Look, Steve, we love you. The American reading public, I mean. You’ve sold millions upon millions of books, had ‘em adapted into films great and small (and sometimes more than once), and gathered enough publisher mojo to publish a fairly noncommercial epic in The Dark Tower.

But goddammit, man, you need an editor. And by this I mean someone who can tell you when your shit stinks — or, at least, when you’ve bloated out a book so far that it begins to collapse in on itself.

11/22/63 is King’s take on time travel. That as an elevator pitch was enough to get me to bite, even though the obligatory pivotal event was yet-more-baby-boomer-bullshit, but I should’ve given it a second though, and a third one if necessary. King playing in speculative fiction is trouble, and he fails utterly to do anything interesting with his premise. It’s telegraphed from the start that, obviously preventing JFK from leaving half his noggin in Dealey Plaza would have butterfly-esque effects that result in an unrecognizable dystopia in 2011 (“now” for the book). Shit, even if that wasn’t a tired and overdone trope in time travel fiction, you’d KNOW that was going to be the case just because of the name on the spine. It’s not like King is known for giving us ice cream and puppies, right?

But because he’s not (apparently) a student of the prior work, he goes there anyway, and gives it only a smattering of pages. He’s way more interested in the “detective story” of how his protagonist determines Oswald’s the real killer, and establishing how much his GenX hero loves the 1958 – 1963 world he’s transplanted to. Baby boomer wish fulfillment much, Steve-O?

The book’s a turgid mess, I’m sad to say; even his shout-outs to his own mythos — we start in Maine, naturally, and the time tunnel opens in 1958, so our hero’s in Derry during the 1958 portions of It — mostly failed to amuse me. He’s also dragged down by the amount of research into the assassination he clearly did, and which he by-God clearly had to get into the book regardless of cost. I’m reminded of one aspect of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as explained to me by a college prof twenty years ago: Dreiser’s book lopes along pretty well until the last third or so, when it slows to a crawl as we move through every tiny bit of legal minutia Dreiser could cram in — because he’d done the research, too, about a notorious crime and resulting trial in upstate New York, and he was hell-bent on using that material, too. It hurt Dreiser, but it’s one of the fatal flaws for King.

Oh well. At least we’ve got Joe. Plus, my “three Kings” reading project still has one entry to go: Owen’s novel, which has garnered high praise. He’ll be on deck this summer.

Oh, one more thing

This makes 25 books from 1/1 to 6/7 (when I finished it), so the “50 book year” thing still seems on point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of what I said before stands. What do you want from me? I was traveling.

I almost skipped this one, as the reviews on Amazon are pretty bad, but given that Child tries to build at least SOME continuity into his books I figured it couldn’t be TOO awful.

Well, yeah, it kinda was. It’s a narrative mess with all sorts of shallow stock characters; one gets the idea Child’s heart just wasn’t in this one. Mark this one “devoted Reacher fans only.”

This one’s kind of a gimme: the author is a family friend (my brother and I went to high school with his kids) in addition to being my stepfather’s former medical partner. Pendergrass is about 10 years younger than my stepdad, and has always been substantially more athletic, so to say people were SURPRISED when he announced he’d start doing triathlons in his sixties would be incorrect. What surprised them was his plan: to do six of them, at the big-boy Ironman level, one on each (populated) continent, all before his 70th birthday.

N.B., if you didn’t bother to click that link, what “Ironman” means in this context:

• 2.4 miles of open water swimming, followed by
• 112 miles on a bike, followed by
• a goddamn marathon, i.e. 26.2 miles running.

Yeah. Right. I’m 43, and can’t image one of them, let alone six, but John nails it. In Arizona, Brazil, Switzerland, New Zealand, and South Africa, he finished well ahead of the official cutoff time. Only in his last outing — at a miserably hot site in China — did he come up at all short. But even then he finished the race. That’s amazing and incredible.

The story is interesting, and it’s a fun read, but it also shows that the author is a physician by trade, not a writer. That matters less when you’ve got something clear to tell, and John certainly does. Obviously, too, this is the sort of thing a man in his sixties can really only contemplate if he’s already pretty well off — tri bikes are very expensive, to say nothing of the travel involved. It’s hard to gauge if this would be fun to read if you don’t know John, but obviously enough people think so that Random House bought the book, so there’s that.

Wow, I’ve gotten behind on the posts, but at least I’m still keeping pace on the reading.

Drinking with Men somehow found its way onto my Kindle several months ago, probably after reading a review somewhere that suggested I’d enjoy it. Past-me is pretty good about that sort of thing, and I’m usually right.

I mostly was this time: Schaap’s memoir takes the form of a sort of bar travelogue: from her days sneaking into the cocktail car of a New York commuter train to her early adult life in Manhattan, she’s regularly become a regular of this or that local haunt. I understand the appeal, and have done it several places myself — hell, back in the 1990s, we used to invite Cecil’s to our parties, and it was a year or two after I stopping hanging out there before I finally stopped getting a Christmas card from the owner.

People who’ve never been regulars think of this as sad. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Anyway, Schaap is a talented writer, but a few times I felt the bar-to-bar structure of the book kind of limited it. She hints at, but never explores, her life outside these bars; it appears only inasmuch as it serves the story of her relationship to each watering hole, so to speak. Her courtship and marriage to her husband, for example, is only discussed as it connects to her bar life.

She’s not without circumspection about this tendency of hers; it troubles her more than once, and I wonder if it’s still something she does. I also wonder what she’ll write next, because — narrow focus aside — Drinking with Men is a great read.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

Robinson deserved every single award she won — and more — for Gilead. It’s tremendous and amazing, and took my breath away with its painterly language and absolute grasp of its reader at every moment. I really can’t say enough nice things about it, but I’m also at a loss as to how to explain its hold on me without veering into the trivial or banal.

I’ll try anyway.

John Ames is an old preacher in 1950s Gilead, Iowa, and he knows he’s dying. Married young, he lost his first wife giving birth to their daughter — who then died soon after. Ames then spent the bulk of his adult life as a bachelor pastor, caring and being cared for by his flock. His closest friend, another local pastor named Boughton, cares for Ames deeply and sort of incorporates him into his own family, as much as was practical; he even shocks his old friend by naming his son John Ames Boughton, about which more later.

Ames gets the surprise of his life when, at 67, a single young woman joins his church and effectively captures his heart. They are soon married, at her instigation, and soon have a son. The book takes the form of a long letter written to the young son he’ll never see grow up, a situation that weighs heavily on Ames’ heart.

The letter is not a tedious sort of Polonius-to-Laertes monologue about borrowing and lending, though; instead, it’s mostly full of his own recollections of his life — he’s acutely conscious of the fact that he remembers clearly things like the Civil War that will seem distant, ancient history to his son, for example. Another good chunk of the recollection is spent on his own theological and philosophical grappling, but not in any sort of evangelical way; Robinson is a practicing Christian, but this book isn’t a work of proselytization. What she does do, quite well, is paint a beautiful portrait of John Ames’ mind, his memories, his loves, the conflicts of his life — past and present — and the ways in which he prepares for his own looming departure. It sounds simple. In a way, it is, but in so many ways it is not.

