Rats (Robert Sullivan)

Many moons ago, I paired up Rats with Andrew Blechman's Pigeons as a Goodbye-New-York-City gift to myself, for obvious reasons. Yes, I wasn't only the weirdo who said "Hey buddy, how's it going?" to pigeons on the street, I always squeaked with joy at rats on the subway tracks or scurrying along the platform: "Good job, little guy! I'm proud of you!"

I am perversely proud of the rat, for turning human civilization to its advantage, spreading with agriculture across the globe, finding a niche in cities filled with garbage--and becoming the most common mammal in the world. They've got a fearlessness and adaptability I admire (and envy). And yes, I think they're cute, even their lil naked tails.

So integrated is the rat into urban life that it's rarely considered in naturalistic terms--there was no Planet Earth segment on the NYC rat, for instance. Sullivan, however, decides to approach them this way, observing them in their unnatural natural habitat: a single alley on the Lower East Side, which he watches over four seasons' worth of nights (broken by the cataclysm of 9/11). He's a great tour guide, with an infectious enthusiasm and a willingness to go off on tangents, burrowing ratlike into all the corners of his story--anywhere there's a tasty morsel of information.

Interspersed with his surveillance, then, are wide-ranging chapters on the relationship of rats to man and specifically to cities; he talks to exterminators both private and public (yes, NYC has a city department dedicated to pest control), delves into the biography of 19th-century rat-fight entrepreneur Kit Burns, details the arrival of bubonic plague (carried by the rat flea) in the U.S. The latter's an astonishing tale--the first victims showed up in San Francisco's Chinatown in March 1900, and a charming mix of racism and business interests covered it up, mayor and governor alike denying that anyone had ever been diagnosed, ruining the career of the doctor who'd made the discovery. And that's why plague is endemic to New Mexico today.

Also, FYI, I just this minute noticed there's a rat on the cover.

Hyperbole and a Half (Allie Brosh)

Look, y'all, you're on the Internet, so you've heard of Allie Brosh. You've read the tale of the Alot, or the God of Cake, or her simple dog; you've announced your ambition to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS; you've laughed until you coughed at her turn of phrase and magical ability to make uncomplicated art so expressive.

And if you suffer from a mental illness, or you know someone who does, you've read and re-read and posted and clutched to your heart her pieces on depression, her dealing with which led to an online silence a year and a half long. The empathetic joy I felt last May when she resurfaced with that brilliant second piece still resonates with me, and I feel like she captures the experience of anhedonia--the most difficult thing for a depressed person to explain--perfectly. I'm awed and grateful.

My mother, besides dealing with her own depression, has plenty of experience with having a mentally ill child (coughs, points to self), and she feels a maternal protectiveness towards Brosh that's just beautiful--and which made Brosh's book, signed no less, the perfect Christmas gift. Nothin' wrong with giving someone a gift you really really want to read yourself, either.

Brosh reprints the hits here, but there's tons of new material: childhood stories, pieces on motivation and secret selfish thoughts, a long hilarious letter to her dogs about theirflawed approach to the world ("Misconception #4: I should eat bees.). It's terrific stuff, and I'd tell you to buy it, but chances are you already have. Good job!

Homeward Bound (Emily Matchar)

Homeward Bound hit my TBR courtesy of my friend Alana Chernila, food blogger at Eating From the Ground Up, author of The Homemade Pantry--in other words, a committed member of one of the many related subcultures Matchar talks about in this book. I, too, have been embracing domestic tasks of late, cooking from scratch, keeping house, knitting and mending; partly because my bundle of chronic illnesses makes it difficult for me to maintain a steady work schedule, but also because I enjoy the role of "housewife" in my partnership (though I prefer the term châtelaine, because I'm also the designated spouse to deal with The Man, i.e. insurance companies, banks, government offices).

And I feel really, really guilty about this, about my contentment with staying home, about my utter lack of ambition regarding a career. Sure, I love books, and I love writing, but I don't want to manage or own a bookstore, and it seems foolhardy to believe I could support myself through writing alone. I'm college-educated, though, upper-middle-class, feminist--so aren't I wasting my life and my talents being a homemaker? Aren't I letting my husband down as an equal partner, since he's the one who has to work to support us? (I'll admit, I feel less guilty since I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a compelling medical reason not to work too hard. Or at least less rationally guilty.)

So Matchar's book, which observes and critiques various aspects of the phenomenon I find myself part of, i.e. educated women choosing not to work outside the home and/or immersing themselves in traditional "women's work," appealed to me immediately., and my friend Molly (an associate editor at Simon & Schuster) hooked me up with a copy. Matchar terms this phenomenon "the New Domesticity," defining it as "the re-embrace of home and hearth by those who have the means to reject those things." That last clause is super important, of course, cause if you're a Colonial woman who sews all her family's clothes because there's no such thing as store-bought garments, well, you're far less likely to enjoy it. Whereas I dropped $60 on merino/alpaca yarn to make myself a sweater, and it's a delightful leisure activity.

Matchar begins with a historical overview of American domesticity, starting with that toiling Colonial gal; crediting the Industrial Revolution with the establishment of "work" as something one left the house to do, which necessitated the parallel sphere of homemaking; the enshrinement of women as spiritual and moral keepers of the home (see Virginia Woolf's Angel in the House, and see also Mallory Ortberg's "Virginia Woolf: Angel Hunter," because it's hilarious); the rise of convenience foods and automation in the mid-19th-century, which had the side effect of giving housewives less to do--and she argues cogently that this unstructured free time led to boredom which led to rebellion which led to second-wave feminism. (I simply cannot back her play when she keeps insisting said feminism didn't help devalue women's work. I can agree that some of the blame should fall on economic factors, some on the fact that women's work was never really valued in the first place--but stay-at-home moms and non-working women are still regularly vilified or at the very least viewed dubiously by some of the very feminist scholars she cites in the book, and by comment sections everywhere. Otherwise I wouldn't feel so darn guilty about not working!)

She then examines different threads of the New Domestic movement, with chapters on lifestyle bloggers, Etsy/craft culture, the DIY food movement, attachment parenthood, rejection of mainstream corporate culture, and homesteading, and it's all fascinating. I love the mix of skepticism and envy that comes through when she talks about these women's lives, and I love that she talks about the strange overlap of left- and right-wing that happens in many of these subcultures. And I extra extra especially love that she draws conclusions, and comes up with some potential lessons that acknowledge the good she finds in the movement while suggesting ways in which it could improve, without yelling at anybody. Seriously, when was the last time you read an opinionated non-fiction book that did that?

Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls (Katherine Larsen & Lynn S. Zubernis)

N.B.: As this is perhaps the niche-iest books I've ever read, I am simply gonna write this as a chatty book report for my fic friend Jessi. The rest of y'all, feel free to stop reading; I won't be mad.

Hi sweet pea! Super jealous of your 3 a.m. lasagna.

Let me first of all tell you what may, for you, be the fatal flaw of Fangasm: it was completed in 2008, and took five years to find a publisher. Thus, it contains woefully little Misha; he shows up in the last chapter, is awesome and adorable, and then the book ends. This also means that the discussion of fic is limited to Wincest, which I know is on your NOPE list, and RPS, which is on mine.

But fic is actually a small part of the story here. It's a strange book, a hybrid of memoir and sociology (a little heavy on the former for my taste, but I'm kind of a jerk about memoirs generally). The authors, both college professors with real jobs and lives and children, document their trajectory as SPN fangirls. They discovered the show, then fic & wank, started attending cons (much to the chagrin of partners & children. I'm not gonna lie, were I a 15-year-old girl and my mom was flying across the country to ogle some hot twentysomething actor, I'd be mortified).

At some point, they had the admittedly brilliant idea to write a book about their fandom, which had the sneaky side effect of parlaying their academic credentials into access to the cast & creators. There are some great interviews in here: J2, obviously (and now I can say, yeah, they seem like nice dudes, but realllll ordinary. Whereas Misha? Total weirdo, hence one of My People), but there're also some nice moments with Jim Beaver, Samantha Ferris, etc. The more they approach BNF, however, they find the line between shrieky fangirl and serious scholar ever more difficult to navigate; eventually, their project comes to the attentions of TPTB and they're signed on to do an official book on SPN fandom (which comes with waaaaay increased access, natch)--but they finally realize that TPTB aren't interested in what they actually wanted to write about, i.e. fangirl guilt, shame, infighting, and above all, the sexual aspects of the fandom. (Because obvy, as much as they keep putting gorgeous people in our faces, TPTB don't want to hear about fan appreciation of such beauty, because Nice Girls don't have libidos.) Whereupon they were promptly dropped, slapped with a freakin' cease-and-desist order, and were left with a nearly completed orphan.

So. Would you like it? Probably, though it's not as insightful as Fic. I do like their notion that we all define "crazy fan" as the person juuuuuust over the horizon from where we're at, and they've got some smart things to say about how odd it is that a group of people linked by passion can clique off and turn on each other for not liking the same thing in the "right way." I really feel bad for Larsen & Zubernis having to wait so long to publish, because there's so much they weren't able to cover, and the book feels understandably dated. And also, it needs more Misha.

Fic (Anne Jamison)

My forays into different genres have lately led me to dabble in the least respected one of all: fanfiction. And by "dabble," I mean that I've written 27,000 words since August--and read many, many more--that center on the pairing of Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, because they are madly in love, dammit, and no amount of furious backpedaling from the writers this season will convince me differently.

Uhm. Excuse me while I wrestle myself back to the point . . . or, rather, use my obvious emotional investment in a subtextual relationship between fictional characters as the perfect segue into the marvelous project that is Anne Jamison's book Fic.

Part anthology, part literary criticism, part sociology, Fic faces the concept and community of fanfiction (as the title implies, people who write/read it don't call it fanfiction) head-on, warts and all, through the lens of history, technology, and a few exemplary fandoms--Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, The X-Files, Harry Potter, Twilight, and yes, my dearly beloved Supernatural. Jamison includes essays by fan writers galore; interviews conceptual writers excited by fic's alterations in the relationship between text and author, media and consumer; and delves deeply into the Fifty Shades of Grey controversy, which it turns out is far more complicated and illustrative of the collaborative nature of fic than I'd imagined.

As a guide, Jamison herself is first-rate, her writing conversational, but a conversation with a snarky smartypants (like pretty much all the acquaintances I've made at Archive of Our Own, a huge fic archive whose founders speak in these pages as well). She understands the urge to expand upon and correct primary texts, having written some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic in her day, and is able to draw parallels between modern fanfiction and old concepts of authorship without simplistically equating them:

Reworking an existing story, telling tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship until very recently. This book is organized to highlight both this kind of continuity with the past, and also what I see fanfiction doing that I believe to be new. . . . Paradoxically, fanfiction, the cultural enterprise apparently dedicated to revisiting familiar ground, ends up leading us to new models of publishing, authorship, genre, gender . . . and to voyeuristic aliens who resemble lava lamps, vampire peaches, sex pollen, and an entire universe based on the structure of the canine penis.

Reading this book has erased the last vestige of shame I felt about writing fic rather than wholly original work (though I still think it's prudent to post my slash under a pseudonym), has in fact made me proud to be part of both a history of reader engagement that spills over into creation--didja know that William Thackeray was so pissed off by the end of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe that he wrote his own ending instead, where Ivanhoe married the right woman?--and nebulous new worlds that blur the line between (as Lev Grossman says in his introduction) "genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality."

Also, I'll have you know I write world-class smut.

(FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Smart Pop, in exchange for an honest review.)

Cat Sense (John Bradshaw)

Whelp, that's 80% of my Christmas shopping done...because nearly everyone I know needs to read Cat Sense. (And my eARC is gonna expire, so I need to get a copy for myself too!)

It's no secret that I'm a cat lady. I mean, I love dogs too, and our rabbit Bernie is a hoppity cilantro-noshing jeans-nibbling ambassador for his entire species, but kitties are the beasts closest to my heart. And I love learning about them--I remember dissecting a cat my first semester in college and then coming home at Christmas to our own kitties, running my hands over them and whispering, "I know what you look like inside." (OK, now I've written that, I sound like a serial killer. It was very awestruck and appreciative, I promise!) I've often thought they are really far better animals than we are--their perfect adaptations to hunting, how their sleek musculature rolls under their skin, those enormous eyes. And, of course, I've had important relationships with several, especially my wee yell-y Siamese, Julie, with whom I lived for sixteen years; I will never receive her kind of devotion from another creature. She helped me become who I am.

