849. Cephalopod Coffeehouse November 2015

Returning to the squishy Cephalopod Coffeehouse, hosted by Armchair Squid and presented the last Friday of every month (except Smarch), I wanted to talk a little about Dave Barry.

Chances are if you know Dave at all, it's either from his retired humor column or the Harry Anderson sitcom Dave's World (where I was first introduced to the hilarious Patrick Warburton).

 

I ended up reading three Dave-penned or Dave-related books in the past month:

 

• Peter and the Starcatcher - The Annotated Script (by Rick Elice)
• The Worst Class Trip Ever
• Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Quicker)

 

The first one is the script to a play adapted from Dave's series of Peter Pan prequels he co-wrote with Ridley Pearson.  I think a lot of people sought a new series of books to read after getting into Harry Potter.  The Starcatcher books were mine, thanks to my love for both Dave Barry and Peter Pan.  When I first heard about the stage adaptation I could only think how appropriate it was, as J.M. Barrie's original Peter Pan adventures were chronicled on the stage.  To finally experience the result, in any format, was a considerable pleasure.  Obviously a lot of heart was put into the production, and because the script came with notes, I got to find out how it all came together.

 

 

Worst Class Trip Ever was Dave's most recent work of fiction, released early last summer.  As with the Starcatcher books it's aimed at young readers (although that hardly stopped me).  And as with his other works of solo fiction, it's a madcap adventure.  His first novel, Big Trouble, was adapted into a movie starring Tim Allen.

 

Live Right and Find Happiness is Dave's latest book of humor, in the style of what you may have read when he was regularly reprinting his columns and/or releasing entirely original work.  Both these last two were released in a year where I needed someone like Dave Barry to lighten the mood.  Just knowing they were there helped me, and to read them was even better.  Live Right features a slightly more reflective Dave, a slightly more mature Dave that has been emerging in his more recent work. 

 

I'll remain a fan regardless, but these were hopefully books that represent Dave's path to enduring cultural relevance.  As someone who lives mostly in the printed word, and who bypassed the ways later humor writers made their names, Dave sometimes seems like he got lost in the shuffle.  But he's a treasure, in ways other humorists could only dream about.  Compared to the ones on TV or in the movies, his appeal will need little translation in the future.  Dave's becoming timeless.

 

At least as far as I'm concerned.  He'll always be one of my treasured writers.  And easiest recommendations.



#744. Overheard May 2014

Count me among those who won't be going.  I'd been living in New York a month when the attacks happened and saw the whole thing from my company's Learning Center, located on the Queens side of the East River, right across from the UN.  My "Prints, Plates, and Diagrams" class was on a break, so along with the rest of my class, I was down on the Center's back deck drinking coffee, enjoying what would otherwise have been one of the nicest days I'd ever spent in New York.  

I don't mind saying that the memory still haunts me.  I have absolutely no desire to relive it.
By the time the weekend rolled around, Hoboken was plastered with "Have You Seen This Person?" fliers.  They were on ever vertical surface in the Mile Square.  One poor guy lost his beautiful blonde wife or girlfriend.  I don't know the story.  But he kept putting those posters up for months and months and months.  I bet I saw her particular "Have You Seen This Person?" flier for a solid eight months after the attacks.  I still feel bad for that guy.
Anyway, that was a long time ago.  

I worked the phones for the telethon they held right after the attacks, and for awhile I jumped every time I saw a bunch of police cars rushing down the street to get anywhere.  But New York is eight million people and probably a million buildings, and for the most part, the City barely skipped a beat.  The Stock Exchange was out of lights for maybe four days, and I remember distinctly that when the mayor asked folks to go out and shop on Black Friday that year to help the City's economy, my mom came up, and we literally shopped 'til we dropped.  That was a pretty good day. 

Eh.  It's fine that they have a museum, but I think it's mostly for the tourists.  Anyone who was there won't need to see it to remember what it was like.

That's Dan Head over at Dan & Sally's Digital Domain reacting to the opening of the 9/11 Museum.  I've known Dan since 2006.  We both wrote about comics at the defunct Paperback Reader, and also overlapped at Digital Webbing (which is probably where we originally overlapped, in the message boards), so it was nice to reconnect with him in the blogging sphere.  9/11 is a subject that remains relevant to me.  Every time there's a piece of news concerning it (last week I read in the paper about the current status of unidentified remains) I still want to clip it and save it (which is what I did for years).  But I'm not a New Yorker (although, in some respects we're all New Yorkers since then), certainly not back in 2001.  That morning I was in a college dining hall.  Dan's memories are so much more...real.  I was fascinated to read his perspective years after the fact.  They're almost mundane.  I never really imagined it like that, what it was like to live there days, weeks, months after the fact.  The rest of us really only heard about the rescue efforts, the cleanup.  But those who lived with it...Anyway, just thought I'd send you some perspective.

Speaking of which:

I finally took a breath and dove into The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's doorstopper of a novel. It just won the Pulitzer Prize (like, a few days ago) and was also shortlisted for 2013's National Book Critics Circle Award, so go Donna! As with Chang-Rae Lee's novel, this was a coming-of-age story and chock full of adventure. Our hero, young Theo, goes through a delightfully Dickensian childhood full of misery and joy, hijinks and heartbreak ... just one damn thing after another. I adored the thrill ride, implausible as some of it was, but the ending was terrible. OK, so you know dramatic structure has five parts — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement? It was all good until the denouement. When you get to that part, do yourself a favor and just stop reading. Because 90% of the book was excellent, I still recommend it. The ending doesn't kill the book, it's just boring.