It’s pretty rare that I find myself profoundly moved by a book. Gilead did it. It is a thing of rare beauty and grace, and you will find yourself better for making time to read it.

In the years since Gilead was published in 2004, by the way, Robinson has published Home, her third novel. Home is a contemporaneous story to Gilead, told from the perspective of the Boughton family (mostly adult daughter Glory) as Old Boughton nears his own end, and as the prodigal son John Ames Boughton returns. I am deeply tempted to return to the world of Gilead, Iowa, through this book, but I’m holding off and savoring the window I’ve just finished, and wondering how much I’ll miss John Ames’ voice when I inevitably return.

By my count, NOS4A2 marks the first author repeat of the year: Hill also wrote Book #7, Horns, which I wrote about back in February. The broad praise I had for Hill three months ago stands; in fact, I’ll double down. With NOS4A2, he really takes it up a notch in terms of storytelling and creating that all important “ripping good yarn” that keeps you up past your bedtime reading just one more chapter.

I’m not really sure how much I can tell you about this book without spoiling anything for you; it’s been discussed as sort of a modern vampire story, but it owes little to the bloodsucking tradition beyond the titular pun. Mostly, it concerns the life of a woman named Vic, who, as it turns out, has a curious ability to find things using a special shortcut bridge available, apparently, only to her. A parallel narrative exists regarding someone else with some special abilities, though his are far darker; Hill deftly intertwines the stories to create a far more complex narrative than you typically enjoy with something that might get labeled “genre fiction” by those obsessed with, well, labeling things. More than a few times you sort of feel the story going in a predictable direction for a moment, only to be surprised by how Hill carries the story into a new and interesting direction.

Here Hill also amuses the astute reader with countless allusions — both to his dad’s work (Vic’s shortcuts themselves, for example, harken back to the elder King’s short story “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” from 1985′s Skeleton Crew collection) and to others. I think my favorite nod was to David Mitchell, whom Hill is on record as regarding as the finest novelist of their generation. If you’re a fan of Mitchell, you can’t miss it.

Obviously the larger shadow is that of King himself, though. It’s here, for sure, and not just in the allusions Hill sets up. The villain, Charlie Manx, at times feels like someone who could’ve been written by the old man. The idiot minion certainly does; both King men seem to have a solid line on building convincing inner monologues for various kinds of creepy and dangerous guys. I saw this first in Horns, with Lee, and again in a different way with Bing. This isn’t a bad thing at all, and it doesn’t make these books any less Hill’s own — writing horror in a post-King world means having been exposed to King’s versions of these characters, some of them morally ambiguous (The Stand‘s Lloyd Henreid, or the childlike Trashcan Man) and some clearly not (Randall Flagg, or more mundanely the various bullies who haunt much of his work). Hill isn’t being derivative here; he’s definitely doing something of his own — but it rhymes with his dad’s work, so to speak. And given his dad’s success, this can only be a compliment.

Given that my to-read pile already includes one of his dad’s latest books, and that his brother’s new book is also getting raves, I think it might be fun to shoot for the family trifecta in this little reading project.

I dunno about you, but a party steeped in lies, infidelity, heartbreak, and despair — and ending in murder and, worse, a return to the midwest — just doesn’t seem all that fun.

I humbly suggest that market-droids and whatnot actually read the goddamn book first next time, lest we find ourselves invited, to, I dunno, a baby shower inspired by A Farewell to Arms.

It’s possible that you, like me, actually thought there were two well-received writers with minimally different names: the author of the much-lauded and long-running Culture series of hard-SF novels, called Iain M. Banks, and the literary novelist unconcerned with spaceships and robots and impossibly advanced spacefaring civilizations called Iain Banks.

Well, hold on to your hat, because if you’re as under a rock as I was about this, you’ll be shocked to hear that they’re the same guy. (The differentiating “M” probably says more about the degree to which science fiction is considered a ghetto than anything else I can think of.) Banks has written ten works in the Culture, plus some other non-Culture SF works, and in addition to 15 works of literary fiction, all since 1984. That’s a pretty solid output for either name, and a tremendous amount of output for one dude, but there you go. It’s little wonder the Times named him in their 2008 list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Anyway, I’d been curious about the Culture books for a while, and Googled around to see where I should start quite a while ago. The easy answer is to read them in publication order. If you do that, as I did, you’ll start with 1987′s Consider Phlebas. And you may well stop there, because Phlebas is a goddamn train wreck of a novel that really didn’t hold together well at all for me. It remains one of the few books I’ve simply abandoned despite being well over halfway done; I realized there was nothing that could happen that I would care about, and that I was wasting my time. Learn from my lesson.

I mentioned this reaction to some Culture-phile friends, and several of them said “Oh, gosh, yes, Phlebas is a terrible place to start. Try again with his second one, The Player of Games. It’s much, much better. You can ignore Phlebas completely.”

And so I did, and so it was. I really enjoyed it, and tore through it in a matter of days. Banks’ Culture is a phenomenally advanced spacefaring civilization spanning galaxies; they’ve solved the FTL problem thousands of years before, live predominately on enormous man-made orbital structures, and are mightier and more advanced than any civilization they encounter — not to mention considerably more enlightened. They exist in a post-scarcity state, where people may do more or less as they wish provided they don’t harm others. From Wikipedia:

The Culture stories are largely about problems and paradoxes that confront liberal societies. The Culture itself is an “ideal-typical” liberal society; that is, as pure an example as one can reasonably imagine. It is highly egalitarian; the liberty of the individual is its most important value; and all actions and decisions are expected to be determined according a standard of reasonability and sociability inculcated into all people through a progressive system of education. It is a society so beyond material scarcity that for almost all practical purposes its people can have and do what they want. If they do not like the behavior or opinions of others, they can easily move to a more congenial Culture population centre (or Culture subgroup), and hence there is little need to enforce codes of behavior.

In The Player of Games, Banks gives us Culture citizen Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famous game player and scholar, who by hook and crook finds himself recruited by the Contact organization — responsible for finding, evaluating, and possibly contacting other cultures — to visit a far-away civilization called the Empire, steeped in power politics and (frankly) a sadistic glee in the suffering of others. The Empire is FTL-capable and includes several star systems, but like isolated central Asian tribes of the 19th century, cannot comprehend precisely how outclassed they are by the Culture — who, for their part, really have no interest in fighting at all. They mostly want to discourage or destabilize the existing retrograde, barbaric societal order in the hopes that something more reasonable will arise.

