try to post about the other clump in a day or two. These are in alphabetical order by author, since that's the way normal people organize books most of the time. (And here I'm scowling at all of the comics shops that shelve by publisher or title or both or in some arcane fashion known only to the local neckbeards.)

Eddie Campbell's other great solo series (the one that isn't Alec) is getting collected again, in two big books that match the format of Alec: The Years Have Pants. First up is Bacchus Omnibus, Vol. 1, and of course I had to get it. (I had all of the previous, Campbell-published collections, but lost them in the flood.)

Displacement is a new travel/memoirish thing from Lucy Knisley, who seems to be developing a new genre out of those pieces. (She goes somewhere, usually with part of her family, and turns the results into comics -- see An Age of License and French Milk and, less fitting that description, Relish.) This time out, I believe it's a cruise with her grandparents. Knisley draws lovely little watercolors and is much more insightful than someone I still think of as being super-young should be: she's not a navel-gazing memoirist, but more like the classic travel writers: going to interesting places with interesting people to find things to say.

Another piece of the massive wall of Hellboy-verse comics came out: AAbe Sapien Vol. 6: A Darkness So Great, written by creator Mike Mignola with Scott Allie and drawn by (in turn) Max and Sebastian Fiumara. And I'm still along for the ride.

Speaking of along for the ride, there's finally a hardcover of Miracleman Book 3: Olympus, the climax of the definitive mid-80s superhero deconstruction by "The Original Writer" Alan Moore and the artistic collaborators who can't be listed on the cover because Moore is a grumpy self-important crank with a mania to erase his credit from anything he did and doesn't utterly love thirty years later. (Showing Alan Moore still has some things to learn about the human condition.) This is the bloody, horrible part of this particular story, and I haven't revisited it for twenty years -- I hope it holds up to the memory.

Speaking of '80s revisionist superheroes, also along for the ride is Zenith: Phase Three from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell. As I recall, the last time this was reprinted -- also a good twenty years ago -- phase three was hard to find and phase four didn't make it, so I'm not clear how much of this I actually read. This time out, I'm planning to get the fourth book and just read them all straight through -- see of that works.

I almost bought Margaux Motin's But I Really Wanted to Be an Anthropologist the first time I saw it, last year, but didn't. Now I have: she has a wonderfully expressive line and what looks like a new angle on some very typically feminine concerns: family, fashion, shoes, career, friends. (And this is from Self-Made Hero, the British comics-publishing outfit that hasn't steered me wrong yet.)

There is a third volume of Young Lovecraft, the webcomic (originally in Spanish, of all things) by Bartolo Torres and Jose Oliver, and now I have it. (See my reviews of the first and second collections.)

I'll follow Roger Langridge nearly anywhere, so I grabbed Popeye, Vol. 1, collecting the first four issues of the new series, which Langridge wrote. (Art is by a bunch of people, including Tom The Blot Neely.) No one else quite did Popeye like, or as well as, his creator E.C. Segar, but that doesn't mean other Popeye stories can't be good in their own way.

And then there's The Complete Peanuts: 1991-1992, famously entirely by Charles M. Schulz. I've gotten a bit behind on the last books in this reprint series, but I might be able to catch up by the big finish (which is coming very soon, I think).

Dash Shaw's most recent book -- I think; he's very prolific -- is the slim graphic novel Doctors, which I'd been vaguely thinking about buying for a while., Now I have it, and I'll probably read it soon.

And last is Matt Wagner's Grendel Omnibus Volume 4: Prime, finishing up the reprint project of the original "run" of his Grendel stories. (It was from three companies over more than a dozen years under a number of different titles, but it was a thing that existed and then ended, so I guess it counts as a run. But I do wish Wagner would write new Grendel stories that aren't about that boring psychopath Hunter Rose.)



[1] Did I mention the new job has summer hours? It does. And it's very weird that I had to get out of publishing to get them.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/14

Most weeks, I get books in the mail and write about them here. But, occasionally, the Mail Gods are fickle, and nothing arrives during a particular week.

This is one of those weeks.

Instead, I'll mention a couple of books I've read recently [1] and enjoyed, mostly out of guilt for my current low-contend mode. (What I'm mostly reading right now is even more guilt-inducing: the Prima guide to Fallout 3, a 2008 post-apocalyptic computer RPG I've been playing obsessively for about three weeks now.)

