Quote of the Week: New Kid in Town

Hemlock Towers then stood empty once more, and gossip soon turned to who might become the new tenants. There were several false leads, of course - an Argentinian couple on the run from the police; someone who looked a lot like Rick Astley; a National Geographic photographer; a barrister convicted of embezzlement; a retired trapeze artist; someone else who looked like Rick Astley but did, in fact, turn out to be Rick Astley; another National Geographic photographer, unrelated to the first in an improbably coincidence. All came to nought, and it wasn't for another fortnight that word of the new tenants came to me by way of Mrs Griswold, who when she wasn't being a supremely lacklustre Stanley Baldwin ran the corner shop and post office.

 - Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit, p.52

Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula by Koren Shadmi

There seems to be a decent-sized, and maybe still-growing, sub-genre of graphic novel biographies out there in the world. I've been away from that end of publishing for a while now, so I can't speak authoritatively to the reasons why, but my cynical side thinks they're aimed at the middle-grade need-to-do-a-report crowd, the modern equivalent of heavily illustrated "junior biographies" from my day.

But maybe there's a serious adult market for comics biographies of random people - who knows? The world is big and full of unlikely things. I'm definitely seeing more of them, for whatever reasons.

Such as this random book today: Lugosi: The Rise & Fall of Hollywood's Dracula, from the cartoonist Koren Shadmi. Shadmi is Israeli by birth, and some of his early comics stories were first published in France, but he's now resident in New York and works in English. 

I've seen two very different books by Shadmi before: recently his fictional graphic novel Bionic, and a while back his debut short-story collection In the Flesh. From his website, I see he's got a bunch of other books, roughly mixed between non-fiction and fiction, coming out more-or-less annually for the past decade - Lugosi is his most recent book, published last year.

It's a fairly standard biography in comics form, starting with a loosely related introduction by a vaguely famous person (Joe R. Lansdale, the horror writer) that talks a lot about the subject of the book and very little about Shadmi's work. Shadmi frames Lugosi's story through the lens of a 1955 stint in rehab, near the end of his life, and returns to that frame periodically, mostly for a few panels or a page. I see that structure a lot in non-fiction comics - The Incredible Nellie Bly, where my post hasn't gone live yet, does very much the same thing - but I think it's mostly a fashion or style; it doesn't necessarily add a whole lot to the chronological story to know that the subject eventually got old. At best, it's a dash of pathos when we're reading about an arrogant, womanizing guy who we might not be inclined to like all that much. (And we are doing that here.)

Other that returning to that frame story periodically, to show Lugosi in the grips of delirium tremens for dramatic effect, Shadmi tells Lugosi's life in order, starting off with the usual early material on his youth in Hungary and how he got to America. The bulk of the book covers his American career, starting with the Dracula play in New York in 1927, when Lugosi was already in his mid-forties. The play is a hit, it goes on tour, Lugosi ends up in Hollywood, he stars in the film version - and his career is launched. From there, the book is a sequence of this movie and that one, feuding with Boris Karloff, and so on, with a few highs and a whole lot of mediums to lows. But Lugosi mostly kept working, and he made a lot of money for a while, so it's hard to feel too bad for him when he cheats on yet another wife and runs through all of his money again.

Speaking of which, Lugosi was married and divorced four times - I don't remember if the book gets into #3 much; there's several decades of turmoil in his private life to get through here - and clearly was chasing a lot of other women for a long, long time. The book mentions the chasing without dramatizing much of it, besides the reason for one of his divorces, but the reader gets the sense that Lugosi was always on the make until nearly the end of his life.

Lugosi does what it aims to do: tell the story of a quirky, interesting life, hitting the moments that the people who really care will want to see - especially covering all of Lugosi's late work with Ed Wood, the often-proclaimed worst filmmaker in the world. Lugosi's life doesn't make much of a story, and it's not really uplifting, since he was a grandiose horndog who mostly made crappy horror movies and died half-forgotten, but Shadmi tells it truly and honestly, which is all anyone can do.

If you want a comics biography of Bela Lugosi, I don't see that you could expect anything more comprehensive, fair, and thoughtful than this one.

Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

I've mentioned the short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" before - it's both one of Neil Gaiman's best, most pointed short pieces and one of the most successful of the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling-inspired burst of revisionist fairy tales from the early 1990s. (I see that my memory was slightly false - I thought it originally appeared in one of the "Red As Blood" anthologies, but it was a standalone chapbook and then reprinted in the 1995 Datlow/Windling annual.)

As so often with successful things, it's part of different clusters - all those anthologies of nasty fairy tales, first, and then more recently an odd program that seems to be trying to turn every one of Gaiman's best stories into individual graphic novels. (See How to Talk to Girls at Parties and Troll Bridge; I'm pretty sure there have been several others that I missed.)

So, in 2019, Colleen Doran adapted "Snow, Glass, Apples" (the short story) into the standalone graphic novel Snow, Glass, Apples - which is what I've just read. Like most of the "Neil Gaiman Library" and similar projects (the Coraline adaptation, the two-volume Graveyard Book adaptation.) that I've seen, it's a very respectful adaptation, using as many of Gaiman's original words as possible and just illustrating them rather than attempting to transform the prose story into something new.

Which, somewhat ironically, is the opposite of how Gaiman works when he adapts things - he's always been deeply transformative - but he's a Big Deal and his fans want Pure Gaiman, so I assume his editors and publishers know exactly what they're doing.

Snow, Glass, Apples is thus pretty much exactly the short story, or at least very large chunks of the prose of that story (which is pretty short to begin with), illustrated in a detailed, mostly Art Nouveau style by Doran, on mostly flowing, panel-less pages full of gorgeous, evocative art. If you know the story, this is it, literalized and illustrated by Doran. If you don't know the story, this is nearly as good a way to discover it. (I'm enough of a purist to insist on that "nearly" - the original precise prose is better.)

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

Context matters. The Constant Rabbit is a very angry book, seething just beneath the surface of its metaphor and a very British reserve. And I know what has made me, and people like me, angry on my side of the pond for the past several years...but Fforde is British, and his grounds for anger are somewhat different, deeply specific to what his nation has been going through.

So I don't think I'll try to get too deeply into the anger behind the metaphor; I think I would misplace or mischaracterize it at best. But I know it's there, and anyone reading The Constant Rabbit will know that as well.

This is a 2020 novel, set in 2022 - an alternate near-future at the time it was written. Some sixty years before - in 1965 - an Inexplicable Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event turned a couple of dozen rabbits [1] into bipedal intelligent people, who became part of British society as another minority group and whose numbers have grown since then to a little over one million.

But this 2022 UK, while similar to ours in many ways - Brexit, pointedly, happened here as well - has adapted by making those rabbits legally second-class citizens, imposing a maximum wage on them, forcing most of them to live in rabbit-only restricted areas and elevating the UKARP - no prizes for working out the acronym of the UK Anti-R. Party - to government for most of the past several decades. And most Britons are casually racist about "the rabbit," with the standard fear being the LitterBomb, that the mass of rabbits would suddenly all have large litters quickly and continuously to overwhelm the human population and take over. [2] 

So: we are in a small English village: Much Hemlock. It is conservative, both politically and in the ways of small towns everywhere. A rabbit family is about to move in. And we will see it through the eyes of Peter Knox, about as squishy a leftie as the town has, but who also works for the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, the not-at-all-secret police that control and manage all rabbits.

The plot circles Peter and Constance Rabbit, his new neighbor and, coincidentally, an acquaintance of his from university, in the brief period before rabbits were forbidden higher education. We learn how weasels and foxes fit into this society - spoiler: vastly more privileged than rabbits - and the sordid workings of RabCoT. We see the cruel racism of the organization TwoLegsGood, and we may come to think that Fforde is striking us about the head with his ideas rather more forcefully than he usually does.

I return to my original point about anger: this is a very angry book, but it's a cold, deliberate anger...I might say a very British anger. Fforde has his thumb on the scales for every page of The Constant Rabbit, and it would be a very odd reader who can sustain a point of view different from the one Fforde is driving.

