Girl Detective

#62 in my book challenge for the year. I’ve been reading and loving Vaughan’s Ex Machina and Y the Last Man comic book series for a while, but I had yet to pick up Runaways. My friend the Big Brain told me to be patient; the initial series was going to be collected in a full-size, color hardcover. I’m glad I waited rather than picking up the individual issues here and there. The art, by newcomer Adrian Alphona, is distinctive and engaging, and it benefits from the increase in size. Runaways is the story of six teenagers who accidentally discover that their parents are supervillains. Some have powers of their own, others have gadgets, and one has a genetically engineered pet velociraptor. As the series progresses, both the parents and the teens are fleshed out believably. One of the teens is revealed as the mole, and another turns out to have a surprising crush. In the notes that accompany this collection, Vaughan writes that he was trying to make a true all-ages book, one that could be read, understood and enjoyed by kids and adults. I think he’s succeeded, and am now awaiting the next Runaways collection.

#61 in my book challenge for the year. My husband and several other people I know started Harry Potter #6 (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) only to say, “I completely forget what happened in #5.” Forewarned, I read #5 in preparation for #6. #5 is the 766-page, brick-sized, potential bludgeoning weapon in the series, so this was not something I undertook lightly. Yet I blazed through the book in just a few days, when books less than half as long have taken me twice as long.

I know there are many out there who don’t like the Harry Potter books, and especially don’t like the hype that they’ve garnered. Fair enough. J.K. Rowling is a fair, not a great, writer of prose, and her books have some serious plot flaws, chief among them, in my opinion, the continued failure of Harry and his friends to confide in adults who have proved themselves trustworthy again and again. If Rowling were a bit more precise in plotting, she could come up with much better reasons why Harry & Co. couldn’t or wouldn’t confide.

There is much to these books’ credit, though. First, they’re getting people to read who might otherwise not. Second, they’ve brought notice and acceptability to that bastard stepchild genre of literature, fantasy. It’s not just for nerds anymore. Third, in spite of plot flaws they are hugely enjoyable, eminently readable tales. And finally, they’re full of engaging, sympathetic characters who have grown more complex over the course of the series. In all, I think the books do much more good than harm. I think detractors are welcome to their opinion, but there’s no need to go on about it.

This book once again escalates the darkness and complexity. Harry is a very believable angry young man. He is confused about his attraction to Cho Chang, he is angry that Dumbledore is keeping him in the dark and ignoring him, he is frustrated that people don’t believe him that Voldemort is back, and he is reckless in his interactions with the new defense against the dark arts professor, Dolores Umbridge, who has been sent from the ministry of magic to keep an eye on things at Hogwarts.

The central plot of the book is solid. There is a group called the Order of the Phoenix that has re-formed in order to fight Voldemort. But other subplots, even if they are integrated, still felt extraneous, such as Hermione’s ongoing attempts to free the house elves, and the mysterious thing that Hagrid is up to this book. I found the shenanigans of Fred and George Weasley to be very entertaining, and was thrilled when they seized control of their fate. Someone in the book who is important to Harry does die, but I felt curiously unmoved both times I’ve read this book by it. On the one hand, it seemed inevitable. On the other, perhaps I was so distracted by the rest of the 766 pages (in the English, Bloomsbury edition) that I couldn’t focus my attention.

This book has the same extremely aggravating flaw as all the books beforehand, which is that Harry is unreasonably stubborn about confiding in trustworthy adults, and much distress might have been avoided. Rowling is great at making the reader want to find out what happens next, but I deplore this contrived way that she manufactures the conflict at points.

I am working at a readable summary of this book for those who don’t wish to re-read it before tackling #6. I found it a quick and enjoyable read, though, and am glad to have undertaken it.

#60 in my book challenge for the year. I was given this book (and its sequels) by a kind friend of mine when I was having postpartum trouble nearly two years ago. It continually got shuffled around and never made it onto my reading list till now. I can see why my friend sent it. True to its cover blurbs, it is a funny, touching, life-affirming book. Botswana itself is so carefully and lovingly described it is almost a character itself. But the main character, Ms. Precious Ramotswe, is a gem. She is honest, down-to-earth, and intelligent. I was thrilled to see her detective business succeed. This also was a good reality check book, with many reminders of what is and is not really important.

