The Incredible Nellie Bly by Luciana Cimino and Sergio Algozzino

I don't know why biographical graphic novels can't just tell their story. Maybe there's some Secret Council of Life Stories that requires it, that insists that every story must be narrated by a character. Prose writers don't feel compelled to throw in Bob Jones, intrepid reporter, who will breathlessly sit and listen to the subject of the bio tell all the events "in their own words," so I don't know why cartoonists have to do it.

But they do. Every case I can think of, they do.

This one is The Incredible Nellie Bly, written by journalist Luciana Cimino and drawn - I think I should say painted, since it's full-color and he worked digitally on the art in a way that seems to be all at once - by cartoonist Sergio Algozzino. They're both Italian; this was conceived, created and published there first, even though Bly is American. So the Secret Council is presumably global.

Instead of getting Bly's story directly, told as comics - which would be a perfectly reasonable thing - we start with Miriam (no last name given, presumably fictional), a student at Columbia's journalism school in 1921, one of the few women grudgingly accepted there. She has a major paper to do, and wants to write about Nellie Bly's famous ten days in an asylum from thirty years before. And, to do that, she of course must seek out the aged, reclusive, sickly Bly and get her to tell the story in her own words.

Which, again, Cimino could have done from the beginning: Bly could have narrated the book. I assume authors are sticking in self-insert characters to mimic the process they went through to create their books, but that just means they're not done with the process yet: they haven't gotten to the clear central story they're trying to tell.

(I may just be obnoxious on this point; I see I said something very similar about the Munoz/Sampayo Billie Holiday, which has the same problem but even more so. And, again, that tends to prove my point that the writers of these books do this all the time.)

The frame story is fairly thin: we get Miriam and a fellow student occasionally responding to Bly's stories, or cajoling her to tell the next one, or  worrying about her frailty. But we don't see whatever journalistic work the two of them do: they don't turn into famous or intrepid reporters themselves. They're just there to be an enthusiastic audience, in a work that doesn't actually need that.

The bulk of the book is, of course, in Nellie's voice, telling how she was born Elizabeth Cochran, daughter of a divorced mother near Pittsburgh, and started writing for a local newspaper before coming to New York to make a bigger name for herself. The book does not examine or explain that ambition, which could be positive or negative: it does accept that ambition, and finds it completely normal for a young woman in the 1880s, when it was definitely not accepted. It also, unfortunately, almost explains her journalistic nom de plume, with a song playing in the background of one page that isn't commented on in the text. Apparently, it's by Stephen Foster, so any 19th century Americans would find it instantly recognizable, but I doubt 21st century Italians did.

Bly did take on that name, did some opinion work and investigative journalism out of Pittsburgh - including a six-month trip through Mexico that turned into a book, all before the trip to New York and joining Joseph Pulitzer's new World newspaper. And Incredible runs through those high points; it's good at telling us the main moments of Bly's journalistic career, clearly and in order. We get the insane-asylum story, her big first story for the World. We get the around-the-world trip, a few years later. And we get a sense of the other work she did, though not much in the way of specifics.

Maybe because this book was written by another journalist, or maybe because Bly's life was so full of incident, it's almost entirely focused on that first phase of her adult life, the decade when she was a working investigative journalist. Bly married an industrialist after that, retiring from journalism to (as far as I can tell) mostly do what was expected of a woman in her era, before taking over the business and transforming it when her husband died less than a decade later and then (another bunch of years later) returning to journalism in middle age after the business failed because her financial advisor ran off with all the money. Either of those phases could be interesting books or parts of books, I think: the marriage, bereavement, and taking over a business successfully story or the financial smash turning into a rejuvenated vigor for positive journalism story.

But neither of those are the story Cimino wanted to tell. She closes this book with a line-up of great female reporters - mostly investigative - inspired by Bly, and I would not be surprised if she counts herself as some part of that lineage, as well. And that's a strong focus: I can't fault it. It's what we most remember Nellie Bly for, and it's well worth remembering.

And, for all the unnecessary frame story, Incredible tells that story well. It does get out of its own way, most of its length, to tell us what it has to say in Bly's own words, and Algozzino gives it all a bright sheen, clearly historical but cleanly seen from the viewpoint of a hundred years later. I suspect this is largely seen as a book for younger readers - biographies of inspiring figures often are - and it's good for that, as well as for older audiences.

