But it's not true; I've been full of pointless ennui lately, and I just punted on April. (A similar reason is the explanation for why I've only read a few books these two months.) But the thing about life is that, as long as it lasts, you can always start doing something today. And so I will:
Joe Meno, Office Girl
(4/1) -- Meno is a playwright and novelist, as I recall, with a semi-aggressively "indy" attitude of the old school. (Old-school indies publish with small, scrappy presses in places like Chicago; new-school indies play self-publisher and their books are only available on Kindle.) Office Girl itself is a slight romance, set just before the millennium, between characters who seem destined to be played by Zoey Deschanel and Zach Braff -- it plays like an indy movie of ten years ago. Hell, everything about this book screams "indy" -- so just take that as read. It's small but perfectly formed, yet another one of those stories about young people who aren't sure what they want, but they know they don't want this. (It becomes less endearing when those people get older -- to my age, for example -- and still don't know what they want, and don't want what they have.)
(4/1) -- It's a book of quotes, nearly all of which begin with the word "never," arranged into categories about the kind of advice offered. Quote books are fun to browse through -- they're quintessential bathroom books -- and this one did its job well. Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde (4/8) -- actual review coming soon, I promise! Update: review now posted and linked.
Noah Van Sciver, The Hypo
(4/9) -- This book deserves more than the quick mention I'll make here, but it went back to the library six weeks ago, so it'll get what it gets, and learn that life isn't fair. (A tough lesson for a young book, I guess.) It's a graphic novel about the young Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his depression and melancholy, and how those both caused and were the result of his early failures. Van Sciver has a rough style that fits well with Lincoln's mental turmoil, and he creates a real sense of place -- his Springfield might be the capital of a state, but it's still a muddy small town full of gossips and not-overly-honest politicians. Lincoln is a compelling protagonist, for all that he's not easy to be with -- if he lived a hundred and fifty years later, he'd almost certainly be hospitalized and medicated for his debilitating depression -- and Van Sciver gives a hint as to how he became the man who saved the Union. This is well worth reading for fans of both Lincoln and graphic novels.Matthew Hughes, Hell to Pay (4/17) -- the finale of the "To Hell and Back" trilogy; I expect to actually review it soon, but check out what I wrote about the first two books, The Damned Busters and Costume Not Included, and then go out and buy every last book Hughes has ever written.
DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New Orleans
(4/22) -- The Wife and I celebrated our 20th anniversary recently (one month to the day after I finished this book, actually), and we've been looking around for a get-away-from-the-kids vacation together for a couple of months. For a while, it looked like we could tack on a few days at the beginning of a business trip I have to New Orleans in late June -- we did something similar in Disney World two years ago, and that was great -- but the schedule and the cost of flights stymied us in the end.So I read this book as part of that planning: it's a relatively recent (not just post-Katrina, but post- most of the cleanup and with notes about what's back and what isn't), gorgeously illustrated look at that very odd city. DK has always been good at the visual side of their books, and this is no exception: you really get a sense of what things look like, and the maps are great as well to show how close or far away various locations are. I'm not going to get much use out of it -- I will be in NOLA for four nights because of flight schedules, but I'll be stuck in a convention hotel most of the time -- but it's an excellent book for anyone planning a more frivolous trip there.
(4/30) -- The family hasn't quite decided where we're going in November, when we take our big vacation every year. (New Jersey schools are closed three days during the week of Election Day, plus usually one half-day, so it's a great time to get away.) But it might just be Orlando once again, since we really enjoy a lot of stuff there, and know it pretty well by now.Still, I enjoy reading guidebooks, and reading is much cheaper than actual travel, so I ran through the Unofficial Guide for this year anyway, picking up a few tips and changes along the way. (For example, it sounds like The Mouse is now clamping down on Fastpass abuse; you used to be able to use them far past the official window, up until closing time that same day.) And I still insist -- even now, after Wiley has divested them and Google has grumpily agreed to continue to put them out in that yucky, old-fashioned paper -- that the Unofficial books are the most entertaining and best guidebooks that I've ever used, full of useful information and pleasant prose alike. (See my big post on the the 2011 guide and Color Companion for more details.)