All of which is to say, of course I wanted to read this book the moment I discovered it existed. I was richly rewarded: Bradshaw's account of the history, biology, and behavior of the domestic cat  is extensive and full of buttonhole-worthy tidbits--and his ultimate argument that, in order to preserve their future, we need to start thinking seriously about actually finishing the job of domestication by breeding cats for sociability, really opened up a new avenue in my thinking. (And made me happy to think that Benny, who wasn't neutered until he was around four, almost certainly has descendants out there, and they must be terrific cats!)

Here, have some kitty facts that I've been bugging my husband with while he plays Candy Crush Saga:

• You know who was totally all about the orange tabbies? THE FREAKING VIKINGS, THAT'S WHO. Brains' new nickname is obviously "my little Viking cat."
• 4000 years ago, the Egyptians developed the first word for "domestic cat," Miw; soon, it was also a name for girls. Same thing happened with the Romans, for whom "Felicula" (little kitten) was a common girls' name about two millennia ago.
• We all saw that medieval manuscript the kitty walked across with ink on its paws, right? Bradshaw cites several examples of places and times (like first-century Britain) where we know cats were well integrated into society because they left footprints on clay tiles.
• We all know cats can see better in dim light than we do...but it'd never occurred to me that they see worse than we do in full daylight. Obvious in retrospect.
• Oh, also I read about the most arduous scientific experiment ever, testing how the amount of handling kittens get in their second month of life affects their relationship with humans. It involved picking up 29 eight-week-old kittens (who are at their MAXIMUM CUTENESS), to see what they'd do. Science is awesome.

There's more, of course, including some great tips on keeping indoor cats happy, and info about the structure of feral cat societies that explains (ruefully) why Brains and my parents' cat, Juju, keep scrapping even after living together for three months--they're angling for matriarchal dominance. Unfortunately, I don't think there's much I can do about that, besides try to keep their stress down individually with lots of pets. Another arduous process!

I suppose it's not too much of a stretch to say that this book is highly recommended for cat folk--but I'm gonna say it anyway. Also, meow.

(FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Basic Books, in exchange for an honest review.)

Readin' across America.

On the last day of May, my husband and I packed up a van with our critters (two cats and a rabbit) and left Brooklyn for my hometown of Wichita, KS. 1400 miles later, we took up temporary residence in my parents' basement, which I'm way more excited about than y'all think (we Perlebergs are a tight-knit, loquacious, loud, weird clan). Five days later, in the wee-est of hours, we boarded the Amtrak's Southwest Chief in the nearby burg of Newton, and went another 600 miles to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Santa Fe, NM. And back, six days later.

What I'm getting at here is: Having traveled roughly 2600 miles in the past two weeks, I have read a LOT of books recently. And I know I'm never going to write them all up individually, but I don't want 'em to go entirely uncommented on, so. Comments!

I started with Jincy Willett's July release, Amy Falls Down, which I loved to pieces--but I'm reviewing it for Wichita's alt-weekly F5, so I'll link to that when it's up.

Basti, Intizar Husain: NYRB Classics sucked me in by describing this as "the great Pakistani novel." And besides, I've only ever read one book translated from Urdu (Naiyer Masud's Snake Catcher). The book follows Zakir through roughly forty years, from pre-Partition British India to the 1971 war that gained Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) its independence. There are also dreamlike, surreal flashbacks to the Delhi of 1857, convulsed by the Indian Rebellion (if you're my dad and know Indian history primarily through British eyes, you'll have known it as "the Sepoy Mutiny" until you made Pakistani friends at work and they're like, "Uhhhh, NO"). The narrative shuttles back and forth in time, space, and culture (the references, helpfully compiled in a six-page glossary, derive from Muslim, Hindu, and even Buddhist religious and folk traditions)--it can be difficult to orient oneself, although Pritchett has helped a lot by adding lacunae between sections and ellipses to indicate fantasy/flashback passages. A fascinating read--like all my favorite translated literature, it makes me want to learn the original language so I can read it again.

Once Upon a Tower, Eloisa James: The latest in James's generally brill fairytale series! This one has elements of Rapunzel (obvy). I lurved the hero, Gowan, because he is Tall and a Virgin and SCOTTISH--his height led me to just picture Sam Winchester (IN A KILT OMGGGGGG) the whole way through, endearing him further. Since I was more into him than her--Edie, a talented cellist trapped in an era when women had to play it sidesaddle if they wanted to do so in public--I thought everybody was too hard on him in the third act. YMMV, as they say.

Pigeons, Andrew D. Blechman: You know, I don't miss much about NYC qua NYC--but I sort of love pigeons. To quote myself from Facebook: "they are honestly really pretty birds, and I think it's cool how well they've adapted to this hyperurban habitat, such that they're most of the wildlife landscape of the city. Plus, during mating season, watching the dude pigeons fluff up their feathers and do their little head-bobbing HEY HEY HEY LADIEZZZZ at the females, who never look the slightest bit interested . . . free entertainment! So hilarious." This book, then, was a goodbye-Big-Apple gift to myself. It's very much in the recent tradition of One-Subject Non-Fic (e.g. Mark Kurlansky's Salt or Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette), and as such is anecdotal. Blechman visits the racing lofts of Brooklyn, the Westminster Kennel Club of pigeons shows in Pennsylvania, gun clubs that indulge in live pigeon shoots, a pair of CRAZY old ladies moseying around Manhattan dumping pounds of birdseed on the ground for city pigeons...great stuff. AND he debunks the "flying disease factory" myth that has maligned the rock dove over the past few decades: yeah, pigeon poop can breed bacteria and fungi in large quantities. But that's sort of the favorite hobby of excrement in general, isn't it? Handling a pigeon won't get you sick. SO THERE.

Red Shift, Alan Garner: THIS BOOK. Guys, I don't even know what to say about this book. It threads through three different times--Roman Britain, the English Civil War, and 1970s England--connected by a place (Mow Cop, a village on the Cheshire/Staffordshire border) and an artifact (a stone axe, 3500 years old, hidden and found between the timelines). But they're also bound by madness, and mysticism, and one of the strangest narrative flows I've ever muddled through. And I don't mean "muddled through" in a bad way, somehow--and when I say "I didn't get it, but I'm not sure there's anything to get," I don't mean there's nothing there, simply that confusion and immersion and a feeling of slipping through consciousnesses that you can't quite get a hold of are absolutely what the reader's supposed to feel. What Garner wants. It's crazy good.

