Single Panels from Wheeler and Gross

No, I'm not the Wheeler in question -- my lack of drawing skill nearly flunked me in a theater arts course back in college (and was one of the things that put the kibosh on my vague plans in that area). But here are two books of cartoons by men who can draw -- and be funny at the same time -- which I read in the not-too-distant past.

I Thought You Would Be Funnier by Shannon Wheeler

Wheeler is best known as the creator of Too Much Coffee Man -- one of those brilliant ideas that someone would have come up with eventually, but so intensely itself that afterward you can't imagine it in anyone else's hands -- but he's been trying to sell single-panel cartoons to The New Yorker for some time. (And with some success; I've seen his stuff there a few times.) This may in part be because New Yorker is almost the only market standing for single-panel cartoons -- I'll come back to that later -- but it's a damn good market, too.

(By the way, Shannon Wheeler is no relation to me, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a pretty common name. But I'm willing to pretend to some vague connection, since he's good at what he does, and even vaguely reflected glory is pretty nice. Also, I was somewhat grumpy about Wheeler's 2007 collection Screw Haven, When I Die I'm Going To Mars at ComicMix, and I note approvingly that he doesn't seem to have taken any of my advice, but is still advancing in his career and work while trying new things. Also also, what I read was is the first book of its name -- in true comic-shop-publisher style, there are already at least two subsequent volumes with exactly the same title.)

These are all intensely New Yorker cartoons -- moment of urban ennui, with lots of talking animals, couples in bed, men talking from behind desks, and all of the other usual furniture. If you don't like that sort of thing, you will not enjoy this book. Wheeler also uses a somewhat different art style here than the TMCM strips -- all black and white and looking like it was drawn with various markers, quite a bit like Matt Diffee's work in the New Yorker.

So these are all pure single-panels: one image, one line of caption. Cartoons like that have to work instantly -- show a scene and twist it, at the same moment; they're either funny right away or not at all. And they're all in a particular fairly narrow niche of that world; the New Yorker doesn't take cartoons too explicitly about sex, or with gross-out humor, or anything too corny, or representative of myriad other kinds of human behavior too far from their remit. Wheeler works in that milieu pretty darn well, running down the middle of the style -- not sarcastically commenting on it like Bruce Eric Kaplan or obfuscating it like Roz Chast -- and so this is a solid collection, full of funny stuff in that style.

So, again: if you like that style, this is a swell book. Since it was published by a comics-industry house (BOOM!), it might not reach the hardcore New Yorker-lovers as well as it should, but it's worth seeking out.

Your Mother Is a Remarkable Woman by S. Gross

This book, on the other hand, is from 1992, and shows the cartoon ecosystem we used to have, since it reprints cartoons from a period of more than a decade prior to that date. (The New Yorker cartoons here are dated, since that magazine buys copyright, and wants notice -- and some of those are back to the early '70s.) The front matter gives a long, fascinating list of places the cartoons originally appeared -- I won't list them all, but they include Science Digest and Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review and Good Housekeeping, Audubon and Teenage besides the usual suspects like New Yorker, Playboy, and National Lampoon. That meant that more cartoonists were able to make at least some money from the single-panel form, and that cartoons on a wider variety of topics were being created regularly.

On the other hand, for a cartoonist usually seen as being cutting and vicious (famously the author of I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead), these are almost all sweet, inoffensive cartoons -- not bland, precisely, but pretty, and nice, and almost entirely suitable for your maiden aunt.

If you happen to be a maiden aunt, and are looking for amusing cartoons, I can highly recommend this collection. If not, it's still amusing, but it might feel a bit old-fashioned and same-y if you read it all through too quickly. In that case, I recommend putting it somewhere -- perhaps the smallest room in your house -- where you can read one or five cartoons at a time, be amused by them, and then continue on with your day.

(Of course, this book has probably been out of print for close to twenty years now, so the specific recommendation isn't all that useful. That's what you get for getting literary opinions off the Internet!)

In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

Behavior I Don't Want to Encourage

Since I'm a blogger who has a handful of people reading his rants -- even though those rants have been thin on the ground lately -- I get the occasional pitch from marketers, asking me to promote this whatzit or mention this thingamabob. I'm entirely in favor of people sending thing to me for free -- e-mail me if you have anything in that line -- but I'm grumpier about offers that don't include the sweet touch of the Package Fairy, or which have that faint whiff of shadiness to them.

(A few days ago, I was offered untraceable money via PayPal -- though, tellingly, it was only after the fact and "if the client was happy," which I assumed meant it was just as solid as it sounded -- if I would post a link, recommend it, and never mention that it was sponsored. I politely demurred, of course -- I probably could be bought, but I don't go that cheap.)