This feels shorter and much more pointed than Fforde's usual novels: he's always written about mildly dystopian societies, where things work badly and for the benefit of an entrenched hierarchy, but he's never been this obvious and blatant about tying that to the present-day. This may be a bit disappointing to Fforde fans for that reason: there's a constant background hum of axes grinding here, and even if you think those axes are right, the sound is still unpleasant and distracting.

[1] "There had also been six weasels, five guinea pigs, three foxes, a Dalmatian, a badger, nine bees and a caterpillar." (p.84) The narrative also mentions two known similar events elsewhere in the world, and possibly many more that were suppressed violently.

[2] I assume this is meant to be patently foolish, because even if bipedal rabbits can breed at the speed and in the numbers of non-sapient rabbits, there still has to be a longer period to grow a man-sized rabbit to maturity and taking care of millions of babies is not an easy thing for anyone. Plus, you know, a LitterBomb would be hugely obvious immediately and that rabbits don't have any political power and they're pretty much fanatically nonviolent.

Ordinary Victories, Vol. 1 by Manu Larcenet

I may have this wrong, but here goes: Ordinary Victories is a series of four somewhat autobiographical bande dessinees by French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, originally published in French from 2003-2008 and published in two omnibuses in English soon afterward. The current English-language editions are back to being published individually, and seem to only be available in electronic formats. Their main character is a photojournalist named Marco Louis, and in the course of this first book he meets a woman, Emilie, who has a longer-term relationship with. (I also saw the second omnibus way back when, and wrote about it for ComicMix.)

At almost the same time - as in, starting the previous year, 2002, and putting out five volumes through 2008 - Larcenet also started a more specifically autobiographical series of books, Back to Basics, which he did with Jean-Yves Ferri. (See my posts on Back to Basics volumes one and two.) Basics features "Manu", who looks almost exactly like "Marco" in Victories, but who is actually a cartoonist. Manu's partner, "Mariette," also bears a very close resemblance to "Emilie."

I have the very strong suspicion that Victories is only very slightly less autobiographical than Basics, though it's in a much more serious mode: this is more of a soul-searching "what should I do with my life" kind of story, while Basics is a lighter "moments from our crazy life out in a goofy rural town" story. I also think that Victories is largely about the years before Basics: they don't tell the same story, or tell it in the same way, but, together, they tell two phases of Larcenet's life.

So all that was in my head as I read this first book of Ordinary Victories: wondering how much of Manu is in Marco, and how much of Marco I could retroactively read into the Manu of Basics. But they are separate projects, in different genres: they may show complementary views of one life (or, maybe, they really don't, and I've misunderstood), but they are still each their own things.

Marco is around thirty. He's had a solid career, on the dangerous and unpleasant side of taking pictures professionally, but is on an extended break from it. He's been seeing the same therapist for years, and thinks he's "better" enough to stop now. But he's starting to have panic attacks, for no obvious reason. This is the story of how he starts to move on from that moment - perhaps even more, he has to get to a point where he wants to move on. He has to see something in the future that he wants to change for, to move on from smoking "Big Fat Joints!" with his brother and thinking about how he used to work as a photographer.

Along the way, Victories is mostly a slice-of-life story. Marco sees his brother and his parents, he meets and starts dating Emilie, and he semi-regularly runs into an older man who lives near his new rural cottage. I'm not sure at all if this "rural" is the same "rural" as the Ravenelles of Basics - this could be two different ways of looking at basically the same move, or two stages of getting further away from the bustle of the big city. Or, again, they could be two different stories doing different things with some of the same material from Larcenet's life.

By the end of Victories, Marco finally is ready to move out of his comfortable box. I won't say why, or how - the way to learn that is to read the book. But he does it, and he does it in an interesting, believable way, and we the readers want to see Marco succeed: maybe not go back to being a photojournalist, but to find something to do with the rest of his life. And I plan to see how that plays out in the next book, and, probably, to re-read the back half of the series again a decade later to find out how Marco ends up and see how that all hangs together once I've started from the right place.