Guarded (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 9, Volume 3), Andrew Chambliss & George Jeanty, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg & Karl Moline: Picked this up at Santa Fe's adorbs comics shop, Big Adventure Comics (along with the first issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga, which I will be reading more of POSTHASTE). I'd previously purchased Volumes 1 & 2 (Freefall and On Your Own respectively), and I've liked this season so far; it's MUCH more grounded than the whee-no-cable-budget insanity into which Season 8 devolved--and, in fact, shows Buffy finally dealing with the fact that she's never become an adult, that despite how well she handles herself with Bad Badness (in the aftermath of magic's banishment, vampires are cut off from their demonic source, and have become feral, indiscriminate butchers), she's terrible with responsibilities like jobs and rent and all the trappings of maturity. Me too, lady, me too. (The second arc features a bait-and-switch storyline that maddeningly shies away from a serious and heartbreaking decision she's faced with--and I totally understand that it was the last straw for some fans--so be forewarned. Me, I'm sort of a helpless Whedon apologist, so I'm willing to press on.)

Back in Wichita now, I'm halfway through Elizabeth Gaskell's 1865 Wives and Daughters. More to come!

The Philosophy of Horror (Noel Carroll)

My husband has a degree in film from NYU (go ahead, ask him how useful it is!), so he has a few texts hanging around--including Noel Carroll's fantastic The Philosophy of Horror.

I haven't indulged in academic writing in a while, which is a roundabout way of saying this isn't general-audience-easy to read: but it's worth the trouble indeed, for anyone interested in the horror genre and by extension the way that fiction works from a philosophical perspective. Carroll spends a lot of time of both the paradox of fiction, i.e., "How can something cause a genuine emotional response in us when we know it's not real?" and the paradox of horror fiction in particular--"Why on earth do we read/watch things that frighten and disgust us?" These chapters (2 and 4) are the most abstruse; Carroll admits in his introduction, "[Chapter Two] is the most technical chapter in the book; those who have no liking for philosophical dialectics may wish to merely skim it, if not skip it altogether." (Isn't it nice when an author gives you permission? I had forgotten my love of said dialectics until I fell back into the comforting style: "X theorizes this. But that doesn't work because of Y and Z...")

Chapters 1 and 3 are the empirical heart of the book, and the ones that will stick with me as I consume artifacts of the genre, and related ones like sci-fi/fantasy--currently, this means that during my daily binge on Supernatural, part of me checks off Carroll's criteria. First, he defines and refines the concept of art-horror (distinguished from feelings of horror elicited by real-world events), and what's required of a "monster" to be an object of this emotion. They must be threatening, obviously, but further, what he calls "impure." The latter term borrows from anthropologist Mary Douglas, who explained the impure as things that fall in between or cross the boundaries of cultural categories, creating contradiction from which we recoil. The easiest example of this is things like ghosts or vampires, who are both living and dead; but Carroll ticks off many other types of transgressive monsters: combinations like werewolves (man/beast) or China Mieville's khepri (woman/scarab); magnifications like the radiation-embiggened critters of 50s sci-fi; the incomplete, crawling hands and eyeballs and formless blobs. He argues persuasively that the fundamental feature of art-horror is cognitive threat; we react to these interstitial creatures with not only fear but revulsion.

And in chapter 3, he analyzes recurring features of horror plots--not denigrating them as formula, but teasing out the way that many stories work, in order to understand how they're satisfying. He characterizes the most common structure as "the complex discovery plot," which consists of four phases: onset (the monster begins to affect the human world, generally by killing people), discovery (the protagonist[s] begin to understand that this threat is unnatural, outside their usual experience), confirmation (often, they must convince an authority of the nature of the threat, overcoming initial resistance to the supernatural explanation), confrontation (what the Winchesters would, constantly and puzzlingly, refer to as "ganking" the monster). Of course, these four phases can be shuffled around and repeated and recombined, and some stories only use two or even one (all onset! all confrontation!). It's an absolutely marvelous theoretical framework, elegant and precise and extremely convincing.

And, you know, a great excuse to read some Joe Hill or watch some horror movies. For research.

Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals (Gordon Grice)

Recently I've been working my way through the non-fiction titles on my TBR shelf, which I often neglect. In very brief: a 60s Catholic title on true and false demonic possession, sadly not as awesome as it sounds; Peter Carlson's followup to K Blows Top, May 28th's Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy, another winner about two New York reporters shuffled between Confederate prisons before their daring escape across the Applachians; Leonard S. Marcus's winning collection of interviews with picture-book illustrators, Show Me a Story.

And so I came to Gordon Grice's SUPER AWESOME Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals. As the title implies, it's a compendium of the wide range of animals that are known to kill or injure humans--not just the usual suspects like lions and crocodiles and cobras, but insects that spread disease, domestic dogs that try to better their social standing by biting children, fish that leap out of the water and collide with boaters (one woman suffered a collapsed lung and five broken ribs when a sturgeon hit her), elephants that huck rocks at people (in fact, the elephant kills people in more ways than any other animal, including stomping, goring, swatting with the trunk, even sitting on them on purpose). It's encyclopedic in scope, engagingly written (favorite image: Grice's son's carnivorous water beetle darting around its aquarium "like a frantic pecan"), and a treasure trove of Fun Facts that delight my bloodthirsty inner child. Here are tidbits from all the pages I dog-eared (yeah, maybe it's a bad habit, but it meant I could find these again):

• "[The panda is] best known as the mascot of a certain conservation group and as a sexually reluctant object of human scrutiny in zoos." [25]"
• People often ask me what the most formidable predator in the world is. . . . As it happens, there is a clear answer to this perennial question, and the answer is orca." [89]
• "[The crocodile] can even slow its metabolism so it doesn't starve while waiting to ambush a particular prey item."[133]
• "In Germany, a single crow with the habit of knocking people in the head drew police to a park where, after one or two stratagems failed, they finally got the bird drunk on schnapps and arrested it." [149]
• "It has been said that if England had been as rife with chiggers as the southern United States is, English Romantic poetry might have been avoided." [179]
• "[A]bout sixty [species of millipedes] have repugnatorial glands. (The great regret of my life so far is that I have never had occasion to use that phrase in conversation.)" [182]
• Wondering why it is that butterflies are exempt from the usual insect disgust: "This thought recurs to me every time I see some painted beauty flexing its wings like a slow dream of sunset while it sips at a pile of dog feces." [207]
• Caption beneath a picture of a cutesy-wootsy bunny-wunny-woogums: "Pet rabbits have bitten off human fingers." [272]

More anthology than narrative, the book still manages an underlying theme, saying to its human readers: You are not exempt from nature. You are, rather, part of it, for good and bad. You are not at the top of any "food chain"--to animals, you're just another animal, sometimes a pest, sometimes a meal, most often completely uninteresting.