Their means are simple: the Empire is ordered entirely around a fiendishly complex game called Azad. Empire citizens learn it from childhood; performance in Azad tournaments determines one’s place in society. The winner of the periodic tournament becomes Emperor. Having made contact with these barbarians, the Culture send Gurgeh to enter this same tournament, figuring a “filthy alien” doing well at their holy game might be the push they need. Madcap hilarity ensues, obviously.

This whole setup may seem obvious — a game used as a metaphor for both state and the competition between states, and used to highlight the differences between modern egalitarian societies and repressive ones, etc. — but Banks handles it with a deft hand, so it doesn’t ever come close to collapsing under its own weight (which is, sadly, a common problem in the so-called “literature of ideas”). Plot and pacing are miles ahead of Phlebas. I’m intrigued by the Culture, by its interaction with other civilizations, and by the ways in which Banks explored those issues here. This is idea-SF done very, very well, and I’m no longer surprised about why Banks is so beloved.

It’s a certainty that I’ll read more Culture novels, and soon, but I do intend to savor them; the sad news this year — and what prompted me to finally go read Player — is that Banks announced about a month ago that he has terminal cancer, and is unlikely to live more than another year. There will be no more Culture novels; his literary novel The Quarry will be his last. In the Culture, one gets the idea that genofixing has long since done away with anything as banal as cancer; it’s a damn shame that the mind who gave us this fascinating far-future place cannot emigrate there instead of dying in Scotland.

I’ll make this brief: Oswalt is brilliant, and is a gifted writer, but he allows his comic sensibilities to get in the way here. The memoir portions of this collection of essays and assorted other bits are very strong, and I’d love to see more of that kind of thing from him — God knows he’s good at it, and it seems likely he’s got more such stories.

But what drags this book down are the filler bits where it feels like he’s trying to force standup material into essay form. He actually addresses this in the book, saying explicitly that he’s insecure about the personal essay portions and hopes to do more of them in the future as his comfort level increases; I hope so, too. I’d happily buy and read more. As for the rest, I found myself skimming rather than savoring those parts of this otherwise solid debut.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland at Amazon.

Jesus, what tripe. This is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person’s mystery is. It’s chock full of badly fleshed stock characters, entirely too many un-shocking developments that Flynn clearly sees as revelatory, and runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages. There is not a single “surprise” in the book that isn’t telegraphed WAY WAY WAY in advance, and that any halfway intelligent reader will see coming.

I’m reminded of something Dorothy Parker said: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

The only upside is that I now have a CLEAR CHOICE for “worst book read this year,” whereas before it was a tossup between The Night Circus and Empire State — neither are even in the same league of awfulness as Flynn, so congrats for that.

Look. I’m not quite sure what to say about this, other than it’s brilliant. There’s a lot going on here that has nothing to do with pencils, but also a shocking and unironic amount that is, clearly, 100% about pencils. It’s weird, and very hard to describe.

It’s short, fun, and perfectly apes the sort of mid-century trade guides that you may have encountered in your youth with something that’s not quite a wink and not quite sincerity while being a bit of both. I mostly read it because Rees was on the JoCo Cruise, and seemed remarkably funny — plus, possessed of a completely nonironic enjoyment and knowledge of pencils and pencil history. I’m still not sure what inspired him to do this book, but I can say it was fun to read.

Also, owing to a post-cruise email dialog with Rees and my own nerdery, I now have distinct preferences when it comes to pencils. Make of this what you will.

First, seriously: Fuck you, depression.

To think what else Wallace might’ve written had he stuck around is to court despair. I read and loved Infinite Jest a few years ago, but have kind of stayed away from the rest of his pile in an only half-conscious desire to ration what little material Wallace left behind. That’s probably a mistake.

In this book of essays, he’s at the top of his game. It’s like watching Jordan play basketball: nobody else was even engaged in the same activity. He’s just that good. The topics vary wildly:

• there’s a personal memoir of tennis and weather;
• a discussion of the relationship between television, irony, and (then-) modern fiction in America;
• a screamingly funny travel piece about visiting the Illinois state fair;
• a fascinating discussion of poststructuralism and the so-called “death of the author” in literary theory;
• one of the best “behind the scenes” film articles I’ve ever read, about David Lynch shooting Lost Highway;
• a lengthy discussion of the realities of professional tennis as they relate to then-rising pro Michael Joyce; and, finally,
• the eponymous piece about “managed fun” aboard a 7-day luxury Caribbean cruise.

It was, predictably, the final essay that pushed me to read this book now; “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” would be great even with no personal experience, but reading it after having done such a cruise makes it even more clear how perfectly right all his observations were.

This guy really had no peers at all. Even if some of the topics above strike you as banal, or as overly academic — the poststructuralism bit ran in the Harvard Review initially; it’s deep water — I assure you they’re captivating when Wallace gets ahold of them. Reading him is an exercise, for me at least, of muttering “Holy Shit!” every few minutes at yet another brilliant turn of phrase or previously unconsidered insight. The words are delicious, and the essays just get better upon reflection or rereading. This is what great writing looks like.

I feel like it’s kind of unfair to do this, but this is that rare book where a pithy summary isn’t unfair: this is a GenX treatment of superheroes in print, told from a variety of points of view. If that idea appeals, you’d love this book. If not, well, keep walking, because it’s not for you.

You’ve got your soon-to-escape superpowered madman, you’ve got your reconstituted super-team, and you’ve got your mysteriously missing and presumed dead Superman analogue. The ingredients aren’t what makes this inventive; it’s the storytelling that I enjoyed the most.

Plus, there’s a bit more going on here than just that — it’s definitely self-aware, which adds to the fun. Grossman slyly references other books, both in genre (the hat tips to Watchmen are frequent, plus it’s impossible to write about costumed heroes without references to comic antecedents) and out (there are nods to his twin brother Lev‘s well-received novel The Magicians).

It’s a well-crafted little book, and one I found FAR more interesting than I expected. I’m definitely on board for his next book, which is said to draw more on his “day job”: Grossman is a video game designer by trade, and has some seriously solid — even classic — titles on his C.V., including System Shock, Deus Ex, and the last big game played here at Heathen HQ, Dishonored.

I debated whether to include this one, as it’s a slim little tome, but it’s still worth commenting on. The book takes the form of several short articles covering the cycling — what, in the author’s view, is important and what’s not. The central message is in the title: Just ride a bike. No argument there.

Petersen is seen by some as (somewhat) responsible for the return of well-made steel bicycles, among other things. After a career with the Japanese firm Bridgestone (though you probably know them better from tires, they made excellent bikes, too), he struck out on his own with the generally well-regarded Rivendell Bicycle Works, which has been quite successful. A glance at his bike prices may give you a hint why; they’re all very, very expensive. I’m sure they’re very nice, too, but I’ve only ever seen one in the “wild”.