Ex Libris by Matt Madden

You are reading a blog post. It is about a book. You immediately worry that this is going to be some kind of pomo bullshit, probably designed to mimic the book itself, and that the blogger thinks he's being clever.

Reader, you are so very right.

Ex Libris is a visually inventive but thematically vague graphic novel about comics and reading and creation and all of those things, unfortunately mostly on a very superficial level, by the cartoonist, editor, and translator Matt Madden. If it were about something more culturally impressive, I would say it smells heavily of the lamp. As it is, it smells of...what? India ink? Whatever a fresh piece of illustration board smalls like? It smells like ambition and comics and trying too hard, frankly.

We open with a person entering a room - we are the person entering the room, like a first-person shooter. Madden very deliberately avoids any identifying details - even as he provides the protagonist with a sad romantic backstory with "M." - to maintain the sense that this person is "me," the reader. (Madden gets more specific just before the end: I'm not sure if that's meant to be a big reveal or just an admission that no one can commit to the bit that fully and still have the thing work.)

The person closes the door and sleeps on a futon. When "we" wake, "we" notice there is a bookcase: the only other piece of furniture in the room. Leaving the room is never mentioned; it's not forbidden so much as merely outside the scope of possibility.

The bookcase is full of books, of course. All graphical in nature: comics and manga and bande dessinee and collections of strips and graphic novels and improving non-fiction and literary short stories and metafiction. Because comics can be any kind of story or book you can think of, of course!

Ahem. Yes. So can poetry. So can prose. So can film and TV and songs, opera and site-specific art installations. I hope we're beyond the "Bang! Pow! Special Pleading for my favorite artform!" '80s-style apologetic for comics, but maybe we will never get over Macho Grande.

Madden goes on from there, with a whole bunch of examples of the comics "you" are reading in this room, all of which are intrinsically connected to "your" mental state and "your" internal monologue. Unless you are thinking, "this is artistically impressive, but awfully empty," because Madden doesn't have an answer to that.

It is artistically impressive. Madden draws in a couple of dozen styles here, for a panel or multiple pages, and constructs inventive pages with multiple styles and quirky eye-catching devices and panels-within-panels and more complicated things I don't have a good vocabulary for. Ex Libris would be a great book for a course about how to tell stories in comics, since it includes nearly all of the potential ways to do that.

But the story it tells is a massive, dull cliché: "you" are a frustrated comics-maker, and "you" just need to pick up the pen and tell your story!

Well, no. Not for the vast majority of people who will read Ex Libris. Not at all. Most of us like to read books, and we like the books we read to tell us something - about themselves, about the outside world, about a fictional world. We don't much like them to harangue us to stop reading and do something else.

If you are looking for a book to inspire you to make comics, Ex Libris is your baby. If you like quirky metafiction and comics told in different styles, you'll find a lot to like here. If you just want a story, stay far away.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 10, 2022

So this is an odd one. I've had books that came in the mail as review copies, books I bought, books other people bought me as presents, and books borrowed from the library. This time out, I have a book sent to me by my employer, somewhere between a present and homework.

Even more interesting, it was published from my previous employer,  Wiley, back in 2018. (After I left, but not ages after I left.) I suspect that whoever edited this book - I can't find a notice on the copyright page or buried in the Acknowledgments - just might be someone I vaguely knew from my years there. I still don't know if I'm going to find time to read this, but I'm connected to it in more ways than usual.

The book is The Storytelling Edge, by Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow of the marketing-services company Contently. (My group at work uses some of their stuff, for full disclosure. I've been nowhere near any decision-making process.) It is a business book, all about how to use storytelling to connect with customers and prospects.

And usually I'm really cynical, especially about business books, but that's what I try to do at work, all day long every day - it's my job these days. I do think it's important, and complicated, and difficult. So I might have to read this book to see if I agree with how these guys say to go about it.

Quote of the Week Bonus: Visitors and Residents

Sunshine pierced the haze that enveloped London. It came down Fleet Street, turned to the right, stopped at the premises of the Mammoth Publishing Company, and, entering through an upper window, beamed pleasantly upon Lord Tilbury, founder and proprietor of that vast factor of popular literature, as he sat reading the batch of weekly papers which his secretary had placed on the desk for his inspection. Among the secrets of this great man's success was the fact that he kept a personal eye on all the firm's products.

