I’ll just come right out and say it: holy CRAP was I disappointed in this one. In the decade since it hit the streets, Carter has gotten nearly universally good reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s been on my “I should read that” list for a long, long time, so when geek-celeb Wil Wheaton wrote about loving it on his blog a month ago, I finally got around to ordering it from Amazon.

Carter Beats the Devil is one of those “fictional story told with real-life character” books, which sometimes works but usually ends up too clever by half. This one starts well enough, but Gold really kinda runs out of steam about halfway through. It went from a page-turner to a slog, and then stayed there; I found it a chore to finish. Even the “big reveals” towards the end didn’t really pay off for me, anyway.

Anyway, onward.

(SO behind, still.)

Yeah, I know, but I was traveling again. Reacher books just go down easy, which is troublesome as now I’ve only got 4 left. Write like the wind, Lee!

61 Hours is an odd one in that it’s framed, constantly by the titular countdown that we only slowly grow to understand. Reacher, of course, is drawn into a web of intrigue in an isolated small town — which is by no means new for him — but by this point in the series Child’s gotten good enough with characters that they’re a bit better than stock, which is nice for pulp.

Mark this one, as always, for fans only, but I enjoyed it, if for no other reason than the consistently hilarious visual provided by the generally-offscreen antagonist.

There is a “secret” underground library branch in NYC located at the 51st street 6 stop.

This is: awesome.

In the 70s and 80s, it was routine to see one-page ads in comic books for snack cakes; they’d take the form of mini-stories usually featuring the hero on the cover of the book, so you’d end up with Spiderman shilling for Hostess, for example.

Don’t you think this is an idea that needs to return? Yeah, me too. So does Brendan Tobin. Turns out, he’s a Breaking Bad fan, too. Enjoy.

(I’m still catching up.)

If you think about for any amount of time at all, you’ll notice something about TV’s evolution since we GenX types were kids: the broad market has gotten worse (Honey Boo Boo anyone?), and shows in general define success with vastly smaller chunks of a larger market, but there are at any given moment a few shows on the air (now there’s an anachronistic phrase) that push the boundaries of the medium and eschew trite 42-minute stories that return all the pieces, unchanged, to their starting positions before the credits roll.

Look at it this way: In 1978, the Emmy winner for best drama was The Rockford Files, which was a completely legitimate choice. However, Rockford was pretty simplistic, and employed the usual tropes — chief among them was that Jim and his pals were always more or less in exactly the same position at the end of the hour that they were at the start. Continuity was for soap operas, not so-called “serious” TV.

Then something interesting happened: Hill Street Blues. it was the vanguard for a whole new kind of TV show for adults, one that featured solid acting, good writing, real direction, and tossed out the whole idea of the continuity-free world. Episodic TV could — and should! — exploit the sheer expanse of the form; after all, every season had 22 hours to fill. Why not try some longer stories?

Hill Street and St Elsewhere and LA Law and Wiseguy and other shows in the 1980s pushed these boundaries probably as far as they could go on network TV, and then 1990s shows like NYPD Blue pushed them a bit more. . . and then HBO noticed, and let David Chase to The Sopranos, and then the change was mainstream.

Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised, which is compulsively readable if distinctly flawed by a somewhat limited vision, is a study of these changes in quality TV. It takes the form of a chapter-by-chapter analysis of several key programs in the evolution of the modern TV drama, including Hill Street, but with a decided emphasis on the more recent examples. If you find media criticism and analysis at all interesting, this is a great book to pick up. I was disappointed that he didn’t go farther with the idea — Sepinwall mostly ignores broad trends in the medium, one of which is the implied subject of the recently published Difficult Men (why ARE so many of these elite shows centered on horrible people, like Tony Soprano or Walter White or Don Draper or Vic Mackey?). But what’s here is good, and is worth your time.

I’m super behind. Forgive the brevity.