Petersen’s list of things worth ignoring when it comes to biking is long and very idiosyncratic. One review referred to him as biking’s philosopher crank, and that’s pretty fair. Petersen is down on helmets, on clip-in pedals, on athletic/technical clothing (which only means he’s never ridden in the South), on riding predictably, on good cadence, etc., etc., etc. All this rises from something I call the unearned certainty of the autodidact — a weird sort of know-it-all position taken by someone who mistakes their own experience for universal truth, especially when that experience is coupled with a personality that makes one certain of one’s own brilliance. Petersen allows this to color his reasoning and make assertions that are at best tenuously supported by cherry-picked facts.

But that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. And in fact I hope at least some of the time he’s saying crazy crap to provoke discussion and not because he believes it wholeheartedly.

One area where Petersen and I completely agree is his recognition that race culture has damaged regular-joe biking. Twenty or thirty years ago, racing bikes were absolutely better in all ways than the bikes ridden by normal humans, but somewhere along the line specialization pushed those bikes into completely unsustainable places. As a result, the bikes that the Armstrongs of the world ride are nervous, twitchy, and fragile creatures that withstand the punishing conditions of a multiday race more or less ONLY because the teams have mechanics and spares on hand. They’re all made of carbon fiber, too, which has a pretty dreadful failure mode when compared to metal frames.

But walk into any bike shop, and 99% of what’s for sale that isn’t a low-end comfort bike is basically a racing bike, made of aluminum at the low end (which has a TERRIBLE ride) and carbon from $1800-2000 on up. Carbon’s more comfy, but see above re: failure modes. These bikes typically have no attachment points for everyday niceties like racks, either — it’s all weight-weenies all the time, which is sort of like a car dealership only carrying 2 seaters. Most people who walk into a bike shop don’t want or need a race bike; they are Unracers, as Petersen calls them. But there’s very little above the entry level for these folks in most shops. That’s a problem.

When I was shopping for my bike, I found literally nothing I wanted from either of the “big two” (Specialized and Trek), since even if they MAKE non-racer bikes that aren’t giant heavy comfort bikes, they don’t get stocked because they don’t sell as well. And they don’t sell as well because they’re not stocked. That’s bad. All you see are flat-bar hybrids and racers, so even if the shop can order something else for you, you may not even know something else is an option.

Rivendell makes steel bikes intended for broad use and customization, and they sell well. As I mentioned above, some say Petersen’s success is what made it possible for companies like Surly and Soma and others to make a living selling comfortable steel frames as well, and at a fraction of the cost of Petersen’s no-doubt awesome bikes. If true — and I can see how it might be — that’s an unalloyed good (no pun intended). Just like Petersen’s frames, my Surly has plenty of mount points; the frame could support a variety of build-outs, from true cyclocross to commuting to touring to whatever you want to do. No race bike from Specialized or Trek can say the same thing.

Anyway, this is running long. If you like biking, you should probably consider reading Just Ride, even if you’re sure you won’t agree with Petersen’s more outré pronouncements. His central message, which can get lost in his crankiness, is that biking is fun and you should do more of it, and not worry about the clothes or getting fast or any of the ancillary stuff.

In that, he and I agree completely.

OH MY GOD this book may be one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Lawson, net-famous as The Bloggess, has had the sort of life that begs for a memoir, due largely to her truly bizarre upbringing in rural west Texas. (To say more about it would be to rob her book of impact, but it’s literally all I can do to not quote her at length about, say, the 11 ways her childhood was different than yours (raccoons!), or the story of the most freaktastic puppet ever, or her issues with rural wildlife, or the tale of the scorpions, or any of a hundred other bits that left me in tears with laughter.

I’m currently only reading my 15th book of the year (these little blurbs lag), but it’s a cinch Lawson’s screamingly funny memoir will be near the top of my year-end list. She’s astoundingly gifted as a humorist and writer, and her voice stays hers even when she’s recounting painful or scary episodes (Lawson battles arthritis as well as an anxiety disorder).

Every single one of you should read this book RIGHT NOW. Seriously.

I picked this book up from IO9 at some point, and it’s been languishing on my Kindle forEVER, so I thought I’d finally give it a go. I was hoping, based on press, for sort of a speculative/alt history police procedural a la Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which I found utterly delightful.

Sadly, I was to be very disappointed. Empire State is Christopher‘s first novel, and it shows. It’s all over the place, with elements of noir, steampunk, alt history, mystery, superheroes, and more, and none of it ever quite gels into a coherent story.

I can’t say as I recommend this. Amazon’s reviews seem to bear this out, though that’s a notoriously fickle metric. The narrative just doesn’t hold up, and the characters are kind of flimsy and interchangeable (and not just in the way allowed for in the book’s universe). Christopher’s attempt at worldbuilding here is, well, a good attempt, but it doesn’t really work. The kitchen-sink approach to plotting — masked heroes! war! airships! robots! alternative universes! detectives! conspiracies! — rarely flies well, and this is no exception.

Good LORD I’m behind on these things — plus, as my general posting frequency has showed, I’m a little swamped at work. A few books will have to get the short shrift to allow me to catch up, as over the weekend I finished book #13.

THAT IS ALL is Hodgman’s final entry is his “Complete World Knowledge” trilogy, and what you get here is more of what you got in the other two. I’ll confess I actually skipped the second entry, but enjoyed the first when it came out back in 2005.

Because of this, I can’t really tell you much about how the style evolves, but I can tell you that Hodgman is playing at a more substantial game here than just a recitation of made-up facts. TIA concerns itself primarily with a countdown to the end of the world, events leading up to or contributing to it, ways in which one may prepare, and how he intends to survive as a deranged millionaire.

But there’s a metaphor at work here, too, that Hodgman winked at during his performance on the nerd cruise last month, when talking about his children. He noted that everything ever said, more or less, about one’s children boils down to “children are awesome, and I am dying.” He’s not wrong. Obviously, a meditation on the end of the world is a charmingly and grandiose way of confronting the sense of mortality one inevitably acquires in middle life.

Frankly, I was a little surprised how much I enjoyed TIA as an actual book (instead of a multi-hundred-page joke, which is what I expected). I’m actually considering revisiting the first book, and reading the second, as a consequence.

One note, btw: don’t skip the list of 700 ancient and unspeakable gods. There’s gold in there (just as I’m sure there’s gold in the list of hobos in the first book).

Terrible Nerd is Savetz’s memoir of sorts of growing up nerdy in California around the same time I was growing up nerdy in Mississippi. Near as I can tell, it was much easier going in California. ;)

I met Savetz on the Giant Nerd Cruise last month, and he gave me a copy of his book as we were playing Cards Against Humanity. I read it on the boat, which tells you how far behind I am on these posts.

He’s a nice guy, and his book is a fun read, but probably only if you’re part of our tribe.

I’m rarely amused by graffiti, but this is kind of awesome.

Achewood may be returning as a cartoon.

What the hell, Farmer, a series book?

What of it, Judgey McJudgerson?

But don’t you usually read SRS LITRATURE?

Mostly, yeah. But I also travel a bunch. There’s a place for junk food in one’s diet.

Aren’t these books mostly all the same, though?

