I see by the low rating of this volume of Tom King's Wonder Woman run--to be expected because he has previous runs on the other two in the DC trilogy-I see by the low rating of this volume of Tom King's Wonder Woman run--to be expected because he has previous runs on the other two in the DC trilogy--that people are either sikci fo Tom King or just reflecting on the crazy nature of this story. And I can see why people get cold on it as a whole, because there's a lot of junk tacked on at the end to fill out the volume, but overall I continue to be so impressed by King's consistent inventiveness. Just amazing. Quirky, but remarkable.
The opening feels like a kind of rom-com as Superman and Wonder Woman go to a mall to get Batman a birthday present, which feels light and silly and just fun. Then the central story, whcih could have been developed more, sure, but still promising; as the blurb says: "Captured by a team of villains, Diana Prince finds herself up against the nemesis of our story, The Sovereign, wielding the Lasso of Lies. As her new adversary tightens the grip on Wonder Woman’s psyche, will she prove victorious over the web of Amazon lies weaved in Man’s World?"
So in one sort of fantasy sequence that is interwoven here, Diana plays a fifties housewife sort of chained to a trad husband who wants his supper on time. So this undercurrent here is a critique of the whole back-to-when-men-were-men and women were barefoot and pregnant and making pot roast that the current wave of incel demands. And Diana is of course having none of that bs. So it is easy and kneejerk liberal to make fun of/deeply critique the current view of women in the Amerikan right, but King takes a fresh and lively approach only he could do well. True, if you are looking for a more narrative, more rock 'em and sock 'em superhero approach, you will be disappointed, but this is as King is always about, ideas, and a frsh aproach to Wonder Woman as feminist icon for today. Cool, I say, though I admit the stuff tacked on undermines the whole a bit....more
Fright (1950) by Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich was re-released as part of the Hard Case Crime Book series, a very pulpy noir book. Hopley was actuaFright (1950) by Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich was re-released as part of the Hard Case Crime Book series, a very pulpy noir book. Hopley was actually part of--as you can plainly see, sorry--his actual name, but he used it as a pseudonym along with many others, as many noir/pulp writers did. They didn’t get much money for these books, which they wrote fast and maybe primarily for as much cash as the chiseling crime book industry would throw at their feet.
But Woolrich was no run-of-the-mill crime writer; arguably he was one of the best, actually, as many include him in an elite club with folks such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. Fright was not one of Woolrich’s best books, but it is a good page turner. As even a cynical bastard like James Ellroy would acknowledge, “You could palpably feel the agony in Woolrich and his work.” A “master of suspense,” without question. Even the title admits that this tale is cataloguing just this basic emotionHe is maybe best known for the short story “Rear Window” that Hitchcock adapted to film (Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly). Other titles include The Bride Wore Black and The Black Angel.
This one is about a guy-the time period is 1915 Manhattan--who is working on Wall Street and about to be married to the woman of his dreams, who makes a mistake, gets blackout drunk and sleeps with a stranger who blackmails him just before the wedding. Oh, yeah, (spoiler alert) and he kills her and stuffs her in his closet. It's called Fright, but the fright comes from guilt, so it's a cautionary moral tale: Don't get drunk and sleep with a stranger especially before you marry the (rich) girl of yr dreams, you idiot! So of course he talks his young new wife into leaving Manhattan immediately to escape to a small nameless town, and then things really go downhill, a crosscountry trip of escaping from "mistake" after mistake. An increasingly frightful trip to Hell! He is now afraid of everyone; are the cops on his tail?! All misery, all the time.
So you start with the typically sleazy cover that looks like it sets up the scene; a femme fatalish woman in her underwear, with a man, crazed by her beauty, her allure, follows her to his doom. This is not exactly what happens in the book, but you can’t fault the artist who probably never read the book. The idea of such a cover promises lots of sex, too, which in this case is kind of a cheat, as almost nothing sexual happens at all after the One Night of Regret, which he doesn't recall because blackout. If you are looking for The Joys of Sex, look elsewhere; this is the opposite of a bodice-ripping S & M billionaires-with-babes sex romps, sorry.
