The Cape, a one-shot comic book released by IDW Publishing in late 2010, has an unusual pedigree (and no it has nothing to do with the ill-fated NBC television show of the same name). It’s an adaptation of a prose story by Joe Hill, which originally appeared in his short story collection 20th Century Ghosts. Hill (the son of Stephen King) is also a comic book writer, best known for the critically acclaimed Locke & Key, which is also published by IDW. He’s involved with The Cape as a creative consultant, working with writer Jason Ciaramella and artist Zach Howard to not only adapt the story, but also create a mini-series that explores the characters and their world.
I missed The Cape entirely when it was originally released, but stumbled upon the “Legacy Edition” that IDW published a few months ago to coincide with its 2011 Eisner nomination for Best Single Issue (it didn’t win, but Joe Hill was awarded Best Writer for his work on Locke & Key). The reprint also includes Hill’s original story, which is really the occasion for this review. While the comic was somewhat disappointing, reading it back to back with Hill’s short story brings the strengths and limitations of the comic book medium into relief. … Continue reading »
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
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The Leftovers, by Tom Perotta. Reviewed by Stephen King (New York Times).
I really like when King publishes reviews. He does a great job of contextualizing the books he writes up (“‘The Leftovers’ is, simply put, the best ‘Twilight Zone’ episode you never saw.”). I’ve never actually read any of Perotta’s books, but I did love the movie Election. This one has an eerie, intriguing premise. It’s about the people left on Earth after a rapture-like event takes most of the people away. I’m a little skeptical about how much satire will be at work here and how true it will ring, but still, this is definitely the kind of book that catches my interest.
At 2 paragraphs, Drabelle’s review is pretty much the embodiment of short and sweet. There’s not much analysis, but he gets the gist of the book–it explores how an individual’s language use is related to gender and self-image. Sociologists and grammar nerds take notice.
Open City, by Teju Cole. Reviewed by Giles Foden (The Guardian).
This is actually the second review the Guardian’s run on this book in the last month. (The first Nico pointed to briefly a few weeks back.) The novel’s a hard sell since it basically documents a guy wandering around, but Foden does a great job of dissecting the book and presenting its working parts. This excellent review makes me want to give it a go.
The Cut, by George Pelecanos. Reviewed by Mark Athitakis (Barnes & Noble Review).
That Pelecanos was a writer and producer for HBO’s “The Wire” is reason enough to find interest in this book. By more than one account (Janet Maslin of the New York Times also has a review up this week), this is a sound, if straightforward, crime novel. Set amid the social politics of Washington, DC, The Cut is about a former Marine working as a PI working a small-time drug case that turns into a much bigger situation. The strength here, according to Athitakis, is in the characterization of Spero Lucas, the protagonist PI. A good sign for the beginning of an intended series.
[In this new series (idea copped from High Fidelity), our contributors put together a "top 5" list of books on a theme of their choosing. Read other entries in Top 5 Books here, and catch up on other fun series like this on our Special Features page.]
Pretty much every night before I turn off the light, I read in bed for a while first. It’s a way of focusing myself for sleep, a way of driving off the stray concerns of day by replacing them with a singular voice. Mostly, this works for me, but I’ve learned over the years that reading in bed can be a dangerous proposition. I come from a line of pretty adept insomniacs to begin with, so put a good book in my hands and I’m apt to forget why I was in bed in the first place until it’s already 3 am. If the book isn’t good enough, though, then it just doesn’t do the trick. I lay my head down still full of whatever was hassling my mind during the day.
To that end, I’ve identified a certain kind of book that puts me to sleep in the best possible way. Each of these books comes doled out in small doses of strangeness, short, experimental pieces I can finish in a few minutes while I’m winding down and still take away something worth dreaming about.
