The Sisters Brothers

There was no post here yesterday because I was up waaaay past my bedtime the night before finishing The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt.  I wanted to be sure to finish before yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up between The Sisters Brothers and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder.  (Spoiler: The Sisters took it handily.)  I started reading the book on Monday night.  I would have read it in a single sitting if it weren’t for pesky work, having to be alive in the morning to get kids to school, etc.  Holy crap, what a good book.  I can’t believe it took me so long to read it.  To start with, check out that flippin’ sweet cover:

Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers, “the mean one” and the “husky one”  as one unfortunate soul describes them.  They are also hired gunmen feared throughout the west.  The story begins with the brothers leaving their home in Oregon City for their latest assignment for their book The Commodore.   First stop is to check in with The Commodore’s hired detective who has been tailing their target around Gold Rush San Francisco. What should be an easy assignment turns out to be anything but.   The adventure will change the brothers lives forever.

It’s a cracking adventure, too.  The novel has been compared to True Grit and the author has been described as “like Cormac McCarthy with a better sense of humor.”  The novel was also short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize.  Those are big boots to fill but deWitt pulls it off admirably.  It speaks volumes about the author’s ability that a Western historical novel that is at turns violent, crude, and “ribald” can also be sentimental and literary.

Getting all lit-101, the brothers/sisters dichotomy serves to highlight the internal struggle of the brothers to find peace with who they really are, underneath the yoke of their unusual occupation,  The job colors how others see them, and it weighs heavily upon them to live up the billing.  The novel is set during  the Gold Rush, but it’s take on San Francisco could also be used to describe the city during the modern Gold Rush of the internet boom or the greed that has taken over Wall Street. The brothers meet a stranger who, sensing their new arrival, tells them about the madness that has gripped the city with the influx of so much sudden wealth:

“The whores are working fifteen-hour shifts and are said to make thousands of dollars per day.  You must understand, gentlemen, that the tradition of thrift and sensible spending has vanished here. It simply does not exist any more. For example, when I arrived this last time from working my claim I had a sizable sack of gold dust, and though I knew it was lunacy I decided to sit down and have a large dinner in the most expensive restaurant I could find…So it was that I ate a decent-sized, not particularly tasty meal of meat and spuds and ale and ice cream, and for this repast, which would have put me back perhaps half a dollar in my hometown, I paid the sum of thirty dollars in cash.”
Charlie was disgusted.  ”Only a moron would pay that.”
“I agree,” said the man.  ”One hundred percent I agree.  And I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively.  Furthermore, I hope your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.”

When the brothers finally meet their target, he turns out to be the sort of old coot/poetic madman that populates the best films and books of the old west.  When he tells Eli that “most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives,”  Eli can’t help but take the words as the most apt description of his own life.

Wil Wheaton, the judge of yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up has this to say about the two books:

If State of Wonder made me feel like I was struggling to stay awake during The English Patient, The Sisters Brothers made me feel like I was sitting in a movie house in Red Dead Redemption, watching an episode of Deadwood that was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by the Coen Brothers. If I was the wrong audience forState of Wonder, I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers.

I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers, too.  It may not be for everyone, but if it sounds like it’s your thing, don’t put it off another minute.  A great novel awaits.

Guitar Zero

I recently caught the end of an NPR story about a book called Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning by Gary Marcus that sounded fascinating.   As the NPR story says, Marcus  ”took up guitar at the relatively ancient age of 38, by starting with the video game Guitar Hero.”  In the book Marcus uses his experience to discuss the science of learning and why certain tasks like learning to play a new instrument or learning a language become harder as we get older.  As a student who took up guitar later in life than Mr Marcus and a science nerd to boot, I had to check it out.

I once heard a younger acquaintance remark “well, any monkey can go off and learn how to play guitar.”   Marcus and I are here to tell you that’s not the case.  At least not well.   An old canard popular in the telling of the punk rock movement  is that the bands barely knew how to play their instruments.   While it’s true that they may not have had the mastery of some musicians, I recommend that you try to play along if it’s so easy.  Playing basic chords really fast and in time to create a song that actually sounds (arguably) good are actually several different cognitive skills that are all relatively difficult to master.  That anyone ever does borders on the miraculous.