This one’s easy: If you love the Old Man’s War universe, then The Human Division makes a tasty read, but I wouldn’t jump in here as a first venture. This time the shenanigans are mostly political instead of military, but our hero is still one of the genetically enhanced soldier types like those that staffed OMW itself. Lots of wry dialog, plenty of nerdy sarcasm, and a generally rollickin’ good yarn if you like this sort of thing.

My sense is that Scalzi is capable of much more “serious” writing, given his resume (and his work at Whatever). I think I’d like to see him stretch his chops and venture out of this witty-SF category and into a different world, just to see what he could do with a less completely genre work. My guess is that he’d do just fine, which is more than I can say for lots of SF types.

Anyway, a fun book. Enjoy.

This is an exhaustively researched piece on the use of DC continuity in Gaiman’s Sandman.

If you were a fan, don’t miss it.

Sandman Slim is back for more in book 5 of Kadrey’s reliably entertaining urban fantasy series. He’s not the devil anymore, so it’s back to LA to work at thwarting the arrival of some pesky old gods; you know, the usual sort of thing.

Plenty of authors are playing in this space, but for my money Kadrey is doing the best job. He’s clearly a student of the noir/hardboiled tradition, and that shows through; our hero — his actual name is James Stark — has much in common with the gumshoes written by Chandler and Hammett and Crumley, to say nothing of the character’s namesake. If angels, devils, supernatural mysteries, and tales of revenge aren’t interesting, this isn’t the series for you, but if you’re into both noir and modern fantasy, you might want to look into the first book — you absolutely don’t want to read them out of order.

After discussing The Big Sleep at a friend’s house not long ago, I was enthusiastically loaned a copy of The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley. I’d never heard of either book or author, but Mrs Heathen — an alum of a mystery bookstore — nodded sagely as John handed me the book. It’s a good one; neither John nor Erin steered me wrong here.

I’m apparently the last one to know this, but Crumley was a great inheritor of the noir/hardboiled tradition. I’m just sorry I didn’t read him sooner (had I read his 2008 obituary in the Times, I’m sure I would have; therein he’s described as the literary offspring of Chandler and Heathen patron saint Hunter Thompson). His books are placed later (Kiss is in the 1970s), but still honor the form pioneered by Hammett and Chandler. He was never hugely successful, but he’s on the short list of “favorite writers” for a whole host of more modern American crime novelists, including folks like Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos. It’s for good reason; Kiss is a hell of a yarn, and carries itself with such poise and style that I really didn’t mind the somewhat abrupt ending.

This one’s worth picking up if the world of hard(ish) boiled detectives appeals to you at all. Here’s how it begins:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Beat that.

Let me get this right out of the way: HOLY CRAP I CAN’T BELIEVE I READ AND LOVED A CELEB BIO.

There. I said it.

Mrs Heathen read this a year or more ago, when it came out, and was laughing out loud and reading bits to me so often that I eventually agreed I’d have to read it. I’m not sorry. Lowe — who did not have a ghostwriter here, I should note — has written a surprisingly warm and self-aware (and, in places, unflinching) book about going from nowhere, Ohio, to California, and about getting his fondest dream granted when he became a a no-shit movie star at a terribly young age (in The Outsiders). Madcap hilarity, at least in hindsight, ensues with remarkable regularity.

Lowe is both aware of and cautious of his profound luck and privilege, but at the same time manages to let us into his own perspective as an insecure actor auditioning with other folks just starting out at the time (recall a guy named Tom Cruise was also in The Outsiders). His California neighborhood was also home to a couple sets of brothers of some note — the Crazy Dad in the area was Martin Sheen, fresh off Apocalypse Now and a long way from Bartletian gravitas. The Estevez and Lowe brothers ran around with Sean, Matthew, and Chris Penn, which must’ve made for some very odd pick-up baseball.

This wasn’t the first bit of right time/right place Lowe had; his early career intertwined with many others, and afforded him a wealth of hilarious stories (some with absolute Hollywood royalty) I won’t spoil here. It’s enough to say that Stories is really just about the ultimate summer read, and that, if you’re bashful, in this age of miracles and wonders you can load it on your Kindle if you don’t want anyone to think you’re “slumming.” Recommended.