(FYI: I read this in hardcover--the book changed publishers and title for the paperback. I like the hc cover better, because GRRRR TEETH, but you'll probably have better luck finding it as The Book of Deadly Animals, with a yellin' hyena.)

Shock Value (Jason Zinoman)

Jason Zinoman's Shock Value, a simultaneously intimate and wide-ranging history of 70s horror film, puts paid to the Christmas 2011 book haul, and it only took me till July 1st!

Horror, an admitted blind spot in my genre literacy, is as marginalized in film as in fiction; Zinoman argues--persuasively--that the seventies saw not only the much-vaunted New Hollywood of Coppola and Scorsese, but a parallel and still more gutsy revolution in scary movies. Directors like Wes Craven (Last House on the Left), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) rejected the over-the-top but harmless hijinx of Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and various atomic monsters (Night of the Lepus, anyone?) in favor of raw, primal fears.

Shock Value is a great read for any movie buff (it was, in fact, a gift for my erstwhile-film-major fiancé, who also enjoyed it), but I'd like to applaud Zinoman especially on two points. First, he's really good at describing visuals and sound--I know this seems a necessary skill for any film critic, but it's easy to just assume your audience has seen what you're talking about, and/or gloss over technique in favor of narrative, and he avoids both those pitfalls, without belaboring the reader with data. I've seen several of the movies he chronicles (Rosemary's Baby, Alien), and I wasn't bored reading their stories; several I haven't yet seen that his book made me add to my list (particularly The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Carpenter's The Thing); and he ratifies my desire to NEVER EVER EVER see Last House on the Left, yeesh.

He also manages to combine artists' biographies with discussions and analyses of their art without giving in to the temptation to find analogues for every motif in said artist's life, a common and comfortable means of critique that is also really, really boring to me--in that it de-mystifies imagination, turning the godlike ability of the creative brain to create novelty into a sort of psychological waste product. Sure, it's worthwhile to connect the famous chest-burster scene from Alien with writer Dan O'Bannon's painful, lifelong digestive troubles (diagnosed as Crohn's disease in 1980, the year after the movie came out). But lots of people with Crohn's disease (all but one, in fact, out of an estimated half million in North America) didn't write that totally awesome, terrifying, still-shocking-no-matter-how-many-parodies-you've-seen moment. O'Bannon's genius isn't diminished or "explained" by his physical ailment. Zinoman gets that, and this makes Shock Value a much more interesting, entertaining book.

12 Who Don't Agree (Valery Panyuskin)

I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago, which was simultaneously fascinating and tedious. The best part, though, was hours and hours of uninterrupted reading! Valery Panyushkin's 12 Who Don't Agree, collected portraits of modern Russian dissidents, was a beneficiary of this idyll, months after I'd added to my list (it came up in discussion at WORD's Classics Book Group during our year o' Russians). Panyushkin himself is an anti-Kremlin, anti-Putin journalist (which can still get you mysteriously shot), with an easy narrative style. He's picked a wide range of folks to profile: young, old, male, female, even famous (former chess champion Garri Kasparov, now an opposition leader).

Many of the harrowing stories center around the Beslan massacre, an incident in 2004 when Chechen separatists seized a school in the Caucasian province of North Ossetia (Russia has something like 200 different ethnic groups, and the former Soviet republics just add to the total. It gets confusing almost immediately). After a three-day hostage crisis, heavily armed Russian troops stormed the building, killing most of the terrorists and fully a third of the hostages. The government responded by consolidating federal power, including changes to election law (eliminating direct gubernatorial elections, e.g.). It was the last straw for many former Kremlin supporters, especially as they saw the differences between what eyewitnesses said of the crisis and what the official media reported.

12 Who Don't Agree (the Russian title, 12 nesoglasnykh, I think means literally "dissenters," though I was sorely tempted to ask the folks from Moscow & Ukraine sitting behind me in the jury room) confirmed my belief that it's pretty much never not been awful being a rank-and-file Russian. I suspect this explains their literature. Also, that people still use the word muzhik in casual conversation, which is adorable; and that there's a Russian candy bar called Hematogen that (as the name implies) contains processed cow's blood. GAH

The Shirley Letters (Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe)

In my (now-completed) quest to actually read the awesome books I got for Christmas, I finally hit The Shirley Letters. It's possibly the most obscure tome in my library: a collection of 23 epistolary essays published in The Pioneer, California's first literary magazine, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe's accounts of her experiences in gold mining towns in 1851 and '52. Clappe was an educated New England woman and aspiring writer who came to the wilds of California with her doctor husband, where she fell in love with the wild beauty of the Sacramento Valley and the make-do life of the homesteader. While I'm using her letters as invaluable primary source material for my Gold Rush-set romance (fallow though it may currently be), I think they're worth seeking out as a forgotten masterpiece of creative nonfiction, and a feminine perspective on a masculine time and place.

Though Clappe is a wonderful, witty writer, who casts her eye in turn on social life, mining techniques, and vivid portraits of natural settings, for my money her powers of description are never better (or funnier) than when she details her domestic environment. At first, she and her husband Fayette lodged in Rich Bar at the Empire--"the hotel of the place," which boasted the "dazzling splendor" of two or three glass windows and a second story, and a primary decorative motif of an "eternal crimson calico--which flushes the whole social life of the 'Golden State' with its everlasting red." The building itself, however, was little more than a rough wooden frame with walls and roof of canvas; she calls it "just such a piece of carpentering as a child two years old, gifted with the strength of a man, would produce, if it wanted to play at making grown-up houses." Yet she's fully aware that the Empire really is top-notch accommodations in comparison to the other residences in Rich Bar, many of which were hovels made of pine branches covered with old shirts.

