Here's what I did read this month:
Walter Mosley, The Long Fall
(1/2) -- The first book in a new mystery series (new as of 2009) by the author of the excellent Easy Rawlins novels (and of the smutty, odd Killing Johnny Fry), set in New York, with a deeply morally conflicted hero. Mosley is a great writer -- not just a good crime novelist, but one of our best today period -- and particularly interesting for white guys like me to read, with his thoughtful, deep takes on American racial divides. It doesn't do to talk too much about the plot of a mystery, but this book has a good 'un.
(1/4) -- I've covered this series -- and Schulz's amazing fifty-year run on Peanuts -- in extensive detail before, and there isn't much I could say about these two years in the mid '80s that I didn't say about the previous two years in the mid '80s. Yes, this isn't Schulz's best work -- so it's A Winter's Tale rather than Macbeth, The Cat-Nappers rather than The Code of the Woosters. It's only disappointing in comparison with those heights, which isn't entirely Schulz's fault.S. Gross, Your Mother Is a Remarkable Woman (1/6)
(1/7) -- Second in the humorous mystery series, after The Spellman Files. These books are fast-moving, deeply enjoyable, regularly funny, decent mysteries, and even seem to have real character development going on. (The publisher compares them to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books, which is a huge slander on Lutz's heroine Izzy Spellman -- Izzy is smart and competent and has real skills, albeit also an intensely compulsive nature and a hatred of self-reflection. If Izzy is still unable to control herself in another five books, I'll admit the comparison, but not before that -- and I don't expect it to happen; Lutz is clearly moving her characters and situations forward.) Again, talking about the plot of a mystery is not a good idea -- but these books both go quickly and stick with you.Nigel Auchterlounie, Spleenal (1/7)
Julia Wertz, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (1/13)
Nare Silver, The Signal and the Noise (1/17)
(1/22) -- Susan Hill may be a dark, cutting novelist, telling stories full of nasty doings and the horrors that mankind can get up to -- I've never read her novels, so it may be so. But, on the basis of this book, I highly doubt it. Hill spent a year reading only books that she already had in her (apparently large and wonderful, thoroughly English country) home, and wrote this book about the experience. There's quite a bit about the books she loves, about writers now forgotten, about the Great Books, about the joys of re-reading, and various other booky topics. There's also a few bits of autobiography, mostly concerned with Hill's very early days in the literary world -- her first novel was published in the early '60s, when she was a 19-year-old college student, and I'm afraid she does talk about how nice all of those older literary gentlemen were to poor young her without seeming to realize why they were so nice -- but she does stick to her topic most of the time. And she's entertaining about it, if quite English in an old-fashioned sense: country, Anglican, serious, pull-up-your-socks kind of English. This is exactly the kind of book you'd expect from a sixtyish British female novelist writing about the books she likes to read, and, as long as that's something you're likely to enjoy, Howards End Is on the Landing is delightful.
Lisa Lutz, Revenge of the Spellmans
(1/24) -- Third in the series; see above for my spiel. I'm now two books behind, and I hope that the status will not remain quo when I catch up with the series in another month or three. (There's one sure way for a mystery series to kill itself: flash-freeze the background and characters, so that nothing ever changes or grows, no one seems to get any older, and the same comedy bits can get trotted out like clockwork in each book. So far, Lutz does not seem to be falling into that trap, which is especially keen for funny writers -- the audience wants the same old stuff over and over, since they liked it the first time, and writers must be cruel and sure, like a shark, and always move forward.)Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (1/29)
Chester Brown, Ed the Happy Clown (1/30)
Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan, Demo, Vol. II
(1/31) -- Ten years after the first series of Demo stories, more or less,Wood & Cloonan came back for six more stories of unusual young people and their travails. (See my review of the first collection.) This clutch is even further from superheroism than the first one -- only two of the protagonists here have anything I'd call a power of any kind, and the others are different from regular humanity in only neurological ways as far as I can see -- but they're still well-observed stories about odd people trying to live around or with their oddnesses, and Cloonan's art is still lovely, particular, and expressive, with excellent use of blacks and lots of specific faces for these very specific people. The stories are all separate, like the first grouping, and the getalt is still a weird combination of real-folks characterization and high-tension superhero storytelling, as if Demo is trying to straddle the divide between Spider-Man and R. Crumb all by itself. I may need to dive into a reading project soon, to shake the doldrums off. Since I have three candidates in my head (and in various degrees of readiness on my shelves), I may need to put that up to a vote here. And if I say "I may need" a few more times, I'll become completely vague and unable to make a decision, so I'll quit there.
is his first book -- his official Big Explanation. Since it was designed to be a big bestseller, there is absolutely no math in it -- though Silver is a statistician, and his analyses rely heavily on Bayesian methodology -- and it, as it must, attempts to reduce all of life to one thing. (Oddly, for Silver, that thing is an equation, which is hard to do in a book with no math.)
, because it is -- particularly the title song and their cover of "Brand New Key."