Five Books to Take to Bed
5. The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand
This collection of “poetic inventions” presents one of America’s greatest living poets at his most nimble. It includes literary criticism, personal essays, prose poems, and fictional encounters with Jorge Luis Borges and a President who likes to read Chekhov to his cabinet. In whatever form it takes, Strand’s voice is always confident and compelling. He could write for the IRS and probably manage to make the tax code riveting reading. Thankfully, he has a lot more imagination than that. … Continue reading »
It’s been a few years now since Millhauser’s excellent Dangerous Laughter came out, so I was definitely eager to get my hands on this book and read some new stories by one of my favorite authors. We Others only contains 7 new stories, but this was hardly a let down. The new material is substantive and the 14 selected stories form a very fine compilation of stories I was happy to read again. Both new readers and his fans alike should be satisfied.
Millhauser often builds scenarios in commonplace settings, but somehow manages to give them the aura of a fairytale world (without the fairies). He is a fabulist, and for many of his stories his trick is to impose our real world, or some bastardization of it, upon that skewed reality.
Sometimes, stories like “The Invasion from Outer Space”–in which a yellow space dust made of single-celled organisms blankets the earth but doesn’t seem to cause any harm–pull this off through the first person plural, a tough voice to write in successfully. Through this lens readers can take in the oddity of the broad world before them and compare it with their own. Millhauser doesn’t need to set the stage in these stories, because the stage is his story. “The Next Thing” has a singular narrator but accomplishes a similar type of storytelling. It begins as a Wal-Mart-like megastore, evolves into underground habitations, then an entire corporatized town, and eventually an authoritarian government of a sort. … Continue reading »
Machine Man began its existence as a kind of blog through which Max Barry sent readers one page a day of the novel in progress. Those readers, who had to pay after the first 43 pages, gave Barry feedback that he sometimes incorporated into the plot of the novel. He even let the cover be decided by popular vote.
This sounds crazy. I mean, crowd-sourcing a novel? That’s a train wreck waiting to happen. That backstory made me skeptical of the book, to the point that I almost didn’t read it. Luckily I eventually did, and the novel itself overcame my skepticism and won me over in a big big way, because the end result, Machine Man the finished product, is delightful.
For the record, I have previously used the word “delightful” zero times to describe a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one that comes together this well. Machine Man has a fascinating plot, outstanding (and hilarious) writing, and one of the all-time best sci-fi protagonists ever. It’s easily one of the two best books I’ve read this year. Let me tell you why. … Continue reading »
The inevitable first question when looking at a mystery book with 26* authors is, how did they do it? The second is, of course, does it work at all?
I’m still not really sure the answer to question number one. I had fun imagining, while reading this book, that each author was given a character, or a role, kind of like a dinner party parlor game. By the end of the book, with enough authors writing multiple entries from varying perspectives it becomes clear that this wasn’t the case.
It also becomes clear that Gulli is a fine and comprehensive editor. The answer to the second question? Yeah, it works; everything is sewn up nicely. … Continue reading »
Steeped in the bleak history of mid-twentieth century Europe, Shelley Puhak’s award-winning Stalin in Aruba nevertheless brims with a dark humor. The poetry, lyrical, full of fresh, vivid imagery, is saturated with grim irony. Even the title suggests this, juxtaposing one of history’s most monstrous dictators with an idyllic vacation island. In the eponymous poem, indeed, Stalin’s infamous liquidation of his enemies and undesirables blends into the techniques of photographic manipulation, cropping, chopping, clarifying pictures, as if genocide were merely an option in a Photoshop program. “Purging the Aunties,” a poem based on Stalin’s arrest and execution of many of his female relatives, is likewise set during two birthday celebrations for touchy Uncle Soso, again juxtaposing the horrific with the mundane, bringing to mind the macabre image of skeletons dancing during the Black Plague. … Continue reading »
I’m a huge DBC Pierre fan, but I’ve had this one on my shelf for 8 months (since its UK release) without finishing it. Ulin’s take on it is characteristically eloquent, and at least a measure more generous than my own. I have to imagine the people who don’t like Pierre won’t be nearly so generous. Then again, they’re not nearly as astute and enlightening as Ulin, either. [Get this book]
Alice, by Judith Hermann, reviewed by Phillip Hensher (Guardian)
Hensher’s review casts a wide net in a short time, and manages to squeeze in a mini-history of novelists portraying loss and its effects. This is a piece worth reading. [This book is not yet available in the U.S.]