Reviewing the Mail: December 29, 2022

I had an eye doctor appointment last Thursday, which meant I had to be in Manhattan - when you see a doctor once a year, you can stick with the same one for twenty-plus years, even if she's no longer all that local to anywhere you are regularly. And that meant some book-shopping.

Back in the old days, I would have come home with giant bags full of stuff, but the Strand isn't the store it once was; it has the same books you can find in every decent independent store (and many other places) at pretty much the same prices. So, from there and from the neighboring outlet of Forbidden Planet, I found a few things:

A Song of Stone by Iain Banks - I've read most of the "M" books (Banks wrote without a middle initial when committing literature and with one when committing SF), but only one or two of the others. In fact, the only one I can call to mind is The Wasp Factory, largely because I am a huge sucker for unreliable narrators. This is some sort of a thriller, set in at least a local apocalypse - "the castle" has been overrun by an "outlaw band" and things apparently get complex and dramatic from there. I think this is generally considered one of Bank's better books, and it's fairly short, too.

Call for the Dead by John Le Carre - this was his first novel, way back in 1961. I've read the next three: in reverse order The Looking Glass War, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and A Murder of Quality. And I've gathered a few of the later, fatter books, in large part because I like this trade dress - the other large part is that I think I'll like the books, and want to read them "someday." This one is short, so I expect I'll get to it before too long.

City of Secrets by Stewart O'Nan - I buy O'Nan's books regularly, and have been hugely impressed by every one I've read, but, even though he's not all that prolific, they tend to pile up on the shelves. His books are emotionally powerful, no matter their subject - and each book is completely different from the last - so maybe I have a hard time psyching myself up for them. But I always intend to read them! (Some of the O'Nan books I've seen: A Prayer for the Dying, The Odds, The Night Country, Last Night at the Lobster, and The Speed Queen.) This one is about a Jewish refugee in Jerusalem in 1945.

World Record Holders is a collection of comics by Guy Delisle that I didn't even know existed before I saw it on the shelf. (Even a decade and a half out of skiffy publishing, I can be surprised when that happens. I shouldn't be, since I used to take a lot of time and effort to keep up with publishing schedules, keeping endless lists and monitoring lots of catalogs and websites, but I guess it's like a missing stair and I will always hesitate when I hit it.) This is all short work, mostly from earlier in Delisle's career - most of the original publication dates are in the late '90s, with the most recent story from 2014.

And last is Sunburn, a new graphic novel by Andi Watson and Simon Gane, who previously worked together on Paris. Paris was a low-key historical romance between two women; this one seems to be contemporary and more of a coming-of-age tale, about a British girl vacationing with her family in the Greek islands. I suspect there is some romance in it, but I'm less sure if it turns out as well as in Paris - but we will see.

This Year: 1969

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

I was born half-way through the last year of the Sixties; I have no independent memories of that era. Everything in my head came in later, filtered through nostalgia and common knowledge. Family lore has it that my mother could have gone to Woodstock, if not for me - she was living in Albany, New York, less than an hour from Max Yasgur's farm. She didn't; she probably wouldn't have even if she didn't have a two-month-old baby, since people often don't do the things they think they want to do, and don't consistently want the things they think they want.

My song for 1969 is You Can't Always Get What You Want, by the Rolling Stones.

It was released as a single when I was a month old; I probably heard it dozens of times before I knew what a Rolling Stone was. It was big, it was resonant, it was a song for a moment and an era, a song that was old-fashioned enough to have a chorus of angelic schoolboys and modern enough to have those boys singing about how all desire is fruitless.

I've loved long, all-encompassing songs since then: the kind of songs that demand attention, that stretch out longer than is probably wise but hold the stage for their whole length, songs that aim big and succeed wildly. This might have been the first one like that in my life - sure, let me say that. Who could prove otherwise?

I like to focus on how little this song claims. It insists you can't get what you want. It notes that sometimes, if you try, you might get what you need. Even that isn't guaranteed. And it tells a series of quick stories, all focused on the singer (Mick Jagger, of course), all frustrating in one way or another, all a bit enigmatic and not entirely clear. Like all of life. We're all wandering down to the Chelsea Drugstore and running into Mr. Jimmys of our own.

