FuzzyCo

Mike Doughty wrote a book. It's called The Book of Drugs. It's about taking drugs, and then not taking drugs. It's about being in a band, and then not being in a band. It's very, very, very honest. If you are interested in drugs or bands or honesty then you should read this book.

FuzzyCo grade: A

(I was going to leave it there, but then I made the mistake of reading some of the Amazon reviews . Even the people leaving four and five star reviews continue to chastise Mike for not being more grateful to Soul Coughing or the fans who love that music. See that part up there where I talk about honesty? Mike could have made the nicey face: "Oh, I had a bad time in the band, but I'm glad you like the music." But he's given us all the gift of telling us how he actually feels. I mean, I've made a piece of art or two in my time, and when I look back at them, I can see every single flaw and they all hurt. And when a collaborator has made the flaw, even if I like them (which I do, all of my artistic collabators! Nicey face!) it stings a little. And if I hated those collaborators and they had taken advantage of me for years and were involved in a terrible part of my life, yeah, I could see how even hearing the name of one of those pieces of art could be infuriating. Anyway, Mike doesn't need me to defend him in a parenthetical comment.)

Related:
Zulkey interviews Mike Doughty in text
Klausner interviews Mike Doughty in sound

I was so excited about Children of the Sky that I went back and re-read a previous book in the series, A Fire Upon the Deep. That may have been a mistake, as the scope of AFUtD is galaxy-spanning and I kept waiting for CotS to match that. CotS is, instead, a novel of political intrigue within a small community and I frankly got bogged down in all the machinations and wanted to get back to the grand space battle that cliff-hangered from the last book. And, spoiler-alert, it never comes.

FuzzyCo grade: B

What a journey… finishing Flashman on the March I've now read all of the Flashman books. At the beginning I was appalled but kept reading. By the end I was lamenting the adventures of our scoundrel that I'd never get to read. One of Fraser's great techniques throughout the books was to scatter references to the rest of Flashman's life. For example, Flashman frequently refers to the fact that he fought on both sides of the American Civil War, and now I'm sorry that I'll never get to find out how that came about.

I'm not sure if I've just got used to Flashman's terrible ways, or if Fraser toned down the character over the years. But by the end I actually kind of liked the old reprobate.

This final volume is set during the 1868 British Expedition to Abyssinia. As usual with the Flashman books, I learned about a section of history I'd never even known about before. I mean, as simple as the notion that Ethiopia used to be called Abyssinia. I did not not know that. Flashman does his usual stumbling through history, cheating and womanizing the whole way.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

A big gap in my science fiction reading is Octavia Butler, so I was happy to find a copy of Dawn on the Maryknolls borrow-leave bookshelves. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but this wasn't it. Dawn is a somewhat old-fashioned science-fiction story—it has the feeling of those old '60s scifi stories where the idea somewhat squashes the characters. There's a lot of talk of people's emotions, but the people just felt a little flat to me. So I was surprised when I was looking it up for this post to discover that it's from 1987*.

The idea, though, is a big one. Humanity has nearly wiped itself out in a nuclear war and aliens have rescued scattered survivors. They're going to help humans repopulate the earth, but will we ever be the same? (Dun, dun, dun).

FuzzyCo grade: A

* I was also pleasantly surprised to see that it was the first of a trilogy, since it didn't have that chopped up feel of an obvious first book, one of my pet peeves.

Flashman and the Tiger is the penultimate Flashman book and it's a collection of two novellas and a short story. It's also the driest of all the Flashman books, by far. One of the novellas is about a Baccarat Scandal, of all things. Flashman, sad to say, is most at home at war, or at least skullduggery.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

Down the Mysterly River is by Bill Willingham, who is best known for the Fables comic book series. If you're familiar with that series, it's not too much a surprise nor spoiler to reveal that DtMR explores the same sort of meta-fiction: the characters in this story are characters from other stories thrown together (albeit, here, not from folk tales but actually from imagined works of a fictitious author). Sometimes the meta-fiction thing can feel a bit done, but the characters are great. It's almost a shame that the source works here are imagined—I'd love to read the adventures of the warrior-badger Banderbrock.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I read the first few pages of Children of the Sky, the recently released third volume in the Zones of Thought trilogy and realized right away that I wanted to re-read the first volume, A Fire Upon the Deep, before I took up the story again. Now that I'm halfway through CotS, I don't think my concerns about getting lost in the plot were valid—Vinge does a fine job of easing back into the plot, characters, and even the nature of the weird aliens, the Tines. (The Tines are dog-like creatures who only achieve sapience in packs of 4 or more.) But I am glad I re-read AFUtD, because it's a really good book. Half the story is a space chase, trying to outrun a vengeful god-like artificial intelligence. And the other half features the children of an advanced technology crash-landed on the world of the Tines, who have their own politics and complications in play. And are super-weird (the whole hive-mind thing is very hard to wrap your head around).

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Among Others was the best book I read this year. It's about a teenager recovering from an accident in the late seventies, sent to a boarding school, and who finds solace in scifi and fantasy books. It's also about magic, but the kind of magic that, as the narrator admits, you could think was just coincidence if you didn't believe in magic.

Walton captures so perfectly the feelings of seeming apart from your schoolmates, of the voracious reading, and finding compatriots in other readers, that I might almost say it doesn't need the magic. Except, of course, that it does, lest it be a different book.

Of course, I'm just six years younger than Mor, the narrator, and so perhaps it's all just something that rings true to those a particular time. But I think not. If you're a reader of any stripe, this is one you'll want to read.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

At some point when we were living in Maryland (so, sometime between third and ninth grade) I went on a school field trip to Harper's Ferry to learn about John Brown's Raid. I remember the scenery, and something about it being connected to the Civil War, but before reading this book I couldn't have told you anything about what actually happened in the Raid, nor what it signified. Now, thanks to that rapscallion Flashman, I know all about it, and indeed about the political state of the US at the time. That wily Fraser, always tricking me into learning.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Goliath is the third book in the Leviathan trilogy, featuring a alternate WWI, where the Germans have steampunky mechanical devices and the British are "Darwinists"—doing advanced genetic engineer. The titular Leviathan of the first book, for example, is a living airship* that's a heavily modified whale. There's also a prince on the run, a girl disguised as a boy, equally hidden love, and perspicacious loruses. Oh, and Tesla. Who is a jerk.

Great stuff and a fine end to the trilogy.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* You have to have airships for steampunk.

The big question in a series like the Secret series, where you set up a big mystery, especially one like "the secret of eternal life", is how you handle the revealing of the secret. Do you not reveal it and leave it a mystery, or do you reveal the secret and risk it being a let-down?* Without getting into any spoilers, I think You Have to Stop This handles the problem just fine.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* cf. the "best singer/artist/poet in the world" problem in movies.

When I was in seventh grade I got into the "gifted and talented"* math program. Once a week, after school, I'd meet up with the other nerds from around the county at one school and we'd have a three-hour math lesson. The teacher would assign us a bunch of homework and the idea was that we'd sit in a regular math class back in our normal school and do the homework while sitting there. At my school** when we had finished our homework (or, more accurately in my lazy case, when I told the teacher that I had finished my homework) we could go play in the "computer lab"—a little cubicle with 4 Apple II+s.

I'd have to ask my dad, but I think that played a part in our choice of home computer—we ended up getting an Apple IIe. That workhorse served us for typing school papers and so on for years and years. When I got to college, as a CS major (for my sins), I spent a lot of time on UNIX systems, and dorm-mates' PCs, but my sophomore year my roommate had a Macintosh SE and it just worked the way I wanted a computer to work and I was firmly in the Mac camp.

So, all that is to say that I've been an Apple Computer user, and indeed fan, for years and years and years. So Steve Jobs was, of course, present in my computing life. It'd be hard not to use Apple computers for so long and not be aware of Steve, to know some of the mythology of the creation of the Apple I, of the pirate flag over the Mac group's headquarters and so on and so forth. But I'm not sure I was really quite as informed about his life and his history with the company as others. I'm not sure I noticed when he was kicked out of the company, for example, and then some years later he was back and that just sort of happened in the background for me.

That's all to say, I know a complaint I've heard from some people about Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs, is that covers a lot of ground that's already been covered in other histories of Apple the company. But I hadn't read those books, so it was new to me. So as a summarizer, Isaacson is pretty OK. But this isn't a great book. But as the one official biography, and now that Jobs is dead, it's probably the one we're going to get.

If want an extended and super-nerdy*** takedown of this book, check out the Hypercritical podcast, episodes 42 and 43.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

* Sorry, but that's what it was called.
** Go Owen Brown Middle School Pumas!
*** I mean that in the most nerd-positive way possible.

Flashman's back in India, just in time for the first Sikh War and some real-life characters who are as colorful as the invented Flashman himself.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I think that This Isn't What It Looks Like might be my least favorite of the Secret series. Is it unfair to complain about unrealism when you're reading a children's book that features the search for eternal life? Anyway, this one is the sight one and features a lot of coma ancestral memory journey stuff.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Snuff is the latest Diskworld novel, following Captain of the Guard Sam Vines out to the countryside for what's supposed to be a relaxing vacation, but turns out to be an investigation of a murder. Of course.

It feels to me that Terry Pratchett's style has gotten a lot more compact, especially in the plot department, over the last few years, and it's hard not to read that as a reaction to his progressing Alzheimer's. But maybe I'm reading too closely.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

100 Bullets starts out with a great concept—a mysterious man shows up with a gun, 100 rounds of ammunition, and evidence that pinpoints the person who ruined your life. And he tells you that you can use any of the bullets without repercussion. Azzarello uses that concept to tell a number of gritty, gripping stories. But then, the story expands to reveal the mysterious man and his story and, frankly, I fend that a lot less compelling.

FuzzyCo grade: A at the start, B- by the end

Flashman and the Dragon finds Flashman in China and mixed up in the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War. I think this may be my favorite Flashman book so far. I learned a lot (not the point of these books, I'm sure, but a delightful by-product of Fraser's extensive research) and Flashman just isn't grating on my nerves the way he used to. If I was reading these over, it's possible that I would advise reading them in in-book-chronological order, rather than the order they were published, as it occasionally gets tricky remembering what has and hasn't happened to Flashman yet—the conceit of the novels has Flashman himself writing them at an advanced age and he often refers to events from throughout his life.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

One of my favorite authors as a kid was H. Beam Piper and his trilogy of Fuzzy books (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, and Fuzzies and Other People)— about the discovery of a sapient race of small, fuzzy creatures on an alien world—were a big part of the reason why. A few authors have written sequels to the books, but John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation is instead a reboot, re-imagining the first book. If you're a Scalzi fan, as many people seem to be, I'll bet you'll like it just fine. For me, it's mainly served to put the Piper books back onto my reading list, to see if I like them as much now as I did in my teens.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

This Book is Not Good For You is the third book in the Secret series and it's the "taste" one. Chocolate is the central taste, and the book touches on the issue of child labor in chocolate harvesting, which I hadn't realized was a problem. This book was published in 2009 but it seems like within days of reading it, I was reading about Blood Chocolate all over the place. It's fair trade chocolate for me from now on, for sure.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I have to say, the titles of these books are really catchy. And this second book in the Secret series (it's the "sound" one) is a notch better than the first, I think.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I mean, if your sister interviews a famous anonymous author, the least you do is read the darn books, right? Especially if the first book in the series is just a 99¢ ebook. Well, that combo worked on me, anyway. The Name of This Book Is a Secret is the first book in the Secret series, about a pair of kids who get caught up in the ancient struggle between the Midnight Sun, a deranged group of alchemists bent on discovering the secret of immortality, and the Terces* Society, who know the secret and are determined to protect it and thwart the Midnight Sun.

I have to say that at first glance, there was a lot about the book that reminded me of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, especially the device of the narrator, himself involved in the action somehow, trying to warn you away from reading the book. But the Secret series is it's own thing and has it's own devices. For one, each of the books revolves around one of the five senses. This first book it's smell. Hmm... smelly.

Anyway, it's pretty good for the first book in a kids' book series that the author admits he made up as he went along.

FuzzyCo grade: B

* Secret spelled backwards. Get it?

Flashman & the Redskins brings a rather late in his career Flashman back to the United States and finds him mixed up with George Custer, the Indian Wars and eventually surviving, in typical Flashman fashion, the Battle at Little Bighorn.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was so enthralled by The City & the City, and I had just been given a Nook by Erica for our anniversary*, so I thought I'd see what China Mieville e-books I could borrow from the Chicago Public Library and Kraken popped up. It's a very different book from TC&tC—it's a journey through a secret magical city within London. You know, one of those. But a very good one of those.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Yes, I'm catching up on my reviews from August. La la la.

The City & the City is a mind-blowing noir-ish mystery novel set in a city that is also another city, sort of overlaid. Sort of. It's very hard to explain, and really, discovering the nature of the thing is a great part of the journey of the book.

FuzzyCo: A

Flashman's Lady adds a new twist to the well-set format of the Flashman series—Flashman's wife Elspeth is (SPOILERS!) kidnapped and throughout Flashman's memoirs extracts from Elspeth's diary are inserted. The historical backdrop of this volume is the reign of Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar and fighting pirates in Borneo. And I don't know if I'm just becoming inured to Flashman after six of these novels, or if Fraser lightened him up over the years, but I'm really starting to get into this books as adventures and not quite noticing how incredibly terrible of a person Flashman is.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Rule 34 is a sequel to Halting State and like that book is a near-future policing mystery, is written almost entirely in the second person ("you are standing in a room…") and has a fairly confusing plot. Great characterization and feel-spot-on technology speculations make the whole thing worth it.

FuzzyCo grade: A

You know, if I'm going to write reviews I really should do them right after I read the book. Art & Fear was a) short and b) about art… and fear. I was inspired at the time, but I'm not sure I could tell you a lesson I learned from it. But let's blame my memory and not the text.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I'm chugging through the Flashman books and this one was even more of a history lesson for me. Despite all his best efforts, Flashman is back in India and cowards his way through the Sepoy Mutiny. I knew bits and pieces about this important episode in Indian and British history, but neither the scope nor details and Fraser really fills in a ground-level view of the time.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Have I ranted before about my main problem with mainstream superhero comics? (That's not rhetorical, I'm writing this on the train into work, so I can't easily check.) It's not anything about the underwear-on-the-outside suits or the unrealistic superpowers or the exaggerated story-telling or anything. It's that they never end. In the back of everyone's head when they're writing Superman issue #436 is that there's going to be an issue #437 and #438 and #536 and so on. So there are narrative arcs, but no one can change too much, because the whole thing has to keep rolling along. Individual writers even take chances, killing off favorite characters and so on, but then someone else always comes along and figures out how to bring them back from the DeadZone or whatever and so the reader learns not to get too worked up about any particular change -- it'll all be back to the status quo soon enough. It's my same problem with ongoing TV shows. I so much prefer stories that set out with an end in sight. Annnd, I just remembered that I did just rant about this in regards to Planet Hulk. Oh well.

So anyway, Y: The Last Man is not one of those stories. Brian Vaughan set out to tell a huge story -- what if every male animal on earth, including humans, died all at once? Except for one man and one monkey. And he did it in 60 issues of a monthly 24-page comic book.

Reading it all at once, like DVD-bingeing on an episodic TV show, it's perhaps not as even as something written all at once would be. There are definitely both some sections that feel crammed into 24 page chunks and others where there's some padding going on. And the very end of the story maybe feels like it has a bit of a deus ex machina to cram a happy ending on the thing. But overall it's an excellent story (that ends!).

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I can't pretend to give you any sort of objective review of Predator* because it was written by my friend Matt. But I'm really glad I read it—we've talked about his day job, but when we get together we usually talk more about improv or beer, so there were plenty of stories here I didn't know at all. And they'll all be new stories to you, about a fascinating new facet of modern warfare.

FuzzyCo grade: He's one of my best friends, of course it's awesome!

* colon: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story

OK, I'm going to stop protesting about how disturbed I am by Flashman and all of his terrible, terrible behavior, because obviously something is keeping me reading the series. I can't tell if Fraser has toned down Flashman's terribleness, or if I'm just getting used to him. Flashman at the Charge finds our (anti-)hero in the Crimean war and eventually at the battle immortalized in Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade. And when I say immortalized, you know of course that I mean I'd heard of the poem and assumed it referred to a battle, but had never read the whole thing nor really knew that much about that whole war, so if nothing else these books are getting me somewhat educated.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

When You Reach Me is a young-adult 12 Monkeys. With sleep-overs and lost friendships.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I started watching Justified after the first season, which was good for me because I was able to gorge on those thirteen episodes and then terrible as I was that most unusual of things—caught up on a running TV show. I had to wait a week between episodes. The horror.