So it begins very pulpy but actually gets better, more literary, in a way, as things go on. The new young wife--a doormat for much of the book--makes a kind of surprising turn, after the descent into Hell becomes too much for her, but the surprise is no feminist uprising, though. Then it almost turns bathetic, very over the top in a wild way. But the epilogue makes it clear this tale is in the hands of a master of the bleak noir crime tale. I dunno, it moved from 2 stars to 3 stars and it may finally be better than that. ...more
The Flemish House (1932) is Georges Simenon’s 16th (of 75) book in his Inspector Maigret detective series. This one takes place in Givet, near the BelThe Flemish House (1932) is Georges Simenon’s 16th (of 75) book in his Inspector Maigret detective series. This one takes place in Givet, near the Belgian border. Maigret is asked to visit the town at the request of Anna Peeters, who wants him to clear their wealthy Flemish family from what is suspected guilt in the murder of a young woman, a lower-class local woman named Germaine Piedboeuf who gave birth to Anna’s brother Jospeh's child. The town hates the Peeters family and thinks they killed Germaine.
But who really murdered the young woman? Maigret, out of his jurisdiction, finds the answer to the question, but the resolution is surprising, and somewhat disappointing. But the atmosphere, the tone, the loca color, is superb. ...more
“In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, credulity, respect.”
Stefan Zweig's The Burning Secret (19“In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, credulity, respect.”
Stefan Zweig's The Burning Secret (1911) is an intense novella focused on twele-year-old Edgar, the only child of a woman who seems to feel she has never loved her husband. Away with her son, she sort of casually opens the door to the attentions of a baron who initially gets inside her world through Edgar. When they are connected, however, the baron--it seems to Edgar--abandons him, as does, it seems, his mother. The boy does not understand what is going on with this couple, but gets worked up into an emotional turmoil that escalates to attacks on them and running away.
This is a very astute psychological portrait of a boy on the cusp of adolescence, very sensitive, very anguished, beautifully rendered, reminding me of early Hesse stories, Joyce's Dubliners. There are surprises in it especially involving the ways the boy is able to manipulate his mother in the process. When you are twelve you probably don't fully understand the "burning secret" of adult lust! I really enjoyed it....more
Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now availablNobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now available as such. As with many great works, it took me a long time to figure out what this is about. In my initial review of the first volume I admit I kinda made fun of the mundanity, the repetition. While acknowledging that some interesting things were going on with the character, when I saw the words "hypnotic" associated with the prose, I used the phrase "sleep-inducing" to describe what is going on sometimes in that first volume. I regret that and feel foolish and ignorant about it. So I'll once again revise my reviews of the first two volumes to reflect my current view that this work is, like the other two novellas I read and liked, a real contribution to the history of literature, a great story about a simple rural painter, Asle, and his dead wife and his explicitly clear doppleganger.
The surface story of an aging, isolated painter, quietly spiritual, here comes to conclusion. The whole story takes place in seven sections, one for each day leading up to Christmas. Asle's world is small, painting every day, so,metimes seeing Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer is his gallerist who shows and sells his paintings. A doppelganger artist also named Asles. His dead wife, Ales, with him very day. We sometimes go into the past, and fluidly, quickly interchangable with the present. In the last week we meet two women who like the two artists, who look alike, both named Guro, one of them a woman he meets in a restaurant, one of them Åsleik's sister. I think it is all told in one unbroken sentence, all 667 pages!!
After what has been pretty steady pacing, abrupt but fluid shifts of point of view and time frames, there is an intensity in the final pages to underscore Fosse's intention to convey what is happening to the main character at the end, on Christmas day. Notes: Joyce, Beckett, language, great empathy for this man, for all of his characters. What is going on? Ultimately, mystery, magic; someone said Gregorian Chant; the music of Hildegard von Bingen, Tomas Transtromer, Tarjev Vesaas's The Birds, stories of simple people in the deeply spiritual struggles of their every day lives. And the place of art and its relationship--for a Christian artist--to God.
I don't know at this point in my life that I will take the time to reread it all, but I really should, now that I am just beginning to understand it, but I am not foolish enough to pretend that anyone can fully understand great works of art. As Ales says, art shoud also be operating beyond anyone's rational capacity to describe it. If it could reduced to an argumentative "point," it would not be art. Art lives in mystery. Fosse said it: "writing is a way to express the unsayable."...more
This is one of my favorite short stories from one of my all time favorite short story collections by Flannery O'Connor, one that is relevant to the coThis is one of my favorite short stories from one of my all time favorite short story collections by Flannery O'Connor, one that is relevant to the continuing refugee crisis.”The Displaced Person” is about a woman on a farm who takes in a “displaced” Polish family, the father having survived a concentration camp. He’s an amazing worker and so disrupts the largely dysfunctional indolence of the farm, but when he states his intention to bring others from Poland to join them, this crosses a line for her:
"It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."