Fifty-plus years later, during another era of frustration and upheaval and protests and law-breaking Republican Presidents and apocalyptic threats, it's still true. It's still exactly right. It's still focused on what's important: if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

This Year: An Introduction

I've wanted to write more about music for a long time, and haven't done it. Lurking in my drafts is a series to be called "Lyrical Essays," posts springboarding from interesting song lyrics, and I won't say that I'll never do that, but I haven't yet.

For 2023, I had the idea of picking one song for each year of my life, posting a version of it - everything is somewhere these days, so I think it will work - and writing, at least a bit, about why that song is important to me. To make it overly complicated, I'm also only using any artist once, which is I think traditional for a series.

That's This Year, which will post every Monday on this blog, starting tomorrow.

Now, I'm turning fifty-four this year, so it will not be quite one song per year. I've made my list - I had to make sure, first, that it would work, and I could come up with a coherent sequence - and I have several asterisks. Twice I'm picking two songs for the same year and skipping an adjoining year, just because I couldn't decide (1982 and 2011) and two years were left off (1971 and 2015), mostly because I couldn't decide on anything important enough for those years, and I realized I was at exactly fifty-two without them.

So each Monday there will be a post about one song, from the year after the week before, starting with the year I was born. Come back tomorrow for the biggest cliché in the whole series: in my defense, I was very young when that song came out.

The series title comes from the Mountain Goats song, which I guess is a bit of lagniappe for the series - it's not one of the main list. You may have heard this song in 2020, when it had a resurgence for fairly obvious reasons; I think Stephen Colbert was the initial vector. It's very specific to the singer's (John Darnielle) life at a moment in his teens, and also utterly general - we all have years like this, and sometimes all years feel like this. And we can all say, "I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me." I hope you do; I hope it doesn't.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2022

Every year, I post something like this on New Year's morning - a listing of the books I liked best the previous year. Some years I've read less, and keep it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

I'm doing it again; I read slightly more books in 2022 than in 2021. The numbers aren't what they were back when I was an editor, or during my periodic Book-A-Day binge years, but I read 191 books in 2022, which is enough to find some themes and favorites.

First, though, I feel the need to link back to those past posts: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

But, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic (that monthly thing, for example), and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year.
1. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best."
1. I can't define "best." I can definite "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's everything I read all in one stew.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose to newish books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to other people's lists; it doesn't always work.
1. I do not only list books published in 2022, for example - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wants to do that, but I just don't read enough, or in that focused a way.

January

I'll start by mentioning that I've been reading Joan Didion's non-fiction over the past eighteen months or so; I read The White Album in January. Under my rules, it's not really eligible, but it's a great collection of interesting thoughts presented well, and still worth reading forty-plus years after it was written.

Everything else I have to mention is a comic of one kind or another - Guy Delisle's affecting memoir of his youth, Factory Summers, the gorgeous and thorny The Golden Age, Book One by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa, and R. Kikuo Johnson's deep No One Else, a book I still think needs to be read at least twice.

My favorite is the lovely, sunny, wonderful Always Never by Jordi Lafebre, a love story told in reverse.

February

The old book worth mentioning this month was Lord Emsworth and Others, a collection of Blandings Castle stories by P.G. Wodehouse. It contains "The Crime Wave at Blandings," and if you read nothing else ever by Wodehouse, you must read that story.

I was very taken by Dennis Duncan's Index, a History of the, which is exactly what it says it is, and which is exactly as good as you hope it would be.

My favorite, though, came from the field of comics: Mikael Ross's The Thud, the story of a life-changing event and the young man whose life was already much different from what most people would have hoped for.

March

I don't think I'll keep up this pattern the whole year, but I'll start by mentioning Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, a great collection by a great poet. There is a newer, probably more complete Poems available, which is probably the place to go.

Also old is John le Carre's second novel, the murder mystery A Murder of Quality. It's set in a world alien to most people who might be reading this - a "Great School" of England in the early 1960s - and relentless in its searching eye on that world.

My favorite is once again a comic: The Strange Ones, a long-gestating story about punky kids in the early '90s by Jeremy Jusay.