This is the guy who won the publicity lottery a while ago when some numbskull Fox commentator (who is, unaccountably, their religion correspondent) couldn’t get past the fact that Aslan, a Muslim, wrote a book about the historical Jesus. Fox followed by stirring up all manner of bullshit controversy around the book, and sales skyrocketed. Fox probably doesn’t care either way, and just saw an opportunity to shout “LOOKOUT! MUSLIMS!” at its sadly credulous base again, so I guess everyone’s a winner here.

Anyway, Aslan’s book is actually pretty NON-controversial outside of rabid fundie circles. His entire point, which is made abundantly clear several times, is that he’s seeking evidence and analysis about the historical Jesus only. He’s not interested at all in matters of faith, in Jesus’ divinity, or in the religious implications of his research; he’s just gathering together what scholars generally agree on regarding this particular exceedingly influential resident of first century Palestine.

The resulting book is a treasure, and one that I think nearly anyone with more than a passing interest in Christianity should probably read — believer, agnostic, and atheist alike, because it’s fascinating. Aslan places the events of Jesus’ life in the historical context that is typically missing from Sunday School. What were the geopolitics like in Palestine 2,000 years ago? How did Rome treat the area? Who had power and influence? We know Jesus was crucified; what did that mean, in the world of that era? And when the gospels and other New Testament books get written — and by whom? That the gospels were likely not written by their titular apostles is no longer an even remotely controversial statement, but what may surprise many readers is the sort of “doctrinal drift” that occurs as one moves from the earlier gospels to the later ones — possibly, in Aslan’s view, to render a revolutionary movement into something more palatable to Rome.

Also covered in detail is the ascension of the former Saul of Tarsus — better known by his post-conversion name Paul — as the effective head of the faith. How’d that happen, when those who actually traveled with Jesus were still around?

Aslan provides the missing backdrop, and does it in a compulsively readable style. I can’t overstate this, but most people in churches learn in a silo; I certainly did. There’s “Christian” publishing, and then there’s everything else, and never the twain shall meet. Additional historical texts and sources are almost never introduced in religious instruction, at least not in the mainline Southern Baptist church of my youth; it’s sola scriptura all the way down. Aslan’s book provides more context in a few hundred pages than I got in 20 years of church instruction.

Moreover, the latter third of the book is given over to notes and sources, lest ye think this “dangerous mooslim” is simply trying to tear down Christianity with his book and interpretations (he’s absolutely NOT doing that, I assure you). I’m sure some folks at very conservative seminaries and “bible colleges” may take issue with some of what he says, but the broad academic response to the book has been (mostly) “yeah, that’s pretty much what we’ve been saying for years.” Aslan just puts it in an accessible format.

I don’t mean to say it’s all settled fact, obviously, or that Aslan’s sources and analysis are the only ones possible. Obviously, there’s little we know to be absolutely true, in a historical sense, about the life of Jesus, beyond his crucifixion (which, according to Aslan, tells us quite a lot). Much is extrapolation and conjecture, or is based on accounts written long after the fact (e.g., the gospels themselves). But Aslan’s book does provide an excellent opportunity to start a conversation about that context both within and outside communities of faith, and that’s a very good thing.

Oh, mercy.

I hadn’t read this since high school; it’s lost none of its delight, really, but I get that it’s a sort of delight not everyone understands or enjoys. My own re-read was triggered largely by the news that James Franco has adapted it for the screen, which is an odd thing to consider — AILD is infamous for its constantly switching points of view and stream-of-consciousness technique (typically from Vardaman); it’s not at all clear how either idea will translate to the screen. I had similar reservations about adapting Watchmen, and had them largely vindicated. In general, when a work lives so fully in the medium that birthed it, translating it to some other medium is an undertaking fraught with peril.

But I’m sure I’ll still go see it, because Faulkner.

(By the way, it turns out there’s a band — working in the previously unknown to me genre of “Christian metalcore” — using the title as its name. Said band (who I’m sad to say own the domain name “asilaydying.com”) are in the midst of some difficulties at present, as it appears that, back in May, their lead singer was arrested in a Barnes and Noble for trying to hire an undercover policeman to kill his estranged wife.

