Wondermark: Beards of Our Forefathers
David Malki!
July 31
Wondermark is one of the most demented and routinely brilliant webcomics there is. One of my favorite things about it is that its author is completely obsessed with detail, and with the quality of time gone by. Everything he makes shows this. It's a beautiful book, and (like the comic) it's full of little prizes for the attentive. And there's only one typo in it and one error in parallel structure, and that's really good for something from Dark Horse (or DC, or Marvel, or even Vertigo ... they're all just awful at copyediting). Also, the comics are so dense that they tend not to stick in my memory. I've been reading them online for years, and I read the whole archive when I started, and I still don't think I recognized more than two or three through the whole book. That's priceless.
Audiobook: Be More Chill, from Audible.com
Ned Vizzini
July 23
I ran out of podcasts, so I listened to this in the car on the way down to Roanoke and for most of the way back. I enjoyed it a lot. It'd been on my list for years and years (I think I read about it in the newspaper when it came out), and it's been on my iPod for years (I canceled my Audible.com subscription ages ago). But it was only five hours long, so it was just about right, and I was able to listen to it finally, and I'm glad I did. Despite being written in the very early 2000s, it didn't feel dated (I was actually worried about this, what with it being a techie sort of book). I'm not sure what else to say about it that won't ruin it. Don't look up "squip" on Wikipedia, that's for sure.
McSweeney's 26
Dave Eggers, et al.
June 25
This issue came in three parts; two small books of short stories ("From Overseas" and "From Our Shores") plus a slim hardcover with little, if any, admitted authorship, called "Where to Invade Next." I don't remember any of the stories in "From Our Shores." But all of "From Overseas" was great. Haunting and lovely. The one story that bridged both volumes was probably my third-favorite. Cute little books, and recommended.
Which brings us to "Where to Invade Next." Which is probably the scariest book I've read all year. Through most of it, say the first two-thirds, it read like satire, not unlike things I've read in (and on) McSweeney's before, and very like things I've read in (and on) Harper's. Completely straight, unapologetic, unblinking, and (you hope "mostly") true. Then we got to the last two countries in the book, Sudan and North Korea. The Sudan chapter taught me things about Darfur I'm embarrassed to say I did not know (the janjaweed are openly backed by the government? And the Sudanese air force firebombs villages after they're through raping and pillaging? And they taint wells and ruin fields? Really?), and it was scary in a completely different way. Some of the strategies outlined in the book started to make perfect sense.
Which was an outstanding setup for the North Korea chapter, which advocated, over and over, the assassination of Kim Jong-il, and outlined a worst-case-scenario plan for preemptive strikes on North Korea that would "in all probability" destroy Seoul. Then I read today that sanctions against North Korea are being lifted, and after having read this book that seems like an incredibly bad idea, given that one of the most advantageous things about the situation there is the economic isolation and cultural imprisonment of its population.
At the end were ten pages of references, not one of U.S. government origin, which just made me glad there'll be a new administration soon, maybe one that's not hell-bent on, well, bending hell to its will.
I only give fives to books that change something about me.
Ella Minnow Pea
Mark Dunn
June 1
I loved this book. Just wonderful. It repeatedly surprised and delighted me, made me laugh out loud, made me read sections of it out loud even though there was no one else to hear. I wrote out a list of words to look up, words I'd never seen before or didn't recognize, or words that were just stone cold made up. The beginning is charming, the middle is a little scary, and the end is almost completely satisfying. Very, very close to five stars.
The Compass Rose
Ursula K. LeGuin
May 25
Excellent, and so varied! I really liked almost every story in here, and I was surprised and delighted by the ridiculous swings between lightness and fear. In the former category, "Sur," the last story in the book, about a fictional (or is it?) trip to Antarctica, was a favorite, and in the latter, "The Wife's Story" simply blew me away, to the extent that I made Lisa read it. I'm a sucker for twist endings. "Intracom" was ridiculous, but perfectly appropriate as an example of how far afield this writer can go without losing you. The longest stories in the book, "The Diary of the Rose" and "The Pathways of Desire," were very affecting and exactly enough scary.
Pearl the Cloud Fairy
Daisy Meadows
May 24
Sweet and harmless, like the other book I borrowed from Neva. A slightly more interesting story. Colleen was amazed I'd read two whole books in one day. Hee. They're about 70 pages long and written at a first-grade level or so. I toughed it out.
India the Moonstone Fairy
Daisy Meadows
May 24
Read on our camping trip. I was taking a break from the book I was reading (which I finished a day later) and couldn't steal Lisa's, so I read one of Neva's. The series is really long with lots of sub-series (weather fairies, jewel fairies, animal fairies, etc.) divisions in it. The books are cute, and the stories are simple, and for what they are they're harmless and sweet. This one made less sense than the other one.
Arthur and the Minimoys
Luc Besson
May 19
Well, that's just derivative as all hell and really pretty terrible, innit.
The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
March 27
I was cleaning out my books and trying to get rid of some, and I didn't realize I owned a copy of this, so I read it. I'd never read it before, but it was on my mind because one of the stories in it was featured in a recent Ask the AV Club column. In any case, I read it for the first time over the last few days, and I've arrived at a conclusion. Science fiction from the '40s and '50s almost always has one big weakness that I can only put aside with difficulty: a complete lack of prescience. You may recall how over the years in this space I've repeatedly pointed out the ridiculousness of the Little Fuzzy
books, how they're in the distant future but they still have 8mm movie cameras and cocktail hour, how the future is present only in videophones and (as I've said) "ridiculous melting-pot names like Hirohito Bjornsen." Well, you'd expect more than that from the great Ray Bradbury, wouldn't you? Nope. The Martian Chronicles takes place in the near past and near future for me, spanning about 1999–2026, but it's also a frozen 1950. Gas costs pennies (and we took gasoline to Mars), women don't have jobs, and there are rampant lynchings in the South (although there's also a mention of Confederate money, so it might be an alternate timeline where secession stuck). Sound recording is done on wire spools, and everyone knows Morse code. I understand, really I do, that there was only one Jules Verne and only one Arthur C. Clarke and that most great writers don't approach their level of scientific guesswork. I really do. I understand that fifty or sixty years ago no one could have predicted the invention and omnipresence of optical media. But there are some things that seem like they should have been obviously on the horizon even if they weren't real, and monetary inflation, electric cars, wireless telephones, and ever-lessening sexism and racism are among them. Still, this is way better than a lot of stuff. The story "Usher II" was by far my favorite in the book. Just wonderful. Once you put aside the claim that fantasy and horror were outlawed and all such books burned in 1975, that is.