Considering what a pleasant rarity sunshine in London is, one might have expected the man behind the Mammoth to beam back. Instead he merely pressed the buzzer. His secretary appeared. He pointed silently. The secretary drew the shade, and the sunshine, having called without an appointment, was excluded.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Heavy Weather, p.1

Quote of the Week: The Lone and Level Sands

The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page - perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books. As we turn their pages, they amuse/shock/inspire/console/instruct us; but after we return them to our shelves or the public library, they linger in our souls only like the distant images of childhood. Years ago our elementary school was the burning center of the universe, a place of anxiety, triumph, and heartbreak. Now it's just a building whose windows we peer into on an idle Saturday afternoon., Once upon a time this playground may have helped shape our lives, but today it's simply the place we walk our dogs.

 - Michael Dirda, "The One and the Many," in Readings, p.71

Heavy Weather by P.G. Wodehouse

Stop me if you've heard this before: it's summertime at Blandings Castle. The Empress is feeding in preparation for the annual Fattest Pig competition, dreamily watched by Lord Emsworth. Galahad's memoirs are lurking about, potentially scandalous to an entire swath of now-respectable middle-aged men, greatly desired by a publisher and greatly feared by Gally's formidable sisters Constance and Julia. And a young man is in love with a fabulous gal that his family thinks is unsuited for him.

Of course you have heard that before: it's roughly the plot of Summer Lightning, P.G. Wodehouse's 1929 novel set at Blandings. It's also roughly the plot of his 1933 novel Heavy Weather, which takes place about two weeks later. [1]

This time there are two young men with romantic problems, since Wodehouse delights in increasing complication. Returning from Lightning is Ronald Fish, son of the formidable Julia and nephew of the distracted Emsworth, who wants to marry a chorus-girl named Sue Brown. And joining us from wider fields of Wodehousiana is Monty Bodkin, who will be allowed to marry the fabulous (and entirely offstage) Gertrude Butterwick if he can prove he's not merely a wastrel heir by holding a job for a full year.

The plot this time does not center on plots to steal the Empress. But it does center on plots to steal or otherwise leverage that manuscript of Gally's - either to get it to Lord Tilbury, the publishing magnate who has paid for it but was informed by Gally it has been withdrawn, or to deliver it to Constance for destruction. The existence of the manuscript is the only thing currently keeping Ronnie's engagement with Sue from falling before the full force of Constance and Julia's attacks.

This is a Wodehouse book, so it ends joyfully, with virtue rewarded, young love in bloom, funny hijinks along the way, and all stolen items returned to their proper owners. (Shockingly, there are no major impostors to be unmasked in this book - that's almost unheard of for Blandings, which has impostors like some ancestral piles have rising damp.)

I don't know if this is one of Wodehouse's best: the plot strands sometimes stay pretty separate, and the ending isn't as much of a smash as some. And it is something of a re-run of Lightning. But it's a fine entertainment from his prime period, amusing and wonderful in its every word, so to say anything more would be carping.

[1] Scholarly voice: We can deduce a consistent temporal relationship between Wodehouse's fictional world and the real one. Given an initial value of tⁱ (time in-universe) as 2 weeks being equal to a value of tⁿ (time normally passing) of 4 years, this paper will prove that....

Stranger Planet by Nathan W. Pyle

You've seen these: big-headed, blue-skinned Beings doing a lot of the same things you do, but describing them in more formal language with longer, convoluted words. Probably on social media; maybe elsewhere.

It's a good concept, and gets pretty funny, relying on the juxtaposition between the banal (everyday life) and the elevated (creator Nathan W. Pyle's usually Latinate dialogue) for its humor. You might think that joke would run out of gas pretty quickly, but you'd be wrong: like all the best jokes, it's basic and flexible and each iteration leads off in a half-dozen new directions, like an ever-proliferating bush of joke-telling.

Stranger Planet was the second collection of Pyle's strips in this style, after (somewhat obviously) Strange Planet. It came out in 2020, and he seems to have spent his time since then making "Strange Planet" almost a lifestyle brand - the quirky version of "life is good," I'd say - rather than making more comics. That is a much better path to vast success in the 21st century, so I am not complaining, only noting that I tend to prefer more comics to expanded lifestyle brands. If you are interested in adorning your physical form and surroundings with Strange Planet accouterments, check out his webstore.

