Girl Detective

Oh, I loved re-reading Carter Beats the Devil, the next selection for Twin Cities’ book club Books and Bars. And I’m glad I liked it, since I was one of the people who recommended the book. What if I’d misremembered, or been in a weird mood, or hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t that good? I’m glad to say, none of these are true. Gold’s tale of vaudeville magic was as thumping a read the second time as it was the first.

The Overture with which it opens introduce Charles Carter, a stage magician in 1923, and a famous show which President Warren G. Harding attended. Amazing things happen, then the book recedes to Carter’s childhood:

“I’ll need an assistant sometimes.”

Their eyes met, and James’s watered. He looked away.

“It’s all right,” Charles added. “I can do it alone.”

James slipped into the tub, under the water, and then resurfaced. Later, Charles, too, would get into the tub, but for now he stood alone and held the rock in his hand, because it had already started for him: his hands felt naked without something in them–a card, a coin, a rope–and whenever they held something secretly, they felt educated. (66)

This book is enthralling historical fiction, with great characters from the golden age of magic including Houdini, suspense, mystery, tragedy and romance. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is to say that Gold blends history and fiction so entertainingly that I am utterly uninterested in researching what was “real” in the story. The show is so good that I don’t care to know how the tricks were done.

I didn’t feel the love for One Day that critics did. It’s covered with amatory blurbs. I read it for one of my book groups, Books and Bars, and probably would have put it down.

The conceit is descriptions of only one day per year of the two main characters, Emma and Dexter, whom we meet in bed the morning after they finish university. Emma is a brainy feminist idealist. Dexter is a handsome lazy guy from a wealthy family who develops a drinking problem. Since the book starts with them in bed, it ostensibly avoids some of the “will they or won’t they,” yet it doesn’t. That tension underlies most of the book, and I didn’t find it that compelling, mostly because I didn’t care for the main characters. I am fine with unlikeable characters, but only if they are complex. Emma and Dexter were unlikeable because they were uninteresting to me, each a pastiche of unsurprising stock traits.

There is a major twist toward the end, and I feel the book picked up a bit after that, if only because there was finally some character development, but it was too little, too late for me. I leaked a few grudging tears at the end, so wasn’t unmoved, but became annoyed with it again as I tried to find illustrative quotes, and have given up. Not for me, but it did inspire a good book discussion, even if many of us left without figuring out why others loved the book.

Next up: Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold (aka Mr. Alice Sebold.)

I saw the spine of I Think I Love You, and had to pick it up; that was a favorite song from my girlhood and had a renaissance in college when my roommates and I would get up on a coffee table and sing it with improvised microphones at the top of our lungs. I think we all also had it played at our weddings; I have a photo in my wedding album of us dancing and singing to it.

After I picked it up I saw it was by Allison Pearson, whose I Don’t Know How She Does It I enjoyed and it helped me make the decision to resign my corporate job and stay home with my then 9mo son Drake. The description of I Think I Love You talked about teen idols, girls’ friendships, women’s friendship, the difficulties of middle age, all of which sounded right in my wheelhouse. The back blurbs were starred reviews from PW and Kirkus. I charmed a double discount from the guy behind the desk, and walked out with it, which was going to happen in any case.

The book centers on Petra, a 13 year old Welsh girl in 1974 hopelessly in love with David Cassidy. She holds a precarious place in a clique of girls, and a burgeoning best-friendship with Sharon. Petra’s chapters alternate, though, with Bill, a college-grad know-it-all who ghost writes an English David Cassidy fan magazine. As much as it shames him, he finds he is very good at his job, while he tells his girlfriend he’s a rock journalist, bending the truth more than a bit.