Over Easy is a somewhat fictionalized memoir in comics form of a pivotal time in the life of young cartoonist Mimi Pond. She was finishing up her art-school days and looking to enter the "real world," when she got a job as a waitress at a local cafe. It's a great time capsule, both of a particular time in a person's life and of the late '70s, and Pond's expressive, decorative line makes every page lovely. She also avoids the temptation to wrap everything neatly up in a bow or turn it into something of huge importance: this is her life, or at least a part of it, and it's far enough in the past that she can see it clearly and present it as something closer to fiction.

And The World of Ice & Fire is more-or-less The Silmarillion for George R.R. Martin's massive and as-yet-unfinished "Song of Ice and Fire" novel series, written by Martin with Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson (who run one of the top GRRM-fan, SoI&F-lore websites). Unlike Silmarillion, World focuses mostly on people and history: it's organized as a history of Westeros from the dawn of time, with a gazetteer of the rest of the world (at about the same length) bolted on to the back. It's almost entirely about things that we haven't seen and probably never will see in the main SoI&F series, and it makes me hope GRRM can finish up that series quickly and start writing novellas about roguish adventurers traveling to the quirkier corners of this world, a la Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (or Darger & Surplus, or Cugel the Clever, or even Conan -- I won't quibble about the kind of adventures). I just really want to see a story about Sothyros.

(I will quibble a bit about the maps, though -- I know there's a separate map book, but this one screams out for maps of Essos, the various small islands, and Sothyros. Even something deliberately archaic with "here there be dragons" would be useful for orientation. It does have decent maps of all of the sections of Westeros, though the one for the Crownlands is hidden in the backmatter.)


[1] And still intend to "review" in some at least slightly longer form, eventually.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/8

I'm back again, and here are the books that arrived over the past week. As long as publishing companies continue to think that sending free books to some random guy in North Jersey is a good idea, I'll continue to write about them here every Monday morning -- this my pledge to you the home viewer.

I do not, however, pledge to be perfectly accurate or fair, though I do try. So if I insult your favorite author, either inadvertently or on purpose, I hope you won't take it personally.

First up is the new Mistborn book from Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self, which is coming as a hardcover from Tor on October 6th. (Sanderson gets to go first because my younger son -- the one who plans to be an evil, world-conquering genius one day -- picked up one of his YA books at the library yesterday. This clearly proves Sanderson is a great writer, since all of the Wheelers have impeccable taste.) Shadows of Self is set in the steampunky end of the Mistborn timeline, I think -- I'm not entirely clear on this series, though I'm pretty sure it spans several centuries and different tech levels -- and focuses on a guy named Waxillium Ladrian, who I don't think is a series hero.

I have a couple of manga volume from the fine folks at Vertical, a scrappy and smart company that focuses on translating Japanese books for a US audience (fiction, non-fiction, and manga). Witchcraft Works, Vol. 6 is the latest in Ryu Mizunagi's series, about a school for witches -- yes, yes, another one of those.

Vertical also has Gamon Sakurai's Ajin: Demi-Human, Vol. 6, continuing that series about unkillable demi-humans and how they are exploited and tormented.

Updraft is the first novel from Fran Wilde, a YA in which a young protagonist is forced to give up her dreams, join a secretive governing organization, and confront the horrible secrets that underpin her world. Oh, wait -- I said "YA" already. (Actually, wait: it's priced at $25.99 and isn't from an official YA imprint, so maybe it's an adult novel along the exact same lines.) It's coming from Tor on September 1st in hardcover.

Judd Winick, whom I will always think of as that guy from the first season of The Real World -- I'm old, and that's about the last reality show I watched -- is back with a new series of graphic novels for those shorter people who live among us. (No, not gremlins -- kids.) Hilo Book 1: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth is about a sunny, blond-haired kid with great powers and very little knowledge about our world, because he's not from here. Wacky, kid-friendly hijinks ensue. This one is from Random House's Young Readers imprint on September 1.

Here & There is a big fat first novel from playwright/screenwriter Joshua V. Scher -- who I suspect was thrilled to be freed by the limitations of people in space actually saying his words and that drove him to write 650-plus pages -- which looks like the thriller-y end of SF or the SFnal end of the thriller. A teleportation experiment went badly wrong, and then the author of the secret government report about that experiment went missing -- so now one man must Find the Truth, No Matter What the Cost. It's from Amazon's 47North imprint, available November 1st.

