Two by Tim Kreider: We Learn Nothing & Twilight of the Assholes

I've got another blog, Editorial Explanations, which tends to devolve into my making fun of right-wing cartoonists. Sure, I there are some left-wingers in the mix, but those are fewer -- mostly because (I like to think), lefties do wordier, more convoluted cartoons that are harder to complain about rather than because I'm just a big stinky biased cretin. (Though, if you're on the Internet at all, you'll hear the latter opinion about yourself very often. It could even be true, some of the time.)

I have never featured a Tim Kreider cartoon on Editorial Explanations. There's a simple reason for this: he quit doing political cartoons -- his alt-weekly editorial cartoon, "The Pain -- When Will It End?" did end, back in 2009, and Editorial Explanations only got started two years later in 2011. So I hope no one imputes bias to the fact that he got out of the way before I started targeting his profession.

Twilight of the Assholes was the third and final collection of "The Pain," published by Fantagraphics in 2011. I've actually been reading it since then -- maybe even slightly earlier, since I got it as a PDF from the fabled Secret Fanta Online Repository for Comics Reviewers during the brief period when it looked like I would keep writing regularly and seriously about comics -- and only just finished it. Kreider is pretty much the archetype of the liberal cartoonist, with a massive need to overexplain everything, so nearly every cartoon here comes with a full-page essay (some essays are substantially longer than that) about how much Kreider really, really hated George Bush.

I kid Kreider -- he hated many other things, too. But Bush was #1 with a bullet, and the various functionaries and policies of his government made up most of the rest of the list.

So Assholes was a PDF, which meant that I forgot about it for months at a time -- I've mentioned here before that ebooks are certainly convenient, but they don't mesh all that well with my picking-books style, which revolves around staring at shelves -- and read it in bits and snippets on trains and elsewhere when I remembered it existed.

That's not a good way to read editorial cartoons, I think -- it might work a generation or two later on, when the particular politics are safely historical, but not when they're just receding into the recent past, and still resonant with the current news. Editorial cartoons, at their best, are created in a white heat, right at the deadline, to capture a particular feeling (usually anger; let's be honest) and moment in time. So you want to experience them as close to the time of creation as possible, for maximum gestalt. But I've never been good at doing things the right way.

Kreider has a smooth, flowing line -- he draws more like Aubrey Beardsley than any other editorial cartoonist I've ever seen, and vastly more than I'd ever expect any editorial cartoonist to do. He also -- I've said this repeatedly, and I'll keep saying it -- fits lots of words into a cartoon, in the liberal manner, either to throw in all of the ideas he has surrounding a news event or to head off several potential interpretations of his politics ahead of time. (Right-wingers are vastly more likely to make simple, stark cartoons with few words -- Obama is a Muslim, liberals are all America-hating wimps, that kind of thing.) So Kreider's cartoons can be physically hard to read -- his lettering gets flowery and expressive in dialogue, and there's often big blocks of hand-lettered text as well.

And, of course, this collection covers the second administration of the second, and lesser, Bush, which was not a high point in American civilization. There was a lot for Kreider to hate and complain about, from the bungling of Hurricane Katrina to the multifarious problems with our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he took full advantage of that -- this is not a book for anyone staunchly in favor of the Iraq War (surely there are still a few such idiots, right?) or for neocons in general. Kreider knows the point of an editorial cartoonist is to have strong opinions and to express them forcefully, and he's very good at that. It all feels like old news, now, but that's what happens to all editorial cartoons: first they're timely, then they're dated, then (if they're lucky) they're history. Kreider's stuff is currently in that big ditch called "dated," we'll all have to check back in fifty years to see if they turn out to be history. For now, though, they're vastly more palatable for those of us who thought invading Iraq was a really stupid idea ten years ago.

And then "The Pain" ended -- I'm not clear on all of the details, but the continuing death-spiral of alt-weeklies (just slightly ahead of the rest of the newsprint business) certainly had something to do with it. In a not-necessarily-related move, Kreider has been doing more essays and fewer cartoons over the past few years -- though, looking at Assholes, it does have more words than pictures, so he's been moving that way for a while.

To amplify that thought: We Learn Nothingis one step on from Assholes -- the latter was a collection of editorial cartoons with explanatory essays, while Nothing is a book of essays with illustrative cartoons. (Not completely different, no -- but subtly different enough that Nothing was published by the classy NYC house Free Press, not a comics company.)

Nothing is not a political book -- there's a flavoring of politics around the edges, but it's essentially a collection of personal essays (in the tradition of either Montaigne or Sedaris, depending on how cynical you are), telling stories from Kreider's life and his take on various aspects of modern society. If newspapers weren't clearly dying, he probably would have transitioned from a newspaper cartoonist to a newspaper columnist, but they are, so he didn't.

The essays here tend to be substantial -- ten pages or more, much longer than the newspaper gig I postulated above would have allowed -- which gives Kreider room to wander around all sides of his topics. They're not heavily structured essays, but they're not baggy monsters, either -- they have a purpose and a shape, and pretty much do what they set out to do, whether that's concerning unrequited love, Kreider's near-death experience, dealing with people with radically different political views, or, most often, telling stories of Kreider's misspent last decade or so, and the people he spent it with.

Kreider has a way with words -- I've marked a couple of passages from Nothing for "Quotes of the Week" here, and there are a number of other paragraphs that equally well crystallize an interesting thought or important distinction. And Kreider is very entertaining, whether he's fulminating against some stupidity by Republicans or telling stories of his friends -- and the stories about friends are guaranteed to have a larger potential audience. We might learn nothing, but we can have a lot of fun along the way.

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky

This book was inevitable: after Waiter Rant (see my review at the end of this monthly roundup), my colleagues in trade publishing were beating the bushes for more of the same kind of thing -- semi-anonymous semi-memoirs from the fancier end of the hospitality business, to tell us that our worst fears are not just true but not even close to what's really happening.

Tomsky has worked in fancy hotels -- mostly at the front desk, mostly in midtown Manhattan -- for about a decade, and I detect a certain amount of "but I really want to be a writer" in Heads in Beds, so he's precisely the person those editors were searching for. He tells his story -- a military brat who hit the end of his academic career in New Orleans, with a useless philosophy degree and a burning desire to make a lot of money without working too hard -- under the bizarre guise of "Tommy Jacobs," whose story he tells in first person. (Surely he realizes his real name is on the cover, so this serves no purpose?)

