The Afterlife Diet by Daniel Pinkwater

The only novel officially for adults by kids-book genius Pinkwater is this odd 1995 item, which is plotted and told a lot like his best YA novels -- sideways, slyly, around corners and leaving out the boring parts. It asks the eternal question: is there dieting after death? The plot begins in the afterlife, but mostly takes place on earth, explaining the events that lead up to its first sentence: "Milton Cramer, the lousy editor, woke up in a room he'd never seen before."

As a fat guy, and a long-time lover of Pinkwater's book, I loved this when I first read it -- I had a copy of the hardcover from 1995, which was lost in the flood -- and got a new one as soon as I could. And why do we re-buy books we love if not for an excuse to read them again?

The Afterlife Diet is one of those books that's hilarious on the surface, but -- in the immortal words of Fat Albert, "if you're not careful, you may learn something." The something you'll learn is about life, or yourself, or psychiatry, or the human condition -- Pinkwater is tacking the big stuff here, and doing it magnificently.

If you are currently an adult, and have never read Pinkwater (which is horribly sad, but may be true for some people), this is a good place to start, if you can find a copy. If you're a Pinkwater fan who didn't know he'd written for adults, you now have a gem to find.

The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 by Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa,

Whenever I'm looking to take a family trip to the Lands of the Mouse (whether in Anaheim or Orlando), I always make sure to check out the most recent Unofficial book on the subject during my planning. Sure, I've internalized most of the lessons at this point, but there are changes every year, and other things that I need to be reminded of. In 2011, during my year-long Book-A-Day string, I read a good-sized pile of guides to Walt Disney World (and then read two about Disneyland last summer), and the Unofficial books, in all of their varieties, are clearly the most useful and directly helpful of any of the books I've seen. Others sometimes have more facts and figures, but the Unofficial books tell you what to do, in conversational language, and incorporate not just a huge wealth of personal experience and Big Data computing power, but also anecdotes and ideas from dozens of their readers.

This year, I got The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 pretty much the second it was available, through the magic of ebooks, and read just about all of its 850 pages (I may have skimmed the chapters on things that don't really apply to me, like tips for little kids or the details of the cruise ships) on my iPad over the course of a little more than a week. And, yes, I did still learn some things -- so, unless you go to WDW substantially more often than I do (several times a year, for example), this book will still have useful things to teach you.

And my employer no longer publishes these books, so there's no reason for me to be politically nice at this point; I really do think the Unofficial books are excellent travel guides, and would buy more of them if they covered other locations I was going to travel to. Sure, it will be useless to you if you're not going to Orlando, but any travel guide has that handicap. And I have to think that, if you were trapped in a doctor's office for several hours with nothing to read but travel guides, this is the one you'd choose, and you'd be pretty well entertained along the way.

The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World Dining 2013 by A.J. Wolfe

"DFB" stands for Disney Food Blog, one of the resources I'm using pretty intensively to prepare for the family's annual fall vacation this year. (No points for guessing where we're going.) DFB has published several books -- delivered in PDF form, and sold directly from the site, in the age-old way of targeted non-fiction -- and I've bought and read both this one and a shorter, much more targeted "mini-guide" to the 2013 Epcot Food & Wine Festival, which will be going on when we hit the World. This book is updated annually, and covers, as you might guess, all of the restaurants, carts, stands, and other food-acquisition opportunities in Walt Disney World -- with both quick capsule reviews of all of the food locations and lots of themed chapters (where to get a good steak, what are the best snacks, how to eat healthy, how to work the Disney Dining Plan, special occasions, dining with kids, best drinking establishments, sample dining itineraries, and more).

I suspect that most of the material in this book originated on the blog, and could probably still be found on the blog with some effort. But I don't mind paying for it, for two reasons: First, it's important to pay for things that are useful to you, so that the people behind those things get recompensed and keep doing them. (If something's free, it's either a hobby rather than a business -- which means it may disappear at any time -- or that thing is not actually the product; you the customer are the product.) Second, assembling and organizing that information in a format that can be read easily offline is a major benefit.