An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories
Ivan Brunetti, ed.
March 15
It took me a really long time to get through this, longer than it should have. I raced through the beginning, where a transparent and utterly disarming love for Charles Schulz is apparent every few pages, and I raced through the middle, which is a mix of ancient, crumbling early examples of the form and the more typical anthology fare (sexy and autobiographical). It was really great to get this older stuff as a counterpoint to the usual pages of Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Jaime Hernandez, and so on. Then I got near the end, where there are many pages of dense, complicated R. Crumb stories in a row, and I got bogged down a bit. Crumb is great, but just a little too dark and angry for me sometimes. But maybe it's okay that it took a while. It's a big book, this one, and by virtue of being an anthology not tied to a specific year it had a great deal of variety in it. Very little of it was stuff I'd seen before, which is good; I don't usually like reading excerpts of works I've already read in their entirety. It should make me feel good to already be familiar with something, but instead it makes me feel bad for other readers who aren't getting the whole story.
Born Standing Up
Steve Martin
March 8
Just absolutely delightful. I was amazed at some of the things I learned about him from reading this. One of my favorite themes running through it was his admiration for other people's happy families. Even the name-dropping was charming and gave a real sense of how at a certain level Hollywood has always been a small town. I loved the introduction of Disneyland—imagine being ten in 1955 and getting a job selling guidebooks at a new park that just opened down the street. Very little was missing here, but I did feel like the transition from "struggling" to "successful" was a little unexplained. Maybe it's just that I wasn't alive in the late '60s and very early '70s to understand the bizarre zeitgeist that allowed him to catch on so quickly. Maybe it's that Steve Martin is such a known quantity now that it doesn't seem bizarre anymore. In any case, like I said, delightful and charming.
The Fatal Bullet. A True Account of the Assassination, Lingering Pain, Death and Burial of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States. Also Including the Inglorious Life and Career of the Despised Assassin Guiteau.
Rick Geary
February 7
I'm really intrigued by this Treasury of Victorian Murder series, mostly because there's one about H.H. Holmes
, and ever since Devil in the White City
I'll read anything about the 1893 World's Fair. But the books in the series vary wildly in price for some reason, and the Holmes one is pricey, and I didn't want to risk it. So I bought the one about Charles Guiteau. It turns out Rick Geary is one of those great comic artists who can draw people who look like themselves, which I love, and he is an absolute master of lettering, which is great. I'd very much like it if these comics were in color, but they're just fine, and I'll buy more. Now, if, like me, you've seen or heard Sondheim's Assassins
at all, you know Guiteau lived in the Oneida community and then wrote Garfield a bunch of letters and decided he was due an appointment to be the ambassador to France. The guy was loopy. The real story, however, is how Garfield had the unmitigated bad luck to get shot right around the time doctors were just starting to realize there was a tie between infection and cleanliness, and he died after months of suffering. Were Garfield shot about thirty years later, he would have lived. And according to this book, he was a hell of a guy.
Maus
Art Spiegelman
February 4
I'm reading a comics anthology
right now that I'm enjoying, but it's taking a while because it's really very dense. It's thicker than a Best American Comics
and much, much more varied in style and especially in era than McSweeney's 13
. When I get to something that's familiar to me in it, I'm happy, because a lot of what's in there is completely new to me or just not really my speed. More on that when I finish that book. The point is, I got to a few pages of Maus and I found myself needing to put the anthology down and re-read Maus. So I did. This book has been universally acclaimed for years, so nothing I can say will be new, but I can say that no piece of Holocaust literature has ever affected me as much as Maus. The only thing I can think of that even comes close to its impact is Life Is Beautiful
. Spiegelman's father's story is one of luck and mindblowingly resourceful ingenuity that spares him untold suffering, and still he loses nearly everything. It's a beautiful story, beautifully told, and the depiction of people as animals is metaphor done exactly right. It's not until you realize you have forgotten you are looking at mice that you realize just how good it is.
Mouse Guard: Fall 1152
David Petersen
January 29
Absolutely, without a doubt, the best new comic I've read since I started paying attention to such things. I'm so glad I picked this up on a whim, and I'm seriously bummed that the place I buy my comics from is out of stock on the first two issues of the next mini-series. (Don't worry, I found them on eBay.) This is what Redwall
should have been, what Redwall was for the first couple
of books
, before it completely lost my interest. Mouse Guard is brutal and beautiful, and just really, really extremely fine work all around. Highly recommended.
Serenity: Those Left Behind
Joss Whedon et al.
January 28
And that does it for Firefly. This comic series fills in what happens (well, most of it) between the end of the TV series and the start of the movie, and now there's nothing left of it, and I'm sad. It's a lovely comic, with even a bonus Jo Chen painting of Kaylee in the book, but maybe I should have remained happy in my ignorance and my knowledge that there was another Serenity story I didn't know. Now I know there aren't any. By the way, Borders was having a graphic novel sale, so the current disturbing trend will only continue. It's what I'm reading these days. I'm sorry they're not real books.