No idea what you mean. See, this is the one where Reacher ends up investigating an improbable conspiracy, and then has to take it down more or less single-handledly.

And this is different from the other ten you ready because?

Um. Right. Still, good fun. This one was mildly different because it was the first written post-9/11, which forces some changes on Reacher’s behavior. Also, I was on vacation. There was drinking. And a beach.

I’m so behind on this; I actually finished Horns before the cruise.

I’d read one of Joe Hill‘s books before — Heart Shaped Box, his debut novel — but somehow missed out on Horns when it was released, and then it went into the perennially sifted “I’m gonna read that…” pile. I shouldn’t have delayed.

Horns is great fun from the start. Instead of slowly building to a monstrous development after hundreds of pages of hinting, Hill drops us right into the mess from page one. Ig Perrish wakes up with devil’s horns. They have odd effects on people. Given the immediate past circumstances of his life — everyone thinks he murdered his girlfriend Merrin a year before — there’s plenty of opportunity for these effects to create amusing developments.

It’s only after you’re hooked on the story that Hill paints the rest of the picture — Ig’s childhood, his family, his friends, his relationship with the dear, departed girlfriend, etc. — and if I have a complaint here it’s that these sections kind of drag a bit, and I felt at times like I really wanted to get back to the first story thread, which I was sure would be full of righteous retribution. And then, in those moments, you realize that you are reading a book that has you rooting for the devil.

Nice work.

Here’s a little bonus, btw: Horns is already being made into a film, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ig and Juno Temple as Merrin. Principal photgraphy started last September.

Comics geeks know who this guy is already, but for the uninitiated I’ll simply note that he’s one of the most influential comic book writers of the last 25 years. In addition to groundbreaking work on titles like Doom Patrol and Animal Man, Morrison has been a part of some of the biggest names in mainstream comics — he’s penned Superman, Batman, and the X-Men at one point or another, and has generally succeeded both critically and commercially across the board.

He’s a big deal, on par with more mainstream-famous types like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. I’ve enjoyed his work for years, so when I discovered — a bit late, as it turns out — that he’d written a sort of combination memoir/history of modern comics, it went right into the to-read pile.

That book — Supergods, which is an awesome title — absolutely delivers, but it does so in a style I can best describe as well-meaning but chronically overwritten. Morrison never uses 5 words when he could use 10. He’s the anti-Hemingway here, and it drags the book down a full letter grade, unfortunately. Even so, for dedicated fans of the medium (and of his work), it remains great fun. I came away with a greater appreciation for the development of the modern form and better understanding of how the Silver Age/Bronze Age stories of my youth functioned as part of the greater whole.

For example, Morrison pulls together lots of sources to give a solid narrative arc to the Golden Age – Silver Age transition, which was mostly just confusing to me as a kid. Back then, reading only the modern, post-Silver Age books, I considered the Golden Age versions of heroes like the Jay Garrick Flash (i.e., the one with the tin hat), or the Alan Scott Green Lantern (the one with the purple cape), to be goofy knock-offs — a huge injustice, since in fact those were the originals. The ones you think of as normal — Green Lantern as a cosmic policeman using alien technology instead of a railway engineer with magic powers — were “re-inventions” done after the more or less wholesale collapse of superhero comics in the late 1940s.

The stories he’s able to tell — by virtue of having been there — about the changes in comics in the 1980s and 1990s are no less interesting, especially when he lays into the Image boys (“The dial was never turned to anything less than total bugfuck hysteria in any given Spawn story”). What he says of Rob Liefeld’s art is too longwinded to retype here, but I laughed out loud several times.

Supergods bogs down a bit in the last portion as Morrison delves a bit too deeply, perhaps, into his own weird occult thing, but in truth it’s a minor sin. It is, after all, his book, and that period of his life shows up on the page as part of The Invisibles, which I’m now meaning to re-read. (Great quote from this era: “By the time I realised I’d become semi-fictional it was too late to defend myself.”)

I can’t really say this is a book for everyone, but it’s definitely worth your time if you are, or have ever been, a devoted fan of modern superhero comics or of Morrison’s own work — which I suppose is par for the course with a memoir like this. Being both, I had a great time despite his sesquipedalian tendencies.

Going Clear is award-winning journalist Lawrence Wright‘s new book about Scientology, and holy crap should you ever read it. Actually, you should probably read a couple of Wright’s books; the hype and anticipation about this particular book are due in no small part to Wright’s resume — among other things, he wrote The Looming Tower, which is absolutely the definitive history and analysis of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the mid-east and central Asia in the years before 9/11. (Seriously; if you haven’t read this book, whatever opinions you have about the sources and causes of modern terrorism in the region — and how it affects us — are absolutely incomplete. Go check it out. For bonus points, read Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game first; it’s the definitive study of empire gamesmanship in central Asia, and it’s that backdrop that leads into the hornet’s nest the region has become.)

There are other reasons for hype here, too. Most proximately is the celebrity-gossip “what a bunch of kooks” buzz that surrounds modern Scientology, thanks in part to the antics of Tom Cruise. More specifically, though, Wright’s 25,000 word New Yorker (14 February 2011) profile of screenwriter and director Paul Haggis set some pretty high expectations for the book — expectations which I believe are met handily.

Haggis spent 34 years as a Scientologist, starting in his early twenties. He raised his children in the church, and was a vocal supporter and financial backer even after gaining access to the infamous OT III information (famously detailed on South Park). What finally broke his faith, though, was Scientology’s overt support for California’s Proposition 8. As it turns out, Haggis’ two daughters are gay.

After making this break, Haggis had a bit of the zeal of the un-converted, if you will: he was willing to speak in detail and at length about the church, its doctrine, its internal workings, its misbehavior, and the changes wrought within by the ascendency of David Miscavige after the founder’s “departure.” (By the way: they still think he’s coming back.)

I promised a friend of mine I’d write a bit about this one, and then read it in 48 hours and promptly got hyperbusy such that, weeks later, I’ve still said nothing. Fortunately, there are others talking about this book, too; Michael Kinsley’s New York Times review begins with an excellent point:

That crunching sound you hear is Lawrence Wright bending over backward to be fair to Scientology. Every deceptive comparison with Mormonism and other religions is given a respectful hearing. Every ludicrous bit of church dogma is served up deadpan. This makes the book’s indictment that much more powerful.

That’s it, in a nutshell. Wright goes out of his way to be fair, knowing full well that you need only Scientology’s actual words and deeds to paint an accurate picture. This is far and away a different league than, say, the rants of an atheist about Christianity; the core of Scientology is the ravings of a lunatic science fiction author, and it makes the provably fraudulent pronouncements of Joseph Smith look positively tame by comparison. But it’s worse than that, because within this prison of belief operate what are effectively prison camps for backsliding members too afraid to cut ties, where they are held in isolation in fear of violence. More than once, Wright talks to ex-Scientologists who speak of the total isolation and information blackout at work for core Sea Org members — some, upon exit, have never read a book not authored by L. Ron Hubbard.

