Happy 6015th Birthday to Earth!

"The world was created on 22nd October, 4004 BC at 6 o'clock in the evening."
- James Ussher, Archibishop of Armagh, Annals of the World, 1650-54

Quote of the Week

"He is not wrong."
- every third page of A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

In Which I Whine About Something I'm Getting Free

So I'm using OverDrive on my iPad to read library ebooks once in a while -- the selection is horrible, and the waiting list is huge, but the process is pretty quick, and I like reading library books these days.

I particularly like reading library ebooks when they're huge, like, oh, A Dance With Dragons for example.

(Because my iPad might not be as light as it could be, but it's definitely lighter and easier to carry around than that brick is.)

Unfortunately, either my library system or OverDrive -- I'm not sure which, so I'll blame both -- doesn't allow library ebooks to be renewed, and the default lending period is only ten days. Now, there was a time when I'd read a GRRM book in a weekend, but I was reading them professionally then -- plus I have a lot of other demands on my time these days.

So I find myself on Day 10 at just shy of the halfway point, and the damn book is going to vanish at midnight. And I can't even put the book back on my "waiting list" -- so I can maybe get it back in two months -- until after it expires, because OverDrive just wants to make more trouble.

This, I tell you, is no way to run a railroad. I certainly can dig up another copy of the book -- it's a bestseller; they're all over the damn place -- but it's not the way to endear patrons and keep them happy so they vote up the next town budget.

The Amazing Belated Sixth Anniversary Razzamatazz!

Six years (and two weeks) ago, I first inflicted Antick Musings on the world. It was intended to be my training-wheels blog, since I was expecting to very soon begin to blog for my then-employer. Well, "very soon" turned into "many months later," and then my then-employer turned into my former employer, quite against my will. But Antick Musings still continues, though exactly what it contains has changed quite a bit -- I avoided writing directly about the SFF world (in particular, I scrupulously avoided seriously criticizing the books in the field, which may seem impossible to some of you now) while I worked in that field, much as I studiously avoid ranting about the business-book world and the headaches of my current day-job here now.

Last year, I missed the big fifth anniversary, for reasons I no longer remember precisely -- but it probably had to do with the fact that I was hip-deep in my year-long Book-A-Day project, and had no time for any other blogging. This year, I nearly missed my blogiversary, but I'm invoking the Retroactivity Clause in my blogging contract, and pretending this is the post I would have made on October 4th.

Since this is going to be a long, links-filled post, I'll begin by looking back at those older anniversary posts: first, second, third, and fourth.

Come to think of it, I think this post will have to cover the last two years, at least desultorily, just to catch up. That will mean it's even longer and filled with more links, but I've never been one to shy away from doing something exactly the way I insist it must be done.

I've begun in past years with the Reading of the Statistics, since that's the kind of guy I am. So here's the post counts for the first six years of Antick Musings:

2010-2011 -- 445 posts
2009-2010 -- 711 posts
2008-2009 -- 880 posts
2007-2008 -- 834 posts
2006-2007 -- 841 posts
2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Looking at those raw numbers, one might want to diagnose the dreaded Blogger Fatigue, and there probably is a bit of that. But I should also point out that much of that 2009-2010 period was taken up with the previously mentioned Book-A-Day project (which began 2/4/10 and ran through 2/3/11), so there may have been fewer total posts, but there were a lot of longer, more essay-like posts (one every single day for 365 days, in fact).

And the other reason for the drop in posts is that I started up a second blog, Editorial Explanations (devoted to making fun of and criticizing editorial cartoons), the moment that Book-A-Day ended. In fact, Editorial Explanations began with a post on this blog on the very day after Book-A-Day ended, even though I'd specifically said that I wasn't launching another bloggy project immediately.

(Clearly, I am not a reliable reporter of my own intentions. This may explain why I like Lawrence Block's books so much, since all of his protagonists seem to be eternally trying to figure out just what they'll do in a given situation -- I know that feeling.)

Anyway, I only posted here 445 times over that year, but I've also posted 810 times at Editorial Explanations in just a little over eight months, so imagine a Roger Maris-like asterisk in that most recent number of posts.