White Rapids
Pascal Blanchet
January 26
Translated from the French, this book tells the story of a company town built along the St. Lawrence River in the middle of nowhere in Québec. It's big on sparse, full-page illustrations and subtle changes. My favorite things about it were the amazing variety and texture achieved with only two ink colors and paper-surface effects, and the marvelous effect of era-appropriate design and style. From the '30s all the way through the '60s, although very little seemed to change, something about the design was continually exactly right.
The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories
Nicholas Gurewitch
January 21
Nicholas Gurewitch is a fantastic artist. I can't think of another webcomic with the straight-out technical chops of this one. The only problem with the book is there isn't enough new material. I know the online work for what it is, and I love it, and I bought the book to support what he gives away for free. The book is lovely, just really well put together, and even has a ribbon bookmark (which I've left at the page with the brilliant Edward Gorey parody). But I wanted more new stuff, unpublished stuff, stuff too weird even for this strip to put on the web, and it isn't really there.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Susanna Clarke
January 6, 2008
Lovely short stories, one set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
and one in the world of Stardust
*, with Mr. Strange and other historical personages of note making appearances. As always, the existence of magic (and of Faerie) is taken for granted in this world, if somewhat scoffed at and hidden. It's like the elephant in the room; when someone doesn't age for forty years, for instance, you notice, and perhaps you discuss it with your intimates in their parlors, but you'd never be so crass as to ask. That delights me. That said, though, it took me a year to get through this book. I had many distractions, and at one point it sat unfinished while I read six or seven others at the same time. Finishing it leaves only one book started and unfinished (The Children's Hospital
). I don't know why it didn't suck me in, but that's not really a bad thing. After all, it took me three tries and a long slog through the first chapter to read Winter's Tale
the first time, and even Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell itself was daunting and went in fits and starts at first. Sluggishness in getting into and through a book is, if anything, a precursor of me ending up loving it and wishing there were more. I can't wait for Susanna Clarke's next novel. (As an aside, did you know it was John Hodgman who reviewed JS&MN for the New York Times Magazine? It was.)*As always, do not buy or read a copy of Stardust without the Charles Vess paintings unless you have first read it with them. I cannot be responsible for your experience if you fail to follow this advice.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
December 25
There was a chapter of this (chapter 3, The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death, I think) in Best American Comics 2007
, and that's how I knew this book existed. It was also called out as amazing in the introduction, and I think somewhere else besides. It was a big deal. Apparently Fun Home was Time magazine's best book of the year—as they put it in that introduction, not best graphic novel or best comic book, but best book of any kind—and I couldn't let that go, despite my silent pledge to read more books with words instead of pictures for a while. The thing is, this form is exploding. There are stories that can't be told this efficiently in any other way. And while I've never been a real fan of her strip (I'm sorry, the name just bugs me), Alison Bechdel can draw. As much as I love the minimalist cartoons of Ivan Brunetti and the graphic-designed forms of Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel draws people who look like themselves, and it's a skill shown at its best here. This is a beautiful book. It made me laugh and cry and blush and scoff, and ... how many stars did I give Persepolis
? This is better than Persepolis.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
Seamus Heaney
November 27
I read about the first half of this (up to Grendel's mother's attack), and then I saw the movie, in IMAX 3D, which was stellar, and then I finished the poem. I found myself on many occasions tapping my foot as I read, and I know that this is because I had read with interest the long, scholarly (but not too scholarly) introduction Heaney wrote. In it he talks about the meter of the poem, the alliteration and repeated sounds in the two halves of every line, even some specific translation choices he made, and it's wonderfully absorbing stuff for an English geek like me. I loved his choice of "So." as the first word of the poem instead of the more traditional "Hark." or "Behold." I appreciated his explanation of the word "thole," which came up once or twice later, and his example of an old Irish relative relating the story at table, which helped with the tone. Certain lines stick with me because of their rare perfect meter ("In off the moors, down through the mist bands/God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping" especially). And the little italic notes that explain what's happening (even though it's not hard to figure out) were helpful. I was glad of seeing the movie, not just because of its wonderfulness but because of the feeling of knowing the characters a little bit more when I came back to the poem. Wiglaf (Beowulf's thane) and Unferth (the taunter at the start and the lender, later, of Hrunting) were given much larger roles in the movie, and Wealdtheow (the queen) was created practically from whole cloth. Grendel's mother, of course, was completely changed, and her role in the bigger picture was (as Neil put it) made up. But these were good additions, and other changes were good changes, and I think they helped me appreciate the story as I finished reading it. I'm very, very glad I read it. It's a cracking adventure. The old language is fascinating, and the new language is harshly beautiful. The world can always use reminders to treasure its heroes.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
November 13
Brutal and unrelenting. I was glad I had my cat so that I wasn't alone with it in the dark. I've been sick, on drugs that keep me from sleeping well, and I rocketed through this in a day and a half. It didn't give me nightmares but I often found myself skimming through a page or two ahead to look for dialogue, just to make sure it was still the man and the boy and no one else on the next page. I cried and cried at the end. The scenario of The Road
is one I think about a lot, probably more than a normal person. I think it's because of my deep and abiding love for The Stand
, or the way The Day After
has always stuck with me after all these years. Who would survive, and why? How long would it last? I've never read a scenario like this one before, with a child born and raised in this after-world, with no economy, no production, no reboot having taken place. It's chilling, and it's hard, and you have to keep telling yourself it's not real.
Best American Comics 2007
Chris Ware, ed.
November 4
You really must think I read nothing but comics anymore. You think this, don't you? It's not true. I swear it's not true. Now that I've finished this and Postcards
I'm only in the middle of reading three books, not five. One is a novel, one is a poetry collection, and one is short stories. See? No comics! I am, however, reading comics online right now. Perhaps I just have a slight problem. This isn't a bad problem, right? Comics are great. This is interesting work, completely unlike anything else, getting better every year, done at its best by people who are cleverer and funnier than most prose authors ... it's good stuff, done well, with huge variety and complexity, and isn't that what reading is supposed to be for?
