Another Busy Weekend

Yesterday wasn't so bad -- Thing 2 had a baseball practice, but he's high enough up in age now that parents don't stick around, so it's not a time sink for me. (One of the joys of parenting that non-parents have no idea about is the "drop-and-go." It starts with birthday parties, round about age six, and builds bit by bit -- and every time an occasion turns into a "drop-and-go," you feel happy for yourself, for saving time, and for your kid, for being big and smart and capable enough to handle this alone.) Otherwise, it was the usual Saturday routine -- newspaper, library, dinner at my mother's. And so, consequently, I goofed around and didn't do much of any consequence.

Today, though, we had a show in the city -- Boom Town, by Cirque Mechanics, an excellent new circus/physical theatre/acrobatics show at the New Victory -- and that meant there would be a hole of about five hours blown out of the middle of the day. (The Wife ended up staying home, ostensibly because she was scared about flooding -- there was a huge rain yesterday, and the river nearby did get into the "moderate flooding" range, so she picked up the slack on some house stuff like laundry and cleaning.) The boys and I had a great time in New York -- it was a bright sunny day; I got pulled out of the audience to be part of the show (and did pretty well, I think; two random strangers told me I was "great" afterward, which was gratifying); and we had a Tim Hortons donut before the show and a lunch at Schnipper's afterwards. (Thing 2 is a connoisseur of mac & cheese, as I may have mentioned, and Schnipper's is well-known for theirs. He approved of their concoction entirely, but, as ten-year-olds will, he still holds out that the very very best mac & cheese is made with Velveeta.)

It was all great, but it did take five hours, as expected. (By the way, I recommend both Schnipper's -- which is a good alternative to the midtown Shake Shack a few blocks north, with a wider menu and equally good burgers. Thing 1, who is a connoisseur of milkshakes, now claims that Schnipper's beats the Shack on their namesake -- and Boom Town, though you'll have more time to check out the former; Boom Town is on the last leg of a long tour and will be done after another week in NYC. So grab tickets now if you're interested.)

And I had e-mailed myself home a bunch of work to get done, besides the usual blogging that I always want to do. There were five items, in order of importance, so I did #1 yesterday (it was also pretty quick)...and then started on #3 (which was more fun) this morning before the trip. Before I finally quite to play some more Lego Star Wars, though, I did finish up #s 1-3, and spent another thirty-forty minutes wrestling with e-mail.


So, in the end, I felt virtuous enough -- I did what I needed to do. But #s 4 and 5 are still waiting for me -- I may be able to get to them at work, but who can actually do real dig-into-it, think-deeply projects at the office anymore? That's what weekends and nights were made for, right?

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

Creating an epic fantasy protagonist is like answering job-interview questions: the trick is to create flaws that are not-so-secretly strengths, adding quirks and idiosyncrasies that make one's hero more impressive rather than less. Patrick Rothfuss has passed a Google-level interview with his trilogy's hero Kvothe, a young hothead with a list of accomplishments and abilities as long as his arm but also a carefully calibrated set of disadvantages (very young, redheaded, from the Gypsy-esque traveling folk of this continent, poor, orphaned) that serve primarily to make him even more impressive to the reader.

Rothfuss introduced Kvothe in The Name of the Wind four years ago, which immediately grabbed him a large and appreciative audience -- and no wonder, since it was a compellingly readable coming-of-age story with an iconic first-person narrator and a frame story that dribbled hints of things to come (both triumphs and tragedies) in the way that prophecy-loving fantasy readers immediately jumped on. Name was also a big book, full of exciting scenes, and secondary-world fantasy readers seem to still value size over everything -- size of book, size of protagonist's ego and abilities, size of scale, size of anything that can be measured. So Rothfuss had an almost immediate fanbase, which, as always, wanted to know how quickly they could expect the next book.