But, today, someone asked me to post an infographic about an oscilloscope. Why? I have no idea. I guess SF is congruent to real science, if you squint really hard, but that hardly seems like a good enough reason to hit me up for it.

It was completely random, there was no whisper of quid pro quo, and oscilloscopes are pretty neat. So what the hell -- here's an infographic about oscilloscopes.

The maker of that particular oscilloscope -- Tekronix, which I thought also made some kind of consumer computer peripherals (networking stuff, maybe), though their website shows only technical measuring tools and similar gee-whiz Buck Rogers stuff -- would really like it if you clicked here to learn even more about oscilloscopes, including a spiffy Tutorial page!

But the next time a marketer wants me to do something, I'm going to be looking for some tangible benefit out of it.

Van Vogt Award Winner Shocker!

One of my many highly placed spies -- well, my ex-boss, actually, but that makes for a much less exciting story -- has forwarded the thrilling press release about the winner of the 2012 Van Vogt Award, which answers many of the questions I had when I posted the nominees last week:

    WINNIPEG SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION Inc
  
    114 BROWNING, Winnipeg, MB, R3K 0L8
  
    _Pghmb@shaw.ca <mailto:_Pghmb%40shaw.ca> _    Pghmb@shaw.ca <mailto:Pghmb%40shaw.ca> >
  
    Postal queries to: 114 Browning, Winnipeg, MB, R3K 0L8
  
    For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
  
    Monday DEC 31 2012
  
    Alphanauts by Brian J. Clarke (Edge) has won the the inaugural A.E.    Van
    Vogt Award.
  
    The award includes a $1200.00 honorarium (The largest in Canadian
    Science Fiction writing) and a certificate.
  
    The other finalists were Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder, (Tor) and    The
    Other by Matthew Hughes (Underland Press).
  
    The award is sponsored by the Winnipeg Science Fiction Association.
  
    The Award is for a book that must be a first-edition full length    science
    fiction novel or full-length science fiction short story anthology,  
    written by an author linked to Western Canada by birth or    residency."
  
    A web site dealing with the award, celebrating A.E.Van Vogt
    contributions to Canadian writing, and Brian J. Clarke's win, will    be
    announced ASAP. It will provide details as how one may enter for the  
    2013 award.  

Congratulations to Mr. Clarke, and to the SF-loving masses of Western Canada.

2012 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees

The nominees for the latest PKD award -- given annually to a SFF book published in US paperback, have been announced, and they are:

• Blueprints of the Afterlife, Ryan Boudinot (Black Cat)
• Harmony, Keith Brooke (Solaris)
• Helix Wars, Eric Brown (Solaris)
• The Not Yet, Moira Crone (UNO)
• Fountains of Age, Nancy Kress (Small Beer)
• Lovestar, Andri Snær Magnason (Seven Stories)
• Lost Everything, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor)

Congratulations to all of the nominees;the winner will be announced in late March at Norwescon in lovely SeaTac (which I thought was a portmanteau for an airport, called thus because it was between Seattle and Tacoma, but clearly it's grown into its own Frankensteinian creature at this point).

(News stolen shamelessly from Locus Online.)

Reviewing the Mail: week of 1/5/13

Actually, what with Big Publishing being more-or-less closed last week (many of the houses officially close between Christmas and New Year's, and the ones that don't are generally ghost towns anyway), there was no mail from publishing companies for me.

I know -- what a calamity! It's so sad when the flow of completely free stuff is even slightly halted, and I'm sure several online review chappies are bitterly bemoaning those horrible, evil publishers right now, because they are complete morons who don't know how good they have it. Luckily, I am made of sterner stuff, and also have some perspective on the world.

So, instead, this week I'll tell you about a book that didn't come in the mail. As usual, there were some gifts coming into the Hornswoggler household that were surplus to needs -- as in, we already had them. Two were books for the estimable Thing 2, and another item was for me. Through the magic of exchange, Thing 2 and I went to a physical store -- yes, I know! like an artifact from a completely different era! -- and got new products, which we desired, to replace the duplicates.

And what I got is At the Mountains of Madness. It was adapted from the Lovecraft novella by I.N.J. Culbard, who also did the art. (Culbard is also an animation director, and, in comics, seems to specialize in adaptations from classic literature -- prior works include several Holmes stories and The Picture of Dorian Gray, all of which were written by Ian Edginton.) Mountains was published by Sterling -- a fine publishing company that was bought by B&N a few years back (and put up for sale abortively about a year ago) -- in February of 2012, after a prior edition from SelfMadeHero in the UK. I haven't really looked at it yet, but the cover is impressively moody, and the art inside looks solid in a classic British-adventure style.

Next week, with luck, will see more books -- but that's all on publishers deciding that they want to send me free stuff, and I hope I'll always be grateful for that. See you then.

Start Your Hugo Nominations Now!

Or, rather, start them four days ago, when nominations opened.