And, as long as I'm talking about other blogging I do, I should mention my shared items -- which come into a sidebar here as "Hornswogglets" -- which has become the outlet for most of my hey-look-at-this-thing link-blogging. (And there are dozens of those, many of which might have become full, if short, posts in past years.) Links to posts here and the shared items also flow into my Twitter account, which in turn flows into the mighty river of Facebook. (Does it seem like I'm desperately trying to prove how engaged and au courant I am, to deny the possibility that I'm souring on blogging? It's possible....)

I just mentioned Book-A-Day, which took over this blog almost entirely for a year, so let me start the intensive link-a-licious part of this post with some of the pieces from that string that I think hold up best, arranged in reverse-chronological order to be that much more blog-ical:

• Jacques Tardi's It Was The War of the Trenches
• Jonathan Stroud's The Ring of Solomon
• Wanted by Mark Millar and JG Jones
• The last volume of the Vaughan/Harris/Mettler Ex Machina comics series
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Cryoburn
•  Jim Butcher's Side Jobs
• The magnificent Alec: "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell 
• Morrison & Quitely's not at all magnificent All-Star Superman, Vol. 1
• Denys Wortman's New York
• This Crooked Way by James Enge
• The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb
• Ambrose Bierce's A Cynic Looks at Life
•  S.G. Browne's Fated
• Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke
• China Mieville's Kraken
• Batwoman: Elegy by Rucka and Williams
• Milton Caniff's Male Call
• Harry Connolly's Game of Cages
• Greg Houston's Elephant Man #1
• Memory by Donald E. Westlake
• Low Moon by Jason
• the appalling How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
• Raina Telgemeier's Smile
• The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
• Tom Bissell's Extra Lives
• the wonderfully retro anthology Swords & Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders
• Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons by Gahan Wilson
• Kick-Ass by Millar and Romita
• Dash Shaw's BodyWorld
• Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
• Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
• John Scalzi's The God Engines
• Solar by Ian McEwan
• Charley's War, Vol. 1 by Mills and Colquhoun
• Michael Lewis's The Big Short
• 12 by Manix Abrera
• Trese: Mass Murders by Tan and Baldismo
• Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis
• Changes by Jim Butcher
• The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
• Horns by Joe Hill
• Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson
• Sexually, I'm More of a Switzerland edited by David Rose
• Hespira by Matthew Hughes
• Captain Freedom by G. Xavier Robillard
• Stephen Emond's Happyface
• Not Less than Gods by Kage Baker
• Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
• Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain

Before I started Book-A-Day -- but after that fourth-anniversary post two Octobers ago -- there were a few notable book-review posts that might still be entertaining now: Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese, Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford, This is Me, Jack Vance!, Matthew Hughes's Template, Jo Walton's Half a Crown, Josh Lieb's I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President (which I may manage to cajole Thing 2 to read in the near future), How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, Mark Stein's How the States Got Their Shapes, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, Justine Larbalestier's Liar, and Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

And then there were more reviews of books after Book-A-Day ended -- almost as if I were obsessed with books, or as if I worked in the field or something! -- including very nasty reviews of the Hugo nominees Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis and Feed by Mira Grant. Other notable reviews here in the last nine months include the third volume of E.C. Segar's Popeye strips, Let's You and Him Fight!; Spy: The Funny Years; Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey; P.J. O'Rourke's Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards;  Steven Brust's Tiassa; Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays Is Missing; Among Others by Jo Walton; Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear; Michael Chabon's The Final Solution; Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mile; John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation; Matthew Hughes's The Damned Busters; Juxtaposition: Two Books for Younger Readers with Words and Pictures;  and Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

And I also chose my favorite books for those years -- 2009 and 2010 -- which somewhat overlaps with the links immediately above. (But not entirely, of course -- I'm also linking to books I loathed, since, like all critics, I believe that I'm endlessly entertaining when I'm full of bile.)

(And I wrote fitfully for other people as well -- I dropped out of writing for ComicMix sometime early in this period, though I still think of myself as just pausing between posts there -- as well as writing a graphic novels column for the bi-monthly magazine Realms of Fantasy. I can't link to the latter, since it's a real, ink-on-paper magazine, but I'll point you to what was one of my last, and probably best, ComicMix reviews: The Walrus Is Batman.)

I even write about books I don't finish, which is incredibly arrogant of me, I know. Abandoned Books posts that I think are worth not abandoning include Michael Shea's The Extra and Dalton Conley's Elsewhere, U.S.A.