I feel I should spoil some of the jokes to either give you a sense of the humor or prove that I actually read it, so here goes. At Halloween, small dwellers say "Provide a sweet or face mild harassment." At a restaurant that clearly offers very spicy fare, the request is "We want painful sustenance." There are also moments that feel like wisdom - one of my favorites is "Do not fret - many creatures are hoping we perish. Very few are willing to make it happen."

These are mostly 4-panel comics, sometimes in short sequences, so it's not simply one substitution - Pyle has a lot of back-and-forth dialogue, which is livelier than you might expect, given the formalistic, logical language. He's also good at indicating the murmured side comment, in smaller text closer to a being's head.

Some of the scenarios are specific to modern life - there's a "streaming services auto-begin the next episode" sequence, and other things like that. But most of it is pretty durable; however old you are, your parents would probably get most of the humor here. (You yourself would have to judge if they would enjoy it; that's a different question.) And the viewpoint gives it all a frisson: not quite how we normally think of things, but still true. Funny, but maybe a little more than funny, too.

One last note: I'm amused to realize Pyle is the same cartoonist who did NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette almost a decade ago; careers are odd and quirky and go in unexpected directions. Glad to see he's still doing interesting work.

Everything Is OK by Debbie Tung

I think this book was created as a single work; I think it's something that should be called a graphic novel rather than a collection of comics. That's not a big deal - it's purely taxonomy - but I'll start there.

Debbie Tung is a British cartoonist and illustrator, working professionally for maybe a decade now. From what I've seen, her work is often personal in that it's about her as a person, deeply informed by who she is and where she is in life, but she's not an inherently autobiographical cartoonist. Or maybe that's a false dichotomy, but she seems to come from a different place than the alt-comics confessional style - all her work is specific, but most of it is outward-facing, as if she's sharing aspects of her self that she thinks a lot of the audience shares.

She's had short work published in a lot of places, for a number of years, and I've seen two of her three previous books - Happily Ever After & Everything In Between, about her newlywed life, and Book Love, which is pretty self-explanatory. (The third one is Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, which was first - I gather it's mostly about introversion and I think it might now read like a predecessor to this book.)

Her new book this year was Everything Is OK, about depression. I think it's telling a story from a few years back, that Tung now has some distance and can make comics about the lowest point of her life. I do think it's true, in everything important. (No book is true in everything, no matter how hard anyone tries. The world is never that clear, that knowable.)

It's a positive book; it even starts with positivity, as it's about to show us Tung sad and having trouble coping with everything in her life. It's here to say that all of these things are transitory, that life is long and worth living, and that help is always available, that everyone is worthy of happiness. And it circles that message, again and again, as Tung tells how she fell into depression, came to be diagnosed, and then got the help she needed to get out the other side. Everything Is OK never dwells on the depression; it is entirely about the title message.

It does make me wonder what OK means. Is OK better than bad but not as good as good? Does it means that it's acceptable? Is it the bare minimum, or something more substantial?

I don't think Tung is saying "this is fine" here - she's much more positive than that. But it also intersects with a song lyric that's been stuck in my head like a koan for the past year - "I'm fine but I'm not OK." I'm glad Tung is OK. I want to believe with her that everything is. And maybe I'm being disingenuous - she means a less expansive "everything" than I'm backing into, here. Tung's everything is your whole life, but not your whole world. Everything you can control and or influence, but not the things you can't.

But I'm running off into philosophy and analogy. Tung is much more grounded than I am. Her story is about a person, going through a bad time. It's her, in this case, but it could be anyone. That's her point: we'll all have lows, we'll all have bad times. And we all need to know that Everything will be OK, even at those worst moments. This is a book that does that, with clarity and honestly and an underlying sweetness. If you tend to overthink things, or get depressed, or feel overwhelmed, it just might be the message you need.

Readings by Michael Dirda

This is a kind of book I enjoy reading, but don't enjoy writing about: I could so easily get so hermetic here, and I feel like I reflexively do that in my writing even when I don't have a good excuse. So maybe this is a day for a just-the-facts exercise.

Readings is a 2000 collection of essays by Michael Dirda, which originally appeared in the Washington Post Book World from 1993 to 1999, during which years Dirda was an editor of that fine publication. (I mean, he was an editor there long before that, and as long after that as Book World was still a thing - I'm pretty sure it isn't, now - and I think he still has an association with the remnant Post, even today.)