The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming
Lemony Snicket
November 4
As Christmas stories about Hanukkah go, this is excellent. It came unexpectedly, as books in my McSweeney's book subscription always do, and I think I'm going to give it to Cindy for Christmas. Or Hanukkah. They're completely different things! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened
Jason Rodriguez, ed.
November 2
I've been reading so many comics lately (you'll see the next book in the list) that I've gotten kind of picky. I loved one or two of the stories in this volume and just kind of liked the others. It wasn't completely magical, so therefore it wasn't four or five stars. I don't know why I feel like I have to apologize for this, really I don't. What I did think were magical, and I loved, were the parts that felt like home. The postcard of Lucy the elephant, especially. I know Lucy. I've climbed Lucy. Is Lucy still there? I refuse to look; for me she always will be. I also loved the Pennsylvania center of it all, and the strangely repeated name Gretna, which must have been Dutch or Scandinavian. One of the stories I liked most had a Gretna in it.
One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box
Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso, Deb Olin Unferth
October 8, 2007
I enjoyed this very much, because this is exactly the sort of thing I enjoy. I find myself, lately, very reluctant to start a novel. I'm not sure if it's some sort of fear of commitment, or fear of disappointment, or what, but when I want something to read I go for the short stories. And most of these stories are very, very short indeed. Deb Olin Unferth's ("Minor Robberies") were the best, and Sarah Manguso's were the shortest. And as always with McSweeney's the books are beautiful things put together in an unconventional way, and that goes a long way with me. I promise to read a novel soon.
Anansi Boys
Neil Gaiman
September 17
I gotta say, I enjoyed American Gods
more. It was fun figuring out where Spider came from and watching him not realize why he was ruining things, and much of Anansi Boys was very funny, but the scary parts weren't that scary, Rosie never rang true for me as being quite so desirable as she was supposed to be, and towards the end, the moment when Fat Charlie became just Charlie went by with no fanfare whatsoever, which was a letdown. I liked that the police were competent, I loved Grahame Coats's inner monologue, and I listened to the last two chapters in the car on the way back from Blacksburg instead of reading them, and the Lenny Henry audiobook recording
is a masterpiece. All that aside, Neil on a bad day (and this is NOT a bad book) is still better than most everyone else, really he is, and Anansi Boys is lovely, really it is. But I enjoyed American Gods more.
Toys Go Out
Emily Jenkins
August 29
This was at Lisa's house, being (I think) a new chapter book she bought to read to Neva, or possibly a gift she'd bought for her niece Ali, but if it were a gift she wouldn't have let me read it, so I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a kids' book, I'd say about a third- or fourth-grade level, but with those little jokes in it for parents who are reading aloud. I found it utterly charming: the character of Plastic, especially, who does not know what a plastic is, and the character of Frank, and the character of Frank's neighbor. Just darling stuff. I read it in one sitting.
The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker
Matthew Diffee, ed.
August 6
Definitely hit or miss, but I loved seeing photos of the cartoonists. (So many of them are so young! And some of them are so cute!) It was also cool how often I instantly recognized a drawing style and said "Oh, that guy!" The questionnaire each artist filled out, while obviously very unpopular with the artists themselves, were hilarious. You wouldn't think there were that many ways to answer the same few questions. Those who really did it up right and drew little filler cartoons all over their pages were my favorites. I'm gonna give this book to my mom. Don't tell her.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, issue 13
Chris Ware, Dave Eggers, et al.
August 3
In many ways this is the best McSweeney's ever. It's absolutely jam-packed; even those of the same heft (and this is bigger than most) that are full of words seem to contain less. There's a fair bit of overlap with Best American Comics 2006
, but this came first, and it just speaks to Chris Ware's ability to recognize the best of his genre that so much from this collection was considered the best of the couple of years covered. Real highlights include David Heatley's "Portrait of My Dad," which I maybe like because it was familiar from the other collection, and because its layout is like a Chris Ware piece; Richard McGuire's "ctrl," which is an absolutely stunning piece of minimalist draftsmanship; and the bizarre (is it fact? is it fiction?) history of the invention of the comic strip. I could look it up to see if it's true, but I don't want to know. (Here's a review from Time magazine at the release of this book. It says much of what I wanted to say.)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling
July 22
No spoilers here, fear not. I haven't given a five in many months, but it's been years since a book put me in such a state. Heaving, wracking sobs towards the end there, and especially the part after the divider page. I got the book around 1 in the afternoon, read until about 2:30, went to get my hair done, read while she was coloring my hair (hee), came home, read until 7, went to Lin's, read a little there, got home around 2 in the morning, and finished the book around 7 in the morning. Then I slept. That's at least the third time Ms. Rowling has done that to me. And I can't think of anyone living who might ever do it again. I hope I'm wrong about that.
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
July 8
I found this in a drawer in the beach house, surrounded by James Patterson and Anne Rivers Simmons books. It seemed the one, or one of the few, books in the house that were worth picking up in the first place. I can best describe this by describing what it reminded me of. I'd never read any Graham Greene before. A lot of it felt like Hemingway, but the sentences were so long. The narration was so internal and metaphorical that it felt like Vonnegut, but so many semicolons. (I've never seen so many semicolons and dashes and colons where periods and commas would have sufficed.) And at first, because it takes place during the war in a warm climate, it felt like Nevil Shute, mostly A Town Like Alice
or even On the Beach
. I enjoyed the language more than the story, the characters more than what happened to them. The guilt that pervades Scobie's experience is completely oppressing, stultifying like the West African heat he lives in, and everything he does, right up to the end, seems like the only way.
Best American Comics 2006
Harvey Pekar, ed.
July 4, 2007
I really enjoyed this. When I saw it on the shelf at the Strand, I said (out loud) "well, that's a no-brainer" and put it in my bulging cart basket without even thinking about it. I did think about whether there were other, earlier editions (there aren't; this is the first) so I could buy them. The whole thing was, start to finish, wonderful. "Onion Jack" was a real highlight for me, as was "Rabbithead." Maybe I like your supernormal stuff. (Maybe.)