Ian Tregillis, Necessary Evil (5/7) -- the finale of the "Milkweed Tryptych" -- after Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War -- sticks the landing and is just as powerful as those two excellent books. Real review coming soon, but don't wait for me: read Tregillis now. Update: review now posted and linked.
Alan Averill, The Beautiful Land (5/10) -- a debut SF novel from Ace and winner of an Amazon-sponsored contest for new writers; my review will come soon, but it is worth reading, so pick it up and give it a glance if you run across it. Update: review now posted and linked.
Carrie Caughn, Kitty's House of Horrors (5/20) -- I'm still desperately behind on this series, but I hope to knock off a few over the course of the summer. I do expect to write a bit on it "soon." Update: review now posted and linked.
Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (5/27) -- the sequel to Case Histories still isn't a conventional mystery, but I'll get more into that later. Update: review now posted and linked.
Paul Collins, Banvard's Folly (5/31) -- real review coming. Update: review now posted and linked.
And that took me two whole months to get through; I'm beginning to think I've gotten my priorities mixed up!
here -- it's a gnarly, twisted crime story, told from several points of view that loop around and presented in a style derived from both classic newspaper comics and noir illustrations -- so maybe I should just say that it's another incredibly smart, engrossing story from the creator of 
by Bryan Talbot is the third in the steampunk anthropmorphic adventure series (after 
is a steampunky book set in a flying city, written by Jared Axelrod and drawn by Steve Walker, which is as adventury and swashbuckling as Bete Noire but not quite as successful. The world is equally thought-through -- it is even sillier, but that really doesn't matter for that kind of story -- but the art looks to be drawn for color but presented in black and white, and the cliches are all presented straight, without the knowing nod that a more mature cartoonist like Talbot provides to the Grandville world. So Blood and Ink features a crusading journalist -- a young woman whose boundless enthusiasms are tiring rather than enthralling -- going up against the much-too-evil-to-be-believed masters of her city, to learn the shocking secret of everything, through lots and lots of bad-movie dialogue.
is a newish book for younger readers by R. Kikuo Johnson, whose previous book was the adult graphic novel 
is, I suppose, Gene Luen Yang's major follow-up to 
is the obligatory "odds and sods" collection from the popular manga-ka behind Emma, Shirley, and the current A Bride's Story, collecting just about every bit of her other art from the first decade of her career. There are a dozen short stories -- all about women, and several of them about maids, unsurprisingly -- and then a lot of more ephemeral stuff, like comics essays on aspects of Agatha Christie and corsets, signing sheets, concept drawings, and several "hey, here's the artist talking directly to the reader" pieces from the backs of collected volumes and other places. It's very, very miscellaneous, but Mori's art is precise and engaging, and several of the short stories (especially the longest, last one, "Sumire's Flowers") are strong and striking. It's probably not the best introduction to Mori's work, but it does show a smart, hard-working creator trying different things and engaging directly with her audience.
is from Junya Inoue, and it's a very shonen story: a young slacker, only good at an online multi-player combat game that uses only explosives, finds himself kidnapped to an isolated island where he has to play that game in real life! This volume is mostly set-up: we meet Ryouta Sakamoto and then see him danging from a parachute in a tree on the island, and then dive right into combat and the details of the different "BIMs." If you thought the big problem with Battle Royale was that all of the kids already knew each other, then you'll be crazy about Btooom! (And, yes, the exclamation point is part of the title, as it must be.)
begins a melancholy giant-mecha series by Tsutomu Nihei. Mankind was nearly wiped out centuries ago by giant, hideous barely-sentient space monsters, and perhaps only one starship, Sidonia, escaped. Sidonia defends itself against those space monsters by sending out pilots in giant robots, but it's been a long time since the last battle -- so there are no veterans, only new recruits. One of those is Nagate Tanikaze, who grew up secretly in the bowels of the ship with his grandfather and knows nothing of the new post-human society, where everyone can photosynthesize, new genders are common, and the dorm matron has a bear head. But, even with all of the weirdness and culture shock, one thing must be as expected: Tanikaze turns out to be an awesome pilot. Knights is surprisingly understated and quiet for a manga -- or maybe it's just a kind of manga that doesn't make it across the Pacific all that often -- with the depth of a novel and a willingness to be obscure and indirect for as long as it takes.
