Russian front.

Have I really been reading Solzhenitsyn on the subway all month? Yeesh. It's marvelous, of course; the Great War (as I insist upon calling it, cause it wasn't just a prequel) is one of my pet fascinations, and I've read novels and poetry and memoirs from Brits and Frenchmen and Germans, but hadn't previously gotten the Russian perspective. Horrible, incompetently commanded, meat-grinder stuff. In less than ten pages, though, I'm off to another of my increasingly frequent YA paranormal breaks, henceforth referred to as YAPs. I've got three titles lined up this time: witches, goblins, and a lesbian retelling of "Cinderella."

Catsup.

Etymological aside: the word ketchup/catsup comes from the Malay word kechap, itself a version of a Chinese word describing a pickled fish sauce. While Americans associate it purely with tomatoes, it is in fact the spices & vinegar that define the substance--the English used to make ketchups out of oysters and walnuts, and banana ketchup is super-popular in the Philippines.

Aaaand a flurry of updating:

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, Graham Greene: a decidely minor, black-comic entry in his oeuvre.

To the Wedding, John Berger: lyrical, but emotionally slight.

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud: a classic, obviously, and useful to a text-obsessed reader like me. Whenever I read graphic works, I'm never sure if I'm spending enough time looking at a given page, especially if there aren't words on it; I've enjoyed David Small's Stitches, loved Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe and the more straight-up comic-book stylings of Joss Whedon's Fray (my Halloween costume two years running) and the Buffy Season 8 series, but I still often feel out of my depth, like I'm not getting something. Understanding Comics helped a bit. (Though you know what? I will never like Watchmen, ever.)

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs: a novel written in alternating chapters by two founding Beats, with an afterword by my cousin James (first, once removed; Burroughs' longtime secretary and executor). I read and enjoyed On the Road, read and shrugged at The Dharma Bums, never read any Burroughs--and I have a chip on my shoulder about the whole Beat movement, as it has been used as an excuse for so much terrible, sloppy art since. But this was engaging, and surprisingly cohesive for being written by two people.

Behind That Curtain, Earl Derr Biggers: read somewhere, earlier this year, that our knee-jerk assumption that the Charlie Chan mysteries were racist isn't really true. And yes, having read one now, Charlie does dabble in flowery humility, and his attitudes towards women are not at all progressive, but he's well-respected by almost everyone he meets, and the ones who do bluster about being bested by a Chinaman are, basically, idiots. Plus, this was a great mystery: long-vanished ladies! Enigmatic clues! Quite enjoyable.

American Nerd: The Story of My People, Benjamin Nugent: a good "ethnography" of the history and subtypes of the nerd, including the roots of the type in the Romantic rejection of reason as what sets man apart in favor of emotionalism--hence seeking rational and rule-based means of discourse (which something like D&D has at its base) made one less than human, instead of more so as the ancients would have believed. He also theorizes that the fake hipster nerd is an attempt to attain authenticity by allying oneself with the artless outsider--really kind of the same way the Beats co-opted black jazz culture, and just as annoying. It's not as boring or scholarly as I make it sound; while I could have done without some of Nugent's self-flagellation for abandoning his nerd friends when he got to high school, it's a fast and oddly heartwarming read.

About to start Solzhenitsyn's August 1914! 700 pages of sheer delight, no doubt.

Rage, sing, goddess

It's no secret that the Iliad is important to me; in what was once referred to as "the most pretentious tramp stamp ever," I've got the first three words (menin aeide thea, the beginnings of the invocation of the Muse) tattooed at the base of my spine. It's a fitting place for these founding words of Western poetry, at the root of the spinal cord, the walled-in fortress of the nervous system (and, to switch traditions, the location of the kundalini chakra). In many ways, the Iliad is Western culture, violent and tender, pulled in opposite directions by the forces of war and domesticity.

Caroline Alexander's The War That Killed Achilles is a lovely, well-written exegesis of the Iliad's chronicle of the devastation and pity of war--a peculiarly human notion, but rarely so well put. For me, as for millennia of readers, the characters of Homer's epic are immediate and familiar, such that I still tear up when I read about Hektor taking leave of Andromache and Astyanax--still more so when Alexander points out that in light of this scene, where Hektor's infant son is terrified by his imposing helmet (whereupon the warrior laughs and takes it off, de-heroizing himself for the sake of his doomed posterity), Hektor's common epithet "of the shimmering helm" is less honorific than poignant detail of his martial duties' cutting him off from his family.

One still encounters people who claim the Iliad glorifies war. I can only surmise they haven't read it. The Iliad begins with rage and ends with two funerals; even Achilles would give up his glory to die quietly in old age, at home.

Adventure kitty!