...

I'm reading Goldfinch right now. I think the book lost the bulk of its momentum after Theo went to live with the Barbours. Tartt's best writing was easily her breathless opening sequence. So far she hasn't come close to recapturing it. And I don't much care for Boris, and I've gone ahead and saw that he comes back again. "Implausible" is a good way to describe the unnecessary sequence of histrionic events. Like a literary soap opera. 

...

I loved Boris! I really enjoyed the Barbours, too; and the bombing scene became almost unlistenable to me (possibly because it triggered some PTSD for me, but also because it was. so. incredibly. long.). We seem to have had opposite reactions to this book! :) But I agree that it is indeed a literary soap opera. 

That's from Stephanie over at Words Incorporated.  It's actually from the end of last month, one of several books she discussed for the Cephalopod Coffeehouse (yes, officially I'm no longer participating in that), then a response I made in the comments, and then her reply.  I finished reading it right around the end of that month, too.  Actually, "finished" isn't quite the word for it.  More like, "abandoned."  Because ultimately, I just never got back into it, once I realized I was no longer enjoying it.  The funny thing is, Goldfinch from Donna Tartt isn't really as random a topic to bring up along with 9/11 as you might think.  At the start of the book the main character finds himself in the midst of a terrorist attack in New York.  One of many things I would've changed about the book is that I would have just gone ahead and made it a 9/11 story.  It was all but one at that point anyway; I just didn't see the point in shying away, which is what I think Tartt did.  Instead it's just a random attack specifically on a museum, that's never really explained, just one of many inexplicable elements that the author uses to create unearned dramatic tumult.  Stephanie loved it, though, and as you can tell even a character who rubbed me the wrong way almost directly from his introduction, the wacky foreigner Boris.  But the thing is, she and I differ again, concerning the ending, and Boris is part of the reason I think Tartt managed to pull a late book redemption, because Boris actually finds some useful redemption as the story finally takes some shape after a lot of meandering through Theo Decker's life (which, as I said in my comment, was at its strongest in the opening sequence when Tartt's writing was at its sharpest and most focused).  But the contrasts between Stephanie's thoughts and mine, just serve to remind me that everyone's perspective is different.

Which is also what Dan's post made me realize.  But then, we all know that already, don't we?  I think we tend to forget that.  So this is a new feature where I will try and explore that, highlighting not just interesting things I've read, but thoughts that have made me think.  Because that's about as relevant as communal blogging is for me.

#676. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse January 2014

It's that time of the month again.  Yes, in different context that means something completely different.  Here, it means books.  To be clear, we're talking books!

Anyway, now that I've made it pleasantly awkward for everyone...It's time to celebrate the thing that has just made Lord Founder Squid feel terrible about being associated with a blog that can make perfectly innocent talk about books sound so weird.  But he knew what I was like when he recruited me.  Granted, he had only seen my traveling petting zoo act, and you can't go wrong with a traveling petting zoo (unless it has koalas...they bite), but still.  (I had koalas.)

Without further inane adieu, here are the books I finished in the past month:

• Zealot by Reza Aslan
• Justice League Beyond: Konstriction by Derek Fridolfs and various
• Teen Titans Vol. 3: Death of the Family by Scott Lobdell and various
• Monorama by Tony Laplume

By Tony Laplume???  Hey, what is this, Pat Dilloway's blog???  (I'd provide a link, but he set it to self-destruct because he read so many spy novels last year.)

Technically, I read Zealot at the very end of 2013, but it wasn't included in December's Coffeehouse chat because I hadn't read it by the time I wrote that one.  It's ridiculously good, in terms of illuminating certain things if you're open to their illumination without religious outrage (of a...zealot nature).  If I'd chosen to write about reading the Bible, which I'm very close to finishing, only weeks away, I might have talked about both it and Zealot today.

But I'm doing the full Dilloway.  (This is different from the Full Monty in that neither of us is British and hey! that means "Monty Python" means "Naked Python"...!)  I'm writing about my own book.  I'm not too concerned about seeming a little full of myself, though, because I know talking about my books on my blog(s) doesn't translate to sales.  I do have a whole blog dedicated to talking about my books and writing and such, so this is kind of infringing on my own territory.  But still.

And the neat thing is that Monorama is a lot more relevant to this blog than you might think.  The whole concept of the "Eponymous Monk" strip I've been running is taken from a few of the stories in this collection, which in turn is based on stories I originally wrote in high school.  (When I was creating a comic strip I actually drew.)  There's another piece of relevant prelude material here, by the way, which in fact comes from here.  Just in case you wanted to see some of the pieces in place.  If you at all care about "Eponymous Monk."  Although there are not too many spoilers there.  That I'm aware of.  (Honestly, I'm making all this up as I go along, even the parts I already know myself...)

Okay, so I'm talking about Monorama, one of my own books.  (One???)  It's a collection of stories I put together from material I had lying around, filled with nonsensical science-fictiony ideas.  Some of the stories are incredibly short, so I grouped those together in the opening section of the book.  One of them is a novella (not Nutella), and that's at the back of the book.  All of it covers basically a decade's worth of my creative output.