April

OK, this time I'll start with something memorable that I'm not exactly recommending: Gilbert Hernandez's polymorphously perverse Blubber, which is like nothing else ever...and I'm not sure if that's a complement.

On the more positive side, Tardi's 1970s story The True Story of the Unknown Soldier is still strong and focused. And Pete S. Beagle's recent novel Summerlong is a mythic gem, a small novel about a small group of people and one extended, unexpected summer.

My favorite for the month was Brandon Graham's SF graphic novel Rain Like Hammers, for its depth, its complexities, for its refusal to do the obvious thing, and for its wandering, discursive story.

May

First: something indescribable. Jim Woodring's The Frank Book collected his earliest stories about Frank and his world - they are the closest to understandable, the simplest and most obvious works in Woodring's corpus, and yet they are still utterly sui generis.

Second, something ending: John Allison's The Case of the Severed Alliance, collecting the tenth and last plotline from his "Bad Machinery" webcomic. All good things must end, especially good stories - it's what makes them stories. Allison is exceptionally good at both of those things.

Last, my favorite: Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel, Crazy in Poughkeepsie. I don't know how much more I need to say, or could say.

June

A big clutch of things to mention: I'll start with Charles Stross's novella Escape from Yokai Land, a return for his series character Bob Howard and a vision of a different part of his nearly-apocalyptic Laundry world.

From the world of comics: Manuele Fior's deep SFnal story Celestia; Darryl Cunningham's well-researched and entirely committed Billionaires (hint: Cunningham is not in favor of billionaires); Rutu Modan's complex and complicated Tunnels; the fabulous and large Alone in Space, collecting a whole bunch of Tillie Walden's earlier work; and Brenna Thummler's already well-known middle-grade story of grief and next steps, Sheets.

My favorite was a quirky novella, something like a sequel and something like a religious apologetic: K.J. Parker's Inside Man, the story of one demon and his human nemesis.

July

I read two old SF novels - one a re-read, one for the first time. J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World was still deeply Ballardian, his second novel but the one that crystalized how he would write from that moment forward. And Algis Budrys's Michaelmas was even more adult and complex than I expected, a smart novel from the era when SF had to be short and so good novels crammed in depths to every word.

Paul Theroux's travel book On the Plain of Snakes was a deep and intriguing look at many facets of Mexico, from the point of view of one old gringo driving through it and trying to be as honest as open as he could be.

Walter Jon Williams launched a fantasy trilogy with Quillifer, featuring a roguish first-person narrator with a marvelous voice, reminding me that there doesn't seem to be anything that Williams can't write brilliantly.

And I read a cluster of excellent graphic novels by women: collections of short pieces by Carolyn Nowak (Girl Town) and Lilli Carre (Heads or Tails), the climate-change mid-life crisis bandee dessinee Amalia by Aude Picault, Jade Khoo's Miyazaki-inspired YAish adventure Zoc, and Lee Lai's deep and affecting story of sisters and lovers Stone Fruit.

The most memorable book is not part of that cluster, but maybe can be seen as related to it: I was trying to read outside my own life and experiences, so I came to Maia Kobabe's resonant and thorny memoir Gender Queer, in which e tries to explain eir entire relationship with gender and the world at large, and largely succeeds.

August

I was reading a lot of old books this year, wasn't I? Two memoirs came in close sequence this month: Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, an early Vietnam memoir from the years just afterward, and Joseph Heller's Now and Then, a more traditional whole-life memoir published barely a year before he died.

Frances Larson's Severed was my "serious" non-fiction book for the month, a comprehensive look at severed heads throughout history - smart, interesting, and sneakily funny quite a lot of the time.

From the visual side, I enjoyed the deeply affecting story of ghosts and family history Ghost Tree by Bobby Carnow and Simon Gane. I finally saw new stories in the Trese series from Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo in Trese, Vol. 4: Last Seen After Midnight, after years of waiting and hoping. And the nutty fast-paced thriller Omni-Visibilis by Lewis Trondheim and Matthieu Bonhomme was a massive hoot.

My favorite for the month was another collection of comics stories by a woman - maybe a late entry in the batch from the previous month - the chilly and thoughtful and formally brilliant Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan.