Anyway, I'm an Elmore Leonard fan, so I thought I'd check out the source material—a short story called "Fire in the Hole" that's found in the collection When the Women Come Out to Dance. Many of the stories are concentrated Leonard-style moments—there's one that's just two pages long. Good stuff. And now how long do I have to wait for Season 3?

FuzzyCo grade: A

Ship Breaker is set in the same oil-depleted, global-warming-flooded world as The Windup Girl. But where The Windup Girl is pretty adult, both in terms of the complexity of the plot and some of the subject matter (sex, I'm talking about sex), Ship Breaker is a young adult novel with a more straighforward plot. Though, if anything, SB is even more gritty than TWG. Teenage Nailer is not an orphan, but he might as well be, living with his crew scavenging scrap materials from the now-useless giant ships left over from our era. And then there's a big storm. And then... adventures. But gritty and grimy adventures.

FuzzyCo grade: A

If you're an orphan , say being raised by a crazy aunt, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have some sort of adventure in your teens. I guess the question is just whether it's creepy or mysterious or pirates or, as with The Order of Odd-fish, heading off to a mystical island that no-one can see and there are giant talking cockroaches and maybe, just maybe, you're an ancient and evil being. I'm not complaining! I love the mysterious orphan genre.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Planet Hulk was a run of the Incredible Hulk comic where the titular character was shot off into space by a group of civic-minded superheroes: Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Dr. Strange, etc). He lands on a far-off planet, is forced into gladiatorial games, leads a revolt, etc. There are some references to the broader Marvel universe—his misfit band of rebels includes a Brood, for example—but in general it's a stand-alone space opera, with both adventure and some dark and serious reflections.

And then, in just the kind of move that generally keeps me from reading Marvel and DC superhero comics, there's an abrupt and contrived ending that sends the Hulk back to Earth to exact his revenge on the superheroes who exiled him. World War Hulk is one of those grand multi-title cross-over events that just always fall flat for me. These stories always set out to be grand and world-changing, but of course the world can't change too much, because then how would we keep all our 70 different titles chugging along with their endless stories. Blegh.

FuzzyCo grade: PH - B+, WWH - D

I picked up The Death Defying Pepper Roux off the same display at the library as I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, but it's a very different book. Set in France in the 1920s or '30s (or so), Pepper Roux has been certain since birth that he will die at 14. So on that birthday he leaves home to meet that fate and along the way has a series of episodic adventures. The adventures are anything but cliched—at one point, Pepper becomes a reporter who only writes good, if fictional, stories. And the language is just a delight to read.

FuzzyCo grade: A

You know, you're standing in the line at the library to check out your very adult books and they've got the 'Recommended for Young Readers' display right there and how can you pass up a title like I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President.

There are a couple of places where Lieb is maybe trying a little too hard (good luck on actually getting kids interested in Captain Beefheart, for example) but this book is as funny as the title suggests. And do I need to summarize the plot?

FuzzyCo grade: A-

There's a lot not to like about the webcomic Penny Arcade. The comics are often obtusely tied to a ephemeral news item that requires a ton of explaining in the news post associated with the comic (replicated somewhat in these collections by commentary on each comic). They're often violent, crass, vulgar, and obscene. And naughty.

And I love the comic. I can go back and read these comics on the web for free whenever I want and I'm still snatching up these collections as they appear.

FuzzyCo grade: A

J.S.G. Boggs* is an artist whose work has often revolved around money. His best known works are hand-drawn replicas of bills which he will try to exchange for goods valued below the face value of the bill and get change for his pains--the change from the bill, the receipt, and the goods then become the work that he will sell to a dealer or collector. Because his work sorta kinda involves forgery and/or counterfeiting, is work has occasionally gotten him governmental attention, both in the US and the UK.

This slim book is expanded from a magazine profile of Boggs. There's some interesting stuff here about process as art, and some overwrought stuff about the nature of money, and some dialog that drove me crazy. I'm guessing one of two things is true: either Weschler designates as quotes things that are actually paraphrased through his own stilted style, or everyone who spoke to him really does speak in the same awkward way. So there's that.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

* Doesn't that sound like a made-up name for a mad steampunk genius?

Here's sort of an anti-spoiler spoiler about The Hunger Games—I was waiting the whole book for signs of hope or resistance to the dystopian regime that forces two teenagers from each of it's subjugated Districts to fight to the death in the titular annual games. And it never came. Our hero, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, [spoilers!] survives to the end of the book (yay) but without changing a thing about her society, and in fact spends the last few pages of the book conforming to expectations so as to avoid the danger she's created from the way she won the competition. A cunningly disguised message to our youth that the best you do is survive the system, so don't try and change a thing, or clever way of enticing you to read the later books in the trilogy so as to hopefully reduce the depressing feeling the end of this book leaves? The Chicago Public Library has a bit of a wait for the second book, so I can't tell you which it is, yet.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Flash for Freedom! is the third of George MacDonald Fraser's novels about the anti-hero Flashman. I've written before about my mixed feelings towards Flashman and his general loathsome-ness. Here, Flashman gets caught up in the Atlantic slave trade and his main concern is not moral concern about slavery, but about the trade's illegality in 1848 and getting caught.

It's obvious that Frasier researches the historical settings of these novels with care (these are adventure stories with footnotes) and the descriptions of the slave transport were particularly disturbing. There's a lighter side to the book as well—Flashman meets Abraham Lincoln and lives out part of the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I'm continuing to read the series, but I don't know if enjoy would be the right word to describe my appreciation of the books.

But here's an odd little footnote of my own about someone who evidently did enjoy the book. The Chicago Public Library has books 1, 2, and 4 of this series, but not this one. I don't know if it's the topless woman on the cover or the slavery or just, you know, it's an obscure old book. But so I had to buy a used copy. And tucked into my copy was this yellowed note:

("Tom—This beats Lolita 10:1. Jack)

FuzzyCo grade: A

Well, in contrast, I Shall Wear Midnight is the 38th Terry Pratchett book set in his Disc World (though just the fourth in the more-Young Adult-oriented Tiffany Aching series) and I'd happily recommend it to anyone who hadn't read any of the others. I mean, it probably makes most sense in the context of the others three Tiffany Aching books, about a teenage girl who has become the witch of the Chalk (a sort of English countryside of the Discworld). Here Tiffany has settled in to her role as a witch, but comes up against The Cunning Man, an ancient creature that stirs up anti-witch sentiment in people. As always, despite the fantastical settings, Pratchett is decidedly a humanist writer—writing about human foibles, human aspirations, and human failings.

FuzzyCo grade: A

When you're a) a completist like I am and b) 13 books into a series, a new one comes out and you just have to read it. I'm not sure I'd recommend Cyroburn to anyone who hadn't already read at least some of the Vorkosigan books and enjoyed them.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I talk a lot about expectations and how that colors my enjoyment of media. And I guess I don't have a point about that except to say that, yeah, I do that and I'm going to keep doing it. For example, I had somewhere mis-read a review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and had the idea that it was about a Chinese-American kid who commits suicide or something. I was, in fact, completely wrong. The book is about a Dominican-American youth (who, yes, dies by the end of the book), and his family, and the history of the Dominican Republic. That sentence maybe makes it sound a little dry, a little ordinary. This is quite an extraordinary book. There's a lot of Spanish in the book, for instance, about a tenth of which I understand, but that was OK because it's written so well that I just kind of let it wash over me and carry me along. There's also a lot of nerdiness in the book, which might be the part that you don't understand, but man it spoke to me.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I've come to Rosanne Cash all backwards. I'm a Johnny Cash fan, I mean how can you not be, but before a few months ago I don't even think I was aware that he had any musician children. Then @rosannecash started showing up in a lot of retweets from people I like alot on Twitter. I followed her on Twitter and found her to be a hilarious master of the short form (and prolific - she's up to 22,000 tweets in just over a year. I'm at 2,600 in four years). She mentioned a memoir she'd released this year, Composed, and so I got that out from the library. And stories there got me interested enough to finally track down some of her music, so that I was then at the place a normal Rosanne Cash fan was since the early 80s.

Composed is obviously the memoir of a song-writer: it's comprehensive without being exhaustive. That is to say, she covers her entire life, from earliest memories to her recent life, but through selective episodes rather than a incident-by-incident coverage of all the events of her life. And events and memories are sketched out in description and details. Even if her life wasn't interesting, which it is, it's interesting just to read the way she's written about it.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

The Thousand is an odd sort of novel—sorta science-fictiony, sorta conspiracy theory, sorta thriller, sorta mystical. I finished it a few days ago and even sitting here now to write this, I'm still not sure if I actually liked it. But it was certainly interesting.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Clementine is a novella set in the same steampunky world as Boneshaker and Dreadnought. It's also a rarity in print (the hardcover of this novella is going for $65!) but cheap in a Kindle edition, so became my first purchase on that ebook platform (I don't have a Kindle, just the app for my iPhone). Anyway, the story. It's an airship chase (that's how you know it's steampunk!) and a fun little adventure.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Crimeny, why do I do this to myself? The second volume of a Scott Westerfeld trilogy comes out and I read it right away and now I'm going to have to wait a year or whatever to find out how these rollicking adventures conclude. Dangit. Anyway, Behemoth, steampunk and, I dunno, bioengineering-punk, alternate pre-WWI, a girl dressing as a boy to join the Royal Air Navy, a young Duke on the run, mecha fights, etc. A year?

FuzzyCo grade: A

My friend Michael Strening, Jr, in addition to being an awesome musician, is teaching middle school social studies this year and he told us about a book that his class was reading—Cod by Mark Kurlansky. His description, that the book was an examination of the last thousand years or so of North Atlantic history through the lens of the titular fish, was really intriguing. Especially since I've just finished listening to the BBC's podcast of A History of the World in 100 Objects, which similarly examines history through things and what they can tell us about particular peoples and times.

Cod didn't disappoint—there's the history of cod fishing itself, and then ways that that fishing interacted with other historical movements. For example, the notion that the American Revolution, for all its lofty philosophical ideals, was likely sparked by the financial independence the colonies had already achieved, fueled largely by the cod trade out of Boston. There's quite a bit about the modern state of cod fishing and the decline of cod populations due to overfishing. And sprinkled throughout are recipes for cod that really make me want to try some salt cod.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Cherie Priest's Dreadnought is a semi-sequel to her Boneshaker—set in the same steampunky alternate history where the Civil War has lasted twenty years so far, and a mysterious gas in the Northwest is turning people into something like zombies. You know, the usual. And like the earlier book, we're following a woman who's already living in hard times as she heads into unwanted adventure for the sake of family. Here, it's Mercy Lynch, nurse for the Confederate Army, who makes the cross-continent journey from Virginia to the Washington territories. Along the way, she's caught up in intrigue and adventure when she catches a ride on the Union's premiere locomotive, the titular Dreadnought, on a mysterious mission to the west coast.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Probably the most interesting thing about Inconceivable is the structure—it's presented as alternating diary entries from a couple who are experiencing fertility issues. And when the characters get off topic and go on comedic rants, it's reasonably funny. But the main storyline is overwrought, overcomplicated, and for a supposedly comedic novel, not very funny. So.

FuzzyCo grade: C

The Faggiest Vampire has the subtitle "A Children's Story". And the crazy thing is, it is. And it's a good one. It's just... that word. They use that word a lot through the book. And, in the book, it's a good word. Vampires really want to be faggy. It's just... you know. That word.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Erica has been reading all of Laurie Notaro's collections of humorous essays and cackling like a madwoman all the way through (LLOLing*, in fact) so I figured I should check one of them out. Notaro's first collection, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club, was a fast read. Her misadventures while drinking and smoking far too much didn't resonate quite as much with me as with Erica** it was pretty funny.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* Literally Laughing Out Loud
** Why that might be is left as an exercise to the reader.

I went straight from finishing The Protector's War to A Meeting at Corvalis. The action jumps ahead a few years again, and we finally have the war promised in the title of the last book. There are big battles, even more swashbuckling, and a bit of romance and the evolution of the day-to-life in this changed world. The trilogy ends in a very satisfying fashion, but I can't wait to read the next four(!) books set in this universe.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The second book in the Dies The Fire trilogy keeps things ticking along. The book takes place six and eight years after the Change of the first book—there are interspersed chapters that flashback to a group of English refugees that give us a picture of what's been going on in the wider world. In Oregon, the chaos of the early years is coalescing into something like small nations, but the Protector of Portland isn't pleased with any competition and gears up for war. Spoiler alert: the title of the book is a bit of a tease. There is a lot of preparing for war in this book, and some battles, but no real all-out war. There are a number of extraordinary coincidences, but enough swashbuckling adventure to distract from those.

The book also continues to meet my particular pet peeveishness: despite being the middle book in a trilogy, it begins and ends in a very satisfying fashion that one could finish as a standalone read.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've read Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death several times, and once drove up to Chicago (before I lived here) to see Lifeline Theatre's stage adaptation—it's one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. This last time through I was listening to the audio version, available free from pinkwater.com. It's read by Daniel Pinkwater himself, which one of my friends remarked would drive her crazy. It's true that Pinkwater has a fairly gruff and distinctive voice. YMMV.

The story is a classic Pinkwater wacky adventure and one of the stars of the tale is a lightly-fictionalized Chicago (the Chicken Man was a real person!). The germs of my love for Chicago were definitely planted in this and other Pinkwater books.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Dies the Fire starts with a completely ridiculously-science-fictional event*: in an instant, electricity and explosives all over the world stop working. Millions die in car crashes, planes, etc. Cities become death-traps of starvation and disease. The novel mainly follows two small bands of survivors in the Pacific Northwest. It's a grand adventure and a good read, but also kind of freaked me out. It really made me think about our modern lives, how far our food comes from, and so on.

I do have to give the book props for avoiding a specific pet peeve of mine: it's a first book of a trilogy, but comes to a very satisfying conclusion instead of a cliffhanger.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Or maybe actually "fantasy", as it's never really explained, it's just the launching-off point for the rest of the novel.

We're 2/3 of the way through Shaun's "get Fuzzy to watch all the Godfather movies" project and so I couldn't resist when I came across a copy of the original book at a garage sale. I was really curious to see how much better the book was going to be than the movie—you know, because they almost always are. Oh my, how much better the movie is. Every scene that was cut out of the book needed to be—there are big long sections that are weird things about Hollywood and sex. And the movie, of course, is much more show than tell, but oh lordy how much "tell" there is in the book.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I think the Chicago Public Library had put their "science fiction" sticker on This is Not a Game, but it's not just not a game, it's also not really science fiction. It's a thriller that happens to involve computers. Dagmar designs Alternate Reality Games (which are a real thing) and first finds herself using her gamer resources to escape a crisis in Indonesia and then, back in the States, to investigate a murder.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Sometimes even published authors get tired of trying to sell something they've written and just want to give it away so that people can read it. And so Will Shetterly has made Midnight Girl available (though there a few ways you can pay him if you like). It's a young adult novella about a young woman with a mysterious family. And in such a short book there are enough twists and turns that I almost hate to say more lest I spoiler the spoilers.

FuzzyCo grade: A

For a young adult novel about people who play video games, For the Win is pretty serious—it's also about labor organizing, the developing world, oppressive regimes, violence, sexism, and you know, changing the world. And like all of Cory Doctorow's work it's available for free download (though he doesn't mind if you go buy it).

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I read the first book of the Clan Corporate series, The Family Trade, goodness, four years ago. And where I was, then, a little miffed that the book just sort of stopped*, I'm glad I waited until the whole series was out before tackling the rest, because I just blew through the five remaining books in a week or so, to the point where I couldn't at this point tell you what happened in one book or another.