Soon, though, they've moved to their own log cabin at Indian Bar, on the Feather River. This 400-square-foot edifice featured a fireplace of mud, stones, and sticks, with a mantlepiece of wood covered with flattened old tin cans. The floor is so uneven that "no article of furniture gifted with four legs pretends to stand upon but three at once, so that the chairs, tables, etc., remind you constantly of a dog with a sore foot." The only window is "yet guiltless of glass," her toilet table is "a trunk elevated upon two claret cases," their bookcase is a candle-box, the library consisting of "a Bible and prayer-book, Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Walton's Compleat Angler, and some Spanish books." And the walls? While they've escaped the trademark red calico, they are instead lined with

a gaudy chintz, which I consider a perfect marvel of calico printing. The artist seems to have exhausted himself on roses; from the largest cabbage, down to the tiniest Burgundy, he has arranged them in every possible variety of wreath, garland, bouquet, and single flower; they are of all stages of growth, from earliest bud-hood up to the ravishing beauty of the 'last rose of summer.' Nor has he confined himself to the colors usually worn by this lovely plant; but, with the daring of a great genius soaring above nature, worshiping the ideal rather than the real, he has painted them brown, purple, green, black, and blue.

And she loves it. That's what amazes me most about her writing (and that of other pioneer women I've read)--that she doesn't miss the relative civilization and comfort of the East Coast, that she embraces the hardships of her rustic surroundings with humor and delight. Here's another long quote for you, because I just can't say it better:

[M]y new home [is] a place where there are no newspapers, no churches, lectures, concerts, or theaters; no fresh books, no shopping, calling, nor gossiping little tea-drinkings; no parties, no balls, no picnics, no tableaux, no charades, no latest fashions, no daily mail (we have an express once a month), no promenades, no rides, nor drives; no vegetables but potatoes and onions, no milk, no eggs, no nothing? Now I expect to be very happy here. This strange, odd life fascinates me. . . . In good sooth I fancy that nature intended me for an Arab or some other Nomadic barbarian, and by mistake my soul got packed up in a Christianized set of bones and muscles. How I shall ever be able to content myself in a decent, proper, well-behaved house, where . . . every article of furniture, instead of being a make-shift, is its own useful and elegantly finished self, I am sure I do not know. However . . . [I] trust that when it is again my lot to live amid the refinements and luxuries of civilization, I shall endure them with becoming philosophy and fortitude.

The Book of Lost Books (Stuart Kelly)

During last summer's literally epic GRRMarathon, the following mystical convergence occurred: 1. I read a scene wherein a character* is reading The Book of Lost Books, and thought to myself, "Man, I wish this was a real book." 2. Mere days later, I came across Stuart Kelly's `1The Book of Lost Books while shelving at Housing Works! Tragically, I didn't have the spare cash to snap it up on the spot, but I didn't forget, and my lovely sister gave it to me for Christmas. This being June, I finally got around to reading it. (Also I finished my fiancé's Christmas present! It's a sweater! Just in time for 90-degree weather!)

And it's everything I'd hoped, a commonplace book of works we'll never read, a bibliophile's catalog of tantalizing impossibility. Kelly's cheery, digressive prose shares the sad fates of reams of writing gone astray or destroyed over the millenia; sure, everybody's heard of Aristotle's lost work on comedy (for certain narrow definitions of "everybody"), but didja know Homer's first epic was a comedy, the Margites? Whole Greek and Roman authors' oeuvres have disappeared, such as the works of Agathon, an Athenian playwright who wrote the only known tragedy with an original plot (Antheus), or those of Gallus, a Roman poet praised by Ovid and Virgil. Kelly even rattles off a list of Greek writers we only know about because Aristophanes makes fun of them, a depressing legacy to say the least. Then there's the case of Menander, a comic dramatist whose wildly popular plays were lost during the Middle Ages--until fragments were discovered in the early 1900s . . . and, uh, nobody liked them very much.

Kelly doesn't limit himself to the ancients, of course, and he expands the definition of "lost" to include unfinished works--The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, which cuts off in the middle of a sentence--and those planned but never written, like Goethe's answer to Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, a scientific epic to be called "The Romance of the Universe," or Milton's Arthuriad. Cervantes had to put aside part II of his pastoral drama Galatea to counter a spurious Don Quixote sequel with his own, which leaves the mad knight safely dead at the end (luckily, no one thought to bring him back as a zombie).

Even relative modernity is no assurance for an author. All of Hemingway's work up until 1922 was in a case stolen from his first wife's luggage. Polish writer Bruno Schulz's novel Messiah supposedly languishes in the KGB archives to this day. Dylan Thomas managed to misplace and re-find his play Under Milk Wood three times.

And mercy, I do so hope that Mr. Martin doesn't add to Kelly's list.

*Research indicates said scene appears in A Feast for Crows--the reader is Lord Rodrik Harlaw, oddball bibliophile among the ironborn and uncle to Asha and Theon Greyjoy.

Kitty Cornered (Bob Tarte)

When I picked up a book with that wild-eyed feline on the cover and the title Kitty Cornered: How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home, I was fully prepared for adorableness and shenanigans. While Bob Tarte's memoir has those in spades, it's also sweet, funny, poignant, and best of all, strewn with bits of absolutely lovely prose.

For instance, he describes "that oddly unhurried but determined feline [run]: erect body, stiffly trailing tail, legs flickering like the frames of a silent movie." Or how Frannie (a frightened stray who makes her way from their yard to their porch to their house--a familiar vector) "was white with mostly black hind legs that made her look as if she were wearing a pair of tights that were falling down." And when she looks at him, "her face fleetingly resembled a dozen different animals: a flying fox bat, weasel, bush baby, panther, lemur, spotted gecko, Our Gang star Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, and obscure creatures I didn't recognize. I have seen all these beasts in kitties I've known (well, not "Alfalfa"); I've also known them to look like a kangaroo, crème brûlée, a Holstein calf, a harried maître d', even a snake, peeking out from under a blanket so all you see is pointy nose and half-open yellow eyes.

Tarte is unabashedly anthropomorphic, and often hilarious, as he chronicles the adventures of his and wife Linda's eventual six cats: Agnes, perpetrators of daily attempts on his life on the basement stairs; elderly Moobie, who requires her water dish held off the floor for her delectation; Lucy, described as "very affectionate!" by the friend they adopted her from, but who turns out to be a "continent of crabbiness" who Tarte makes it his life's mission to befriend; goofy, chubby Maynard, who came to them as Mabel and whose craving for attention is equally only by his ability to wail nonstop when not receiving such; Tina, another stray who becomes Maynard's much-needed BFF, the bane of their bathroom wallpaper, and Frannie's nemesis; and Frannie, Tarte's soul mate in anxiety. I cheered her every step toward domesticity, and shed a tear at a setback or two. (NOTE TO MY SISTER: No kitties die in this book! Don't worry!)