is something else again, a wacky 4-koma series about incompetent pirates by MiSun Kim. There's the distracted, dim captain -- from a rich family, and sent away by his scheming mother for inadequate reasons. And his minder, the devastatingly handsome and deadly family retainer, who cares only about money and has his own gaping holes where social graces should be. And there's the Royal crew chasing them, with their own tangled connections. And a young woman picked up from a shipwreck, who immediately falls in (silly, manga) love with the minder. It's all broader than the side of a barn, and written with very different cultural norms than Americans would expect, which makes parts of it funnier and parts of it just surreal. But the title says that it's Absurd, so we all should have expected that.
is a big, fat (360+ pages, around the length of two average manga volumes) series-beginner from Yuuki Kodama about Staz, a vampire and district boss in the demon world. Of course, Staz is also obsessed with all things from Japanese culture -- because this is a manga -- and so he does nuts when a real, live (well, at least briefly) Japanese schoolgirl appears mysteriously in his district. After a misadventure, the girl is left as a ghost, so Staz vows to return her to life (and then drink her blood) -- and that sets in motion what I expect the series will mostly be, a sequence of odd characters and events that might (or might not) add up to anything particular. So far, Blood Lad is the kind of shonen story that has more energy than sense, but it does have a lot of energy, plus amusing art and quirky characters.
takes the cake in that area; Mari Yamizaki's story follows Lucius, a Roman bath designer from Augustus's time who time-travels (through various kinds of plumbing) to modern-day Japan, to see and be amazed by their bath culture and technology. Lucius then returns to his own time -- not by his own control, but inevitably -- to incorporate what he's learned into his own designs and to become ever more popular and acclaimed. There's a whole lot of panels of Lucius making a stunned face and proclaiming (in a language the Japanese can't understand, of course) how wonderful every last detail of their lives is. Luckily, Yamizaki appears to be playing it all for laughs, because this would be difficult to take seriously. Thermae Romae is very silly, and somewhat weird for an audience that is neither ancient Romans nor modern Japanese, but it has enthusiasm in spades -- maybe too much enthusiasm on Lucius's part -- and it's definitely not a story you've ever read before.
is the second book in Richard Ungar's young-adult SF series "Time Snatchers," after the first book that defined the series title. (Though, unlike most Book Twos, this one will be the end of the story.) The first book had a great set-up, with time-traveling teen thieves controlled by a Fagin-like mastermind in the year 2061, and this one sees the hero of that book, Caleb, yanked back from what he thought was safety and a new life back into the stealing-things-for-a-nasty-boss-in-the-future game. It's coming as a hardcover from Putnam in September -- but that first book is already out in the world, if you're intrigued by the concept.
from Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, the second volume of a series of unrevealed length set during the first invasion of the "Buggers" from Card's famous Ender's Game franchise. (The first volume was Earth Unaware, so I suppose the third book will be something like Earth Totally Screwed.) In this book, presumably, nasty aliens attack Earth and kill lots of people while the Plucky Heroes battle bureaucrats and incompetents to get the chance to poke those Buggers back. It's a Tor hardcover, publishing on that most auspicious day of June 4th.
, in honor of the most recent Nebula Awards banquet Saturday night in San Jose. This is the latest incarnation of the annual anthology thought up by Damon Knight in the mid '60s to give SFWA a revenue stream, and, as usual, it reprints the Nebula-winning stories of two years ago (2011), along with a few also-rans, and functions something like a belated "Best of the Year." (But, one could argue, this is a crowd-sourced Year's Best, and you couldn't pick a better crowd than the assembled writers of SFWA, could you?) This year's edition is edited/compiled (since I doubt she was allowed to really edit the already award-caliber stories here) by Catherine Asaro, a two-time Nebula winner and former two-term SFWA President. Showcase 2013 is published in trade paperback by Py, and hit stores about a week ago.
volumes of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix are out, which reprint Shiro Amano's comics adaptation of the popular fighting-your-way-through-Disney-world-with-a-giant-sword-that-looks-like-a-key games. I am not entirely certain how this series is connected to the earlier Kingdom Hearts manga series -- my guess is that it will reprint everything we've ever seen in the US, and possibly add more than never made it here from Japan, but the book itself doesn't explain what a "Final Mix" is.