The column "Readings" was a very general thing, with no specific remit or focus. Dirda refers to it as "literary entertainments," and each one is a discrete essay, or group of related bits (or, in one case, playscript) about something-or-other related to books, or reading, or Dirda's life as an editor, or the intersection of all those things. It appeared once a month from 1993 though some point after that - at least a bit into this millennium, I think, and maybe longer, since he got a second book, Bound to Please, out of it in 2005 - and ran a few hundred words each time, long enough to be three to five pages in a book like this.

Readings the book collects forty-six essays from "Readings" the column, which the math whizzes among us can calculate covers not quite four years of a monthly column. The book does not explain what's in and what's out, or date any of the pieces - though some of them are clearly from the early days and others ominously mention Y2K in a very late-1999 way - and my guess is that they were assembled to make a pleasing structure and include Dirda's favorites of his columns, maybe with a tropism to displaying the variety of things he got up to.

Every single column talks about books, and, assuming your tastes are anything like Dirda's (and, otherwise, reading this book is unlikely to be pleasant), it the kind of thing that will send you scurrying to write down titles, as he lists his five favorite something-or-others that includes three books you love and two that you've never even heard of.

Dirda is a lively writer with a decent line in self-deprecation, who has read widely and likes a lot of different things. He has a very clear expertise in and enthusiasm for and cheering interest about books by old dead white guys, which he intermittently mentions as a potential drawback - for some readers this may come across as condescending or counterproductive, especially the less one demographically mirrors Dirda himself (white, male, privileged, Boomer, Ivy PhD, etc.).

The wide reading but canonical focus can come across in odd ways: Dirda will rejoice in Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance multiple times during Readings, but I didn't see anything about Toni Morrison or Amy Tan. (Or any similar writers, to be clearer.) Dirda is an excellent guide to the great books written by white guys, in whatever genre they chose. But maybe not for books by those who are not white and/or not guys.

This book is also twenty years old, but it was slightly old-fashioned even then, which means time doesn't hurt it as much. The au courant dates much more quickly than the deliberately retro.

I have a few dogeared pages in my copy, and I expect to go add a number of books to my to-read list because of it. And I think I'm going to keep Readings on my shelf (unlike a lot of things I read these days) and maybe refer to it later for other books I might want to read. That's definitely a specific level of recommendation I can make, though I will repeat my earlier caveat: Dirda is a good guide for a very specific kind of canon, but that's not the only canon any of us should pay attention to.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 3, 2022

One book for this week, and it's yet another one from the library. In fact, I ran in, dropped off the previous batch, grabbed this one from the shelf, and walked out. Amazing they still let you do that.

The Constant Rabbit is, I think, still Jasper Fforde's most recent novel. Like most of his work, it's in the vague territory of fantastika without being part of any specific marketing-driven fiction category. I tend to think SFF readers will, or do, love his books, but I don't know if that's generally true - his first big success was the Thursday Next books, which appealed to mildly literary readers first, so he may be seen as having mainstream cooties by some.

(Because some are idiots, in this as in everything else.)

This is a standalone, like Shades of Grey and Early Riser, both of which were excellent. And it looks to be another weirdly quirky British dystopia mixed with unlikely fantastic elements, as well. It's set in 2022: the very near future as it was written. Some sixty years before, a Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event turned eighteen normal rabbits into bipedal, human-sized intelligent sapients - and, we learn in this book, a small collection of other creatures as well - and now "the rabbit" is a mostly oppressed minority in the UK, comprising about a million "people" with very clear second-class citizenship at best.

I've already started to read it, so let me leave it there: it's quirky, and full of odd world-building details as usual for Fforde, though this one seems to have less humor in it than he sometimes does. I suspect this book is more pointed, about "foreigners in our midst" and ecological collapse, and so on, than he's mostly been in the past.

Quote of the Week: Chosen Ones

I'd never been like that as a child, a valued member of the pack, showered with affection, protected by the safety of numbers. I'd always been a party of one, set apart from the other kids by the conviction - I possessed it from a very early age - that I was destined for something bigger than they were, a future that mattered. I didn't believe that anymore - how could I, my life being what it was - but I remembered the feeling, almost like I'd been anointed by some higher authority, and I missed it sometimes. It had been an adventure, growing up like that, knowing in my blood that something amazing was waiting for me in the distance, and that I just needed to keep moving forward in order to claim it.

