So, have some pictures of the book in the  meantime. Maybe they’ll go partway towards communicating the extent to which I love this book.

It’s not an outstandingly pretty edition, but there are so many little things I love about it: the size (it’s about the same height as but an inch or two wider than a modern mass-market paperback), the worn teal binding, the fact that it’s still printed in letterpress, the unmistakable dry sweetish old-book smell. Also, it was one of the few things that I bought at the archetypal local bookstore-that-was-independent before the owners sold it in 2007.

Also, the brief and mysterious inscription on the endpapers:

Anyone out there who can read Sanskrit…?

Just two more photos under the jump.

Why yes, it is a fictional biography that includes an index before “THE END.”

I have also seen Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation with (swoon) Tilda Swinton, and thought that it was much lighter, but not without substance; it’s also massively eye-candyish, and enjoyable for me from that respect alone. I’d love to see it another time – same goes for re-reading the book, needless to say.

- E

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Additions to the horde
Isaac Marion Stash and a Story
New books for August

In “Making  Squid The Meat of the Story,” China Miéville talks about his preferences in cephalopods; his newest novel, Kraken (speaking of which, I covergasmed recently over the art for Subterranean Press’ limited edition); why he found Star Trek horrifying as a child; and more.

“At a certain stage some people end up not trusting their own imagination,” Mr. Miéville said. “You get this kind of baleful set of voices in your head that tell you, ‘That’s silly; you’re being silly.’

“But I think most people have more ideas in their heads than they think they do. It’s just that those of us in the fantastic fields — either we don’t listen to our own filters, or we have a much higher ridiculousness threshold.”

And in “Hero of Comic-Book World Gets Real,” Alan Moore discusses his current work-in-progress, “a lengthy spoken-word recording accompanied by an atmospheric musical soundtrack and a book of photographs” about Steve Moore, the comics writer and early mover and shaker within British comics. (Sorry if this is completely not-news within the realm of Moorephilia; I’m behind on news about pretty much everything imaginable.)

Also made my week to see continued confirmation that Moore will be continuing work on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one of my most-beloved series, despite his plans to otherwise leave behind the world of graphic novels.

- E

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China Miéville

Incomplete read – one of those books that you start to get a bad feeling about as soon as you notice the back-cover blurbs are all by third-rate authors and obscure newspapers. The Arcanum is a supernatural thriller that attempts to gather together Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, renowned voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau (who died 38 years before the book is set, but oh well), and H. P. Lovecraft on the trail of some mystery involving the Cthulhu mythos. Blah blah blah, all been done before.

I skimmed about three chapters, and it reads like mediocre fanfiction or The Da Vinci Code, full of dun dun DUN chapter breaks and phrases like “carnal treasures” and “In a swirl of a black topcoat he was gone.” It does make a lot of sense if you consider that Wheeler is primarily a screenwriter, not a novelist.

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Thomas Wheeler

You might remember that back in January, I attempted a visit to Argosy (Old and Rare Books, Prints and Maps) in New York, only to find that it was unexpectedly closed for most of the month. Two weeks ago, Kakaner and I finally made it there together, this time in some borderline torturous heat and humidity. It proved to be possibly the handsomest bookstore I’ve ever visited:

Everything immaculately labeled and presented, and gorgeously lit. (You can also see the store’s namesake dangling from the ceiling in the above photo – I neglected to take a better photo of it, but it was a marvelous model.) Very rich, very Old World.

The first floor is all old and rare books, plus a fascinating selection of old maps, prints, sheet music, and so on, in a wide range of qualities and prices. I was tempted to pick up some botanical prints, which I always have a weakness for, but couldn’t really justify the acquisition (sigh). It all also made me wish I were any good at collages.

The above photo is from a glass case full of luxuriously rebound rare copies of classics. We checked out such interesting specimens as an edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Kakaner’s a Verne addict) with hand-colored illustrations, an original Edmund-Dulac-illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, and some sort of small-press artist edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, massive and slipcovered and filled with fold-out photographic illustrations. As you can imagine, these were all well over $1000.

Downstairs was the non-rare books section. I didn’t take a picture, but the contrast to the jewel-case of a first floor was stark and hilarious: the basement was the picture of pretty much every other crammed, fusty-smelling, poorly lit, and generally slightly manky used bookstore you’ve been in, although still better organized than the average. Also, they seem to take only hardcovers, which also puts them one step up from the average.

