vacation time, brother!

See everyone later.

I am bringing with:

Muriel Spark- Robinson
Her second novel.

Aldous Huxley- Antic Hay
I want to try a novel of his out. Brave New World left nary a residue in the memory banks... I hope this one has more wit, less "savages."

Enough for four days?

Also you have a short essay on another hateful NYT Book Review essay to look forward to. Hurrah, no?

Missing

I am going to miss this, but that's no reason for you to.

Go, and tell me all about it.

movies!comics!

Catherine Deneuve is playing the mother in the 2007 movie of Persepolis!

books 28, 29, 31 and 32 or Catching Up

So, so behind in the reviews, as you can see. If any of you are still reading, that is. I sure am, as you can also see by the rapidly blooming sidebar.

Anyway, I’m going to try to get things moving here by giving you guys a few short reviews which will hopefully re-wrangle the flock (so fluffy, you guys) and get some comments going.

Inside Vineyland by Lauren Weinstein

A million, bajillion years ago, Weinstein submitted a comic to Topic Magazine called You Saved My Life, a just a lil’llion years ago, I saw it while doing some work interning at the big T. I liked it. It was black and white, squiggly and kinda evil. I’ve had her on the brain since.

After an as-usual satisfying trip to Rocketship to buy Squirrel Mother (see below), I decided I needed a little bit from the Vine to round out my purchases. I picked up IV after a cursory flip-through. It is a little old, copyright 1999, but comics are the Catherine Deneuve of books, n’est-ce pas?

IV is a lot of one and two pagers, less jokey than going for the jugular. One character, Robot, makes a double appearance in the only two longish stories, Robot Takes a Walk and Robot Quest for Love. Bad, bad things happen, but the Robot can’t quite get beyond want he wants to compute the rest. He can’t. Weinstein draws thoughts like no one else I have seen using an incredibly effective heads-on-writhing-strings method in these stories. Thought bubbles do appear elsewhere, but they are mean, as they should be.

Weinstein’s take on things could be easily dismissed as snark but only if the dismisser is a total asshole. There is something bubbling underneath the funny and that’s the way I like it. Plus, she is local.

Squirrel Mother by Megan Kelso

I wanted this so badly. I coveted the creamy cover and the stories within. I knew the collection contained The Pickle Fork, an amazing story that was in Kelso’s disinherited collection Scheherazade, so I had the best advance opinion of what else was going to be inside.

I don’t want to say this. I don’t.

Squirrel Mother was a disappointment. The drawings are beautiful but the stories just didn’t get there for me. Something is missing, maybe a few need to be longer, or more developed, but I just didn’t latch onto the characters. The exception to this was the autobiographical Green River, about living during the reign of terror of the Green River serial killer, and the silly yet mournful series of stories concerning Alexander Hamilton, Publius, The Duel and Aide de Camp.
Next time, next time…

My Most Secret Desire by Julie Doucet will be written about somewhere else. I will keep you posted.

Astonishing Tales edited by Michael Chabon

Ugh. Usually I am a fan of these compilations by the McSweensters but this one was terribly boring with the exception of a few stories. I mean they have the usual sheen of quiet wackiness so loved by those folks, but- boo. Skip it, but read 7C by Jason Roberts if you can.

A History of Violence by John Wagner

The graphic novel with the best name ever is a little ugly, the drawings that is. Sadly, we never really get a feel for the main character, or his family, because we never really see him clearly. The dialogue is stilted and formulaic in some parts and merely serviceable in others. The good part is that you can breeze through the book in an hour or so, and then have something to compare to the film. I was mostly disappointed that the violence never transformed for me; it never showed me anything, which I think was Wagner's intention with this...

Nevertheless, I can see why the idea so captured Wagner, then David Cronenberg, who did an excellent job trimming the fat for the film, even if his subplots were just flapping in the winds like an old hoagie.

It is hard to find intelligent writing on violence, especially in comics. Any suggestions?

book 26: Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

I bought Great Granny Webster because I liked the way the book tickled my eye. I liked its size and design. The story came second this time. Lucky for me, the story kicked ass.