It took longer than expected, but The Wise Man's Fear hit stores last month with an even larger thump than Name did. (The new book is just shy of a thousand pages, and those pages have substantial numbers of words on them -- again, size is a huge bonus in this market.) And it's very much the same kind of book as Name was -- a little bit of frame story, in which an older Kvothe is seen, reduced to sad and unlikely circumstances, telling the tale of his much younger days, and in which Rothfuss throws out as many as a dozen dark hints a page as narrative anchors for the stuff he'll write later or, perhaps, leave as hints if he doesn't manage to get to them; and then a whole lot of "when I was young" stuff. In the main text, Kvothe only ages about a year -- he's still in his mid-teens, and one begins to wonder if this series will burst beyond its promised trilogy (as so many others have), or if that last book will appear in twenty years as a 10,000-page e-only monster. In keeping with Rothfuss's teasing narrative strategy, most of the events the reader is anticipating happen later in Fear than expected -- if they happen at all. (See elsewhere on the Internet for the blow-by-blow details of those; like most popular secondary-world fantasy, there are now multiples of words written about this series than there are in the books themselves.)

Rothfuss has an admirable control of scene and tension for a guy only on his second novel; this is a very big book with an overgrown "and" structure ("first this happened, and then this happened, and then..."), but it feels structured and moves at a controlled pace at all times. It is huge, though, meaning that all readers will not view all parts of it as equally necessary, and some sophisticated readers may begin to wonder if Rothfuss is just going to keep tossing out hints and not bothering to follow up on them. The frame story is more intrusive in this volume as well, and more obviously counterpointing Kvothe's stories about his youth. (Though there's still no evidence at all that Rothfuss wants us to doubt a word Kvothe says; he's a deeply reliable narrator, as usual in this genre.)

In the end, this series -- Rothfuss has grandly titled it "The Kingkiller Chronicles," based on yet another exploit of Kvothe's that we have gotten only the faintest reports of so far -- is a strong entry in the traditional Tolkeinesque secondary-world fantasy genre, but doesn't transcend that genre. Kvothe is an engaging narrator -- I almost wrote "endlessly engaging," but that might be too much of a temptation to the already-given-to-great-length Rothfuss -- and his story is one of the better epic fantasies that you could find. But it doesn't push the genre in ways that Steven Erikson or George R.R. Martin do; it just settles into the middle of the territory to tell the story it has.

In Which I Casually Mention My Other Blog, As If In Passing

If I were a more diligent blogger, keenly attuned to maximizing my personal brand online and leaping on every opportunity for self-promotion -- you know, the kind of thing that I tell my authors to do all day long? -- I would be posting here at least once a day with some kind of reminder about my other blog, Editorial Explanations.

(As You Know, Bob, Editorial Explanations was a series of posts here before I decided it made more sense as a standalone -- so it's only separate to make it better indexed and cleaner. This blog is "stuff I want to talk about on the Internet," so I still consider Editorial Explanations a subset of the greater Antick Musings world-domination engine.)

On the other hand, I did say for the first five years of this blog that I wasn't going to talk about politics here, because that's a quick trip into crank-dom. So maybe I just want to have it both ways. (Or maybe I'm trying to make Editorial Explanations more of a meta-commentary -- media criticism, to be grandiose about it -- and less about my particular political views. That's the hope, anyway.)

So: if you like, pretend that I have a really promotional post every single day, urging you to check out Editorial Explanations and the other awesome sites in the Antick Musings Network. With that, and some judicious theft of underpants, I'll be well on my way to profit!

Blog Ennui

One unexpected side effect of my year-long Book-A-Day festival was that it entirely focused my blogging energies on those posts, to the detriment of shorter, quicker things. I've realized, recently, that I think of "a blog post," deep in my head, as an essay, probably a review of some media concoction that I've consumed recently. So all of the other kinds of posts that I used to do here -- and I used to post a lot more frequently, before Book-A-Day took over -- dried up during that year, and haven't entirely come back.