I had a few quibbles, though. First, the novel jumped around from story to story, often with little connection or continuity among her cases. Second, there was a little too much reverence for the simple life. The east/west dichotomy is not always so clear cut. Finally, I found the ending strained belief, though it was a relief. These concerns, though, are minor compared to the experience of the whole, which is overall quite worthy.

#59 in my book challenge for the year. This book had some serious wow factors. It is a noir cop novel set in Bangkok. The main character is a Buddhist who uses meditation as a detection method, and can see the past lives of those around him. Several times I paused in reading and thought, this book is really cool. There is murder, corruption, drugs, and a damsel who may or may not be in distress. The book covers lots of ground–east/west culture clash, a few short but stunning passages on Thai food, and the complex situational ethics of Bangkok prostitution. The main character of Sonchai is one of the most compelling I’ve read. The ending is somewhat vague. Some might find it frustrating, but I thought it balanced well, karmically. It’s not nice and tidy like a typical American detective novel, but it’s not inconsistent with the rest of the book, which is pleasantly different from a typical American detective novel.

#58 in my book challenge for the year. I re-read the book after seeing the movie, and can now say that the movie gets muddled when it departs from the book. I can see why the film director chose to depart, because the book is complex. It centers on Sophie, a young hat girl who is bewitched to look like an old woman. Ashamed of her appearance, she leaves home and takes up residence in the moving castle of the title, owned by the wizard Howl. There are many mysteries that Sophie must solve, and she must stand up to any number of witches and difficult situations. Sophie is a strong, well-realized female character, and her story is a compelling one. I recommend this and other books by Diana Wynne Jones for fans of fantasy and Harry Potter.

#57 in my book challenge for the year was Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It was a fast, flashy read that at first blush was quite clever. A little distance made it less brilliant, but still worthwhile and enjoyable. The Guardian has an amusing digested read of Freakonomics. Levitt is an unconventional economist who tackles puzzles that interest him rather than financials. He targets conventional wisdom, and notes that something becomes convention because it’s convenient and easy to believe, while not always true. Among the objects of his scrutiny are drug dealers, schoolteachers, and worried parents. Some of the comparisons he draws are overly extreme, as when he compares real estate agents to Ku Klux Klan members.

One of Levitt’s most contested points was that the unexpected crime drop of the 80’s was due to the aftereffect of Roe v. Wade. The pool of potential criminals was smaller because they had not been born. The authors wait until the end of the chapter, though, to say (in somewhat murky prose) that abortion is not effective crime control. They did point out, though, what many tracts on abortion don’t, which is that abortion is largely an issue for poor, minority women. Financially secure white women will always have access to safer abortions, whether they’re legal or not. One of the numbers they did not mention, though, is that when abortion is illegal, more women (usually poor, minority women) die.

I appreciated the chapters on effective parenting. They discovered that there was no correlation between success in school and reading to a child every day, the amount of TV kids watch, or how often children are taken to museums. There is, however, strong correlation with the age and education of the mother and number of books in the home. Interestingly, they did not define what they considered success in school. There was a murky bit when they argued that school choice didn’t matter–students who applied in a lottery for a different school did the same whether they went to that school or their local one. But another section argued that young children at poorer, mostly minority schools did worse than counterparts at wealthier, whiter schools. This may have been a distinction in age–young children versus high schoolers, but that wasn’t made clear.

Last week I read Bruce Campbell’s autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor (#56 in my book challenge for the year) and went to see Bruce host a screening of The Man with the Screaming Brain (#38 in my movie challenge for the year).

Bruce Campbell is best known for his starring work in the Evil Dead trilogy, a set of B-movie horror flicks from the 80’s and 90’s. I saw Evil Dead for the first time when I was in college (in Henle 21, for the record), because some guy friends were big fans. It was bloody and it was funny, and I remember one of the guys kept up a continuous chorus of, “Oh, this part is so awesome.” It was clear that the guys had the movie memorized.

The director of the Evil Dead films, Sam Raimi, hit the big time finally with the very good Spider Man and even better Spider Man 2. Campbell has managed to stay alive in Hollywood as a B actor, but he doesn’t bemoan his fate. He has genuine affection for the early movies and how much creative control he and his friends had on them. He’s been in some big movies, such as the Coen Brothers The Hudsucker Proxy, and has spent a lot of time doing series television, first on the short-lived Adventures of Brisco Country, Jr. and later as a recurring character first on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and later on Xena: Warrior Princess. If Chins Could Kill is an entertaining, anecdote-laden trip. Campbell is humorous and self-effacing, and comes off as a likable guy. Bruce is touring in support of his new book, How to Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way.