The great thing about these books is that they take an old fantasy trope—what if you discovered that you that your real parents were magical and you could just walk from this world to a fantasy land of princes and princesses—and imbues it with a modern spirit. Our heroine, for example, is not a child but a capable adult, an investigative reporter with the skills and drive to really delve into what she's discovered. And the fantasy land is not a two-dimensional landscape, it's a medieval landscape with politics, economic struggles, and issues all it's own. The only downside to this realistic treatment of a fantastical subject is a point where the books bog down a little in the middle as Stross sort of writes our heroine into a corner where even her capable resources are rendered helpless in the face of all the forces arrayed against her. Perhaps it's realistic that a single person is often powerless against historical forces, but it's sort of a drag in the middle of an adventure series.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

The Hidden Family
The Clan Corporate
The Merchants War
The Revolution Business
The Trade of Queens

* It was, I discovered, really just half of a longer book that Stross had to chop up because his publisher said, no we're not going to publish something that long—this six volume series is really just a trilogy of longer books.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi takes place in a fascinating, gritty future. It's post-peak oil and post-global warming flooding. The landscape is ravaged by plagues of genetically-modifed diseases that affect crops and people alike. Great 'calorie companies' in the US and India dominate the global economy with the crops resistant to the plaques, but sterilized so that everyone must return to them for sustenance. The book takes place in a turbulent Thailand, struggling to remain independent even as the sea threatens on one hand and disease on the other.

There's a wide cast of characters and if I have a complaint it's that the plot got a little coincidental when some of the widely-flung characters began to interact with each other. It's a book of such strong and vivid ideas that I almost wonder if the book was a little longer than it needed to be as Bacigalupi wanted to show us more of this intriguing world, but was having to stretch his plot to do so.

But those are trifles. The book was certainly affecting. A third of the way of the way through, I was at work unpacking a shipment of harddrives and discarding handful after handful of styrofoam packaging and the waste of it all, compared to the threadbare, worn down world depicted in the book really hit me with a punch.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Confessions of Peter Crossman is a collection of three short stories about the titular Crossman, a hard-boiled detective type who happens to be a Knight Templar, one of 'thirty and three' warrior-priests of the secret Inner Circle of that already secret society. This is the sort of thing—noir plus magic—which, when done right, is totally my cup of tea. And this is done right. Crossman wisecracks and fights demons and fallen men with equal aplomb.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Apocalypse Door is a full-length novel featuring Crossman and I'm sad to say that I think the character might be better suited to punchy short stories. In particular, there are periodic flashbacks that introduce us to a pre-conversion Crossman in his previous life as a spy and I'm not sure that that level of emotional depth and back story is needed nor works for a dark-and-mysterious character like Crossman.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I'm a manager at work and my boss asked me to read this book about managing that has informed some his management style. That's a great opportunity—to explicitly know where your boss is coming from. And the information presented in the book seems actually useful as well—it's a philosophy and process for handling the times when an employee has failed to meet expectations: missed a deadline, turned in work with mistakes or not up to quality, etc. The process is fairly straightforward. It's about fostering an environment based in reality and honesty.

There's a couple things that frustrated me: Like with many of this sort of business book, the essential notion could probably be expressed in a pamphlet, but no one's going to pay $20 for a pamphlet, so it's been padded out. Also, the writing is very stiff and businessy. And the example conversations in the book are all so simplistic as to drive me crazy. (The Boss makes the point that it's simple to make the points. But does it all have to sound like people in a 1950s industrial film?)

But that reality and honesty stuff. Man, that's some powerful ideas there.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I think I like Makers the most of any Cory Doctorow book so far. It's near-future science-fictional, but reads like a history of a real technology project/movement, ala The Soul of a New Machine or something. And it doesn't hurt that I was able to legitly download it for free and read it on my iPhone.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Rework is the latest book from 37signals, the company behind web apps like Basecamp and Highrise. Much like their earlier book, Getting Real, and their popular blog Signal vs Noise, the book consists of very short chapters with oft-provocative statements (like, if you're pulling all-nighters a lot it doesn't mean you're hardcore, it means you've managed your time badly) backed up with some examples from their own or others' businesses. It was a quick, easy read but I'm still processing how or whether I can really apply most of their suggestions to my daily work (I don't control enough at work to put the suggestions into play) or to my extracurriculars (I so rarely try to make money off comedy, I'd really hesitate to call it a business). But if you're involved in any sort of business it's definitely worth a read, at the very least to challenge the standard notions of how business should be conducted.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Sandman Slim sounds, on paper, like it would be right up my alley. A occult noir set in a modern LA, featuring a hit man newly back from Hell. But I just think it's trying a little too hard to be cool. And the way it's all set up at the end for endless sequels was so clunky that it really turned me off.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Who doesn't love dark tales of swashbuckling and polar bear-fighting in the frozen north, especially in comic book form? This guy does, for sure.

FuzzyCo: A

Boneshaker is an interesting alternate-history/science-fiction/steampunk novel because it doesn't try to explain absolutely everything about the world it's taking place in. The world is, there's the feeling, the way it is, and searching too hard for explanations is hardly worth it. So, we're in a world where a Civil War-era Seattle has been devastated by a gaseous Blight, unleashed by Leviticus Blue's titular Boneshaker, a tunneling machine. Now Blue's son has gone into the city to see if he can redeem his father's name and his ex-wife has to venture into the city to save her son. There are zombies and airships and swashing and buckling. And hard truths and family revelations.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan and when the last Discworld book, Making Money, was not that great I wondered if maybe after 36 books in a series, Pratchett had finally run out of things to say. Nation allayed my fears that Pratchett was out of creativity in general and now Unseen Academicals has restored my faith in the Discworld series. It's an interesting look at sports and fashion and class-consciousness and destiny and so on. Maybe there's a bit much jammed all up at once in the book that could have been spread out over two or three books, but I'll understand if Pratchett is rushing to get his ideas out.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've read Lizard Music a couple of times before, and seen the stage version that Lifeline Theater did in 1997. This time I was listening to an audio version, read by the author, which you can download for free from pinkwater.com. A friend, recalling some of Daniel Pinkwater's NPR appearances, said that to listen to his voice for two and a half hours might kill her. And it's true that it's a gravely voice. But I just get so caught up in Victor's adventures alone in a thinly-disguised Chicago. The fact that the Chicken Man was a real person always makes me wonder if then there's also a invisible crystal island floating out in the middle of Lake Michigan.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Charlie Stross seems darker in the short stories in Wireless than he is in his longer works. For example, the Lovecraft-meets-James Bond notion he explores in his humorous The Laundry books appears here in a much darker mediation on the horrors of the Cold War. That's not a bad thing, neccessarily, it's just different than what I was expecting.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I think that my enjoyment of More Information Than You Require, sequel to John Hodgman's book of fake trivia The Areas of My Expertise, was enhanced by having seen him read some selections from the book before I read it, and so I was hearing his inimitable voice in my head throughout the book. So perhaps the best way to enjoy it is in what he calls the "audioback" version. I can't be sure—having just finished the paper version I'm not going to go back and listen to all 20 or whatever hours. I don't have that kind of time, people.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Liar is a novel about a girl is a compulsive liar and whose boyfriend has just died. And if I respect author Justine Larbalestier's request not to give away of the twists and turns of the novel, that's about all I can say, because the twists begin twisting right away. Except to say that it's a giant mindfuck of a book and Micah is the very definition of an unreliable narrator. Man, I'm still thinking about this one.

FuzzyCo grade: A

On the way home from seeing the Fantastic Mr. Fox movie we swung into a bookstore to grab a copy of the book to see how much Wes Anderson had made up for the film. Most of it, it turns out. Oh, Mr. Fox, you rascal.

FuzzyCo grade: A

What finally tipped The Time Traveler's Wife onto my to-read list was someone's off-handed comment that it was set in Chicago and was very much a book of the city. And that's true, especially with regard to details—occasionally taken to a ridiculous extreme as when Henry, the titular time-traveling husband, describes (accurately) the two different bus routes needed to get to a particular jazz club. But for a Chicago-phile those details were merely the icing on a wonderful cake of a novel. This is a rich meaty story of two people's love, with the ups and downs and ins and outs, with a complex and artfully constructed time-travel story woven in.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I had harsh words for the character of Flashman after I read the first book in George MacDonald Fraser's series. But there was something that compelled me to seek out more of his (mis)adventures and so I picked up Royal Flash from the library. Maybe it's that the novel is a pastiche of one of my childhood favorites, The Prisoner of Zenda, or that Flashman is less a victim of his own worst instincts than of the machinations of others. Regardless, I found him less loathsome and more the likable (to a degree) rogue.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I picked up A Confederacy of Dunces years ago and I wasn't ready for it at all—I think I read a page and a half and set it back down. But I came home from my latest trip to New Orleans and felt like I was ready to tackle one of that city's classics. Even so, it was slow going until page 180 or so when things really clicked for me. I'm not sure if there was anything special about that sequence (when Ignatius first visits Paradise Vendors) or if that's just how long it took for me to become immersed in Ignatius J. Reilly's world, but from there to the end of the book I was enthralled and wildly entertained.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

The titular character of Flashman is a complete anti-hero. He has all the worst qualities of his Victorian age -- racism, sexism, classism -- with no redeeming personal characteristics. He's a coward, a bully, a toady, and a liar. He is, however, our narrator (oh, he's promised that he's not lying to us, the reader) and so there's, if nothing else, a sort of horrid fascination about how he's going to survive to the end of the book. Why do I want to read more of the books about this horrible person?

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I'm going to be glib and say that The Magicians is Harry Potter and Narnia meets Bret Easton Ellis. But it really does combine the best of "there's a hidden world of magic" with "disaffected young adults try to find their place in the world". I couldn't put it down—every time I thought I knew where the book might be going, it threw me another curve ball.

FuzzyCo grade: A++

I don't feel like I can review An Off Year because I'm friends with Claire Zulkey. But I really enjoyed this very internal story of a young woman who decides on the first day of college that, for reasons not entirely clear to herself, college is not for her and she's returns to her father's house in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Not much happens, but it not-happens in an interesting way.

Related: Unboxing An Off Year

I'd read a few of the Flashman series of books when I was much younger and recently found the first of the series on the free table at work. Opening up the first pages I learned that the main character of those books was based on an antagonist of the titular hero in the British classic Tom Brown's Schooldays. That book is from 1857 so it's public domain, so boom it got downloaded to Stanza on my iPhone* and I read the book over several months in waiting-in-line type situations.

I've had mixed luck lately with reading classics, and I was expecting something a little saccharine. And it's true that as Flashman says on the first page of his book, "Hughes … was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts." But despite the direct-to-the-reader preachiness that occupies great swathes of Tom Brown's School Days, it's still an easy read, a sort of pastorale of a (privileged) young man's life and schooling in the English public school system, specifically at Rugby in the 1830s.

* Didn't I promise not to bore you with details of how I'm reading books. Oops.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I was lucky enough to win an advance copy of Scott Westerfeld's new book Leviathan and I just devoured it this morning.

The book is set in an steam-punky alternate-history World War I. The Germans and their allies are the "Clankers"—relying on giant walking mechanical war machines. The British are "Darwinists"—using genetic engineering to create all sorts of creatures, including the titular whale-based airship.

We get to see these different realms through two very different protagonists. Alek is the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and as you might expect in a book about World War I, he's an orphan by the end of the first chapter and is soon on the run from his father's political enemies. Deryn is a young British woman who has disguised herself as a boy in order to join the British Air Service.

It's a rip-roaring adventure. Westerfeld does action scenes like nobody's business, and there's plenty of that, but there's also all your great bildungsroman elements as Alek, especially, begins to grow from a child to privilege to a young man with a weighty responsibility on his shoulders.

The only thing wrong, at all, with the book is that it's the first of a trilogy and so I'm going to have to wait years, likely, to read the whole story. And this book definitely ends on a cliff-hanger. Can they evade the (spoilers)? What's going to happen to the (spoilers)? And what are the (spoilers)?

FuzzyCo grade: A+

The Child Garden is a science fiction novel set in a future where viruses teach you everything you need to know at age 2 and all cancer has been cured with the unfortunate side-effect that no ones lives past 35 or so. And then things get weirder from there.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Jeffrey Brown's Cat Getting Out of a Bag is the comic book equivalent of sitting around with another cat owner and saying, "does your cat do that thing where they sit in a window and look at squirrels and make that weird chirping sound? Yeah, mine does too." I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Magic Thief: Lost continues the adventures of Conn, the street thief turned wizard and it's a worthy sequel to the first book. The worst part is the cliff hanger ending, so now I'm on tenter hooks until the next book comes out.

FuzzyCo grade: A

In the post-Harry Potter world, I'm sure there's a glut of "orphan discovers he's a wizard" books, but The Magic Thief: Stolen stands out on several grounds. Our orphan hero, Conn, is an unrepentant street thief and the book has a fairly gritty feel (for, at least, a YA fantasy novel). There really feels like there's a complexity and history to the world and the way magic works in it. And all of the main characters have delightfully human flaws, and redeeming qualities.

FuzzyCo grade: A

And thanks to authors releasing their own works under various licenses, ebook reading is not just for the classics (I refer, of course, to my own recent reading of Dracula). I won't bore you much more with descriptions of the exact medium on which I consume any particular book ("the paper was a delightfully robust stock…") but I'm happy to report that once again Stanza on iPhone was a perfectly adequate novel-delivery-system.

Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede lives at the wacky adventure/magic realism end of science fiction, where the alien intelligences behind the events of the novel might as well be angels and demons for all the light scifi veneer of robots and so on. But that's fine, because the story's a subtle interweaving of a meditation on American music of the twentieth century, and of the life of a single mother and her son, and the aforementioned wacky adventure, sparked when Buddy Holly appears on every television in the world, speaking seemingly from the surface of Ganymede (one of the moons and Jupiter) and telling everyone that for more information they should contact Oliver Vale, our humble protagonist. Any one of the elements might have fallen short for me, but the combination really captivated.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've been intrigued by the various dedicated ebook reader devices since I saw the first Sony Reader. But since I'm almost always carrying a smartphone and/or gaming device, I've always figured that I should be able to find a reader application for one of those that would let me read ebooks. With Stanza on the iPhone, I think I've finally found a reader that fits enough text on the screen, and gets out of the way of the reading process as much as possible, that I can really effortlessly read an entire novel.

Dracula was my first test. I chose it because of my ongoing read-all-the-scifi-classics project (and because it's free) but it turns out that long Victorian sentences made for an extra-strong test -- if I can handle that verbosity on the fairly small iPhone screen, then anything written with any sort of punch should be no problem.

On to the book itself: The entire book is told through the interleaving of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, ships logs, etc. For the first half of the book, this increases the suspense -- each participant has glimpses of the bigger picture, but no one sees everything. But by the second half of the novel, the vampire hunters are swapping diaries and journals and an inordinate amount of the action is spent on characters reading each other's accounts of the day before. It all begins to seem a bit recursive.

The action seems fairly stilted, too, by modern standards. Van Helsing spends a lot of time half-heartedly raising ineffectual defenses around poor Lucy ("nobody touch these garlic strands, but I won't tell anyone why, and in fact won't tell everyone in the house -- oops, one of those people removed them") and only gets around to slowly telling everyone. And hey, that ancient and crafty vampire who keeps getting around Van Helsing's best efforts? Yeah, Van Helsing's got a theory about how Dracula's got a "child brain" so they should be able to easily defeat him. Okaaaaay.

And then, can I spoil the end of the novel for you? Dracula is trapped in a box on a boat and they wait to chase after him because they're confident of train schedules. Really. Amazingly, even with his "child brain", he manages to elude them and travel, still trapped in a box, by cart as they chase him for pages and pages until they catch up to him just before his castle and... dispatch him in a page and a half. The end. I can see why even even adaptations that trumpet their connection to the original, change the story.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Where The Neddiad was (kinda, sorta, mostly) set in the real world, The Yggyssey (How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There) starts in the same world, but quickly moves to a parallel, more surreal world where Iggy, a young woman introduced in the first book, makes a perilous, episodic journey (much like, say, The Odyssey).

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization is classic Pinkwater. Ned and his eccentric family move from Chicago to Los Angeles on a whim, encountering a raft of odd characters and foreboding events, culminating in an epic battle, sorta, to save the world.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I'm a fan of Heather Armstrong's blog dooce. Not a read-it-every-day fan, but a always-laugh-when-I-do fan. So I was looking forward to her book, It Sucked and Then I Cried. It's OK, and probably a good entry into the having-a-baby-isn't-all-wine-and-roses genre (if there is such a genre). And she sure can turn a phrase. My one disappointment was that there didn't seem to be a flow to the book. This happened and then that happened and then hilarious description and then that happened. I almost feel embarrassed saying it, because it's such easy criticism, but it reads like a series of blog posts.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I've been enjoying all of Philip Reeve's Larklight books and the third one, Mothstorm: The Horror from Beyond Uranus Georgium Sidus!, is no exception. The Victorian steampunky spaceflight thing is still hitting all the right buttons in my brain.