(Of course, I also started using Twitter more over that year -- though still not as much as the really serious Twitterers -- and I've also been using Google Reader to share links, which eliminated the "Hey! Look at this!" kind of posts I used to do. So it's not just one thing. I could complain about being busy at work, too, though that's nothing new -- it's more likely the result of all the time I'm spending playing Lego Star Wars III and doing odd things with Thing 2 -- watching Yogscast Minecraft walkthroughs, practicing spelling words, talking about "A Series of Unfortunate Events.")

Anyway, I want to have a mixture of posts here -- long reviews and quick thoughts -- but those thoughts recently haven't wanted to be the right length for a blog post. Maybe once I finish Lego Star Wars I'll have renewed blogging energy.

For now, the pile of books on my printer -- remember when I used to complain about that? it's back -- is growing, with a number of excellent things (Among Others, The Wise Man's Fear, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, Popeye Vol. 4) and a couple of mixed-to-good ones (a random collection of Robert Silverberg essays, Musings and Meditations, and Steven Brust's Tiassa, one of his occasional forays into interesting structure and mild self-indulgence) that I want to think about in words here. And that will happen...one of these days.

Travel Plans

I spent much of this evening finally planning my big early-summer sojourn -- three big accounting conferences in two cities on opposite coasts in a ten-day period! fun times! -- leaving me with little time and less energy for blogging.

So let me just say that I'll be in lovely Orlando, Florida starting June 2nd, first for a quick day or two away with The Wife, and then diving straight into the annual meeting of the IMA. As soon as that's done, I get to jump on a plane and zip off to equally lovely San Diego, California, where the meetings of NACVA and ACFE are taking place back-to-back over the next week. Finally, I'll get back to these here parts at about dawn on June 15th, ready to utterly collapse, I expect.

If you'll be in any of those places, please come to the Wiley booth and say hello. And buy a book, won't'cha?

Lord of the Rings Bumper Stickers!

I haven't managed to post yet today, so, instead, here's some frivolity unearthed from the Straight Dope Message Board; this was my contribution to a thread which was, slightly reworded, exactly the same as my title now:

I'm on my way to [logo] The Gap of Rohan [/logo]

Still not King

Close Air Support Provided by Gwahir

My Other Car is a Fell Beast

Movie Log: Tales from Earthsea

The family saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, and I see -- given that I have an empty post with this title sitting as a "draft" -- that I neglected to write anything about it when it was still fresh in my mind. And Tales from Earthsea is just mediocre enough that it slithers out of the memory, given half a chance.

It's not a bad movie, though it doesn't live up to any of its heritage -- it's from Studio Ghibli, being the first movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro, and of course it's based on Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent novels -- and it doesn't either adapt the original stories well or make a new story of its own to tell. Instead, it mixes and matches elements from three or four of the books in ways that don't really fit together, but still stays with a linear plot so that the word "tales" in the title doesn't make sense.

It looks wonderful, in that usual Ghibli way, and Goro Miyazaki has learned the lesson of stillness from his father -- Tales from Earthsea has a camera that lingers in a way never seen in American animation, or much in any movies these days. But I found myself wishing that I had been watching it in Japanese rather than English, because the story I would have made up while watching it to explain all of the various elements would certainly have held together better, and been a better adaptation of Le Guin, than the actual movie that emerged.

There are probably at least three blogs dedicated entirely to anatomizing exactly what's wrong with this movie; go see them for further details. On the positive side, I will say that it's vastly better than the live-action Earthsea miniseries, and equally better than most of the animated movies I've seen over the last decade. It's not bad at all, as I said. But a Studio Ghibli movie of Le Guin should have been something magnificent, and it isn't, at all. It's a lumpy pudding made from random pieces of Le Guin's Earthsea, and a viewer has to be careful not to crack a tooth on it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/9

As always, here's the listing of what arrived in my mailbox for review last week. Also as always, I haven't read any of it yet -- in fact, these books have piled up next to my computer with only a slight glance so far, so whatever I'm going to tell you about them will be based on my prior knowledge and whatever I can gleam from the packaging. I will tell you one thing: I'll never stoop to retyping someone else's blurb copy...mostly because I see, and do, far too much of that at work already.