Marcus walks through the cognitive processes involved in learning the tasks of having your left hand (for righties) bend into impossible shapes on specific strings at just the right moment, while your right hand is doing something entirely different.  Being able to create your own songs, Marcus explains, is its own separate skill.  It’s a relative rarity that some people are able to both learn an instrument and compose new songs on it.   Depressingly, he discusses the barriers to this kind of learning that come with age.

Marcus notes that cognitive scientists estimate that to become proficient at some new skill (like playing an instrument) requires roughly 10,000 hours of focused practice on average.  Some folks may never become proficient, while others may be rock stars in significantly less time.  Marcus investigates why this rule generally holds true, and what happens with those who accelerate the timeline.

In the best sections of this book, Marcus masterfully breaks down the elements of learning to play guitar and puts it in the larger context of how our brain learns new tricks, especially extremely difficult new tricks.   A chapter on what expert musicians know that you don’t is also insightful.  The book strays when it wanders afield of its subtitle.  The chapter on why some music sounds better than others and what the worst (theoretical) song in the world sounds like was a chore for me to work through.   This is, overall,  an interesting read for the mature budding musician and others that are interested in the science of how our how brain learns to make music.  It may come off as  complete mumbo jumbo for  readers lacking a strong interest in at at least one of those subjects.

Friday Links

The Tournament of Books is back!  Catch up on Round 1 and Round 2.  Click the link on the bar at the top to see the brackets.    My pick to win it all…The Art of Fielding.  I will be wrong.

If a tournament of books isn’t your thing,  visit Grantland’s Smacketology to determine The Wire’s greatest character.

The 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced.  My streak is intact!  None of the books that I nominated won.  Again.

This just in…The New York Times says that e-book readers that do other things, like play Angry Birds, may distract some of us from reading.

The Wall Street Journal counters with  the 10 things that e-book readers won’t tell you.

The 100 Best Opening Lines From Books

The 10 Best Fictional Bookstores

The Ithaca NY Library, home of Eleanor Henderson, has compiled a link-tastic guide for her novel Ten Thousand Saints

Video:  The  Shutesbury, MA Public Library turns to ukuleles and YouTube to raise over a million bucks for a new building.

Another video:  Muppets spoof The Hunger Games

Recommended Reads

One of the benefits that I’ve enjoyed, now that I’ve switched over to the dark side and own a Kindle, is reading long-form non-fiction pieces that until recently had no place in the market.  These pieces are too long for any but the most profit averse magazines and too short to be sold on their own.  Enter the e-book to save the day.  I’ve recently read two such pieces that I highly recommend.

The first is a Kindle Single that I had to read because it is written by one of my favorite authors Dara Horn.  I’ve interviewed Dara Horn twice (see the sidebar on the right) and we have not coincidentally reviewed two of her novels, All Other Nights and The World to Come.  Horn was also named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

The Rescuer is a non-fiction account of the life of Varian Fry.  Fry was responsible for rescuing many famous Jews, including Marc Chagall, from occupied France during World War II.  Horn explores why this courageous man is virtually unknown.   Horn is clear that this will not be the typical  Hollywood version of Holocaust rescue stories:

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant — as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper.  When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering.  It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American Culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive.  In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there wasn’t much of that.  Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance.

It’s  a quick and fascinating read. Check it out.