A very British gothic, Great Granny Webster is chock full of sinister characters and places, the main eeriness being provided by the title character and her freezing, foreboding house in Hove, near Brighton in England. I was in Brighton once in March and down by the sea, it looked like Hell itself was spilling out from a tear in the nasty grey sky and whipping through the abandoned piers that make for the seashore scenery.

Great Granny Webster is the story of a woman who tries to understand her family’s ghosts, from the haunting character of her bitter, proud great-grandmother, to her mad grandmother, to the mystery of her long-dead father, whose sister is as light as air as well as being quite suicidal. The main character’s childhood stay with GGW is the circumstance where Blackwood really exercises her gift for restraint and forcing the reader to see what is straining just beyond the edges of her words.

In fact, a stormy, sultry night like this is the perfect time to dip into a ooky family tale, especially on that has such a great introduction that points out what plot devices and characters may have very well been based on life. Blackwood’s life itself is worth looking into, so I my find myself back in the stacks, looking for a bio.

GGW is one of my beloved nyrb books and every time I hit the Strand or other fine, fine booksellers, I am always looking for another to add to my collection.

What's Worth It

I was flipping through the NYT Book Review as I do most Sundays. I like to count how many reviews or articles are about books I would actually read. Usually the count hovers below two, but often it is zero. Occasionally the essay can redeem a whole useless Review, but this weeks’ “Saving the Planet, One Book at a Time” by Rachel Donadio was not one of them.

Donadio starts off by doing some interesting description of what is up with the companion volume to Al Gore’s ever-present film An Inconvenient Truth, the recycled paper, the carbon-neutralness the book’s production. She teases those of us who are kind of wowed by this, she lets us know how useless the not-often-used process is in an industry that uses dead wittle twees and toxic ink to make almost all of its products. She then writes some silly shit about a plastic book made by a green architectural “pioneer” and a chemist and how plastic books may be the wave of the rolling green FUTE- CHA!

What the essay brought into focus for me was how strongly I feel that books are worth it. They are worth the tons and tons of paper, they are worth the toxic inks. Books are not the problem. Here are some things that are not worth it:

-- Paper used to print out “funny” emails from work. Or really, anything from work.

-- Paper used to send endless political brochures around election time.

-- Paper used to print out those ugly low-res digital scans of your cousin’s baby. Buy a fucking 35mm and send me some prints!

-- Carbon dioxide created every time a Greenpeace canvasser asks me if I have a “minute for the environment.”

-- Carbon dioxide created when the folks from our big white house open their mouths to try to convince us that it is we who are crazy—everything is under control.

-- Trees felled to make pressboard to build housing projects, oops I mean luxury town homes, on former farms.

-- Paper used to print the Book Review every week.

Quickie

I am going away for the weekend. To lure myself back I am leaving the excellent Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link in NYC. This book is so good that I went to the library site and ordered half of their holdings from Small Beer Press, including Link's first story collection, Stranger Things Happen. I resisted reading the summaries and just blindly ordered. That's what I like about the library-- no repercussions for wild clicking. This book is so good that if the quality of the stories stays consistant, I will buy it for friends and maybe even myself. I know, I said "buy" and I meant full price.

I will have to lug this computer with me, so keep those suggestions coming. I will need a break from mad deadline chasing and outline writing. I still want to know what's in your bathroom...

Loo-brary

Alot is going on over here but I did not want yall to think I forgot you, so here's a list.

I am taking Doppelganger's excellent word creation (and post) and using it here in tryharderland just to tell you what reading pleasures there are to be found in my water closet.

Don't think about the fecal matter, it will only make you upset!

-- Various magazines gathered from the messy trash piles of my sloppy n ignorant neighbors.

-- Too Fat Can't Fly by Yuko Kondo
A crazy, colorful book of comix short stories. Nice laminated cover keeps water from overzealous washing out.

-- The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton
Her introductions are amazing. Her scholarship on ancient Greece is pleasantly obbsessive. The perfect bathroom book.