There are some juicy stories along the way, but not all that many of them -- Tomsky is telling his story (just like Waiter Rant did), and not itemizing all of the things that desk clerks and bellmen and doormen and housekeepers get up to when you're not looking. He's not a reporter; he's a memoirist, so all you can get is what he personally saw and did and heard about. A more comprehensive book would be better -- juicier, obviously, but with a wider scope and a deeper sense of authority -- but that book would have required a publisher to bankroll a real reporter, send that person across the country to talk to a whole lot of hotel folk (and for that reporter to be good enough to get the real dirt), and then give time for the book to be synthesized and written. It's much easier to find someone who can write and just get him to tell his own story -- and that's close enough for a bestseller audience, anyway.

Don't get me wrong: Heads in Beds is entertaining, and lots of fun. It goes down easy, and the reader hopes that Tomsky has some stuff in reserve -- or some buddies he can hit up for stories -- to fill out the inevitable second volume.

Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins

I've written about Paul Collins's books -- non-fiction, usually on quirky or oddball subjects -- several times before here, including Sixpence House, The Trouble With Tom, Not Even Wrong, The Book of William, and The Murder of the Century. He writes the kind of books that I like to think I might have done, if things had worked out differently -- and we always are fascinated by the people who seem to be alternate versions of ourselves.

Banvard's Folly was Collins's very first published book, back in 2001. Its thirteen chapters each tell the story of one man's quest to change the world -- all of which ended in ignominious failure, usually while that man (or, in one case, a woman) was still alive to be thoroughly destroyed by it. It's an amusing book to read, particularly for those of us who have no hopes of ever changing the world -- we might never reach these heights, but at least we'll never lose everything and become the world's laughing-stock. (Or maybe we will: we're not dead yet, and the future holds unknown dangers.)

So we learn of John Banvard, who invented and mastered the moving diorama as a stage experience just in time to see its fame plummet while he was still trying to make a living. There are literary nuts and forgers, like William Henry Ireland, who faked Shakespeare plays, and Delia Bacon, who insisted her namesake really wrote the (actual, non-Ireland) works of Shakespeare. There's the once-noted French scientist Rene Blondlot, who discovered the sadly non-existent N-rays, and John Cleves Symmes, who was sure he could discover the secret world inside the Earth if only he could get enough funding for an expedition. Most of the chapters are about cranks of one sort or another: Francois Sudre, inventor of the musical language Solresol; the fake Formosan George Psalmanazar; Alfred Ely Beach, who built a secret pneumatic subway beneath New York City; the lousy actor and fashion plate Robert Coates; and Augustus J. Pleasonton, who insisted that blue-tinted light was the premier source of health and happiness.

They weren't all deluded -- though a lot of them were -- but they were all monomaniacs, in common with a lot of politicians and artists and writers. Sadly, all of their monomanias turned out to be either factually untrue or too-quickly out of fashion -- and they all lived in the ages before mass media, when lives might have second and third acts, but they rarely got another run at the big brass ring.

So all of these men (and the one woman) were failures, in the end, even if many of them were hugely successful for at least a while. But, in the end, we're all dead, and at least these thirteen followed their own idiosyncratic dreams, and achieved enough to get a chapter in a book a hundred or three years after they were dead. That, as the man says, isn't nothing.

I wouldn't recommend Banvard's Folly to a young man -- you need to have a good footing in failure yourself to really understand and appreciate it. But, if you've failed and been ground down enough by life, it's a great book, one part Schadenfreude and one part whistling-past-the-graveyard.

Through the Window by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes always feels like a writer insufficiently lauded -- even after winning the Man Booker Prize for his last novel, The Sense of an Ending, a couple of years back, he's never had the attention of his flashier contemporaries like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. And yet Barnes has been more formally interesting than any of those contemporaries, from brilliant and formally complex novels of his early career like Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters to less flashy but equally incisive later novels like Love, etc. through his books of stories like The Lemon Table -- he's kept writing books of short stories long after most writers abandon them for novels -- and a thread of serious non-fiction, from his Letters from London for The New Yorker to the precise mediation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Perhaps it is that very facility, the breadth of his work, that has kept him from those literary-bestseller heights -- the next Julian Barnes book is guaranteed to be very different from the last one.

Through the Window keeps up that streak; it follows a collection of stories, Pulse, with a very different collection: these seventeen essays (and one closely related short story) are all about writers and writing, mostly from the prior decade and mostly from the Guardian. There are three pieces from the late '90s, but it's all relatively recent Barnes; Through the Window collects the thoughts of the mature Barnes on what we presume are the writers most important to him, or the ones he had the most to say about. (That's likely more of a presumption than we should make; Barnes was writing, in all of these cases, for a specific editorial purpose and time, rather than planning the book from scratch -- it's possible that several writers he considers even more vital just didn't come up.)

Barnes is mostly writing about his predecessors here, Orwell and Ford Madox Ford, Kipling and Johnson, Wharton and Arthur Clough, though he does write about some influences whose careers overlapped his, Penelope Fitzgerald and Lorie Moore and John Updike. And what Barnes has to say about each of those writers is measured and thoughtful and based on long experience -- the impetus for many of these pieces may have been an immediate news hook (a new edition, new scholarship, an anniversary), but Barnes's critical opinion exists already -- he's examining it in print on those occasions, but there's nothing quick or haphazard here.

So Through the Window is a quiet and bookish book; the result of long hours sat reading and thinking and arguing in one's own head about books and writers. And Barnes's head is a pleasant and well-ordered one to spend a few hours in, particularly if your favorite writers overlap somewhat with his, or if you suspect he'll lead you to new discoveries.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

We all eat, and we all get food, one way or another. But, like so many other things in life, many of us don't think about eating, the way we don't think about our work or homes or daily routine. Lucy Knisley, though, is not one for the unexamined life: her first book, French Milk (created and published when she was only 22) was the story of a month spent in Paris with her mother, focused on small moments, day-to-day rhythms, and, yes, the food.

For her second book, Knisley has gone even deeper: Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is a combination memoir and meditation on food -- with a few recipes thrown in along the way, as all good food books must. She comes by her food obsession the honest way: her mother was a chef and a caterer, and she worked in a cheese shop herself for a while.