The blog's writing is from the point of view of an enthusiastic and pretty well-versed amateur -- an eater rather than a cook or culinary expert -- and the photography is a bit better than that, with gorgeous views of things that you'll want to eat. It's probably not for top-end foodies -- there's are a few really serious cuisine opportunities in WDW, but many more "good eats" surrounding them -- but both the blog and the book are excellent resources for those of us who want to eat the best possible nosh while we're stuffing ourselves on vacation.

The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days by Ian Frazier

If you read The New Yorker, you're familiar with Frazier -- he's been writing short comic pieces (collected in books like Coyote V. Acme and Dating Your Mom) and longer reportage (which grew into books like Travels in Siberia and Great Plains) for them for several decades now. And if you still read it, you've probably encountered the Cursing Mommy, a conceit that Frazier's spun out into four or five of those short comic pieces over the past couple of years. (Despite the fact that it certainly seems like a one-note premise -- young mother, attempting to be Martha Stewart-esque and do something domestic, gets more and more frustrated as things fail to work and erupts in swearing as the whole project falls to pieces.)

It didn't look like the best material to stretch into a novel, honestly -- the more so because Frazier hasn't written a novel in his career so far. But The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days is a better and more interesting work than those individual pieces were -- even though it integrates them (or pieces of them) along the way.

The Cursing Mommy still doesn't get a name here, though -- she tells us this story, and everything comes through her voice, which is surprisingly strong and varied. This is a comic novel, so all sorts of things go wrong for her over the course of one year -- the book is structured as a daybook, or diary, in which she's specially telling the story in her own writing to an audience -- and she deals with it all as best she can, erupting in anger and cursing more than she wants to. The rhythms of those calamities start out funny, but get more nuanced as the year goes on and things get worse (as they always must in a comic novel). In the end, the repeated line "oh, what a fucking horrible day this is going to be" turns from a laugh line into a scream against the universe and finally into something like a philosophy: they are all fucking horrible days, if you let them be, and sometimes declaring them to be fucking horrible days is all that can get you through them.

Don't get me wrong -- the Book of Days is really funny, with subplots about husband Larry's job troubles, general cluelessness, and love of rare capacitors; about older son Trevor's teenage acting-out; about the budgetary troubles of Trevor and younger son Kyle's schools; about Cursing Mommy's book club, and their love for books about how horrible the Bush administration was; about the family's problems with the rapacious Sphagnum Health; and about Larry's Client/Boss, who pursues the Cursing Mommy with far too much zeal throughout the year. But there's some heart underneath the humor, and Frazier isn't afraid to bury some political points in there as well. (You can probably guess what those are, and judge for yourselves how much they would annoy you.)

Journalism by Joe Sacco

Sometimes a book's title just tells you exactly what it is: this is a book of journalism, and it's by Joe Sacco. There's something thrilling about that purity; it doesn't even have a subtitle to explain that Sacco does his journalism by way of comics -- the panels floating up from the background of the cover will have to do that.

So this is a collection of Journalism. Perhaps the fact that it's short journalism doesn't need to be said? But Sacco's other work -- most famously Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde -- is mostly book-length, the product of a long process of investigative trips into dangerous territory (into the middles of wars, occupations, and other tense, dangerous situations) and more time spent back in the US, turning those explorations into words and pictures.

Journalism collects some small pieces that popped up in between the larger book-length works -- a visit to the war-crimes trial in The Hague of some Serbian mass-murderers, several short pieces about Gaza and Hebron -- and a few longer works that are basically short books in themselves, on the refugee camps of Chechens, on the flood of African refugees troubling tiny Malta (where Sacco was born), and on the poorest and most untouchable of India's many castes in a poor northern state. There are also a few pieces about the Iraqi occupation, with Sacco embedded in a Marine unit, witnessing attempts to train local soldiers to something like competence, and investigating the claims of torture at US hands by two Iraqi men. Those last seem like they could grow into a new book, or be the offshoots of that book -- it's certainly a subject that could use a Sacco to look at it closely.