-- Expo 2001

-- quantify #6

-- the collected short stories of aldous huxley
Alot more funt han you'd imagine. Takes me far, far away from the present.

-- Top SHelf #8(maybe)
Another one of their collected books. I can't say I liked it very much, but the bright blue and poop green color scheme of the cover fits well in the bathrrom, plus, it hides those pesky stains.

-- Typewriter 8
A not so good exquisite corpse comic.

-- The Job Thing by Carol Tyler
This great comic collection makes you happy that you're shitting instead of working.

If you haven't already told the big D what's on your shitty stack, tell me...

book 24: My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl

This is going to be short, like My Uncle Oswald, and sweet, unlike My Uncle Oswald.

Much ahs been made of Roald Dahl’s adult stories, and this is, by plot alone, the most adult of his fictions. The book focuses on the sexual and financial romps of Oswald, as written in his immense diaries. With Oswald, the sexual and the financial are often linked.

What could have been a tongue-in-cheek (maybe even ass cheek) romp through times past, and an exercise in riding euphemisms to climax, ended up being a boring, repetitive, and weak satire of your grandfather’s dirty book.

Skip it and read the stories of Kiss Kiss instead.

book 23: The Bad Seed by William March

Tap, tap, tap went the little girl's shoes, her ice-blonde pigtails swinging with the abandon of youth. Rhoda looks so sweet, so why does her glance send chills up our spine? The Bad Seed was a triumph of creepiness, and the unsentimental ending ratchets up the cinematic dread so high, that even as a jaded teen viewer, I was left spinning the unfortunate family's future in my head for hours after the screen when black, then blue.

I saw the book by the same name in the Strand a little while ago and picked it up right away. I have never been burned by reading "based-on books" like The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Big Sleep, so I thought William March’s take on child sociopaths would be a great pre-summer read. I was very, very right, as evidenced by being very, very tense until the last part of the book when March bowed to his time’s interest in heredity and genetics’ influence on behavior. In a certain way, the film’s ending was much more effective by leaving the girl’s behavior unexplained and unchallenged.

What The Bad Seed offers on the page is an excellent cast of supporting characters, including a charming brother and sister neighbor team, and an even more menacing and malignant groundskeeper for Rhoda to spar with. March does a great job getting inside Christine, Rhoda’s mother, and renders her maternal emotions and increasing dread with a sensitive and detailed eye. Rhoda, in print, has muddy brown hair and is much less perky than her celluloid counterpart. Her ordinariness makes her actions even more monstrous, and March’s descriptions of Rhoda tending to her bangs are a bit of throwaway-line pricelessness.

If you are looking for a great thriller or a tense look at 1950s America from a woman’s point of view, get his right away. If you just love good stories, you can wait a little bit, but you still need to pick this up soon, whether you have a beach vacation planned or not.

book 22: Clear by Nicola Barker

Last year or so, I went to a library sale looking for something out of the ordinary, especially something with a sci-fi/ horror twist. I came out with a giant book called Behindlings. It was almost really good. But, this review is not of Behindlings; it is of another book by Nicola Barker, Clear.

Clear is set in London during the reign of mediocre spectacle that was magic’s dark n greasy heartthrob David Blaine, suspended in a giant glass box above the Thames, starving himself.

The main character is this guy (scroll down to the italics, and replace “new York” with “London” and throw in lots of hoo ha about “trainers”). The supporting characters are cardboard-y plot-proppers. The story is rom/com and the punctuation is all over the place, a characteristic shared by Behindlings, one that greatly interfered with my reading pleasure. What all this means is that the story was snappy, happy and a little sappy—basically a beach read for the Hornby set. This is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t make for memorable reading, as you can tell from this review.

One thing Barker does do here is pull together a bunch of wacky stuff and make it work together really well-- Houdini’s mystique (that guy is everywhere. Thanks Chabon.), cheesy celebrity bios and Kafka’s A Hunger Artist.