Nightwise is the third novel from R.S. Belcher, in which he turns to urban fantasy after two weird westerns. It's got the usual tough protagonist and the usual world full of supernatural stuff. But it also has a great first sentence:

The banker was crucified on the wall of his Wall Street office, fountain pen jammed through both wrists, an Armani Jesus.

It's a Tor hardcover, coming August 18th. And I might just read this one -- I think I still have one or both of his Westerns sitting around on the why-don't-you-read-me shelves.

And last for this week is The Fall of the House of West, a new Battling Boy graphic novel and the direct sequel to The Rise of Aurora West. Like Rise, Fall is written by JT Petty and Paul Pope with art by David Rubin. (The original Battling Boy was by Pope alone, and there are supposed to be direct sequels to that coming also from his own pen.) Like the others, this is from First Second, and set in a giant city where humanity is menaced by all kinds of horrible child-stealing monsters and protected by a very few champions. I'd start with one of the other books -- either one would do -- but this is fun stuff, so I do recommend it.

Due Back at the Library Imminently: A Reading Series

The stack of books at the corner of my desk is getting taller, and I'm still not writing about them. But this has happened before, many times over the nine (!) years I've been typing here, so I'm not worried. Eventually, I'll either take the time to write "real" posts about them, or just dump them into some cursory round-up.

Like this one, for example!

These are all books I need to return to the library today, so this is my last chance to type something quickly about them while they're still in front of me.

We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler is almost two writers -- his work as Lemony Snicket for younger readers relates to his books under his own name, but there are differences. Snicket and Handler are both sly writers, in love with language, but Snicket is more honest and straightforward; Handler delights in tricks and stratagems and complications in his structures.

This is a Handler novel, for adults, more or less his fifth. (That depends on how you count Why We Broke Up, a Handler book for teens, and Adverbs, a collection of loosely linked stories.) It's also an interesting bookend to his first book, The Basic Eight, which also sees a teenage girl spit on her hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats. (And not entirely in metaphor, in both cases.) Since it's a Handler book rather than a Snicket, it's more opaque and writerly -- it starts in the middle and its two-tracked plots are only loosely connected and not driven by incident so much as character.

Phil Needle is a minor producer of non-fiction radio programs (and more commercial stuff to pay the bills, but it's the former he cares about) on the verge of a big deal, for which he flies down to LA from his native San Francisco, with his new young female assistant, to meet with his larger-than-life agent. At the same time, his daughter Gwen is unhappy with her teenage life and looking for a big break.

We Are Pirates is tricksy and slippery, sliding back and from from Phil to Gwen with verve and confidence, telling their stories with deep understanding but not pausing to catch the reader up with every hop. In other words, a Daniel Handler novel. I found it very slightly disappointing -- it has a deflating ending rather than a bang -- but it is bright and crisp and dangerous, like a day sailing in pirate-infested waters.

Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg

Ortberg is the main force behind the website The Toast, which is feminist in a default way -- focused on women and their thoughts like most of the rest of the media is aimed the other way -- and smart in at least a dozen ways. She's an interesting writer who has read and thought about a lot of wildly disparate things, which makes for quirky, fizzy pieces.

And this is her first book: a collection of the text messages that a variety of people -- mostly fictional, and mostly from famous novels -- might have sent each other, if they were as smart and well-read and feminist as Ortberg herself. There's a lot of buried literary criticism here, but it's also incredibly funny on a surface level. And Ortberg isn't all high-culture, not by a long shot: the book is arranged roughly chronologically, and the "modern" last section leads off with Sweet Valley High before wandering through Harry Potter and William Carlos Williams and Nancy Drew indiscriminately.

I might be making this sound heavy going, but it's not: it's quick and easy and funny on every page. But it's also informed by a deeper, more critical eye -- Ortberg is not going to let all of those tormented Byronic heroes get away with their angst and casually women-destroying ways. And that's all good, top to bottom.

Between You & Me by Mary Norris

Norris is a copy editor for The New Yorker, where she's worked since 1977. This is not yet another memoir of that odd workplace, though: it's something like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves for punctuation.

There have been many books on good writing and clean style and proper punctuation over the years -- I've read more of them than most people -- and Norris has an extensive bibliography in the back to show that she's quite aware of all of that. She's mildly descriptive, which is only slightly ironic given how heavily prescriptive the New Yorker is.

If you care about commas and apostrophes and clean, understandable writing, this is a good book. Norris does this kind of thing for a living, and she writes about it here clearly in a no-nonsense style and with good instincts: always follow sense and clarity rather than rules. Writers could do a lot worse than to follow her guidance.