The copy I recently finished reading was one I'd given my parents.  I ended up picking it up and started reading.  (If I was a better editor, which is really clear if you read it for yourself, I would have read all of it when I prepared it for self-publication back in the summer of 2012.)  And you know what?  I liked what I saw.

This is not a matter of self-aggrandizement.  Some of this material I really hadn't read in years.  Now, I know I tend to read about as differently from other people as I write, but there's a comfortable overlap between my twin exercises, which I'm always happy to see for myself.  I really didn't come across anything that I found embarrassing to have in this book (other than, again, the editing).

Some of the stories, two or three in particular, I knew when I made the collection, I had never actually finished writing, the novella included (which is the longest source material to date for the "Eponymous Monk" strip).  I was surprised to find that they still read well, even the novella that somewhat blatantly ends mid-story, or the strict excerpt from another story that ends the collection.  They make sense in their own kind of logic, which is to say the internal logic of the storytelling.  (And really, any decent story ought to be able to be enjoyed even if you haven't experienced the beginning or ending, which is why I sometimes actually enjoy catching a movie or TV show only in part.  People assuming it's the complete story that gives them satisfaction, but really it's the overall quality of the material.  No matter what they say.)

The whole point of Monorama was to present material that potential paying readers could sample in order to figure out what kind of writer I am.  And again, maybe it's simply that I overlap comfortably my "reader" and "writer" hats (like the winter hat some people wear over their ball caps!), but I'm as convinced as ever that I wasn't mistaken in putting this book out there.  In fact, I'm actually a little more proud now, having read the complete book, completely removed from the creative process, and still enjoyed the material.

/full Dilloway

#658. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse December 2013

Please direct all congratulations and lamentations to A Squid for another Cephalopod Coffeehouse post.

This month since I've been reading the Bible (yes, that Bible) and am nowhere near finishing (although if you really want you can read along with me as I muse on my experiences here), I don't have a book like usual to talk about, but rather a different kind of reading experience entirely.

Comic strips!  Specifically, Over the Hedge: Stuffed Animals, which was originally released and I bought back in 2006, when the movie adaptation was also in theaters (Bruce Willis has one of his overlooked but always amusing voiceover roles in it).  I've actually been reading this collection off and on since that year.  This is not a judgment on the cartoon strip, but rather a sad indictment on the state of comic strips in general.  Because without this collection, or the Internet, I would never have read Over the Hedge at all.  I've never seen it in a newspaper, and that's one of the many criminal things to talk about today.

(Incidentally, one of the more popular posts I've done on any of my blogs was all about building a new comic strip line-up from obscure and familiar favorites, which you can read here. I suspect that some of the visits have been from bookmarks people have returned to as they read my digital compilation.)

I love comic strips.  My all-time favorite, as it is for many other dedicated fans even though it ceased publication way back in 1994 (twenty years ago!), is Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes.  I have many other favorites.  My current favorite is Pearls Before Swine.  It's the main reason I don't want crocodiles for neighbors.  (They're idiots.)

Big Nate was created by a Maine native, but isn't popular enough in Maine to have stuck in my local paper.  It's since been extended into Diary of a Wimpy Kid-esque books, and that's been fun to see.  I enjoy that one.  I love Red & Rover, which is a perennial contender for Calvin & Hobbes-esque.  I love Zits.  I love Sally Forth.  I can't believe that FoxTrot has never become a beloved cultural institution, even though it basically invented our current event culture thanks to reliably nerdy Jason, who embodied The Big Bang Theory long before The Big Bang Theory ever existed.

I think the idea of the comic strip is an endangered species.  Yes, comic strips can exist on the Internet.  There are many comic strips that were born on the Internet and have made names for themselves.  But they are inherently a newspaper institution.  They're the last best social commentary we have.

That's what Over the Hedge is all about, by the way.  It features a band of woodland creatures who are forever commenting on the saddest aspects of American culture, all the stuff everyone else always complains about, but with fuzzy creatures who have lives and obsessions of their own (RJ the raccoon made a artform of obsessing over Twinkies long before Zombieland).

Maybe it was Watterson's principled fight against commercialism, but no comic strip since, except for Dilbert, has managed to pierce the heart of popular culture the way Garfield and Peanuts did and still do.  It's not a matter of stagnancy, as some observers are always saying.  You can ignore the likes of Family Circus, by all means!

I wish Dilbert were as successful in an overt way as it has in a subversive one, but as much as it lampoons everything, basically, that led to the Great Recession, it hasn't changed anything.  Yes, I take the funnies seriously.

And I wish more people were aware that an Over the Hedge movie exists, and that an Over the Hedge daily comic strip exists.

Although I would also be content to see Bill Watterson enshrined as one of the 20th century's great artists, where he rightly belongs...That's the strength of comic strips at their very finest.  That's worth preserving.  Newspapers don't seem like they will be around much longer.  How much longer still until comic strips disappear?  I don't think I want to see that day...

#639. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse November 2013

Most of what I read this month was written by John le Carre, plus a Goodreads offering and then what I'm currently enjoying.  Here's the line-up:

• Call for the Dead by le Carre
• A Murder of Quality by le Carre
• The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by le Carre
• A Most Wanted Man by le Carre
• The Otter, the Spotted Frog, and the Great Flood by Gerald Hausman and Ramon Shiloh

And now The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith J.K. Rowling.