FuzzyCo grade: A

It's been a few years since I read The Mysterious Benedict Society so I don't remember if the earlier book was quite as introspective about our young heroes' feelings of exclusion from the world, but The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey does live up to its title and deliver more action.

(Disclosure: the author is my boss' brother-in-law AND I'm going to see him at a wedding next week. So, no letter grade. I liked it, though.)

Daniel Pinkwater is one of my all-time favorite authors and so it was with a bit of surprise that the recent PR for his latest book made me realized that he had written several young adult novels that I had just plain missed. The Education of Robert Nifkin was my first catching up.

Nifkin follows the titular character as he attempts to make his way through high school in 1950s Chicago. It's territory Pinkwater has covered before, but this time Chicago is just Chicago (not "Baconburg" or "Hogtown") and there's no aliens or talking lizards. But the characters are just as large and vividly drawn and the city itself is as fascinating a character. I think I live in Chicago partly because of Pinkwater's love of the city.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Jill Conner Browne is best known for her series of (non-fiction) Sweet Potato Queens books of "Southern wit and wisdom". Erica assures me that those books are delightful -- she certainly laughs out loud a lot when she's reading them. On our recent roadtrip we listened to her first novel, titled, unsubtly enough, The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel. It's... a good first try, I suppose.

FuzzyCo grade: C

You know, I kinda gave Twilight some slack with a hand-waving "well, I'm not in the target audience" and then here comes Devilish to show the folly of that. Because it's aimed at the same target market - teenage girls with an interest in supernatural stories - and yet it's actually good.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style is a great execution of a simple idea. He creates a simple six-panel comic and then reinterprets that story over and over in 99 different styles. It's a great inspiration to think of different ways that you might approach your own creative endeavors.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Starcross: A Stirring Adventure of Spies, Time Travel and Curious Hats is the second book in the Larklight trilogy (series?) chronicling the adventures of Art Mumby and his family in an alternate steampunkish Victorian England where space travel is possible in more-or-less sailing ships. Fresh off of saving the entire Solar System from ancient spiders, Art and his mother and sister head to an asteroid resort hotel for a bit of relaxation, only to find them embroiled in a new adventure of, well, read the subtitle up there. Fun, smart stuff.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I saw a review of Adventures in Cartooning: How to Turn Your Doodles Into Comics on BoingBoing and thought it would be a good primer for my current cartoon project. It turns out it's all stuff I already know, but it would be a great book for a kid who's interesting in cartooning. The information is presented in an engaging narrative about a knight trying to rescue a princess from a dragon.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was pushing through the last few pages of House of Leaves at lunch and a coworker saw one of the distinctly typographically "interesting" pages open in front me. "Are you reading House of Leaves? I loved that book." "Well," I said, "frankly I'm hating it." "Hating how compelling it is?" "No, just plain hate-hating it."

The weird thing is that I should love it. I love multiple layers. I love footnotes. I love codes. I love nameless dread.

House of Leaves is a book that purports to be assembled (by "Johnny Truant") from a manuscript left in a box by an old blind man ("Zampano"). The manuscript concerns a documentary ("The Navidson Record") about a house that contains impossiblely large and shifting black corridors, and the terrible things that happens to everyone associated with the house. In Zampano's manuscript, the movie is a popular and widely-discussed artifact. In Truant's footnotes and extensive narrative, the movie does not exist.

Two main things turned me off. There's a lot of random sex. I'm no prude, but this is really gratuitous "Dear Penthouse Forum, I never dreamed it could happen to me..." level stuff.

And there's a lot of hand-waving about how creepy and deep all this stuff is. Without it ever being, to my mind, very scary at all. Late in the book, Truant meets some musicians who have written songs based on a "1st edition" of the book that we are ourselves reading.

"Take a look for yourself," he said, handing me a big brick of tattered paper. "But be careful," he added in a conspiratorial whisper. "It'll change your life."

Yeah, I read that same book. And it didn't.

FuzzyCo grade: C*

* A for effort, for Danielewski putting together this slab of complex text. And A+ for me reading the whole damn thing.

I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, I love going into a book (or movie or video game, etc) with no foreknowledge other than that someone whose taste I respect has recommended it. Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space is my latest success in that regard. So if you think we have similar tastes, you can stop reading right here and know that you'll likely like it as well.

If you require a bit more information, then know that Larklight is set in a universe where travel in space is possible in wooden vessels powered by engines developed by Sir Isaac Newton and so the British Empire has spread to all of the inner planets. Siblings Myrtle and Art Mumby are thrust into adventure when their home is invaded by some very strange visitors and they are soon off on a journey around the Solar System. Also, pirates.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has a great noir vibe, a great center-piece -- the world of trauma cleaning -- and a suitably f'ed up protagonist. The only problem I have is that Charlie Huston does this thing where instead of perfectly normal quotation marks and "he said"s, he just uses long dashes and never attributes a line of dialog. Which is a real shame, because the dialog would just flow in a very natural manner, except that every 3 pages I'd run across a line where I'd have to pause and parse out the action to figure out who was saying what.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I am not in the target audience for Twilight, a fact I had to remind myself over and over as I read through the book. I came into the book with a lot of preconceptions, based on all the hype over the movie and so on, and in general my preconceptions were proven true. Why did I read the dang thing, then? As a sometimes comedian, I figured I should stay in touch with the zeitgeist. And heck, I ended up liking all 8000 pages of Harry Potter. Twilight is not a bad book, it's just not a book for me. I mean, the big, climactic vampire fight happens offstage, while the narrator has fainted from pain. I like kisses as much as the next guy, but in books I like vampire fights as much, if not more, than kisses. This book likes kisses more.

FuzzyCo grade: C

My only complaint about Magic's Child is that, as the third book in a trilogy, the pacing suffers a little as Larbalestier has to cram in a ton of "remember who this is and what happened" and that some of the moral complexity that her characters are going through might be better explored in a longer work. And despite that catch-up exposition, I really wouldn't recommend this book if you haven't read the first two books in the trilogy.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Benighted has two great things going for it. It's a novel with a Big Idea: it's set in a world much like ours, only 99% of people were werewolves, and when they're wolves they're pure unthinking predators. The small percentage of people who are born with the birth defect that they don't transform are conscripted into a government agency who have to take care of lawbreaking 'lunes' on full moon nights. Whitfield does a great job of world-building and exploring the details of how such a society would function.

But it's also a very dark novel about some very damaged people caught in a terrible situation and that kept me turning pages as well.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children takes a science fiction cliche -- the sexbot -- and makes one the main character of a complex adventure set in a world-spanning culture that robots have cobbled together after the extinction of human beings. Nifty stuff.

My only complaint is the slightly embarrassing cleavage-tastic cover. I felt creepy carrying it on the train.

FuzzyCo grade: A

If you're looking for a pastiche of the mid-90s San Francisco rave scene ("Plugged" magazine or Cosmotology, anyone?) with a stilted metaphysical plot, then this is your ticket. And what kind of freak are you, anyway, that that's what you're looking for? Weirdo.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Justine Larbalestier's code name for How to Ditch Your Fairy was "the great Australian feminist monkey knife-fighting cricket Elvis mangosteen fairy novel" and I think that covers it.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Graveyard Book is (and the author acknowledges this) The Jungle Book, only instead of being raised in a jungle by animals, our hero is raised in a graveyard by ghosts and a vampire. And much as I said with Nation so recently, it's much, much better than that brief description might indicate.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm not a manager, but half of the essays in Managing Humans are aimed at understanding what's going on with your manager. Which I suppose makes sense, even if you are a manager, because unless you're the CEO even managers have managers. It's also aimed at the Software Engineering world, and even just being in IT there were a few chapters that I kinda raced through as not-useful-here. It's all written in a light, breezy style (much as Lopp's blog Rands in Repose) and I think I've got some useful info.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets is a dense book, but then the topic -- a full year spent with the Baltimore Police Homicide Department -- is worthy of an in-depth treatment. Little is glamorized here and there are times when I was surprised that the Baltimore PD agreed to let David Simon research the department to the extent he did. There's enough material here, in fact, that the book inspired two television series -- Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Ghost Brigades is perfectly serviceable science fiction (aliens! super soldiers! mind transfer!) set in the same universe as Scalzi's Old Man's War.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Terry Prachett's new book, Nation, is not a Discworld book, which is a bit of surprise since it's been, what, 12 years and as many books since he's written a non-Discworld one. (Not that I mind -- I've read them all.) And I suppose that might be a plus for folks who don't want to jump into the middle of a 30+ volume series. Anyhoodle, Nation. Sometime in the late 1800s, a tidal wave destroys a entire island nation, leaving only one native survivor -- a young man just returning from his month on the "Boy's Island" on his journey to manhood. The wave also shipwrecks a young English woman on the island. The situation almost seems like a cliche -- shades of Robinson Crusoe or Blue Lagoon -- but in Pratchett's hands it's anything but. This is a gut-wrenching tale of loss, a nuanced look at growing to adulthood, a questioning look at tradition and religion, and a rollicking adventure.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Dan Telfer's Bern, Switzerland is a (very short) fake guide book to the capital of Switzerland that Dan originally presented on stage as part of the Encyclopedia Show. It's hard to avoid comparisons to a certain compelling figure in the fake-fact genre, but Dan's book has a distinctly Telferian dark edge that spirals to a mystical high-point (with an absolutely perfect comedic capper).

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've heard good things for years about The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but I was always a little intimidated because it's such a huge book. It turns out it's half graphic novel, with large full-spread illustrations that you flip through rapidly, in a way that reminds of a flickery black-and-white movie -- appropriate because the book touches on the invention of the motion picture in France. So, it took just over a train ride to read the whole thing -- nowhere near as intimidating as I'd thought. The story suffers a little from "I can't tell you why I'm doing this because the book would be too short it's my secret" syndrome, but the illustrations are gorgeous and Hugo is a plucky young hero.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

A novella is, as the intro to this collection indicates, an odd duck. Longer than a short story, but without the in-depth detail of a novel. Fortunately, these three crime stories are all by masters of the genre and breeze along.

FuzzyCo grade: B

I'm still not sure what all I think about Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. I mean, sure, what about a hardboiled detective novel set in a alternate history where, post-WWII, Jews settled not in Israel but in Alaska is not to love? Maybe it's the wordiness -- Chabon never uses one word where ten will do. And the words are good words, it's just that there are so many of them. I hit a real slow down a third of the way into the book and took a break to read two other books. Once I got back into it, the book flowed along, though.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Charlie Stross' Halting State takes place in a near-future that's future enough that the event that kicks off the novel is a heist that takes place in a multi-player online game and it matters outside the game. But it's also "near-" enough that the police officer who is assigned to the case is a little flummoxed as to how to investigate such a thing. The book trucks along with expanding action and is quite a good read. Oh, and the whole thing is in second-person (as my clever wife pointed out, just like an old text adventure) which was nowhere near as distracting as I thought it might be.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo Award winner for Best SF novel) has an epic scope made personal. A planet-sized space ship materializes next to the moon and its mere gravitational presence alone causes earthquakes and massive tides that wreck havoc all over the earth. We follow a dozen main characters across the world (well, mostly in the US and England -- there's a token character on the other side of the world) as they struggle to survive the catastrophe, and in a few cases to understand it. Some of the novel rings archaic to my ear (like that token non-Westerner) but it's an adventure both grand and small.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I used to be such a big fan of mysteries, but I feel like lately I keep picking up books that aren't bad per se, but are simply pretty middle-of-the-road examples of the genre. Of course, the fact that I'm picking most of these up from the free table at work probably has something to do with that. Anyway, Acqua Alta by Donna Leon is a fine read, but nothing special. Commissario Guido Brunetti is just kind of this guy, you know, though he happens to do his policing in Venice, so that part was interesting. And that, really, is about it.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

So, my review of these two volumes is much the same as of the first two volumes, except that A) by volume 4 Scott is finally confronted with some of his slackeriness and has to, as the subtitle suggests, get it together and B) now I'm totally caught up to what's been published and so now I'm in that terrible state of waiting for TWO books to come out so I can find out WHAT HAPPENS!

FuzzyCo grade: A

Man, I wish Tim Powers wrote more books. I'm a total sucker for his "there is a secret mystical world hidden behind our history" gig. And even more impressive is that it's not the same secret-mystical-world in all his books -- he invents a new one for each book. In Three Days to Never it's that Einstein and Charlie Chaplin collaborated on (SPOILERS!) mystical time machine. Einstein's unknowing grandson and his daughter are caught up in a war between rival spy groups all seeking to control the device.

FuzzyCo grade: A

From the same discussion of Libertarian science fiction that led me to the Hostile Takeover trilogy came The Probability Broach. Oh lord, what a preachy mess. L. Neil Smith wants to wants to show us a Libertarian utopia, and to make it extra convincing he's contrasting it with the grim near-future of 1987. You've got to be a pretty good writer to have a major dramatic scene revolve around parlimentary procedures, and I don't think Smith quite has those chops.

FuzzyCo grade: D

S. Andrew Swann's Hostile Takeover trilogy of books came up in a discussion of "libertarian science fiction" and for some reason that notion caught my eye. There are plenty of anarchist and libertarian names and quotes scattered through the book, but really I'd say it's much more space opera than political fiction. Fortunately, it's entertaining space opera.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Scott Pilgrim is a manga-sized, episodic graphic novel about a Canadian indie-rocker/slacker named, wait for it, Scott Pilgrim. It's an intimate, funny look at Scott's dating life and his attempts to get his band off the ground. Scott's just met a new girl, Ramona Flowers, and before their relationship can move on, he's going to have to fight her 7 evil ex-boyfriends. And by "fight" I mean video-game-style fighting with kapows and booms and the loser disappears in a puff of smoke and leaves coins. (But not big video game coins, Canadian coins.)

There are six volumes planned (four of them are out) and I'm already chomping at the bit to read the next ones. As well, the books have just been optioned for Edgar Wright-directed, Michael Cera-starring movie, so this is your chance to read the books while it's still cool.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Persepolis is a great example of Harvey Pekar's observation that comics are "words and pictures... you can do anything with words and pictures." And what Marjane Satrapi has done is to tell both the broad story of her homeland, Iran, over the twentieth century and of her own very personal and idiosyncratic story from childhood to the end of her first marriage. It's been critically acclaimed out the wazoo and it was nice to discover that it was warranted.

FuzzyCo grade: A

And just when I had been about to give up on older science fiction, I run across a book like The Shockwave Rider. What an awesome psychedelic dystopian freakout. (And what a comment on today that 1975's dystopia seems pretty livable. And I find the third act hopelessly optimistic.)

FuzzyCo grade: A

Sigh. I had such high expectations, since I'm such a fan of Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory. Maybe I just need to stop reading 1960's science fiction. These two novels (it was an Ace Double) are set in a far-far future when the earth has been stripped of all resources and is thus prey to interstellar scavengers (the Kar-Chee). But despite its far flung premise, the characters all felt very "dress-up", especially in Rogue Dragon.

FuzzyCo grade: C

A Trouble of Fools is a pretty solid entry in the "quirky private investigator" genre. My biggest quibble would be that Carlotta Carlyle, the aforementioned quirky PI, seems like her character might have been assembled by some sort of MadLibs process -- she's an ex-cop, ex-cabbie, six-foot, redhead private eye who lives in Boston with a cat, her late aunt's parakeet and a crazy artist roommate. I guess others don't mind, because Linda Barnes has gone on to write 11 more novels about Carlyle. I don't think I'll be joining the throngs, however.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Given how easy it is for me to be sucked into book series, you'd think I'd be more careful than to read a book that's the first of (at this point) seventeen novels. Oops.

On Basilisk Station introduces Honor Harrington who is, more or less, a space (and female) version of Horatio Hornblower. Pretty good, if you like that sort of thing (space and naval fiction, that is).

FuzzyCo grade: B+

The only bad thing about Farthing was that our narrator, Lucy Kahn, was such an engaging character that I was quite terrified of anything bad happening to her. And there's definitely the hint that something unpleasant may be waiting in the wings. Farthing is much like a classic British country-house murder mystery, except that it's set in an alternate 1949 where Hitler has Europe and Britain. And someone wants to pin a murder on Lucy's Jewish husband, if the Star of David pinned to the victim's chest with a dagger is any indication.