Reading the analysis of A Hunger Artist that Barker gives us through the combined mental efforts (and mouths) of her characters is a lot of fun. Kafka’s story is described in loving detail, and so thoughtfully fleshed out that I wanted to drop Clear and run out for a paperback classics fix. Barker does a great service to us booky folks by making A Hunger Artist seem so vital and exciting, even though she ties it to a modern-day bullshit storm- that method could even be the reason the shout-out stands out so much.

Even though I didn’t like Behindlings or Clear so much, Barker has still somehow gotten her burrs caught in my mohair. I want to read her other work. Any suggestions?

Books, by place

This is an interesting project. I love Maud's entry...

I have a hard time remembering what books I have read where. The best book seem to transport me away from whatever bus, plane or bed I read them in.

(Via Maud)

More me

Read me in Bookslut's June issue. I'd tell you where my stuff is, but isn't a wild goose chase fun sometimes?

Clicky clicks for NYC people

-- Topic Magazine's EIC talks with other magazine folks at what looks like an awesome event. Go and see David, he's great.

-- Mocca's Art Fest looks so fucking fun that my head could just explode. I hope other obligations don't keep me (or you) away. More info via Flog!

-- Rocketship brings the noise (in the form of an amazing in-store party) for the Mocca Art Fest. I gotta get my copy of Squirrel Mother signed...

book 25: Love Invents Us, book 27: Come to Me, book 30: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Amy Bloom’s stories tear through my heart. I am weak and tired, I have been for three years, and the tiny walls I have built to keep myself in (and the world out) in the meantime wash away like they were nothing, like they were made of spit and lint when I read her stories. My tears start and stop and I cry for the people I love, and have loved and everything we keep from echo other and every thing we give away to keep loving each other. I cry instead of making an unfortunate phone call. I cry instead of screaming.

I first read Bloom’s work in a nonfiction essay about in-laws in Topic Magazine. [Full disclosure: I am currently a web editor for the online edition of this fantastic mag. Go, get a free login, and enjoy. Bloom’s essay is in Topic 7: Family. The Family issue was what made me want to work with them. I admired a place that would find and publish such a piece, one so unflinchingly angry and yet so beautiful.] When I finally decided to spend the piddly amount of money on her novel Love Invents Us, I thought I was going to get a smartish, bubbly read. What I got instead was a love story that rubbed me raw with terrible realness, nit in the plot machinations so much, but in the moves of the characters, what they do when doors open and close in their path.

Then I had to read Come to Me and then A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Yes, love, love, love—all Bloom’s stories are about love and none are sweet. She has an amazing grasp of what real love is- that it hurts sometimes and that it changes over days and years and moments. Her characters force themselves to forgive and trust and get angry, and are only slightly more articulate about it than the average person who has felt deeply for another person. No one is excluded from Bloom’s world of love- not brothers and sons, lovers and mothers, not the undeserving and the wicked. She manages to capture passion without drama, and makes it seem like an elementary writer’s trick.

We meet Julia, Lionel Jr., Buster and Ruth in Come to Me for a first round of fucked-up families and good intentions in “Sleepwalking.” They come back in ABMCSHMILY, older, maybe wiser, but still straining against family bonds, both external and ones they created, on purpose and by accident. I liked the older story better, where the possibilities for the children Lionel Jr. and Buster seemed wide open, but the newer stories satisfied me like a decent movie sequel—Bloom is riffing on an old theme, and drops the ball a few times, but seeing how it all turned out makes her occasional stumbling in tone and voice worth it.

I would not suggest reading these three too close together. The characters will get jumbled and the endings will blur together. You will miss the rough edges of each protagonist, as they should be experienced, singularly, like running a thumb over a pocket-sized rock, found on that lasting camping trip or pulled from the rubble of a destroyed place. Read with caution and consider the love in your life.

***Edited to add: FYI: not all her writing in these novels is spectacular, but she is well worth checking out if you're thinking about love.

YES!

Thank you bstewart23.

When I bang on the back of your parked-in-the-bike-lane-car, alls I'm trying to say is "Fuck you." No need to get excited.
______________

In other biking news, I got punched in the head by a special person on Manhattan Bridge yesterday. Today I got doored on 19th St.