All ballots must be received by March 10th (of this year, obviously), and nominating is open to members of LoneStarCon 3 (this year's WorldCon), as well as members of last year's and (you eager beavers, you!) next year's.

I'm personally not eligible -- I'm not a member of any of those cons, and I don't expect to make it to a WorldCon any time in the near future (sadly) -- but, if you are, it is your duty as a trufan to nominate something before the deadline. Even if you only read one novelette that you thought was really keen last year, nominate that. Every little bit makes the process better.

Voting on the final nominees will follow this round, and then the winners will be announced at the usual gala ceremony in San Antonio over Labor Day weekend -- precisely the time when you'd want to travel to Texas!

(hat tip to the official Hugo Awards site)

In Which I Demand More Windows

What is the deal with new versions of applications not wanting to have multiple windows? Is this some new trend among designers?

I finally upgraded to Office 2010 at work recently (kicking and screaming, because I needed the newest whiz-bang Excel formatting for a particular project), only to find that Outlook searches all now run in the main window. That's horrible -- the whole point of a search is to hive it off in its own little window, so you can refer to it, and do other things while it's searching away.

I've also been avoiding upgrading to the newest iteration of iTunes, since that also, apparently, doesn't allow the user to create any additional windows. (So this clearly isn't either a MS or an Apple thing -- both of those bastards are doing it.) Again, I usually have at least five iTunes windows open at a time, because I'm building a playlist or just playing music in one window while I sync various devices in another window.

And what I'm seeing of Windows 8 looks like the worst aspects of both of those multiplied, all sleek surfaces and one-thing-at-a-time-ness.

Programmers: your users like multiple sessions. We like control. We like doing what we want to do, and not waiting for your system to get back to us. Put it back the way it was, or we will be forced to hurt you.

What BookScan Measures, and What It Doesn't

I found myself typing a long comment on this post over at The Beat blog -- about Colleen Doran's discovery that BookScan has been horrible at measuring the sales of her books -- so I've ported it over here as well. I think it will make sense out of that context.

Sure, it's true that mainstream newspaper reporters and other ill-informed people state that BookScan covers 75% of the book market as if that means all kinds of books everywhere -- but why should we listen to ill-informed people?

BookScan only covers the US, for starters -- many books will have a substantial life outside of that territory. And it always has been very clear about which accounts report to it and which don't -- it covers most of the largest retailers of books (Wal-Mart is joining as of the beginning of 2013), but does not include the mass of small bookstores, nor does it cover all of the other outlets that sell books sometimes, or sell a few specific niche books. And, as others have said, it doesn't do a good job of covering sales to libraries, either.

So there are publishing areas where BookScan is less useful: craft books, some travel categories, anything that gets picked up in large numbers by non-traditional retailers (like those books in Starbucks), and, yes, graphic novels. What it does cover well, not surprisingly, are the core areas of major publishing: fiction and narrative non-fiction, the kind of books that dominate sales and keep most of the big publishing companies afloat. For the vast majority of those titles, the BookScan rule of thumb (add about 25% to account for libraries and indies) works well, and it's thus the only way publishing people can accurately gauge how books from other publishers are doing. (Nobody in publishing uses BookScan to check out their own books' real sales; we all have internal systems for that.)

The smart publishing people who work in the areas that are less well covered by BookScan know that (and complain about it, of course, since it makes their jobs harder), and they make allowances for those other markets. In the case of the DM, relatively accurate numbers are available separately from Diamond, so anyone looking to sign up a comics project with any hope of hitting a comics-shop audience would have to be an idiot not to check the numbers in that channel. I'm not claiming that those idiots don't exist, of course.

I think what Colleen Doran has really unearthed is that there are stupid, badly informed people -- some of them (at least momentarily) in positions of power at publishing houses. (And many of them writing for major newspapers like the Globe & Mail.) Those people don't understand what BookScan really measures, and use it wrongly. That's not the fault of the tool; it's the fault of the idiot using the tool.

Since she came out of the DM world -- and most of her projects are focused at that world -- it's only to be expected that her books would sell primarily in that world. Since BookScan does not, and has never claimed to, include sales figures in the DM, her numbers are vastly more inaccurate than in the genres that BookScan was made for. That doesn't mean that anyone is lying or misrepresenting things; it means that BookScan is a very bad tool for calculating the sales of products that mostly sell within the DM. And we all should have known that already, since that's not what it measures.

This all seems analogous to looking at a thermometer in your living room and complaining that it doesn't tell you how cold it is outside.

2012 Van Vogt Award Nominees

I was not aware that there was an award named after the man who invented the fix-up, but Locus says that one exists, and has been sponsored by three parties: Winnipeg Science Fiction Association; Conadian, the 1994 Worldcon; and Science Fiction Winnipeg. [1] I presume, though the Locus announcement doesn't say, that it's for SFF novels by Canadian authors -- it could be a somewhat different set of criteria (some connection to Winnipeg, for example).