The gentleman in question — Tim Lambesis — also has a sideband/solo project called “Austrian Death Machine,” which I think we can all agree is several steps down the band-name-quality ladder from his day job. It is, of course, an Arnold Schwarzenegger tribute project.

I am not making (any of) this up. We learn odd things from time to time via Heathen, don’t we?)

This has been on my to-read list for a long time, so when I happened upon it in a shop recently I snagged it and dove in.

Sadly — and this may be the most damning thing I’ve said about any book so far this year — in the 19 days since I finished it, I seem to have almost completely forgotten any charm it held. Critics called it “playful” and experimental, but after a lifetime of reading just that sort of thing, I think it failed to register as novel at all. I read a similarly playful take on “trope” fiction, Soon I Will Be Invincible, back in April, and found it much more entertaining.

You can skip this one.

Lucky #13, for sure. Child was off his game in the prior one, but back to a much better form here. This time around the enemy is a bit more au courant, but not clangingly so; Reacher has been in a post-9/11 world for a few books now, and given his lifestyle it was inevitable he’d have to battle terrorists and well-meaning but dimwitted fascist pseudocops.

Anyway, it’s a return of compulsively readable form for Child, which is refreshing after the train wreck of Nothing to Lose.

Alarmingly, I will note that there are only five more books in the series at this point, counting the one that won’t be out in hardback until the fall. I’m not sure what my junk food of choice will be when I run out of these. Nominations? (I think I’m safe through the end of calendar 2014 at least, so no hurry.)

This one is one of those “big idea” science fiction books. What if, Ashby wonders, we had self-aware synthetic humans in today’s world? Take it further; wonder about love and marriage and kids. Take it one more step, and build your story around the “child” of a mixed couple: human father, “vN” (for Von Neumann) mother. In the world of the book, the child is really only the offspring of the mother; the synthetics are technological, not biological, and so an actual hybrid is impossible. Toss in a sprinklings of Asimov and set the ball rolling, and you’ve got most of Ashby’s novel.

It’s mostly fun, but begins to collapse under the weight of its own ideas well before the end. I find this is an issue in lots of SF: the writer’s “what if” engine goes into overdrive, and more and more ideas get grafted on, and before long the narrative is stuck in a bog of individually interesting notions that, taken together, create a mess.

Still, vN is a debut. Flawed as it is, it still suggests more interesting work to come form her pen. I doubt I’ll bother with the sequel, but I really would like to read what she comes up with next, once she’s done with this world.

You may or may not recall that my first 2013 book was Ben Winters’ The Last Policeman, which I read in one sitting on January first. It’s the tale of a fairly green police detective chasing an apparent suicide that doesn’t look quite right — and set in a world with an expiration date. An asteroid is bearing down on the Earth; the expectation is that virtually no one will live past the following October. This sets in motion a number of events and changes in society, and it’s teasing out these effects where Winters does his best work, at least in the first volume. It’s not that the story is substandard; it’s just that he does such a good job with the worldbuilding that you get a little distracted.

The balance is better with book 2, Countdown City. The clock’s kept moving; by now, we’re inside 3 months. The asteroid is now set to impact the far side of the world, so we’ve added refugee issues to the challenges being faced by the people in Winters’ world. The plot this time is less obvious, and plugs into the impending doom a bit more directly even if it starts with a conventional missing-persons case (which, in this world, are never “conventional” — people run away or commit suicide with alarming regularity). As before, though, I sort of feel like Winters whiffs the ending. Not so much that it ruins the book, and no so much that I don’t want to read the final book (due next summer), but enough to be annoying.

Also annoying: Winters and his editor made some seriously rookie mistakes here when it comes to firearms. In 2013, that’s just silly; gun people are one of the original nerd tribes, and will happily set you straight about any number of concepts. For example, it should’ve been easy for them to find out that SIG Sauer doesn’t even make a revolver — and that, to be honest, nobody the age of Winters’ cop would be using a wheel gun anyway.