In the process, O’Connor shows us how the woman and others on the farm who resent the “displaced person” themselves become "displaced" from their own self-satisfied ways of living. The story becomes ultimately tragic, but is very powerful, and moving, and as I said, relevant to today's immigration politics.
"The Displaced Person" is actually novella-length. It was also developed into a one-hour film I actually saw (and taught, as a high school teacher!) first when it came out in 1976. Here's a trailer for it, but you can see the whole thing on YouTube for free:
Lady Asquith’s “The Corner Shop” (1925) is a much anthologized ghost story by a writer who was once famous for writing them. This particular edition iLady Asquith’s “The Corner Shop” (1925) is a much anthologized ghost story by a writer who was once famous for writing them. This particular edition is part of the world-renowned Seth’s Christmas Ghost Story series, single stories elegantly illustrated in small book format.
This is a story-within-a-story tale where we read a manuscript from recently departed barrister Peter Wood about his having purchased a knickknack at a corner curiosity shop--a Jade Frog--that happens to be worth a fortune. He buys it from an old man he assumes is a butler.
Wood isn’t comfortable with his new fortune, feeling the shop didn’t know the worth of the frog, and so he writes a check to the shop for half of his earnings. He goes to the shop and talks to two women who are the owners.
So I won’t spoil it, though you already know it is a ghost story, but the tale has something of Dickens’s Christmas Carol about it in that it is a morality tale.
Some will find the prose somewhat stuffy, maybe, but it is carefully written, kind of sweet, not really creepy. Aclassic ghost story! I’d read it before in some anthology but was glad to read it again, thanks to Seth’s relentless nostalgia for literature and literary practices of the past. ...more
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (2024) has to be in the conversation as one of the best comics memoirs/novels of all time. For some reason I did not Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (2024) has to be in the conversation as one of the best comics memoirs/novels of all time. For some reason I did not get to it last year, when I read several fine graphic novels, some of them memoirs. This has to be on the shelf with Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Craig Thompson's Blankets, and Art Spiegelman's Maus as yet another brilliant intergenerational story of trauma and recovery, works of art that redefine our understanding of the possibilities of the medium. I'll acknowledge that not everyone will have the time or patience for this very long, very packed story, and it was work for me in ways these other three iconic mountains were not for me, but you need to at least try it, as the rewards are rich.
Hulls is Chinese-American, telling aspects the history of China beginning with her grandmother's memoir, written there documenting brutal aspects of Mao's Revolution. As she makes clear, neither her grandmother's book nor Hulls's own book will ever be legally published there. After years of psychological abuse Grandma managed to escape with her daughter to Hong Kong, and then had a "mental breakdown" that would last the rest of her life. As psychologically astute and intellectually informed as Bechdel's memoirs ab0ut her father (and especially) her mother, this story examines the matrilineal history of her family, digging deeply into (especially) the relationship between she and her mother, who eventually became a (sometimes combative) partner in the construction of the text.
Tess and Mom went for their research back to China, Hong Kong, where they examine biraciality as a site of power and loss for their family. Tessa's biological grandfather was a white Swiss who left the country after grandma got pregnant. The book took ten years for her to write, after she had escaped her crazy family for many years to travel the world, until her grandmother finally died and she elected to slow down and make sense of her and her matrilineal life.
The book is SO well-written, but I can't say it is ever easy. And the artwork, while accomplished, is dark, swirling, emotionally complicated, rarely "Pretty," but how could it be.. Craig Thompson blurbs that she is channeling David B in his intergenerational saga of his brother's illness in Epileptic. If yuo need brushing up on the horrors of twentieth century Chinese history (45 million starved in one period as the official message was Prosperity and Growth and Triumph), this might be a place to begin. In spite of its length and extremely detailed exegesis of the complicated relationship between the three women, I still call it a masterpiece, an often fascinating and often troubling family chronicle. ...more
The Boneyard Mythos: Prelude, The Shadow Eater is a Free Comic Book Day introduction to the universe, a short story focused on a writer who is taking The Boneyard Mythos: Prelude, The Shadow Eater is a Free Comic Book Day introduction to the universe, a short story focused on a writer who is taking a break from his marriage/family for a week to get his script done. But it appears he is already there? As with the other three entries in the series so far, including Passageway, Ten Thousand Black Feathers and Tenement, the art is great and the narrative is allusive, mood-ful, light on the narrative.