I know a lot of cat people, and a lot of book people. All you in the overlap in that Venn diagram? You should all read this one. (My copy is going in the mail as a Mother's Day gift!)

5/5: UPDATE for you visual learners--pictures of the cat cast! Miss Frannie is a Benny-type cat as I suspected.

The Beauty & the Sorrow (Peter Englund)

Sometimes the test of a book's greatness is simple: while I was reading Peter Englund's unique WWI history, The Beauty and the Sorrow, I kept going to bed early (we're talking 8:30), just to spend more time with the twenty voices he's collected--twenty ordinary people caught up in a cataclysm that changed them all.

(I'll admit I had heard of one of these folks--Willy Coppens, top Belgian air ace--but only because I once made my dad a poster featuring every top ace from every country in the war. Cause I'm a great daughter. And he's a great dad--this book was his Christmas gift to me, purchased from my very own bookstore! Thanks, Papa!)

These men and women (and one girl--Elfriede Kuhl was only twelve when the war started) come from all over Europe and beyond. They fought, observed, nursed, and drove in all theaters of the war, including colonial Africa, Mesopotamia, and Persia, fronts I'd known about only vaguely. Some joined up out of nationalist pride, like Vincenzo D'Aquila, who left New York City to join the Italian army (and was jeered at for a fool by the native troops). Others had no choice, like Kresten Andresen, a Dane drafted into the German trenches. Some simply wanted adventure--like Olive King, an Australian who drove an ambulance for the Serbian army, or Rafael de Nogales, a Venezuelan globetrotter who tried and failed to join several Allied forces and then ended up serving with the Ottomans (witnessing many scenes of the Armenian genocide). And fifteen others, diverse, unimportant, often eloquent individuals whose stories will echo in my head for years.

Englund weaves together letters, diaries, and memoirs with astonishing skill (I think about just the translation required and my mind boggles), jumping chronologically from one narrative to another. He tells us in his introduction that he is less interested in writing about "what [the Great War] was--that is, about its causes, course, conclusion and consequences--but . . . about what it was like. . . not so much events and processes as feelings, impressions, experiences, and moods." The result is (as the subtitle promises) an intimate history and easily the best book written about WWI since Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. An absolute treasure.

Going Home (Jon Katz)

OK, this entry is going to make me cry if it goes on too long, so I'll keep it brief.

On the left? Me and Juliana. I got her when I was 15 and she was a silly itty witsy kitten--now she's 17, and slowing down: skinny, easily confused, prone to yowling piteously in the night. She may have a brain tumor, or have suffered a stroke, since she's got an uncontrollable head tremor and a tendency to walk in tight little circles, always turning to the right. Our time together has been wonderful--I have spent more hours with her than any single human being--but it is coming to an end, and it hurts so much to contemplate.

But it hurts a little less after reading Jon Katz's Going Home. Subtitled "Finding Peace When Pets Die," it's a very simple but profound and necessary book. Katz is known for his writing about animals, particularly the border collies that live with him on his farm; the genesis of this book was his having to euthanize his beloved dog Orson. Like most pet owners, he struggled with guilt and depression, as well as the persistent shame of being so broken up over an animal: "It's only a cat, after all," says our rational self (and sometimes misguided people who are trying to help).

Katz advocates inhabiting your grief, while trying to let go of guilt--animals do not fear death, he reminds us,  because they don't understand it, even while it's happening--and perhaps creating rituals for yourself to honor your pet and the joy you shared. I've decided that upon Julie's eventual death, I will donate a sum to a Siamese rescue group, and design a felt cameo to approximate her sweet little face. I'm not saying it won't be hard--devastating, even. But I know I won't be alone.

[UPDATE: Julie died February 13. Bye-bye, little kitty bean.]

Wedding reads.

Yep, that's right: gettin' hitched! In October, at the amazing Queens County Farm Museum, which means we get to take a break from setup to get lost in a CORN MAZE!!!

And because I am me, my first step in a huge undertaking is sussing out books on the subject (did the same thing when I moved to NYC). Due to our realistic budget and general non-buying-into the Wedding-Industrial Complex's soul-sucking (and vaguely misogynistic) materialism, said books are focused on creativity, bargains, and niceness. Here are three reads that have been reassuring, wise and helpful thus far.

First up, Meg Keene's fantastic A Practical Wedding, based on her blog of the same name. This is a wedding book that starts off by talking about joy, and ends with embracing imperfection and the knowledge that the wedding is a blip in your married life. Great stuff, and very thoughtful about both logistical concerns and the strange alchemy of marriage, where two people become one unit. She also provides a clear overview of how U.S. weddings have actually been held over time--a century ago, almost everyone got married at home, wearing their best clothes, whatever color they happened to be--to keep in mind when worrying about tradition. Best advice:

• You won't remember how your wedding looks; you'll remember how it feels.
• A good way to plan the event? Think of the parties the two of you usually have. Then just scale it up.
• Pay attention to the ceremony itself! That's the real thing; the rest just celebrates it.

I also enjoyed Denise and Alan Fields' Bridal Bargains, which as the title implies concentrates on inexpensive alternatives to the all-out debt-incurring bashes sold by the WIC. I skimmed over a lot that didn't apply to us--I'm wearing my mom's dress, for instance, so I skipped the gowns chapter--but there's a lot of good and specific advice to be gleaned, and a total willingness to name names. Definitely worth a look if you're not rolling in dough.

And I haven't re-read it yet, but Miss Manner's Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding came out while my sister and brother-in-law were in the midst of the planning process, and as the maid of honor, I read it for backup. It is scathingly hilarious (as is Ms. Martin's wont) and eminently practical. The largest lesson to take from this one is that etiquette aims to make people contented and comfortable, not stressed or humiliated. And asking people for money is the height of tackiness. (She even thinks registries are tacky, but admits that they're so expected one might as well create one . . . just only tell people about it if they ask.) Can't wait to re-traipse through, laughing and thinking, "Well, at least I'm not these people." Just like watching Toddlers & Tiaras!