I didn't purposefully set up the British duo of le Carre and Rowling, but their crimes of social disorder are perfect companions.  You may know le Carre from Spy Who..., which was the first of his books to be made into a film, subsequently followed by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener, which was my first exposure to the author although I didn't know it at the time, and a movie I instantly fell in love with.  If you love Rachel Weisz you'd probably like it, too.

I knew the name "John le Carre" well enough, but he's the kind of author who was probably better known in the culture during his heyday than later.  His George Smiley, featured in the first three books on the above list as well as a few others, was the antithesis of James Bond, his literary contemporary, and of course Bond went on to far greater popular exposure, whereas you probably don't recognize Smiley's name at all, and even think it sounds kind of comical for a spy.  But read just one of these books and you'll take him seriously, I bet.  Smiley was a product of the real world.  He was the very embodiment of the mundane and horrifying truths of the Cold War.

And le Carre tells a darn good mystery.  I don't read mysteries often.  That's a whole genre I think might get a little tiresome, because the rules are so hard to subvert successfully (although my man Bolano did exactly that throughout his career, part of what made him so great).  His stories are rife with British social mores, so much so that Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality are almost as much about that as the brilliant deductions of Smiley.  But then he's also a master of staging the scene for an entire generation, and Spy Who...was said to be the touchstone of the Berlin Wall that was erected at pretty much the same time as its publication.  In the 9/11 era, le Carre revisits many of the same relationships that emerged after WWII in an entirely new context for Most Wanted Man, and may also explain the two brothers from as recent an event as the Boston Marathon bombing.

That makes him an incredibly relevant writer.  

Rowling is turning into one as well, and not just for having written the blockbuster Harry Potter series.  In her first standalone novel, The Casual Vacancy, she had already demonstrated an uncanny ability to spin a new version on the common theme of a signal death (in Harry's case, two), a trend that continues in Cuckoo's Calling.  Again, I couldn't have known this, but the result this time is so similar to le Carre that it strikes me as entirely appropriate that they exist on a similar wavelength.  Both are incredibly British, for one.  And for another, they know what the British around them are really like, and they're not afraid to write about it.  That did Mr. Dickens quite well a hundred and a half years earlier.  With each new story Rowling demonstrates the ability to view the same event from a different vantage point, first from the perspective of children and then from a whole community's and now and perhaps most directly from the person who's called to investigate the whole affair.  Where to next?  I'll certainly be reading.

Check out more Cephalopod Coffeehouse selections starting with squishy founder, A Squid.

#619. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse October 2013

The cephalopod of the title to this blogging book club is the Armchair Squid, our beloved and very soggy founder.  Please visit him first (er, after me) and give thanks, preferably with whatever squid love to eat.  Unless it turns out to be books.  Because that would just be wrong.

This month I read far fewer books than has been represented in my past participation in the Coffeehouse, which is actually settling back into a more normal routine, now that I'm settling back in with Maine.  That being said, what's been passing for official as far as I've been doing it:

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I'm currently reading Between Parentheses, which is a collection of Bolano's miscellany, mostly stuff he wrote about literature, which helps inform what I'm going to write about this month in regards to my favorite writer (since of course I also wrote about him last month).

The story of Savage Detectives is this: a pair of zealous poets, so extreme in their devotion to their craft that they would disrupt the readings of those they considered their inferiors by shouting their own works, embark on a sacred quest to track down their mysterious predecessor in a minor circle known as the Visceral Realists.  What they discover informs the whole shape of the book, which is this:

The book is in three acts.  The first recounts how a would-be member of Arturo Belano (a stand-in for Bolano himself) and Ulises Lima's  (Bolano's good friend Mario Santiago) inner circle ends up joining them on their quest after he inadvertently liberates a prostitute from her very angry pimp (whose subsequent pursuit is the alternating dramatic backbone of the plot in the third act).  The second act is all about various perspectives and lives recounted, all somehow relating to Belano and Lima's later, separate travels.  What led to these lives of apparent desperation?

The clever thing about the book is that the second act points the reader in the direction of the answer as one of the frequent voices in the fugue finally gives the reader details on the figure who so entrances our wayward pair, a woman who lived a lifetime ago and seems to have all but fallen through the cracks of history.  And more clever still is the reveal at the end of this act where Lima and Bolano have all but assumed the same fate (and the main character from the first and third acts has succeeded even better).

For large portions of the book it may be easy to assume that Bolano is writing as close to a biography as he ever managed, although to think so is about as depressing a thought as you can get.  It's true that he didn't achieve any real success or recognition until Savage Detectives itself was published, so that he very well could have been the anonymous, charismatic, but somehow always suspect drifter he paints Belano to be.  

And yet truth is not always to be found in fiction.  Or at least there are always more shades to a story than it can sometimes seem (which is perhaps another reason why Bolano has so many voices speak in the second act).  In Between Parentheses a different voice entirely emerges, although very much a zealot, not as pathetic as Belano can sometimes seem.  Bolano pursued literature the way other people breathe.  He absorbed it.  He had opinions, strong ones, about everyone, scores of writers I'd never heard of, whole traditions that have eluded me.  And there's a strong case to be made that much of what I know of as his he borrowed from others.  Which is only natural.  I assume he made it very much his own, because there's got to be a reason why I know his name and not so many of the ones he knew and treasured (or tolerated).