The Man with the Screaming Brain is his first time directing a film. It was financed by the Sci-Fi channel, who told him he had to film in Bulgaria, so he re-wrote the movie around that. During the Q & A after the showing, Campbell joked that the film wasn’t released, it had escaped. He did a good bit of bantering back and forth, solidifying that funny, good-guy persona. The Man with the Screaming Brain is the story of a mad scientist (Stacey Keach) who discovers a way to merge brain cells of different people. It’s played for slapstick, and it is quite funny at times. Both City Pages and The Beat have reviewed it favorably, and perhaps a bit kindly, but it’s hard not to want to be kind to Campbell. It will air on the Sci Fi Channel on Septemer 10.

When I moaned the other night that I was behind in my reading, my husband G. Grod patiently explained that I had already met my book challenge for the year, then chosen to increase it, so I was really ahead, and not behind.

Nonetheless, it does feel as if some of the books I’ve read lately have taken up more of my time than they were worth. That, though, probably isn’t so much about slow reading as it is about unworthy books.

#55 in my book challenge for the year, The Year of Secret Assignments is a really good young adult novel. It’s mostly epistolary, told in letters by six students in a pen-pal project, plus in journal and notebook entries. It is both funny and touching, centering on friendship, loss, finding oneself, plus a teensy bit of revenge. The main characters are likeable and engaging, and the book moves at a quick pace.

#54 in my book challenge for the year is the latest graphic novel collection of Y the Last Man, Vaughan’s tale of the only man who wasn’t killed off in a plague that killed all male animals on the planet. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. The story, the characters, and the art are all strong. We finally find out why Yorick survived, and it’s an interesting, believable addition to the plot that still leaves some questions. The collection has a good, cliff-hanger ending, and leaves me excited for the next installment of the story.

#53 in my book challenge for the year is another excellent entry in the Rush Hour series, an anthology of short pieces for teen readers and those of us who admire teen literature. In fact, the anthology might have done its job too well. It featured several excerpts from to-be published novels, and over the next few days, I kept thinking, where was that character I just read. Three of the novel excerpts made such a strong impression–”Open Ice”, “Humble and Grand” and “The Center of the World”–that I felt as if I was still hanging out with the characters.

#52 in my book challenge for the year, and finally, a really good book! It feels as if I haven’t read one in a while. Housekeeping centers around two young sisters and the family members that care for them. It is a meditation on family, loss, home, transcience, and more. The editors of a recent anthology of contemporary writing noted that most of the submissions from women writers ahd been “disapointingly domestic.” Domestic does not mean disappointing, as Robinson’s novel clearly demonstrates. Her writing is lovely, the characters full-fleshed and compelling, the sense of place concrete, and the story pulls the reader right through. Housekeeping met with much critical acclaim when it was published in 1980, and it was only last year that Robinson published her second novel, Gilead, which I am now eager to read.

#51 in my book challenge for the year, In the Shadow of the Law is a legal thriller. It is sure to be compared to Grisham, which is unfortunate, because In the Shadow of the Law is a solidly written, non-formulaic thriller.

Roosevelt is a professor of law and former Supreme Court clerk. His prose is sometimes more exuberant than necessary, but perhaps fiction provides a welcome departure from legal-ese. There is plenty of the latter in this book. One of the characters, Mark, is a clueless first-year student, who regularly asks other characters what is going on. His ignorance means others explain legal facts to him and thus to the reader. While this is useful to the plot and informative in general, sometimes the explanations are long and result in unbelievable dialogue.

The best developed character is Walker, the former Supreme Court clerk who eventually looks to escape the crush of the firm by becoming a law professor. While some of the other characters were a little too easily categorized, each was given a good amount of complex and believable backstory. There was Mark, the clueless one, Katja, the hardworking one, Peter the soulless head of the firm, and Ryan, the boorish one who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Ryan is so obnoxious that I found the chapters on him difficult to read. I became excited when it looked as if Ryan might die a quick and nasty death. Instead, he goes on to an interesting fate that I did not foresee.

At one point, I thought I had foreseen a key plot point to the ending, but it it turned out to be merely one of several factors. The book centers on two cases, a chemical fire and a death-row appeal. Both the cases in the plot were tied up well and believably. The case endings and the fates of the characters were pleasant surprises, not formulaic or predictable. This was a smart, promising legal thriller.