The second e-book I’d like to recommend is Vanity Fair’s How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding by Keith Gessen.  The author founded the hot literary mag n + 1  along with Chad Harbach.  Harbach is the author of a BGB favorite,  The Art of Fielding (my review).  Gessing and Harbach became friends when the two took “an intense, five-person seminar of Herman Melville” their sophomore year.  This e-book is an “inside baseball” look at how books get published.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is just incredible to read that the novel was rejected.  Repeatedly.  Some of those that didn’t see the promise are named.   And then a bidding war breaks out for the suddenly red-hot novel.  Especially fascinating to me are how Gessing’s impressions of his friend’s novel change over time.  He goes from…:

So the shortstop couldn’t make a throw to first.  So?  I didn’t say it at the time, but it felt a little like a Disney film.  (The Bad News Bears go to liberal-arts college.)

to…

Reading the galley, I saw that Henry’s anguish about perfection, and his sudden inability to make the throw to first, mirrored Chad’s difficulties completing the book, especially with so many people around him demanding that he just do it.  I saw other things, too.  But mostly I was just delighted.

This is absolute required reading for anyone who loves books.

Book Club Cook Book & Book Clubs

Every once in a while, something unexpected shows up at BGB Headquarters that we weren’t expecting but are happy to check out once it’s here.   The Book Club Cook Book by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp (creators of bookclubcookbook.com) is one such book.

The book is a great starting off point for new book clubs or clubs looking to shake things up.  The book matches recipes with books.  The recipes are sometimes supplied by the author, other times the food is mentioned or inspired by the book.  Each book/recipe combo also includes a brief discussion of the book.  The recipes look good and doable. (I haven’t attempted any yet.)  Sadly, there are no glossy color food porn shots of what the finished product will look like for any of the recipes.  In fact, there are no pictures of food at all.  That’s ok though.  Stay for the books.

The book selections are varied and intriguing – not just what I would have thought of as standard book club fare.  The book includes recipes for books by Faulkner, Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Sebastian Junger, Dennis Lehane, and many others that would not have topped my hypothetical list.  That’s a good thing.   This isn’t neccessarily your mother’s book club, which I think is the point.  The cook book had me wanting to join a book club and discuss some of the books over the smells of delicious foods cooking in the oven.  However, being male, I may be left to read along and make these recipes at home with a smaller audience.

I know that there are book club’s that exist out there with men in them.  I just don’t have much experience with them.  (Hop in the Wayback Machine and check out this post from 2007 on book clubs in general and the only book club that I ever belonged to specifically.)   Given that lack of male book club opportunity, I was surprised to come across the story of this all-male book club which seems tremendously dorky and excellent all at once (even if the highlighted book is total shite).

I Heart Kelly Hogan

As I like to repeat over and over here at BGB, I love when the books and the music collide like a big ‘ol Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.  I am a huge Kelly Hogan fan.  When I first moved to Atlanta, the singer floored me with her incredible voice and range.  I was heartbroken when she left for the bigger pond of Chicago but heartened when she emerged as a back-up singer on my favorite Neko Case albums.  Neko Case!   So I was very excited to read that Kelly Hogan has a new album coming soon that includes songs written by some of my favorite music-type people.  Check out this list of collaborators:  the late Vic Chesnutt, the Magnetic Fields, Andrew Bird, M. Ward, Jon Langford, and Robyn Hitchcock.  The most interesting collaboration – which gets to the music and books intersection – is a song co-written by Andrew Bird and author Jack Pendarvis.  You can listen to the song here and check out my review of Awesome by Jack Pendarvis here (spoiler alert: it’s awesome).

Friday Links

Pictionary: The Cormac McCarthy Edition -

A BGB favorite Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad has been named a finalist for Best Translated Book Awards.  Hurray!  Read our reviews here and here. Then read the book.

The co-author of the Berenstain Bears passed away this week.  This writer at Slate has some issues that may go beyond the annoying bear family – “Among my set of mothers the series is known mostly as the one that makes us dread the bedtime routine the most…What I do recall is throwing the book away in a fury during my second pregnancy, lest my subsequent children find it and become as attached as the first one did…”  Calgon?

Is your new local indie bookseller your library?