Throughout all of the stories, Sacco always is drawn to the poorest, the lowest, the most downtrodden and endangered -- the refugees, the tortured, the hapless bystanders caught in the crossfire. It's an excellent tropism for a journalist to have, and it's served Sacco well throughout his career -- he's not a journalist who will be tempted by access, or the prestige of wealth and power, or the lure of a puff piece in some cushy Western capital. Sacco is honest and uncompromising in the way a great journalist must be -- he goes to see what he has to see, and reports back as well as he can, showing us the sights as well as the words. Journalism would be an excellent introduction to his work, and is a vital, compelling read for anyone concerned with the way this world really is.

(I've previously reviewed the Sacco books But I Like It, The Fixer, and Footnotes in Gaza here.)

The Best American Comics 2012 edited by Francoise Mouly

Some books are harder to review than others, requiring more energy and effort up front to do a good job -- and anthologies, particularly "best of the year" anthologies, are among the worst. To really review The Best American Comics 2012, a reviewer should have a good sense of what she would have put into a similar book, to compare this actual book to the space of other potential books in order to judge what qualities the anthologist was looking for and what kinds of stories she gravitated to.

There are people who can do that -- I used to have a decent sense of the SF short-fiction field back in my book-club days, and there are probably a couple of dozen people who have that kind of standing to examine this book. But there aren't many of them, and they often are doing either competing anthologies or otherwise professionally connected to the field -- which often precludes an honest review, or one at all.

I've tried to review the books in this series in the past -- I started off comparing the initial 2006 volume with the almost simultaneous Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories and then had standalone reviews of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, then finally sticking 2010 and 2011 into round-ups to hide the fact that I didn't have all that much to say about them -- but I don't think I ever did the job the way it really should be done. And I don't expect this will be much better -- so you're warned.

Francoise Mouly is the guest editor this year, and she bends the book slightly -- the same way each guest editor has bent the book only slightly, picking mostly the same acclaimed alt-cartoonists (literary cartoonists? what is the accepted term for that broad swath of comics creators who have solid careers and artistic interest and don't do men-in-tights books?) as anyone else would. Mouly's big change is a small section of comics for kids at the end, which I'm afraid comes across as special pleading -- most of it is cute and nice and inoffensive and pretty, which seems really minor placed at the end of a book of stronger, better stories.

But, of course, a lot of the stuff in here isn't "stories," but pieces of stories. The literary comics field is mostly one of book-length works these days, so an annual anthology has a bunch of more-or-less self-contained pieces of stories -- this year from Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine, Scott Chantler, Anders Nilsen, Sammy Harkham, Sarah Glidden, Chester Brown, Renee French, and Jaime Hernandez -- along with things that really do stand on their own.

So Best American Comics 2012 isn't really a coherent anthology -- if any best of the year could -- but a series of pointers to some of the best work from the oddly defined year of September 1, 2010 to August 31, 2011. Contrary to what I said up top, the reader who'll get the most enjoyment out of this book is someone with no expectations or knowledge of the field, who can find "The Love Bunglers" or the excerpt from Big Questions without any preconceptions, who can be surprised and illuminated.

I found this book in a library, which gives me hope that it can find those kind of readers -- that it will be stumbled over, on a shelf somewhere, over and over, by people who have no idea that comics can be more than a series of brightly-clothed characters who need to insist that the last part of their name is Man. (Overcompensate much?!) If you read comics, you might want to check this out. If you don't read comics, I'd urge you to find it -- because comics can do anything any other artform can, and this book will give you a glimpse of the ways that's true.

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.

Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite by Barry Deutsch

How Mirka Met a Meteorite is the second Hereville book, about a spunky Orthodox Jewish girl who lives somewhere undefined: a small town or suburb nestled away in a forested area where, apparently, no goyim ever tread and what people do for a living is kept mysterious. (Perhaps it's the Orthodox utopia, since all we ever see the men doing is study.) I reviewed the first one as the middle book of a trio of completed unrelated graphic novels, and enjoyed the spunk but was left uneasy by the tension between Mirka's desires for her life and the clearly defined Orthodox culture that is devoted to turning her into something completely different.

(I'm still not sure how much of this Deutsch is doing consciously, but Mirka is exactly the kind of nail that gets hammered down hard in a society like this -- though people who believe in the values of that community would call it something like "sanding off rough edges.")