Relish is not a book to read when you're far from your next meal; Knisley's art is open and welcoming, with cartoony food that all looks and sounds incredibly good, whether she's focusing on specific foods (cookies, mushrooms, cheese, croissants, pickles) or times in foreign countries (Italy, Mexico, Japan), you want to have some of whatever she's writing about right then. And her stories are equally enticing and immediate, specific stories from her own life related to food and growing up (let's be fair; she's still quite young, so her story mostly is about growing up at this point). Through it all, Knisley makes it clear she knows she's been incredibly lucky to have encountered a lot of great, interesting food in her life to date, and she has the true gourmand's missionary streak, the desire to want to tell everyone about this tasty new thing she's just discovered.

I haven't tried to cook from Relish's recipes yet, but they're detailed enough that I'm pretty sure I could -- more cookbooks could use pictures like Knisley's, to show us what something should look like between stage 2 and 3.

French Milk was a sweet little book about a moment in an interesting life; Relish is an examination of how she came to live that life -- and, more importantly, how to keep living a life open to experiences, in food and art, and to express what's important about that life to others. It's a big-hearted, savory, mouth-wateringly feast of a book, ready to be gulped down.

The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins

Paul Collins is almost exactly my age, has a son with issues in the same spectrum as my older son, and has the kind of career (writing nonfiction books about quirky bits of history) that looks attractive from the outside -- so I sometimes think of him as an alternate-universe me, as if right now on the other side of the Trousers of Time, he's selling books to architects and I'm writing a book about Trollope's favorite trains. This is silly, of course, but if we can't be silly in our own heads, life isn't worth living. So I've read nearly all of Collins's books to date -- Not Even Wrong, The Trouble With Tom, Sixpence House, The Book of William -- and enjoyed them each in their own ways, while following his career with interest.

The Murder of the Century is a more obvious book than any of those, perhaps indicating that someone (Collins himself, an agent or editor or publisher) is getting tired with the sales of those quirky books (a little sleuthing into that well-known book-industry sales-reporting tool shows that Murder is already his second-bestselling book, close behind Sixpence, which has an eight-year head start). Of course, there's nothing wrong with writing books that people will want to read, and Murder is much more commercial than, say Trouble, being the story of a major (but now-forgotten) murder case and subsequent media frenzy in late 19th century New York City.

It's a fine scandal -- a series of body parts (lower torso, upper torso and arms) are found around New York in 1897, and are identified as William Guldensuppe, German immigrant and worker in a Turkish bath in midtown. Guldensuppe was living with a woman, Augusta Nack, who had left her husband for him, and the story is that another man (Martin Thorn) was moving in, and Guldensuppe wouldn't move out. Add the lack of a head -- allowing the defense to claim that Guldensuppe ran away and is not dead -- and the whispered imputations that Nack, a licensed midwife, did most of her work as an illegal abortionist, and the newspaper arms race between Hearst and Pulitzer of the day, and the Guldensuppe murder was front-page material. More than that: screaming front pages, over and over again, with teams of reporters from a panoply of papers doing nothing else and special editions chasing each other and the last scrap of news or scandal or imputation, from the first piece of Guldensuppe was pulled from the East River until Thorn was executed for the crime.

Collins tells that story well, digging into the archives -- as he did in Book of William and Trouble With Tom -- to get lots of details and color. (There's a lot of dialogue in this book, and Collins has a note up front to state that it's all straight out of the papers of the day -- this story was so exhaustively covered that nearly every word of it was written down at the time.) On the other hand, there's less Collins in this book than in his previous work: he's telling a reporters' story this time, in the way a reporter would. It's exciting and interesting and a great window into a world that's both been gone for over a hundred years and still feels very contemporary, with ubiquitous news and blaring scandals.

If you've never read Paul Collins, but like smart nonfiction, Murder is a great place to start -- he has an amazing story to tell, one completely forgotten after the century of shocking murders since. But if you have read Collins before, there's less of him in these pages than you've been used to.

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

If there were a Wonk of the Year award, Silver would have won it in a slam-dunk last year -- this book was a bestseller, his political predictions came true almost perfectly, and he was all over the media (not least at his own, New York Time-affiliated FiveThirtyEight blog). I wouldn't be surprised if he'd also predicted the entire baseball season -- his other main claim to fame in the fields of wonkery was in devising a swell algorithm to predict the usefulness of players -- but I've been disconnected from sports for so long that I have no idea.

So: he's one of the current top Big Explainers, and The Signal and the Noise 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.)

Every single Big Explanation is wrong, with no exceptions, so this one is as well. Oh, it's pretty good, as Big Explanations go -- quite useful, in the right places, and a good tool for looking at a lot of situations in the actually existing world. But a book like this must insist that its Big Explanation covers everything in the world, and so Silver does, and so he's wrong, because nothing ever can do that. But his claim is elegant and not too obviously self-aggrandizing, so you can't stay grumpy at him for long.

If you know what Bayesian statistics are, you don't need to read The Signal and the Noise, only to know that Silver applies Bayes to baseball and politics, poker and weather forecasting, climate change and terrorism and the stock market -- all of which involve numbers and frequencies and lots of statistics, so they're fertile ground. If you only vaguely recognize Bayes -- if, like me, it's familiar while you read it, like the laws of thermodynamics and the carbon cycle, but slips out of mind immediately afterward -- then The Signal and the Noise will be pleasant and may make you feel quite smart. If you detest numbers and prediction, because the lord of the universe explained everything in this book you have right there, then you need to go sit in the corner while the grownups talk.

As long as no one takes Silver's Big Explanations absolutely seriously, it will be quite useful -- and thinking about probabilistic calculations in more situations would be a net positive for most of us. But I'm sure there will be a cult of Bayes -- like the Milton Freedmanites, I suppose, but more fond of brackets -- that insists that all of human life can and will be predicted. We always do have the stupid with us, though, so we can't blame Silver (more than mildly and half-heartedly) for that.

The Signal and the Noise has quite a lot of good thinking, some good tools, and an organizing principle that's vastly more correct than most similar books. For a non-fiction bestseller, this is about as good as it gets.

Women on the Outside: Two Memoirs

Pretty much by accident, I happened to read these two books back-to-back recently: two memoirs by women of their lives tangentially connected to the arts, both about their youth and ideals and how those ran into the actual circumstances of life. One is from a woman who worked as a receptionist for a classy magazine for a long time after wanting to write; the other from a woman who wanted to be a rock star and spent a number of years not quite getting there. One is a highly lauded bestseller; the other is little-known and obscure.