Fantastic novels with disappointing endings

Cool:  beloved children’s books as minimalist posters

Pulp Shakespeare

Oprah’s Book Club Fight Club

Cooking with Poo! and other poorly-titled tomes

Nick Flynn on Fresh Air

Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was on Fresh Air last night.  The book has been adapted into a movie called Being Lynn.  Nick Flynn and director Paul Weitz are interviewed by Not Terry Gross.  Sadly.  It’s a fantastic interview.  (Maybe Weitz calls DeNiro “Bob” too much, but still…)

Multimedia overload: Read the book.  Check out the interview and check out the film trailer below:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

If you don’t buy one e-book this year for reading on your electronic reading device – let it be Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.   My wife and I were looking for a book that we both might want to read to download onto our brand new Kindle.  We clicked through some menus, came across a familiar title – which we both vaguely remember hearing something interesting about – and hit the buy now button.  In mere seconds we were reminded that it was the cool collection of found vintage photographs presented throughout the book that was the interesting thing that we had heard about the book.  Cool found vintage photographs that look like ass on a Kindle.  Dammit!

The found pictures are a grandfather’s proof to his grandson that the fantastic stories of taking refuge during World War II on a Welsh Island are all true.  According to the grandfather’s telling, the island was home to a children’s home filled with kids with fantastic abilities and pursued by evil monsters are all true.  When the now high-school aged grandson sees his grandfather attacked but what seemed to be a monster (large animal?) of some sort, he becomes more sure that his grandfather’s stories were true.  Everyone else begins to doubt his sanity.

In therapy, the grandson plans a trip to Wales to visit the island.  Everyone agrees that having the boy see that the setting  of his grandfather’s stories is a non-magical island in the middle of nowhere will be a step to getting over his delusions.  Of course, the trip proves just the opposite, and the boy learns that his grandfather’s life was more dangerous and complicated than he ever knew.

The story is marketed for a young adult audience, and it often reads as a modern fable.  The grandfather’s stories are a tidy metaphor for his escape from the horrors of WW II to the bucolic island.  The monster’s pursuit of the “peculiars” through time highlights the inherent danger of being different.  Miss Peregrine explains the dangers of being “peculiar” at its most basic level – “Can you imagine, in a world  so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

These themes of otherness are sure to resonate with the angst-y teen reader.  For this adult reader, the story sometimes comes across as a little forced and chances to develop the thematic elements on a deeper level may have been missed.  Still, it’s not a bad book, and it’s worth checking out for the unique use of found vernacular photographs into a coherent and magical story.  But whatever you do, DO NOT read this novel as an e-book; spring for the hardcover.

The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green, has garnered gobs of critical acclaim already; here’s some more.

The story Green tells is that of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager living with terminal cancer in Indianapolis, Indiana.  While that’s not generally the first ingredient for an uplifting novel, the way he tells her story is nothing short of magical.  She speaks like a tamer version of Holden Caulfield, but not in a way that would alienate anyone.  Insightful, witty, and able to relate the day-to-day thinking of a teenage girl within the context of someone with much bigger issues on her mind, both mental and physical (e.g., her oxygen tank), I became a huge fan of Green and of his characters from the get-go.

The story begins with Hazel attending her “cancer kids group” at a local church (referred to as The Literal Heart of Jesus Church).  At this meeting, she becomes captivated by a “guest speaker” named Augustus Waters, a teenage boy who has beaten cancer, albeit with the loss of one leg as a result.  They meet and feel a mutual attraction toward one another (although Hazel is a bit confused and bewildered as to why this handsome, engaging young man might be interested in her).  The two of them share some of their “likes”, and begin to bond over a book called “An Imperial Affliction”, by Peter Van Houten — a book that Hazel has read countless times and is obsessed with.  Their mutual curiousity surrounding what happens to the characters in Van Houten’s book after the book ends leads them on an adventure to discover themselves and what life really means.

There are  some sad and heartbreaking topics touched on in this book; but the way Green handled them left me smiling.  I think this is a book that will be talked about for quite some time.