Meteorite is even starker about that tension; if the message of the first book was "a girl can have adventures and make her own way," this one comes down much more heavily on the old renormative standbys, "be careful what you wish for" and "know your place." Mirka herself does have a great moment of strength early in the story -- she saves her entire town -- but she's quickly outmatched by the meteorite, who is transformed into a simulacrum of Mirka by the witch from the first book.

So Mirka spends most of the book ineffectual, buffoonish, and useless -- doing badly both on her own terms (being a tough, self-reliant adventurer) and her society's (being a quiet, polite, hardworking, modest worker bee). She can't work out how to share her life with the meteorite, her anger and defiance do her no good, and a contest with the meteorite to decide "who is the best Mirka" becomes a series of painful failures. Mirka doesn't win out in the end so much as survive by luck and family -- again, not by the virtues that she's trying to live by, but by the things her society is trying to make her do: trust in God and do what her relatives tell her to.

I hope this series won't end with Mirka a quiet, respectable young woman, married to some man who doesn't seem to do anything but read, but it's difficult to see any other trajectory at this point. It's becoming clear that "Orthodox" is much more important to Hereville than "Mirka" is -- that's unusual for a series of stories in Western society, certainly, since we usually demand that our self-actuated heroes get everything they want because they want it, but, still, this particular twisting of that expectation is sad, for what Mirka could be and for what her society clearly is bent on turning her into.

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.

Rough Justice by Alex Ross

Alex Ross has painted many covers for DC Comics. And they've been collected...almost ten years ago, in his book Mythology. Rough Justice, on the other hand, has sketches and preliminary art, and so will be of most interest to other artists.

Ross's pencil lines are as precisely and closely observed as his more-famous painted art is; he's an artist who really looks at models and objects and tries to draw them like real, solid things. His story ideas, in common with most of the popular comics creators of his generation, are almost entirely rehashed versions of the stuff he loved as a kid -- untold tales of Kandor, a '70s-style Shazam!, lots of Justice Society, and even a new story of the Super-Sons. Hardcore DC fans will love that, of course -- Ross is one of them, and deeply cares about this stuff. Those of us who just like to read stories will look at it, be impressed at the craft, and quietly move on to something with more substance of its own.

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Creator Joe Shuster edited by Craig Yoe

Joe Shuster got half of the rawest deal of the 20th century -- a few bucks in return for Superman, a character that made hundreds of millions of dollars for other men (mostly not creators, mostly not scrupulous, mostly already rich). His story is perfectly crafted as an object lesson -- the artist who went blind, the creator thrown away from his own creation, the man who died just a step above poverty as his images were loved by millions worldwide -- and yet it's completely true.

Secret Identity wouldn't exist in a juster world: it collects the art that Shuster created in the early '50s for a trashy, badly-produced and frankly exploitative magazine called Nights of Horror, printed to be sold under the counter at a number of newsstands in New York. It has a lot of characters that look like Kent and Lane and Luthor and Olsen, because that's how Shuster drew, but these folks are whipping each other and engaged in other kinds of sadistic and sexual torments. This book exists because of prurient interest -- the art in the first place, and its republication in this form after it was rediscovered by Craig Yoe -- and I read it because of prurient interest, and, if you're at all intrigued by it, that'll be because of prurient interest as well. That's a kind of purity, I guess.

Secret Identity has interest primarily in the fact that it exists at all; there may be a few really devoted students of Shuster's line, but there are vastly more who will pretend to be while reading this book. It's a sad and tawdry symbol of the Original Sin of Comics, set to remind us that the house always wins and the little guy always gets screwed.

Daybreak by Brian Ralph

Daybreak is the world's only second-person zombie apocalypse graphic novel: the main character is "you," whose face or body Ralph never shows, whose viewpoint frames the entire story and whose voice is never heard. You begin the book by meeting a friendly one-armed man, and spend most of the rest of the book in his company -- dodging zombies (whose faces are almost never seen, as if You spend all of your time looking at the ground to keep your feet), scrounging for food, and having variously tense meetings with other still-human survivors.