As to the other blogging I do here, well, the most popular posts (judging from aggregate numbers of hits) are the Monday-morning Reviewing the Mail series, in which I write about whatever books arrived in the previous week's mail despite the handicap of not actually having read them.

I intermittently write about movies, as well -- less so recently than I used to, particularly during and after Book-A-Day -- but there are still some things I'm willing to remember: Absurdistan, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Duchess, In the Loop, Whip It, Kenny, Pirate Radio, The American, The Cannonball Run (which gets a surprising number of hits on a regular basis), A Life Less Ordinary, Tales from Earthsea; Wild Target; How Do You Know?. And then I got out of the habit of writing about those movies and had to catch up on six months with one huge post.

I also occasionally pretend to be a journalist -- or, to be more honest, like a hack columnist -- particularly when something interesting is going on in the publishing world. These will all be pretty dated a year or two later, but they're among the most time-intensive blogging work I do, so I'm damn well going to link to them! British-Style Book Price Wars Come to the US. Amazon and Macmillan. More on Amazon-Macmillan. Myths of Amazon-Macmillan. Behold! There Is a Straw-Man Argument, and It Is Good! Are E-Book Readers the New Web Browsers? Goodkind's Plethora of Three-Book Deals. Reading by ARC Light. Amazon Algebra. Comment on Promo Quantities. Publishing Brands. In Which the Sky Has Not Fallen. Of Bestsellers, and Their Lists.

In a similar vein, I brought back my very intermittent series Book Marketing 101 for a post on Getting Into the Right Shelf Category.

It was during this period that I actually codified my Social Networking Policy.

Things that I was grumpy about during these two years included -- but was not limited to! -- the post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, gender presentation and youth sports, and how I hope I'm not really all that smart.

I'm very rarely positive about anything, and I'm sad to say it takes something like impending death to bring it out, but, it did: An Appreciation of Kage Baker.

I am semi-shamefully an Amazon affiliate, though it never adds up to much money. (Though, if I were really mercenary, I'd do some sob story now about how I'm trying to rebuild my library after the flood, and, oh-please-sir, won't you use my Amazon links to help a poor drowned library?) And, half the time, I'm more interested in making fun of the idea of selling things anyway, which is remarkably twisted even for me. That impulse hit its height at Christmas 2009 with a series of posts I called Twelve Days of Commerce, which I think are pretty damn amusing. (But, then, I would.)

I try to avoid having Big Ideas, but they can strike any of us -- even when we're drinking a lot of fluids and resting our feet as much as possible -- and I was struck with one last February: A Modest Proposal for E-Book Pricing.

I had another one this June: Characteristic Ages of Genres.

One of my very few public-service activities is gathering together all of the various unbelievable news stories each first day of April, and I did that in both 2010 and 2011.

I've done fewer and fewer "memes" as the years have gone on, but I did catch a few: The Periodic Table of Women in SF. SF Masterworks. Book Title Meme. Every Goddamn Animated Movie Ever Made. Decade Meme.

I had to finally shut down my apparatus for stalking David Itzkoff -- for several years, the utterly incompetent reviewer of SF for the venerable (but clearly either stupid or easily duped) New York Times -- when they hired a replacement, the incomparable Jeff VanderMeer.

I wrote something like an obituary for Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote a lot of great books, not enough of which I've read yet.

After seeing my SF-awards blogging ebb lower and lower over the previous years -- I missed the World Fantasy winners entirely in 2010 and also neglected to do my usual grumpy "Handicapping the Hugos" post that year -- I lept back into the Hugos with both muddy, oversized feet and produced a series of long, complaining posts about all of the award categories, Hugo Thoughts. I also (later) posted an annotated list of the Hugo Winners. I've done other fitful Award blogging over these two years as well, but, in general, my position has been that, no matter what just won whatever award, it's a giant travesty. And, finally, I posted the list of thing that I Would Have Nominated for the Hugos If I Wasn't Such a Goober.

I'm probably not the right person to do it, but I did give Advice to a Would-Be SF Writer. I also reprinted my own ten-years-old advice How to Write a Novel, again, without any reason for anyone to consider me an expert on the subject.

Speaking of old things about topics outside my area of expertise, I also shared my outdated Syllabus for a Non-Existent SF Course.

Although I would like to think I do have something worth saying about What Makes a Good Review, if I say so myself.