The Dark Is Rising
Susan Cooper
June 15
Definitely better than the first one (Over Sea, Under Stone
; see below). Better paced, with a clear and accessible structure to it (watching him collect the Signs was almost like a demonstration of game theory). There's a mistake in it, where Mary is called Margaret once, and because I am often obsessed in books featuring large families (or, in the case of Hogwarts or Infinite Jest
, schools) with figuring out birth orders, ages, and whatnot, that really bugged me. I read the first chunk of this on the planes to California and finished it in bed in the hotel after my DS battery died and I couldn't play Puzzle Quest
anymore. I wondered through the whole thing how it was supposed to relate to the first book, but at the end I was quite satisfied on that point. Overall, I'm now much, much more excited to read the next one (Greenwitch
) than I was to read this one after finishing the last one. And that's all you can ask for from a series, really.
Clan Apis
Jay Hosler
June 11
The way some people (not least among them Neil Gaiman) talked about this, I thought it'd be more than it was. The art is great—imagine being able to tell the difference between bees in a black-and-white comic!—and the science is interesting, but that's really all there is. There wasn't a great deal of story beyond the life cycle of a beehive. I guess I thought it'd be science fiction ... and I was expecting a little less science and a little more fiction.
Over Sea, Under Stone
Susan Cooper
May 27
I enjoyed this, but not as much as I expected to. It was fast-paced, with a tension in many places that made me nervous, but I never really feared for the characters. I knew from the tenor of the narration that no one was going to die or really be hurt, no one was going to suffer, no one was going to be left behind. The ending, even still, seemed anticlimactic. I've begun reading The Dark Is Rising
, the next in the series, and that has more potential. I'm not familiar with this series yet, obviously, but I wanted to read it before the movie comes out. I know Ian McShane is in the movie, but I don't know who he's playing, and I don't want to check in case it's a character whose image will be changed for me by knowing the casting. There seems (so far) to be no link between the first and second books, leading me to believe Over Sea, Under Stone may be a prequel on the order of The Magician's Nephew
, which is not supposed to be book one at all. You know how I feel about that.After Long Silence
Sheri S. Tepper
May 26
I believe I may have said about the last few Tepper books that the twists weren't up to par. This one was so good that I literally smacked myself in the head. I turned to Lisa (I was reading in our hotel room at the beach) and explained it to her at length. This was very tiresome for her. In any case, that head-smack moment, where something's been teased at and hinted at and not shown to us, and is then made clear in a wonderful, piercing clarity, is what I love about Tepper, and you know that if you've been reading these pages for years. I simply can't recommend this author highly enough. I don't know how she does it. I believe After Long Silence
may be out of print (I got it at the Book Thing), but you really can't miss. Almost anything of hers is worth your time.
The Farthest Shore
Ursula K. LeGuin
April 25
Good story. But we're not here for the story. I just love to read the way she writes. For years I've been saying how much I love the names she comes up with, and that's part of it, but there's a physical poetry to her writing that utterly charms me. She's an absolute master of the sound of words. It goes beyond simple tricks like alliteration into a taming of metaphor I wish I could see more often in my own writing. You read it, and you know it, and it is. Like this: The rocks and reefs "lay low, under or half-under the wash of the waves, covered with anemone and barnacle and ribbony sea-fern; like water-monsters, shelled or sinuous. ... huge, deformed, diffuse, as if life writhed half-conscious in the rock." I love it when adjectives are put together in ways grammar and reason deny, but it works: "The sea-waves beat on the them with a sound like breathing, and they were wet with the bright, bitter spray." The spray of the ocean is bright and bitter, it's clear to any native speaker, but neither of those words would come to a lesser writer as a way to describe it. Plus they both begin with B. I'm a fool for the alliteration. But now I'll stop. The close analysis of magic destroys magic. "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
March 29
So close to five. Very close. I just can't make the case for life-changing. This is the other book Julie gave me, and I liked the other one so much I figured this couldn't be bad. But I just roared through it. It was so damn good. In the beginning it's about the mother, then it's about the son, then it's about the mother again at the end for a bit, and the gradual grace with which Lahiri moved between them quite amazed me. I thought about the Indian girls I knew in school, I thought about Boston and Cambridge, where I was recently, and I thought about growing up around the same time Gogol and Sonia were. The writing was so clear and transparent that (to paraphrase one of the blurbs) I kind of forgot I was reading and just lived it. I'm intentionally writing badly about it, not trying to talk about it on its own level, because I know I can't. (Except for the phrase "gradual grace," with which I'm as inordinately pleased as I was with "impossible intimacy" years ago in this space.)
McSweeney's 21
Dave Eggers et al.
March 24
This was a pretty good one. It's just a book this time, nothing crazy going on (though the cover does fold open to make a neat 360-degree picture). The stories were short and for the most part pretty good. I especially enjoyed "Last Words," which is mostly told by a macaw, and "Grandpa Clemens and Angelfish 1906," a Joyce Carol Oates story that makes me want to do further research in hopes it's purely fiction, and was especially creeped out by "The Pram," about a nanny, and "The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan," about a fake gynecologist. (Yes.) In between the stories were images of letters sent to Ray Charles, of which you can see more at letterstoray.com.
The Areas of My Expertise
John Hodgman
March 13, 2007
Exact same problem as Mountain Man Dance Moves
. Many good things in too many doses. Had I left this lying arond as an occasional-dip book, I might have liked it more, but I tried to read it in order without breaks to read other things, and it just doesn't quite work in that scenario. It's funny, and in places (especially the part about New Orleans in the epilogue) it's actually touching, but there's just so damn much of it. Not enough of it is tongue-in-cheek enough. It's completely straight the whole way through, and I really do understand why, but I like a little ludicrous frivolity in my humor writing, and there just wasn't enough of that.