The story is about a troubled writer taking a break at a remote cabin, for a week from his marriage/family, ostensibly to getting a late script done, But it appears he is already there??! He gets freaked out, clearly, encountering some being who seems to echo some of what he has been saying. It just may be that I am starting to get the approach here. Standalone glimpses into the world, start any place you want, they all tell you something about the mythos but never all of it. . . The idea for The Bone Orchard Mythos sprang from Sorrentino, who wanted to do darker stories, but expansive, like H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
I have actually, to tell you the truth, been reading the first four entries backwards, starting with Tenement, then Feathers, then Passageway, then this! And what does it say that I givethis very spare short short story with little narrative at all four stars? I guess because I am trying to read with them and their image-focused approach. This one has some coherence to it I like, a relatability I didn't find in the others so far.
My third experience of the self-contained entries in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Boneyard Orchard Mythos comics series. As with their Gideon FMy third experience of the self-contained entries in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Boneyard Orchard Mythos comics series. As with their Gideon Falls horror series the art, the images are central, and there seems to be a building that is a portal to Evil. In Gideon Falls, it is a barn, and in this one it is an apartment or tenement house, where seven lost people live. One has died, and they all are trapped and so they go into the belley of the beast.
None of the characters or their stories are particularly memorable, but I think more and more story and character are not the point in the Lemire/Sorrentino horrorscape. The point is images of horror, which Sorrentino does particularly well, with Dave Stewart adding a great deal to the mood through his coloring. Nothing in the narrative really comes together, nothing really happens, as with the finish of Gideon Falls, so I think this is either 1) that Lemire is just not that good at conveying what he wants to say through these stories or 2) the team has deferred to tone and mood over story. I may need to rethink all of this at some point, but I still will say there is not much "there" there. At the end there is some information about seven key mythos figures, one per tenement storey. So maybe oveer time we get some more detail there?...more
This second offering in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Yard Mythos is a little better than Passageways, the first volume, since there is a lThis second offering in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Yard Mythos is a little better than Passageways, the first volume, since there is a little bit more focused story, wherein two gamer girls get lost in the game world, ala Stranger Things. Sorrentino's art is insanely good, as usual, the main reason to see any of their collaborations, moving in the volume from mighter sweeter brightly lit artwork to the usual dark, brooding expressionistic horror aesthetic. The story moves from the girls' youthful connections to their adult lives as they inevitably separate. But that fantasy world is always with us, apparently.
I'm trying to figure out why the storytelling in Lemire's horror work is so. .. . thin, elliptical? If you take a positive view, it is more "poetic" in that it is missing narrative links, so maybe it is more about tone and mood as the core of horror for Lemire, in keeping with Sorrentino's artwork, of course. Let the images do the work. Maybe most fantasy and horror is mainly about the images over narrative coherence? At any rate, a lot of folks like the art way more than the writing here....more
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because Job: “My soul is weary of my life.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because I don’t know.”
You are planning a party; here’s your guest list:
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (from Crime and Punishment) Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener” Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (from The Metamorphosis) Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus (from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Camus’s Merseault (from The Stranger) Beckett’s Molloy Sartre’s Roquentin (from Nausea)
I'm a comics guy, too, so let's let in Noah Van Sciver (who wrote Disquiet [I suspect naming it with Pessoa in mind] and a comics biography, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln.
Hmm, maybe you also invite Hamlet (for some historical perspective) to recite his “To be or not to be. . . “ soliloquy as entertainment, or have Macbeth say out his speech at the party opening, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. . .”
And you will add your own literary grumps, when you begin to pick up the pattern of this literary party guest list. Some fun, eh? What’s a good party game for this bunch, Russian Roulette? My list above is all male, but I also just read (8/21) Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece, so I could make another list of just women, too, of course.
I just met someone who is a perfect addition to the guest list, Bernardo Soares, from Ferdinand Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet published in 1982, 47 years after his death at 47 in 1935. What do they have in common, the characters on our guest list? All men, yep. Men largely living without women. And many of them alone, even if they live with others. Sad, sad men. Melancholic. Intense. Maybe today we would psychologically diagnose some of them as bipolar or neurologically diagnose them as autistic/Asperger Syndrome or philosophically diagnose them as nihilist?