Hedy's Folly (Richard Rhodes), plus a personal failure

I can't remember where I first heard about the connection between bombshell actress Hedy Lamarr and the invention of spread-spectrum radio (blah blah blah science, but anyway without it cell phones wouldn't be possible)--I had thought it was on the listifying website Cracked, but I can't for the life of me find it. Anyway, having read the story in capsule form, I was excited to read Richard Rhodes' latest book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World--and also to introduce myself to Rhodes, author of some heavy-hitting histories, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

It is, no doubt about it, a fascinating story. Austrian-born actress Hedwig Kiesler ("oh, of course that's what Hedy is short for!") fled an unhappy marriage to an arms dealer to take Hollywood by storm in the late 30s. She was, though, as whip-smart and inventive as she was pretty, and somewhat bitter about being known only for the latter--once saying "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." During the now-unimaginable celebrity fervor to support the war effort during WWII, she teamed up with avant-garde composer George Antheil, whose compositions often depended on synchronized player pianos (for research, I looked up and listened to his most famous piece, Ballet méchanique, which sounds to my philistine ears like a rolling suitcase full of spoons being pulled over a broken sidewalk. With an air-raid siren in the background). Together, they developed a communication system to make the signals guiding radio torpedoes more difficult to jam. While they patented the idea and submitted it to the Navy, the military demurred . . . until they realized in the 60s it was immensely useful. Conveniently after the patent rights had expired. In fact, Lamarr didn't get credit for what turned out to be a world-changing invention, the basis for wi-fi and cell phone technologies, until 1997. Antheil had died in 1959.

The only problem with the book is that it's not a book-length story--more of a long article. So even though Hedy's Folly is already slim (272 pages, with a heckuva lot of notes), it feels padded, especially Rhodes' digressions into how an inventor differs from a scientist or how to write a patent properly. In that sense, it's not a successful book. But it does bring this weird little slice of history to a larger audience, and that's a worthy endeavor.

As for that personal failure? Well, with apologies to my friend M. Sullivan, I could not for the life of me get through the first volume of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, Master and Commander. It was actually the meticulously researched historical accuracy that did me in, I'm afraid--I appreciate the intricate knowledge of how Napoleonic-era sailing ships worked and all, but I don't really . . . care about the names of the different sails and bits of rigging? For me, at least, there was too much of that and too little of the people. Whether it swings towards the latter later on, I will never know.

The Possessed (Elif Batuman) . . . and a wee Christmas-y Gogol!

Missed the last meeting of the Russian year of the WORD Classics Book Group due to dumb ol' stupid ol' fun-ruining illness, but I did read the book, and it was indeed a fitting cap to the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Gogol experience. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is a joyous journey through the lives and peculiarities of people of all nations who find devote themselves to Russian literature. Batuman is an unapologetic member of their ranks, having almost accidentally found herself a Stanford graduate student in comparative literature.

But though she's got a wonderful analytical mind, her prose evades even a whiff of academic density. The long essay that (in three parts) forms the backbone of the collection, "Summer in Samarkand," details her experiences ostensibly learning Uzbek in that still-exotic city--it's a laugh-out-loud funny culture-shock story, a historical introduction to the complexities of Central Asia (as she learned later, "Uzbek" was not even a defined ethnicity or language until the Soviets decided it was in the early twentieth century), and a guide to a literary tradition largely unknown (and honestly somewhat nebulous) outside of the region. Her writing's lovely, witty, smart--even if you've never read a word of those daunting Russians, I highly recommend the book.

I also read, in the spirit of the season, a wee New Directions paperback edition of Gogol's novella, "The Night Before Christmas," a decidedly un-Moore-ish romp featuring the devil, guilty husbands hiding in sacks, and caroling for sausages. It's a fun, frisky folktale, and just cemented my opinion: Gogol is totes my favorite Russian writer!

Comics history.

So even though I've nine self-assigned books this month (Newberys + Russian classics book club), I've found myself with spare reading time in between (mostly wonderful) obligations. Over the past couple of weeks, I diverted myself with a pair of books on the gory, over-the-top crime and horror comics of the Fifties and the outcry against them that led to the prudish Comics Code--far stricter than the Hays Code ever was. Unfortunately, both had pet-peeve flaws that kept 'em from really floating my boat.

David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague is a narrative history of the comic-book genre, from its origins in the newspaper comic strip to its newsstand-grabbing sensationalism to the Congressional hearing that led to its (temporary) decimation. He interviewed dozens of writers and artists who worked on the sometimes-controversial comic books, and quotes them ad infinitum (to his credit, he does note when their testimony seems more self-serving than truthful). It's an interesting story, a tale of populist culture vilified and ultimately censored by the quasi-scientific and law enforcement establishments. But I do feel that Hadju falls too easily and too often into the Those Repressed Fifties Folk trope, wherein it goes without saying that any objections on the part of parents or government at the time was witch-hunting or quashing dissident (and, it's implied, correct) viewpoints. It's true that paranoia and fear cause overreactions, and blaming comics for juvenile delinquency was objectively untrue. I think, though, that were (and are) points to be made about the appropriateness of the images churned out by EC and its multitude of imitators: they were shocking, gory, grotesque. They were meant to be, and they were not on the whole meant to subvert the dominant paradigm and to expand the minds of children, to save them from the unbearable conformity of the times. They were designed to make money; anything else was a side effect.

One of the other problems with the book is its near-total lack of images, which is why I read it in tandem with The Horror! The Horror!, a collection that includes many of the crime and horror comics referenced by Hadju. And boy, there are some doozies! Melting faces, ax murders, lots and lots of pointy breasts--fun to look at for low-culture-appropriating adults like me, but honestly? I can see what worried parents. It also can't be denied that, with a few exceptions, these comics were badly drawn, poorly plotted, and cheaply printed. Well, strike that--both Hadju and Jim Trombetta, who contributes overly academic, sneering, insufferable essays* in between the comics collected here, would deny that. I think that damages their case, honestly. Rather than arguing for the preservation of these comics on artistic grounds, couldn't they simply point out that censorship is wrong even when what's being censored is no great loss?

*If I had stopped reading these in-between bits after rolling my eyes at the first few, I would have enjoyed the book, like, 75% more. That's what I recommend for anyone not looking to relive their days in grad school lit.