Bill stood and watched beside the other journalists, most of them men, none of them Cassidy fans; not in public, at any rate. How surprising it was, then, to see their lips move in sync to half the songs, as if they had been versed in his collected works by the power of hypnotic suggestion. Maybe they couldn’t help it; maybe they just had the radio on all day, in the kitchen at home, beside the draining board, and then on a shelf at the office, next to an open window. Cassidy songs would come and go, through an average radio day, and over the weeks they would seep into your nervous system, whether you wanted them there or not, and you would find yourself breaking out into a song, no more able to prevent it than you would a violent rash. (145)

The book moved from the 70’s to the 90’s, and does a very good psychological portrait of teenage fandom. Both the dust jacket and the binding are a blinding hot pink, so you have to embrace that you’re reading chicklit; I can’t really imagine a guy reading this book. It is by a woman, about girls and women, and really for girls and women and the different stages of life and love that many of us go through.

I was born a little late for the David Cassidy craze. My first pop crush was Donny Osmond, and my second was David’s younger half-brother, Shaun. But the details of pop-star worship are dead on, even with different pop stars, and girls from a different country than mine. If you ever had a crush on a pop star or ever suffered the cruelty of other girls, then I think you’ll find much to identify with and appreciate here.

This year I finally acknowledged how silly it was to say I wasn’t going to buy any books. So I noted something like I’d try to keep it to two a month. Which did not take into account graphic novels, so it’s not a much less silly goal. I’m not sure what a reasonable one would be, but perhaps I can keep track of this year’s acquisitions, and base next year’s on it? (Did you notice how I weaseled out of accountability for the WHOLE YEAR?)

Jan books

For my own purposes (and perhaps as an excuse to my husband, who is a little better than me about not buying books) I’ll include the rationalizations/perfectly good reasons.

One Day by David Nicholls. For Books and Bars on 2/22/11. Also because I could have won something by buying a book. Didn’t win.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. Because I saw the movie and read a recommendation at The Morning News.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. Bought for The Morning News Tournament of Books because library queue too long, and I really enjoyed Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.

News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist by Laurie Hertzel. I won a signed copy at my friend Amy’s blog. Woo!

Savages by Don Winslow. Same reason as Lemon Cake: ToB plus library queue too long.

Number of these I have even started: 0.

February books

Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett. Because I’m starting a book group on literature with religious and mythic themes. I thought this might have a related essay.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Because this was recommended online as an example of the Demeter/Persephone myth, so I might want to read it for the above-mentioned book group, and it’s an Oxford World Classics edition, my favorite.

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. I recently read an old Guardian article dishing on past Booker decisions; it made me want to seek this out. Since it’s about women and philosophy, I thought it might also work for the book group.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Because it’s about women and religion and I might want to read it for the book group, and when I went to look for my copy, I couldn’t find it.

I Think I Love You by Alison Pearson. Four of these things belong together; one of these things just doesn’t belong…It’s awfully pink, no? Saw the title, which was one of my favorite party songs in college, saw it was by Alison Pearson, whose I Don’t Know How She Does It I loved, saw it was about girlhood crushes, friendship, aging, motherhood, and had starred reviews from Kirkus and PW. I couldn’t leave Barnes and Noble without it, and it jumped the TBR queue ahead of all the other books in this entry. And I love it. So there.

I will lead a discussion next week of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and just finished re-reading it. This was my third time through, and I like it better each time (2005, and in 2007).

Gilead is narrated by John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist minister in small-town Iowa during the 1950’s. Ames married late in life, and has a seven-year-old son to whom he’s writing a series of letters for when he’s gone. In them, he describes his family, including his father and grandfather, both preachers, though of very different approaches. The family history is tied to the town of Gilead, and its past of racial unrest. During the writing of his letters, Ames is disturbed by the return to town of his godson and namesake, John Ames Boughton, called Jack.

He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved.

Ames experiences jealousy, anger and fear as he struggles to understand the complicated relationship between this young man (the son of Ames’ best friend) and himself. Themes of mortality, religion, prejudice, relationships and belief underpin the book, all told in Robinson’s clear, beautiful prose. Ames can be a slippery narrator, though, often writing one thing when the truth lies clearly elsewhere. In interviews about the book, Robinson has said the conflicting Biblical stories of Gilead intrigued her. The phrase “balm of Gilead” refers to something made from a native healing plant, yet a possible translation of Gilead is “rocky area.” Robinson carries this disparity through in the book, urging the reader to realize multiple, often conflicting truths.

