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093) Starlight: The Return of Duke McQueen by Mark Millar and team, finished November 29
from morning to juuuust past midnightConcept:
An Air Force pilot has a JohnCarteresque experience---swept onto another planet where he becomes a great hero---only to be returned home where he is dismissed as a liar and a lunatic for the rest of his adult life. Then, forty years later, he gets a chance to return. And takes it.
This comic ties nicely into the pulp tradition that birthed it and is great fun to read. It did make a point of telling us how much older McQueen was now, but it never seemed to make any difference. So there's a lost opportunity.
But overall a fun and satisfying read.
Some previous Millar: Huck, Red Son, UpUpandAway, Aztek.
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094) Blackbeard's Ghost by Ben Stahl, finished December 6
Stahl is better known as a painter and, seeing the cover to the first edition, I'm convinced he's also the painter of Aldetha from Disney's film adaptation to the novel. Also, it's bears a striking resemblance to the most terrifying book upon the bookshelves as I was growing up.maybe a week
The movie takes greeaat liberties with the novel, but rightly so, really. It's ... not a great book. I mean---it's fine, I guess, but it's hardly a book that will be remembered. Its best part was the prologue which shows us ol' Blackbeard still alive and in his time. That part's great. Then we move to the present (c. 1965) and we get a couple generic schoolboys who say "Jeepers!" a lot (a lot) and some rules of magic that never quite make consistent sense. In an age that's really grappled with the rules of fantasy and worldbuilding, he would probably get better editing. The illustrations are keen, though!
There is no romance, there is no track coach, there is no casino, there are no little old ladies, etc etc etc. Aldetha is a friend, not a wife, and she outlived Blackbeard, although she did die by fire. So it's really nothing like the movie.
When I was in seventh or eighth grade, we watched a Disney film that was based on a book we had read in class. It was one of the first times I realized a movie could be better than a book it was based on. The main character was abducted by local natives and eventually returns to white civilization because he wants to hang out with his younger brother. The movie makes it a girl he's falling in love with which even as a middleschooler made waaay more sense.
That was a relatively small change compared to what Blackbeard's Ghost would do ten years later, but it just goes to show.
Hitchcock said he would never make the Brothers Karamazov into a film because it's already perfect as a book. The thing to do is to buy bad books with potential and recreate them into excellent movies. Now, I'm not saying these Disney films are "excellent" but it does go to prove the point.
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095) Supermarket by Rudy Vanderlans, finished December 11
ELAPSEFlipping through this book, the photographs are ugly and poorly designed---they break all the rules---and the only reason I paid a dollar at the library sale is because it's about the Mojave, the desert that is part of my sense of identity. The towns under his lens brush right up against my hometown. So I paid my buck.
I think I decided to read it finally because we were about to watch Bagdad Cafe and it too is Mojave-based. Even more appropriately, though I did not know it at the time, both are made by Europeans.
The book is mostly two photographs per page, often taken out the window of a moving car with parts of the car in-frame. Every once in a while with a different kind of paper---older is demeanor---featuring quotations from John C. Van Dyke's The Desert, celebrating is starkness and color and beauty. Not what Vanderlans has been capturing at all.
For much of the book, I did not like it.
But then---these humanless photos---the grotesque emptinesses---became to feel almost unbearably true. Although I could not see it at first, this Dutch Berkeleyite has captured something about the desert that I absolutely recognized and, ultimately, was moved by.
"Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a whole clearly."
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096) In Real Life by Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang, finished December 14
one shoe-shopping tripVideo games and economics! That's what this book offers, according to the introduction. And it was an honest description.
Besides the pleasure of just reading it, what I liked about this comic is how it played with identities. There was the surface level of characters appearing both as their IRL bodies and their avatars, but also how the nerds bully the preppie and how foreigners aren't quite so foreign while being more foreign than imagined. Just the opportunity to think about the modern world with empathy makes this book a valuable exercise.
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097) The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice by Carolyn McVickar Edwards, finished December 16
month or twoTwelve traditional tales from around the world. Lots of overlap, lots of divergence.
A lot to think about.
I'm using this as fuel for this year's solstice poem.
Edwards has a knack for making her tellings feel old and oral. She also has a knack to be bloviate in her introductions. But, of course, one could skip those.
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098) "P" Is for Peril by Sue Grafton, finished December 18
This might be the longest I took to read one of these Kinsey Millhone novels, but that's no knock on its character. It was misplaced a few times, for one thing, but also---it might be fair to say I savored this one a bit more. Reading it slowly let the writing settle in a bit more.onehundredthirtytwo days
I'm not making claims that Grafton is a George Eliot or anything, but she's good. She writes good books. And reading it more slowly, with long gaps, I was able to see how her craft expands to fill the space.
And she ends with a lovely ambiguity that doesn't really match the hardnosed PI's "writing-a-report" gimmick---but would you have it any other way?
The revealed-in-the-final-pages "villain" is no villain at all. She's so richly drawn and good that it hurts to learn she's the bad guy. But, for Kinsey, truth first. And the guilty must be punished. Even when it's kind of a bummer.
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099) The Fall of Richard Nixon: A Reporter Remembers Watergate by Tom Brokaw, finished December 20
couple weeks maybeI heard about this book in a Washington Post review. I was actually more interested in the other book talked about in that review, but the library didn't have this one and they had a dozen or so available copies on this. So I went with #2.
It was okay.
As the review said, it's more a personal remembrance, which largely means Brokaw is telling personal stories, only some of which are amusing if you don't know the people. He also repeats himself sometimes. Once he said roughly the same thing three times on a single spread. He comes of as ... old. From the acknowledgements, it sounds like he wrote a bunch of random stuff and some folks at the publisher put it together for him and edited it up into form.
He's a clear writer but not an interesting writer. Which I'm sure served him well on television, but not so well here. Considering how short this book is (and that it's his eighth) I expected more.
Still. Timely stuff. Who knows what will come next, here, in 2019? The past mostly reveals it'll never be obvious until it's long over.
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100) Treason by Orson Scott Card, finished December 23
This novel is:sixty days even, including start and end dates
a rewrite of an earlier novel, Treason.
still an immature OSC work (which he admits in the rewrite's Author's Note) but possessed of the strengths of both his short stories and better novels.
flavored like fairy tales.
picaresque.
delightfully inventive, and happy to be a fantasy as much or more than a work of science fiction.
grotesquely violent in a medieval way.
humanist in the sense of being deeply engaged in questions of what it means to be fully human, both as an individual and as a society.
in possession of a colophon the likes of which the world will never see again:
The manuscript of this novel was composed usingan excellent example of everything people who feel betrayed by old Scott Card loved about young Scott Card.
WordPerfect on an AL 386 computer with an NEC Mul-
tisync monitor; it was printed out on an Epson GQ-3500
using a Glyphix font, and duplicated on a Canon NP3525-
EF.
easily interpreted as old Scott Card was there all along.
a rollicking fun read, even with its distant, quasi-philosophical, first-person narrator.
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