Ralphs has a detailed, textured art style that works well for this story -- he's really good at drawing rocks and rubble, broken machinery and tangled junk, rain and darkness, grubby hide-outs and makeshift shelters. His dialogue is serviceable, but it gets choppy -- he's only showing one side of a conversation, but still wants the entire thing to be clear. Daybreak has a clever idea, but it never transcends the level of "clever idea" -- the story is just fine, entertaining on a picaresque zombie-story level -- but the reader has to assume that Ralphs was aiming at something more than that, and Daybreak doesn't deliver on that level. Still, it's a fun graphic novel with zombies and an interesting organizing idea, which is pretty good.

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.

Necessary Evil by Ian Tregillis

I don't know how well Tregillis's previous novels have sold -- I could look them up easily, but I'm ignoring that for a rhetorical purpose -- but the cover of Necessary Evil has the flop-sweat look of a cover desperately trying to drag in an audience that has failed to be engaged so far: vague quote from a big name, pretty blond young hero with guns blazing, what seems to be several massive simultaneous explosions, and no hint that it's the third book of trilogy.

That's a damn shame if true, because Tregillis's "Milkweed Tryptych" -- comprising Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War and now Necessary Evil -- is a towering achievement, brilliantly integrating large-scale secret-history fantasy with the classic spy novel and telling a story that is both deeply human and full of characters who are vastly more than human. On the evidence of these books, Tregillis is a major talent, and not just because his local-writers-group friend George R.R. Martin says so. Tregillis is a major talent because he's written a compelling, mesmerizing, thrilling sequence of novels, because he's believably organized the plots of those books around a woman who both can see all the possible futures and is ruthless enough to always pick the best future for herself alone, and because he has the widescreen imagination and painstaking skill to make a WW II fought between British demon-summoners and Nazi electrically-sparked supermen seem more real than the true history.

(See my reviews of the first two books, linked above, for the details -- you definitely don't want to start with this book, but I give the whole series my highest recommendation. If you've ever enjoyed Tim Powers's Declare or Charles Stross's nasty tales from "The Laundry Files," you will love these books.)

Even sketching the setting for Necessary Evil would be a massive spoiler for the second book, so I'll try to be vague: the precognitive Gretel has seen one way -- one convoluted, folded-onto-itself timeline -- that humanity can escape the attention of the extradimensional Eidolons and survive. As this book opens, her plan to create that timeline -- and, as ever, to warp everyone around her into doing what she wants as well -- is under way, and Raybould Marsh, once one of England's best spies, is the only one besides her to know the plan. Necessary Evil hurtles forward from there, continuing the brilliant story of the first two books and culminating in a magnificent ending.

Look, this is a major series by a great new writer. Period. Necessary Evil should be on award ballots for 2013 -- as many of them as it can be shoehorned onto. (Maybe not the Golden Spur, but just about everything else.) Just go read Bitter Seeds and try to stop there. I dare you.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn is the second in a very unlikely mystery series: unlikely both in its very existence and in its popularity. Kate Atkinson is a literary writer by temperament -- she won the Whitbread Award for her novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, for example -- whose fourth novel, Case Histories, had a private detective as a major character and concerned some criminal activities. (See my belated and fuzzy review for more.)

Case Histories wasn't much like a genre mystery, but mystery-lovers around the world picked up on it -- I got my first copy of it from my then-colleague, the editor of the Mystery Guild -- perhaps because it was a damn good novel with some mystery elements in it, or perhaps just because the crime fiction field is vast and expansive, with room even for great books that don't fit into marketing categories. In any case, Atkinson wrote three further novels with Jackson Brodie in them -- it's not fair to say they're "Jackson Brodie" novels, given her multi-plot-line style and social novelist's eye -- which are treated as a mystery series, despite how poorly they fit into the usual definition of that category.

One Good Turn is set a year or so after Case Histories; Brodie's life has been changed by the end of Histories, and he's left the private-detective business to be, mostly, a man of leisure in a small house in France. But, for the course of this book, he's in Edinburgh for the Festival, trailing his actress girlfriend Julia and not enjoying anything at all. He's not central to this book -- not even as much as he was central to Histories -- but he is one way into it, and turns out to be perhaps the most unbiased of all of the viewpoint characters.