 - Tom Perrotta, Tracy Flick Can't Win, p.6

Limited Edition by Aude Picault

Claire knows what she wants. A skilled neonatal nurse in her early 30s, living in some French city, she's dating but wants to find a guy she can settle down with - someone who doesn't run away at the first sign of domesticity. She doesn't say - to herself or anyone else - that she wants babies, but she works with them all day long and clearly doesn't want to give up the opportunity for babies yet.

All around her are friends and family, men and women, in their own relationships. Claire doesn't comment on those, except sometimes to call out really obvious issues, and the narration never does. But the book is clear-eyed, and has an aim, even if that aim is not clear to the reader for a long time.

That's Limited Edition, Aude Picault's bande dessinee - the French original was Idèal standard in 2017; the English-language edition came a year later, translated by Matt Madden - which looks for a long time like it will be the story of how Claire finds love and happiness.

It is a story about finding what you want, but Picault has a wider view: Claire needs to be clearer about what she really wants, and about what she's willing to accept. What she'll settle for, what seems to be great but turns out to be not good enough. What she can do to change things, and the things she can't change.

Picault never says this, but the one thing you can never change is other people. Each of us can change ourselves, or try to. We can adjust how we react to others, and push others in a direction. But we can't change them, and we can't make them do what we want.

So Claire does find a long-term boyfriend, Franck, who has a lot of the things she's looking for. But he also has a lot of things she's not as happy with - or, perhaps, she notices more and more those sides of him as time goes on.

Limited Edition is about sexism, in a way: there's a constrained sense of the roles of men and women that most of the men and some of the women live by, and several of them talk about it explicitly. I don't know if Claire explicitly realizes that, but the list of recommended reading at the end makes it clear Picault certainly does.

And Claire makes the right choices, even when they go against what she thought she wanted.

Picault tells this story in a lovely airy style, mostly thin lines with pops of shades of that yellow color on the cover. Her people are realistic in their bodies and dialogue, even when we wish they'd be a little better and more wonderful.

I'd previously read Picault's slightly later book Amalia, which has a similar tone and feel: Picault seems like a creator who is willing to let stories flow organically and trust the reader to figure things out. Limited Edition feels even more pointed and specific than Amalia; I'd recommend this as a great first book for anyone interested in Picault's work.

Tono Monogatari by Shigeru Mizuki

We all have expectations for certain kinds of stories - a romance will have two characters fall in love and get together by the end, a mystery will have at least one murder to be solved, an epic fantasy will have un'usual apo'strophes in the middle of words.

The first expectation is that they will be stories, formed into a narrative with beginning and end, and preferably a middle as well. But that is not always true.

Tono Monogatari is a collection of folktales, in the first instance. An amateur folklorist collected them, a hundred-plus years ago, mostly from one tale-teller in one Japanese region, gathering all the bits of lore that one guy could tell him about the yokai and kami of the area.

And a lot of of them are not stories. There's some "oh, yeah, one time this guy saw something!" or "and he was walking, and it was creepy!", plus the more story-like "this thing came into town and here's what happened." But a lot of them are basically "yokai, man, they're bad news - didja hear about the one that killed a guy over in that village?"

The noted manga-ka Shigeru Mizuki turned that collection of folklore into a manga - call it a graphic novel or comic, if you want to use English-language terms - late in his life, about a decade ago. It was published in an English translation by Zack Davisson (who also provides an introduction and a number of short text pieces explaining various Japanese cultural and folkloric ideas) last year.

And the Mizkui Monogatari is a fairly faithful visual version of the original book, as far as I can tell, taking the 119 tales in the original, mostly in order, and turning them into comics pages mostly directly, only adding himself as a commentary character, most often with a panel of reaction at the end of each tale. So he'll be saying things like, "Oh, yeah, that happens all the time!"

So, the first thing to note is that Monogatari is episodic. More than that, it's fragmented. It retells little bits of lore, some of which are in story-like shapes, about the semi-mythical creatures that people in the Tono region in the decade of the 1900s sort-of still believed in, we think, more or less. And those stories had already been retold once to put them into more elevated literary language and make them more consistent. Monogatari was edited rather than compiled; it was the product of a viewpoint and a purpose, to capture these stories before they disappeared and transmute them into the true literature of the nation. And, as I understand it, that was mostly successful: the underlying book is seen as a masterwork of Japanese literature.