Don't ask me why I thought anyone would care about my Zen Koan for People in Fabric-Covered Boxes.

I expanded a quick thought far beyond any reasonable length in Anatomy of a Tweet.

I didn't aim my firehose of sarcasm at consultants quite as often as I might have, but I did attack Seth Goden at least once.

And I keep saying that I should blog more about music, but I rarely do. Practically all of those occasional posts: Slow Burn Songs. Josh Ritter Redux. In Which I Express Admiration for a Band With a Long, Odd Name. My Favorite Song As of This Exact Moment. (I also posted a series of Mountain Goats lyrics during a patch when I was feeling particularly cheery.)

When my younger son was selling popcorn for Cub Scouts (at almost exactly this time last year -- come to think of it, he's supposed to be selling popcorn right now, but, in the flood aftermath, it's not really a priority) I shamelessly tried to enlist the ravening hordes of the Internet to sell vast quantities. (To no result, of course.) I also keep thinking that I should blog more often about the things my family does -- as I did in the first couple of years of Antick Musings -- but the only recent example is Parenting: Harder Once You Actually Do It.

I kept one eye on the doings of all of the other Andrew Wheelers in this world, for we are legion and we are all devastatingly good at what we do.

About six weeks ago, the waters rose in my little New Jersey town, and, though I'd never gotten more than a little water in my house before that, this time it turned out to be a full evacuation and six feet of water in my basement. I was not happy. I'm slightly happier now -- or at least resigned, since it's now solidly in the past. But I expect I'll be thinking (and writing, and talking) about things I lost for years to come: it was a great mass of stuff, books and comics and sentimental junk and random storage and more, and it all had to be pulled, ruined, from floodwaters and thrown away.

More annoyingly to both of us, I had way too many posts about how I wasn't blogging enough, or promising to blog more, or just ruminating out loud about my bloggy impulses, but those are all better left to moulder in the archives; they're of their moment, if anything. Besides, I think that's plenty enough links now, isn't it?

So that's what I've been doing online (mostly here) for the last two years. It looks like I'll keep up this bloggy thing for some time more, and thanks for reading so far. Since the actual end of the sixth year, I've done the usual stuff -- a big review post on Dan Wells's "Mr. Monster" trilogy, a look at the B&N/DC Comics fight, and so on -- and I expect to keep doing it until someone physically stops me.

Free Josh Ritter Sampler!

On of my current favorite musicians -- and The Wife's hands-down current favorite -- is the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, whom I've mentioned here a few times.

And now you don't have to take my word for it; he's got a sampler on NoiseTrade which could be absolutely free if you want. (If you want to pay something, they're happy to take your money, but they don't require it.)

The sampler has eight songs, including two live cuts, and includes some of Ritter's best songs. And, again, you can get it absolutely free if you want.

So don't say I never gave you anything. (Even though it's true: I didn't give you this, after all.)

The Clown Car of Literary Awards

So, let me get this straight.

If the people administering an award are so incompetent that they can't even manage to communicate effectively with each other, and mangle their own list of nominees, the only way to "preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work" is to ask the author you just screwed over to withdraw her book from contention?

First of all, it's idiotic to "withdraw" a book once it's already on the shortlist.

Second, withdrawing a book implies that something is wrong with the book -- or that the author dislikes the award process for some reason -- which is the opposite of the problem here.

Third -- and, as a father, this is by far the most important lesson to me -- if you make a mistake, you need to be the one to fix it. You don't ask if the person you just injured can go away quietly so that it's less trouble for you. You screw up; you fix it -- that's the rule.

Look, we all know that Shine would have no change of actually winning this award -- the same set of judges that will make the final decision decided on the mangled shortlist -- but demanding that Shine be removed entirely is the action of a petty, self-centered prick. You don't fix thoughtless stupidity by being a prick; you fix it by being generous and apologetic. Someone at the NBA -- maybe the administrators, maybe the judges, maybe both -- hasn't learned a lesson my ten-year-old already knows well.

Lauren Myracle is way too polite and understanding; the correct answer to the NBA's insulting request could only be "fuck off."