The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club
Laurie Notaro
March 3, 2007
I've been reading the John Hodgman book
for two months. Two months! It's delightful, it's funny, and it's very, very, very hard to read a bunch at a time. I found myself desperately wishing for a book where something happened to someone, but I wasn't in a place where I could start a novel. You see my dilemma. Julie gave me The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club for Christmas at least two years ago, and it'd been sitting there on the to-be-read shelf all that time. Recently, the to-be-read shelf moved to the to-be-read Sticklebook, which is awesome, and because I couldn't face another evening of only being able to get through two or three states in the funny list of states in the Hodgman book, I grabbed for Laurie Notaro. And she proceeded to crack me the hell up. I laughed out loud at this book, the second time hard enough that I had to put the book down. I seriously can't recall the last time I laughed out loud at a book. It was easy to read, things happened, it was episodic, and it was such a relief. It was so much fun.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon
December 4
First, I should apologize for the out-of-order dates in here. With these entries now under a content-management system, which is obviously how they always should have been, I don't have good control of their order. The dates are accurate; the stacking is not. Fine. On to the book. This had been on my list of recommendations for ages, well over a year, and I think I must have Anna to thank. I read this other book earlier in 2006 or maybe in 2005, called Dogsbody
, and I raved at the time about the way its author (the faboo Diana Wynne Jones) somehow knew the thought processes and logical practice of a dog. You believe, reading that book, that she knows how a dog thinks and reasons, and it is fascinating. In The Curious Incident, you feel the same way about an autistic teenager. He copes with his difference by being fiercely and repetitively articulate about exactly what he's feeling and thinking and why. He explains and narrates himself, and he makes it painfully clear what it's like to think the way he thinks, to fear the things he fears, and to lack understanding of things other people take for granted. The sentences are long and complex, even when the thoughts they're expressing are the most simplistic ones. The whole story about the dog is really a sideline; the story is about Christopher's family, and about lies he's been told, and from a standpoint of how difficult it must have been to write it, to take on the voice, it's just a tour de force. Highly recommended, as they say. The only reason I give this four and not five stars is ironic: I didn't love the book. It's not lovable, because Christopher keeps you at arm's length, because he has to, and there is no one else in the book who deserves to be loved. It is the best book I've read since probably The City of Ember
, and definitely since Dogsbody, but I can't love it.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
December 23
Because it is so amazingly self-referential and bizarrely meta, I feared this book from the beginning because of how much I hated the last thing I read that was like that (The Broom of the System
). But it worked out okay. This is a 500-page version of a McSweeney's copyright page, and I love those a lot. Not since Winter's Tale have I felt the need to mark so many passages in a book, so many throwaway sentences and little descriptions and thrown-off thoughts that were so real. This is one I especially liked, that I thought was a good example in its self-awareness. "I knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it ... that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome." I feel like that all the time.
McSweeney's 20
Dave Eggers et al.
December 15
This was a quick one, as every third page was a painting. I really liked some of the paintings. Some of them I did not like, such as those that combined human and animal bodies (there were two or three). Those fell squarely into the uncanny valley, and I don't care for that. The abstract ones were my favorite. The multiplicity of paintings made for a shorter-than-average issue with fewer stories, but the only one that really sticks in my mind isn't even in the book. It's the booklet stuck in the back, part one of The Children's Hospital.
I ordered the book from Amazon soon after reading this excerpt, and it's what I'm reading now. Issue 20 also kind of let me down on one of my favorite McSweeney's regular features, namely, the copyright pages. They are on the covers, and they are obscured by art, and I found myself poking at the embossed edges trying to peel it off and peek underneath. I think that's a metaphor for something.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 11
Dave Eggers et al.
December 2
This was the first issue of McSweeney's I was ever aware of. It's an absolutely stunning book. I love the text on the cover. I love the spine especially (although it does have a typo). I love the words "Unrequited doesn't begin to describe it and Samantha Hunt is free." I can't even remember the number of times I picked this up off a shelf in a bookstore and fondled it. I do remember noticing it was marked "Number 11" and always, always looking for earlier issues so I could start fresh. I didn't know every issue looked different, and there were a couple of years of frustration when every time I spotted it and checked it turned out to be 11. I wish I'd just bought it, because I would have discovered McSweeney's sooner, and I would have been happy. The DVD in issue 11 is a clear precursor to Wholphin, in the way it has commentaries-on-commentaries and such. My favorite part was Sarah Vowell and John Hodgman's commentary on the editing of the making of the DVD. That was delightful. And the anecdotes Francis Ford Coppola shared during his director's commentary on the making-of were great too. What a good sport (he wasn't the director, you see). Utter silliness, and exactly the sort of thing you find in Wholphin. Anyway, I digress. Issue 11 is a really good one.
Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists
McSweeney's (that is, the Internet Tendency, not the Quarterly Concern)
October 23
I enjoy Lists. They're one of my favorite features on the McSweeney's site, along with dispatches from Lisbon, McSweeney's Recommends, Convergences, Letters, of course, and especially Reviews of New Food. I love Reviews of New Food. The thing about Lists is they're given a few at a time. They're brilliant in small doses. Sometimes they are short enough that they can be quoted in their entirety aloud, as I did last night when Lisa was talking during Battlestar Galactica. Sometimes—often, actually—they are completely deadpan until the very end, when they get hilarious. Sometimes—and this is my favorite variety—they are so ridiculous and contrived it doesn't even matter if you get the joke; you feel brilliant anyway, just for wanting to read such a thing for fun. In a way, those ones are awesome. But if you read a couple hundred Lists at a stretch, the gag begins to wear thin. As far as I can tell, the entire contents of this book are available on the webpage (also linked above), which goes back to 1999 (no Lists were published between September 3 and November 5, 2001, by the way; I do indeed remember a bit of a humor hiatus then, but I'm glad we recovered quickly). Anyway, the book is just a pretty and portable version of the webpage, except for one important thing: unicorns. Many, many, many lists not on the website were commissioned for the book (go to Letters and scroll down to the latest missive from Carlton Doby), and all of these additional lists are about unicorns, and most of them are awesome. But they're not quite $12.95 worth of awesome. That's all I'm saying.