Was it such a good idea to read his nonfiction after reading another book that so brilliantly encased his fiction?  Sometimes it's not wise to peek behind the curtain.  Sometimes the bubble can be burst, when you see how the sausage is made.  And yet even when he exhausts me Bolano fascinates me.  The whole reason I started to devote so much energy into reading as much of Bolano as I can get my hands on is because of something he wrote in 2666.  It only figures.

The way Savage Detectives reconciles itself affirmed that he deserved the acclaim, and deserves my devotion.  Belano and Lima went in search of a myth and ended up disillusioned shells of themselves.  Is that something Bolano experienced?  Is that something he felt, before the acclaim of this book?  If so, he doesn't seem to have confessed that anywhere else.  Do I want to know?

Either way, I'll keep reading Bolano.

#610. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse September 2013

I'm only a day early for this month's Cephalopod Coffeehouse meeting!  All thanks still go to founder, who sometimes refers to himself as A Squid.

As has been my routine, here's a preliminary list of the books I read in the month (now slightly less impressive!):

• Fated by S.G. Browne
• How to Live Safely in a Science Ficitional Universe by Charles Yu
• Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolano
• The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano
• The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano

I'm currently reading The Savage Detectives by...Roberto Bolano.

I've already done a post on HL2SU.  Fated was pretty good, too (although it ends on the most interesting note of the whole piece, like a segue to a Christopher Moore book).  And then I reached Roberto Bolano.

Roberto Bolano is my favorite writer.  He died ten years ago, but you'd hardly know it from his English language publishing schedule.  I first learned about him from the wildly anticipated release of 2666, which was kind of like the Harry Potter of the literary set in 2009.  The massive tome, split into five volumes, is everything conceivable and good about fiction, what I like to consider the ultimate book.  Reading it was the first best way to fall in love with Bolano, which anyone really should have, and in the best of all possible worlds his name would now be as famous as any of the other classics writers you can think of.  At the moment he's not any kind of ready presence in a bookstore, however, at least not here in the States (and my survey is as extensive as it can be), and that's as big a crime as what lies at the heart of 2666.

Anyway, after the massive (and richly deserved) hoopla, it became necessary to release the rest of Bolano's works in English, a project that has only recently, after near a dozen releases, reached its climax.  I haven't managed to collect all of them, but of the ones I have I've finally gotten around to reading them.  That is to say, savoring them.

Most of his books are short works, under two hundred pages.  I'd previously enjoyed By Night in Chile, which affirmed my devotion to Bolano.  Monsieur Pain did likewise, as did The Skating Rink.  The Insufferable Gaucho is a collection of still shorter works, including some essays (and for those interested *cough* Pat Dilloway *cough* in those he sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut), and is probably a release better suited to devotists.

Bolano had a rich voice, and he immersed himself deeply in his characters, who tended to be melancholic literary types exploring mysteries without resolution.  It was always the journey that was the point, as his subjects took readers on a guided tour of their lives as they saw them.  Like many writers, Bolano tended toward sensational, often sensual individuals, though ones who lived on the margins, or who interpreted themselves as living on the margins, of society.  The Skating Rink in particular is extraordinary as it explores three different people whose rotating viewpoints pivoting on a murder in the eponymous location, each at different social levels.  Like a lot of his stories, it reads like a prototype 2666, but is also distinctly its own story.

One of the great benefits of reading Bolano is his focus on Latin America as well as locations in Europe, notably Spain and France.  Bolano himself was Chilean, but he traveled extensively.  When I think of ways my life could have gone differently, this is how I imagine the ideal to be.  In Bolano's view, the literary life was still very much the romantic life, with circles of friends the way it was, say, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.  This was something I knew in college, but I had no idea how to sustain that.  Maybe it's something only the young experience?

Before 2666, there was The Savage Detectives, Bolano's second longest work and what originally brought him international acclaim even among English readers.  Having only read the first sixth so far, I can't speak too much about it, but it rings true with everything I've said in this post, and is recognizable as classic Bolano.

To read Bolano is to truly enjoy reading.  Along with a select few, he's the ideal of all writers for me, and the standard by which I compare all writers, why it can sometimes be difficult for me to appreciate not merely other styles but different levels of skill.  To me, you're either this good or aspire to be, and if you don't, I have no idea why you're writing.  Is this elitism?  Perhaps.  The love of writing should look this good.  And the amazing thing is, Bolano considered himself first and foremost to be a poet (and he was good at that, too, as evidenced in The Romantic Dogs).  Perhaps good writers must be good poets, too.  They must be in love with language.

I will be savoring The Savage Detectives for as long as I can, thank you.

#600. The Cephalopod Coffehouse August 2013

Via our wonderful host the Armchair Squid, here's to the fourth month of the Cephalopod Coffeehouse!