Then the second thing to note is that "folklore" isn't the same as "supernatural." I was surprised to realize that the first batch of stories were all about yama otoko and yama onna, who are slightly larger, wild people who live (supposedly) up in the mountains and often are in conflict with "normal" people. And it goes on from there - I may be reading these tales the wrong way, but a vast number of them come across to me as "these other people, who we do not count as human, are evil and should be killed." And putting this in historical context - towards the end of Japan's forced modernization, in a time of resurgent militarism towards its near neighbors - gives me an uneasy feeling, as if one of the hidden purposes of Monogatari was to insist on the superiority of the rural Japanese people, the true lords of the world.

Back to the point about supernatural creatures: sure, there are some kappa near the end, and other things that are obviously powered by the supernatural. But there's also a lot of "so I saw a woman in the woods I didn't recognize, and killed her, so she's totally a yama onna!"

I may be biased, but that strikes me as just pure "don't talk to strangers" and garden-variety Othering, presented in a very stark and (frankly) bland way. I tend to like a lot more freakiness and magic in my folklore, and less "kill those people on sight."

So I may have been a bit bored with Tono Monogatari. Mizuki tells all of this in a fun, semi-goofy way - he draws people with funny faces and in embarrassing situations a lot of the time (even when "people" means "him," which I greatly appreciate), so he keeps it light and entertaining and amusing the whole time. He's definitely a master, and does great work with this material. But the material feels dark and twisted at its core, in ways I'm both not comfortable with and don't have enough background knowledge to really engage deeply with.

So keep that in mind, if this is an area that interests you. It's not just "funny stories those rural peasants used to believe." But, then again, folklore was never that simple, in any time or place, which may be my real point.

A Journal of My Father by Jiro Taniguchi

Yoichi Yamashita got out. Born in the provincial Japanese city of Tottori, his family quietly expected him to join his father's barber shop and stick close to home. Instead, he got a scholarship to a Tokyo university, started working in graphic design, and almost never went back.

A Journal of My Father is his story, a twelve-chapter manga created in the mid-90s by Jiro Taniguchi, collected into one volume in Japan then and translated into English last year by Kumar Sivasubrmanian for Fanfare/Ponent Mon. In a way, it's about why Yoichi's was the wrong decision, or maybe, to be more subtle, about how he made that decision the wrong way and did it too strongly, how he cut off his father from most of his life.

It starts with Yoichi in middle age, somewhere near fifty in the early 1990s. His father has just died at the age of seventy-six, and Yoichi has to go back to Tottori, for the first time in fifteen years, to pay his respects. He expects it will be just that: a quick visit, as short and desultory as possible, and then he can get back to the real life he's built in Tokyo with his wife Ryoko.

Although, I should be honest: this is a very Japanese story, very 20th century, so the life Yoichi built is entirely based on work. Working all the time, morning to night, incessantly, to crowd out everything else in life. And, frankly, his father did the same. For all of the insights and thoughtful psychological depths A Journal brings to the story of Yoichi and his family, it never connects those two things, maybe because a fish will never ever mention water. Characters may point out similarities between the two men, but their common workaholic nature will never be seen as a negative: how could it be? Even when it caused the father's divorce and drove the son away forever?

The funeral is the frame story; most of the book is made up of flashbacks, things Yoichi remembers as he's sitting during the evening vigil, the night before the funeral, drinking sake and talking with his family. The flashbacks are pretty much entirely in sequence; Yoichi is remembering his childhood, his relationship with his father, from nearly the beginning.

And not his relationship with his mother, which is even more broken - she got a divorce when Yoichi and his older sister were in primary school, and basically never got to see the kids again. She, unlike the father, is still alive. This is a book about men and the relationship of fathers and sons; women are there, but in the workaholic world, they are not central. I do wonder why Yoichi doesn't have even a second to think that he could build a relationship with the parent who is still alive, while she is still alive.

I also wonder why Taniguchi has pointedly not given Yoichi any children of his own: that would have forced the story to open more, perhaps, to shift the focus from one man and his father. But it does mean we see Yoichi only, eternally, as a son.

Journal is a carefully-observed work, psychological complex, entirely real and honest. It's also embedded in a culture that is not my own, which has certain very strong expectations of what a man will do and say and feel - some of which Yoichi lived up to fully and some of which he did not. But, like all cultures, those expectations are not simple and easy: they were in conflict for Yoichi, and he picked the ones he felt were most important to him. Journal judges Yoichi fairly harshly, or it allows the judgements of others against him to stand unanswered. Taniguchi's afterword implies that he sees himself as something of a Yoichi, but his family was larger - Yoichi was the only son of his father, making him the only true heir.