Engaging, engrossing, exciting, terrifying. A wonderful, wonderful book.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I'm something of a completeist when it comes to book series. So it was a bit of surprise to discover that there was a Travis McGee detective novel that I hadn't read. And not a late addition to the series or anything: #8 of 21 novels. In retrospect, the mental checkbox for "read all of the McGee books" probably should be listed under "read all of the McGee books available at the Howard County Public Library in the early '80s."

So how does One Fearful Yellow Eye hold up to my early teen memories? For starters, this is something of an aberation for Travis McGee -- most of the books are set in South Florida and strongly informed, as would be books by my faves Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, by that location. This time, however, McGee travels to Chicago to help out an old friend. He's not a fan of my fair city.

In fact, McGee is not a fan of a lot of things. Hot-air hand dryers are part of the "international communist conspiracy" to make us "too irritable, listless, and disheartened to fight" one half-page rant informs us. I think the effect is supposed to be "McGee the manly he-man shoots straight from the hip", but to my ear it sounds half-a-step from "you kids get off my lawn".

Maybe I need to give another shot to one of the Florida-based McGee novels, especially since I'm now sure there are several I haven't read. But this one didn't whet my appetite for another visit to the Busted Flush.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

For a 1951 sci-fi novel by a man who would really come into his own as an author of detective novels, Wine of the Dreamers is not half-bad. In context. For its time.

FuzzyCo grade: B-, but I'd still rather read a Travis McGee book.

I didn't enjoy Rock On nearly as much as I thought I would. Dan Kennedy lucked into a job at a major record label in 2002. So sure, it's a dying industry. And even under the best circumstances, learning how the sausage is made is never fun. And too bad he didn't feel qualified for this job he doesn't even really like. But guess what, Dan, we're all working in dying industries we thought would be glamourous at jobs we don't feel qualified for, and we're not sure we want anyway. That doesn't mean you have to be so whiny about it.

The chapter about the Iggy Pop concert is pretty good, though.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

In Cory Doctrow's new Young Adult Novel Little Brother it's the very near future and a teenager sneaks out of school to play an ARG at the same time as terrorists attack San Francisco and in the ensuing chaos is picked up the Department of Homeland Security. With a friend secretly imprisioned and the DHS tightening control of San Francisco, our hero decides to fight back and bring down the DHS.

The book is equal parts politcal screed, hacking and culture jamming HOWTO, and David and Goliath adventure story. I've been reading about the book on BoingBoing and elsewhere for months and I think I read it far too critically to get the sense of how someone coming in fresh, or say in the target demo, might experience it. For now, I'll just say that it's certainly an interesting book.

Note: like all of Doctrow's works, you can download the book for free.

FuzzyCo grade: B

I've never seen Jackie Brown, but now I've read Rum Punch and if Tarantino just avoided messing with the story too much, I'm sure it's a great movie. Because it's a great book.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Charlie Stross' Accelerando is available for free download and that's the version I read, on an open source ebook reader running on a lightly-hacked consumer electronic, no less, which felt very Strossian. At least, like the first few near-future chapters, until the run-away pace of technology (hence the book's title) took the characters and the plot far off into post-singularity weirdness.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Jason Shuga's Bookhunter imagines a world where the special Library Police investigate book thefts with SWAT Team-level firepower.

FuzzyCo grade: A.

(via Making Light)

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's memoir of his stand-up career. That career was, more or less, "I worked really hard for years and had a couple of lucky breaks along the way and then I got famous." The details are, of course, what makes the story and Martin provides engrossing ones. Also fascinating, especially in my usual "casting about for my artistic purpose" state, is that Martin was pursuing an "avante-garde" comedy by age 20. The passage where he decides this also provides my favorite piece of advice from the book:

[As a postscript to a letter to a friend, Martin writes:]
I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.

I'm not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I really enjoyed the first two Jumper books by Stephen Gould and so I was a little nervous about the upcoming movie adaptation (as was Gould himself last year). I mean, a bad movie doesn't actually hurt the books, of course, but you don't want something you like dissed by a terrible adaptation. So it was interesting to discover that Gould had gone in an new "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" direction with the latest Jumper book.

The movie, as might be expected, changes some of the 'rules' of teleportation and history of the world that Gould had established in the books. In the books, Davy Rice is (probably) the first teleporter in the world and his interactions with the authorities reflect the uncertainy they have coming to grips with his unusual abilities. In the movie, teleporters have been around for centuries and there exists a secret organization dedicated to killing them. Davy is introduced to the new world by another Jumper who has already been fighting back at that organization. So the new book, Jumper: Griffin's Story, inhabits that new world entirely and is the backstory of that new character.

There's a certain degree of similarity of Davy and Griffin's stories -- I suppose partly because they're both, essentially, coming of age stories. But it was still a great read and I'm actually excited to see the movie now -- I want to see what Griffin's like after all he went through in the book!

FuzzyCo grade: A

George Pelecanos is one of the writers of The Wire and The Night Gardener, while not actually set in the same universe (as we'd say in the scifi world), feels very much The Wire-esque. Of course, Pelecanos has been writing these sorts of books for longer than The Wire has been on the air, so I suppose The Wire is very Pelecanos-esque. Whichever and whatever, I'm really glad to have discovered his writing--it'll be another way to satisfy my Wire fix when the series comes to it's all-too-soon end.

The Night Gardener is set in Washington, DC and suburban Maryland (not far from the seedy Baltimore of The Wire) and follows some just-trying-to-do-their-jobs homicide cops as they try to solve several murders. The death of a young man might be connected to some decades-old serial killings, but this is no flashy Bones or CSI and these cops are on no great crusade.

"How do you solve a murder? Tell me. 'Cause I'd really like to know."

"What are you talking about?"

"Would finding the killer raise those kids back from the dead? Would it bring closure to the families? What would it solve, exactly?" Ramone shook his head bitterly. "I lost the idea a long time ago that I was accomplishing anything. Occasionally I put assholes away for life, knowing they can't kill again. That's how I speak for the fallen few. But as far as solving goes? I don't solve shit. I go to work every day and I try to protect my wife and kids from the bad things that are out there. That's my mission. That's all I can do."

We also get to see things from the perspective of criminals and school children (just like on The... alright, I'll stop now).

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've been intrigued by Mike Figgis since we saw Time Code during the rehearsals for A Day in the Life -- it's a flawed movie, but an incredibly interesting idea. And Leaving Las Vegas was gut-wrenchingly good, so I knew he had chops. So I was looking forward to reading Digital Filmmaking. And indeed there's some practical advice here and some broad opinions about the future of film and the possibilities of cheap filmmaking. But most importantly, it had me itching to get my hands on my camera and get filming.

Before I say anything about Kissing Snowflakes you should know that a) I am not in the target demographic for this book, being neither a teenager nor a girl and b) I'm friends with the author, Abby Sher (improvista, essayist, and now novelist). Having gotten those caveats out of the way: it's wonderful. Sam(antha) Levy is headed to a Vermont ski resort with her brother, father, and brand-new step-mom, and without her best friend. Can anything good come out of the trip? Maybe Drew, the handsome, blond ski instructor? You'll find, in alphabetical order, art, betrayal, caddish behavior, a dog, drinking, friendship, kissing, literature, mom-issues, (talk of) sex, and some skiing.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I confess I have a weakness for 'factoid' books like The Reverend Guppy's Aquarium -- a collection of essays about "how everyday items were named for extraordinary people". This one has perhaps a bit more depth than the usual bathroom book -- Dodd gives deft biographical sketches of all of his subjects, beyond the simple circumstances of their language-enhancing exploits, and he also does his research, penetrating past oft-repeated hearsay to find the truth. Reverend Guppy, for example, was not actually a Reverend, but hated tying ties and so affected a collar of his own design that later biographers assumed was a clerical collar.

One nit, picked: Dodd's previous claim to fame was being the "as told to" of the Rolling Stones' autobiography and he name-drops Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at rather odd moments.

But I'll forgive Dodd any self-agrandizement for relating these two maxims from Jules Léotard's (the original "daring youing man on the flying trapeze") Mémoires (published at age 22 -- the quick celebrity autobiography has been around since the mid nineteenth century, it seems):

Never judge a man by his mustache.

and

Make sure you never catch typhoid fever if you have something else to do.

Words to live by, my friends.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Fried Chicken is the first in a short series of books by John T. Edge exploring iconic American foods (donuts, hamburgers and fries, and apple pie are the other subjects). There are short sketches of distinctive fried chicken cooks and histories of several regional variations, and each chapter ends with a recipe. I was impressed that despite the fact that Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance that he starts the book off with the thesis that "fried chicken is best served without a side of provincial bluster" and gives equal weight to Guatemalan and New York fried chicken, for example. But most impressive to me was that I made it to page 100 before I took a trip to Popeyes. Love that chicken!

FuzzyCo grade: B

I've been hearing a lot about this manga (which is also an anime and a live action movie, now) so I took the opportunity at Erica's cousins' to read Volume 1. So, yes, I can understand the appeal to high school misfits -- Japanese high schooler Light Yagami finds a "Death Note" dropped by a Shinigami ("death god") and decides to use the powers of the note to cleanse the earth of evil doers. Half the book reads like a late night 'philosophical' discussion as Light tests the increasingly detailed rules governing the use of the Note.

I guess this was the first translated-but-not-inverted manga I've read and I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to reading right-to-left. Neato.

Iain M. Banks' scifi novels are all* set far in the future when the dominant human society is the Culture, a post-scarcity near-utopia. As a utopia, the Culture is somewhat boring, because nothing dramatic really ever happens there. So most of his novels are set in the ranks of Contact (and its secretive sibling "Special Circumstances") the branch of the Culture that interfaces with other species and isolated planets where humans live under less enlightened governments.

Inversions is set on such a human planet where they no longer have knowledge of the stars and things are just making the first tentative steps out of a feudal system, and is told from the perspective of natives who have no notion that Contact might be working among them. In fact, other than a few touches that might be puzzling to someone who hadn't read any of Banks' other books, this might as well be a stand-alone fantasy or ahistorical novel. In any case, it's a pair of lightly intertwined stories -- one of a bodyguard to a ruler in one nation and the other of a doctor to a king in another.

Both stories cover a lot of ground -- there's court intrigue and the clash of nations and romance and unrequited love and torture and despair and, perhaps, redemption. Heady stuff. A great read.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* or mostly, at least. I haven't read them all, so I'm not sure.

Yeah, I read pop culture sensation novels 10 years after they're popular -- that's just how I roll.

Actually, let's digress about the tricky notion of picking what book to read next. My main reading time these days is the 45-minutes each way I'm on the train going to and from work. (On average, that's 100 pages a day.) So a book has to be messenger bag friendly, doubly so if I'm carting my laptop around. I've got, for example, a copy of 1491 I'm itching to sink my teeth into. But it's a 450 page hardcover. No way I'm lugging that thing around. Bridget Jones's Diary, on the other hand, is a 260 page trade paperback (and further, printed on pretty thin paper, it seems). Bingo! Though, I did feel a bit funny reading BJD on the train, and not because it's girly or ten years out of vogue or anything. It's just that from a distance, the cover might seem to be some other sort of book, if you know what I mean.

Veering back towards the track, I'll mention that I started giving my reviews a 'grade' (ala, I suppose, Christgau via Entertainment Weekly) and BJD is decidedly hard to pin down. There's some good stuff in there. For example, I really got into the obsessive chronically of numbers of drinks drunk, cigarettes smoked, calories eaten, etc at the start of each day's diary entry, and especially the subtle variations thereon. And there are some funny set pieces (though some clunkers too -- much of Bridget's life is a little too sitcom-y for me). And the plot's pretty good, except that there we run into the rub that it's not really Helen Fielding's, is it? (And that's a point -- is it 'cheeky' or 'self-aware' of an author ripping off Jane Austin to reference both Clueless and Pride and Prejudice itself?)

Ultimately, I think the reliance on that plot might be the book's real Achilles' heel. Because... (and I'm about to drop a spoiler here, but surely you've seen the movie. Or seen Clueless. Or read Pride and Prejudice. Or seen Pride and Prejudice. Or, perhaps, seen Pride an Prejudice.) ... I think "now she's with the right man, even though she's hardly even spoken to him, so everything will be fine" worked better in 1813 than 1996.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I'm glad I read The Time Machine before The Time Ships, because it heightened my appreciation for what Stephen Baxter has achieved in the latter book -- writing an marvelous novel that manages to be both a faithful sequel to a hundred-year-old book and an epic journey through millions of years and several very different human (and post-human) civilizations. FuzzyCo grade: A.

I picked up The Time Ships at a used bookstore last week to read on the plane, but discovered in the first few pages that it was a sequel, of sorts, to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. And I realized that while I certainly knew the story of Wells' novel, I wasn't sure if I had ever read it.

So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg and read it on my laptop. Given the current debate over whether a computer screen is a suitable replacement for books, it was an interesting experiment. I opened up the text into BBedit, enlarged the text to a comfortable 14 points, and read away. For a short novel (at 32,600 words, The Time Machine would just be just shy of qualifying for NaNoWriMo) it was a fine reading experience. Of course, it's a lot harder to hold a MacBook Pro in one hand on the El.

And also, given my frustrations with the last few "classics" I've read, I was happy to discover that The Time Machine is a pretty good read.

Part of the reason I was so hard on Cascade Point, I've realized, was that it's in my least favorite segment of speculative fiction -- the future as a simple mapping of the past* -- the starship version of a tramp steamer is even called a "tramp starmer", which really rings hollow to my ears. And it had a side helping of "the technical problem with your imaginary technology" ala the technobabble problem of the week on Star Trek: TNG. Boo, I say.

These problems are highlighted by the nature of Cascade Point's companion novella in this Tor Double -- Greg Bear's Hardfought. Hardfought is truly speculative fiction -- a look at a battle between a completely alien race and a humanity so far removed from us that they are on their way to becoming alien as well. There're plenty of universal questions pondered -- the nature and limits of war and what it means to be human -- but there's also some pretty far out stuff. I mean, there are flashbacks in this story to the year 29,000! In 85 pages, Cascade Point felt like a stretched out short story. Clocking in at 92 pages, Hardfought feels like a vast novel whizzing by. FuzzyCo grade: A.

* Which, of course, can be done well -- Firefly's future as old west, for example. But I still don't like it in general.

Not the best sf novel I've read in a long time. (I'm just being snarky -- it won a Hugo. And I guess Timothy Zahn writes good Star Wars novels.) FuzzyCo grade: B-.

Update: More thoughts on Cascade Point in my Hardfought review (they're two halves of a Tor Double).

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is the best sf novel I've read in a long time. Make that, the best novel I've read in a long time. It's action packed (there are two major plot twists in the first 16 pages!), full of spot-on future speculation, and full of distinctive characters. My only complaint is that there are a few loose threads left at the end. Vinge is said to be considering a sequel. I can't wait. FuzzyCo grade: A+.

The first book of Ben Mezrich's that I've read, Bringing Down the House, was about a group of MIT students who used a group blackjack technique to make a lot of money until casinos began to figure out their system and brought heat down on them. This new book, Busting Vegas, is about a group of MIT students who used a group blackjack technique to make a lot of money until casinos began to figure out their system and brought heat down on them. Seriously. A chapter in I had to double-check to make sure I wasn't just reading the same book over again. And perhaps because he knows that he's repeating himself somewhat, Mezrich is trying way too hard here. It's a dramatic story, but the prose is overblown and Mezrich tries to make even walking through a trendy Boston neighborhood seem psychologically intriguing.

And the dialogue... At one point Mezrich notes that interview subjects often meet him in noisy places to defeat the recording devices they presume he's carrying and notes that he's "not that kind of writer." Well, he might want to start, because the reconstructed dialog he puts in people's mouths is stilted and unrealistic. (I would quote you some, but I gave the book away minutes after I finished.)

FuzzyCo grade: C.