One of these books is smart and incisive and clear-eyed; the other is gauzy and vague and platitudinous. And I think you've probably been around the block enough to have figured out which is which.

Janet Groth spent over twenty years as the receptionist of the eighteenth floor of The New Yorker's offices -- "the writers' floor," she was told when she was hired. Those years were 1957 to 1978, and twenty more years later -- after an entire second career as an academic that clearly progressed more satisfactorily than did the New Yorker gig -- she wrote The Receptionist about those years, to join that long shelf of books about the fabled New Yorker offices. One would assume that a book based on twenty years would be filled with juicy, interesting stories of the writers she worked with (or at least in front of), but one would be mistaken: The Receptionist only devotes a few introductory chapters to the famous denizens of that eighteenth floor (all of whom were amazingly nice and kind and special) in her early years, and then instead devotes the bulk of its space to a look at the young Groth's neurotic love-life. (And that could have been an engrossing book: she was on the front lines of the sexual revolution, as a young professional woman from the sticks in big bad New York in the high Mad Men years.)

The Receptionist is a slim book, but don't let that fool you: it's even slighter than it looks. It masquerades as an insider's look at the New Yorker in its golden years under William Shawn, but Groth was never an insider -- in fact, the buried message of The Receptionist, the one Groth doesn't seem to have realized herself, is that she remained on the outside that entire time, ushering people into offices but then leaving herself for a seat by the elevator. (And that book, had she realized it, could also have been something really worth reading.) Though, perhaps, I might be too hard on Groth: it's possible that she wrote a passionate, deeply felt, wart-and-all look at the men of the '50s and '60s New Yorker, and that the folks at Algonquin edited that all out, for fear of lawsuit or unpleasantness. That's very unlikely, though: Groth's writing in The Receptionist shows an essential timidity (yes, the very thing that American society tried its hardest to inculcate in her entire generation, but that's an explanation, not an excuse) and instinctive turning away from any kind of conflict, so I very much doubt that version of The Receptionist ever did, or could, exist.

Groth simply doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, or reputation, so The Receptionist is maddeningly non-specific, as she refuses to even name the boyfriends she had fifty years ago for fear something utterly unspecified might happen. Groth writes, in her early chapters, about how a few New Yorker types pursued her -- she only includes the ones that did so gracefully and as gentlemen, like John Berryman and Joe Mitchell, leaving the reader to wonder if there were any real wolves on the premises -- without ever quite making the connection to why they did so: she was blonde and young and (apparently) available. She never makes the case that they liked her for her she's too busy talking about what geniuses they all were. But surely there must have been more steel in the twenty-something Groth than she tells us, because, according to her, she didn't succumb to the advances of any of those eighteenth-floor geniuses, over a course of many years and what must have been many (genteel, gentlemanly) attempts to get into her pants.

She did, though, succumb to the advances of others, starting with a cartoonist she calls "Evan Simm" and leading through a small group of mostly young men over the next few years -- and this makes up the bulk of the book, the story of how one young woman went from thinking she'd marry the first man she slept with, to thinking it would be the second, to finally realizing (a few years later) that her relationships with men were not healthy. But Groth tells us this -- and tells it to us, too often, at secondhand or by hiding the names of her boyfriends -- rather than making it immediate and real. Maybe she's just too far from that mixed-up twentyish girl to empathize with her anymore, but the young Janet Groth is unknowable in The Receptionist, and the older Groth not much better: it's never clear why she does any of the things she does (or doesn't do), or even that Groth realizes that she's being that opaque.

So The Receptionist combines a tepid whitewashed look at the New Yorker fifty years ago with a bland veiled story of one woman's sexual coming of age in the same era (minus the actual coming of age and learning anything) into one mediocre package. It is a bestseller, but, then, I've already said "mediocre" once, so I'm repeating myself.

Alina Simone isn't famous. She possibly never will be famous. She has never worked for people that are famous. (Though her childhood best friend is Amanda Palmer, who became exactly the kind of rock star that Simone burns to become.) She has, however, been a recording and touring musician -- not as successful as she'd like, but working at what she wants to do -- for the past decade, releasing three full-length records. She might not have done exactly what she wanted to do, but she's nobody's receptionist. And, last year, a collection of autobiographical essays -- it's not quite a single narrative, though the book does have an arc as a whole -- called You Must Go and Win was released, at about the same time as her most recent record, Make Your Own Danger.

And, in sixteen months, You Must Go and Win has sold about 13% of what The Receptionist has done in four. (Who says that rock 'n roll is more popular than the written word?) Once again, there is no justice in the world.

Simone is smart, authentic and entirely honest -- a good part of You Must Go and Win is taken up with her struggles with her own dreams. How does she know what she really wants? Does she want what she really wants? But even more of You Must Go and Win is concerned with the essential meat of the memoir: who am I? where did I come from? how did I end up here?

And when "here" is a flea-infested (and tiny) sublet in Brooklyn, there's an immediate tension there. Even better, "where did I come from" has an equally interesting, specific story: Simone was born in Kharkov, which is currently in Ukrane but was part of the Soviet Union when her parents got permission to leave. (She's a little older than you might expect, from a would-be rock star, and her voice is all the better and richer for it.)

You Must Go and Win is partially about rock 'n' roll, and about dreams thereof, but it's just as much about Russia and Ukrane and weird parts of the world, about punk rock in the old Soviet Union and Simone's love for the dead punk icon Yanka Dyagileva, about her fears and loves and the non-profit day job that kept sending her to Siberia, about traveling the country with Amanda Fucking Palmer, about the Russian Orthodox church and the heretical Doukhbors. Simone is an interesting person, with passions for odd bits of intellectual and social history, depressive in that old Russian way, but always clear about who she is and what she can do. And she writes with the energy of punk rock and the intellectual intricacy of an Orthodox icon.

I read You Must Go and Win because I knew Simone's music, but that's completely unnecessary. She's a great chronicler of her own life, and has lived enough interesting moments to fill many more books like this. This is the book you should be reading.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

If I'd read this closer to Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor (see my post last month), I'd have combined them into one post, since they're very much the same kind of thing: complete (or nearly so) collections of the occasional nonfiction by major writers who started off solidly in the SF camp but have since drifted in somewhat different directions, but remained solidly in favor of SF and regularly define what they do as SF. (And my personal relationship to the two writers is also very similar: I last read Stephenson with Cryptonomicon, since I fell out of the habit with his massive historical trilogy and was out of the SF field professionally when he came back to it.)