I have reached and now surpassed my 50 book challenge for the year, coming squeakily close to doing it by the end of June, if it hadn’t been for the overlong Prep. Since I managed to reach my goal just past the middle of the year, I have re-evaluated. In general, the goal is a good one–approximately one book a week for a year. But I also read graphic novels and teen fiction, both of which are usually very fast reads. I wondered if I should stop counting these books, and only list the so-called adult books. Yet that seems unfair. They may be faster to read, but they’re still books, and books deserving of wider attention and appreciation than they’re usually given. Based on my personal choice of reading matter, I think a goal of 100 books for the year would be a more suitable challenge. It would urge me to read, on average, one “big” book and one young adult or graphic novel a week. The new goal, then, is 100 books for the year. I’m already behind!

#50 in my 50 book challenge for the year was Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, about a midwestern girl who attends an exclusive east-coast prep school on scholarship. Sittenfeld recently wrote a mean-spirited review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot, which I thought was a sweet, well-written book. When a friend gave me her copy of Prep, I decided to judge for myself whether Sittenfeld had written a good book, and whether it was better than Bank’s.

The answer was no, on both counts. Prep reminded me in tone of Alexander Payne’s film About Schmidt. It dwelt on the awkward, the ugly and the embarrassing in human nature with scarce redemption to balance the pain. My friend had noted, “the main character is a little self-involved. Sometimes I wanted to slap her upside the head and tell her to get over herself.” My friend is much kinder than I am. I found the main character, Lee Fiora, so self-involved that she was almost completely unsympathetic, and I spent most of the book’s 400+ pages wanting to shake some sense into her. Lee was an uncomfortable mix–hyper-observant of others, yet uninsightful about herself. Her actions consistently hurt those around her. Four hundred pages lacking in self-awareness, growth, and plot did not make for an enjoyable or rewarding reading experience. Prep read like an uncomfortably realistic high-school girl’s journal, with the boring, overwrought and turgid bits left in.

Prep, though, is not without merit. Sittenfeld’s prose was overall good, and she had some excellent insights into issues of class, as cwhen Lee notes how she sometimes wears her non-scholarship roommates clothes: “And I could have offered her something of mine, but she didn’t wear my clothes, which was not a fact we discussed.” (P. 252)

A weird thing that bothered me was that Sittenfeld used semi-colons so liberally that I suspect many of them had to be edited out. Most pages had a semi-colon and frequent em-dashes, and as a former copyeditor I found these punctuation marks to be distractingly frequent.

A weird thing I liked, though, was the cover, which has a pink and green grosgrain belt that is realistically crinkly to the touch.

#49 in my 50 book challenge for the year, Necklace of Kisses revisits Block’s most famous character Weetzie Bat at 40. A kind friend lent me an advance reader’s edition, as this book has not yet been released. “Where were the kisses, Weetzie Bat wondered”, as she considers her failing relationship with My Secret Agent Lover Man. In the wake of 9/11 he has shut her out, and now goes by Max. Weetzie escapes to a pink hotel. We are treated to tantalizing and too-brief chapters on the supporting characters, including Max, Witch Baby (who now goes by Lily), and Cherokee Bat. Most of the book concerns Weetzie’s magical adventures at the hotel as she encounters a surgically altered mermaid, a satyr, a sweet transvestite, fairies on the run, and more. Some of the encounters are charming, some are menacing, and all are underscored by Weetzie’s desire to meet with Zane Starling, a boy from her youth that she didn’t kiss and now wishes that she had.

Block’s prose is lyrical and well suited to her story of magical realism. Both the story and the characters are more grounded than many of Block’s previous works. It was a bold and interesting move to take the ethereal character of Weetzie and to bring her forward from 80’s LA to situate her more squarely in the harsh light of modern time. I suspect that the increased realism is informed by Block’s own relatively recent motherhood, since many of Weetzie’s meditations concern raising Witch Baby and Cherokee. There is a touching scene in which the daughters admonish Weetzie to dress her age, grow up and go home. “And now they had looked at her so coolly, as if she were only monstrous in her orange sneakers.”

Necklace of Kisses is a sequel to a well-loved and critically acclaimed teen-fiction series (collected as Dangerous Angels), yet I believe it will be marketed by publisher HarperCollins as adult fiction, or more accurately a crossover book, one that will be shelved in adult sections in libraries and bookstores, but purchased by both adults and teens.