I was going to include this at the end rather than the beginning, which is what I've done in the previous installments, but I figured why break with tradition, and the long list always seems to impress, and this one's long indeed, so here goes, what I read in August:

• Star Trek Online - The Needs of the Many by Michael A. Martin
• The Best American Comics 2007 edited by Chris Ware
• Absolute Death by Neil Gaiman and various
• CassaStorm by Alex J. Cavanaugh
• Azlander: Second Nature by Gabriel Brunsdon
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
• Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos by Harlan Ellison and Paul Chadwick
• Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris by Grant Morrison and various
• Doom Patrol: Down Paradise Way by Grant Morrison and various
• Star Trek: Enterprise - The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin
• Bayou Vol. 1 by Jeremy Love
• Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham and various
• The New Avengers Vol. 1 by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Prophecy and Change edited by Marco Palmieri
• Hellblazer: Rare Cuts by various
• Gone to Amerikay by Derek McCulloch
• Batman: No Man's Land Vol. 4 by Greg Rucka and various
• Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes by Ed Brubaker and various
• Manifesto by Anonymous
• Zulu by Caryl Ferey
• Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

 A large reason why the list is so large this month is because the move that is now days away that will affect much more of what hasn't already been affected by my formerly regular routines in recent months.  I had made a Good Reads goal of reading 75 books, and I wanted to hit that by the end of the month (I've eclipsed that, too, after stretching from the starting point of 50 earlier in the year) when I was still sure I could make regular and timely updates there.  Lots of graphic novels, obviously, as with past lists, but also a bunch of pictureless books, including intrepid ninja captain Alex Cavanaugh's forthcoming new book, which I won at said Good Reads.

I've said before that when I hit the Star Trek books, I'd talk about Star Trek books, and so here we are, I've finished that set, and I'm ready to talk.

I've fallen in love.  Not with Star Trek books in general, but Una McCormack.  She saved Star Trek books for me.  Chances are if you know much about Star Trek books at all, you still won't know the name Una McCormack off the top of your head.  She's not one of the marquee names, even though she should be.  She's awesome, she really is.

The Never-Ending Sacrifice begins almost like any other Star Trek book.  But it builds.  And builds.  It becomes unlike any other Star Trek book quickly enough.  It becomes simply a work of great literature.  The story is all about a Cardassian youth seen in a single episode from the second season of Deep Space Nine, appropriately entitled "Cardassians" (the really notable thing about the episode itself is that it's the first time we see the inimitable Garak since his first appearance, although it's not until later in that season that he becomes a true icon, in "The Wire"). 

This youth had become an orphan, and became stuck between worlds when he ended up being adopted by Bajorans.  The nefarious Gul Dukat uses him in a political ploy, sending him back to his Cardassian father, which mirrors a Next Generation episode that features the actor who was once in St. Elsewhere and would later become Dr. Quinn's son.  Anyway, McCormack brushes on the events of this episode, but really enters pretty quickly into her own story.

It's a lot about Cardassian politics at first, but mostly it's about damaged individuals, and being caught in the swoop of big events.  It's a true epic, completely breathtaking by the end.  It's brilliant.

And it ended up finally making clear to me that problem I always had with Star Trek books.  Most Star Trek books are written from a sense that really has nothing to do with Star Trek itself.  Star Trek, in its filmed incarnations, has always been an expansive look at the human condition.  Sure, there are a lot of wacky things that happen, and the term "technobabble" became especially informative at one point, but in the end, it was never about the starships, the gadgets, the aliens, any of that.  It was about trying survive in a universe that often seems to make it as hard as it can.  A world very much familiar to Star Trek viewers.

It was never "just" science fiction and space conflicts.  But that seems to be what most Star Trek books are about.  They try to ape certain aspects of the filmed experience.  Some of the books even read as if they want desperately to be a movie or an episode.  But even those never seem to get the point.  Even the Dominion War wasn't just about having a war for a couple of seasons.  For pete's sake, they played baseball on the holosuite during that arc!

What I mean to say is, McCormack brought an old world perspective to her book.  Star Trek was always a new world's perspective on the old world.  Most Star Trek books are strictly new world.  They lack any real substance (and sometimes are written fairly poorly besides).  They aren't really Star Trek at all, even if all the trappings are there.  In McCormack's hands, you don't even need to know too much about Cardassians or Deep Space Nine to see the outstanding appeal of her prose.

(And by the way, by complete happenstance, Prophecy and Change features her very first professional work.  I didn't plan that or add it in retroactively.)

After Never-Ending Sacrifice, I also got to enjoy Zulu, which was equally delightful.  I wish all books were as good as these, I really do. 

#597. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse July 2013

Here's my monthly book recap:

• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 1 by Michael Stutz
• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 2 by Michael Stutz
• The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation by Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell
• JSA, Volume 4: Fair Play by Geoff Johns and various
• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 3 by Michael Stutz
• The New Teen Titans Archives Volume 1 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez
• Astronauts in Trouble by Larry Young, Matt Smith, and Charlie Adlard
• The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence
• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
• Why I Became a Muslim by Ian Nisbet
• Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - Watching the Clock by Christopher Bennett

And for the record, I'm currently reading Star Trek Online - The Needs of the Many (so yes, I reached the Star Trek block, though there are three more to follow).

Before going much further, let me give thanks to our Cephalopod founder, the Armchair Squid.  The preceding sentence is not to be construed as suggesting the Squid himself is a cephalopod (or some sort of worship; I don't even particularly like sea food).  He is clearly a lemur.

That's about as jolly as this one's going to get, folks.  This month has not exactly been one for the record books, and that's even before I reached Why I Became a Muslim.  I've referenced before how I formed a Reading List from among the books I've acquired over the years, the priority order as it were.  Sometimes even this List and my selections aren't good enough to keep me reading the best of my own material.  There are several books in the above bullets that weren't even in the List, and although this is always bound to happen, part of the reason why is the Good Reads Curse.