In Some Remarks, Stephenson, non-fictionally, is as we've always suspected: geeky in the most interesting ways, deeply private and protective of that privacy, quirky and particular about his working and living arrangements as only a very successful novelist can be, and intellectually fascinated by a series of shiny new ideas in the way of so many other SF writers. Stephenson, though, could get funding from magazines like Wired to chase those shiny ideas, resulting in pieces like the epic "Mother Earth, Mother Board," a nearly-novel-length tracing of the state of subsea telecommunications cables as of 1996.

Most of the pieces in Some Remarks bear the hallmark of one geeky obsession or other -- Stephenson, for example, is one of the very many SFnally-oriented men of his generation who are still struggling with the fact that they all didn't get to go to space -- though all also bear Stephenson's very particular obsessive focus on specific minutia.

Stephenson fans will be most interested to know that Some Remarks contains two of his very few short stories -- "Spew" and "The Great Simoleon Caper" -- as well as the first sentence of another story that will never be continued. That's not a lot of short fiction, but Stephenson isn't, temperamentally, a short fiction writer at all; he only has another story or two existent at all.

Some Remarks could not be other than a random collection of now mostly-superseded thoughts -- when SF writers are invited to perform journalism, there's always an element of "tell us what THE FUTURE will be like," and that dates very quickly -- but Stephenson's thoughts are the product of deep cogitation and a very particular angle of attack, which makes them worth revisiting even a decade or two later.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot

Mary Talbot is a professor and scholar with a long list of academic publications; she's also the daughter of noted Joyce scholar (author of The Books at the Wake, still a standard reference to Finnegans Wake) and general unpleasant person James Atherton. Bryan Talbot is the noted graphic novelist and comics-maker behind the Grandville books, Luther Arkwright, Alice in Sunderland, and others.

With Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, they team up for the first time -- as will inevitably happen in the world of comics, those these don't don't, as far as I can tell, fight each other first -- to tell the intertwined story of young Mary Atherton (mostly before she met Talbot, though his long-haired hippie self does show up in the later parts of the book) and of Joyce's daughter Lucia, frustrated dancer and eventual mental patient. The clear connection is their cold, obsessive fathers -- "my cold mad feary father," to put it, as the Talbots do, in Joyce's own words -- and Mary Talbot makes use of that in this heavily narrated book (presented in a typewriter font, as if it were the manuscript the elder Atherton was banging away at for most of Mary's childhood), switching regularly from past to present, from Joyce to Atherton, and around again.

The Talbots don't deliberately try to aggrandize Mary's troubles with her father, and they can't help but seem trivial compared to what Joyce did to his daughter: stifled her career, and any chance at an independent life, and drove her into an asylum for the rest of her life. James Atherton might have been a cold British mid-20th century father, but he wasn't the self-obsessed monster Joyce was -- or, perhaps, Mary Atherton had opportunities in the '60s in England that weren't available in the same way to Lucia Joyce in the '30s. Either way, Mary Talbot makes Mary Atherton look like the lightweight side of the comparison, which isn't good for the book -- Dotter could have been stronger if it had focused entirely on Lucia, whose life provides more than enough drama for a story twice the length.

Of course, that would be a sadder and drearier Dotter, which clearly wasn't the Talbots' intention -- comparing Mary with Lucia allows Mary's life to be a positive example and a potential escape. Still, it does feel unbalanced: Lucia's is clearly the deeper, more dramatic story, and Mary's life, in this context, is interesting mostly due to the parallels, which isn't entirely fair to the writer telling the story of her own life.

Two Small Guidebooks to the City of Angels

My family will be spending some time in Southern California in the near future -- mostly for theme-park activities in the Anaheim area, but with side trips elsewhere -- so I've been reading up on the various tourist traps in the vicinity. Along the way, I read two directly competitive pocket guides to Los Angeles, and thought that I might as well look at them together.

Frommer's Los Angeles Day by Day was written by Garth Mueller, and -- at the time it was published, last year -- came out from a venerable publishing house with which I am also associated. (Said venerable publishing house has since sold off that piece of its operations to the not nearly as venerable but vastly cash-rich data octopus Google.) It's pocket-sized -- slim but taller than a mass-market book, with a large fold-out map in a pocket inside the back cover and several other maps of specific areas in a three-panel fold-out from the front cover.

It's organized by interest rather than geographically, with chapters on shopping, dining, lodging, nightlife, outdoor activities, and arts & entertainment. But it opens with the author's curated "best of" recommendations -- first, suggested itineraries for one-, two-, or three-day trips, and then a half-dozen specialized day trips for particular interests (fans of movies, architecture, rock music, art, shopping, eating, or those traveling with kids). Assuming that Mueller's expertise is what it should be -- which I can't evaluate at this point since I haven't made the trip yet (and I don't expect to follow any of these suggested tours explicitly, anyway) -- this is the most useful part of Day by Day, giving travelers a template to start from when they plan their days in LA.

It has a crisp, authoritative look, with "tabs" for each section embedded in a color bar to make thumbing through easier, and there's a lot of color photos, though many of them are presented postage-stamp-size. The two-column layout presents a lot of data in a way that keeps it all easy to follow, and occasional sidebars give more detail on specific points.

The bulk of the book is written in capsule-review style, like listings in Time Out -- entirely useful, highly factual, but a bit dry to read straight through. The day-trips are more lively, with more anecdotes and factoids to spice them up. But this isn't a book to be read straight through to begin with; it's meant to be a reference and a guide, with each reader gravitating to the sections that she is most interested in. And, for that, it's very usable, with good maps embedded in the text to show where various places are in relation to each other. This book would be a bit bulky for a pants pocket, but it could easily go into a jacket, purse, or glove compartment for a trip around the city. Between the maps and the curated tours, it's an excellent (and clearly opinionated) guide to LA.

Lonely Planet Pocket Los Angeles has a similar form-factor: it's shorter (closer to the height of a mass-market), and both slightly thicker and deeper, with marginally thicker paper than Frommer's. Its inside-back-cover fold-out map has more density -- one side is mostly taken up by a listing of places, so it can function semi-independently from the book -- but lacks the large area maps Frommer's does. (Lonely Planet's map is also paper, and tears out from the book, while Frommer's is plasticized and sits in a clear plastic pocket in the back of that book.)