W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton

The Alphabet mysteries have been declining and fading into the West for some time now -- at least the last three books (Vengeance, Undertow, and Trespass) have aspired to the quality of Serious Novel at the expense of telling a good mystery story and making their main character interesting and useful. And this one continues the streak: as is now usual, Grafton carefully drains her mysteries of all tension in occasional third-person chapters about a more colorful character, while series heroine Kinsey Milhone wanders about detecting and ruminating on things in a way presumably meant to be entertaining.

I don't feel like picking apart the ways this book is disappointing, particularly since it's disappointing in the same ways the last few books have been, and I wrote extensively about them. Wasted is readable in that I've-been-a-bestseller-for-thirty-years way, and it's nice to check back in on Kinsey's life, in her rapidly receding 1988.

I think I'm just reading these out of inertia, and possibly out of hope that Grafton will pull something big out of her hat for Z. And it does seem a shame to give up on a series when it's so close to the end -- I know exactly how those people hate-reading Spider-Man for most of the past decade must feel.

Quote of the Week

I'm making this Quote of the Week because a) I love the metaphor, b) I agree with it, and c) it's funny, in a sad and depressing way:

"With a mix of aggression, boffo self-assertion and nonsense, Trump has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing."
 - Josh Marshall, The Declining Marginal Value of Crazy

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/1

Hello again! Here are some books, yadda yadda yadda. You know the drill by now.

The Last Man, Vol. 3: The Chase is the third in the graphic novel series -- I should say BD series, since it's originally French, and I like to be sophisticated and condescending like that -- by Balak, Michael Sanlaville, and Bastien Vives, about a world dominated by a fighting championship and the odd partnership that is (of course) dominating the current running of that championship. It's from First Second, available right now, and I hope to read and review all three Real Soon Now.


(But I already have a stack of twenty-plus books I've already read, and the reviews are coming much slower than Real Soon recently.)

Next up is a YA novel from Colleen Houck: Reawakened, in which a New York teenager discovers an ancient Egyptian mummy in the Met is actually a Prince who needs her help battling the evil god Seth. It doesn't say so, but I would not be surprised at all to find out that this is the first of a series. Reawakened is coming from Random House's Young Readers imprint as a hardcover on August 11.

Tom Doyle is back with the sequel to the military contemporary fantasy American Craftsmen, The Left-Hand Way. This series seems to marry the usual urban fantasy "evil things and the secret organization of magicians that battle them are absolutely everywhere, even though no one ever notices" stuff with a large helping of Clancy-esque saluting and honor and duty and long descriptions of weaponry and uniforms. If you like both of those things, this could easily be your literary Reese's Cup. This one is a Tor hardcover, hitting stores August 11.

Fable Comics is a large-format collection of new short comics, edited by Chris Duffy, all adaptations or riffs on classic Aesop stories. There are twenty-eight stories in all -- including several from George O'Connor -- from such diverse creators as James Kochalka, Roger Langridge, Graham Annable, R.O. Blechman, Mark Newgarden, R. Sikoryak, Elanor Davis, Jaime Hernandez and Graham Chaffee. It's published for kids, but I bet plenty of adults will enjoy it. It's a hardcover from First Second, coming in October.

Cixin Liu is a massive SF bestseller in his native China, and his first novel translated into English, The Three-Body Problem, is a current Hugo nominee. (Which is a complicated story, in this most unusual of Hugo years.) The sequel to Three-Body is The Dark Forest, and it's coming from Tor in a translation by Joel Martinsen as a hardcover on August 11. This is the middle book of a trilogy, so the secret plot of the aliens from the first book has been uncovered, and humans are mobilizing to defeat them, but I don't expect a strong resolution in this book.

And last for this week is the new "Darger and Surplus" novel from Michael Swanwick, Chasing the Phoenix. The main characters are two con-men traipsing across a quirkily diverse post-apocalypse world -- one human, one not precisely so -- in search of opportunities and vast wealth, hampered only by their own very large flaws. Darger and Surplus previously appeared in the novel Dancing Bear, in which they hit Russia (it hit back), and they've also been central to a series of great novellas. This time out, they've made their way to China, with the slight problem that one of them is currently dead. Swanwick has been writing great novels for thirty years now, and the Darger & Surplus stories are the closest we have to a modern Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, so I'm looking forward to this one with glee. It's a Tor hardcover, coming on August 11.