The Submission, by Amy Waldman, reviewed by Claire Messud (New York Times)
A special 9/11 commission picks a submission called “The Garden” from a heap of anonymous architectural proposals. Then it turns out that “The Garden” was created by a Muslim architect and things get sticky. The Submission sounds like a thoughtful, nuanced, unsplashy novel, and this review is the same. [Get this book]
Luminarium, by Alex Shakar, reviewed by Donna Seaman (Chicago Tribune)
There’s no shortage of 9/11 books this month, with the 10th anniversary fast approaching. Shakar’s novel about the tragedy focuses on a pair of brothers who released a virtual reality game that gets forgotten in the aftermath of the towers falling—a similar occurrence, as Seaman notes, to the release of Shakar’s first novel shortly after the real 9/11. It sounds a bit petty, but Seaman likes it a lot, and Shakar has a good track record here at C4. [Get this book]
[In this new series (idea copped from High Fidelity), our contributors put together a "top 5" list of books on a theme of their choosing. Read other entries in Top 5 Books here, and catch up on other fun series like this on our Special Features page.]
This recent (or, in Internet-time, ancient) piece on NPR.com got me to thinking not only about the many thousands of books I’ll never read, but also the hundreds of books I’ll probably never read again. Some of them because I’ve grown out of them (“Franklin W. Dixon’s” Hardy Boys, any Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy barf I’ve ever lapped up); most of them because they left no impression (Forgotten Title by Uninspiring Writer); and a wonderful few that I won’t read again because, assuming I continue to smoke, I have, at best, 30-35 more good years of reading in me and so much new writing still to discover.
It would be easy to write a post about the top 5 books I’ll never read again because they were garbage, but that’s the kind of thing that belongs in Junk Novel Roulette. (My contribution to which I am heavily overdue on. Oh Diane Mott Davidson, how I long for the day I have time and appetite enough to devour your “culinary thriller” The Cereal Murders.)
Instead this is a post about five wonderful, masterful books I will never read again. The full title should be The Top 4 Books I’ll Never Read Again (Despite the Fact That I’d Love To) Because They’re So Goddamn Involved and Time-Consuming, and the Top Book I’ll Never Read Again Because I Don’t Want to Die of Self-Inflicted Head Trauma.
Top 5 Great Books I’ll Never Read Again
5. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
I’m a sucker for any book with my name in the title. I’m also a sucker for any book that’s just flat-out excellent and beautifully written. This is the most autobiographical of Dickens’ novels, a bildungsroman that takes us through the childhood and into the adult life of David (a.k.a. Doady, Daisy, Trot), along the way introducing us to memorable characters like Uriah Heep, Wilkins Micawber, and Agnes Wickfield.
David Copperfield was released in serial form, like much of Dickens’ other work, and so it’s really, really, really long (most unabridged versions run upwards of 800 pages). I have so much Dickens still to read and so little time. Sorry, my Dickensian namesake, but we shall never meet again.
Besides, you’d just make all the same mistakes the second time through.
Embassytown is the second Mieville book I’ve read, and I liked it much more than the first—although I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve become accustomed to his style, or because his sensibility better suits this plot and premise.
Previously, I read The City & The City, an ill-conceived detective novel set in a weird city, undone by the incomprehensible motivations of its characters.
The motives of the characters in Embassytown likewise resist understanding. That’s because, as I’ve finally realized (or perhaps just accepted), China Mieville doesn’t give a shit about his characters, or why they do what they do. Mieville only cares about the weird ideas he dreams up; he only gives his novels plots and his characters names to make something like a canvas, on which his weird ideas can be displayed.
That means that if you look for narrative art in his books, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as I was when I read City. But if you approach his work as conceptual art, you might find it enjoyable, even if it’s largely meaningless. That’s what I found this second time around. … Continue reading »
Creators: written by Jason Caiaramella, art by Zach Howard, based on the short story “The Cape” by Joe Hill