Lonely Planet is also clearly hipper than Frommer's is, from the open-shirted author photo of Adam Skolnick to its focus on neighborhoods (the trendier the better). It does have a quick "do this each day" section up front, possibly to compete with Frommer's, but the book is primarily organized geographically rather than by interest, starting with Hollywood and circling around to hit Beverly Hills, Downtown, Santa Monica, Burbank, and excursions to points further away.

Lonely Planet feels like it gives more space to shopping and nightlife -- again, aiming at a hipper crowd than Frommer's -- so visitors with those items high on their agenda will want to gravitate in this direction. It also is quite thorough in differentiating between the different strands of nightlife: old Hollywood, new Hollywood, LGBT, and so on -- to give the reader the best guidance as to exactly which trendy club she will be most comfortable in. But all that hip trendiness can make an older, stodgier, less shopping-obsessed reader -- your humble correspondent, for one example -- feel bored and out of place; this is not a guide for those who don't intend to make hitting boutiques and/or nightclubs a major part of their LA itinerary.

The design is bright and modern, with pastel headers and sidebars to organize sections, and lots of color photography -- as expected from Lonely Planet, it's entirely up-to-date in both tone and style. For readers who are equally up-to-date, this is the perfect guide to LA. (The rest of us may want something a bit more sedate.)

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

I've said before that one of my favorite kinds of books is the collection of occasional essays by a novelist -- preferably, collecting twenty or thirty years worth of random non-fiction from someone much more comfortable with fiction -- and so I was very happy to see Distrust That Particular Flavor, which is precisely that.

Gibson has written about two dozen pieces of journalism, speeches, introductions, and other odd lengths of string since about 1990, and they are collected here, in the kind of stylish package that adds a couple of pages between each piece to make the covers just that much farther apart. The essays and speeches here are all more or less dated, since what people ask SF writers to do is talk about the future, and nothing dates more quickly than non-fictional futures.

But these are all Gibsonian futures, with his spiky wit and wry viewpoint, which makes them at least as interesting as the actual future that we did receive. And, as is also usual for this form, he provides a short afterword to each piece, talking about when it was written or what has happened since or something similarly interesting. It's not Gibson fiction, but, for me -- and I'm at least three novels behind -- it apparently is better.

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank

Reading polemical books is a guilty pleasure -- I don't trust anyone who can read books like this and not feel guilty about having one's biases and received ideas so carefully stroked and petted -- so I try not to do it very much.

I haven't read Frank before, though he's quite well-known in lefty to moderate circles for such what's-wrong-with-those-people books as What's the Matter With Kansas? Pity the Billionaire was his new book at the beginning of this year, chronicling, as he put it, how the biggest market failure in seventy years almost immediately created a right-wing backlash that demanded the elimination of all government oversight that's supposed to keep such failures from happening.

I wish he was a bit better at detailing the fiendishly sneaky jujitsu that the Tea Party performed in turning anti-banker anger towards the kind of people who wanted a tighter rein on bankers. And I suppose someone in his position can't drill down to the underlying cause, which is that most people are bone-stupid and easily led. But this is a book that looks at what already seems to be the rear-view mirror -- the heyday of Glen Beck two years ago -- with a clear eye and a position informed by actual facts, and that's fairly useful. When the time comes to write the history of our era, this book will be cited in the footnotes several times.

Quiet by Susan Cain

The kinds of nonfiction that hit major bestseller lists run to a type: serious but friendly explanations about how the whole world is explained by X. Sometimes they're diet books, sometimes exercise -- quite often they're political -- and very regularly, they're things like this, talking about people by tossing them into a few very large buckets, making vast generalizations and almost equally wide-ranging prescriptions for society, and making the reader feel both smart and special in the end.

For Susan Cain and Quiet, the big explanation is the gap between introverts and extroverts, and, from the title, you can guess that she comes down on the side of the shy and unassuming. (You might not be able to tell from the Internet, but I'm a huge introvert myself -- most of us who read lots of books are, for obvious reasons -- which is why I grabbed this particular bus to begin with.)

It's a book that someone like me wants to believe -- that I'm special and wonderful and would be a massively productive and awesome member of society if only I could find just the right niche -- and I'm sure it will help some people. (It got me thinking about some aspects of my own life, which might lead to useful changes, or it might not.) It's reductive and middlebrow, though: you might feel smart and connected while reading it, but, afterward, you're likely to wish that you'd tackled something with some heft instead.

The Disneyland Encyclopedia by Chris Strodder

I recognize that most people are not like me; most people don't read encyclopedias -- even encyclopedias about theme parks -- for enjoyment, and don't embark on reading a dozen books for a family vacation. But I am me, and I do do those things.

And I can tell you that The Disneyland Encyclopedia is a really swell way to waste a dozen hours or so, if you have any interest at all in Disneyland, theme-park history, or just the ways that American icons morph and adapt over the course of a couple of generations of continuous operation. Chris Strodder's book contains over 500 entries, covering every element of the Disneyland park -- people, attractions, stores, lands, restaurants, events, TV shows, promotions, and less definable stuff -- with details of what it was (or still is), how it's changed, and what's interesting about it. Upfront, there are maps of the park as a whole and the various lands, with buildings and areas keyed to a list of the various things that have been there over the years -- this is sometimes a bit vague, due to major renovations, but generally is usefully precise. And the back of the book has an extensive index, a solid bibliography, and an appendix listing the entries by land and type (attraction, person, restaurant, store, etc.). Strodder also has included his own black-and-white photos of every element that's still in existence, though those those photos tend to be small in the book -- there are a few photos in color on Strodder's website, but it would have been nice to have had them all accessible there.

So this is absolutely the book for anyone interested in the history of Disneyland; I've never seen or heard of anything half as comprehensive or detailed. (I also note that I read the 2008 first edition, which has a blue cover; a second edition came out this summer and has an orange cover -- I assume, but do not know for sure, that the updates are primarily about changes since 2008 and not new archival information.)