Clash of Star-Kings by Avram Davidson

Both the title and back cover blurb of this slim novel rather overstate the excitement contained within ("they came from the Evil Stars!"). Which is not to say it was a disappointment, but rather than a grand adventure it's a short, tense tale of a small Mexican village where things are not as they seem (ala The Wicker Man) and the few scifi elements mentioned (a brief mention of a "star ship") could easily be discarded to leave this a disturbing fantasy. FuzzyCo grade: B+

Man, if you wanna have even your nerd friends call you a geek, carry around a Star Trek novel for a couple of days. My excuse for reading The Final Reflection is that it's by the late John M. Ford. Ford didn't publish that many books, but they're all worth reading. Yes, even the two Star Trek novels he wrote.

This novel is set well before the original Star Trek series (it features a cameo by Dr. McCoy literally in diapers) and is entirely from the point of view of Klingons. Ford was one of the first to take a stock 'unknowable enemy' and posit that they might be doing what they do for reasons that make sense to them. The whole 'honor-obsessed' Klingons of the Next Generation shows and beyond -- that all comes from Ford originally.

It's also a novel about playing games, which is just odd, since the last sci-fi novel I read was about that, too.

It's also just a really good novel about a young man (well, Klingon) making his way in an Empire, and a universe, that has little sympathy for anything new, or different, or weak.

FuzzyCo grade: A.

There's more than a whiff of space opera around Iain M. Bank's The Player of Games -- an alien empire determines their rulers by means of a complex game and so The Culture sends one of their greatest game players to investigate. But it's also an intensely personal journey of one man and a biting indictment of all empires. And it's an adventure. And it was about fifty times better than I was expecting. FuzzyCo grade: A.

1633 is a sequel to, of all things, 1632 -- a sci-fi novel wherein an entire modern West Virginia town is transported back to 1632 Germany, right in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The first book was rather adventure-filled as the Americans attempted first to survive and then to bring something of democracy to 17th century Europe. This second book in the now-sprawling series is much more talky. The already complicated politics of the time are rendered even more complex by history books stolen from the Americans. The English king, for example, has Oliver Cromwell arrested before he's actually done anything, because the history books say he will lead a rebellion in the future. Characters spend pages and pages on info-dumps and speculation on the motives and plans of other factions. Really, I don't think I should like this book at all, and yet I kept reading and reading. FuzzyCo grade: B-.

I can't really complain about Vengeance in Vicksburg, because I knew what I was getting into when I bought the darn thing at the Jackson Airport. V in V is number five in a series of "Mississippi Mysteries" by Phil Hardwick, each an alliteratively titled mystery set in a different town in Mississippi. Hardwick is, according to the back cover, an "award-winning real estate columnist" and indeed the descriptions of the locales are best thing about the book. The mystery, and even the action sequences, are kind of boring.

While we were in Vicksburg this past weekend it happened that one of the Second City touring companies was performing in town. I called one of our friends in the company to see if we could meet up after their show and he said, "while I've got you on the phone, could you tell me the name of a local small town and a local tourist attraction -- we have a place in the show where we throw those in and it always gets a laugh, just saying the names of local things." This book is that same principle, only for 112 pages.

Set in a future where people can make multiple, temporary copies of themselves, Kiln People by David Brin is meant to be a sort of noir-meets-scifi novel. But I found it to be something of a slog. It just didn't seem very (and I use this word advisedly) real. Only the fact that I've enjoyed many other Brin novels got me through the first 300 pages, and by then I'd made such an investment in the dang thing, I had to push on to the end.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

I'm a huge fan of Pratchett's Discworld books, but I have to say that this is not the best of the bunch. Maybe it's that the main character, Going Postal's Moist von Lipwig, is a thoroughly reformed scallywag. In Postal we all knew that he was going to realize that he had a heart of gold and do the right thing, but it was fun watching him discover it. And the plot is clever enough, but maybe just a bit too clever, with too many of its gears exposed. It's not bad -- I LLOLed* a few times -- but I've read better from Pratchett.

* It's well documented that LOL, originally "Laugh(ed) Out Loud", has become completely devalued. So I'm introducing LLOL -- Literally** Laughed Out Loud.
** Of course, since literally is also already devalued from its original meaning, I may be fighting a losing battle here.

The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard

The Hot Kid exists at the intersection of Westerns (it's set in Oklahoma), gangster stories (it's the 30s), and true-crime fiction (in a touch of meta, one of the characters writes for those sorts of magazines). And it's unmistakably Elmore Leonard. Yes, please.

Marathon - The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon

This is kind of the book when it comes to Marathon information, and it is indeed a smorgasbord of advice, tips, anecdotes, and inspirational stories. I'm glad I wasn't relying solely on this book for my marathon plan, but it's a great resource.

Well, there's that, then. I was impressed right off the bat with audacity of the flap blurb -- in lieu of any plot summary or such it simply read "We now present the seventh and final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter." In other words, "look, if you don't know who Harry Potter is at this point, we don't need your business -- just go crawl back into whatever cave you're living in."

I found it somewhat darker and heavier* than the first six, but it's been a build to that I suppose. Now I'm off to read all the sites I was avoiding for the sake of spoilers.

* Including, of course, literally.

Seriously. I'm on like page 280 of 6000 and I keep almost catching glimpses of discussions on the internet. I knew that if I was going to read this last book with any sense of surprise, I'd have to read it quick before the plot was just out there in the zeitgeist. Soon, I'll bet you, people will be using events from the book as examples in pop culture, just because so many people have read it that it'll be a cultural touchstone. (Or maybe I'm over-estimating the influence of a bunch of 12-year-olds and nerds.)

Oddly, because of the circumstances, it's hard to think of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as anything except a prelude to the final book, which I'm about to start. I suppose it'd be different if I had to wait a year for the next one instead of five minutes.

I read the first four Harry Potter books and then bought the fifth (i.e. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) while I was in Scotland in 2004. I promptly never read it. But now that the last book is out, I figured I'd better finish up the series quick before all the shocking revelations were just out there in the zeitgeist. As Penny Arcade and Threadless* have noted, there's a statue of limitations on spoilers.

So, you know, pretty good for the cliched kind of wizardy young adult lit that it is. And hey, I did like sweetkealoha and found out which House I'm in:

* In fact, I just noticed that there's a sixth-book spoiler on that shirt.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

When we saw 500 Clown Frankenstein last month, the Clowns used the text of the novel in a rather physical fashion. It made me realize that I had never read the original novel. So thanks to Dover Thrift Editions I soon had a copy for $2 (if you can stand to read on a PDA or computer screen, the novel is available for free from Project Gutenberg).

There are, as you might expect, a ton of differences between the original story and the Universal Studios movies that are most people's source for the Frankenstein story. And of course, it's the product of a different era. But I have to say that Victor Frankenstein's passivity and whininess drove me crazy.

I was impressed by one authorial trick -- the novel is narrated by a British explorer who is writing letters to his sister relating the stories that Victor Frankenstein is telling him (think about the layers of meta there for a second) and Frankenstein never actually says how he built a person. Since it turned out to be such a mistake, he doesn't want anyone else to try, he says. But it's a delightful bit of hand-waving that prevents Mary Shelley from having to explain how it actually would work. (Unlike the movies, there doesn't seem to be any electricity or dead bodies involved, though. He just builds a man from scratch. Interestingly, after he's already built a working man he needs to go consult some English scientists when he's trying to build a woman -- evidently lady parts are different.)

I'm signed up for the Chicago Marathon and I'm training by myself using the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.

This is a book that comes out of a class at the University of Northern Iowa that is a joint class between a psychology professor and a phys. ed. professor -- the phys. ed. professor brings the training you need to complete a marathon and the psychology professor brings a lot of self-helpy stuff about the mental preparation you need to get through the training process and then the race itself. I'd make fun of the self-helpy stuff, except that it seems to be helping already. And the book is aimed squarely at the non-runner and getting you to complete a marathon. Not do it with a great time or lose a lot of weight or any other side goals -- simply complete a marathon. Since that's what I'm trying to do, it seems like the perfect training program for me.

You can follow along with my Marathon progress on my main blog, if you like.

Your Movie Sucks is a sequel of sorts to Roger Ebert's earlier I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie -- both collections of his reviews of movies he enjoyed the least. The earlier book covered a few decades of reviews and so it had the stringent requirement of one star or less; the new book covers just the 21st century and so, I assume to pad out the book a bit, includes 1.5 star movies. It does mean that some of the reviews are less vitriolic and more Ebert basically saying, "eh."

But when Ebert is on a tear, ripping into a terrible movie, it's quite a sight to behold. The book opens with an extended introduction detailing a few reviews that resulted in public exchanges with the director or stars, like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (from which review comes the title of the book) and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny.

It should be noted that these books are, like so much these days, effectively free online -- just go to the Advanced Search on Ebert's site, set the "Star rating To" field to one or one-and-a-half stars, and click Submit. But it's harder to take your computer into the bathroom, which just might be the natural home for this sort of book. Of course, you might also want to use it as a sort of affirmational -- read one of these reviews right before you leave the house and there will be a certain spring in your step. No matter what you do or don't do during the day, at least you didn't make a terrible movie.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is Austin Grossman's debut novel and it's rather good. It's a superhero adventure told in alternating chapters by an experienced evil genius (he's in prison for the twelveth time when the book starts) and a new cyborg hero. The action of the story is straight out of a silver age comic book (the villian says things outloud like "Who dares?" and "In the coming era I will rule the world, as is my right.") but the inner lives of the two narrators are complex and authentic.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Heaven - Season One by Mur Lafferty was recommended by Boing Boing and I listened to it as an audiobook over the course of a couple runs and bike rides to work. By chapter 8 I was not very interested, but I kept going just to finish the narrative. Which, as you might expect from a book subtitled "Season One", ended on something of a cliffhanger, so I wasn't even satisfied there.

FuzzyCo rating: eh.

Now that I've started running, I'm trying out listening to audiobooks. The first one I listened to is Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, released as free audiobook by Subterranean Press.

The book is in Baker's "Company" series, about time-traveling immortal cyborgs, but this one is a stand-alone comedic adventure, set in 1930s Hollywood. It was delightfully read by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

There's code here and there on FuzzyCo that goes back to 1994 or so, when I built my first webpage by hand and hosted it on my personal account on schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu (try typing that five times fast). And HTML 1.1 served me just fine for the next 10 years. Right around the time that I would have probably needed to really dive in and modernize things around here, I moved much of the site over to MovableType, which took care of enough that I could put it off for a little bit longer. But there are things I want to do with FuzzyCo that are going to require that I get up to, say, 2003 web design standards. So I'm slowly getting up to speed on the current state of web design.

This book is not a beginner's how-to level book to CSS, and so I didn't understand half of how I would actually implement the examples given. But I really glad I read it first, because it gave me a lot of great ideas about how to approach the workflow of redesigning my site(s), rather than just diving in and replicating my old tables structure with a bunch of divs and calling it a day.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

What a great new children's novel this is (grades 5-9, says the publisher). It's a grand adventure story of four extraordinary children brought together by the mysterious Mr. Benedict to save the world from impending doom. Each of the children has different strengths -- Reynie is a hardworking puzzle solver, Kate is strong and acrobatic, Sticky remembers everything he reads, and Constance Contraire is... contrary. But mixed in are some fairly serious explorations of the notion of family, of how far you can go fighting evil without compromising your ideals, of bravery.

A great review by Jessie at What We're Reading Now.

(Disclosureville: Trenton Lee Stewart is my co-worker Kenner's brother-in-law Trent.)

The Atrocity Archives by Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross mixes Cold War spy fiction with "nameless horrors" stories ala HP Lovecraft, with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy and modern computer geekiness mixed in, for an engaging read with a surprisingly sympathetic main character.

In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Revised 2nd Edition) by Walter Murch

This book was recommended in an aside in the DV Rebel's Guide and since editing is the area of film-making (other than, say, scoring) I'm most insecure about, I thought it'd be worth a read.

The first part of the book is a long essay, adapted from a 1988 lecture, on the nature and philosophy of editing. The second half is a discussion of the difference between analog and digital editing -- Murch knows this terrority well, having won the first editing Oscar for a digitally edited film.

The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap by Stu Maschwitz

We've made some action movies before, but FuzzyCo has recently decided to film an action movie that takes longer than 24 hours to make -- we'll see if the quality goes up in any proportion to time spent. Reading this book was step 1 in the new process.

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a spare and affecting work from Chicago comic book writer and artist Anders Nilsen. It's snapshots of his relationship with his girlfriend Cheryl Weaver, culminating in her sudden illness and death in the winter of 2005. By no means an exhaustive memoir of their life together, instead we get illustrative moments -- postcards they sent each other, a letter to his sister detailing a comically disastrous camping trip, a short list of Anders' faults as a fiancee. And almost before it's begun, the book is over -- returning from France, Cheryl is diagnosed with cancer and then treatments fail and then she dies. To the reader, it's devastating.

Cancer is something of a hot-button topic around our house these days, but I don't think that's a requirement to appreciate this book -- as Anders says in his afterword, "it's just love and loss. And everyone, for better or worse, can relate to that."

"The new graphic memoir, "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow," breaks a great many rules of form, concluding with what might be the most devastating 16 panels of artwork in Anders Nilsen's career." [LA Times]

"It's very difficult to deal with Don't Go Where I Can't Follow from any sort of objective or critical viewpoint: simply put, it's the best graphic novel to be released this year." [Tucker Stone]

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

I think the two things that mark this as a Hiaasen book for younger readers is that the cast isn't quite as huge as usual, there's no sex, and the ending is much more unambiguously happy.

Penny Arcade Volume 3: The Warsun Prophecies by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik

Penny Arcade is a webcomic with lots of video game in-jokes, strong language, and juvenile humor. I love it. This book is a collection of every strip that appeared on the site in 2002. Let me emphasize that those strips are still online -- you can read them for free. But I like having them around in dead tree format. I sometimes laughed re-reading a strip that I had read a few minutes before. There's something about PA that (often) plugs straight into the humor receptors in my brain.

The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld

I read a lot of Westerfeld last year, enough that I think I'm pretty much out of books until he writes more. Fortunately, he's prolific. The Last Days is a sequel to Peeps, set in the same world, but focused on a different group of kids, who are more concerned about getting their band together than the looming apocalypse.

A fast, fun read.

Last year I set myself the goal of reading 50 books in the year. No problem.

This year I set myself no such formal goal, and it's probably a good thing because I only just finished my first full book of the year - Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Now, I'm not ashamed that it took me almost two months to read just one book because 1) I've watched a lot of TV and movies in that time, which is valuable media consumption as well, 2) the novel is both 600+ pages and dense, rich text and 3) it takes place over 100 years of winter in New York, so it was somewhat apropos to read it over the course of the winter.

But it wasn't bad to tear through a whole 1/4 of a book on the train this morning. Caviar is great, but popcorn is nice, too.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

It took me several months to finish this dense, rich novel, but it was well worth the time. It's just a freakin' awesome read.

In August I completed my self-imposed goal of reading 50 books in a year and I said I was going to stop counting -- well, I just stopped counting in public. I definitely slacked off in pace, as I only read 29* more books in the rest of the year. But I was intentionally focussing more on video games in my personal media consumption. Now I have to decide if I'm going to set myself the same goal this year.

51. Lulu Eightball - Emily Flake
52. Lady of Mazes - Karl Schroeder
53. Chasing Vermeer - Blue Balliet
54. Clockwork - Philip Pullman
55. Wall and Piece - Banksy
56. The Big Bounce - Elmore Leonard
57. Parakeets - Nikki Moustaki
58. Old Man's War - John Scalzi
59. Skinny Dip - Carl Hiaasen
60. The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum
61. That Noise - Dan Telfer
62. Beauty and the Biz: The International Adventures of America's Third-to-Next Top Model - Elyse Sewell
63. 1632 - Eric Flint
Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting - Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick
64. Penny Arcade 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots - Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins
65. Penny Arcade 2: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings - Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins
66. Manifold: Space - Stephen Baxter
67. Castleview - Gene Wolfe
68. Swag - Elmore Leonard
69. Definition of Awesome - Zach Miller
70. Terraforming Earth - Jack Williamson
71. Penultimate Peril - Lemony Snicket
72. The End - Lemony Snicket
73. Psychlone - Greg Bear
74. Improvising Better - Jimmy Carrane and Liz Allen
75. From Campus to Combat - James Alter
76. I Know You're Out There - Michael Beaumier
77. The Areas of My Expertise - John Hodgman
78. Sick Puppy - Carl Hiassen
79. Queen of Angels - Greg Bear

* And a half -- I'm in the middle of Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson.

