KITTY!

On Tuesdays I play D&D in the offices of Vertical, Inc., a publisher specializing in translated Japanese fiction and manga. (And yes, I realize that the geek force emanating from that sentence could power a small city.) So I've been lucky enough to discover Chi's Sweet Home, an impossibly kawaii manga about the life and times of a grey tabby kitten, available in English (translated by my fellow adventurer Ed Chavez!) and full color as of yesterday. Either you read that and think, "How could you write a whole comic book about a kitten? Snoozers" or (like me) "HOLY SHIT!!! A comic book about a kitten!!!! SIGN ME UP!!" It's dead adorable, is what I'm saying. And in one of those things about Japan that just makes you cock your head to one side and say "huh," it's actually serialized there in the premiere manga magazine for adult men. Yup. If your dad were Japanese, he'd be reading kitten adventures on the subway.

Scary stuff, kids!

There comes a time when even the YAP break isn't a far enough retreat from the exigencies of adult reality. Yesterday was such a day: I read two middle-grade ghost stories by the absolute mistress of the genre, Mary Downing Hahn. Started with September's upcoming The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall, which very much echoed The Secret Garden, but with a vengeful spirit bent on murder. And in the dark, I read 2008's All the Lovely Bad Ones, which managed to hit my scare spots--knocking, half-heard whispers, that feeling you sometimes get of a presence where none should be--OK, I'm going to stop that, despite the sunshine. I felt both stories got less frightening once the ghosts manifested in human form, but that's really my only complaint. I remember having the crud scared out of me by Wait Till Helen Comes in my youth, and it warms my heart that the Kids Today (with their Twitter and their Justin Biebers and their I-don't-know-what) still love and consume simple tales of hauntings.

Well lookit that, a regular update.

And I've been getting up around 9 every day, and I've done an hour of yoga for the past four days. Crazy times, folks, crazy times.

LOVED Angus, etc. So many ways a book can be great: this one's all voice, immediately engaging, funny, and unique. Going to have to read the other nine in the series now. Also, will try to use the term "nuddy-pants" as often as possible.

Been a busy reading week: again with the crazy times, my stack o' to-be-reads is perilously low. (I do have a few Dietrich tomes to read, but besides a biography which I'll probably hit next, I'm waiting till I've watched all the flicks, so's I know what's being talked about.) Snapped up a galley of Julia Wertz's upcoming Drinking at the Movies (from Random House! Good on her!); she's the pen behind the immensely amusing not-quite-a-webcomic The Fart Party--this book's about her recent move to Brooklyn (she's currently in Greenpoint, even). How v., v. timely!

& I read an upcoming book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, having never sampled her (except I think she had a tale in the Gaiman-edited Stories). Book's called Sourland, and really? Ehn. She's got a way with a sentence fragment, but if I want to read pages and pages about widowhood, sexual assault, and unbelievable dialogue, I'll read Thomas Hardy and also get long descriptions of the barren moors. Barren moors FTW!

And right now I'm reading the last non-filmy book on my stack (hoping to remedy that with a trip to the library this afternoon), The Radleys, by Matt Haig, whose previous novels The Labrador Pact and The Possession of Mr. Cave garnered great reviews from yours truly. This one's, surprisingly, a vampire novel, albeit about a family of "abstainers," who have rather a more miserable time of it than the Cullens. It touches on a lot of his previous themes, though: he's very interested in the unraveling of familial bonds, particularly the failures of fathers. And he can write, though the exceptionally short chapters in this one take some getting used to.

Of note, all too briefly.

The single awesomest-sauce book I've read in the past (sigh) six weeks? China Mieville's Kraken, which starts off with the disappearance of a specimen giant squid and unravels (over one momentous page turn) into enough crazily inventive shit for a dozen-novel series. A supervillain condemned to life as a sentient tattoo; a teleporting mage/Star Trek nerd whose spells (unnecessarily) duplicate the look and sound of the Enterprise's transporters; dueling apocalypses, including one hailed by an unexpectedly fearsome ferret cult. Next Tuesday, all!