First is the book with the best title: Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, a fictionalized memoir in comics form originally published in Japan in 1973 by one of the best-known and most acclaimed creators of manga. (And the fact that there are still major manga creators essentially unknown to English monoglots speaks to the immense depth and breadth of that universe in Japan -- it's like moviemaking; if making a movie was cheap and easy enough for nearly anyone to do it.) Onward is the story of a portion of the Japanese Imperial Army during the late years of WWII, centered on the dictate from the high command that their soldiers must die -- and die well -- if they can't win, and based closely on Mizuki's own wartime experiences. It's being published this month by Drawn & Quarterly, one of North America's greatest comics publisher and a house with a strong line in translated gekiga (manga stories for adults, more or less), from Yoshihiro Tatsumi to Susumu Katsumata.

DAW is publishing three mass-market books in May, and those are:

• Night Mares in the Hamptons, second in a contemporary fantasy series by Celia Jerome, about a graphic novelist (Wilow Tate) who is one of the rare magical Visualizers, able to bring creatures from Faerie into the real world by drawing them. This time out, she needs to save her small Hamptons town from the havoc caused by three rampaging magical mares, with the help of a world-famous horse-whisperer (who, in best urban fantasy fashion, seems to be a hunky cowboy type).
• Spellcast, a novel by Barbara Ashford that combines summer stock theater and fantasy -- in a way the back-cover copy is reticent about specifically describing -- in a small Vermont town.
• Well of Sorrows, by Benjamin Tate, was originally published in hardcover last year, and is an epic-fantasy take on the colonization of America, with young Colin Harten coming to a new continent with his family to escape wars among the nobles of Andover, and finding what seem to be dwarves (dwarren) and elves (Alvitshai) there, along with his own inevitable magical destiny.

Always the Vampire is the third in a light-hearted paranormal romance series about vampire princess Francesca Marinelli (described as "Gidget-esque" in a description of the first book, La Vida Vampire) by Nancy Haddock. This time around, Francesca is preparing to be the maid of honor at her best friend's wedding when a magical construct called the Void (not the most original name, I suppose) puts the kibosh on her boyfriend (whose name is Saber, which is, I have to admit, pretty darn original), and she has to save everyone once again. It's a trade paperback from Berkley, coming May 3rd.

I was going to say that I used to know something about this next book, but then I unremembered it. But that would have been a really lousy joke, and dumb as well. So I won't. Peter Orullian's The Unremembered is the first novel -- and the first in a big epic fantasy series -- from a guy with a really striking author's photo and the usual odd resume (marketing for Xbox, touring internationally as a vocalist), and it's being published in hardcover from Tor tomorrow. Orullian has been blogging for Suvudu ahead of the publication of this book -- just the way that book marketers like me are always urging new authors to do, to get out and "get their names known" -- and also has an impressive website. My epic-fantasy taste buds are still regenerating from being burned out over sixteen years at the SFBC, but Unremembered looks like a solid, old-school-style epic, with a forgotten danger to the entire world held back by a crumbling magical barrier and a young man with a destiny he doesn't realize.

S.M. Stirling is in the middle of a straight-up urban fantasy trilogy -- not the first thing I ever would have expected from a usually much more SFnal writer -- with The Council of Shadows, the sequel to A Taint in the Blood. I didn't read the first one, but our hero is Adrian Breze, once of the nicer members of the secret race of Shadowspawn (shapeshifting predators who are probably somewhere in the werewolf sector of UF, not anything to do with Andrew Offutt's swords & sorcery hero), and this time out he's also battling a plot to destroy/conquer/enslave all of mankind. (Fantasy, as always, is full of megalomaniacs.) Council is coming from Roc in hardcover on May 3rd.