September

Most of what I have to mention this month is fantasy of one sort or another, so let me start with one story collection and one novel, both by formidable women writers: Prophecies, Libels and Dreams by Ysabeau S. Wilce, gathering the smaller pieces of her Califa sequence, and Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, an early, dreamy, erotically-tinged story of other worlds and impossible desires and what we give up to get what we have to have.

Somewhat in the same vein is Dionysos: The New God, the last in George O'Connor's twelve-book retelling of Greek myths - they're ostensibly for middle-grade readers, but don't let that scare you away.

I don't think Bastien Vives's bandee dessinee The Blouse is actually fantasy, but you could make an argument in that direction, if you want. It has a stark, unblinking camera eye and an uneasy view of sex and power and visibility. Vives was also part of the team, along with Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot, creating the souffle of a caper story The Grand Odalisque, which is lovely and deeply enjoyable and about as serious as a random Bond movie.

My favorite for the month was back in the fantasy realm: Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars, a solo omnibus of three albums by the very prolific Lewis Trondheim. It's much like the Dungeon series co-written by Trondheim, with some twists of its own: a smart, adult series set in a big, complex world where anything can happen.

October

Old things: Roy Morris Jr's excellent '90s biography Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company and P. G. Wodehouse's wonderful '30s Blandings novel Heavy Weather.

Graphic things: the affecting and down-to-earth A Journal of My Father by Jiro Taniguchi; Max de Radiguès's two-track tale of young love and confusion, Simon & Louise; the complex memoir of a frightening illness, Parenthesis by Elodie Durand.

Josh Ritter's long-gestating second novel, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, was a big-hearted and open and wild as its title implies.

And my favorite was a new short novel by an old favorite: Tom Perrotta's multi-viewpoint Tracy Flick Can't Win, a book that is both a sequel to Election and a smart book about middle age and choices that stands on its own.

November

I'm very slowly reading old novels by John Le Carre, and got to his mid-Sixties The Looking Glass War this month. It's a devastating look at deluded men and the damage they cause.

Jasper Fforde's much newer The Constant Rabbit had a similarly hostile aim, but much more obviously - it's a coldly angry novel, tangling up a dozen modern issues into an unexpected fantasy framework.

Megan Kelso had a new collection of her comics with the long pieces collected in Who Will Make the Pancakes - it was welcome, reminding me of her subtleties and deceptively simple drawings.

Speaking of subtleties, my favorite book was from Bastien Vives - the puckishly-titled A Sister, which is not a memoir but was inspired by his own life, and which has the same unblinking eye I admired in The Blouse earlier in the year, but in a more focused, personal story.

December

Starting with the old, once again, let me mention Manix Abrera's wordless comics collection 12, which I was happy to see has finally been published "in English" (strange to say about a wordless book, but you know what I mean) and re-read with pleasure and joy. I also, after a decade and a half, finally read Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher.

Similarly old, but which I only just discovered: Michael Wex's lively and culturally-centered tour of the Yiddish language, Born to Kvetch.

Also old, and finally coming down from the shelf for a read at the end of the year: Ian Frazier's discursive, personal, thoughtful On the Rez, the story of a friendship and a people and a time and, a bit, about Native life in the USA.

I got to the second of the Ralph Azham series by Lewis Trondheim, The Land of the Blue Demons, which was just as good as the first.

Tom Gauld's new collection of cartoons, Revenge of the Librarians, came from the bookish side of his work, and was just as smart and enjoyable as his work from the scientific side, or elsewhere.

And that leaves me with two novels to choose from for the last slot of the year. Both are sequels, of their own kinds. Both are genre books, by their own lights. Both are fun - one is lighter than the other. 

Silver goes to the unexpected The Burglar Who Met Frederic Brown, written and published this year by the indefatigable Lawrence Block, funny and quick and also an excursion into a different genre than most readers would expect.

And my final favorite is Lavie Tidhar's Neom - a SF novel set in an indefinite future but a mostly-positive one, a world full of wonders and dangers, full of minds human and otherwise, full of people living quirky and interesting lives, full of opportunities and threats and surprises.