Other than that, a lot of what I've read recently has been pretty meh. Exceptions: Emily St. John Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, a new biography of Catherine of Siena (my confirmation saint) by Don Brophy, Kevin Cannon's graphic punch-em-up adventure Far Arden, Terry Pratchett's wonderful middle-grade Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. And I've just started Louise Rennison's "Confessions of Georgia Nicolson" series (first title in a long string of great titles: Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging). V. much a teenage Bridget Jones, which I love. To this day (as in the last sentence) I use/overuse Ms. Jones' "v." abbreviation, one of only two lasting effects a book's had on my spelling--the other is using "uhm" instead of "um," from Peter Hedges' What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

I've a summer assignment from my boyfriend (you'd think this would be a long story, but I just asked) wherein I'm to write a 15-page paper on a film subgenre of my choice; I've chosen the seven films Marlene Dietrich made with Josef von Sternberg in the early 30s. This will mostly entail, you know, watching the movies, but I'm also doing some reading on the subject (so far, Carole Zucker's just-OK The Idea of the Image), interesting so far mostly because I've read very little film criticism, and considerations like length of shot and lighting rarely enter into my thinking. And isn't world-expanding what a good relationship is all about?

Two disappointing reads I'd like to mention. First, this year's Nebula winner The Wind-up Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. There was some good stuff in there, like the titular genetically engineered disposable person, Emiko, who moves like she's always in a strobe light so she can't pass for a "real" human being; and the similarly lab-created "cheshires," chameleon cats who've surplanted their less changeable counterparts. But all the OMG GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD WILL DESTROY THE WORLD (& ALSO IMPERIALISM BOO!) felt woefully on-the-nose, particularly in the dialogue. Maybe I just find political sci-fi boring?

And last night I finished Patrick Ness's YA-dystopic (I know, I should have loved it, right?) The Knife of Never Letting Go, which I've been meaning to read for ages. It had, again, a great setup, the coming of age of a boy on a planet where the thoughts of men can be heard by all and animals (including his totally adorable dog) talk, though they talk like animals, mostly concerned with food and safety. But there are too many chase scenes, and too many BELIEVE IN YOURSELF speeches, and (mouse over for big ol' spoiler). Too, it's the first of a trilogy, and it ends with no closure whatsoever, just a giant cliffhanger--I think there's more to the writing of sequential novels than chopping up one big story into several books. Each entry in the series should have some satisfaction in itself. (Yeah, maybe I'm a hypocrite because I just found the equally NO WHAT HAPPENS ending of Connie Willis' Blackout more exciting than maddening. But I love Connie Willis, so there.)

Merry month of May!

I plucked the review copy of One Bloody Thing After Another because its back cover featured blurbs by Kate Beaton and Ryan North, the two best webcomickers going (Hark, a Vagrant and Dinosaur Comics, respectively)--the author, Joey Comeau, writes the photocomic A Softer World with Emily Horne, and I'm pretty sure he's Beaton's roommate. No mere nepotism here, though--it was a great, twisted, blackest-humor read, about a girl with a suddenly-flesh-craving mother, her lesbian best friend, and an old man with the world's dumbest dog and an annoying headless ghost who's trying to tell him something. Fine holiday fun.

Also read Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody, having loved her surprise-hit The Elegance of the Hedgehog (except for that gutwrenching page turn), perhaps the only NYT bestseller ever to feature a cogent gloss on Husserl in the first fifty pages. Rhapsody's story is concurrent to Hedgehog's (there's a cooler term for that; what is it? Intraquel?), about a dying food critic's mental search for the ultimate flavor. His gustatory memories are interspersed with chapters from those surrounding him, and this more or less saved the book for me, because the critic is an unabashed sonofabitch, not someone I really wanted to spend time with. Most of the other narrators couldn't stand him either, with the notable exception of his cat.

And I reread Peter Cameron's amazing, amazing The City of Your Final Destination, spurred by the recent film adaptation (which hasn't gotten great reviews, and I think they stuck Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the exact opposite roles they should have had). This novel (about a KU doctoral student, his preternaturally capable girlfriend, and the executors of the late German-Uruguayan novelist about whom he's trying to write his dissertation) has simply some of the best, most elegant and fluidly created characterization I've ever read, and perhaps the most well-recorded, naturalistic dialogue.