The End
Lemony Snicket
October 18
THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS. I DON'T CARE. I really wanted Violet to turn sixteen and get rich. I wanted maybe an epilogue, where Violet and Quigley were grown up together. In any case, I did not get those things, but I got the island where everything eventually washes up, the deaths of characters I liked and characters I didn't, more (or less) mystery about the Baudelaire parents (who is Violet's father, after all?), and a raft made of books. It was refreshing for some adults to finally see through one of Olaf's terrible disguises, and it was very cool when I realized how gradually Sunny's dialogue had changed (and adorable when she translated for the baby). There were many, very many, literary and cultural references, and not just in the baby-talk like always, but in the names (every shipwrecked/marooned character ever), and I admit I didn't get them all. It must have been fun to research these things. I'm glad my bookstore display is now full, and I do so treasure these books with their rough-cut pages (did you notice there's a page-cutter in the story?) and their matte covers and their darling typography and great production values. But I'm a little disappointed at not having been handed a nice ending on a silver platter. But I can't possibly have been expecting that. I haven't read The Beatrice Letters
yet. Maybe that will help.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 18
Dave Eggers et al.
October 9
I liked the stories in this one and found them more memorable than the last McSweeney's I tried to remember. There's one in here called "Somoza's Dream" that I quite liked, the story of a South American assassination told from several viewpoints and not in order. There's a Roddy Doyle story called "The New Boy" that rang very true, a good reflection of how easily children make friends, and there's some interesting gay stuff, and there's a Lawrence Weschler bit at the end. I like him. His Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder is one of my favorite nonfiction books. He's always struck me as one of those people who (like me, in a way) is interested in the knowing of things for its own sake. To borrow a line from what I just read: Sum ergo cogito. I am, therefore I think.
Zel
Donna Jo Napoli
October 1
Rapunzel fascinates me. It's one of my favorite fairy tales, because it's one of the ones that suffers so greatly from the bowdlerization, the taming, the watering-down of the nineteenth century. Rapunzel has eyes being pierced (so does Cinderella, by the way), a secret pregnancy, a lonely birth in the desert, a miracle, lots of hard and sharp things that trip the hero and heroine up on their way to happy-ever-after. The prince does not rescue her from the tower, is my point, really. And in Zel the story is told pretty truthfully. The "witch's" desperation is understandable, the nickname "Zel" is just darling, the allegory of the goose on the growing nest of rocks is heartbreaking, and the years in the tower are just as maddening as they must have been when the story was told to frighten, not to amuse. Before now, the Caldecott-winnning picture book Rapunzel was my favorite; now this might be. I hear nothing but good things about the forthcoming Disney adaptation, but I strongly suspect it will be the tamed story, not the wild one. I love the wild one.
Creepy Susie: And 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children
Angus Oblong
September 30
For some reason, the TV show The Oblongs always greatly amused me. I liked the way the Debbies walked, I liked Helga's little details, I liked Milo, I liked the three-legged conjoined twins, and I liked the cross-dressing bartender. And the They Might Be Giants theme song. The book on which the series was based has the little pieces that let you know it was the source, but they aren't all together, and there are too few of them. I really like the hand lettering, so that's a high point, and the story about Scooter cracked me up. But the book isn't The Oblongs, and it isn't as good.
The People of Sparks
Jeanne Duprau
On or about September 22
I'm pretty sure I read this in one day between my two recent hospital stays. I'm sorry about the imprecise dates. It's been a shitty month. Anyway, the people of Sparks are not as interesting as the city of Ember. The high point of this book for me was the discovery at the very, very beginning that you could look down on Ember from a narrow place at the top of the cave. I just didn't feel the thing. I agree with the reviewers on Amazon that I'd like to see more stories set in Ember. Ember had the thing. The forgotten purpose, the abandonment, the unknown need for escape, it was just magic. Sparks was a shallow postapocalyptic place we've seen before.
The City of Ember
Jeanne Duprau
On or about September 19
This was one of those books you rip through at a frenetic pace, but you're not sure why, and it goes really fast because it's huge print because it's a kids' book, and it doesn't quite pay off, but it's still totally worth it.
The Better of McSweeney's, Volume 1
Dave Eggers et al.
On or about August 10
There were some stories in this collection that absolutely kicked my ass. One of these was "The Ceiling." I can't even look at this book without thinking about how much that story messed with me. I got bogged down with fear after that one. I got bogged down with time at the William T. Vollman entry, just because it was really long. It's not that it wasn't unenjoyable, it's just that I know from a decade-old experience not reading The Ice-Shirt that I can't stand the guy for long at a stretch. I enjoyed the letters, especially the Sarah Vowell one. I enjoyed the copyright pages, but I always do. I wish I could remember more, but when I close my eyes all I see is "The Ceiling."
Naked Pictures of Famous People
Jon Stewart
June 5
I picked this off the shelf because I'm sick. Both Inkspell and Wicked are sitting unfinished on my nightstand, as is the unstarted Prince Caspian, but I just needed something easy and light. I read this years ago, but it must have been during one of the Book List's down years, as I can't find a reference to it in earlier pages here. Oh well. There's one thing in this book that just kills me, though I was expecting it this time and it didn't crack me up like it did the first time. That one thing? "This is dermatitis. This is leprosy."
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 15
Dave Eggers et al.
May 30
This was the Icelandic issue. I really enjoyed one of the Icelandic stories, the one called "Interference." It was the first piece of science fiction I can remember reading in McSweeney's. Much of the rest of this issue was just not my style. The long, long story "Uninvited" was cute in places but overall fell flat for me. That one took me so long to get through that I've just about forgotten the first half of the issue. I know there was a Roddy Doyle story in there, though, and I always like those.