The book barely acknowledges World War II and the Holocaust, though it’s set in 1956 America. Further, much is made of the suffering of fathers and sons, but little of daughters and their mothers. I suspect these are deliberate omissions, though, examples of the complicated nature of Gilead and John Ames.

Thoughtful and meditative, this is a book to savor, not gobble, and especially poignant in its consideration of the many complications in father/son relationships.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Emma Donoghue’s Room arrived to much hoopla last fall. This was largely due to its explosive subject matter, a mother raising her now-five-year-old son in a small room. The boy, Jack, knows nothing of the outside world, and narrates the book.

Here’s what I can say without spoilers: this is a powerful book about a mother and son. The author, for the most part, pulls off the tricky feat of the five-year-old narrator. This is not a happy-sunshine book, but neither is it apocalyptic doom. It’s provocative and well worth reading not only for its many merits, but also to talk about it later. Those who might want to avoid it are readers averse to stories with deadbeat fathers, child-in-danger motifs, or violence/rape of women, though these last were not graphic.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

***

Seriously, spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t read it. You don’t want to know.

I was amazed by the powerful narrative of the beginning of the book, and impressed with the slow accretion of facts filling in the background of the little boy and his mother, Ma, and how they came to be in Room. I loved the proper naming of everything in their tiny space, like Bed, Toilet, and Meltedy Spoon. I was impressed by the energy and ingenuity of Ma and the many ways she invented to raise Jack in isolation. For the first half, I felt compelled to read the book. It had a very high must-know-what-happens quotient. I was also impressed by how the author raised anxiety to a breaking point in me as a reader, then changed the setting to the outside world. I could feel what Jack and Ma were feeling throughout, and other characters as well. The psychology and motivations are very well done even if often squirm-inducingly uncomfortable.

The second half of the book, in the outside world, wasn’t as compelling to me as the first for several reasons. One, Jack’s voice wasn’t as consistently believable as a young boy:

That helicopter was full of paparazzi trying to steal pictures of me and Ma.

Two, everyone from the outside was either continually insensitive (Ma’s mother, father, and brother’s family, Noreen the nurse, the Oprah-ish character, i.e. most people) or not (Officer Oh, Dr. Clay, Steppa Leo). There wasn’t a lot of variation in the way people reacted, even if I did clearly understand why some of them were being insensitive and often even empathized with them.

Three, the end of the novel became too overtly didactic at points, for example criticizing those who are uncomfortable with breastfeeding, and most parents for how they care for their children.

What was to be four, but has changed even in the writing of this, was that I found Ma without enough complexity. For the most part, she was a perfect mother, raising her child skillfully even in spite of the insane circumstances. Once outside, she continued to be a strong, vocal character, wavering little, and making sense in the face of many people’s nonsensical behavior. However, while I did understand her choice to keep the outside world from Jack until he was five, I had a very hard time with her cajoling him in the escape attempts. In the second half, many readers didn’t believe she would attempt suicide, leaving Jack on his own. I initially felt the same, but after reflection felt the opposite. Suicide is not a rational, balanced decision. It is, for most, a strong impulse to stop the pain, which Ma had in abundance. I easily believe her pain and PTSD could have overwhelmed her protectiveness of Jack, especially now that she was away from her captor and in a safe environment with Dr. Clay and Noreen on the inside, and her mother and brother on the outside. So while initially Ma struck me as not complex enough, I changed my mind.

In the end, I recommend this book. Its many strengths far outweigh the few criticisms I had, and I suspect the characters will stay with me for some time.

For two other reviews I liked see Aimee Bender’s at the New York Times and one from the Entertainment Weekly blog.

The third in Gibson’s “Bigend” trilogy, Zero History brings back two of the three main characters from Spook Country, Milgrim and Hollis. Milgrim is now working for Bigend, and Hollis reluctantly drawn back into doing same.