The Worst Thing is a thriller from Aaron Elkins -- author of the Edgar Award-winning Gideon Oliver series of mysteries, plus a number of other books -- about a man who was abducted as a small boy, and now, in mid-adulthood, spends his life designing hostage-negotiation programs. Since the book is named The Worst Thing, we can all guess what happens to him: he gets held hostage again, while on a business trip to Iceland, and has to survive his own reactions as well as his captors. Worst Thing is a Berkley Prime Crime hardcover, coming May 3rd.

And last this week is another manga -- which came shrink-wrapped, indicating that it's not at all for younger readers -- Lychee Light Club from Usamaru Furuya. (It's also based on a play by a group called Tokyo Grand Guignol, which may give you another indication of the contents.) It's another story about a club of Japanese students, but this Light Club -- a secret brotherhood that meets in an abandoned factory in their dark, dirty industrial town -- is building a robot fueled by lychee fruits to further their goals of never having to grow up or have contact with girls. Vertical will publish Lychee on April 26th.

Font Update

I've gotten a couple of complaints since my Font Overhaul of a few weeks back, and I noticed myself that the blog was difficult to read on Windows machines -- I work on a Mac at home, and it looks just fine in every browser I can think of on a Mac -- so I've changed the main-text font back to boring old Times New Roman.

It doesn't fit with the rest of the font "family," but it may be something people can actually, physically read, and the latter is definitely more important. Please send any comments about readability to my e-mail (see column to the left for details) or leave them on this post -- I'll get them either way.

Looking for a New Assistant

Updated With Real Link!

This job hasn't been posted yet, but I have gotten all of the approvals signed off, so I can let the world know: I'm looking to hire a new assistant. (I'll update this post with a link to the job, once it has been posted; for now, interested parties could e-mail me directly at the address to the left.)

My previous assistant has moved on and up to a new job within the wonderful world of Wiley -- and please take that as a subtle hint that such fortune could eventually happen to my next assistant as well -- and so I desperately need someone new to sit in a cube just outside my office-icle and do all kinds of complicated publishing-related stuff.

The job reports both to me and to my boss, and supports a group of five marketers (some of us more than others), in a fast-paced, hard-working, fun-loving, adjectivally-hyphenated group we like to call Wiley Global Finance -- google us for more details. (And that "global" isn't simply puffery -- Wiley publishes globally in English, and this position will entail regular contact with colleagues around the world.)

We're looking for someone with 1-3 years of experience, but we're open to various kinds of experience: publishing, digital media, marketing in other areas, or something else related to finance, accounting, and markets. Our group is aggressively moving into digital products of various kinds -- ebooks are the most minor, obvious piece of that -- and we're looking to find someone who will help us continue moving forward. We have openings at the marketing assistant level only rarely; this is not an opportunity that comes very often.

John Wiley & Sons is a strongly growing, rock-solid company (over two hundred years old, and check out the course of our stock price over the last year) that publishes heavily in the less-glamorous ends of the information world -- we're public, so you could easily check to see how we're fared over the past few years and what our leadership team says about the future. And we're located in lovely Hoboken -- not New York, but you can't see New York from New York, either -- which is great for people who live in New Jersey and the southern half of Manhattan.

This is a "book publishing" job, if you want to be excessively reductive about it, but that may not be true in five years -- or two, or even one. Wiley is a company run by smart people with real plans and visions, and I love what our future looks like. Please contact me directly or click here for more details -- and please feel free to let anyone else know about this job.

Quote of the Week: Teen Riot!

"This is a weapon of the American psychological war aimed at infecting part of the population with a new philosophical outlook of inhumanity...in order to prepare for war."
- East German magazine Young World, in 1956, during an attack of the vapors over Elvis Presley

Movie Log: Morning Glory

Several times while The Wife and I were watching Morning Glory, the Blu-Ray quietly skipped ahead a chapter or three, jumping over twenty minutes or so at a clip. Sneakily, it repeatedly tried to do that by jumping between scenes that both featured the young heroine (Rachel McAdams) having a meeting with her boss (Jeff Goldblum). When the movie itself tries to tell you, "You don't really want to watch this," it's not a good sign. Possibly worse, we didn't realize the first jump had happened until the second one hit -- and didn't really miss the twenty minutes in which the movie laboriously explained how McAdams went from a minor producer on a minor early-morning cable show out in the wilds of New Jersey to running the big morning show for what's supposed to be one of the Big Three networks in New York.