In our usual fashion, we went on a hunt for the sci-fi section, and after a somewhat confusing search located less than half a bookcase, mostly of Anne McCaffrey, at the back of one aisle. So, not much to really get excited about there.

I was kind of amused that sexuality and gender went under “Curiosa.”

Gorgeously battered leather bindings, $10. A little reminder that basement presentation aside, it is one classy bookstore.

- E

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Roosterguarded
Bookstores of New York: Skyline Books
Bookstores of New York: Books of Wonder

What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up… and some of its people, too – including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion; and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Un Lun Dun is basically Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere meets The Phantom Tollbooth, and owes debts – some playfully acknowledged in the text itself – to many other classics of children’s and fantasy literature, including A Wrinkle in Time and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a cleverly crafted and delightful book: Miéville lets loose yet again with his famously phantasmagorical imagination, filling out his alternate London with topsy-turvy architecture (houses constructed of obsolete technology, a ghost town whose buildings constantly flicker through various historical incarnations, a web-cocooned “Webminster Abbey”), a lovingly detailed bestiary, and a vast arsenal of puns (some of my favorites: UnLondon’s sister cities include Parisn’t and Lost Angeles).  All of these are complemented by Miéville’s appropriately inky, energetic illustrations. For fans of his adult fiction, there are also plenty of touches of eerie, deeply unsettling dark fantasy, some of which could have come straight out the New Crobuzon books – I couldn’t help feeling that the Black Windows of Webminster Abbey might be lesser cousins of Bas-Lag’s Weavers. With his usual anti-authoritarianism, Miéville also takes a good amount of pleasure in dismantling and inverting the tropes of the fantasy quest, so that we get a very unintended heroine who quite literally refuses to go by the rules of the (talking) book.

For all its delights, though, Un Lun Dun somehow failed to really surprise and engage me. It felt a bit like a themepark ride: there’s plenty to see, but it all goes by rather quickly, and you’re not sure how much it really meant to you at the end of it all. The characters are all likable enough, including the quick-thinking, occasionally snarky heroine, but few are really memorable enough to be lovable, and I had about the same feeling about the book as a whole. Its pleasures lie more in its ingenuity and dazzling wordplay than in any real emotional connection. I also had a little difficulty with the writing style, which is heavy on short, bluntly declarative sentences. And though I appreciated the plot’s pro-environmental, pro-literacy bent, the messages were shoehorned in a little awkwardly and obviously.

So, like Kakaner, I’m going to have to make a conditional recommendation for this one: try it out if you’re a big Miéville fan, are looking for pure entertainment, or have a younger reader of strong constitution to share it with. I would have loved this so much more had I read it when I was about twelve – too much younger and I think certain scenes might have kept me from sleeping at night, though I would have read them with relish anyway.

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China Miéville
Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

After witnessing the resurrection of his dead love from a riverbed, a village boy sets off in wild pursuit of the cloaked women in whose company she now rides. One is a sailor-swordswoman-storyteller; the other, a soldier-nun on the lam from her convent. Under the roof of one inn in a distant land, all of these stories interweave with those of a varied cast of characters, including a fox who’s not always a fox, a stable-boy dreaming of adventure, and a cantankerous innkeep.

Alas. I’m a Peter Beagle fangirl to the end, primarily on the basis of The Last Unicorn, but The Innkeeper’s Song was a dud for me. Wondrously imaginative concepts, compelling characters – but only in summary. In execution, the rapid multi-character narration distracts from the action, and while Beagle does an impressive job of differentiating the various voices, I found most of them – and I really hate to say this – unbearably irritating, with “folky” or “lilting” speech patterns that came off as stilted and artificial.

About the same sentiment applied to the plotting. While there are moments of incredible emotional intensity and sublime, twilit weirdness, they were by far outnumbered by the points at which I had to put the book down and say “REALLY? Did that really just happen?” (Also – for one of the most awkward and unearned sex scenes I have ever had the displeasure of wincing through – “was it really just described in those terms?”) Considering my reaction more carefully, it’s not so much that the events (most of them) were that outrageous. Rather, the theatrically affected narration somehow resulted in my having the sense half the time that I had no idea what the characters were doing, or why (and not in the good, pleasurably mystifying kind of way). Even worse, I didn’t really care, despite all the potentially awesome setpieces, like a showdown between Nyateneri (the soldier-nun) and a pair of ninjas assassins in the inn’s bathhouse. The only sequence that I wholeheartedly enjoyed was the second-to-last chapter, in which one of the characters undertakes a nightmarishly intense descent into death – as in many of Beagle’s works, mortality is a chief concern of The Innkeeper’s Song.