She was starting her second cup, Times unread, when she saw Hubertus Bigend mount the stairhead, down the full length of the long room, wrapped in a wide, putty-colored trench coat.

He was the ultimate if velour-robe types, and might just as well have been wearing one now as he swept toward her through the drawing room, unknotting the coat’s belt as he came, pawing back its Crimean lapels, and revealing the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen. He somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, if if he grew somehow closer.

Both Milgrim and Hollis are, improbably, on the trail of… wait for it…

pants. Milgrim is trying to find a prototype of a good military pant, while Hollis is recruited to track down something known as a secret brand. Tying together the marketing and fashion aspects from Pattern Recognition and the spy/spook elements from Spook Country, Zero History brings in old characters and weaves them in with new. It is not easily identifiable by genre, though Gibson is traditionally shelved in Science Fiction. There’s mystery, thriller, and even romance. This book, like its predecessors, was plain fun to read and had a huge amount of “I want to know what happens next” charisma, which carried me swiftly along, with short chapters and alternating viewpoints.

After finishing, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Gibson from the current print edition of Rain Taxi. And I look forward to spelunking through his previous works.

Spook Country, the 2nd in William Gibson’s “Bigend” trilogy, includes only one character (Hubertus Bigend himself) from and the briefest mention of Pattern Recognition, the first book in the series, so it could easily be read on its own or in reverse order.

Spook Country is told from three viewpoints: Hollis Henry, the former lead singer of a popular broken-up band; Tito, whose mysterious family ties are a mix of Cuban, Chinese and Russian. And Milgrim, a Russian translator addicted to Atavan kidnapped by some vaguely militaristic guy named Brown. All are mixed up in some way with covert intelligence and virtual reality locators on the GPS grid.

“Rausch,” said the voiced in Hollis Henry’s cell. “Node,” it said

She turned on the bedside lamp, illuminating the previous evening’s empty can of Asahi Draft, from the Pink Dot, and her sticker-encrusted PowerBook, closed and sleeping. She envied it.

***

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

***

Milgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat he’d stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli, watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of key’s taken from a small transparent Ziploc bag, exactly the sort of bag that Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s East Village dealer, used to package crystal.

As in Pattern Recognition, Gibson writes breezily about global business and emerging technologies, adding political fallout from 9/11 this book to make a headier mix. All three characters are engaging and sympathetic. Bigend’s motivations, and his behind-the-scenes manipulations, are as mysterious as they were in Pattern Recognition. This is heady stuff, well-written, that made my brain feel just a bit more alive and alert while I was reading it. I’ll be on to Zero History to finish the trilogy posthaste.

I re-read both Tana French’s The Likeness and its predecessor, In the Woods, in preparation for a discussion at Book and Bars last week. I loved it again this time, again strongly enamored of an academic/intellectual haven depicted, but was surprised to find myself disappointed in the ending, which dragged on and on, for well over 100 pages once the biggest of big reveals happened. Nonetheless, I was happy to spend time with this book, narrated by Cassie Maddox, a supporting character from In the Woods, who is suffering emotional fallout from her previous case when she is presented with an opportunity to go undercover and find who murdered a girl who looked just like her. Cassie’s past and present, undercover and real-world selves, personal and professional lives, get mixed up in complex and fascinating ways as she joins a household of insular intellectuals, all of whom are suspects in the murder.

Like In the Woods, there is a fairly preposterous premise, but I was happy to suspend my disbelief and tear through the book. Even though I knew who did it, I still appreciated the plot, though not the pacing at beginning and end. I was happy to spend more time with Cassie, and liked meeting her former boss Frank. I especially loved her time spent undercover, the group of people she falls in with, and their bizarre but idyllic life:

“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world–we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a farm more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

As I raced to finish the book in time for the discussion, I was shocked to discover something I’d missed the first time through. It’s in a paragraph near the end, so I assume I was skimming through the slow bits the first time I read to get to the end. I shared this with some friends who’d also read the book, who were also shocked when they carefully read this short but powerful paragraph. If you want to check it out and have already read the book, it’s on page 444 of the US Penguin trade paperback.