The Good Reads Curse is derived from the giveways the site always has available.  What you get from these giveways is a combination of what you've signed up as a matter of chance for winning, and sometimes, as I've learned, otherwise.  I've ranted before that a lot of books should never have been written, and a lot of writers should seriously reconsider the idea that this is their calling.  This is not a popular sentiment in a blog community filled with writers, not in the sense that bloggers are writers, because they have to be (then again, some of them cede vast tracks of Internet to images), but bloggers who either are already or hope to be published authors of some extraction.

Anyway, what I mean to say is, a lot of what I read this month was writing that should probably have never existed.  Starting with the Circuits of the Wind cycle and certainly including Why I Became a Muslim and also Watching the Clock, this stuff was just not very good reading material.  I quit reading Star Trek books a long time ago expressly because of that, but thought I'd given space and discerning selection enough to have gotten around that.  (Hopefully I can still be proven wrong.)

Circuits is an especially painful effort to lump in this travesty of words, because it was obviously a passion project.  But the writing simply was not good enough to support the passion.  The ambition was not met by skill.  And even one of these three volumes could have been more than enough.  Much the same can be said for Mockingjay, by the way.  I've explained elsewhere why I've read the Hunger Games books at all, but I just don't want to do so again.

The main subject of my wrath should already be obvious.  Why I Became a Muslim is downright insulting.  It's a parody, it really is, of all the prejudices anyone could have against Islam as a whole, written from the perspective of a sincere convert.  One who does such a bad job of expressing himself that he has more or less made it even easier for anyone who doesn't understand the religion in the first place to think it all the more vile.

That's what bad writing can do.  Good writing can accomplish so much, but I don't think that people realize how bad writing can do just as much.  A bad movie, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, can simply be reduced to an object of derision.  Good movies can find the same fate, but there are certainly plenty of movies where it can be universally acknowledged that they are bad.  Bad writing, though, in a book, can have so much more damage.

That's what I mean when I say that books have to be acknowledged as different from other expressive forms of entertainment.  Bennett wrote Watching the Clock, as I've often noticed in the past with bad writing, almost as if he wasn't even writing from the perspective of writing a book so much as trying to copy some other source material (which I assumed was children's cartoons and bad porn, a combination to frighten any good parent).  A writer has a great obligation to do more than just string along sentences and thoughts.  They need to know how to put them together. 

Because if they don't, it shows, and that's what's most striking about Why I Became a Muslim.  This is a explanation of his beliefs more than how he reached them.  Even describing his early years Nisbet can't explain how he reached the conclusion, only to state that he did and then propound the version of what he learned.  It's enough to make anyone scoff at Islam rather than embrace it.

This was far from his intention.  Ostensibly, he began writing it to explain to a son he believed he'd never see again why that was.  He instead presents no discernible consideration for any of the developments that led to that predicament.  It was enough for me to temporarily believe that all Muslims are exactly like that, and that's all anyone needs to know.

Bad writing...!  I came into this post fully believing that I was going to go on a screed against a large segment of the world's population, one that by Nisbet's reckoning has taken its entire stance against everyone by the conviction that it's simply got everything figured out and has for a long time, ever since Islam's founder set down the original record.  And yet even a casual scholar will know that Mohammed struggled for years to establish the beginnings of his new faith (there would be no acknowledgement in Islam's own culture about these early problems otherwise).  It didn't happen overnight.  Yet to hear Nisbet tell it, that's exactly what happened, and because that was the case, Islam is, was, and always will be right about everything. 

If only that were the end of it.  But Why I Became a Muslim is filled with that kind of writing.  I will give Nisbet the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's merely the writing.  There are many Muslims who believe in their faith in exactly that way.  Sadly, they all seem to be suicide terrorists.  And alarmingly, before his conversion Nisbet was in fact learning all sorts of things that might turn out to be useful for just such a cause.  Clearly he doesn't seem to have considered that.  And yet I have.  That's the world we live in today, unfortunately.

I'm not condemning all of Islam.  There's just no point in that.  But I am condemning bad writing.  I hope some day I never have to read it again, or those who perpetuate it will be more willing to see where they've gone wrong.  Because in most cases, bad writers never want to hear that. 

And that's the worst of it.

#593. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse June 2013

Okay, before we dig into Armchair Squid's Cephalopod Coffeehouse book talk, let's list the books I read during June 2013:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King
• Doctor Who - Shada by Douglas Adams by way of Gareth Roberts
• Blockade Billy by Stephen King
• Lunatics by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel
• Cobra: Son of the Snake by Mike Costa and Antonio Fuso
• The World of Flashpoint Featuring Superman by various
• Insane City by Dave Barry
• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
• Cave of the Dark Wind by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
• Batman and Robin Vol. 2 - Pearl by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• War of the Green Lanterns  by Geoff Johns and various
• The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
• Starman Omnibus Vol. 6 by James Robinson and Peter Snejbjerg

and currently:

• Fanon by John Edgar Wideman

Okay, again, before you start to feel like all I do is read, just know that this extensive list is not as impressive as it seems.  Obviously, if the title has superheroes in it you can be assured that it's a graphic novel collection, which doesn't take so much time to read.  There are also several really short books in there, Blockade Billy and Cave of the Dark Wind especially, while I read Good Man Jesus in a single sitting (for whatever reason, which does happen to me but not too often).