The plot sprawls out over several days, set off in the very first section by a road-rage incident that ends with quiet, mousy crime writer Martin Canning saving a life almost against his own will, which drags him into the plots of both the attacker and attackee -- each of whom is in Edinburgh for very specific but initially murky reasons. Several bodies pile up quickly -- seemingly without any connection to each other -- and the local police investigate in the form of DI Louise Monroe, who has her own complicated connections to other parts of the case.

Like Case Histories, One Good Turn loops around through a small group of people who end up being more connected than we would expect -- but, unlike Histories, it all happens in a much smaller time and space. If I were wearing a serious lit-crit hat, I'd probably rumble on about how Atkinson came from family sagas, with their vast scope of time and space, to the saga-ish Histories and then realized that crime fiction could give her the chance to compress a similar amount of action and event into less than a week. Whatever the reason, Atkinson tells a compact, tight story here, with threads that appear to be separate at first inexorably pulling closer and closer as we realize who all of these people are to each other -- all the way up to the very last line of the novel.

One Good Turn is a damn good book, and doesn't require knowledge of Case Histories -- Jackson Brodie is in no way a series detective, just a guy around whom interesting things happened a few times. And it shows what a serious writer with an eye for humor and character and the often bloody vicissitudes of life can do when she finds herself in the crime fiction arena, and what a crime plot can do to enliven and up the stakes for a novel of character and connection.

The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

Getting old means, more than anything else, that things are ending. Everyone knows this: that there's a last time for everything, and each last time marks another step toward death. Even something as small as realizing that forty is too old to go on a Tilt-A-Whirl any more is one small step, one indication that a once-assumed capacity and ability is now gone forever.

Paul Theroux has been a professional traveler for forty years, since his first unhappy journey across Eurasia was encapsulated in The Great Railway Bazaar. Some of the countries he's visited are now closed to outsiders, or too dangerous to visit -- each of those is an ending. But with The Last Train to Zona Verde, Theroux comes up against a larger ending, realizing that there are countries and types of travel and situations that he's just not up to anymore at the age of seventy.

Last Train declares itself Theroux's "Ultimate African Safari," and it's his farewell journey in Africa if not his last travel book entirely. Theroux was always happiest -- well, as happy as he ever allows himself to be seen as, which is not very much -- at the edges of things, out in wilderness of one sort or another, on a bad train or jolting bus or faraway from modern cities. Last Train doesn't give up on those things, but it could signify that getting to those places -- getting through the horribly overcrowded and corrupt Third World cities that are the gatekeepers of wilderness -- is just too much for him now, physically and emotionally. Those cities have gotten larger and more hellish in Theroux's lifetime, and Last Train culminates in Luanda, the capital of Angola, a city broken in more ways than even Theroux can deal with.

Before that, though, the journey begins in high spirits and hope, as Theroux plans a trip up the East African coast from Cape Town to match the similar journey down the west coast a decade before in Dark Star Safari. As usual, his plans are fluid and contingent -- he knows where he'd like to go, but doesn't plan exactly how he'll get there, or all of the stops along the way. So he planned to travel by land through South Africa and Namibia and Angola, and had vaguer ideas of how to deal with the war-torn countries north of them, and no clearly defined end-point -- this would be a safari that lasted as long as it could, and went as far as it could go. And Theroux finds joy along the way, in Cape Town and out in the bush on his way north.

Zona Verde, like all of Theroux's travel books (and nearly everyone else's travel books, too), is made up of episodes -- what he sees and does in a particular place before he moves on to the next stop. And each of those episodes is exquisite here, with a poignancy and clarity driven by Theroux's knowledge that this would probably be his last trip through Africa, a land he's loved since he was a young man. Theroux is still unparalleled when it comes to deploring dirt and corruption and thoughtlessness, but he's equally good in celebrating the simple joys of human existence -- as he writes, early on in Zona Verde, "the best of them [humanity] are bare-assed."