Winters compounds the problem by invoking a sniper rifle with a military designation (M140) that’s either made up or so obscure as to be a poor choice. Since there IS a Marine sniper rifle called the M40, plus a couple others based on the M14, it’s easy to see where the error came from, but that doesn’t completely excuse it. if you’re going to be specific, get it right. Being less specific to finesse your lack of knowledge on a given subject is no sin, as long as you don’t destabilize your plot; in both cases, Winters would’ve been safe avoiding the specific reference.

Cowdery is a well-regarded bourbon blogger and writer; as I’m a fan of the spirit, I sought out his book, which I think he self-published. It’s a bunch of solid articles, but it lacks the editing polish and overall coherence we associate with big-publisher books. That’s a nit, though; Cowdery’s book is a compulsively readable survey of the history of bourbon — which is a pretty fascinating tale. Aging, for example, comes late to the party; 18th century American corn whiskey was, typically, unaged and therefore clear. (Why bourbon is typically aged much less than Scottish whiskys is also an interesting tale, by the way.)

Cowdery also gives us a great survey of who, actually, is making bourbon today. It’s fewer people than you’d think — there’s no end of contract distilling and label opaqueness. The bourbon boom that happened after this book went to press have just made those problems worse. (Seriously, look at a bottle and see if you can really and truly tell where the whiskey was made. Odds are, you can’t, but for a very small number of brands.)

Anyway, it’s a good and quick read, but it might be worth waiting to see if Cowdery plans to update it in light of the modern developments in the whiskey market. Even if he doesn’t, though, it’s worth your time.

I’m mildly embarrassed to admit this, but I’d actually never read this before — or, actually, any Chandler (or Hammett, for that matter). I’m really sorry I waited this long. The Big Sleep is an early giant of this genre — and while Dashiell Hammett came earlier, it’s arguably the ur-text of the whole realm.

Reading it, you get a weird little cognitive dissonance here and there as you run across events or dialog that seems like cliches — but then you realize it wasn’t a cliche in 1933. It’s like watching Stagecoach and noting the “tired” Western tropes — they weren’t tried when John Ford used them. Phillip Marlowe is the hard-boiled private eye, refined from Hammett’s Sam Spade: he’s full of whisky and wisecracks, isn’t afraid of violence, and follows an uncompromising personal moral code. Spade and Marlowe’s children are legion — most notably Robert Parker‘s Spenser, but there are countless others ranging widely through genre (for example, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, and Richard Kadrey’s Stark within the world of urban fantasy).

It’s not a long book, but it’s a rich one. You’ll find yourself reading some portions aloud to yourself, even slipping into a snappy patter as you do it, just for the sheer pleasure of saying the words:

“Tell me about yourself, Mr Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?”

“Sure, but there’s very little to tell. I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade. […] I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives.”

or

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-lounge with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. […] The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. […]

She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass.

“So you’re a private detective,” she said. “I didn’t know they really existed, except in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotels.”

There was nothing in that for me, so I let it drift with the current.

A bit later:

I grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. “I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your manners.”

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind you showing me your legs. They’re swell legs, and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

You can hear those rhythms far and wide now, but in 1933, they were new.

Go. Read. Seriously, even if “detective fiction” isn’t really your thing. Chandler was way, way more than a genre writer. His works are well worth your time.

Dude. Gaiman. Done.

Seriously, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a brilliant and delightful meditation on childhood, a vein Gaiman seems fascinated with lately (cf. Coraline), but that’s fine by me. Ocean is a modern fable or fairy tale, with supernatural menaces and allies obviously perceived only by our young protagonist, but it’s in no way tired or old hat; it’s a great story, and worth your time.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered with any of Banks’ non-SF works, except, well, he died, and then my friend and longtime Heathen Lindsey X passed her copy of this on to me. I dove in.