That kind of isolation alone is an excellent cult hallmark, but it’s not the only thing that marks the CoS as something other than a “regular” religion. To tell the story properly, though, it’s necessary to tell the story of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, which Wright does in great detail. What becomes immediately clear is that Hubbard was a legitimately brilliant, fascinating and accomplished guy — but also a megalomaniacal compulsive liar, even when the truth wasn’t damaging. He exaggerated his military exploits, his accomplishments, and his education, to hilarious degrees. He was a serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible father. There’s more than a hint of narcissism. And, like Joseph Smith before him, when he sought to found a religion for his own benefit, he had the poor planning to make pronouncements that were trivially easy to disprove even within his lifetime (such as the conditions on planet Venus).

Not, of course, that this has limited the Church, apparently. Scientology has become a quintessentially American cult, focussed as it is on Celebrity and wealth. The explosion of celebrity-worship in the late 20th century in some ways seems to have made Scientology almost inevitable, especially since it was really getting started in a period of time when many baby boomers were actively seeking new meaning and structure. There remain no small number of “ordinary” Scientologists who insist the church’s methods — auditing, e.g. — have helped them overcome challenges, meet goals, and achieve success. But the church’s underbelly is a seedy and awful place, so it’s hard not to view even that as the fruit of a poison tree.

The most fascinating fact about this entire phenomenon may be the existence of dedicated Scientologists who have “escaped” the clutches of the mainline church, but who persist in auditing and meeting and study as “independent Scientologists.” For them, the problem is not the church or its doctrine (even Xenu and the intergalactic war); the problem is the cult of personality surrounding Miscavige. They may have a point, but they can’t explain away Xenu, or the thus-far undemonstrated powers supposedly granted to those who have “gone Clear.”

Read this book.

Mrs Heathen and I (as well as our pal R.W.S.) got hooked on Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series back in 2007, when I was traveling full time. I devoured and passed on the first eight books in a couple months of long flights and hotel rooms, and since then we’ve snatched up the new installments more or less as quickly as Butcher could write them — even as, we must admit, the quality of the stories became a little uneven.

The books concern a “wizard for hire” in modern-day Chicago named Harry Dresden; he works as sort of a paranormal PI, and some of those cases turn out to be connected to giant plots by evil powers (as is so often the case). The early books are pretty stand-alone, but starting around the 7th book or so, hints of a broader over-arching plot begin. By book 10 (Small Favor, from 2008) the self-contained stories are completely in service, one way or another, of the longer narrative.

As with any “multi-installment” series, staying fresh is an issue. Butcher has done a reasonable job with worldbuilding over the years, and hasn’t exactly painted himself into a corner, but for whatever reason the last couple books weren’t quite as much fun as the earlier ones (aside, maybe, from the body count in Changes). Our little Dresden fan club was pretty unanimous in a “meh” rating for Ghost Story last year, so it took me a while to snag the 14th and latest installment, Cold Days. (Fun fact: despite the plural title, aside from a handwaved introductory period, the action takes places within a single 24-hour day.)

Yeah, well, read it in about 2 days. Loads of fun, but it’s entirely unclear to me where we’ll go next — despite the fact that Butcher apparently plans for 6 or 8 more books before Harry’s story is done. Harry’s experiencing some pretty serious power inflation to go with the ever-higher stakes, but at least this time around it worked. I reckon I’ll stay along for the ride.

I don’t remember why this one ended up in the to-read list, but smart money says a glowing review somewhere. Let me just get his out there, then, so as (hopefully) to save someone else the trouble: Holy CRAP is this book ever a tedious pile of self-indulgent nothing.

Seriously. I haven’t been this disappointed by a book since the unaccountably award-winning Among Others last year, though the book itself has more in common with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (which I also hated) in its apparent pleasure in its own rambling, shambling blankness.

Avoid. Seriously. Thank goodness I have a decent palate cleanser on hand.

My friend Mike wonders how Warren Ellis gets away with only writing a book every few years, but if he continues to improve at this rate, he can stay on this pace as long as he likes.

Ellis is mostly famous as the author of Transmetropolitan, an influential comic that ran between 1997 and 2002. Since then, he’s also written a wide variety of other titles, both creater-owned and otherwise (and also including the source material for the 2010 film RED, about which Ellis has said “if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.”) However, he’s also written prose, most notably the 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein, which I read and enjoyed.

Vein was a fine, if short, bit of work, and was mostly carried by Ellis’ voice. If you’re familiar with his blog and other online work, it’s easy to see its protagonist as a stand-in for Ellis himself (not in a wish-fulfillment Mary Sue sort of way at all, though, unless Ellis actually has a jones for scrotal inflations). Its plot was well into the sort of grotesque/absurd area that Ellis has explored in some detail in his graphic work; Wikipedia’s plot summary starts with

Michael McGill, a burned-out private eye is hired by a corrupt White House Chief of Staff to find a second “secret” United States Constitution, which had been lost in a whorehouse by Richard Nixon.

So. Right. It was fun and all, but it also (and obviously) absurdist.

Gun Machine (out this week) is very different. Our hero, New York Detective John Tallow, is still somewhat Ellis-ian (and, like McGill, he’s got some goofy sidekicks), but the story is an inventive and real-world police procedural mostly devoid of the absurd flourishes that formed the bulk of Vein. It’s also significantly longer without being padded.

Ellis starts us with a violent and shocking set piece that ends with our hero seeing his partner killed before killing the assailant himself; the gunfire exposes a heretofore apparently sealed tenement apartment completely full of guns. Guns adorn nearly every inch of the wall, floor, and ceiling. And, as it happens, every one they test turns out to be tied to some unsolved homicide, going back twenty years or more.

It’s a weird setup, which we expect from Ellis, and I worried a bit that the excesses of Vein would show up and run off with the story. That never happens. Instead, we get a solid and disciplined novel that I found very hard to put down. It’s still a bit weirder than so-called mainstream thrillers, but mostly in tone. (The killer’s totemic apartment ties into his own delusions, not some secret mystical power, for example.)

If I have one complaint here, it’s that the conclusion of the work is a bit abrupt — though by no means as unsatisfying as, say, some of Lee Child’s work has been (all these guys could take a lesson from the late Mr Parker on that front). I get that endings are hard, and Ellis’ isn’t bad, but I definitely came away wishing the last chapter had fleshed a few things out a bit more. That’s a nit, though. Gun Machine was big fun, and I’ll be first in line to read Ellis’ next novel even if he takes another five years to churn it out. (Confidential to W.E.: Please don’t.)

Now: I think I’ll read something completely devoid of policemen.