I am hesitant to critique the book because I have such affection for the characters and their author. While I was thrilled to revisit some of my favorite characters, I’m not sure I liked them as well as I did their 80’s selves. One of the things I love about Block’s books is how she writes about food. Here, though, Weetzie is a lactose-intolerant, sugar-eschewing, teetotalling vegetarian. The descriptions of food were still good, but I found the numerous dietary restrictions distracting, and the food in this book didn’t sound as delicious as in previous books. Also, there were a few too many awkward brand name mentions. What discomfited me most, though, is the dreadful cover featuring a photo-realistic sparkly pink suitcase. (Weetzie’s suitcase in the novel is covered with tiny pink rosebuds.) I was embarrassed to be seen reading a book with that cover. I wished for a cover that was more impressionistic and ethereal, yet I wished that for the characters and the book as well. I wanted more balance between the magic and the realism, and instead Block veered too sharply between their extremes.

#48 in my 50 book challenge for the year. Block is one of my favorite authors. Wasteland, a teen-fiction novel, is the spare, bittersweet story of Marina, and her sorrow in the wake of her brother Lex’s death. Marina casts about for reasons, aided by her friend West. The book is narrated alternately by all three, even by Lex, seemingly from beyond the dead. The book is powerful and provocative, but I felt Block pulled her punches at the end with a soap-opera-convention plot turn. It is filled with late 70’s/early 80’s detail, and does not have much of Block’s characteristic poetic prose and magical realism, though it is nonetheless beautifully written.

You died. You were sitting on the bleachers in P.E. when Ms. Sand told you to go to the principal’s office. You were peeling the yellow rubber thing that said N.H.H.S. off of your green gym shorts and chewing your fingernails on the other hand. You could taste the bitter peel of polish. You were staring down through the slats of the bleachers to the gym floor. You were not even forcing tears back down because there weren’t any because you were dead.

You, that’s me. You called me you and I called you you. That was our name for each other. When you died I did and so it didn’t matter. (P. 19)

#47 in my 50 book challenge for the year. This graphic novel picks up where Persepolis left off, with the teenaged Marji sent to Europe to escape war-torn Iran. Abroad she finds a universal truth–at home she felt repressed, but abroad she feels alienated, so neither can give her comfort. My favorite section was the visit from her mother, and the affection conveyed between them. Satrapi returns to Iran to find it both changed and the same. The simple art evokes the story and emotions well. Like Persepolis before it, I found it easy to engage with the story of a woman whose life is very different from mine, and think this is both an excellent story as well as good insight into a different culture.

#46 in my 50 book challenge for the year. Though not labelled as such, this is a novel in stories. We meet Sophie Applebaum with her family at her cousin’s bat mitzvah, and re-visit them periodically through the next two decades of life changes. The book could be read simplistically, and wrongly, as Sophie’s quest to find a man. Instead, I found Bank created a tapestried life for Sophie that also included her evolution in self-awareness, jobs, friendships and family relations. Bank’s writing is deceptive. Her style is spare yet razor sharp. She is able to convey characters and nuances in relationships with very few words. Her characters are recognizable without being cliches. I loved the charming but unreliable crush in “Teen Romance” and the should-be-right-but-isn’t guy of “The One After You.” The book is both funny and sad. It ends with Sophie getting the best of an old boyfriend at a party in Brooklyn as she leaves with a new one, and in a job that she isn’t embarrassed to admit. It wasn’t so much a happily-ever-after ending, as much as the highest, happiest point she had yet reached, one that she might yet go beyond.

On our second cigarette break, he offered me his jacket, and I took it without a word. He said, “So, what line of work are you in, Applebaum?”

When I told him I wrote advertising copy, he asked if he’d seen any of my ads.

“Live live live girls girls girls?” I said. “That’s mine.”

He seemed to know that I’d made this joke before; he went right by it. (P. 214)

Yet another great graphic novel collaboration for Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev. Strong story, strong art, and book #45 in my 50 book challenge for the year. This story jumps between three main points in time. Each part of the story is drawn in a different style, suited to the comics history of the time. The flashbacks are seamless, and both story and art lend to good characterization. We are also introduced to a new superhero. This could be a standalone graphic novel, but I recommend you go back and start with Volume 4: Underboss, and keep reading. Daredevil is a great character, and this team has put together a series of really good books.