The only major negative is that Strodder deliberately did not ask any questions of Disney officials; he hasn't interviewed anyone or done any original research, just read the primary documents and the already-existing books about Disneyland. (Readers will note that he relies very heavily on souvenir books as primary sources: he seems to be someone who started off as a souvenir-book collector and only afterward decided he wanted an encyclopedia of Disneyland, so wrote it himself when no one else did.) It would have been nice if he'd done some journalistic digging -- but, then again, the scope of Disneyland Encyclopedia is so large that he could be researching just Adventureland attractions for a decade or more. So that's something of a missed opportunity; I have to assume that Strodder has a list of questions he'd like to have answered, and there are certainly people still alive who could answer some of those questions, if he wanted to track them down and ask.

But that is a quibble: Disneyland Encyclopedia is now and is likely to remain the most comprehensive book on the park -- unless the Disney company follows Strodder's lead, opens their vaults, and does a similar book based on official archival materials -- and so is of strong interest to serious Disney fans, anyone interested in 20th century pop and cultural history, and Californiana.

Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California With Kids by Michael and Trisa Knight

Words can have very specific meanings within particular contexts -- for example, in the title Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California with Kids, the word "kids" means particularly small children: definitely those under the age of ten, and mostly those up to the age of six or seven.

Now, I have two children myself, but those sons are now fourteen and eleven, which means I have one "teen," one "tween" and no so-called "kids." So this book is not as closely tailored to my interests as it might have seemed. Luckily, I knew that going in, so I was able to triangulate as I went.

(And authors Michael and Trisa Knight do talk about the interests of older children along the way, somewhat -- but little kids are tyrants that can ruin an entire vacation without trying, so they need to be catered to, and their needs much more carefully scrutinized, than my older and more self-sufficient guys.)

If you're going to be visiting the Anaheim branch of Disney Uber Alles, and doing so with some rug-rats in tow, this is probably the most targeted, specific book you can get for that trip: it covers not just the two Disney parks and their ancillary leisure opportunities, but several other tourist traps in the close vicinity: Universal Studios Hollywood, Knott's Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Sea World San Diego, LEGOland, and even some quick tips about zoos and other "educational" stuff. The Knights cover all of the rides and shows, plus restaurants, lodging choices (in much less detail) and general tips.

This book is much less designed than you'd expect from such a big name as Fodor's: the "maps" of the parks are very rudimentary and practically useless, there are no photos, and the text just flows in big sections broken up by call-outs for "Insider's Secrets," "Fun Facts," and "The Scare Factor." Also, Michael and Trista Knight may have gone to these parks many times with their many children, but Fodor's Disneyland is purely based on their own experiences and preferences: there's no larger survey or data-collection effort behind this book. (Unlike, for example, the Unofficial guides.)

The Knights are good guides, if limited in their expertise: their recommendations are solid and defensible, but reading Fodor's Disneyland is more like having a long conversation with a family that really likes Disneyland than like getting tips from an expert. If you prepare for vacations through overwhelming preparation, as I do, this may be substantially less than you want and need -- but, if you're less obsessive, it'll probably be just right.

The Titanic Awards by Doug Lansky

Travel is expensive, complicated, and difficult -- so it's supposed to be sublime and wonderful. But of course things are very rarely what they're "supposed" to be in this world.

And so, in honor of the gap between what is and what should be, travel writer Doug Lansky put together The Titanic Awardsto dishonor the worst people, places, and things in travel -- the worst hotels, cities, airports, cruise lines, passenger behavior, tourists, and just about anything else you can think of. The Awards were given in three ways -- first, some categories were crowd-sourced through a survey taken by over 2000 people from 80 countries; others were from official statistics compiled by industry groups and associations; still others were Lansky's personal choices from years of bad travel experiences; and the last group were other personal reminiscences by other travel writers of the horrible experiences they've had.

So Titanic Awards aims to give a holistic, in-the-round view of bad travel and tourism: airplanes, ground transportation, hotels, food and drinks, destinations, and those pesky fellow tourists. And it succeeds quite well: no one will want to read this book straight through, but it's a lovely schadenfreude-filled voyage of discovery, in which only other people have horrible things happen to them. If you want to know who the worst drivers in the world are, or which major airline has the smallest seats, or which country's tourists are the most rude, or where the world's most crowded swimming pool is, The Titanic Awards is the book for you.

Two Travel Books With Very Little In Common

The following two books are both about travel destinations somewhat near a place with "Disney" in its name, but that's about all they have in common. But I finished the two of them on subsequent days, and that's as good a reason as any to toss them together and see how they bounce off each other.

Fodor's Los Angeles: 25th Edition, edited by Rachel Klein

This book lists seven writers, an Editorial Contributor, and twelve various art/design/production folks, so pardon me if I don't name them all. I'm assuming Klein wrangled them all to turn their contributions into a book, so she'll get the credit here.

Fodor's Los Angeles appears to be a quite comprehensive guide to all of the things one might want to do while visiting the City of Angels -- quite a lot of those things seem to involve shopping for clothing, watching for moderately famous actors, or clubbing, none of which appeal to me, so I'll take the book's word for it that they are desirable activities. (My own tastes tend towards shopping for books, watching random unknown people, museum-ing, and wandering randomly, and those are totally different.)

I'll be in the LA area for about a week this fall, as part of the Hornswoggler clan's big annual trip. The main draw this time is Disneyland, but that's not enough for a whole week, so I'm doing some due diligence to figure out what else to do while we're there. (I am the official family entertainment planner -- if I don't figure out what to do, it won't be done.) Fodor's Los Angeles has a subtitle that promises coverage of Disneyland and Orange County, but that's quite secondary -- LA itself is the focus on the book, and there's a lot of city there to describe.

Fodor's is a classy, professional, long-lived travel-book series, with all that implies: a knowing tone, excellent design with lots of sidebars and charts, gorgeous color photography throughout, and a good-sized map stuck into the back. You could very easily use this one book to plan a trip and bring it along (to leave in the hotel room or chuck in the backseat of the rental car), and it would be quite valuable. Not quite so much for me, though, since my geographic focus is a bit south and west of LA itself. Still, it gave me a better grounding of the geography -- and, probably most important, emphasized that Anaheim is not LA, and getting from one to the other will take time and effort (particularly on freeways at rush hour).

The Dark Side of Disney by Leonard Kinsey

Switching gears entirely, Kinsey's Dark Side is a personal, apparently self-published guide to Walt Disney World (the one outside Orlando, Florida), with acceptable book design, some not-terribly-useful black and white photos, and more attitude than you could credit. Kinsey is a youngish man who combines in an unlikely way a deep love for all things Disney and the teenage hell-raiser's desire to find trouble and/or fun wherever he can.