All right, so one moves a mere 1400 miles (to Bushwick, Brooklyn! Everyone is allowed one "I guess you're not in Kansas anymore" joke. Just get it out of your system) and one's blog falls by the wayside. And looking back it seems reading itself has fallen off a bit: though I did deeply and unironically enjoy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and another paranormal Austen sequel, Amanda Grange's Mr. Darcy, Vampyre. (The "y" just makes that title, doesn't it? Also it's dedicated to Catherine Morland.) On the gritty-realism side, there's As God Commands by Niccolo Ammaniti, translated from the Italian: I can't characterize it better than a back cover pull-quote from La Repubblica calling him "a modern-day Dickens"--just that kind of ordinary darkness, the underpinnings of polite society, with a child at its center. Ammaniti's a much finer prose stylist for my tastes, though.

Currently: Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, about New York pop-culture obsessives. My favorite kind of postmodern freestyling prose, checked by arresting metaphors.

And I have a new bookstore gig: WORD, in Greenpoint. Stop by!

Werewolves, weddings, and Williamsburg.

Picked up one last YA-paranormal read: The Dark Divine, by Bree Despain. Notable mostly for the author's ability to create actual suspense, in that nothing even vaguely supernatural occurs for 100 pages, just offhand details and rumors, and the full picture doesn't come out for many chapters after that. While the revelations themselves weren't brilliant (werewolves!), and I did see the twist coming: still. There was a twist. There was some plotting going on! Good on you, Bree!

Then, the marvelous Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding, which galley I garnered with my mad bookseller skillz on behalf on my little sister, who is tying the knot in March. It's a wonderful, straightforward, sardonic how-to on having a nice wedding with niceness instead of buying into the wedding-industrial complex (my sister's phrase) that turns women into money-grubbing high-maintenance monsters on the grounds of a misguided confusion of femininity with selfishness, solely to enrich their own coffers /end rant/. My favorite quote, on the list of why everyone's miserable at the now-traditional production-number wedding: "The groomsmen [are crying] because they've had too much beer all week. (The bridesmaids have had just as much, but they hold it better.)"

And in celebration of my fast-approaching half-cross-country move, I'm finally reading the 40s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

YA weekend!

Good Lord, I love these.

Up til 1:30 last night reading Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods, the first in the series of the same name. It's set in the ranks of old-money Manhattan: the twist, though, is that the spoiled rich kids that populate this glitzy milieu aren't descendants of folks who came over on the Mayflower--no, they came over on the Mayflower, because they're all vampires. The writing's not great--the story relies heavily on info-dumpish "now you can know the truth" conversation--but the re-mythologizing is top-notch. De la Cruz blends in the fall of Lucifer, Caligula, and the lost colony of Roanoke with the vampires' history, and locates their immortality not in their bodies as a whole, but in the blood itself. It's the blood that lives forever, and passes from host to host along with their memories, so that they experience many lives, but not always as the same people. No mere "hey-they-sparkle!" varnish: this is real imagination, and it shines through the slipshod plotting.

Today I've started The Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda, about the youngest and only female member of the Templars, half-Pakistani Billi SanGreal, plunged at fifteen into the Order's never-ending battle against the forces of darkness. The opening scene is straight-up Buffy-style, with the hate-and-black-ichor-filled spirit of a murdered little boy on a creaky swing in the middle of a deserted playground. Awesome sauce!

Why don't they write books for grown-ups like this? Or rather--because they certainly do (Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series springs to mind)--why are such books relegated to the Genre Fiction ghetto, and not allowed to coexist with (often dour, self-righteous, or o'er-consciously-literary) Serious Literature?

Children's books.

Three recent reads that dovetail together nicely:

The Book of Dragons, E. Nesbit: Nesbit wrote some of the greatest children's fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I say this boldly, but I must confess I had only read Five Children & It, long ago, my curiosity piqued by references in Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful Half Magic (or maybe Seven Day Magic? One of Edward Eager's wonderful, wonderful, mid-century reads, which I wore to shreds as a little one). This collection of dragon-centered tales sums up her style, though: ordinary children matter-of-factedly experiencing the incredible.

The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt: While I was reading this, I didn't want to be doing anything else. Not working, not eating, not sleeping. I just wanted to read my book. It's a family saga, essentially, but also a brief history of England from 1895 to the end of the Great War, with special emphasis on radical politics (Fabians, Russian anarchists, brick-throwing suffragettes) and art. A main character, Olive Wellwood, is clearly a fictionalization of E. Nesbit herself, down to the socialism and the open marriage. It's probably the best book I've read this year, and Byatt makes it look effortless. Towards the end, she even tries her hand at some Great War poetry, and darned if she doesn't have Sassoon and Owens and Graves nailed.

The Magician's Elephant, Kate DiCamillo: I'm reading this now, and it feels like it was recently discovered in an attic in London, in spidery brown ink on yellowing parchment. Like Nesbit, or at least Olive Wellwood, or, definitely, Kate DiCamillo, who understands the rhythms of fairytale like almost no one--except children--does anymore.