If we're lucky, Zona Verde will turn out to be Theroux's last African trip, but not his last travel book -- he's not young, but he's still writing as well as he ever did, and it would be a shame to have his eye turned away from the outside world, never again to stare intently at the things only he can celebrate or disdain this well.


Footnote: I've previously covered the Theroux travel books Ghost Train to the Evening Star and The Pillars of Hercules here.

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.

Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty's House of Horrors was the seventh book in the Kitty Norville contemporary fantasy series, and the last to come from Vaughn's original publisher (Grand Central), whom she left over what seemed to be their insistence that she concentrate on this series and not spread her time among other projects. [1] Subsequent books have come out from Tor, which is proverbially the place where SFF authors go once they get angry with their current publisher. (There's no similar story in the field about what happens when Tor authors get unhappy; perhaps they simply change editors, of which Tor has a plethora.)

So it's three years old now, and there have been five more novels in the series since then, counting Kitty in the Underworld, scheduled to release this month. And so any detailed criticism I could offer up here would be deeply pointless, since this is not just middle, but old middle.

(I've also reviewed several earlier novels in the series -- Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand, and Kitty Raises Hell -- and did a quick take on one later book, Kitty Goes to War, here as well. So I've been pretty Kitty-fied over the years.)

So: this is the one where Kitty Norville, her world's first publicly declared werewolf (and late-night radio host), agrees to do a reality show with a bunch of other supernatural folks, and one requisite doubter, off in a remote lodge deep in snowy mountains. And, of course, things turn out Not To Be As They Seem -- as if the title, and the existence of the genre of contemporary fantasy itself, haven't already tipped you off to that.

It's fun and zippy -- zippier than many of the other books, since it's slightly Christie-esque in its set-up (bunch of odd characters in a remote location, and then nasty things start to happen to them) -- and well worth reading, as is the whole series. But I would recommend starting at the beginning; the books basically stand on their own, but sub-plots and character development go on in the background, so it just makes sense to hit them in order. 


[1] I've only read one of those non-Kitty books, After the Golden Age, which was pleasant but not up to the level of this series. But she's written a couple of other novels since the move to Tor as well, and I'm not about to claim my opinion is more important than Vaughn's.

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Look, there's just one thing I really have to say about this book, so I'll say it up front. Remember Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Big literary splash, praise from a whole bunch of respectable people, aura of smartness emanating from it? Came out a couple of years ago? Had no plot at all and was just a single metaphor as all-enveloping and useful as kudzu?

Well, How to Live sucked. [1] But The Beautiful Land is almost exactly the book that all of those respectable people pretended that How to Live was. So if you thought you wanted to read How to Live -- a smart time-travel book, SF with some literary heft and a good story, too -- but then got suckered into staring into Charles Yu's navel for over two hundred pages, then I want you to know that The Beautiful Land is the book you really want to read.

It's not quite a time-travel novel, true -- it's about alternate universes rather than the past. But it uses a SFnal device to make metaphors concrete -- while at the same time (and unlike Yu's book) keeping track of the fact that its SFnal devices are actual devices that work and have controls and exist in a real world with more than a tiny handful of self-obsessed people (unlike Yu). It's about one young man, and how he ran away into a SFnal device rather than deal with his real life.

But The Beautiful Land is also about the girl that young man ran away from, and that opens up The Beautiful Land from being the claustrophobic hall of mirrors that How to Live was -- The Beautiful Land is about real people who were damaged by horrible experiences in the real world, not just a boy who's afraid his daddy doesn't love him enough. And the stakes in Beautiful Land are higher as well: there's an entity from the worst dreams of Greg Egan or Charles Stross that wants to clean up all the world that have those noisy, messy, complicated living things on them.

Takashiro O'Leary was the Bear Grylls of Japan -- more or less -- but he's washed up, broke, and suicidal in a lousy NYC hotel as Beautiful Land opens, for all that he isn't even twenty-five yet. He's that old SFnal type, the man who needs a frontier to explore, a boundary to breach, a new land to do his best not to die in. And the Axon Corporation -- the usual shadowy consortium of interests, organized around one semi-mad genius -- has a device that finds new lands, and they need a fearless explorer to check out those new lands and report back on which ones are ripe for exploitation.