I hurt.

Moustaches in NYC

Via Maud (and her listings compiler, Lauren):

Go to the IFC to see some Frenchy moustaches in La Moustache!

I guess this means I need to hurry up and finish the book...

book 20: Life by Gwyneth Jones

It has been awhile since I finished this book, so forgive me some vagueness:

Winner of the James Triptree Jr. award, Gwyenth Jones wrote about sex and science in Life. I was intrigued by the purpose of the award, to recognize writers who tackle the subjects of sex and gender in SF, and after doing a NYPL search on Jones, I decided to read Life.

The main character in Life is Anna Senoz, a hard-working gal with a passion for science, who secretly has a hot body and a wild side. This last part is a major part of the story arc. Unfortunately, Jones likes to use the word "hole" in a sexual way. Gross. But anyway, sex, in many of its permutations, supposedly drives the plot and brings all the disparate topics and characters together, but generally I felt as if I were reading two books: one about a romance, and one a poorly researched text on sexual politics and its influence on science and academia.

The main love triangle- Anna, her American college lover Spence and crazy, mostly lesbian Ramone (oh shocking!)- lacks tension. The supporting characters, mostly older women who mentor either Anna or Ramone in some way, were more interesting and Jones managed to tell us more about them in a few lines here and there than she did about Anna in the whole book.

The scifi in Life comes in a near-future, hard science flavor, sprinkled with some crunchy AI flakes. Anna discovers (by accident) an evolutionary trend in genetics that will slowly obliterate the male sex chromasonal structure on a genetic level, showing gender to be an almost entirely constructed thing (I think, anyways. It was complicated, and I'm sure if I had liked the book more I would have absorbed the theory more fully). Her research on this project is thwarted, but her obsession grows. The science writing and the comment on women's current place in the sciences, were the best part of the book, even if Jones' writing feels labored when she tries to tie all the chromosonal hoo ha in with the plot. I was disappionted that the whole book wasn't as interesting- I'd love to read some smart, female-inclusive, hard SF. Too bad Life was not it.

Any recommendations? I'd still love to read more Triptree winners, hoping that they all don't suck as badly.

The database is down...

... so I am free to wish I was reading.

Anyway, I just finished one good book (Love Invents Us), one gooder book (Great Granny Webster) and I am in the middle of a collection of two novellas (Class Trip and The Moustache by Emmmanuel Carrere) that is knocking my socks off so far. The translation is amazingly elegant in Class Trip which made the reading even more delicious because I was wondering through each nasty little scene what, if anything, had changed from the original French.

(Apparently The Moustache is now a film too.)

Reading Carrere makes me want to check out this book by him, which caught my attention when it came out a couple of years ago. It is a bio of Philip K. Dick, the idol of a certain kind of nerd, one I usually like very much, and writer of some of the most engrossing sci-fi ever. Dick has also written some amazingly impenetratable crap(like the last two books in the Valis triliogy), but even his worst casts a spell on a line-by-line basis. I imagine writing a bio of Dick that adequately captures both his brilliance and his glaring shortcomings as an author, as well as gives just enough facts and specualtion about his twisted private life would be very hard. From my small taste of Carrere, it seems like he has the subtlety to do it so I'd like to give I am Alive and You are Dead a try when I am in the mood to be someone else.

Hi all

I am backdeded up with reading ans, more obviously, writing. I blame working. I love the money, I love the endless free tea and toilet paper, but I miss you all. The books I've been reading recently have been pretty good and I will tell you about them soon.

In the meantime, here is a partial list of things that are on my desk at home:

- a broken bicycle bell
- small Fiskars
- Lonely Planet Spain 2003
- Letters that need responses
- my parents' wedding photograph, reminding me how much better life looks in pictures
- matches
- erasers
- a green silk hankerchief
- a freecycled VHS copy of 'Downtown 81'
- a small basket of bobby pins and hair bands

On my desk at work:

- crumbs
- empty tissue box
- various training manuals
- half full Temple University water bottle
- smudgy fingerprints

What's on your desk?