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/15

I'm writing this on Sunday evening, after a long day with my family during which I did not get to New York Comic Con with my sons, because the furshlugginer thing sold out a few days ago. (That's the world of comics for you: ruining absolutely everything with the pre-order, collector's-item, gold-rush mentality.) So I'm not going to write about the fun stuff I bought there, or anything else related to that big show in the Javitz center that I didn't manage to get to.

(Instead, The Wife and I took the boys to an indoor play area in the great land of East Hanover, where they waved plastic wands at scenery for a couple hours, drove go-karts, and did various other activities that they greatly enjoyed.)

That grumpery aside, I did get mail last week, and in that mail were some books. It was an interesting and odd collection this time, but, before I get into the details, I need to hit you with the weekly disclaimer. Remember, these things arrived on my doorstep just a few days ago, and I haven't read any of them yet. So what I can tell you about them will be  as accurate as possible, but will not be based on any personal experience with the text.

That said, I'll start with a book that sidesteps that problem neatly by not having any text: The Zombie Survival Guide Journal, which credits itself to Max Brooks. This is a bizarre affectation, since -- as I just said -- it doesn't have a single word inside it besides the copyright page; it's a blank book. It does feature spot art from (and recycles the cover of) the graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, which Brooks did write, but none of his words make it over here. The art -- credited in very, very small type on that copyright page -- is by Ibraim Roberson, and it, presumably, is the real selling point here. This Journal has what the publisher breathlessly calls a "3-D holographic cover that brings a mob of flesh-eating undead to life," but which the more prosaic of us would call simply a lenticular print. If you're in the market for a blank book with some zombie art in it, this one hit stores a couple of weeks ago, and was published by the fine folks at Potter Style, part of Clarkson Potter, somehow related to Three Rivers Press, part of the Crown Publishing Group, subsumed into the Random House Inc. hivemind, wholly owned by the Bertelsmann monolith.

Next I have three paperbacks from Berkley Sensation -- all November releases in mass-market, all romances -- which somewhat puzzle me, since I've never been much of a romance reader. (I don't disparage romances, as so many fantasy readers feel compelled to do -- perhaps in a desperate attempt to keep girl cooties from jumping onto them -- but they're not usually of great interest to me personally for my own reading.) Anyway, I'll be more at sea than usual writing about these, but I'll do what I can:

• The Black Hawk is a historical, the fourth such from Joanna Bourne -- who's won one RITA award and been nominated for another for those three previous books, implying good things about her writing -- with the usual impressive slab of man on the cover. It's set in 1818, its heroine seems to be a slightly anachronistically active spy forced to throw herself into the care of her ex-lover (and possibly boss and/or compatriot) after an attempt on her life, and I note that Bourne's editor is my former colleague Wendy McCurdy, which doubly means that it has to be good. (Anyone I've ever worked with is by definition one of the best in the world.)
• Heart of Darkness -- the first in a paranormal series by Lauren Dane -- is slightly closer to my usual reading area, since it's about witches in the modern world, and the kind of magick that has a "k" at the end. (I do wonder if the succeeding books will be named things like Typhoon, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes.) It's another story driven by love, sex, and desire -- I did say that these were romance novels, didn't I? I probably shouldn't repeat myself so -- in which a high-ranking organization witch falls for the male "outlaw witch" who's been siphoning power from her font and finds trouble brewing with his nasty mother.
• And the third Sensation book is another paranormal, Eileen Wilks's Death Magic, which I think is the eighth novel in her "Lupi" series, about a tough FBI agent and her werewolf fiance.

I've heard good things about Kou Yaginuma's manga series Twin Spica, but somehow I don't think the current volume (#10, coming the first of November from the fine folks at Vertical) is the place to start. It's about the first astronaut training class at the Tokyo Space School, in a near future where astronauts seem to be very young indeed. I hope to drop back to the first volume to read this series, and that's where I'd suggest you start as well.

Melanie Rawn starts up yet another series -- she's two books into a contemporary fantasy series for Tor that have had a rocky reception, plus of course the famously unfinished Exiles trilogy, sitting at two books and counting for nearly a decade and a half -- with the high fantasy novel Touchstone, also declared (by her web site) to be the beginning of a trilogy. Touchstone will be a Tor hardcover in February, and it's about a young man described as "part Elven, part Fae, part human Wizard -- and all rebel," who flees his courtly responsibilities to be in the theater.