I read a few interviews with the author, and was not surprised to find she’s an actor, given the depth of characterization and psychological motivation in her books. I was also not surprised she named Donna Tartt’s Secret History as a favorite of hers, and an influence, especially in the plot of The Likeness. I recently read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which has a similar intellectual covey and the author says he re-reads that book every few years. I read it long ago, but think it’s getting time to revisit it, given how much I’ve liked two books strongly influenced by it.

I get the title of Tana French’s debut mystery novel, In the Woods, confused with that of the Sondheim musical, Into the Woods. So forgive me if I type the wrong preposition when writing about French’s novel, which I recently read for the second time. I tore through it the first time, and I tore through it this time, with an added appreciation for the clues and red herrings sprinkled throughout the book as it weaves together two mysteries, a child murder in the present with a case where two kids went missing in the past.

I’m not giving anything away that isn’t on the back cover or in the first pages. The narrator is Rob Ryan, a detective on the (fictitious) Dublin murder squad in Ireland. I was happy to suspend my disbelief when Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox happened to get the call for a murdered girl in the suburb of Knocknaree, the town where two other kids went missing twenty years before. Those two kids went into the woods with a friend. He was found later; they never were. The friend who was found? Adam (Robert) Ryan, the narrator.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception…

This is my job, and you don’t go into it–or, if you do, you don’t last–without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

Rob is smart, charming, and completely messed in the head (understandably) from what happened when he was a child. Whether he’s exactly the right or wrong detective to investigate the new mystery makes for fabulous, devour-able fiction. Well plotted and paced with excellent, complex, psychological characterizations, this was a thumping good read, even when I knew whodunnit. (I am amused that, without referring to my old entry, I chose the exact same quote as I did over two years ago when I read the book for the first time. Perhaps because it just cries out to be quoted.)

Edited to add: In interviews, French says she’s a fan of complex mysteries, like Donna Tartt’s Secret History and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. Not all plot points are tied up neatly and satisfactorily. I was reminded of some of the books of Margaret Atwood, in which the author challenges the reader to decide and imagine for herself what might have happened. A lot of people were outraged that all the mysteries weren’t explained. I found this provocative in a good way.

I have something to admit. At the risk of losing my geek-girl cred, I had not read anything by William Gibson. Not even Neuromancer. Like many other books and movies, I’d always wanted to read it, but hadn’t yet managed to. Gibson’s Pattern Recognition started waving at me last year, when John Warner at the Morning News did a Biblioracle session; he asked readers for the last 5 books they’d read and recommended one to read next. He picked Pattern Recognition for me. Between one thing and another, I didn’t get around to it. A little later I noticed Pattern Recognition again on a friend’s Facebook page; she listed it as one of her favorite books. Third (and finally) my husband started the new William Gibson, Zero History, and felt he needed to return to Pattern Recognition, the first of the trilogy. As he re-read Pattern Recognition, then Spook Country, then Zero History, he kept telling me he thought I’d like them and if I read them we could discuss them. So, here I am, finally having read Gibson and Pattern Recognition. And I’m very glad I did.

Cayce (pronounced Case) Pollard is an advertising savant, hired for big bucks by global companies to evaluate logos and other marketing stuff. She’s also a “footage-head,” a devotee of found video clips from the internet by an anonymous creator. She’s doing work for the improbably named Belgian, Hubertus Bigend, when her worlds start to collide in intriguing and dangerous ways.

“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending to its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.” (69)

Gibson is shelved in sci-fi/fantasy, and while this book has elements of both, it’s much more complex than that. It’s also a mystery, with some philosophy, post-modernism and who knows what else thrown in. As I read, I was reminded of, among others, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, Jasper Fforde’s Eyre Affair, and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I felt my brain twisting and turning as I read, firing synapses usually dormant. I very much look forward to Spook Country.