Congrats to Dan for finishing NaNoWriMo, early even.

Back in May I talked about the codes you can solve in Joe Meno's novel, The Boy Detective Fails. One of the decoded texts ends with an email address. I emailed the address, but never received a reply. A few weeks later I stopped by a talk-back after a performance of the play The Boy Detective Fails and asked Joe Meno himself what was up with that. He said that since the book was still in pre-release, it was likely that no one at the publisher was checking that email yet. So I forgot about it until Kathy asked in a comment if I had solved a further code received from that email address. I sent off an email yesterday and got back a message in code.

So, some hints for solving that code after the jump:

"Wicked people never have time for reading," Dewey said. "It's one of the reasons for their wickedness."
-- The Penultimate Peril

I mean, I can't let George Bush beat me in number of books read this year.

(via Bookslut)

While we were down in Santa Fe, it was a bit hard to avoid Tony Hillerman books. Even places that didn't sell books had racks of his Southwest-based mystery novels near the cash register. I waited until I got back to Chicago, but I picked up a copy of Sacred Clowns and plowed through it in a few days. It's another story of his two Navajo Tribal Policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, investigating the murder of a koshare, the sacred clown of the title.

But hey, it was book 50! I did it, I met my self-imposed goal. So, yay. Of course, it was all a little tainted when I found out that Leo Allen was gunning for 100 this year. I had thoughts of upping my ante and changing my goal, but I'm trying really hard to quell that thought, stop comparing myself to others, and just get on with my life. I mean, I'm not going to stop reading books this year, but I think I'm going to stop counting.

Somebody should check out this Dashiell Hammett kid, I think he's got a few good books in him. OK, The Thin Man is great, but reading a book from even just 75 years ago there have been cultural shifts that make it hard, sometimes, to discern subtext. For example, when Nick and Nora have a cigarette in bed together, I don't think that's supposed to signify anything (or is it?). But what really struck me was how much Nick drinks. Was that normal? I mean, it was the era of the three-martini lunch, yes? But he drinks a lot.

But never let it be said that I won't give somebody a second chance. I may have abandoned Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles but I spotted Grunts in a used book store and it looked worth my $2 and it was.

Grunts is starts out with your standard Tolkien-esque Final Battle between Good and Evil, but from the perspective of the presumed expendable orc ground troupes. Add in some magical army weapons from our own world, and proceed through 460 pages of parody of both fantasy cliches and war movies.

There's a potential here for a real re-examining of the role of the "cannon fodder" ground troops in fantasy novels, ala the way Terry Pratchett dove into the life of the disposable city guard in Guards! Guards!, that's never really realized. But maybe that's not the point here and it's much more about cooked-halfling and "I love the smell of Grecian fire in the morning" jokes. At which it succeeds just fine.

One side effect of this Read 50 Books challenge is that it makes me, for good or bad, much less likely to toss aside a book if it's not really catching my fancy. I mean, I've got numbers to make, people, I've got a quota to fulfill. Are we meeting our LY? Are we!? (Sorry - different job.)

So that's the only reason I even made it halfway through Mike Resnick's The Widowmaker. Gah, I felt like I was being bludgeoned while I was reading it. Wooden, two dimensional characters and a plot out of a pulp Western (and not a good pulp Western) but in spaaaace. The main character does a lot of staring at people, which I think is supposed to menacing. Or deep. Or something. But I began to imagine that it was a vacant stare, with maybe a hint of drool forming at the edge of his mouth. Man, I hated that book. The Widowmaker is not book #47.

So I picked up Reflex by Steven Gould and I felt like I had been liberated. I don't think it's just the contrast -- Reflex is a really good book. It's a sequel to Jumper, where we met Davy Rice, a teenage runway who discovers that he can teleport. Gould drops that single extraordinary detail into a very realistic picture of our own times and discovers where it takes his characters.

Reflex picks up ten years later with Davy working for the NSA and happily married to Millie, now a family therapist. Davy is abducted by a shadowy organization who want to force Davy to use his powers for their purposes. While searching for her husband, Millie discovers that she can also teleport. And we're off to the races. It's an exciting book, but what really got me was the characters -- everyone in the book seems a full-formed person, even minor characters. Good, good stuff.

Oh, and I found out tonight from Steven Gould's website that a movie is being made of both Jumper and Reflex and he's used the option money to finance quitting his day job and going back to writing full-time. I wish him good luck (and more good books) and hope, you know, that they don't ruin the movie :-)

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds is a nice, meaty SF book about a post-Nanocaust Earth and a sort-of alternate history Earth in 1959 where WWII never happened. Except the alternate Earth exists three hundred years in the future and half-way across the galaxy. It's complicated. The best parts of the book are from the point of view of Wendell Floyd, a lowrent jazz musician and private detective in 1959 (sorta) Paris. I think I could easily read a whole series of Wendell Floyd detective novels.

And just as I'm nearly my challenge goal of 50 books, I find out that New York standup Leo Allen is aiming for 100. Splutter. It's really hard for me not to rise to the challenge and up my ante to 100, also. But wait, he lists Lulu Eightball by Emily Flake at #51. I mean, it's great, but it's a collection of cartoons. If I can list collections of cartoons...

I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet, but Kyle assures me it's great. I can now assure him that the novel it's based on, by Diana Wynne Jones is also delightful. What a great mix of playing with and inhabiting the conventions of fairy-tales.

Now having read Fine Prey I think I'm two books away from having read the entire Westerfeld oeuvre (not counting the Powerpuff Girls nor Goosebumps books).

Whenever there's a book I should be reading, no matter how much I might enjoy that book, I'll usually pick up something else. There's a book I should be reading right now, so I picked this collection of David Brin stories that I'd already read off the shelf. Except, it turns out I hadn't read them before, just the first story, so whenever I had previously picked it up off the shelf, I'd look at the first story and go, "oh, I guess I've read these before," and put it back. (I have a terrible memory for short story collections. In runs in the family -- my mother can read Agatha Christie books over and over because she forgets who did it.)

Anyway, River of Time is a collection of some of David Brin's earlier short stories. There's a few clever ideas here, but I find his novels a lot meatier.

And speaking of improv games, back in the old National Velveeta days, one of my favorite improv games was World's Worst, so I'm sure that's part of why I snapped up Mark Frauenfelder's The World's Worst : A Guide to the Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept, and Dangerous People, Places, and Things on Earth. I breezed through it in a train ride and I've throw it into the bathroom for other's browsing pleasure.

Mark also recommends good things at Mad Professor.

Around the time I was reading Candyfreak, Steve Almond was rather publicly quitting his job as an adjunct professor at Boston College. So when I saw that he was selling signed copies of his books on his website, I figured, heck, dude could use $15 and so I ordered a copy of My Life in Heavy Metal.

So, it's short stories. Huh. I think I had been a) confusing it in my head with Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, which is a memoir and b) I think I read a few too many hyper-modern, very abstract, the-house-fell-in-love-with-a-rock-and-they-had-a-baby-who-was-an-Idea short stories a while back, because it's been quite some time since I read a modern lit short story.

Anyhoo, the stories in My Life in Heavy Metal are nothing like those house-rock-Idea ones. They're all very real. Mostly slices of the lives of people in relationships slowly going wrong. Which makes me sad for Steve Almond that he writes so knowingly about them, but happy for me that I could read these well-crafted stories.

After reading all that young adult fiction, I figured it was time for a grown-up book. Light by M. John Harrison is very grown-up. It's a science-fiction novel set simultaneously in the present and 400 years in future, and rather more full of sex and violence than I was expecting. But really, the thing about this book is how dense it is, how full of language. I had to read many paragraphs a few times, not to make sure I understood them, but rather to make sure I had gotten all the juice out of it.

Why do I do this to myself? I know how I feel about trilogies, but I read Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons even though I knew that Magic's Child won't be out until 2007. 2007! That's forever!

Hana Schank's A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life was recommended on some blog or another (I forget) and I decided that a quick read about someone else's wedding problems was just what I needed six weeks out from my own.

I really connected with Ms. Schank at the beginning of the book, as she sets out to have a wedding that's not "different" (e.g. the hot air balloon wedding or the oft-maligned Klingon wedding) but isn't necessarily the same as every other wedding, either -- because that's the path we're trying to tread as well. As the book went on, I became a little frustrated that she seemed to do an awful lot of research about how arbitrary most wedding customs are* only to turn around and acquiesce to many of those traditions. But then, I'm a little hesitant to criticize since a) she's a real person and not a character and b) I'm sure it would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Hana Schank will be in town this week, at The Midwestern Ladies Auxiliary Love Revue, June 22, 7-9 at The Hideout (1354 W Wabansia). FuzzyCo friend and work-neighbor Claire Zulkey hosts. It's at the same time as our Chicago Metblogs 2nd Birthday Party, which is a shame because Emily Flake and Wendy McClure will also be there.

* Ask for my All Our Traditions Were Invented by the Victorians(tm) Rant next time we're at a bar.

My co-worker Jason saw that I was reading The Boy Detective Fails and so loaned me Hairstyles of the Damned.

Hey, that Joe Meno can write. Hairstyles is a year in the life of a high school kid, Halloween 1990 - Halloween 1991. He's a misfit, at the bottom of the social ladder, and music is very important to him. Am I on repeat here?

And in the same way that you might be spooked by odd shadows or strange noises if you watch too many horror movies, I was finding that reading all these high-school-kids-not-fitting-in books was making me nervously reexamine my high school memories to see if I had really been as well-adjusted as I think I was. (I mean, I was a dork, but a relatively happy dork.)

Why am I so hideously behind the times in my Chicago-based-hip-cool reading? I mean, I'm Not the New Me came out a year ago and I just got around to reading it.

Wendy McClure's new book is The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan which consists of hideous 1974 Weight Watchers recipe cards and her humorous commentary. The book comes from her online collection of the same.

I'm Not the New Me is a memoir, inspired by and derived from her blog Pound. Pound is about, sometimes, McClure's weight loss and body issues, but also about the other things in her life, too. And the book is that, too.

I think maybe I read too much Scott Westerfeld too fast, like the way I love a DQ Peanut Buster Parfait, but eating a whole one always makes me sick. Midnighters #3: Blue Noon was very good, but the moment I turned the last page I felt like I had to burp. Is that weird?

One hundred and fifty-seven days (43%) into the year, my thirty-third book of fifty (66%) is Midnighters #2: Touching Darkness. Author Scott Westerfeld is celebrating 10 years of freelancing. Numbers, numbers.

Did I actually say what the Midnighters are about? I did not.

In the small town of Bixby, Oklahoma there is an extra hour between midnight and 12:01 AM when the whole town is frozen, except for several young people with extraordinary powers. Oh, and except for the old, evil things that live in the dark. You, know, them.

Westerfeld does a lot of stuff really well, but two things stand out to me in these books: action sequences and strange powers as a metaphor for adolescence (cf Buffy). Between all the Westerfeld I've been reading lately and King Dork, I'm feeling really good about how non-incredibly-traumatic my own nerdy high school years were.

Well, I'm on a serious Scott Westerfeld kick. Though, as are half the people I know, it seems -- I borrowed the three Midnighters books from my soon-to-be-in-laws and the third book immediately went off to Kyle. So I read Midnighters #1: The Secret Hour today. I'm really glad I have the second book on hand as it is, again, the first book in a trilogy that really just feels like 1/3 of a larger book.

Michael Schaub of Bookslut has been going on and on about King Dork by Frank Portman so I picked it up, and gosh, he's right. It's an awesome book.

I'd didn't realize until I was half-way into the book that Frank Portman is Dr. Frank from the Mr. T Experience. Which means there's also a song King Dork and you can download it from here.

Specials, by Scott Westerfeld, finished up the Uglies trilogy with a bang. Tally Youngblood has been transformed once again and is now an agent of Special Circumstances, the super-fast, super-strong, and super-ruthless secret police of her future city.

Holy Cow, was this book good! The first 50 pages are one of the best action sequences I've ever read in a book, and it doesn't let up from there. And there are surprises and plot twists and... wow.

The plan set in motion at the end of Uglies is well underway when Pretties by Scott Westerfeld begins -- Tally Youngblood is back in New Pretty City, now transformed in a "Pretty" -- a supermodel-level beauty. Like everyone. But also, like everyone, her brain has been turned to a bubble-headed mush by the operation. Will she escape the city? Will she even remember that she ever wanted to escape? (Ellipses... Of... Doom...)

Mmmmp mmm mm mmmmp mmm mmmm mmmmmm.

Sorry, my mouth was full of candy. I think I gained 5 pounds just reading Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond.

Candyfreak is in that genre known as creative non-fiction. As in, we learn a bit about the history of candymaking in the US, a bit about some people who make legacy candy bars, and a bit about Almond himself and his obsessions and neuroses.

Yes, I'm reading some more Scott Westerfeld. Uglies is the first book in his "Pretties" triology. Fortunately the third book just came out, because this one ended on a pretty serious "this is the plan, now let's get started"-style cliffhanger and I have the feeling that I'm going to get antsy if I don't keep plowing through the whole series. (I've been deliberately not-reading the 12th book of the Series of Unfortunate Events because I know it's going to end on a terrible cliffhanger and the last book won't be out until October.)

Anyway, Uglies is set in a far-future where everyone gets an operation at age 16 that turns them into a super-model looking "Pretty". But is there more to the operation than just the looks...? (Well, of course there is. It'd be a pretty dull triology otherwise.) Oh, and hoverboard chases.

After I finished reading The Boy Detective Fails, I went back and solved all the codes in the book. I really went back and forth over marking up the solutions to the codes in the book, or doing it on scrap paper. In the end I worked them out without marking up the book, so that I could hand it off to other people and they could enjoy solving the puzzles on their own.

If you've read the book and you're having trouble with the codes, or you're just lazy (like me), I wanted to provide some help. I'm not going to provide the solutions, just how to solve the codes, but I'm still going to treat it like a spoiler and hide the rest of the information past the jump...

My friend Chuck has been going on about these Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher. So I thought I'd give the first one, Storm Front, a read. Eh.

Harry Dresden is a wizard who lives in present-day Chicago, advertises his services in the yellow-pages (which doesn't always sit well with his fellow magical practitioners) and, you know, fights crime.

The premise is intriguing enough, but the book didn't really grab me. (Well, I did tell Erica I had to finish a few pages before I could have dinner last night. I mean, you can't just put down a book in the middle of a giant scorpion attack.) Besides the generally lack-luster writing, the Chicago setting of the novel kept bothering me. Because, aside from some geographically accurate details about going down to the Dunes, it's not really Chicago, it's a Generic Big City. For example, Harry Dresden's apartment is on 10th. Except, there is no 10th St. (8, 9, skip, 11.) And there's a crucial scene where Harry is trying to escape from a demon by getting over the bridge on Reading Rd. Which also doesn't exist. Jim Butcher lives in Oklahoma, but there are these things called maps...

OK, I'm not sure why it bugs me so much. I guess it especially grates since I just read The Last Hot Time which really captures the feel of Chicago, albeit transformed by magic.

Oh, and this is egregiously mean, but compare the first six words of Jim Butcher.com with the fourth paragraph of this essay.

On Saturday night Erica and I went and saw the opening night of the House Theatre's newest show, The Boy Detective Fails. The play was adapted by Joe Meno from his own novel of the same name, which won't be available until September. But they have advance copies for sale at the show. I enjoyed the show so much that I picked up a copy of the book and devoured it over the last few days.

Wow.

The story is fairly simple: Billy Argo is a former child detective in the mold of the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. Scarred by the suicide of his sister, he himself attempts suicide and then retreats into a mental institution for ten years before emerging, blinking, to try to make his way in the world. But it's a book full of sadness and wonder and magic and mystery.

I'm still just a bit... wow.

======

Oh, and I'm now halfway through my little challenge, just a hair ahead of schedule. I'm a bit worried about the summer, since I'm trying to ride my bike to work more than take the train, which loses me about an hour of reading time a day. Do audiobooks count if they're unabridged? Hmmm ...

When I finished up Strip Tease, I noticed that I had a copy of Native Tongue lying around my cube as well, so I decided to make it a little Hiaasen-fest.

Native Tongue follows the shenanigans surrounding a second-rate Disneyworld knock-off, the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, starting with the abduction of two endangered blue-toungued mango voles, and proceeding to encompass, in normal Hiassen-fashion, real estate development, extra-ordinary steroid abuse, the Mafia, a one-eyed former Governor, and a little old lady who shoots a surprising number of people.