Tamora Pierce is one of the best writers out there at making real, tough, believable heroines in fantasy worlds -- some people might add "for young readers," but I'd stack her Tortall novels up against anyone ostensibly writing for adults as well -- and there was a time, back in my SFBC days, when I was all caught up on those Tortall novels. Not now, though -- I have in my hand the finale of her current trilogy, Mastiff, and that's made me realize that I still haven't read the first of the trilogy, Terrier. Mastiff is coming  October 25th from the Random House Children's Books folks, and if you haven't read Pierce before -- and you like stories about real women in adventurous fantasy world -- you've now got another chance.

I've also got Black Jack, Volume 16, the latest in the series reprinting one of Osamu Tezuka's -- remember him? the Japanese Godfather of manga? -- most popular series. I reviewed the first and second books, several years ago, for ComicMix, and the stories are all pretty similar -- all a lot of fun, and crazily entertaining, but it's an episodic series, so a reader can jump in anywhere. For instance, how about this new volume? It's hitting stores this month.

And last for this week is Bubbles & Gondola, an album-sized graphic novel by Renaud Dillies published by NBM this month. It looks lovely, in a George Herriman-esque style, and tells the story of a mouse author with writer's block, who finds inspiration in an unlikely form.

Getting Off by Lawrence Block

Some books need more explanation than others. When a beloved author comes out with the seventeenth novel in a series he's been writing for three decades -- like Lawrence Block's recent A Drop of the Hard Stuff, for example [1] -- everyone is more than clear on the concept. But when the author's next novel is credited as "Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson," and the book itself is a lurid, sexy thriller, written in an early-paperback throwback style, then a reader could easily become puzzled as to what Getting Off is and how it came to be.

Block has written seven previous novels as Emerson, from the erotica of Threesome to the "sensitive lesbian fiction" of Enough of Sorrow and what the author's bio describes as a work of "mainstream contemporary fiction," A Week as Andrea Benstock. But the most recent of those Emerson books -- Andrea Benstock -- was published in 1973, without a whisper of Block's name attached to it, like the six earlier Emerson books. Since then, Block's early pseudonyms -- Emerson, Paul Kavanagh, Andrew Shaw, Sheldon Lord -- have become more widely known, and those pseudonymous books have either become much more expensive as old battered paperbacks or have been reprinted in new, fancier editions with Block's name attached. And most of those old pseudonymous books were so for a reason -- the Paul Kavanaghs are the major exception -- since they were quick, unsophisticated genre entertainments, written by a young man eager to make a living and aimed at the lower ranks of a paperback industry that was pretty downmarket to begin with.

Getting Off, on the other hand, fully appears to be a new novel in a similar style. There's no introduction or other explanatory notes -- it's a paperback-y thriller from Hard Case Crime, so those would be entirely out of place here -- but it's copyright 2011, and was built, in part, from stories appearing in the recent anthologies Manhattan Noir, Bronx Noir, Indian Country Noir, and Warriors. So the reader has to believe that Block, for whatever reason, decided that he had one more "Jill Emerson" story in him, almost forty years after the last one, and this is it.

Getting Off is told in a tight third person by a damaged young woman, who uses a lot of names in the course of the book. Let's call her Kim, since that's probably the most important name she has in the book -- but it's not the name she was born with, or the one she's used a majority of her life. (Not that there's any name that she's used the majority of her life.) Kim is somewhere in her mid-twenties, and she's drifting around the USA. She'll stay in a town for a while, until she meets a nice man in a bar somewhere, then goes back to his place (or possibly hers), has sex with him, and then kills him.

Block keeps his prose in a stripped-down '50s noir style, so there's no point in asking questions -- this is the story he's telling, and if the social background feels more 1961 than 2011 (aside from a few lamp-posted details), we'll just have to take that as an element of style rather than substance. Kim isn't entirely happy with herself, but this is what she does, and she can't stop herself. We do learn why she does this, and it's a reasonable explanation -- pulpy and noirish, as it must be, but entirely believable.

But Kim is now becoming obsessed with the few men she didn't kill after sleeping with them. There are five of those -- just five men who, as she thinks of it, can brag to their buddies about her. And so she sets out to get rid of them, to symbolically make herself a virgin again.