The nominees for the 2012 award are:

• Alphanauts, Brian J. Clarke (Edge)
• The Other, Matthew Hughes (Underland)
• Lady of Mazes, Karl Schroeder (Tor)

Congratulations to the nominees, and a winner will presumably be announced in the fullness of time.



[1] It's a bit odd to see a twenty-year-old Worldcon still running around organizing things, but I suppose that's hard to get out of your blood.

This Was the Year in Hornswoggling: 2012

Anything done for at least two years in a row becomes an unbreakable tradition -- ask any four-year-old -- and so it's time once again for the first and last sentences of the past twelve months, linked to the posts in which they appeared.

(This was a meme, five or six years ago. I would lay serious money that no one else is still doing it, since it doesn't make a lot of sense. But it amuses me, so it lives on here.)

Since a lot of Antick Musings these days is my standard posts (yes, I know; it's a rut, and I've been thinking, now and then, about how to pull myself out of it), I've ignored those, when necessary, so that the following is mildly more interesting:

January
I have no illusions about my reviews; they're read by an audience of dozens -- sometimes rising into the low hundreds -- and might help to push an additional ten or so copies of something if I'm lucky.

Just in case it's unclear to some of my newer readers, I am being so sarcastic with this phrase that I am surprised the entire Internet does not burst into flames.  

February
The NY Times has the standard story on the results, announced yesterday, and the consequent stock price slippage and analyst beard-stroking.

Maybe it's just my cynicism talking, but that sounds suspiciously like the slow clap of literature -- you're not all that good, got it? you're just mildly better than some other things. 

March
I'm interested in theme parks, and I'm interested in design (in a vague, general way, related to some books I've worked on at my day-job and reading Henry Petroski -- on that level). And so I thought The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World would be interesting, since it's a guide to the "secret" (here meaning "minor" or "background") details of Disney's Florida theme parks.

But Liew's lovely watercolor art is the real draw here: I'd love to see him illustrate a new edition of the Alice books, or adapt them directly to comics, using his own designs.

April
You probably have heard by now that Christopher Priest was unhappy with this year's Clarke Award shortlist, going so far as to say that the panel should be disbanded, the award skip 2012 entirely, and that all the fields of Carthage be sown with salt so that nothing will grow there ever again.

This time, Gift of Fire brings the mythical Prometheus to the modern world, while Head of a Pin deals with a company making utterly realistic animation to allow new movies with long-dead actors that discovers an entity lurking in their software. It hits stores May 8th. 

May
I'm more than normally concerned with the idea of good graphic novels for teens and tweens, for two very selfish reasons: my sons, aged eleven and fourteen, are reading piles of manga and graphic novels these days (not so much traditional Western-style superhero comics, though, in common with most of their generation), and I want them to have good stuff.

You could even buy a print, were you so inclined.

June
Haruki Murakami Bingo, from the inimitable Incidental Comics.

The next blog entry should be from a real computer, back in my home, and, with any luck, it will also have more substance than this one. 

July
It is simply impossible to declare a novel "not funny."

Feiffer was one of the first to sketch the reality of modern life, and one of the best as well.

August
I discovered Erickson's first two novels -- Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach, both mid-'80s Vintage Contemporaries, with that over-designed look that signaled Smart and Literate to so many of us in those days -- as remainders not too long after publication, right next to each other on a table in a mall bookstore that's probably been gone for two decades.

And he did: My Friend Dahmer isn't impressive simply because Backderf knew and grew up with Dahmer, but because he's spent these last twenty years trying to figure out how he became Dahmer -- and if there was any way that could have been stopped. 

September
Words can have very specific meanings within particular contexts -- for example, in the title Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California with Kids, the word "kids" means particularly small children: definitely those under the age of ten, and mostly those up to the age of six or seven.

But it's yet another tool to poke through things that look like data, which I suppose is moderately useful, at the very least as a way to waste time. 

October
TenNapel is a successful and accomplished maker of cartoon images -- he created Earthworm Jim, and has spent the last decade or so making excellent graphic novels like Ghostopolis (see my review) and Bad Island (also see my review) -- who I never see discussed among the usual comics circles.

Says the man who plans to both read "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" and re-read The Basic Eight on his upcoming vacation.

November
If I'd read this closer to Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor (see my post last month), I'd have combined them into one post, since they're very much the same kind of thing: complete (or nearly so) collections of the occasional nonfiction by major writers who started off solidly in the SF camp but have since drifted in somewhat different directions, but remained solidly in favor of SF and regularly define what they do as SF.

Oh, and if this drives you to think of buying something-or-other from that particular retail behemoth, here is a handy link to allow you to do so.