AND! I finally, for the first time in maybe two and a half years, came to the bottom of my stack of books to read, and rewarded myself with a trip to the Greenpoint branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I checked out two collections of Lorrie Moore short stories (already read Self-Help, a razor cut to the bone), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's founding steampunk novel The Difference Engine, and China Mieville's kids' book Un Lun Dun. Spring's finally, definitively arrived; I'm going to sit in the sunshine and read as much as I can stand.

Fallow.

Like many an amateur blogger before me, I keep procrastinating my posts until I look up and it's been weeks since I last wrote. In my case, it's not from lack of copy--I'm always reading--but the opposite: I've finished six books since April 9, and am halfway through a seventh. (And I started an eighth, an attempted YAP break, but the heroine was one of those "oh poor me I'm so pretty and it's so hard putting together designer outfits" character types the appeal of which mystify me entirely. Quit after 20ish pages.) I feel like I owe each and every title a thoughtful, well-worded review; considering I used to regularly write 500 words on a single book for the Watermark newsletter, I know I'm capable of it. But the backlog daunts me, continually. So I'm trying something different today, and letting Goodreads shoulder the cataloging-and-rating burden for the past month. And I'm just going to write about the three books I've really loved.

First: a short-story anthology called, generically enough, Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. While most of these contain speculative-fiction elements, they're not really tied together by any more definite themes. Gaiman says in his introduction that the four words that drive storytelling for him are "and then what happened?"; the ensuing collection is a fine, fine narrative salmagundi of page-turners of many stripes, blurring the line between genre and lit-fic with aplomb. (As well they should. It's a stupid line--realism in Serious Literature may be the vogue of this and the last century, but it's only one way to tell a story, and not necessarily the truest. Hell, epic poetry used to be the go-to for culture-defining tales, and that shit rhymed: what's "faker" than that?) Ten days after finishing the book, the one that most sticks in my mind is by Jodi Picoult (which I learned recently is pronounced not Pih-COLT, but PEE-ko. Huh). I've been curious about her for a while; despite her being known for penning tearjerkers for middle-aged women, not my usual cup of tea, I'd come to respect her for tackling tragedy head-on, with startlingly bleak sensibility. She doesn't do happy endings. This story starts with the death of a child in the first sentence and follows the grieving parents as they grow apart. Except here, they grow apart literally: she finds herself able to reach the top shelf, he trips over his suddenly-too-long pajama bottoms. The space between them swells to the magnitude of their dead daughter. It's a breathtaking metaphor for loss.

Ingrid Law's middle-grade novel Savvy caught my fancy two Aprils ago in a big way. An X-Men-y coming-of-age tale about a family where each member acquires a superpower on their thirteenth birthday, it was warm and creative and chock-full of killer figurative language, and introduced me to a great vocabulary word, scumble, an oil-painting term that the characters use to describe mastering their often-destructive gifts. And Scumble's the title of the companion book coming out in August! Huzzah! It is, I would scientifically calculate, 92% as awesome as the original.

I'm currently flying through Robin Bloor's Words You Don't Know, based on his blog of the same name. This is one of those books that turns me insufferable--I'm this close to just announcing to the subway car, "Didja know jentacular means "relating to breakfast"? I'm going to use that all the time!!!" It's finally given me a word for my family's tradition/habit/vice of chattering away about all manner of highfalutin topics at mealtime: deipnosophy, which specifically means "intellectual conversation over dinner"! It's made extra-perfect by how often word origins is the subject of that very conversation.

What I read instead!

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway: YES YES YES. Like a dystopic Catch-22, full of black humor and tongue-dazzling wordplay, a great end-of-world-and-after scenario, and wonderful characters. Destined to be a classic--and unlike back-of-book blurbers, I do not use that phrase lightly.

Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa: I've read three books by Ogawa now (I think that's every one translated into English so far) and they've all been wildly different, but all stark and beautiful. This one is very dark, about the BDSM relationship between a 17-year-old girl and a man fifty years her senior. Point your mom towards The Housekeeper & the Professor instead.

The Boneshaker, Kate Milford: Middle-grade steampunk FTW! Full of creepy automatons, snake oil salesmen, and deals with the Devil, with an appropriately plucky heroine. Loved it.