Morning Glory for a long time looks like it's going to become yet another story in which a hard-working young person learns to quit and slack off for the greater glory of her soul, but ends up slightly less cliched than that in the end. McAdams is painfully perky, and has the unrealistic klutziness that modern movies use to telegraph that she is the female lead in a romantic comedy, but she does work hard, and she does mean well. Her job, basically, is to drag that morning TV show away from the bottom of the ratings, and her great hope of doing so was to team gruff, grizzled veteran newsman Harrison Ford (playing it by finding the least likable aspects of Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Andy Rooney) with the existing female host of the show, Diane Keaton.

And, in a movie made two or more decades ago, the relationship between Keaton and Ford would be the center of the movie -- it should be the center of the movie. But it's not, because the big face at the middle of any movie poster has to be young and perky, so McAdams is shoehorned into every scene. Oddly, her own relationship -- with the nearly colorless Patrick Wilson, there primarily to be the hunky guy who she clearly deserves and so doesn't need to have any characterization of his own -- is mostly filled in through implication and allusion, as if the movie couldn't be bothered to actually have a romance in its romantic comedy.

So Morning Glory is shiny and obvious and constructed entirely according to formula: it's a Hollywood romantic comedy; we all expected that. Keaton and Ford are good in it -- though they could have been much better if the movie were allowed to be about them, and not the random young klutz wandering through their lives. And -- even though I kept a beady eye on the time-code on my disc player throughout the second hour of the movie -- I kept getting the feeling that I was still missing scenes, and this time they were scenes that didn't make it into the movie at all. In any case, Morning Glory won't thrill anyone but died-in-the-wool Harrison Ford fans, but it won't offend anyone but the most Milquetoast of Dubuque grandmothers, either.

Tonight's Festivities

The Wife and I spent more than a hour this evening chatting with a gentleman from a company that provides sump pumps -- have I mentioned the recent flood and our sleepness night? it's been much on our minds since -- coming to the conclusion that we'll need to move all of my books five feet away from the walls in the basement (where she exiled me and the books when Thing 1 was born) to have this work done.

As you might guess, I have a lot of books, so this idea does not fill me with joy. In fact, I'm utterly dreading it, since I'm pretty sure I have at least a ton of paper that will need to be shifted. (Shifted once, so the men can do their work, and then, eventually, shifted back again, probably to new shelves.)

I should be writing here about some book I've read or movie I've seen, but all I can do is obsess about moving all of those mounds of paper. Maybe tomorrow.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead by Dave Barry

Dave Barry is not a serious writer, or a deep writer, or an important writer. But he's a funny writer, and has been consistently funny for about thirty years now, which is no small thing. (I realize that I actually remember when Barry moved his column to the Miami Herald, back in the late '80s, and that I worried that it might be bad for his Northeastern-guy humor. It wasn't.)