-- the book that once again reminds me that spelling "Eldritch" without the T is not strictly speaking correct -- by the portmanteau author Cat Adams. ("Adams" is, not secretly at all, actually the writing team of C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp, who wrote the long "Sazi" series under their dual names before becoming "Cat Adams" as well.) This one is, I believe, the fifth book in the urban fantasy series about Celia Graves -- a part-Siren personal security consultant to the stars, recently turned half-undead by a vampire's bite, who seems to have the usual complicated personal and professional life required of a contemporary fantasy heroine -- in which she has to protect her cousin Princess Adriana, who will marry the King of Rusland if the assassins don't get her first. It's a trade paperback from Tor [1], officially arriving for sale tomorrow.
. It's the grand finale of the City Trilogy, after City of Fire and City of Ice, and will be available in a week, on February 5th. It's an epic fantasy full of evil dragons that might be set in our world (references to the Silk Road) or maybe not (that road leads to the Kushan Empire). And I hope there's an in-story reason for the amazing length of that arrow on the cover -- seriously, it extends around the spine and still doesn't come to a head there, so I'm sure it must be a plot point.
-- reprinting stories about conflicts and other SFF interactions between man and ape -- is just the book to do it. And it's not just an excuse to put "Rachel in Love" and "Red Shadows" into the same book, though they're both here, as they should be. The other seventeen stories come from names like Howard Waldrop, Joe R. Lansdale, Mary Robinette Kowal, Philip Jose Farmer, James P. Blaylock, Clark Ashton Smith, and, inevitably, Edgar Allan Poe (no points for guessing which story). This is a February trade paperback from the folks at Tachyon.
is the first novel by R.S. Belcher -- though he did win the grand price in the recent Strange New Worlds contest -- and it's a hardcover from Tor, officially published last week. As the title implies, this is a weird western, set in the creepy frontier town of Golgotha. The flap copy mostly runs through the various creepiness and weirdness -- an apparently hanged sheriff, a hoard of mythical treasure, a secret order of pirates and assassins, that old abandoned silver mine and what might be coming out of it -- rather than giving away the story, so I should do the same.
, including issues 81, 101-103, and the Summer Shindig # 2. The book itself just credit the whole shebang to Simpsons creator Matt Groening (in small type on the copyright page), but the stories themselves include the original credits. You probably know what to expect from Simpsons stories by now, but I'll note that this leads off with a fine homage to Carl Barks (and his modern followers), "Uncle Burn$."
, credited to Robert Jordan (writer of the original novel, in case you've forgotten), Chuck Dixon (adaptor to comics) and artists Marcio Fiorito and Francis Nuguit. I do have to admit that I don't understand the appeal of adapting a novel into comics [2] -- new stories for comics about the same characters is perfectly cromulent, though -- but clearly there are people who see an appeal there. Tor publishes this in hardcover on January 29th -- though, in case you didn't know, this collects the individual issues originally published by Dynamite through comics shops.
is the quiet, aching "Joy to You Baby":
, the fifth in a series of graphic novels retelling Greek myths. (The earlier ones are 
, a novel by Stephen Blackmoore which I tend to assume will launch an urban fantasy series (since it's about a necromancer in LA with secrets and a history and all of those interesting things), though I note that Blackmoore's first novel, City of the Lost, was a similarly noirish contemporary fantasy set in LA (with zombies). So he may actually be that incredibly rare creature nowadays, the novelist who writes different books each time out -- if so, we need to treasure him.
, the first book of new series "The Children of the Dragon Nimbus." (Through my incredibly powers of deduction, I can tell that this is related to her earlier serieses "The Dragon Nimbus" and "The Dragon Nimbus Histories.")
. That's a series which has been a while between books -- they only come around every four years or so -- which means you Britain fans should make a big deal about it, and be more than ordinary happy for a new book.
-- third in James Dashner's dystopian YA "Maze Runner" series -- a few months back with the ARC, and now I see it again, since it's a Delacorte trade paperback that published on January 8th.
. It hit stores January 15 as a trade paperback from the fine folks at Pyr. And, from the back cover description, this book may actually see the group of the series title form, from the ashes of the now-defunct Society of Paragons, in order to finally defeat the fiendish plots of Lord Eschaton.
. It's a memoir of her eating life, with what looks like plenty of digressions (and recipes!) in her lovely clean-line style. And you can get it from First Second books (yes, them again) in early April.
by Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe. (The main character here is named Sadie, so I think it's not a memoir -- though Halliday's previous comics have been memoirs, and her author's note feints in that direction as well. So this is either fiction or it isn't.) In Peanut, a girl goes to a new high school and decides she wants to stand out, so she tells all her new classmates about her life-threatening peanut allergy...that she doesn't actually have. Hijinks (and, I expect, drama) ensue. It was published by Schwartz & Wade books, a YA imprint of the giant Random House empire that I was previously unaware of.
. It's the sixth book in the Imager series -- which I have to admit that I haven't read any of -- and Tor will publish it in hardcover tomorrow. The plot description is full of people, terms, and places that I don't know -- obviously, since it's book six of an epic fantasy series -- but I can note that this one sees the first imager fighting force in (this particular fictional) history.