The Horse and His Boy
C.S. Lewis
May 4
I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe last August, in preparation for the movie. I started this book the day after I finished that one. I finished this book a scant nine months later. This speaks to the compelling nature of book two (cough) of the Narnia series. You know who's not even in this one? That's right. The Pevensies. I like the talking horses, I like the way people live in Calormen, and I like the geographical exposition. But already he's talking about how Susan is too grown-up, and it's just kind of tiresome.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 19
Dave Eggers et al.
May 2
The first issue of my subscription (I bought 16 and 17 individually), issue 19 arrived in a cigar box. It's a marvelous collection of what I first thought were satire and now think are real military and emergency-preparedness publications from the last century. From a production standpoint it is a triumph; it would have been a real privilege to work on this, and someday I will lay out and preflight a tiny perfect-bound book with scanned backgrounds made to look like aged paper. Just marvelous. Really. The high point of this issue is precisely what it was supposed to be: the wonderful T.C. Boyle story Wild Child in the main book. I'm a T.C. Boyle fan.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 17
Dave Eggers et al.
April 25
Issue 17 is the one that looks like a pile of junk mail. Highlights are the David Mamet drawing in Envelope and the long story accompanying a Nigerian-scam letter. Midlights include the closest thing this issue has to a main book, which is a magazine called Unfamiliar. I was embarrassed to carry Unfamiliar on the train because of the full-page, full-color drawings of human organs (including what I believe to be a uterus) that decorate its front cover and divider pages. The reason it took me well over a month to read this issue is Yeti Researcher, a send-up of an obscure academic journal, played completely and utterly straight. The Teddy Roosevelt "Wendigo" tale therein is the best part, but the magazine as a whole was the worst part of issue 17.
Audiobook: Anne of Green Gables, from Audible.com
Lucy Maud Montgomery
April 6
I've been distracted from reading, and even from audiobooks, lately by the ability to watch videos on my iPod. This is a temporary problem, and I expect to be back to voraciousness within a few weeks. I apologize to my reader(s).
Anne of Green Gables has always been one of my favorite books, and the cover of my old copy of Anne of Avonlea has one of my favorite pictures, featuring an adolescent Anne sporting a wonderful Gibson-girl hairdo. In order to listen to the second book, however, I had to listen to the first book first. So I did.
Because this book is a hundred years old, I shall forgo the avoidance of spoilers. Sorry. In any case, I had forgotten that Matthew dies in the first book, thinking it happened later, and while I had a very clear memory of the reënactment of the Lady of Shallot (stories featuring my name tend to stay with me), I had forgotten about the degree of Anne's childish resentment toward Gilbert during the first book and found it kind of tiresome. I had also forgotten that Diana wasn't as smart as Anne and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde wasn't a widow. Lastly, one of the main points you have to know to have this book make any sense is that Matthew and Marilla are brother and sister, not a married couple, and I don't think it's mentioned more than once or twice in the whole story. I'm not even sure how I know it. I think one minor character says "your sister" to Matthew early on, but besides that, it isn't really there, even if you listen (watch) for it. Maybe this living arrangement, the never-married brother and the spinster sister, was more common when the book was written, and it seems strange only to today's readers. I just wish it was made more explicit early on, because I get creeped out at the idea of children reading this book for the first time and wondering at the strange timbre of Anne's "parents'" relationship.
Audiobook: Legends II, Volume Three: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy (Unabridged Selections), from Audible.com
Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Orson Scott Card
April 3
I've decided to include audiobooks in this list, because they take just as much time as “real” books and they aren't free and it feels unfair to skip them. This one is three novellas: The Book of Changes, from the world of Majipoor, by Robert Silverberg; The Monarch of the Glen, from the world of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman; and The Yazoo Queen, from the world of Alvin Maker, by Orson Scott Card. The Gaiman story was of course the best of the three, and the only one that didn't bother with tons of exposition to explain the world it was set in.
The Majipoor story was practically nothing but exposition, for literally two hours, and mostly politics at that. I don't believe we needed to know the exact relative importance of the fifth son of the Coronel in the world as a whole before we got to the actual story. Since that one came first I almost gave up on the whole audiobook. This story felt like a prequel, because it's about the composition of an epic poem called “The Book of Changes,” which I suspect must be in the other books. I always thought of Silverberg as an editor, but there are a dozen Majipoor books.
The American Gods story had Shadow caught up in a Beowulf legend in Scotland and was actually very cool. I really enjoyed that one's narrator's Scottish accent, too.
Although I tremendously enjoyed Ender's Game, I've always disliked Orson Scott Card in the back of my head, partially for the whole Mormon thing and partially because the Ender sequels were nowhere near as wonderful as the original. I'd heard of Alvin Maker, but didn't know anything about him or his world. This story seemed a little contrived to me—they meet famous historical figures, and it felt like they were on their way to lose the Alamo—but I liked this world's gentle, persuasive brand of magic very much.
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 16
Dave Eggers et al.
March 20
I am enamored of McSweeney's. I love the Internet Tendency, and I love the Quarterly Concern. Every issue is different, and this is the first to appear here. I'll be describing them in more detail than you actually need. This issue came in a beautiful clothbound four-panel foldout. There was a theme, trees. One panel held a black plastic comb with "Timothy" engraved in silver. One panel held the main book of stories, of which the standout for me was a Roddy Doyle piece containing the phrase "for fuck sake" a delightful number of times. The third held 13 oversized heart-suit playing cards, meant to be shuffled and read in any order, telling the story of the investigation into the theft of the Queen's tarts. And the fourth held a thinner book with one story, called "Mr. Nobody-At-All," which was told in the form of many, many people speaking at an artist's funeral. I really enjoyed all of this. Every bit.