The Wasp Factory a slim thing, and there’s not much I could say about it that hasn’t been said by deeper thinkers than I. It’s somewhat bleak, and certainly violent and sometimes disturbing — the more sadistic passages of Consider Phlebas have nothing on this. I felt Banks’ voice for sure, despite the age of the work (it’s his first novel), but I missed the wide-ranging inventiveness of his Culture books. I found myself somewhat surprised by the nearly universal accolades this book got; it’s a fine work, sure, but I didn’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. It’s still worth your time, though — as I noted, it’s short, so it won’t take much of it.

I’ve never bothered combining two posts before, but it seems fair with these books — the last two of a trilogy I started a year or two ago with Leviathan Wakes.

Corey — the pen name of collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — has created here a pretty solid little hard-SF space opera. The initial scene is set with the first book (seriously, start there if this appeals to you): in the not-too-far future, mankind has settled the moon, Mars, parts of the asteroid belt, and some of the gas giant moons. Our story involves a somewhat disgraced pilot (Jim Holden), tension between the Belters, Mars, and Earth, a hard-boiled-ish detective, a missing girl, mysterious alien tech, political intrigue, and a pace that’ll keep you up nights. There’s lots to like here.

The second book, Caliban’s War (which I finished over a month ago; I am so VERY behind on these posts), is perhaps a bit better, though it relies more on stock characters than the first, and the recurrence of a central theme (“missing girl”) is only mostly excused by the starkly different environment in which the pursuit happens. The mysterious alien tech is better understood, and bad things are happening because we meddled with it. (Who saw THAT coming, right?) The best part here is that a new main character is a irascible and bluntly charming Indian woman (Chrisjen Avasarala) who works political angles within Earth’s government with an aplomb that wouldn’t be out of place from Frank Underwood.

The final book, which I read partly because “vacation” and partly because of the momentum I felt after reading the second, is more of a let down. They move the pieces around, and we return to our ersatz Han Solo as a main character while adding a few new ones who are nowhere nearly as much fun as Avasarala. There’s a clumsy plot that calls back to the first book, and a sort of on-rails experience regarding the “big reveal” about the alien technology, where it came from, and what it’s ultimately for.

Still, none of these books take more than a day or two to read, so you don’t expect them to be plotted like Swiss watches. They were fun, and I’d probably give something from Corey another go, but I’m pretty sure I’d skip anything else in this particular universe; it’s clear they love it, but it’s equally clear they hold on to some elements book to book more than perhaps they should.

On this day in 1937, Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His suicide in 2005 remains a goddamn shame, because I’d love to hear what Hunter would write about PRISM or Trayvon Martin or Obama or Romney or Ted Cruz or even Tim Tebow. But we won’t get that.

Thompson wrote about politics, about sports, about counterculture, and most famously about drugs, but my favorite passage of his remains this, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about the failed promise of broad societal change in the sixties:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.

Of course, it’s earlier in the book that we hear his most famous words (“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert…”). By the way, this is the picture from the first edition’s back cover:

(That’s Oscar Zeta Acosta on the right, the inspiration for Raoul’s friend and attorney Dr Gonzo. Acosta disappeared in Mexico in 1974; in 1977, Thompson described him as “One of God’s on prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and to rare to die.”)

Thompson’s culinary advice is also solid, as shown here in his description of a nutricious breakfast:

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.

Modulo the Bolivian marching powder, we see no reason why this shouldn’t become a national standard.

Godspeed, Hunter. We miss you.

Neil Gaiman shared this link on Twitter yesterday; it covers interesting backstory about how a then mostly unknown Tori Amos came to write “Tear in Your Hand” after reading a borrowed copy of “Calliope” (Sandman #17) in 1990, and how complementary shout-outs ended up in subsequent issues of Sandman (most notably the fact that “Tear” is playing in the background a few years later, in issue, #41).

Rantz tells the story well. Go read it.

Back in March, I talked to you about THAT IS ALL, John Hodgman’s final volume of complete world knowledge. If you’re interested in that book, it might be worth your while to check out the audiobook instead, because it is brilliant.