• Gun Machine at Amazon
• Cory Doctorow’s review at Boing Boing
• The trailer for the book, narrated by TV’s Wil Wheaton

I realized, in retrospect, that I’d read too much ephemeral bullshit online last year and not enough actual books, so my only real resolution for 2013 is to read more books. I certainly have no shortage of candidates — a revised online information diet would still include plenty of sources for new interesting tomes, and that’s where I found book 2013.1, The Last Policeman.

It’s no secret I mostly read so-called “serious” books, but my travel schedule and (frankly) age have softened that prejudice a bit in recent years. I’ve read more SF, devoured all of the Harry Dresden books, and even picked up a bit of a mystery/thriller habit that I initially thought was confined to Robert Parker’s “Spenser” novels (turns out I was wrong, and as a consequence I know in my bones that Tom Cruise is absolutely NOT Jack Reacher).

Anyway, book #1 for 2013 is a hybrid title. The Last Policeman is both a mystery and, technically, a science fiction story. The argument is this: owing to the impending and inexorable arrival of a large asteroid, Earth as we know it has about six months to go. We join the story in media res on that point; the protagonist (Detective Hank Palace) fills us in on the recent past as part of the narrative, so we get to explore how the world reacted as the likelihood of impact moved from “nothing to worry about” to “oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die.” His rumination gives us most of the speculative-fiction bits in the novel (which is otherwise set in a world basically just like our own), since obviously the impending doom of all or most of mankind is going to do some very weird things to society, to the economy, to geopolitics, and most notably to individual humans themselves.

Palace’s job as a murder cop has become very odd indeed, since, as zero-hour approaches, more and more people are opting to check out early. Suicides are rampant, which of course creates an excellent smokescreen for a murder or two. It’s not at all inventive that the story hinges on Palace deciding one particular “hanger” was in fact a murder, but it is inventive that it takes place in a world where “well, so fucking what?” is an increasingly viable answer.

The book’s not high lit by any stretch of the imagination — I read the whole thing on New Year’s Day — but it was definitely fun. I’ve learned to be kind of circumspect about recommendations from places like BoingBoing or IO9, but this time around I wasn’t disappointed. I expect I’ll read the other two books Ben Winters has planned for Detective Palace.

As of today, it has been 195 days since Achewood was updated.

How I would like to work for you! contains the text of her 1933 letter to The New Yorker seeking employment. Sadly, they turned her down.

Strongbad interprets children’s literature.

The Hairpin and Poetry magazine are collaborating; the first example is the former running two poems from Karr with an unmistakable subject.

You should not, under any circumstances, miss these if you are at all of the literary bent.

I’m really, really confused how Among Others beat out Embassytown for best novel. The latter was legitimately compelling and inventive; the former is a terribly simplistic young-adult outsider-comes-of-age story that boils down to “Are you there, Sci fi? It’s me, Mori” and leaves more plot threads unresolved than not.

Because we all need a mantra:

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess.

The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Carry on.

This two-volume, slipcased omnibus edition of 9 classic SF novels is significantly more affordable than the last object of booklust I mentioned…

The glorious book nerds at The Folio Society have issued a new edition of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, printed as Faulkner wished — with multiple colors denoting the time and point-of-view shifts.

It is $345, in slipcover, on archival paper, with a commentary volume, and I WANTS IT.

Gaiman returns to Sandman.

The May 28 New Yorker has a fantastic (and long) story on the extraordinary exploits of William Alexander Morgan, the American ne’er do well and wanderer who became the only American Comandante in the Cuban revolution (there was, apparently, only one other foreigner with that title).

We likely forget that there was a coalition of forces united behind Castro thanks to the excesses of Batista’s regime. Morgan joined a band of revolutionaries who were also ardent anti-communists; his star fell as Fidel moved to the left and the same sort of totalitarianism that doomed Batista, with predictable results, but the man’s story reads like something Hemingway could’ve written.

(Know anything about this cat, Gar?)

Last year, I read the otherwise brilliant A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s a fine (and interestingly structured) novel of modern life, but it’s marred pretty seriously by a hamfisted stab at “modernity” or “experimentalism”: Egan renders one chapter as a PowerPoint-style presentation (presumably because in her life as a writer she’s never really exposed to the horror that is PowerPoint in American business life).

No, I’m not kidding. It’s the sort of overly precious goofball conceit you sometimes see in experimental writers (and Egan has certainly got some metafiction DNA), but not really in good ones. Frankly, I completely support attempting something like this — I mean, why not? — but part of being “experimental” is knowing when to wash your attempts down the lab drain instead of foisting them on a reading public.

Obviously, opinions vary on this — Goon Squad won big awards — but as a veteran of an English department I know all too well that some writers’ shit doesn’t stink, and that authors with the reputation Egan has can get away with things that others couldn’t. Sometimes, they’re even praised for it. Inshallah.

Anyway, fresh off the goofball presentation chapter, we find now the news that Egan will tweet a short story for the New Yorker. What’s hilarious, sad, and graspy about this is that Egan has no real Twitter presence today. There’s nothing linked on her site, and a Google search turns up only an account (@EganGoonSquad) presumably started to promote her last book, and probably not run by her at all. It hardly matters; there are only 7 tweets spread between August 2010 and the day before yesterday.

What this suggests is that, like the PowerPoint gimmick, this will be a nonnative usage of an established form by a writer mining for novelty, not narrative or story or character. Egan is not a digital native. She has no real online presence, nor any real engagement with social media or blogging or anything of the sort. Consequently, what’s likely to happen is that she’ll chop a story into 140-character bits, have an assistant type it in, and bask in the glow of an “experimental short story” that’s essentially free of any experimental character; after all, serialization is a 19th century technique.

If she or her editors had any grasp of the culture of Twitter, this might’ve been interesting. Twitter is not a broadcast medium; Twitter is a conversation. Chopping an otherwise unremarkable short story into 140-character pieces isn’t particularly inventive, and is unlikely to include anything unique to the form.

Further, Egan’s little stunt overshadows the countless inventive uses of Twitter already happening — there’s fiction there, and character-based commentary, and a whole host of other genuinely novel expressions that Egan apparently knows nothing about.

What we’re left with, then, is an old-school magazine (which I love) and a Boomer writer establishing in a very public way how little they understand about the online world. Again.

Unfollow.

The iPad is now in its third year, and it’s difficult to overstate the impact its had on computing, especially portable computing. I know it’s certainly changed the way I interact with the richness of the web, for example, and has made it vastly easier to have a ridiculous amount of information just a few taps away — and on a big screen. I love that.

Because I am a giant literature nerd, though, one of the most exciting developments on the iPad was, at least for me, this edition of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterwork. Dense with allusion and reference, it’s a poem that’s launched a thousand dissertations and annotations. And the folks at TouchPress realized they could bundle the text with reams of backing information, readings, annotations, and reference material in a single beautiful package on the iPad.

(Older Heathen will remember that there were attempts at this sort of rich publishing model in the initial CD-ROM boom, but the iPad gives us a much richer experience.)