Barry is probably the last of the great American newspaper humorists, part of a tradition that flourished hugely in the generation just before his -- with Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Russell Baker, and plenty of others -- but stretches back past Mark Twain to Kin Hubbard and other names forgotten by all but specialists today. Barry is a smartass, as the newspaper humorist so often were, but it was always a soft smartassery, suitable for your hip aunt if not for your disapproving grandmother. And even a decade out of the day-to-day newspaper grind, he still writes short, puffy pieces that avoid the real third-rails of American writing (politics, religion, and privilege) while focusing on superficially transgressive material: fart jokes, booger jokes, "men are stupid" jokes, "women are crazy" jokes, "aren't we suburban people wacky" jokes. And he has the requisite sentimental streak -- American newspapers are as sentimental as the day is long -- winning the Pulitzer in the '80s in large part for a column about the birth of his son and continuing to dive into pathos in between booger jokes.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead is an original collection of Barry essays, possibly the first of its kind. He's written standalone books for decades -- all the way back to his first, The Taming of the Screw -- but they were always about single topics, while the essay collections gathered up a bunch of newspaper columns (and they did pile up, at one or more a week) to give them a more permanent form. So this book is a lot like many other Barry books, miscellaneous and scattershot, jumping from the amusements of his wife's Judaism to riffs on Miami, from a nearly-straight account of why men should get a colonoscopy at age fifty to a (quite good) Twilight parody, from his script for 24 to an examination of why youth sports are being ruined by parents. It's all fairly obvious material; Barry has never been a trail-blazer, and his topics are usually ones that have been well-worked by others. But that's part of the appeal, as well: like a Borscht Belt comedian, Barry tells you the jokes you expect, about the things you already think are funny, and makes you laugh at them every Sunday night (for a two-drink minimum.)

This is a silly book, with very little substance in it. Barry instinctively realizes that no one goes to him for real seriousness, and he relies on faux-seriousness when he comes close to important issues. It's a fine Dave Barry book, entirely suited for reading on an airplane, in the smallest room in the house (though these essays are notably longer than his old newspaper columns, which may fit less well in that milieu), or -- as I read it -- on a train. If you're within two sigma of being a typical American, Dave Barry will make you chuckle out loud at least once with this book.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/2

I tend to assume that you folks know the drill by now -- that I get books from publishers to review because I post reviews here, and that guilt drove me to list those books every week, since I'll never manage to review more than 20% or so of the stuff I see, so these lists are based on a quick glance and common knowledge -- but perhaps that's an unwarranted assumption. If so, please re-read the previous sentence more carefully.

This week, I'll lead off with Reunion, the new graphic novel from Pascal Girard, which is this week's entry in the "I would have bought it anyway" category. Girard is a Francophile Francophone [2] Canadian cartoonist who I discovered with his heartbreaking, amazing Nicolas, a short, spare graphic novel about the childhood death of his kid brother. (And that makes it sound like spinach, I know: but it's a touching, lovely, brilliant book  that is well worth reading.) I reviewed Nicolas for ComicMix, and decided to look out for more books by Girard. This is another autobiographical story, with Girard going to his ten-year high school reunion (platonically) with the girl he had a crush on back then. And Drawn & Quarterly is publishing it, in English, everywhere in North America this month.



Wolfsangel is the first book in a planned historical fantasy series by M.D. Lachlan (pseudonym for a British writer whose real name can be found with a bit of judicious Googling and Wikipedia'ing), published as a trade paperback from Pyr last week (and in the UK last year). It has a brutal Viking king, at least one prophecy, witches who live on a troll wall, and the gods Odin and Loki -- plus a great wolf peering out at you from the cover. How can you resist?

The Rise of the Iron Moon is the third novel in a lose steampunk series from the excitable British writer Stephen Hunt, in which a friendless orphan suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant and dealing with the fate of her entire nation. (No point for guessing that she has a Secret Destiny; every genre protagonist is issued a Secret Destiny during the dice-rolling stage of character generation.) Tor published Iron Moon as a hardcover a couple of weeks ago, back in March -- so you should be able to find it everywhere [1] now.

And last for this week is a new novel from Grandmaster Frederik Pohl -- over ninety and still writing regularly, as you'd know if you followed his Hugo-winning blog -- All the Lives He Led, a SF story about the 2000th anniversary of the Mount Vesuvius eruption, and one ex-American caught up in the middle of plots and mysterious disappearances ahead of that grand celebration. It's also from Tor, also hardcover, and is officially on-sale on April 12th.


[1] Possibly not including major book retailers fighting through bankruptcy proceedings, of course, and only within the narrow geographical regions in which Tor has license to sell books.

[2] He's probably a Francophile as well, since his books are first published in France. But, as was pointed out to me in email, what I meant to say is that he works in French, and thus is a Francophone.