I’ve cut back considerably on my comic reading in recent years, being diligent about only reading things that I like, and stopping on books and series that are less than great. I’m happy to say I tore through Fables volume 14: Witches. Powerful villains terrorize two factions of Fables, who fight back with surprising results. I was gnashing my teeth at the cliffhanger that ended #91, and the following two issues, while good, became an annoying distraction as I’m more interested in the main tale, specifically with Frau Totenkinder, who has always been one of my favorite characters, and who plays a central role in this volume.

Fables the series posits a world in which characters from myth and fable live secretly in our world. It’s dark, magical, sometimes funny, and almost always engaging. For fans of dark fantasy, and other Vertigo titles like Sandman.

A friend recommended the graphic novels Jonathan Ames’ The Alcoholic and Julia Wertz’s Drinking at the Movies to me at the same time, and they make good companions for each other. I wrote about The Alcoholic already. It’s dark and moody, while Drinking at the Movies is more upbeat and consistently funny. Wertz chronicles her move from SF to NYC with an eye at least as honest about herself as she is about others (as all good memoirists should be, I think).

This isn’t the typical redemptive coming of age tale of a young woman and her glorious triumph over tragedy or any such nonsense. It’s simply a hilarious–occasionally poignant–book filled with interesting art, absurd humor and plenty of amusing self deprecation.

She makes 20-something slackerhood funny, and her Sunday-comics boxy layouts and iconic art make this easy to read, even when the subject matter is serious, like her drinking, depression, addict brother, and more. Way more fun than it should be, which says a lot about the talent of its creator.

The Alcoholic came out in 2009. Drinking at the Movies was published in 2010. I just read “Lush for Life” at Salon today (link from The Morning News). There’s a weird synchronicity going on with tales of booze and debauchery.

Though published as fiction, the graphic “novel” The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames reads more like real life. Whatever its blend might be, it’s an engaging, brutal, funny, tragic story.

My name is Jonathan A. and I’m an alcoholic. I have a lot of problems. Not more than the average person, really, but I have a propensity for getting into trouble, especially when I’ve been drinking. This one night, I came out of a blackout and I was with this old, exceedingly tiny lady in a station wagon.

Illustrated in moody black and white by Dean Haspiel, the tale charms and horrifies by turns. But because of its honesty, it’s never less than enthralling, even when Jonathan is at his most pathetic. For fans of other messed-up memoir authors, like David Sedaris and Alison Bechdel.

I’ll try to briefly wrap up last year’s reading.

Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. How could a version of Anne’s story not move me? I was dry eyed at the end of this “graphic biography” with stiff, photo-based art and few new additions to the story, while condensing the rest to a bare personal and historical summary. This might be a good way to introduce a young reader to Anne’s story if they were daunted by her diary, but it is a poor substitute for that great book. I feel like a complete crank for not liking this book, but please seek out Anne’s diary or Francine Prose’s book on it instead.

Richard Stark’s Parker Book Two: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke. The shades of black and blue suit the noir tale perfectly. Cooke’s second adapation of Stark’s Parker books is a well-told and illustrated tale. Parker is a definite anti-hero, and though his and the other characters’ attitudes to women are abominably of their time and genre, it’s hard not to root for him. Also, this book is printed on heavy paper, with thick end pages of a mod design. It’s a lovely object.

Ex Machina volumes 9 and 10: Ring out the Old and Term Limits, by Bryan K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. I’ve felt ambivalent about this series for a while, and hoped that the creators could bring it to a satisfying close. They brought it to a close, but one that left me in a bad mood. The series is about Mitchell Hundred, a reluctant superhero who saved many on 9/11, and was subsequently elected mayor. The last two volumes of the series find him deciding not to run again, and attempting to finish out his term while also battling the friends and enemies working against him since the start of the series.

Some questions I had were unanswered, they made a long-suffering character suffer too much, in my opinion, and the meaning of the ending seemed too simple, and not even fitting for the series. Bah. These bridged the end of the year and the new beginning, and I hope 2011 will bring more auspicious reading. If you want a good series that ends with integrity, I highly recommend Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.