So what does Soares, a mild assistant bookkeeper, bring to the party that we don’t already have? Well, for one, he’s Portuguese, from Lisbon, and The Rua dos Douradores, where he lives and works and eats alone in one solitary restaurant night after night. Soares’s “story”—never to be finished, based on scraps of paper Pessoa threw in a trunk, edited and arranged by Richard Zenith with loving care—is mainly a collection of aphorisms and philosophical reflections and psychological insights with respect to Soares’s experience of “disquiet,” which I take to be a psychological condition akin to depression, ennui, and alienation, but which also seems to be a kind of existentialist statement.
Some people think Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet makes of Lisbon what Joyce’s works make of Dublin, or Kafka’s works make of Prague. The difference? Joyce’s novel is a narrative, and Disquiet actually resists narrative in most respects. It resists coherence, completion, and is a kind of deconstructionist, meta-fictional precursor to postmodernism. Resistant to logic. Often absurd. I don’t think it is for everyone, especially if you want to read a good old-fashioned story, but it does create a portrait of an interesting character, and it does have some of the most beautiful and insightful sentences you will ever read in a book. Many people list it as one of the greatest works of fiction of all time, and I won’t say nay to that, but I think as he never finished it, most readers won’t finish it, either. Would Pessoa care if we finished it? What does it mean to "finish" or not finish any book, especially this one?
The basic move Pessoa makes to convey “disquiet” is a set of repeated paralyzing contradictions, inversions, circularities or oxymorons, which can also seem very darkly funny:
“. . . the stoicism of the weak.”
“Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.”
“Consoler of the inconsolable, Tears of those who never cry, Hour that never sounds — free me from joy and happiness.”
“To give love is to lose love.”
And on and on, delightfully and sometimes painfully so.
The Book of Soares’s Disquiet is a portrait of melancholy, of isolation:
“Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.”
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.”
Soares in his spare time keeps a journal of sorts, though we have no idea when he wrote what he wrote. Writing and reading do sustain him, in a way.
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.”
But writing is also not self-discovery so much as it is self-erasure:
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
“I write because I don’t know.” {but not that he now expects to know; see above where life has no meaning to discover]
And he’s also sustained by dreaming (which is of course related to reading and writing):
“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.”
But as with writing, there's also the flip side of dreaming:
“The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.”
And he's alone:
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
We are left with this explosion of dolorous language, “those feelings that inhabit the gloom of my wearinesses and the grottoes of my disquiets.”
The Book of Disquiet raises questions about the nature of authorship in that, while it is technically authored by Pessoa, it is credited to one of his several heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper. Who is Pessoa? He’s not a stable, unified person, but multiple and fractured. Pessoa was known primarily as a poet with several titles under several different names. The whole idea most of us ascribe to of an author's "voice" is clearly undermined by Pessoa. He leaves us with fragments of literature and identity.
As Soares says, I feel “The vast indifference of the stars.” Seems like he and Hamlet and Beckett and Camus would have a lot not to talk about at your party. ...more
"But a day will come when you will open your doors, when all cats and dogs will open their doors.”
Animal Pound #1 is the first issue of an allegorical"But a day will come when you will open your doors, when all cats and dogs will open their doors.”
Animal Pound #1 is the first issue of an allegorical comic by Tom King, drawn by Peter Gross. It’s a political allegory. The rating is very high here on Goodreads, but I’ll say for now 3 stars, as it doesn’t (yet) transcend the foundations of its obvious foundation, Orwell’s Animal Farm. It's not really an update, but a leaner, get-faster-into -the-action reminder of sorts of where we are without the weight of the original Russian political references, and (as yet) cannot name any leading political figures. This first issue came out in 2022, but it seems extremely timely right now, in early 2025.
Why? Get this: You have cats and dogs (and a few rabbits, so far) in cages, with beasts on two legs in charge, the keeper of the keys. There’s an animal disposal (incinerator), and food and water are dispersed sparingly. But from the beginning, you see that an escape is being planned, and thanks god it happens pdq and doesn’t wait two volumes to happen, ala lots of comics.
One basic point is that cats and dogs, both working class animals, seem to be opposed to each other, ala right and left America, but they learn they have more in common than they realize. When they do realize it, the revolution may begin, the uprising against the oligarchy--the tyranny of the "strong" rich men over the rest of us.
“Someday they will unite and overthrow this tyranny.”