December
It's time once again for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, one of those wonderful literary awards that only the Brits could create and administer with anything like a straight face.

Hope you all liked it.

Coming in 2013: more posts! (I could hardly have fewer than 2012, I think.) Possibly even a few that aren't belated reviews of books, too!

Favorite Books of 2012

This is the seventh annual year-end "Best Books of 2012" list from Antick Musings; it's possibly the only major annual milestone that I haven't forgotten at least once. Prior years are only a link away: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

I should explain my idiosyncrasies, since I certainly have them:

First, I do this list on the last day of the year, and cast aspersions on any "Best of the Year" list done any sooner. My point is slightly muted by not getting any reading done on my Christmas vacation this year, but making a list of the best anything of a year before that year is done is, I will always argue, cheating.

Second, these are "favorites" rather than "best." That's partially to avoid arguments, but also because I don't entirely believe that I can decide what are the objectively "best" books.

Third, this has to be based on what I read this year, and so it doesn't include a lot of notable new books (because I didn't read them) and does include somewhat older books (since I found them this year).

Fourth, it's not based on genre of any kind -- I came out of the SFF world originally, and I've reviewed comics (from various nations), but my reading, and hence my lists, also includes various kinds of non-fiction, literary fiction, and some less classifiable things. If you don't like your kinds of books touching, like peas and mashed potatoes, this will not be the list for you.

Fifth, I write a sentence or two about the contenders each month, making a longer list of books worth reading (for the right readers).

Sixth and Last, I pick one book from each month to make a Top Twelve, which is doubly quirky: it gives me an extra two slots, but forces me to pick a best book each month, even if some months had two top-notch books. Since these lists are all arbitrary anyway, I like the way this particular rule really lampshades that.

This year, I read 158 books -- up a bit from last year's 146, but still down substantially from the average 343 books a year I read semi-consistently from 1991 through 2010. (I didn't keep track before the fall of 1990.) For whatever reason -- backlash after the end of the big Book-A-Day run in 2010, my new iPad around that time, increased stress and workload at the day job, sunspots, Alien Space Bats -- I've gone from reading a book nearly every day to reading one about every 2-3 days. That does mean I saw fewer books than in the past, but, on the other hand, the other books were in large part SF art books, masses of manga, and other art-heavy and quite generic material.

And here's what I read this past year that was worth remembering:

January
Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 was easily his biggest novel, though not his best -- there were good things about it, but it's best left to Murakami aficionados. Tim Powers's collection The Bible Repairman and Other Stories was a fine slim collection of good stories by an excellent fantasy writer. Paul Hornschemeier's Life With Mr. Dangerous was a fine graphic novel about being young and unconnected. Bright's Passage was a tightly focused first novel by singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, and was exactly the kind of novel you'd expect an artist like that to produce. And the best book of the month, unsurprisingly, was Julian Barnes's Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.

February
This is one of those months with a plethora of half-decent choices and no obvious winners. Peter Ackroyd's short history London Under was a bit too short and too scattered; Michael Lewis's Boomerang was engrossing but an extended exercise in blaming the victims of the financial crisis rather than attacking the perpetrators. David Koenig's history of Walt Disney World, Realityland, was enthusiastically amateur, in both good and bad senses of the term; P.J. O'Rouke's Holidays In Heck showed that, yes, O'Rourke is a closed-minded, grumpy old man entirely resting on his laurels, but some of those laurels are still pretty entertaining. So it has to come down to the genre saviors -- either Scott Westerfeld's steampunk YA trilogy-ender Goliath, or Drew Weing's small-format graphic novel Set to Sea. In the end, Weing's book has lived more strongly in my memory, so the top of the month is Set to Sea.

March
The first novel for younger readers under the name of Daniel Handler -- much better known to that audience for writing books as Lemony Snicket -- was the excellent and carefully organized Why We Broke Up, illustrated by Maira Kalman. Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds was a very idiosyncratic look at the SF world, from a writer who had repeatedly denied having anything to do with that world (which she explains, even more idiosyncratically, in the book). Jon Ronson -- he who previously wrote about men who stare at goats -- wandered around a bit in The Psychopath Test, but its best pieces are engrossing and its least-connected pieces are still entertaining. Stephen Fry's second memoir, The Fry Chronicles, wasn't nearly as gripping and necessary as his first, Moab Is My Washpot, but that's the curse of success, isn't it? And I should mention George O'Connor's Hades: Lord of the Dead, the latest in a series of graphic adaptation of Greek myths ostensibly for younger readers. But the best book this month was Bill Mauldin's sixty-year-old cartoons, as collected in Willie & Joe: Back Home.