But again, a lot of this was easy to read quickly because a lot of it was just very good, and very easy reading.  Crying of Lot 49 was a short read but it took a while, as your better literature (not books in general, but what would typically be called literary fiction) is apt to do.  The writing becomes more involved.  You need to concentrate a little more, with far less nonsense going on that flows from sentence to sentence, page to page, words connecting in such a way that leaves you thinking as you read rather than just knowing that you're being taken for a wild ride.

And that was the way it was with Black Album, and Fanon, as well.  These are reads that even if they take days or a week still feel as if they're taking a month if not longer, not in a bad way, but as if you're living with it and not just watching it pass by.  The books I don't like to read, they're the ones that are a part of the landscape that I'm not particularly interested in.  I'm someone who likes to look at the world around him, but there's always a necessary filter, otherwise you'd go mad noticing everything.

So the month was a combination of the stuff I really love to read, mind-expanding and also simply enjoyable reading.  I even got to read another Douglas Adams!  Sort of!  Adams wrote a little bit of Doctor Who, and a little bit of it got lost along the way, remembered it was falling or something, and recently the kind Mr. Roberts decided to complete it for us.  Since I'm someone who settled the Homer controversy for himself by deciding that it ultimately didn't matter who Homer was or how responsible he was for what we read today of the Trojan War and the journey home for Odysseus, just so long as we acknowledge that he was incredibly important in preserving a long tradition, I don't mind seeing a favorite author become a legacy carried on by someone else.  This isn't to say that I think the creator of anything isn't important, or that we can blithely slap anyone's name on anything (the way some people feel about Shakespeare, although I argue the man was the man, and anyone who says differently has no idea how art really comes about), but that in preserving a name and its legacy, we preserve a part of the culture that's every bit as important as what that person may or may not have contributed.

Confused yet?  You just haven't read enough of me.  By the way, all of these books have lovely, full-sized write-ups at my Good Reads feed.

So if I were to choose only one of these books to write about (again), which would they be?  I'll cheat again and choose the one I'm currently reading, which would be Fanon, naturally.

Fanon is kind of based on the life, or perhaps simply the legacy, of Frantz Fanon, who might be considered the pioneer of the revolutionary '60s.  Author John Wideman has written very much a stream-of-consciousness novel out of the impact Fanon continues to have on his life.  Sometimes it's straight-up metafiction, with Wideman interposing his perspective on the story he's writing, the character he's created and intends to follow.  Sometimes it's really just whatever Wideman feels like writing about.  It's very much the kind of book you will read if you've got patience as a reader, don't just want a straight story but rather are willing to enjoy the journey the author sets you on, no matter the shape it takes.  It's one that begs for some concentration.  That's what I find fascinating about not only reading but writing.

(And for the record, part of what's bothered me about blogging is that I stumbled into a whole community that doesn't seem to understand any of that.  That is another topic, but let me just emphasize: I will never champion something or someone just because I want to champion that someone, but because I believe in the work, in the words themselves.  It's not the story, but rather the way it's told.  Anyone could tell a version of any story, and think they're clever simply for having written something, but writing is more than the art of telling a story, just as reading is more than the art of following a story.  If you don't have an honest-to-god reaction to the story, then the result is a failure.  It's not a matter of support.  It's a matter of preserving a tradition.  No one ever listened to someone tell a story badly.)

So while I ride the wild beast of Wideman's Fanon, I anticipate more books on my Reading List, and even the odd diversions elsewhere.  In July I'll be reading another Good Reads listing I received in the mail, Michael Stutz's Circuits of the Wind trilogy, and then hopefully reach the string of Star Trek books I'll be permitting myself to read after having long since sworn off Star Trek books.  I used to love them.  Practically read nothing but them.  But after a certain point, I stopped trusting them.  I read too many bad ones.  I became so selective that I talked myself out of them entirely.  But a few years ago, I started seeing that there might be some good ones still in that line.  And so I'll be seeing if I was right.  And maybe that'll be the topic for next time.

#590. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse May 2013

I've got a bunch of books to choose from:

• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
• The March by E.L. Doctorow
• The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
• how i became stupid by Martin Page
• Rez Salute by Jim Northrup
• Supergods by Grant Morrison
• The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
• Martin Monsterman by Manny Trembley
• Kaboom! Volume 1 by Jeph Loeb & Jeff Matsuda

And the book I'm reading now, 11/22/63 by Stephen King.

None of these were bad.  On Goodreads I rated each of them either four or five stars (out of five) (and King is already looking at five stars), which meant that this month was an uncommonly good one for me as far as reading went (not to mention prolific, though a lot of these were fairly short).  Choosing one book to rule them all (rather than blab on about all of them), I'll go easy and talk about the current one. 

I've talked about 11/22/63 and King in the past.  The book's central location (or at least starting point) is Lisbon Falls, Maine, which is my hometown, and right next door to where King himself grew up.  Al's Diner isn't really, but Frank Anicetti and the Kennebec Fruit Company are.  You may not know either by name, and you may not even know their defining element, Moxie, but trust me, all three are a big deal, not just for me, not just for Lisbon, but for a lot of people.  The Moxie Festival draws thousands to town every year (this year's is being held July 12-14, if you care to stop by).  Moxie is an acquired taste, a soft drink of a bygone era, when soda was used as medicine (no kidding).

The book is King at his best.  It's about the Kennedy assassination, but it's also about people, which contrary to popular opinion is what he does best.  You can't tell a good horror story without knowing about people, and it's something King knows better than anyone.  It's another of the many stories he's been waiting to tell for years.