; I read the first one a number of weeks ago but haven't managed to write about it yet. It's a pretty violent recasting of Battle Royale with a video-game overlay; our main character is a master at a competitive online game about blowing up the other players (like a much more specific Team Fortress 2), and then finds himself kidnapped to the obligatory remote island to play a real-world version of that game for no good reason by the usual shadowy forces. If you think that fighting manga have too many guns and not enough bombs, this is exactly the series for you.
this month. (See my reviews of volumes 
this month. (Both my sons love it, and have the full set -- so I could easily read them all if I wanted to.) I read and reviewed volumes 
, the latest spin-off from the vast Haruhi Suzumiya empire, focusing on one of the minor characters of the main story. (Don't ask me more detail than that; I'm not really up on all things Haruhi.) The art is by Puyo, the story is by Haruhi creator Nagaru Tanigawa, and the original character designs are by Noizi Ito.
this month -- I read the first one, and haven't managed to write about it yet. It's broad and goofy and very stereotypically shonen, about the slacker demon ruler of a piece of Hell, his otaku love for all pieces of Japanese pop culture, and the human girl who accidentally dropped into his realm. It's the kind of book that starts to ignore its supposed premise by about the hundredth page, so it'll probably turn into something very different if it runs long enough.
, with presumably even more panty shots to celebrate. (The book is still in its protective wrapper as I write this, but it's rated "M" for mature, the most restrictive rating of any of the Yen books this month. So anyone hoping for some fanservice should look her first.)
, from the team of Akiyo Satorigi (art), Suzhito Yasuda (character design), and Ryohgo Narita (creator). Sharp-eyed followers will note that no one is credited with actually writing this story, but who needs writers?
by Ikumi Katagir and Ai Ninomiya (credited as "original story," which looks like a slam on Lewis Carroll to me). Alice this time is a young man, entering the confusing world of Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts is a pretty young man. (This doesn't seem to be turning into yaoi, but it's early days yet.)
. The story is by Ryukishi07, the art by Jiro Suzuki, and it continues to be based on a series of murder-mystery games, much like the vaguely related Higurashi: When They Cry series.
by Mari Yamazaki, the amazing story of a time-traveling Roman bath-house designer from the age of Augustus and the modern Japanese bath technology that inspires him. It's a unique idea, and the first volume -- which, again, I read but haven't gotten around to writing about -- was a lot of fun in that very earnest Japanese way.
is the first novel in a new series by Dan Krokos (author of the previous YA novel False Memory). Planet Thieves may be YA or middle-grade, if that distinction is of burning importance to anyone. It's coming from Tor Starscape this month, and is the SFnal story of a starship on a routine training mission full of young cadets from the Academy when it's attacked and boarded by a vicious alien race that has been at war with humanity for generations. Those cadets -- led by our hero, of course -- must take back their ship and get back to Earth to warn about this new assault.
, the sequel to her werewolf novel Silver, from Tor in hardcover this week. It's urban fantasy, obviously, but seems to come more from the old hurt/comfort strain of fanfic -- focusing on alpha wolf Andrew, who finds and saves damaged Silver, who can't shift due to torture -- rather than from the more usual "all these supernatural boys love the totally awesome female protagonist" romance-influenced style of contemporary fantasy. This time out, Andrew and Silver are looking to take over the pack he used to belong to, because that's what werewolf novels are about. (And "that" is the outdated simplification of wolf pack hierarchy, because that's more amenable to fiction than the messier actual reality.)
, coming as a Tor hardcover next week. (I had some Antiagon Fire once, but a quick course of over-the-counter treatments cleared it right up -- ask your pharmacist!) This is the seventh book in the series, and I have to admit that I don't know what's going on -- it's epic fantasy about armies and empire clashing, with magic and skulduggery and all the rest, but that's about as specific as I can get.