Getting Off is a very episodic book, both because of Kim's lifestyle -- move to town, stay awhile, meet a guy, fuck him, kill him, move on -- and because of its origin as a series of stories. A reader does have to have a certain faith in Block as a writer to trust that Getting Off going somewhere other than a well-written series of lurid scenes of sex and death...or, perhaps, a reader might be perfectly happy with that series of lurid scenes, and not worry about any larger picture at all. But, eventually, Kim's quest to cleanse herself with the blood of her lovers leads to someone she doesn't want to kill -- her sometime roommate Rita, who may possibly become something more -- and she begins to see a life that might not be entirely based on screwing and stabbing men.

Of course, this is a noir novel, so I'm not going to promise any kind of conventional happy ending. But Getting Off ends very satisfyingly, and it tells a hell of a nasty, sexy, bloodily fun story along the way. Lawrence Block, whatever name he's writing as this time, is one of the great masters of crime fiction -- that wide field that encompasses thrillers and mysteries and noir and less definable things -- and he has definitely still got it.

[1] Which I read two months ago, but haven't yet gotten around to writing about.

Quote of the Week: A Sound

"The sound of a harpsichord -- two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm."
- Sir Thomas Beecham

Funny Stuff: Two Books I Don't Have Much to Say About

I've recently read two miscellaneous books of funny essays -- one by a single writer, and one by many -- and don't have a whole lot to say about either of them. But if I slam them together at high speed in the CERN of the blogosphere, perhaps -- just perhaps -- I can get them to combine into a blog post.

First up is Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, a career retrospective of one of my favorite writers, focusing on his funny material. [1] The title, of course, is a reference to the famous retrospective Just Enough Liebling, collecting the work of a somewhat different writer also associated with The New Yorker. [2]

Quite Enough mostly collects the best of Trillin's regular columns -- published slightly more often than monthly for a few decades starting in the mid-70s, for The Nation and Time and syndication -- which have previously been seen in his books Uncivil Liberties, With All Disrespect, If You Cant Say Something Nice, Enough's Enough, and Too Soon to Tell. There's also some of his "deadline poetry" -- decent doggerel, though not as lasting or as funny as his prose work -- for The Nation over the past two decades (also collected, though I won't give you a sheaf of links this time). And then there's also a few snippets from his occasional novels, with the preponderance coming from Tepper Isn't Going Out (the greatest novel that ever will be written about parking in Manhattan).

As you might guess from the Nation connection, Trillin tends to the lefty side, but he doesn't get specifically political all that often -- and much of his best funny work is about his family. (So don't avoid this book unless you're really allergic to New York liberals.) Trillin is from the midwest originally -- Kansas City, Missouri -- and he's got the mid-country diffident shrug down better than anyone else; his humor comes from a populism rather than an elitism, a sense that we can all make things better if we just pull up our socks and do it. All of the pieces here are short, and organized into semi-coherent thematic groupings -- not too obviously, just enough to make them clump nicely and play off each other -- and it's a joy to read through.

Calvin Trillin is one of our national treasures: I insist on this, and will hear no argument otherwise. And I now have an excuse to track down all of his books again, and re-read them as if for the first time.

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes is credited to "the Editors of McSweeney's," as if they couldn't help extending the title humor a little farther than they should. (Of course, all of McSweeney's emanations are credited that way -- it's a major affectation, but I suppose it's at least a consistent affectation.) It has an introduction by John Hodgman, which contains the indisputably true lines

We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.

The book itself contains a few dozen literary parodies, pastiches, and japes, all presumably taken from the McSweeney's website, though there's no notice of prior publication. (When I am proclaimed King of All Books, as I inevitably will be, my very first decree will be to require full and detailed notices.) There are no biographies of the authors, but then again, I found most of the names completely unfamiliar. There's also no table of contents -- this is a book almost entirely devoid of any apparatus for helping the reader, I have to say.

Otherwise, it's the kind of thing you'd be happy to find on the toilet-tank of your well-read friend; some of the pieces here are more successful than others, but I didn't think any of them were complete failures, and they were all at least vaguely funny. Oh, and the book itself is a joke -- if you ever see it in person, check out the binding.


[1] Here's where I put the obligatory "I used to have a long shelf of Trillin books, lovingly assembled over the past two decades, before the damn flood inundated them all" notice. No matter how much you hate hearing me repeat that, folks, it's nothing compare to how I feel having to say it again.

[2] I had a copy of that, too, though I hadn't managed to read it before the water got to it.