One cat paints on the wall, after they break out, “The doors will remain open.”
But knowing King, I do think this will become a far more complex story, so I will add a star expecting that, anticipating greater complexity.
I read The Busy Body (1962) because it came up on Audible as free, is short, and because I knew it would be entertaining, though I prefer the grittierI read The Busy Body (1962) because it came up on Audible as free, is short, and because I knew it would be entertaining, though I prefer the grittier novels of his pseudonym, Richard Stark (the Parker series). Westlake is interesting beecause he can be very funny in writing crime novels, but his Stark books are almost completely devoid of humor. This one, The Busy Body, is a kind of tall tale about a young hitman who murders a guy and told by his boss to dig up his body because he is wearing a blue suit where half a million bucks worth of heroin is sewed into the lining of the coat.
Of course the body is missing, and thus the coat, a girl gets involved with the killer, and on and on. A good escape read, a few yuks. Early on it seems just silly but when the action gets more intense, later, Westlake knows how to dial down the laughs to make you pay attention to the carefully structured plot, and create a bit of suspense. One of the best, Westlake, and this isn't even one of his best, but it's worth a listen....more
Read for my Spring 2025 YA class, a YA mystery featuring a true crime film crew documenting the process, following another YA mystery we read of a somRead for my Spring 2025 YA class, a YA mystery featuring a true crime film crew documenting the process, following another YA mystery we read of a somewhat different kind, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez. Typically if you teach a book you have read it before, but when I teach lit--and especially YA--courses I always try to read with the class some books I've never read before, to help me resist the temptation of being the "expert" so we can discover it together as a class. This was the runner-up for the 2024 Goodreads YA category, which is one reason I chose it.
The class response to this book--read by college students, many of them English majors, was mixed. I did get an email in the middle of the night to the effect: OMG! I did not expect that to happen! I was sort of into the book, annoyed by themc, but then it took off for me. Some in my class liked it okay, and some struggled to finish it.
For myself I thought it was a decent YA page turner, albeit a kind of generic one. Set in a small town in New Hampshire, the author admits she never went there, only consulting google mpas for streets and locations. Thus, it never felt like it was set in the northeast at all. Nothing felt NH about it. It's about plot, with requisite mystery surprises, and some of those do feel like surprises, but it's not particularly about character, and doesn't contain much descriptive writing. It just rolls to the conclsuion, so of you want a fast story, here it is. Thus high Goodreads accolades and scores. I really thought it was a 2.5 book, and roudn up because it did what it set out to do, was moderately entertaining. But compared to Sanchez? That fel real and relatable, and compared to our next book, Shairley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle? Oh, please. But hey, I did give it three stars!...more
P.J. Lynch's lovely, muted (it's a snowy evening!) watercolor picturebook illustration of Robert Frost's famous poem, taking place on the Winter SolstP.J. Lynch's lovely, muted (it's a snowy evening!) watercolor picturebook illustration of Robert Frost's famous poem, taking place on the Winter Solstice.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep....more
I Is Another is 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's second offering as part of his Septology, so this book is comprised of sections 3, 4 and 5. It’s aI Is Another is 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's second offering as part of his Septology, so this book is comprised of sections 3, 4 and 5. It’s a story of two doppleganger artists, or two different sides of an artist, both named Asle, one of them a widower whose wife's name was Ales, and his best friend is Åsleik. No, this is not a joke, and thank god Asle’s art dealer is called Bayer, eh? I know, most readers hate it when writers name central characters Eileen and Ellen, or graphic novels depict characters similarly. Well, the two Asles look alike and are both artists! Take that!
What the heck is the point, here, you ask? Well, it’s in part the old saw about identity, I think, that we are made up of the people we know best and love, we are at times interchangeable with them. This is of course most understandable in grief, with Asle, who talks with his dead wife as some do. But one Asle is a Christian, one is an atheist.
Book Two, I is Another, (which might remind one of Martin Buber's I and Thou, continues the story where book one left off, continuing this stream of consciousness narrative that slips between memory and present, and so on, sort of surreally at times. When the two Asles meet in a pub, that’s interesting. Early boyhood experiences are interesting, and sometimes a little disturbing, including an account of an assault by a man at an early age. It has echoes for me of Beckett, and maybe Knausgaard, what I’ve read of him, a detailed account of mundane life in a small town by an artist who is alone most of the time, thinking, talking to himself or Asle, which might be the sweetest part of the whole book, their faith, their love.