Fantastic is Right

The short animated film The Fanatstic Flying Books of Mr Leonard Lessmore won an Academy Award.   It sounded like the king of thing I should check out.  As it turns out, last night the movie was available for FREE from the iTunes store (no longer the case).  The price was right.  (It turns out the movie is available in its entirety – at least for now – for free on YouTube.)  It is an amazing little film that book lovers will love.   The story is by children’s author William Joyce, and it is also available as an “enhanced e-book iPad app.   Check it out already.

Friday Links

Strunk & White rap about The Elements of Style.  10 points for originality – 5 for execution.

I think that I have to buy Nathan Englander’s new book of stories after hearing him make Terry Gross snort on Fresh Air.

I really enjoyed the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Not everyone did.  Those that didn’t like really didn’t like it.  The same split, perhaps even more so, seems to apply to the movie.  The Guardian asks, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: why do so many people hate it?”

The Millions break down the field for best adapted screenplay.

2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists announced- interesting list – The Art of Fielding is up against Ten Thousand Saints for best first novel.  I loved them both.

JK Rowling has an upcoming book for adults.

Amazon bullies distributor for independent publishers.  Boo!

The Hunger Games soundtrack album tracklist has been announced.  Decembersist, Arcade Fire, Neko Case, Carolina Chocolate Drops…

Steven Colbert’s children’s book, the one he discussed with Maurice Sendak, is actually going to happen.

Manhattan’s “guerrilla library system”

Ann Patchett is My Hero

I need to plan a trip to Nashville just to check out Ms. Patchett’s bookstore:

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

While it has no dragon tattoos, hornets’ nests, or fire (well, maybe a little fire here and there), Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in the All the Confusion? was nonetheless my first foray into Scandanavian fiction.  And an interesting foray it was, despite the lack of spies, crime, and international intrigue.

The book tells the story (in the first person) of Mattias, a gardener from Stavanger, Norway.  Mattias has an interesting outlook on life, which is epitomized (at least in his mind) by Buzz Aldrin — you want to be effective, you want to get done what has to get done, but you don’t want to be the figurehead or the center of attention.  Aldrin was the second man on the moon and thus lost much of the spotlight to Neil Armstrong, but Aldrin was apparently the main man on that mission to the moon.

Mattias has an average life in his youth and successfully avoids the spotlight, until one night at a high school dance he decides to join the band onstage and sing a song, demonstrating that he has an unbelievably good singing voice — a talent that no one expected, and which he doesn’t want to show again.  His performance attracts the attention of a girl named Helle, though, and the two become a couple and remain together for over a decade.  However, his relationship with Helle and his job at the nursery all hit the skids around the same time, leaving Mattias confused and directionless.  He opts to join his friend Jorn on a boat ride to the Faroe Islands where Jorn’s band is playing a gig, and the next thing Mattias knows he is lying on a rural road in the rain with no recollection of how he got there or how he got the scars on his hands.  He gets picked up a nice man who takes him to a remote village, specifically to a factory that has been converted into a halfway house of sorts for psychiatric patients who are no longer committed in an institution.

Mattias is invited to stay at the Factory with the other residents, Palli, Anna, and Ennen, all of whom are looked after by Harvstein, the man who picked Mattias up from the road.  Each of them has their own issues, and each is struggling to build an identity that will allow them to function in society.  Ennen, a young lady that Mattias begins to bond with, is totally obsessed with The Cardigans, a band from Sweden that I personally was obsessed with in the mid-1990′s, even flying from Atlanta to NYC to see them the first time they came to the U.S. to play live shows.  (Exhibit A) I would have been Ennen’s hero, as I weaseled my way backstage and ended up hanging out with the band for the evening.  Good times, good times.

Anyway, back to our story.  The book is divided into multiple sections, each of which is named after a Cardigans album.  Interesting literary device.  Plus, Norwegian is certainly an interesting language.  While I read Harstad’s book as translated into English, the names of many of the people, places, and things sometimes apparently couldn’t translate directly and thus would feature some strange characters that I couldn’t recognize.  Of course, even the ones that could translate into our alphabet were still such strange combinations of consonants that they didn’t really really register with me and I kind of disregarded learning how to spell or pronounce them — in my head, when I came to one a second time, I would just think “Oh yeah, that’s the one that started with a J and had that cluster of t’s in the middle”.