Myths of the Past

Nearly two years ago, I typed the following quote into a blank blog post:

"There are political consequences to remembering things that never happened and forgetting thing that did."
- Ariel Levy in the 11/16/09 New Yorker, in the middle of a review of recent books on feminism

And then started a meandering paragraph about how everyone recreates their lives through memory -- sometimes deliberately, more often just by remembering some things and forgetting others -- and that means that we all live in slightly different worlds, ones with subtly different events and clearly different implications. It was rough, the usual bloggy first draft, but I clearly intended it to lead somewhere.

It never did, I'm sorry to say -- I still think it's an interesting insight (though it's hugely not original with me), but I no longer remember exactly what I wanted to say about it...and that's enough of an ironic comment on my original idea that I think I need to leave it right there.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/8

Today is Monday, I'm sorry to tell you. One possible bright spot is that it's Columbus Day, which isn't really a holiday here in the US, but, if your bosses are particularly Italian or particularly generous, you may not have to work today. (I do, sadly, and the vast majority of us do.)

Another possible bright spot is the list of books I'm about to throw out at you: they're the things that arrived in my mailbox last week, sent by happy publicists who want you to know about books that you'll buy and read and love and recommend to all of your friends and their third cousins. I haven't read any of them yet, and -- to be utterly honest -- there's a very good chance that I won't read any particular one of them, since these books come in much faster than I can read. But I can tell you interesting, and 99% true, things about these books based on my mysterious sources, so let me get to that right now:

Tribulations gets to go first because it's that rare bird, an original science fiction novel published first as a mass-market paperback. (Once these roamed the earth in vast hordes, like buffalo or the passenger pigeon, but their ranks have been decimated by superstores, Internet retailers, and the deadly ebook.) It comes from Tor, it's by Ken Shufeldt, and seems to be a sequel to Shufeldt's first novel Genesis [1]. In Tribulations, a space-ark -- one of a small fleet fleeing an asteroid-obliterated Earth -- tries to go FTL, has some trouble, and finds itself (incredibly luckily) right next to a hospitable planet. Of course, that planet has prior inhabitants, and there wouldn't be much of a novel if those inhabitants were quiet, peaceful, and loving, would there? Tribulations will hit newsstands, bookstores, and PXes near you in January of 2012.

Speaking of mass-markets, this is also the week of the month when I get the three books that DAW is publishing in mass-market the next month. This time out, that month is November, and your DAW selections are:

• Courts of the Fey, the obligatory original anthology. It's edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, and contains a dozen new stories about, as you might have guessed, the light and dartk courts of the faeries, by authors including Mary Robinette Kowal, Sarah A. Hoyt, Jane Lindskold, and Lilith Saintcrow.
• Fire Works in the Hamptons, the second book in an urban fantasy series by Celia Jerome (aka romance writer Barbara Metzger), about a graphic novelist whose creatures come to life.
• And the long-awaited cheap edition of Tad Williams's Shadowrise, the third book in the epic fantasy "Shadowmarch" sequence.

Speaking of Shadowmarch, November also sees the trade paperback publication of the fourth and last book in that series, Shadowheart, which originally hit stores last year as a hardcover a year ago. So if you were waiting for the Mama Bear of publishing formats -- neither too big, like a weighty hardcover, nor too small, like a flimsy mass-market -- you are in luck. I should mention that Shadowheart is also from DAW, but you could probably figure that out yourselves.

I saw an advance copy of Margaret Atwood's essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination a few weeks ago, and haven't read it yet. And now I have the finished hardcover, in which the cover figure looks even more like the King of All Cosmos than I'd previous thought, which is yet another reason to read it. Nan A. Talese's line of books for Doubleday publishes this on October 11th.

And last for the week is another book from DAW, who are just showering me with wonders this week: Tanya Huff's The Wild Ways, second in the contemporary fantasy series that began with The Enchantment Emporium. This one moves from Calgary to the Maritimes -- Huff is a particularly Canadian writer, if you didn't know -- and to the battle over offshore drilling pitting the usual nasty oil company against a family of selkies. And our heroine -- the girl on the cover the guitar on her back, looking as if she was quickly comped in -- is right in the middle of it. Wild Ways is a November hardcover.

[1] Which has quite a lot of reviews, he noted, without making any stand whatsoever.