Top 12 of 2022

And then, to pull that unwieldly long ramble into an actual list:

• Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
• Crazy in Poughkeepsie by Daniel Pinkwater
• Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
• Inside Man by K.J. Parker
• Neom by Lavie Tidhar
• Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan
• Rain Like Hammers by Brandon Graham
• Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars by Lewis Trondheim
• A Sister by Bastien Vives
• The Strange Ones by Jeremy Jusay
• The Thud by Mikael Ross
• Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

That's what I read that was worth celebrating and remembering; I hope you have high points of your own, and, maybe, that my list above gives you some thoughts for your 2023 reading.

Quote of the Hour: You Know, That Guy

He had that kind of crumpled, worried face which is only a hair's breadth from the music halls and yet is infinitely sad; a face in which the eyes are paler than their environment, and the contours converge upon the nostrils. Aware of this, perhaps, Taylor had grown a trivial moustache, like a scrawl on a photograph, which made a muddle of his face without concealing its shortcomings. The effect was to inspire disbelief, not because he was a rogue but because he had no talent for deception.

 - John Le Carre, The Looking Glass War, p.15

Quote of the Hour: The Callipygian Muse

Their voluminous costumes rendered them of indeterminate gender, but when the chorus member nearest me fell, a great cry rose up from the audience - and it wasn't lamentation. Unsheathed by a robe that had ridden up to its owner's waist when she collapsed was a glorious, golden Greek ass, as plump as a peach in a pair of thong panties. Every eye in the theater was drawn immediately to its radiance. This was the reward for the polite schoolboys who had refused to join their restless friends in the flights up the aisle.

 - Ayun Halliday, No Touch Monkey!, p.246

Quote of the Hour: If You Don't Mind Me Sayin' So

People who tell you they're disappointed in you are full of the worst kind of shit and you can always ignore them. The stuff they say only means that you're doing what you want to do, not what they want you to do. It's the people who really do care about you who will never tell you when you've hurt them.

 - Josh Ritter, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, p. 145

Quote of the Hour: A Powerful Thirst

The advice one would give to every young man starting life is, on arriving in Market Blandings on a warm afternoon, to go to the Emsworth Arms. Good stuff may be bought there, and of all the admirable hostelries in the town it possesses the largest and shadiest garden. Green and inviting, dotted about with rustic tables and snug summerhouses, it stretches all the way down to the banks of the river; so that the happy drinker, already pleasantly in need of beer, may acquire a new and deeper thirst from watching family parties toil past in row-boats. On a really sultry day a single father, labouring at the oars of a craft loaded down below the Plimsoll mark by a wife, a wife's sister, a cousin by marriage, four children, a dog, and a picnic basket, has sometimes led to such a rush of business at the Emsworth Arms that seasoned barmaids have staggered beneath the strain.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Heavy Weather, pp. 153-4

Quote of the Hour: There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days - No, Really!

More and more, I sense that focused reading, the valuing of the kind of scholarship achieved only through years spent in libraries, is no longer central to our culture. We absorb information, often in bits and pieces and sound bites; but the slow, steady interaction with a book, while seated quietly in a chair, the passion for story that good novels generate in a reader, what has been called the pleasure of the text - this entire approach to learning seems increasingly, to use a pop phrase, "at risk." Similarly, even a basic knowledge of history, classical mythology, and the world's literatures now strikes many people as charmingly antiquarian. Or irrelevant. Or just sort of cute.

 - Michael Dirda, "Millennial Readings," in Readings, p.215

Quote of the Hour: What Will You Be Remembered For?

I'm not ashamed of this life I've made for myself. Or at least that's what I thought, until this Hall of Fame thing started up. It saddened me in a way I hadn't anticipated. I kept imagining what would happen if my old high school started a Hall of Fame and my name came up for consideration. What would people say? She's an Assistant Principal. She helped her mom when she got sick. That wasn't gonna cut it. Nope. Not good enough. No Hall of Fame for you, Tracy Flick.

You're a nobody.

 - Tom Perrotta, Tracy Flick Can't Win, p.98