Unfortunately, the novel’s stagy, borderline sententious quality undercuts the obvious care with which it’s crafted. Under all the bluster, I could still dimly glimpse all of the things that I normally associate with Beagle’s works, the bittersweetness and the playful lyricism and the dusky, mysterious feel. Here, they just left me all the more bummed that I didn’t actually enjoy the book.

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Peter S. Beagle

Malcolm Gladwell is a seasoned journalist and a staff writer for the The New Yorker, as evidenced by his tight, logical, and compelling writing. The Tipping Point explores the socioeconomic phenomenon of its namesake, “The Tipping Point,” or the point at which some product, behavior, or idea suddenly becomes a sweeping epidemic in a population. As demonstration, Gladwell explores a variety of fascinating and relatable social processes–   the teenage smoking epidemic, the sudden wildfire popularity of certain products, and the sudden decline in New York City crime– homing in on product, concept, and process development, marketing, and testing. He boils down the process for these phenomena to three common factors, linking together epidemics which we would have otherwise found unrelated.

Not being trained in any field of socioeconomics, I cannot offer insight or criticism into the technical elements of the book. All I can say is that this book provided an incredibly rigorous learning experience for me. Gladwell assumes a reasonably intelligent audience, and lays out his arguments and evidence concisely with appropriate depth. Gladwell lays out the “Law of 150″, a concept that proclaims that 150 is the maximum number of people that work and network together thoroughly and efficiently, and not only uses anecdotes and interviews to support his findings, but even digs a little deeper into anthropological studies on villages that support this law. It was refreshing to see an author work harder than usual to find his evidence and argue so fervently for a claim. And this is not the only case– he uses genetics and psychology to support his case study of teenage smoking, and specific, irrefutable examples of how predicting trends helped the Airwalk campaign.

Most of all, I liked that I didn’t feel like I was being fooled. I was disappointed with the technical caliber of Freakonomics and its sequel, and found its assertions far-fetched and relied on statistical gimmicks. With The Tipping Point, I felt like I was with the author while he researched and culled relevant sources and experiments, and followed the reasoning in his own mind trying to piece together However, I will admit that some of his lesser-proven conjectures, such as the “The Broken Window Effect”, or that the visual cleanup of New York City’s transportation system was responsible for a sudden decline in the crime epidemic, were not exactly based in scientific discovery. But in his defense, why write a book just to regurgitate information? I think it’s only natural that he  want to infuse his work with his own theories and I felt he did so eloquently, carefully enough, and unassumingly.

I’ve heard much criticism about his other book, Outliers, and, well, the very title lends itself to skepticism. The Tipping Point deserves to be read based on its own merits and without the negative reception of Outliers. The “Tipping Point” itself is a kind of personally developed concept that Gladwell is exploring, so I think the right/wrong demarcation is slightly blurred and shouldn’t be judged in the same way. Anyway, what I’m saying is that The Tipping Point is worth the read, and if nothing else, you will certainly learn a lot of incredibly interesting things.

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Malcolm Gladwell

Ah, with the beginning of every summer comes the shutting-off of my brain for approximately 24 hours, as I devour the newest installment of my beloved narcotic of choice, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. Changes, as the twelfth book and approximate halfway point of the series (…I am simultaneously disturbed and awed to realize that I have, in fact, read all twelve), is, well, a game-changer. Butcher, who’s already infamous for his gleeful sadism towards his characters, ups the stakes tenfold in this book, and packs it with even more explosions, evil twists, and shocking revelations than usual.

On the first page of the book and in one stupendously awful phone call, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, finds out from ex-girlfriend Susan Rodriguez that not only do they have a daughter whom he was never told about, but that she’s been captured by the vampires of the Red Court. Behind the kidnapping is Duchess Arianna Ortega, who’s out for revenge for Harry’s role in the death of her husband. With the wizards’ White Council both unwilling and unable to help him, Harry has few allies at his side and little time to accomplish a seemingly impossible rescue. Harry finds himself forced to weigh his love for his daughter against his principles, and may have to go further than ever before in sacrificing his beliefs for the sake of power.