I like some of the reflections on God and art, that Shining Darkness evidence of God that he sees himself in his painting. One thread is Asle I visiting Asle II in the hospital, as he had visited his wife there. Is it like seeing yourself dying, from the perspective of your younger self? Over time, the repetition in events, the everyday, and the language, has a somewhat lulling, somewhat intensifying effect as in a film by Bergman. Somewhat hallucinatory effects.
So, yeah, my initial review had this book as between 3 and 4 stars, and now I'm hooked on the language and this sweet character and his doppleganger (or his he imagining ths guy?!) and his talking to his dead wife, and his faith and struggles with the spiritual spects he sees in art....more
I didn't read all of this (2013 published) collection, but I saw it on Audible for free and was in a car, and was interested in it chiefly because DasI didn't read all of this (2013 published) collection, but I saw it on Audible for free and was in a car, and was interested in it chiefly because Dashiell Hammett is one of the twentieth-century's finest writers of fiction who, like Raymond Chandler, did not want to be pigeonholed into the category of "detective fiction" master alone. So none of these stories are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora, or Continental Op. Almost none of them were published in hsi lifetime, in part because editors/pubishers only wanted to see his detective fiction which, because he had gotten sick and needed more money to support his family, paid better. Then he went Hollywood to get the even bigger cash, and he finally didn't even bother sending or resending the stories out.
Of the 18 stories and 3 screen treatments here, I listened to maybe a third, and they were good, crime stories, noir, but trying different things than the Black Mask editors required of their writers. One that received a posthumous crime writing award is “The Hunter,” wherein a detective investigates a fraudulent check, written by a man trying to make ends meet for himself and his (unmarried) girlfriend and her child. There are laws on the books in California that say it is illegal to live with someone else's wife, even if it is consensual, and as we find out, the husband is a bad guy. So the detective follows the law, does his job and gets paid, ruining this couple's life. Not a Sam Spade/Thin Man story, but one that is critical of that law at the time.
Another one I ik is “The Diamond Wager” which concerns a bet about whether a valuable necklace could be stolen from a jewelry store in Paris. A jewelry thief story! “The Cure” is also about a bet – that one man’s fear of swimming can be cured by another man (and the consequences are completely unexpected). Obviously as the editors intended, we get a broader sense of Hammett's talents from this collection....more
I have read and enjoyed several of Allen Say's picture books, including his award-winning Grandfather's Journey (1993), wherein he travels where his gI have read and enjoyed several of Allen Say's picture books, including his award-winning Grandfather's Journey (1993), wherein he travels where his grandfather had gone in order to better understand him. So it's autofiction, as is this work, where Say depicts a grandfather (now, 30 years later in 2025, so more like himself now) on a walk finding a paper airplane he recalls similar to one he as a boy nicknamed it Tonbo, the Japanese word for dragonfly. As he follows the airplane, drifting in the air ahead of him as he walks, it takes him back in time, ala F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Benjamin Button" story; as he proceeds to places in his younger years, to his youth, people call him young man or boy, and he doesn't initially realize he has time traveled to his youth.
Finally, he lets the airplane go on, for other kids to find it, and nickname it themselves. Here Say is acknowledging the need to pass on the world (and the work of art) to younger generations. The illustration work features full-page oil paintings, lovely, evocative of passing time and that loss, though never quite lost, obviously. And Say as of this day in January 2025 is 88 years old, still making relevant and powerful art. Is it "ageist" to put it that way that he is "still" making art at this old age? Well, I say his age to acknowledge this is auto-fiction, but also to say I am inspired by his work even as I enter old(er) age.
This is a story for grandparents to read their grandchildren, but I think grandparents would appreciate its thoughtfully inventive approach to memory and generational continuity....more
Count me as a big fan of Laura Perez's work. I loved her Totem and other works. This is a collection of linked stories exploring the edges of cosnciouCount me as a big fan of Laura Perez's work. I loved her Totem and other works. This is a collection of linked stories exploring the edges of cosnciousness, the occult, the mystical and magical that enters some of our daily lives. It begins with a kind of lecture that lays out the psychic territory that I found laregy unnecessary, and then gives fictional examples of dreams, visions, deja vu, and so on. Perez's art (hey, oldsters! Hers is the distinctive title sequence art for Only Murders in the Building!) is well worth taking a look at. The stories feel a little flat to me sometimes, not all that remarkable....more