Samira Moheb was never Tak's girlfriend, though that probably would have happened eventually -- if he hadn't run off to explore jungles and do his TV show in Japan, and she hadn't enlisted as a translator and spent three tours of duty in Iraq, watching people get killed around her in sudden horrible ways. Now, four years after Tak supposedly committed suicide, she's a mess, a barely functional stew of post-traumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

The last thing she expects is for Tak to show back up in her life, toting a briefcase that can take them both to alternate dimensions and a crazy story about that half-mad genius, Charles Yates, and how Tak's really spent the last four years exploring alternate worlds for Yates and Axon. Even if she could believe that -- that Axon plans to shift our real world, the central one, into a pattern where they already own everything and run the world -- Tak's story about Yates is even less coherent: that he's double-crossing Axon, as part of a plan to live forever in a perfect world, the Beautiful Land.

And what will make that land so perfect is that it can contain nothing that is not Charles Yates.

Beautiful Land charges forward from there, with Tak and Samira -- two people broken in their own ways, who have to try to survive and save whatever worlds they can save or create -- and with Judith Halford, Yates's nearly-as-brilliant assistant, who is coming to realize the true horror of Yates's plans, and that there's only as much room for her in the Beautiful Land as there is for anyone else other than Yates.

It's a damn good SF novel: it moves quickly, it has real emotion, and it's filled with interesting, specific, modern people. You could do much worse than to read it.


[1] See my review for the bloody details. But it did.

Impulse by Steven Gould

Please do not judge this book by its cover, which is dour and subdued and drab. (Only one cover in a thousand ever quite looks like anyone involved really wanted it to look, anyway -- most of the time, it just hints at what it could have been.) Impulse is the third novel in a loose series about teleporters in the modern world -- following Gould's excellent first novel Jumper, nearly twenty years old now, and Reflex, but not the side-novel Jumper: Griffin's Story, which was related to the movie made from Jumper rather than the very separate world of the novels -- and Gould is just as colloquially readable a writer and engagingly compelling a plotter as he has ever been.

(The way I'd describe Gould to someone my age or older: remember how it was easier to just keep reading a Heinlein juvenile novel than to stop and do anything else? Gould has that same matter-of-fact, unflashy ability to roll out a story where putting it down is harder than reading just one more page.)

As Jumper was the story of Davey Rice, abused teen of an alcoholic father (and inadvertent discoverer of a very Bester-esque form of teleportation), and Reflex was the story of Davey's love Millie and how she saved him from the shadowy organization that wanted to break him to serve them, Impulse is the story of their daughter Milicent "Cent" Rice, born in hiding and kept secret from the world her entire life.

But Cent is fifteen when Impulse begins and even the best-behaved, most parents-loving teenager is going to want some space from her parents -- and some friends outside of them. So, once Cent learns how to "jump" herself -- as in Bester's Stars My Destination, at least some subset of humanity can learn to teleport, given the right life-or-death situation -- her parents eventually give in to her pleas and move from their secret isolated Arctic lodge to a typical house in a typical American suburb to give Cent the chance to live a typical life as a highschooler.

It doesn't work out that simply, of course -- that suburb has its own problems, and Cent isn't the type not to stick her nose in and try to make things better -- but Impulse never descends into melodrama. Gould instead manages the tricky feat of telling a story that includes dramatic events but isn't defined by them, and, which is possibly even trickier, creates real tension in a story about a family of teleporters without resorting to the usual genre trappings.

So: look past that drab cover, and this is a swell book -- suitable for older teens, as well as most skiffy-friendly readers above those years -- that has a certain flavor of Classic SF while still being modern and telling a great story mostly from the point of view of an up-to-date, contemporary young woman. I can't say that Gould did Cent's voice "right" -- I'm not a girl, and haven't been a teenager for two decades -- but he gave her a great voice, and a great story to tell in that voice, so I'm pretty confident that even readers with a much more immediate knowledge of the inside of teenage girls' heads would really enjoy it.