Some random holiday reading

First things first: this blog is now two years old.

Next, here's a random sample of what I've been lying on the sofa reading. I should first add what a pleasure it is to do this, even when what I'm reading isn't very good. Long live the long academic winter break.

Adrian Tomine: Summer Blonde. Back in January '08, I wasn't too wild about Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings; it had an unsympathetic and uninteresting protagonist, and seemed to cover political ground already throroughly explored in print by about 1992. But I was told that book was something of an aberration for Tomine, whose drawings I nevertheless have always liked; and the four stories in this 2002 collection are much, much more to my taste. There's a sameness to them--disaffected urban twentysomethings casting about for reasons to live--but it's akin to Raymond Carver's sameness, a pleasing, flexible personal signature with a lot of potential for emotional nuance. I especially liked "Hawaiian Getaway," about a zaftig Asian-American underachiever who makes prank phone calls to the pay phones across the street from her apartment building. The glimmer of hope and happiness (or perhaps of ruin, it's hard to tell which) at the end really makes the story. All these pieces have 80's-style in-media-res endings, which gives them a certain retro charm. And Tomine obviously loves drawing girls--he's good at it, and they're all cute.

Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict. Connelly has long been a disappointment to me. His first half dozen novels were brisk, nicely plotted police procedurals, but he began to drift off into repetition and, later, self-parody, slipping in references to the hit movies made from his other novels, and randomly throwing his various bestselling protagonists into stories together for a little gratuitous cross-series synergy. Sadly this book is in the latter category, bringing rough-and-ready lawyer Mickey Haller together with brooding police detective Harry Bosch. But the result is actually pretty good, if not precisely a return to form. There's plenty of inventive courtroom drama, a minimum of the-hunter-becomes-the-hunted crap, and a nice twist at the end. The denoument is a real eye-roller, but by that time you've had enough fun to forgive it. Really, if all bestsellers were this decent, I'd be able to do about 80% of my book shopping at Wal-Mart. Not that I would.

Robert Charles Wilson: Blind Lake. This 2003 novel represents all that is both terrific and awful about contemporary science ficiton. Great concept, lousy execution. Scientists at a government installation in Minnesota have managed to find a way to observe the inhabitants of another planet, but they're not quite sure how they did it. The facility goes into a mysterious lockdown, with no contact to the outside world, and the technology being used to watch the aliens develops a mind of its own...the whole thing ends up laying out some interesting ideas about sentience, culture, and artificial intelligence. The problem is the two-dimensional characters and their interpersonal dramas, which are uninteresting and overwritten; all the cutesy references to familiar "old-fashioned" late-20th-century culture; massive agglomerations of expository dialogue; and hopelessly pedantic, tin-eared prose. I wish SF writers didn't feel the need to literarify their writing when that's not what they're good at; I'll take the cool detachment of Stanislaw Lem over this stuff any day.

Interesting Things on the Sister Blogs

I'm very excited about the conversation I just had with poet and essayist Mark Doty--go have a listen on the Writers At Cornell Blog. Mark is a visiting writer at Cornell this semester, and gave an excellent reading here last week (along with other visiting profs Paul Lisicky and Denis Johnson). Today we talked about his poetry, particularly his preoccupation with animals; how his treatment of death, as a subject, has changed over the years; and the notion of artistic representation (and its place in artworks themselves). Mark is hugely articulate about his own work, and it was a great talk.

Over on The Litlab, poet Virginia Heatter offers up a surprisingly funny homophonic translation of Sappho--or, as she prefers to call it, an "aural Rorschaching." Virginia is an MFA student in poetry at Cornell.

Finally, I want to say how very much I love Adrian Tomine's new New Yorker cover. Perfect--literature from laptop to hobo campfire.

Acme Novelty Library No. 18

I just finished reading the latest installment of Chris Ware's ongoing comic series, and it's my favorite thing from him in quite a while. I've been enjoying the single-day-of-school narrative, "Rusty Brown," that the last two books have focused on, but No. 18 returns to the one-legged anti-heroine of the "Building Stories" cartoons that ran last year in the New York Times Magazine. I'm glad for it. This installment deepens the character enormously, and brings real pathos to a series that I was worried might be a little too cute for its own good.

The front endpapers are devastating--a swirl of text and images, set against a black background, which represent the narrator's contemplation of suicide. You have to turn the book around and around to read it, and it's a big book--the result feels like driving the death bus. We read her fragmented thoughts, and watch her imagine who might discover her corpse: her parents, her landlady, her cat. It's terribly sad and real, as are the back endpapers, which depict her lying awake in bed, over and over, at different ages. The last drawing in the book shows a sleepless night at perhaps age three; her leg is not yet missing, but she is still sad.

In between we get some back story--a boyfriend, an abortion--but the real strength of the work comes from the Ware's stunning illumination of workaday detail. He shows us, over two pages, the evidence of time passing at a florist's: the light changing, the gradual droop of a rose. There's a wonderful bit where the protagonist tosses a pair of stained underpants into a washing machine, and I can't quite explain why it's so moving. And several pages are dedicated to stripping away the layers of her body, like the acetate pages in the encyclopedia she read as a child. We see her frumpy clothes, her flesh, her muscles and bones, while all around the panels tear away the layers of her misery. Ware's ability to move the eye around the page is unmatched; he continues to experiment with the architecture of comics in emotionally satisfying ways.

I wasn't as wild about Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, the story of Ben Tanaka, an insufferable prick who nevertheless is always surrounded by beautiful women. Reviews of this book have praised its addressing of the politics of dating among Asian-Americans, but really, if you've been to college in the past twenty years, you've heard it all already.

What I do like about Tomine is his drawing style--he's great at depicting the bland details of urban living so that they seem wonderfully alive. His characters are also hugely expressive in their faces and body language--so much so that the best bits of this book are the panels where nobody's saying anything, and nothing's going on. This is why I love Tomine's New Yorker covers--they pack a lot of story into one picture. Special props for the look on Ben's girlfriend's face when she discovers his cache of white-girl porno, and he lamely points out that there's a Latino chick in there somewhere. It's perfect.