Multitudinous OMGWUT moments aside, I actually didn’t enjoy Changes as much as most of the preceding books. Butcher is so heavy-handed in writing emotional distress that I was irritated pretty much as soon as I heard the novel’s premise and realized that Harry’s emotional state for most of the book would be Righteous Fury of Wrath and Righteousness. I love Harry as a protagonist, and generally find the improbable extent to which he holds to his principles endearing and actually pretty admirable, but reading Harry in continual high dudgeon for close to 500 pages just gets excruciatingly repetitive, even with my brain mostly turned off.

Also factoring into my lukewarm reaction was Changes’ rather joyless, monumental feel, relative to the rest of the series. While the unusual grimness was deliberate and earned, and I should probably just get used to it given the probable trajectory of the rest of the series, it was tough to sit through when I usually savor the Dresden Files books for their madcap momentum and dorky humor. This is also one of the most obviously sloppy books in the series. I’m usually not terribly attentive to continuity errors and the like, so when there are plot holes and memory slippages big enough for me to notice them, that means they’re preeetty noticeable.

Nonetheless, the horrifyingly cliffhangery ending does promise to lead into an amazing-sounding next novel, for which I am now very excited indeed. Go go Gadget Dresdenverse major changes!

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Jim Butcher
Welcome to the Jungle, by Jim Butcher, art by Ardian Syaf (2003) [E]

Since I’ve been wasting too much time trying to write summaries and not enough actually reviewing, I’m deploying a back-cover summary here:

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening – until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

So my main difficulty with Bel Canto laid in the fact that it’s halfway a rapturously romantic fable about the power of art – opera in particular – and love, and halfway a grim tragedy. Now, that’s basically the story’s selling point, that the author plays on the tension between romance and realism, but it left me feeling a little cold and mostly troubled throughout. The romance reaches such giddy heights, with character after character discovering hidden talents and unexpected love, that my suspension of disbelief (which is notoriously generous) just gave up and wandered away about halfway through, leaving me reluctant to be really convinced and moved by any of it. (I still teared up at the ending, though.)

This despite Patchett’s coolly, dreamily elegant and often funny prose, the artfulness of the entire set-up, and my wanting to really care for the characters, all of whom are very human and carefully drawn. There’s a French ambassador who just wants to go home to his wife, a vice president who throws himself with increasing satisfaction into his role as maid to captors and captives alike, a translator who’s forced to find words of his own for the first time in his life, a weary Red Cross negotiator who watches the breakdown of the hostage-terrorist divide with growing unease… I did think that their development suffered from the fact that the cast is so large, so that many don’t get much further than sketches, even if those sketches are evocative.

All in all, I found the book pleasing in style and admirable in craft, but as a whole it just didn’t click for me.

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Ann Patchett

On an Earth whose surface has been scorched into uninhabitability by the expanding sun, a lone, gun-toting traveler arrives at what may be humanity’s last outpost. At the bottom of the former Marianas Trench, a group of scientists have established a settlement complete with gardens and a space shuttle equipped for escape from the burned-out planet. The new arrival, who simply calls himself the Pilgrim, is at first welcomed as a much-needed defender against the various mutated beings that prowl the trench, but his fanaticism-fueled taste for destruction may bring unwanted consequences.

This mini-series (a sequel to the 2001 Just a Pilgrim, which I realized only belatedly) got a big meh from me. While the concepts and imagery are gratifyingly ambitious, the overall direction of the plot is way too obvious if you know anything at all about Garth Ennis and his pet topics, i.e. have read Preacher. As much as I love Preacher, Ennis’ expression of his anti-Christianity is so extreme and lacking in nuance that I had no interest in swallowing it twice. Just a Pilgrim was pretty hilarious to read shortly after seeing the recent film The Book of Eli, though, which is diametrically opposed in its message and about as lacking in depth – I think if you put a copy of Pilgrim and a recording of Eli in the same room, they’d explode each other.

Artwise, I did like Ezquerra’s monumental vistas and Paul Mounts’ mucky textures and bruised, sweltering color palette of intense purples and oranges, although occasionally the color choices did end up being hard on the eyes.

For the record, I also tried to read the original series but couldn’t maintain interest, for about the same set of reasons that I had a hard time getting through Garden of Eden, but also because the art had a much cruder look to it, despite the artistic team being the same.

Conclusion: if you’re looking for Western grit, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, and fairly mindless violence involving mutant jellyfish and hammerhead sharks, you may like this. Just don’t expect depth or anything approaching meaningful commentary on… anything, really.

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Garth Ennis
The Boys, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson (2006-200*) E