I hoped that the warm reception (and immediate financial success) of The Waste Land app would mean we’d see similar treatments of important works — and especially important works that were logistically hard to carry around. The two that I’d most love to see are Ulysses and Infinite Jest, which also happen to be two of my favorite novels. In either case I’d gleefully pay for a work again just to have a bundled experience of the quality delivered with The Waste Land.

And yet: Nothing. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed, either. Won’t someone make this happen?

If you somehow missed Neil Gaiman interviewing Stephen King, well, it’s now on Gaiman’s own site, free of the Times’ paywall. Enjoy. Not terribly long, and very worth your while.

I have now fixed that.

It’s mostly about Wilbur, of course, but Charlotte does make an appearance. Not safe for work, church, life, or sanity. Nor do I think it is, strictly speaking, kosher. Or halal, for that matter.

The Awl’s “Classic Trash” feature takes on The Secret History.

Nothing else i say will make this post more interesting if you didn’t wear out a copy of that book, but everyone who did has already clicked through. It’s that kind of book.

Found at — where else? — Whole Foods:

Yesterday would have been Douglas Adams’ 60th birthday.

In his honor, tomorrow I will turn 42.

Nicholas Carr suggests that publishers include ebook downloads with regular books, in the way record labels do with vinyl and MP3, or the way you get music by default if you buy a CD.

I think record labels only do it because they sort of have to — a CD can be ripped and shared quickly, and while they tried to sell us formats that were locked down, nobody ever bought SACD or DVD-A in real volumes. They’re still stuck with CD, which means format shifting is a dead letter for the RIAA.

Book publishers may think this means they can keep trying to bill us twice for physical and electronic copies, since there’s no reasonable way to “rip” a novel onto your Kindle. But it’s still the right thing to do, for lots of reasons. The biggest one is that it’ll shore up their existing distribution channels (brick & mortar stores) at the expense of Amazon, and it’s in nobody’s best interest for any one company to control American publishing.

Sure would be nice. I pay a premium for a vinyl + CD-or-download-code package vs. what it would cost in the iTunes store, or what a CD alone would cost, because I prefer the form factor and tactile experience of vinyl. I’d pay a mild premium for books with Kindle editions included, too.

So during some interval of excess travel a year or two ago, I found myself reading an excerpt of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels on my Kindle, courtesy of an ad in the New Yorker. I remember thinking the combo seemed odd, but now that I’m 7 books into the series I guess they knew better than I.

The Reacher books are pretty dumb. Let’s get that out in the open immediately. I tend to see Child’s “clever plot developments” coming a mile off, mostly because they aren’t all that clever. But these stories of a wandering vigilante former Army major (who, famously, keeps neither a fixed address or even a suitcase) came along at pretty much the right time: we were all out of Dresden at the time, and Robert Parker is dead, and now what antisocial chaotic good badass is going to entertain me on plane rides or when I’m otherwise too braindead to read the next really good book on my stack?

So, Reacher. Six novels in, he’s fought bloodthirsty counterfeiters, insane militia separatists, megalomaniacal, crazed Vietnam vets from central casting (by way of Blofeld), a really lame serial killer, and weirdly obsessed would-be assassins of a fictional vice president. None of them are very good, but the thing is you run through the book in only a couple hours anyway. (Seriously, I never would have read so many without the Kindle’s ability to buy on the run.)

I thought briefly about a more detailed discussion of these pulp delights, but that seems pointless. I will say that order does sort of matter — each book is self contained, but later ones refer to previous adventures — so if you’re inclined, start with Killing Floor. It’s a bit more graphically violent than the others, and was published in 1997, so it’s mildly outdated, but still fun.

Apparently, in addition to penning almost exclusively annoying and poorly structured, overly precious novels about baby boomers, Jonathan Franzen also hates ebooks and considers them (I’m not kidding) incompatible with a just society.

Also, I’m sure he would like us to get off his lawn, turn down our music, tuck our shirts in like normal people, and otherwise conform to his increasingly myopic view of the world. I’d say he should just spend more time writing, but after slogging through the Corrections I sort of hope he’ll stop doing that, too. Others do it far better.

If you’re fan, you should, at your earliest convenience, go read this essay over at neil Gaiman’s site, about the influence of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton on his literary development. It’s completely brilliant and wonderful.

Also, it includes photographs of all three. If you are like me, and read Sandman when you were younger, and perhaps had not at that time or since actually seen a picture of Chesterton, you will be astonished by how obvious the correlation is between the author and Gaiman’s character “Fiddler’s Green.”

Some Heathen are aware of our affection for Jim Butcher‘s “Dirty Harry Potter” series The Dresden Files, concerning the adventures of a modern day wizard (Harry Dresden) working as a paranormal investigator in Chicago. I discovered them during a period of intense travel five years ago, quickly caught up, and have read each new book pretty quickly after publication since.

Well, that sort of changed with the last one. After Changes, the penultimate volume, I was getting a little tired of Butcher’s schtick. He’s turned a certain corner by my lights such that his voice is overrunning his narrative talent, but he’s selling so well he’s got no reason to reign it in. Hey, dude’s making a living, and presumably a nice one, so more power to him, and I absolutely recognize how hard it must be to sustain a series, so this isn’t meant as a dig. It just means I was less enthusiastic about reading Ghost Story when it came out last August. In fact, I didn’t pick it up until this week, when I was reminded it existed after loaning a giant sack of Dresden books to a friend recuperating from some surgery.

Let’s just say my fears were a at last partly justified. I blew through the book quickly, obviously, as is often the case with genre work. I certainly enjoyed it more than The Trinity Six I mentioned in the last book post, but that’s not a high bar. Mostly, I’m still along for Harry’s ride because I already have a bunch of time invested, and I’m interested to see how it all resolves, but that’s the literary equivalent of being in an abusive relationship. Seriously: Ask any Game of Thrones fan.

What’s worse is that Ghost Story doesn’t resolve any of the growing backstory for Harry. There’s nary a peep of the White Counsel, the Black Counsel, or anything beyond the immediate repercussions of the events in Changes. Granted, that was heavy, but what that leaves us with in Ghost Story is a fairly thin plot with a fairly predictable end that’s telegraphed way, way in advance. (And, to be perfectly honest, the finale of Ghost Story is a clear and obvious place for Harry to end up based on the events of Changes; the plot of the most recent book ends up being almost completely filler.)

So, read it if you’re into Harry. And I can’t say the first few books (at least) aren’t fun, so the series itself is at least worth some of your time.

Oh, and how funny is it that Butcher is still putting the same plea to “please read my sword and sorcery Codex Alera books” in the back of each Dresden tome? Apparently, he only wrote the Dresden books to make cash, and his main love is a cycle of traditional fantasy. I do not have the sense that the fantasy carries any of the charm he’s managed with the Dresden Files.

(Confidential to certain parties in surgical recovery: It may be possible to steal Ghost before Erin reads it, given the pace with which you’re reading the others…)