April
This is another month with three decent choices -- which I read, back to back, right at the beginning of the month -- none of which is perfect. I wanted to like Charles Stross's Rule 34 better than I did; it's s tremendous achievement, but, sometimes, just reading it also felt like an achievement, as Stross tried to cram in every possible speculation of how life might be different ten years in the future. Ludovic Deburme's graphic novel Lucille (which I read in translation, for what that's worth) was dark but strong -- so there's some beer metaphor struggling to escape. But I think I'll award the crown for this month to Case Histories, the book that launched an unlikely detective series for its author, the literary novelist Kate Atkinson.  

May
And then there were a bunch of good books the next month: Rudy Rucker's memoir of a life in SF and math, Nested Scrolls, Tim Powers's fine new novel Hide Me Among the Graves, Steve Erickson's rich and allegorically topical novel These Dreams of You, and Ysabeau S. Wilce's barn-burner of a trilogy finale, Flora's Fury. But the two best books this month -- by far -- were both graphic novels, both fearless and groundbreaking and intensely original. Since, by my own rules, I can't put them both on the list, Anders Nilsen's vast and encompassing Big Questions has to yield, even if only slightly, to Ray Fawkes's even more expansive, big-hearted, and human One Soul, one of the most uplifiting books I've ever read.

June
I read only five books in June -- my reading life was the casualty of two big business trips and a "fun" trip chaperoning my fourteen-year-old and sever hundred other kids of the same age -- so this will be a hard decision. It will not be John Scalzi's Redshirts, believe you me -- Scalzi is seriously slumming there -- but it also won't be the old things I read or the further evidence of Frank Miller's descent into madness, Holy Terror. No, the only possible choice for June is Matthew Stover's Caine's Law, the fourth in a very bloody, and bloodily fascinating, SF/Fantasy series about death and power and family and love and other painful things.

July
There were a bunch of good books this month -- on the fantasy side, Jasper Fforde's first book official for young readers, The Last Dragonslayer, and Mary Robinette Kowal's second Regency, Glamour in Glass; and, on the comics side, Osamu Tezuka's dark classic The Book of Human Insects and Guy Delisle's story of his year-long life in Jerusalem. I also read an excellent non-fiction book, Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar-retracing Ghost Train to the Evening Star. But the best book of the month was the gripping, pitch-black Cold War fantasy The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis.

August
I read all kinds of odd things in August, including two very different but similarly good books about properties belonging to Walt's old buddy The Mouse (Chris Strodder's The Disneyland Encyclopedia and Leonard Kinsey's The Dark Side of Disney), two wonderfully goofy graphic novels (Teen Boat! by Dave Roman and John Green, and Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest, Book Three) and Matthew Hughes's superhero trilogy middle Costume Not Included. On the more serious side, Derf Backderf's graphic novel of a childhood buddy, My Friend Dahmer, was compelling and carefully constructed. And the best book of the month was the latest in Charles Stross's "Laundry Files," the evangelical-tweaking, Armageddon-whistling-past The Apocalypse Codex.

September
Easily the best book I read this month was William Carlos Williams's book-length poem Paterson, but that doesn't count -- I've read it at least twice before, and it's around sixty years old. Otherwise, it was another month of mixed decent books, with three pretty good non-fiction books (Susan Cain's bestseller Quiet, William Gibson's odds-and-sods Distrust That Particular Flavor, and Thomas Frank's rabble-rousing Pity the Billionaire), and three decent graphic novels (Mark Kalesniko's dark-side-of-Hollywood-animation Freeway, Raina Telgemeier's sweet tween-romance Drama, and Darwyn Cook's flinty, stylish adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker: The Score). But the best book of the month was Daniel Pinkwater's latest quirky, weird masterpiece, Bushman Lives!, one of the several utterly sublime books that Pinkwater has given to the world.


October
I read a really good first novel this month that I haven't managed to write anything about yet -- Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, a secondary-world fantasy with slightly steampunky elements that's really more of a legal thriller. And I read a bunch of good graphic novels -- Kevin Huizenga's unclassifiable Gloriana, Paul Tobin & Colleen Coover's obliquely told Gingerbread Girl, Eddie Campbell's money-focused The Lovely Horrible Stuff, Kevin Cannon's epic Arctic adventure Far Arden, the Joycean biography Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by cartoonist Bryan Talbot and his wife/Joyce scholar/professor Mary M. Talbot, the surprisingly light and entertaining STD-themed Monsters by Ken Dahl (another book I haven't managed to write about yet), Michel Rabagliati's latest Quebecois slice-of-life story, the deep and resonant The Song of Roland, and Jeff Lemire's moody family story The Underwater Welder (also as yet unreviewed here). But the best book of the month was prose, and non-fiction -- Alina Simone's memoir of her life in and out of rock 'n' roll (and in and out of Russia, and in and out of a number of other fascinating things), You Must Go and Win.