Again, this is deeply sexist: Yoichi's sister did stick around Tottori, did learn hairdressing, did become part of the business - and all because she wanted to. But that is vastly less important than that Yoichi didn't. In many ways, A Journal is the story of people who can't see that their expectations for each other hurt them all for decades.

As I said: Fish. Water. They'll never tell you about it. You need to read with an eye for the patterns that are never mentioned, or you'll never see them. A Journal is full of patterns like that: it's a deep and rich book about people honestly depicted, living normal lives in a real world. It may make you think about different things than it did for me, but I expect it will make you think. And, as always, I recommend books that make you think.

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

The thing about Tom Perrotta is that all of his characters are just this side of stereotypes: instantly recognizable, the kind of people we've known in our own lives and often have been, to one degree or another. Mostly Generation X, like Perrotta. (And like me, which means you may need to take what I just said with a grain of salt: we always love best the writers who mirror ourselves back.)

But the other thing about Perrotta, the more important thing, is that he seems to care for and understand all of those characters equally. His books tend to have multiple viewpoints - at least two major ones, such as in The Abstinence Teacher and Mrs. Fletcher, and often several secondary as well, as in Little Children and this book - and there's never a sense that he's on someone's side. Perrotta knows his people are flawed, and that they often do horrible things, but he's clear-eyed about them and lets us see them from inside.

No one is a villain inside their own heads. Perrotta's work is a great example of that.

Tracy Flick Can't Win is his new novel this year; it's substantially shorter than most of his books, barely two hundred and fifty pages of not-that-small type, broken into often quick-cutting chapters across multiple points of view. It's also the first time he's explicitly written a sequel; Tracy Flick was one of the main characters of Election. (You may have seen the movie, even if you never read the book.)

The central character is Tracy Flick, obviously. She went on strongly right after the events of Election: huge college successes, off to law school at Georgetown. Well on her way to her dream of being the first female President; entirely possible. But it's now twenty years later, and life got in the way. Tracy is a never-married single mother of an eleven-year-old daughter, living in suburban Green Meadow, New Jersey and the Assistant Principal of the local high school. It's not nothing: it looks a lot like success. But it's not what she wanted. It's not where she thought she would be.

She's not our only viewpoint character, of course. Almost equally important is Vito Falcone, the most famous Green Meadow graduate, a football legend who went on to have a short career in the NFL before an injury removed him from his dreams forever. His life has gone even more sideways recently, but he's taking steps to get back.

And then there's Kyle Dorfman, though we don't get deeply into his head. (I tend to think there isn't a "deep" there.) A tech-bro who cashed out and came back to Green Meadow, now the head of the Board of Education and looking for new things to disrupt and transform. If he has dreams, they're all about bigger and better start-ups, not running a high school, no matter what he tells himself now.

And Jack Weede, the principal of GMHS - Tracy's boss. He's had it tough - out for most of the past year with a major heart problem, a wife just coming out the other end of years of cancer treatments - and is looking forward to his own dreams. His retirement decision sets off most of the plot here; he and his wife have a dream they want to follow.

And also two members of the student council, Lily Chu and Nate Cleary, just starting out on their lives - smart and pretty focused but unaware of a lot. And Diane Blankenship, aka "Front Desk Diane," the one who keeps this whole school running and who everyone loves.

It's a large cast for a short book, but Perrotta keeps them from being stereotypes. They are types at times, but in the sense of "I know that guy." But they all have things they care about, and we understand and sympathize with all of them. Even the ones who want contradictory things.

What is the book about? Two things: Kyle wants the high school to have a Hall of Fame for some stupid tech-bro reason, and everyone else just goes along with that, running through a process to pick the first inductees over the course of a school year. And Jack is retiring at the end of that same year, so the Board and the Superintendent will be hiring a new Principal. 

Tracy wants the job, of course. Tracy is best-positioned for it, Tracy is the most qualified for it, Tracy has worked harder than anyone else for it - that's the story of Tracy's life.

The book is called Tracy Flick Can't Win. It covers most of an academic year. It's smart and thoughtful and full of people I think you will find immediately real. I won't tell you what happens to all of them in the end, but it's a Tom Perrotta book. Everyone screws up somehow, in different ways. Some are fixable; some aren't. And you don't necessarily get what you deserve. Just like life.