The link there goes to a review that goes into detail about the evolution of Hodgman’s voice, which is something I had intended to do in my blurb but ended up leaving off, largely because I wasn’t sure how much of what I thought I was seeing was in the text, and how much was colored by casual interaction with Hodgman on JCCC3 (where, obviously, he wasn’t “in character” all the time).

This is spot on, though:

Without giving too much away, you should know that That is All makes its crucial Turn when Hodgman stops writing as a familiar character, and begins writing as what we might guess is “himself,” whatever that means for a writer who is so aware of his changing status and thus his changing voice. Taking on a new voice, one that is so unselfconscious, is surely a vulnerable place to be after so many years occupying jokey versions of himself — we’ve heard Hodgman as a Former Professional Literary Agent, Resident Expert, Famous Minor Television Celebrity, and finally Deranged Millionaire (if you aren’t familiar with these, read your history). Now we are hearing from the post-post Hodgman — in other words, beyond the narrator-in-character writer there is a Hodgman voice we’ve been waiting to hear from again (I remember this voice from before his first book), and boy does it hit home. The book’s brilliant conclusion, telling the story of the metafictional Anne Darling Egan, serves as a transition not just in the book, but in Hodgman’s career — it suggests what Hodgman will do next, after the end of this series of postmodern characters. I have no inside information, but listening to the long segment preceding the closing song, I couldn’t help but think — Hodgman has a novel in him.

What I conclude from That is All is that Hodgman’s Deranged Millionaire character was gaslighting us the entire time. The truth, of course, is that Hodgman himself is a genuinely kind person who uses character as a way to express himself with a kind of wry, safe detachment. His recent Derangement is a fun side-note in the arc of his career, but careers aren’t what matter. What matters is that we do what we love, that we are with the people we love, and that we do our work surrounded by friends — that is what Hodgman has been doing by bringing in Paul Rudd and Jonathan Coulton and running gags that span dozens of hours of audio and years of work — he’s demonstrating to us what is most meaningful isn’t the jokes, it’s that those jokes are shared.

If you (a) enjoy good writing, (b) enjoy Iain Banks, and are sad he’s gone, or (c) just love Formula 1, then you should definitely go read this. Here’s a bit:

It’s all about the power, and weight transfer. The F1 cars weigh 600kg. In a Lamborghini Diablo – a maniac, kaka off-a-shovel device if ever there was one – each bhp has nearly three kilos to move around. In what we’re to be driving, each horse only has to shift 800 grams. Under acceleration drivers get hit with 2.5gs, under braking it’s four gs.

[…]

‘Allez! Go!’ Clutch out.

The sound assaults. I feel like a shell in a gun. The car leaps forward like a Navy fighter slung from a carrier. Feather slightly, pull back on the right paddle for second, exit pits. Assume the line. First gentle corner again, burst of – Holy shit! – power, then the counter-intuitive braking. It’s not really counter-intuitive, it’s just counter to anything I’ve learned in a road car, apart from how to do emergency stops. You stamp on the pedal. And stay stamped. It’s 40kg of pressure called for in the F3s; 80 in the F1s.

‘I brake, I wait’ Stephan said. The first part of the braking zone is the one place in each corner you have even the most microscopic amount of time to think, because initially, brake is all you do. Meanwhile, having just rearranged themselves after acceleration and then cornering, your internal organs struggle to find yet another novel configuration. I suspect bits of my insides that didn’t know the other parts existed have found themselves on term close to intimate, all jellied up together like passengers in a tube train. I start changing down (not too fast, or the engine blows up). Apex. Push the accelerator delicately, smoothly, trying to keep the whole foot on it, not just the ball. The LCD screen swings the revs on a ballistic curve from left to right, starting at 3000 and ending at 13,000rpm. The power…is crushing, awesome, frightening, dazzling. And synesthetic; over-spilling to invade and co-opt the sense that don’t appreciate it from first principles, obliterating divisions in the mind, searing tis impression forever into the deepest places in the memory. The car reacts instantly to every input like it’s responding to intentions, not actions.

Author Joe Hill decided to try out one of those “You Write Like ____” sites. Madcap hilarity ensued.

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.