November
Two funny series books are worth mentioning -- the series-starting The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz, and the most recent book in the Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde's The Woman Who Died a Lot. Ian McEwan's new novel, Sweet Tooth, was mildly disappointing but worth reading. A graphic novel Western by two creators I was totally unfamiliar with -- JT Petty & Hilary Florido's Bloody Chester -- was strong and smart and darkly exciting, so much so that I haven't managed to review it yet. I re-read Daniel Handler's first novel, the awesomely unreliably-narrated The Basic Eight, but I really shouldn't list that as the best of this month. Luckily, I moved from that book to Handler's alter-ego Lemony Snicket's new book, "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", which is nearly as sneaky but substantially funnier. (And I'll actually review it eventually.)

December
This has been another slim month -- only six books -- but several of them are worth mentioning, from Terry Pratchett's early-Victorian problem novel Dodger to Lois McMaster Bujold's return to the Vorkosiverse in Lord Vorpatril's Alliance. But the best book, for the most bittersweet reason (he's ending the strip as of December 31) is James Kochalka's American Elf, Book Four -- four years of daily diary comics by a master of the form.


And then the full Top Twelve, re-arranged into alphabetical order:

• Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Ray Fawkes, One Soul
• James Kochalka, American Elf, Book Four
• Bill Mauldin, Willie & Joe: Back Home
• Daniel Pinkwater, Bushman Lives!
• Alina Simone, You Must Go and Win
• Lemony Snicket, "Who Could That Be at This Hour?"
• Matthew Stover, Caine's Law
• Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex
• Ian Tregillis, The Coldest War
• Drew Weing, Set to Sea

Read in December

As usual, this post will fall somewhere between a list of links to actual posts about the books I read and a quick rundown of those books here. And, as I type this early in the month, I don't know which will be true. Also, there's a strong chance that I will not manage to cover everything before this month actually ends, since that's the way things have been going recently. But here's what I read this month, and moderately deep thoughts about those books will be available, here or elsewhere, at some point.

James Kochalka, American Elf, Book Four (12/2)

Terry Pratchett, Dodger (12/3)

Bill Willingham, et. al., Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland (12/10)

Julian Barnes, Through the Window (12/10)

Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (12/17)

Stephan Pastis, Pearls Freaks the #*%# Out (12/28)

Wow, that was a slim month, wasn't it!

Two SFF Novels Due Back at the Library Yesterday

These two books don't have a whole lot in common -- they're both novels, both SFF, both in established series by popular  authors, and probably both really bad places to begin those respective series -- but they are both overdue library books, which means I need to scribble something down quickly and get them back to minimize The Wrath of the Librarians. (Edit: Too late. They're already back now -- after an emergency library run for a school reading project that Thing 2 was supposed to have been working on for the last week -- so see if you can find the point in each write-up when I lost the book itself to check my facts in. Also, note that "yesterday" here means "Saturday.")

The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde

Long-running series can easily fall into a rut -- and here you can pretend that I'm pointing to your favorite example of that truism, without actually making an example of any specific authors who might take a snit -- but Fforde's "Thursday Next" books have been able to avoid that recently through the odd tactic of writing about different versions of the heroine.

The previous book, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (see my review), focused on the fictional Thursday -- the one who "plays" the character in the novels as they were published (and ghostwritten) in the world in which Thursday is real. But Woman Who Died a Lot returns to the "real" Thursday -- the one who was the heroine of the other novels in the series, most specifically picking up the plot from 2007's First Among Sequels -- and her ongoing battles with the evil world-bestriding Goliath Corporation, usually in the person of her nemesis Jack Schitt.

Died a Lot takes place during one week in 2004 -- two years after One of Our Thursdays, in the wake of a decision to reform all of the SpecOps divisions disbanded a dozen years before. (That's all backstory -- and mostly between-book backstory, too -- so it's mostly just scene-setting for fans of the series.) Thursday interviews for the job of heading her old division -- the Literary Detectives -- but instead is hired as chief librarian of the Swindon All-You-Can-Eat at Fatso's Drink Not Included Library. (One of the slier bits of backstory is the ongoing discussion of the Stupidity Deficit -- this fictional UK has a government run by the Sensible Party, which means that all of the unexpressed stupidity backs up at useful-to-the-plot times to explode in various amusing ways. In this book, the government has taken steps to introduce carefully moderated levels of stupidity in their actions, including truly bizarre naming deals.)

But the real core of Dies a Lot is Thursday's family -- her son Friday will now no longer become the longest-serving head of the ChronoGuard, since it's been proven that no one invented their time machines and they shut down before they began; her genius daughter Tuesday is trying to perfect a technological Smite Shield to protect Swindon from the wrath of God (who has been prodded by the dominant Global Standard Deity religion to reveal himself and begin a pattern of overwhelming smitings); and her third child Jenny is completely imaginary, a false memory planted (originally in her head, later elsewhere) by Aornis Hades, a memory-controlling mnemonomorph and the second-most deadly of that clan.