The second thing I noticed about the way the story was written was that it seemed to fluctuate between sections that looked like normal English prose and sections in which two pages could go by without a single period — basically a string of clauses separated by commas. I don’t know if that’s something that’s normal for (and peculiar to Norwegian), or whether Harstad’s writing style was simply inconsistent.  Not a bad thing, just an observation.

Anyway, back to our story (again).  Mattias begins to essentially build a new life at the Factory and in the Faroe Islands, not really seeing any reason to go back to Stavanger.  He misses his parents and his friends, but I think he just doesn’t really feel that he has anything to offer to them that merits him being present physically.  So he works a couple of different jobs near the Factory, including as a gardener subsidized by the state to plant plants that are destined to die because of the climate.  As he leads this new life, the people around him in his new environment cause him to re-think who he is and what his value is.  It’s difficult to necessarily think like him, but you root for him and want him to be happy, even when it seems like he’s sabotaging his own chances at happiness.  The book takes a strange but fascinating turn near the end, leading the characters and the reader to a place that you honestly didn’t think you’d go.

It’s an entertaining and engaging read, with plenty of pop culture references.  Strangely enough, though, I couldn’t really tell when I finished the book whether I was happy or sad or indifferent, or maybe so much of each that they cancelled each other out.

Also: Check out Tim’s review.

Friday Links

The 100 Best Books for Kids

20 most beautiful bookstores in the world

Top 10 First Person Narratives

The Millions outs one of Britain’s most serious men of letters, Martin Amis, for one of his earliest works: Invasion of the Space Invaders:An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines.  Busted.

The New Yorker rounds up its best Dickens cartoons to celebrate the author’s 200th birthday.

Meanwhile, across town, The New York Times visits the completely depressing Dickens World.

Real life Doogie Howser writes book  called “We Can Do” – hmmm, not loving the title, Doogie.

Trying to justify the purchase of that iPad?  Check out “iPads in Education – How you & your iPad can volunteer together in your child’s classroom” Parts 1 and 2.

Lev Grossman adds two books to your reading list.  OK.

Big news in the academic publishing world: the “academic spring” is here.  Would you think it unreasonable that government-funded research should be freely available to the citizens who paid for it?  Elsevier, the largest scientific journal publisher, begs to differ.  Scientists are getting pissy.  You don’t want to get the scientists pissy.  MobyLives has the scoop here, here, and here.

The inevitable

Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles reports on sh*t book reviewers say.

I’m guilty of about 67% of those. More or less. Only gripe: he forgot to use the word “limn”.  Also: why so many pairs of glasses?

Things we didn’t learn in history class

The book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) has found its way to the big screen:

Tim Burton is the producer.   Hmmm.

Also, unrelated, behold this 34-foot tower of books about Abe Lincoln.

Let’s Hear it for Public Broadcasting

Last night I watched the new PBS documentary, Slavery By Another Name, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Atlantan (and neighbor) Douglas Blackmon.  It’s a powerful look at a shameful episode in US history (it is Black History Month).  The show is punctuated by a remark that Blackmon makes near the end that a court case in 1942 (!) marked the technical end of slavery in the US.   Yipes.

After watching the documentary I was forlorn and despondent.  Perhaps even melancholy.   I tuned into the radio (via the internet) to catch the rest of yesterday’s Fresh Air, which  featured a strong interview with actress Viola Davis.   What I missed while driving around town earlier in the day, however, was Terry’s interview with Flight of the Conchord’s Bret McKenzie about his Oscar-nominated song “Man or a Muppet.”  Awesome.

And there you go.  The full range of human emotion compliments of public TV and radio.