We saw a trailer for Hoot last week and it reminded me that I wanted to read some Carl Hiaasen (it did not make me want to see the movie). And lo-and-behold I had Strip Tease lying around.

Is there something in the water down there in Florida? Hiaasen's books seem to be firmly rooted in the Elmore Leonard model -- huge casts of odd characters trying to make their way through the depths of borderline-criminal Florida society. (Come to think of it -- Dave Barry's Big Trouble and Tricky Business were the same -- it must be the water.) But there are much worse models to follow and Hiaasen does a masterful job with this story of the chaos that ensues when a US Congressman tries to defend the honor of a stripper by nearly beating a man to death with a champagne bottle.

Oh, and speaking of movies, I didn't realize until I was nearly done with the book that it had been adapted into the Demi Moore movie of the same title. Was that movie terrible or just lackluster?-- it's been so long since I've seen it that I forget. No matter, the book is neither.

I picked up a copy of Directing Improv by my friend Asaf Ronen at the merch table of the Phoenix Improv Festival. And I read it. And I reviewed it for the New Improv Page.

The Last Hot Time by John M. Ford is a "contemporary fantasy", set in a modern Chicago where elves (yes, elves) and magic have returned. It's also a coming-of-age story for the main character, Doc Hallownight, with rather a bit more sexual politics than I was expecting. But, I suppose, is what you always get from John M. Ford -- a bit more than you were expecting.

I first encountered Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen a few years ago through Merlin Mann's website 43 Folders. GTD presents a system for managing all the projects in your life in a stress-free manner. It's a very practical framework, but most of the examples in the book are aimed at executives, sales people, etc. 43 Folders looks at geek-specific ways of implementing GTD, and has moved on other 'life-hack' techniques. So it's a great combo for someone like me.

When I first picked up the book I only made it halfway through before I got distracted by another book (insert easy jokes here). Even that 50% of the book had been very valuable (the 'next action' concept alone can really transform a to-do list), but I wanted to finish the book at some point. So this year I thought I'd make it part of my 50 Books challenge and then I wouldn't let myself move on to another book until I'd finished this one. Since it'd been a while since I read that first half, I started over at the beginning.

So, now I can check that off my list. I have not sat down and done the complete overhaul of my project management system like David Allen recommends, but it's influenced my systems even more. We're running the Wedding Project under GTD concepts, for example.

If you'd like a quick intro into some of this stuff, here's an entertaining hour-long talk Merlin Mann gave at Bay-Chi on "This is About Much More Than Tools and Rules".

The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford

I had the pleasure of walking into this book knowing very little about it. I know John M. "Mike" Ford mainly from his comments and occasional posts on Making Light, and this book was recommended somewhere or another (probably there). I managed to forget whatever was on the back cover and just dive in. And I had such a great time discovering the book on its own terms that I'm rather hesitant to tell you anything more.

I'll say this: it's a history, and a fantasy (but despite the title, not an elves-and-dwarves-and-dragons fantasy). It's got quite a bit of the complicated genealogy of Richard Plantagenet (later Richard III) that, quite frankly, often went over my head. And half of everyone seems to be named Richard or Edward. But it's also got some of the most vivid and gripping characters I've ever read.

It was bound to happen sooner or later with some book: I got 170 pages into Rats and Gargoyles and just... stopped... reading it. I carried it around for a few days without making any progress and then I switched bags and it didn't make the trip and then I realized it had been a week, at least, since I'd read any more in R&G. This will not do -- we have a goal, we have schedules to meet, people. People I respect recommended this book, so I think I'll assume that Mary Gentle's style is too subtle for me. (But absent that context, I'd just call it vague -- I'd find myself re-reading whole pages trying to figure out what, exactly, was happening.) It's always a hard decision for me to just abandon a book, but the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing.

So, to get back on the horse, so to speak, I grabbed a mystery that I'd found on the free table at work sometime back, Symptoms of Death, by Paula Paul, and knocked it out in two train rides. Hmp -- pretty standard Victorian-England-set mystery fluff. I'm going to go throw it back on the free table.

I've been having terrible luck keeping up with the book group that I'm theoretically a part of of (I haven't been to a monthly meeting in, oh, six months?) so I thought I'd read the new One Book, One Chicago book and get in sync with a few thousand of my fellow Chicagoans.

The book is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander* Solzhenitsyn. It is, as the title suggests, exactly one day in the life of a prisoner in a labor camp in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It's fiction, but based on Solzhenitsyn's real experiences in such camps.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov spends most of his day trying to stay warm, thinking about food, and actually trying to get some work done (a work-gang system in the camp encourages production).

My god, this book has depressed me. I mean, it was bad enough that at the end of yet another horribly dehumanizing day, Shukhov remarks that the day was, you know, a pretty good day. I suppose there's something there about the indomitability of the human spirit or something. But what really depresses me is that I realized halfway through the book was that I was tensed up, bracing myself for the atrocities, and that they weren't coming. I'm not saying nothing bad happens in the book, I'm saying that by modern standards nothing incredibly, horribly bad happens in the book. And the fact that the god-damn gulag isn't as bad as what I know humans can do to humans is weighing heavy on my mind these days.

If you've read the book, the Chicago Public Library is hosting a forum to discuss it.

* Or Aleksandr or Alexandr. Crazy Cyrillic transliterations.

So when I was at the library, the other book I was trying to find was The Hidden Family, which is the second half of the story started in The Family Trade. The library's online catalog said that they had two copies and that neither was checked out, but they weren't on the shelf, and I guess that means they were in shelving cart limbo. But where The Hidden Family should have been, there was Iron Sunrise, also by Charlie Stross. So I grabbed it.

Iron Sunrise is a sequel to Singularity Sky, which I'd read a few years ago. But it's a "set in the same world with some of the same characters" sequel, not a "book chopped in half" sequel*, so it was pretty easy to pick up and get up to speed on the background. Back from the first book is Rachel Mansour, a UN weapons inspector, but in a post-Singularity world where the UN is a freelance peace-keeping corporation and the weapons of mass destruction are capable of destroying suns. In fact, the book is something of a murder mystery, only the victim was an entire world. One of the survivors of that world's destruction is Wednesday, a goth teenager who has been secretly trained since childhood to be an agent of the "weakly godlike" AI entitywho lurks behind the scenes of the books, and who (Wednesday, not the Eschaton) is the other protaganist of Iron Sunrise. "Action-packed" would be a good hypenated word to describe the book. "Good" would be a good single word.

Slan by A. E. van Vogt is a science fiction classic that I had never read, and it had just come up in a blog post somewhere (that I can't remember where), and I happened to see it at the library. Far in the future, a mutated off-shoot of humanity lives under extreme persecution. These "slans" have enormous strength, incredible intelligence, and, using "tendrils" on the tops of their heads, can read minds. A young slan, Jommy Cross, is orphaned at age nine and struggles against the massed armies of the Earth.

I understand that it's a book that was very important to a lot of people because of its theme of persistence against persecution. In the 1950s sci-fi fan culture there was a saying "fans are slans". And an Amazon reviewer says:

I first read Slan in my early teens, and (this is going to get a little personal here, folks) I really identified with the struggle against persecution because at the time I was an adolescent struggling with my own sexuality and the realization that I am gay - something that in my youth (and to a *slightly* lesser extent today) was something to hide, something to fear, lest you suffer persecution.

I re-read the book along with a few other Van Vogt novels as an adult, and it still gave me that feeling of empowerment - that being different was not necessarily "bad."

So, yay, and it's an important part of sci-fi history, but it was really hard for me to read as anything but a historical document. The science-fiction-guesses-that-turned-out-to-be-wrong I don't mind so much. At some level all science fiction is just make-em-ups, fantasy with robots instead of goblins**. And the lack of actual plot or the resolution thereof, I can live with(out). But it's the dialogue. It manages to be melodramtic and stiff at the exact same time. Drove. Me. Crazy.

An overview of A.E. van Vogt's career
A collection of Slan covers

* Sorry I keep harping on this, but the whole concept continues to cheese me off. Especially since I still don't know what happens in The Hidden Family.
** Oh, don't start flaming me for this -- I can argue the other way myself, far into the night.

Just getting ahold of a copy of The Killing of Worlds (by Scott Westerfeld) (it's the sequel/second-half-of-the-book to The Risen Empire) proved to be such a saga -- multiple trips to local bookstores and getting to the library just after it closed and then I ordered it from Amazon and signed up a free trial of their thingy that was supposed to get me free two-day shipping, but in three days it had made it to Addison, IL and then I did make it to the library, and then the book came from Amazon the next day. Whew. Anyway, it was a fine end to the story -- it ended in an "open to a sequel" manner, but nothing so abrupt as The Risen Empire.

Longitude by Dava Sobel has the rather unwieldy subtitle "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time". Determining longitude (that is, how far east or west you are) had been a navigation problem for sailors for millennia, and the quest for a solution reached a crescendo in the 18th Century. So I was all set for a rollicking scientific adventure, but the whole thing felt a little flat. The book was expanded from a magazine article and it still feels like it's just a sketch of the drama surrounding John Harrison and his perfection of the chronometer.

Here are the current top 25* books from whatshouldireadnext.com. Bold the books you have read. Italicize the books you plan to read. Leave the rest.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

15 of 25, if you're keeping score. So, um, I had to read the same books in school as other people, is what I think this list means.

* Via Bilal Dardai. Bilal said "50" but his list had 45, and the current What Should I Read Next? list has 25. So I went with the current list. (I was 30/45 on Bilal's list -- lots of science fiction in the next 20.)

I've been having a hard time finding the second halves of those two books-that-were-only-half-the-story books (bookstores not carrying them, library closed just before I got there, etc.) so I've ordered them (thanks to an Amazon gift certificate I got for my birthday from the Antoines. Thanks!). While I've been waiting for them to arrive, I took a break from books and finished Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (oh, so cute). I was going to start another video game, but I discovered that I'm in such a voracious reading mood that I couldn't wait until my Amazon order arrived and so I stopped by Borders and, using a rediscovered Borders giftcard (Thanks, whoever gave me that, long ago), picked up a copy of Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

I picked it up based on a recommendation by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I was not disappointed -- it's a novel about events of cosmic signifigance (billions of years pass between the beginning and end of the novel) but seen from a very ground-level, human perspective.

Usually I try to read books (and see movies) knowing as little as possible about them before I plunge in. With book #10, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, I went in with a lot of baggage -- the book has been a bijallion-seller, it's been praised and denounced seemly-endlessly. We discussed it, on a tangent, at my old bookgroup. From all that information, I wasn't anticipating that I'd like the book, but my boss had a copy laying around in his office and I told I should give it a chance. And besides, if I'm reading fifty books, I can sacrifice one or two to keeping up with the zeitgeist. So I cleared my mind and tried to give it an unbiased read.

Dear Lord I hated that book.

I think it was the unrelenting mediocrity. I mean, I've seen worse books, but they were either just incoherent, or at least bold in their terribleness. My bookgroup had said that it was, at least, a compelling read, but I think that was just the endless, forced cliffhangers at the end of every. single. chapter. Bleh. Bleck. I had a bad taste in my mouth when I finally finished.

I decided to cleanse my pallette with Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire. I've been enjoying Westerfeld's young adult fiction, so I thought I'd give his adult science fiction a try. I succeeded in going into the book with knowing anything about it -- I didn't even read the blurb on the back. And it was delightful -- it's a space opera about the clash of interstellar civilizations. The one problem, it turns out, is that it is, again!, a huge book chopped in two for publishing reasons. So now I have two more second-halves of stories to read.

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold is a rollicking adventure tale, and yet also an examination of loss. So now I want to learn a bunch of magic tricks, and read about the Harding Administration and Philo Farnsworth, and also sit and think a little.

Book #8: Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner : A Sort of Love Story by Alan Zweibel. Erica suggested that I read this, one of her favorite books ("maybe just because I love conversations," she said). Zweibel was a writer on the first season of Saturday Night Live, where he met Gilda Radner. This book is a re-creation of conversations the two had over the course of their friendship, from early flirtation, to becoming great friends, and eventually to her death from ovarian cancer.

It's a tiny thing, but it drove me a little crazy that there was no typographical difference between the two voices, especially since a lot of the conversations are like:

-- Hey.
-- What?
-- Hey.
-- What?
-- You know.
-- Alright.

and sometimes I had to go back a half a page and count lines to figure out who had said what.

After reading so much science fiction in a row, I was feeling a little genre-shame, so I dug out a buzz-worthy book from last year (my copy's cover notes that it's a Today's Book Club selection) -- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It's a murder mystery, where the murder victim is a dog and the detective is a 15-year old boy with autism. I was surprisingly moved.

I squeaked in #7 just at the end of the month last night, which, if I may be a little OCD about the numbers for a second, puts my "rate" at 7.5 books/month, which would mean I'll get to 50 in 6.6 months. In any case, this goal feels eminently doable. And, it's been quite nice to plow through a bunch of books -- it feels like the old days.

I guess I'm just in a Scottish Science Fiction mood: book #6 was Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod. The sub-title is "A Space Opera" and it was, indeed, a post-Singularity romp.

Just finished book #5 this morning - The Family Trade by Charlie Stross.

Mini-review: An investigative journalist discovers her family heritage means that she's a "world walker" -- able to teleport between our world and another. In this other world, her family are merchant princes, using their abilities to become rich in both worlds. She's plunged into court intrigue and power struggles. And, ba-ba-bamp -- danger. It's good stuff, especially since Miriam is actually competent.

One annoying thing about the book is that it ends rather abruptly -- it turns out it's half of a longer book, chopped up for various publishery reasons. So now I have to go get the next one.

I starting reading Scott Westerfeld last year when Cool Hunting turned me onto So Yesterday, a young adult novel about, well, cool hunting. Westerfeld writes young adult fiction and science fiction (and young adult science fiction) and my future in-laws have been reading his Midnighters books and got me Peeps for Christmas (but kept it for a few weeks so they could both read it first -- clever).

Peeps is a science fiction vampire story. Our hero, Cal, is a carrier of the parasite that causes vampirism (or as they refer to it in the novel, is "parasite positive" -- a peep) and works for an ancient, secret organization that works to control the spread of the parasite. In addition to a rollicking adventure story, every other chapter has delightfully gross information about real parasites. Make my hamburger well done, please.

My coworker Kyle had loaned me Anansi Boys, so I figured I should read it next to give it back. I mean, that and I've been wanting to read it since before it came out. I followed along on Neil Gaiman's journal as he wrote the book. It's set in the same world as American Gods, but is a much more lighthearted book.

When I got off the train late last night I was just at the part where (MILD SPOILERS) the killer has Fat Charlie and Daisy hostage in the nightclub and Spider has been staked out by the Bird Woman for Tiger to kill and the ghost is walking from Florida to St Andrews and Rosie and her mother are locked up in the meat locker and things are obviously coming to a head (and I'm not sure that sounds more lighthearted) and so I just had to stay up and read the last 50 pages. Whew.

I just finished Engine City by Ken MacLeod, the third book of his Engines of Light trilogy, and my 2nd book (of a hopeful 50) of 2006.

Micro-review: Alien cultures, political thriller, space romp. And now, bedtime! I have to get up way-too-early-for-a-weekend tomorrow and edit a bunch of video for Dirty Movie Night.

I just finished my first book of 50 of 2006. At this rate I'm perfectly on track for... 20 books. Oh well, again this is just a personal challenge and I'm trying not to get caught up in the game of it. Anyway, Dark Light by Ken MacLeod, book two of the "Engines of Light" Trilogy = check.

So there's this challenge to read 50 Books in a year. (Did I read it on Bookslut? Anyway, I've been following Neal Pollack's attempt through 2005.) And now that we're in the new place and my in-boxes-for-two-years (or more) books are meeting my custom-built-for-a-different-house bookshelves, I'm confronted rather physically with how many books are in my too-be-read pile. And I feel like I used to read plenty more than 50 books a year. Of course, that was back in the 16 years as a student when reading books was, in effect, my job.

So, I've decided to try. It's just under a book a week. Should be no problem, right? Of course, we're already a week into 2006 and I've only just finished the last half of Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod, which I don't feel like I can count against 2006, both because it was just half of the book, and because it was a re-read in preparation for reading the latter two books of the Engines of Light trilogy. Sigh. Wish me luck!