Oh, and Goliath has been sending ever-more-sophisticated robotic duplicates of Thursday to learn her secrets -- which is the explanation of the title, since Thursday and her husband Landen (with occasional help from others) has been disposing of those for some time.

It all comes together in that one week -- Thursday's new job, the upcoming smiting, Friday's predicted murder of another young ChronoGuard would-have-been, and a secret Goliath plot that involves palimpsests of incredibly rare but also incredibly boring incunabula. I wouldn't dream of explaining how it all comes out: Fforde is wonderful at juggling several odd plotlines and bringing them all to a head at once, so this is a book that has to be read. The whole Thursday Next series started out as a love letter to Great Books, but it's widened since then: Dies a Lot is not just a deeply entertaining romp, but a Rube Goldberg device encompassing the whole of the literary world, with an emphasis on librarians this time around. It's a series deeply appealing to anyone who loves books and reading, which should be everyone reading this.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold 

And this is the most recent -- though not the latest, since it's actually set earlier in time than the prior book, Cryoburn -- book in Bujold's long-running "Vorkosigan" series. It's the long-promised "Ivan book," focusing on the usual series hero's ne'er-do-well cousin (who actually isn't all that ne'er-do-well, actually; it's just that he seems that way compared with omnicompetent, manic Miles).

And it's been thoroughly chewed up and digested by the fans of the series by this point; I wouldn't at all be surprised if there were already page-by-page concordances of Alliance explaining which plots of which entire books Bujold tosses off in a sentence of dialogue.

Personally, I enjoy reading Bujold's books, but I don't feel the need to re-read the entire series before a new one so all of the references are fresh -- I also don't think Bujold deliberately writes for that audience either, but her quietly competent and all-encompassing style makes it a useful reading technique.

I've always liked Ivan better than Miles -- Miles is the kind of person I'd try very hard to avoid in real life, while Ivan is someone I could aspire to be, if I was born into the minor nobility of a far-future alien world -- so seeing him find what I must assume is the love of his life (Bujold doesn't do divorces for her viewpoint characters) was nice.

So, this is Bujold in mostly-light mode, along the lines of A Civil Campaign (though not as frivolous as that book), and it's better-balanced than the last Vorkosigan novel, 2010's Cryoburn. But the people who are likely to want to read this book probably already have. Hope you all liked it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/29

If I were a betting man, I'd be willing to lay down some serious moolah that today's post will be the least-trafficked "Reviewing the Mail" post of the year.; I expect everyone will be busy with other things, and not reading blogs as assiduously this Monday morning as they do other weeks.

And that's just fine with me, since I've been writing much less assiduously over this vacation week -- or not writing at all, most of the time -- so it seems only fair.

Anyway, as usual this post lists whatever came in my mail last week -- which, this time, is four manga volumes from Yen (and that means my old colleague -- we started at Wiley the same day -- Ellen Wright was working last week, even if no one else in publishing was). All are coming in January, which is looming very close. I haven't read these books yet, but here's what I can tell you about them:

The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Vol. 3 continues a Haruhi Suzumiya side-story, with a story from series creator Nagaru Tanigawa and art by Puyo. As you know Bob, the Haruhi stories began as light novels illustrated by Noizi Ito (who is credited here for character design), and have since expanded nearly to the limits of the known universe -- besides the novels, the main manga, the TV anime, the anime movie, the audio dramas, and the videogames, there's also another manga side-story that began earlier this year and an official parody 4-koma manga. (Notice how I carefully try to hide the fact that I'm not familiar with the content of any of those media properties, since I haven't read them? Oops....)

Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story -- an interesting historical story that follows an Englishman down the 19th century Silk Road through central Asia, with each volume covering one stop, and one young woman's journey to marriage at that location -- reaches a fourth volume with a stop at a small fishing village on the Aral Sea. The bride this time is actually twin sisters -- you're not seeing double on that cover -- Laila and Leily, who energetically seek a pair of wealthy and handsome brothers for themselves.

Yana Toboso's popular Black Butler series, about a young British lord in a world that's not quite our own, and (more importantly) his amazingly resourceful butler, Sebastian, continues into a twelfth volume. The main cast is still on the Campania, a ship hired by the Aurora Society to show off a resurrection process, but that process has gone, predictably, very wrong, and the creatures the back cover copy carefully does not call zombies are shuffling about, wreaking havoc, as the ship meanders towards a gigantic iceberg.

And last for this week is Black God, Vol. 18, the very exciting boys' manga by Korean creators Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park. (See my reviews of volumes 2, 3, 4, and 15 for more details -- this one is a lot of fun in that superpowered all-fighting mode of Bleach and Naruto.)