Dark Side, in this one way like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts: more-or-less legal and ethical ways to save money on a WDW vacation; ways to achieve sex, drugs, and rock n' roll in the parks; and a grab-bag of "tricks, tips, scams, and bugs." Kinsey's tone -- like that of a slightly less feral Jay from a Kevin Smith movie -- is the same throughout: he's discovered some totally awesome stuff to do, and he really wants to share it with you.

I shouldn't pick on Kinsey: many of his money-saving tips are smart, and a few were even both entirely aboveboard and new to me. And he takes great pains, throughout Dark Side, to keep clear what is and isn't legal, and to repeatedly advise his readers not to do the illegal stuff...or, at least, not to blame him if they get caught doing it. And Dark Side is a hoot to read, even if it's very short (156 pages of text, minus the photos I mentioned) and relies primarily on the author's own experiences, a few vaguely sourced stories, and a lot of hearsay. (David Koenig's Mouse Tales books, though not focused on giving tips to visitors of Disney parks, are much better at telling stories about what mischief people can get up to in those parks.)

If you don't expect a conventional guidebook, and are willing to loan Kinsey your benefit of the doubt, there's a lot to enjoy in Dark Side. But the definitive "dirty tricks" guide to WDW has yet to be written -- though it would likely take a team of writer-researchers at least as sneaky and smart as Kinsey is.

Nested Scrolls by Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker has always seemed one of the more personally interesting SF writers: descendant of the philosopher Georg Heigel, professor of math and computer science, devoted to writing SF with real science that also incorporated his personal life and experiences, a style he dubbed "Transrealism." His novels have been wild and raw-nerve affairs for his entire career, from White Light to Postsingular -- they've all had a consistent mad-professor tone and a loose-limbed laid-back affect, in which even the most bizarre and extreme transformations (man to robot to alien, at the very mildest) are just something to shrug about and live with. A favorite SF writer of slackers, surfers, and math-heads, Rucker could have been the second coming of Philip K. Dick: just as dazed by the wonders of life and identity, but one rung up on the karmic ladder and happy to see what happened next.

Nested Scrolls is the story of Rudy Rucker's own life; how he became the man who wrote those novels, and what was going on in his life while he wrote them. It's a surprisingly conventional autobiography, beginning with Rucker's earliest childhood memories and moving forward chronologically through his life. It tells all of the stories of Rucker's life to date, and is as interesting in the rhythms of a family (through his own childhood, marriage in college, and eventual children) and the terrors and rigors of the academic life (Rucker was nearly a top-rank math researcher, but he didn't get that one big paper, breakthrough or theory when he needed it, and so settled into teaching college math, and eventually computer science, at a series of mid-rank schools) as it is about Rucker's SF career.

Rucker is a thoughtful, introspective man accustomed to writing long prose -- and he has more than a hint of the Richard Feynman-esque wild man about him -- and Nested Scrolls launched out of a near-death experience (a cerebral hemorrhage) in 2008: so this is both a book Rucker was well able to write and one that he knew he had to do now. Nested Scrolls has some of that urgency to it, as if it's the things that Rucker needs to get down on paper, the details of his life or of life itself, while he still has time.

A writer's life is not full of big events, nor is an academic's. Still, Rucker's Transrealist style -- the point is to "write like yourself, only more so" -- makes Nested Scrolls an engrossing, deeply thoughtful amble through one well-lived life. It's vital for readers of Rucker's novels, and exceptional even for those who've never read him before.

Two Books About Disneyland

Wendy Lefkon, editorial director, Birnbaum Guides 2009: Disneyland Resort: Expert Advice from the Inside Source: The Official Guide (7/21)

That, more or less, is how the cover bills this book, with all of the things that seem to be title elements in order from top to bottom. (The copyright page is no help at providing an "official" title.) I also look dubiously on this book for not having an old-fashioned "writer," but instead having what seem like four or five editorial Chiefs, no actual Indians, and one guy credited for "additional material." (Given that this is an officially licensed Disney product published by an arm of the Disney octopus itself, it may well be that most of the text here is official, coming from some Disney functionary or document.)

Yes, I'm planning another vacation. This year, the Hornswoggler family will not be returning to the halls of Orlando (where we've been in November for the past four years), but are instead heading to the fabled land of Anaheim. And so, as usual, I'm reading a bunch of guidebooks to figure out what we'll most want to do, and how to do it with the minimum amount of fuss.

This particular book is several years old, which isn't its fault. (My local library system has far fewer books on Disneyland than on Disney World, presumably based on traffic patterns.) It's published annually; I've linked the current edition above. It's superficial and completely uncritical, though, and that is it's fault. The Birnbaum book is a decent guide to the basic details of the two theme parks and other Disney stuff in Anaheim (and has some suggestions and ideas for other things to do with your time in Southern California once you're all Moused out), but I would be very wary of trying to use a book like this a primary planning tool.

Bob Sehlinger, Seth Kubersky, & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2012 (7/26)
I have previously expressed my admiration for the Unofficial guides (primarily the ones dealing with Orlando attractions), so take that as read -- also, the fact that these books are (for the moment) published by the same company that signs my paychecks regularly might tend to make me more positive about them.

So: as I just said above, this year's trip is to Anaheim, where I've personally been twice over the past decade (for business trips, from which I carved out half a day or a bit more to get over to Disneyland), but which the rest of the family hasn't seen. The physical layout is completely different from Orlando -- the two Disney parks and accompanying stuff are smack in the middle of a city, with a bunch of what looks like mostly older hotels surrounding it, plus a convention center and its associated stuff just to the south. I'm still figuring out where to stay, particularly since I'd like to both be able to walk to the parks and stay in a decent place with enough space for me, The Wife, and our two ever-growing sons.

After using them for several long, expensive trips, I trust the Unofficial Guides to tell me the truth: what's good and bad in any particular Disney thing (ride, show, hotel, restaurant), and also about the surrounding non-Disney stuff (unlike some official publications, which prefer to ignore anything non-Disney in the vicinity). I haven't completely decided all the details of the upcoming trip, but I am sure that this Unofficial Guide has already been a lot of help, and that I'll be referring to it regularly for a while to come.