Comix Roundup

I’m attempting to get caught up on overdue reviews (some of which date back into last year).  I always find it difficult to write about comics and graphic novels.  To satisfy both conditions, I present a roundup of unconscionably brief reviews of comics/graphic novels that I’ve read in the recent to near-recent past.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword

I picked up Barry Deutsch’s Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword based almost entirely on the tag-line at the top – “Yet another troll-fighting 11-year old Orthodox Jewish girl.”  It seemed like the sort of thing that my daughter would be very into.  Mirka is certain that she’s destined to be a hero.  She argues constantly with her step-mother, Ferma, and gets into all sorts of trouble.  Along the way she learns lessons about tradition and how to be a strong woman and a hero.  My daughter loved it.  (Check out more about Hereville at the author’s website.)

The Martian Chronicles

I hadn’t read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles since I was a kid.   I remembered enjoying it, but I couldn’t recall much about the stories.  When Dennis Calero’s graphic novel adaptation popped up in my mailbox, I had to check it out.  The stories mostly read as a space version of The Twilight Zone.  These tales, in its original or graphic novel form, definitely would appeal to the fabled reluctant young male readers.  For me, it was like traveling back in time.

Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story

I’ve read a novel novel by Mat Johnson that I completely enjoyed.  I’m from New Orleans.  This one jumped into my cart without a second thought.  Dark Rain is a robbery/caper story that just happens to take place in New Orleans.  During Hurricane Katrina.  It could really have been set anywhere, but the flood and the historical weight of the moment certainly add tension and seriousness to the story.  I dug it.   Here are some sample pages.

Feynman

Feynman is a graphic biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.  I read about this one somewhere or other and decided to check it out.  I didn’t know much about Feynman, but the tagline If this is the world’s smartest man, God help us all” is certainly a memorable one.   What struck me about the book was Feynman’s insatiable curiosity about the world and his humility about the limits of what physicists actually understand about their own work. This is a great read, and it was easily my favorite of the books in this roundup.  Read more about it and check out some samples of the artwork in this article from American Scientist.

The Influencing Machine

Brooke Gladstone’s On the Media is a staple on NPR stations around the country (just not Atlanta’s WABE).  Her graphic novel The Influencing Machine is a great crash course for those of us who can’t tune in regularly.  The take home messages for me – the media has been vilified as long as it has existed (i.e., it’s not a new phenomenon) and as screwed up and imperfect as it is, a free news media is essential to democracy.  That may sound obvious, but the historical perspective presented in the book really helped me to appreciate the truth of those statements.  Check out the animated book trailer.

The Arrival 

I bought and read Shaun Tan’s The Arrival yesterday.  I’ve read glowing reviews for years and always meant to get around to checking it out.  It finally jumped into my basket.  The Arrival is a brilliantly conceived and executed story of immigration and assimilation.  Our nameless protagonist leaves his young family behind to set sail for a new country and a chance at a better life.  There is no dialogue in the story, but the drawings are ripe with metaphor and depth.  It’s a fantastic story, and I am looking forward to reading and discussing with my daughter soon.  For more on the story and some examples of the beautiful art work, visit the author’s website.

Friday Links

Two business models.   Random House says it will sell e-books to libraries with no restrictions on the number of check outs. Penguin will no longer make e-books available to libraries.

Meanwhile, California has cut ALL state funding for libraries.   Yikes.

Different business model – The Humble Bundle: e-books bundled together for sale.  You determine what you’re willing to pay.

I love this idea: Q:  Should you get a free e-book copy with your dead tree  book purchase?  Or vice-versa? A: Yes.

Check out the writing office that National Geographic has lined up for its explorer in residence.  WANT.

Charles Dickens celebrated his 200th birthday with his own Google doodle.   I’m celebrating his birthday by picking out one of his books to read in 2012.

Beautiful reading lamps hand-made from books.

Are literary women finally getting the attention they deserve?

Unrelated: Why is it more interesting to spend an evening with this book than a beautiful woman?

Amazon has rounded up trailers for some of its best books of February.