Things I Read Through the End of October

[roadrunnertwice]

Yellow Tanabe – Kekkaishi vol. 33 and 34

33: Wow… could we actually be approaching the end, here? (I mean, it’ll be a while, but it looks like it’s in sight.)

Yoshimori’s mom remains one cold customer.

34: OH YEP, that definitely ends with a “see you in the final volume!” splash page. Wooooo!

Johann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim and (for vol. 3) Boulet – Dungeon: Zenith vols. 2 and 3

Aw man, Dungeon! I’ve missed this series! I grabbed these on whim at the library and got lucky — there are like four or five separate series of this comic, and vol. 2 of “Zenith” just happened to start with the final pamphlet I’d read back in the day.

Reading this again reminded me of how casually brutal it can be in between the slapstick, frequently killing off characters when there’s no particular reason to. But then I remembered that the whole comedic basis of the series is that they run a business that massacres people, and that brought me back down to earth.

The addition of Boulet to the team was surprising and worked very well. I can’t decide whether he’s a superior cartoonist to Trondheim? I also can’t decide whether my reaction to the story would have been different originally if he’d been drawing it from the start — Trondheim’s style is very isometric and zoomed-out and almost sprite-like, in a way that isn’t like much else you see these days and which played well with the idea of a story about the shitty people who run an honest-to-god roguelike dungeon. Boulet gets much more up-close and personal with everyone, and it’s a very different feel.

Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler – The Future of Us

Dep’t of Books I Flipped Through in the Title Wave Because the Ridiculous Premise Demanded at Least a Peek, but Which Didn’t Ultimately Strike Me as Worth Reading

Two kids in 1996 install an AOL CD and find themselves logged on to Facebook via 2011, reading their future profiles. That’s kind of funny! I don’t know if it’d even be possible to make a really good book out of that, but I have to high-five the trend-whoring audacity of it all. (If only it’d been released four years prior, so we’d have a bunch of ’90s kids helplessly trying to navigate MySpace.) Although I’m not really sure who this is written for: it reads very young, and is obviously here to capitalize on Facebook-fluent early-teens, but due to how the chronology lines up, all the cultural references are from around when the putative target audience was born, and the present-day Facebook-using versions of the characters are over 30.

Anyway, here’s my problem: Why isn’t whasserface’s 31-year-old self getting up in her past self’s face with a temporal feedback loop? Because FUCK YES she remembers having done this! I don’t care WHAT you were doing in the Bush era, time travel is obviously the most fucked up thing that’s happened in your life! She would have set like eighty calendar alerts to be sure she caught the window of opportunity, she’d be writing coded messages to herself on her public timeline, she’d be trying to get her to change some things and prevent her from changing other things, her teen self wouldn’t want to cooperate. It would have been a total paradox shitshow! THAT’S what I was hoping to read. Instead it was ultimately pretty rote, so no thanks. (I also instinctively gritted my teeth a bit about how a contemporary web browser wouldn’t have been able to even load Facebook’s front page, even given a clean and fast DSL connection to the future, but that’s obviously my own personality flaws intruding here.)

Kip Manley – City of Roses “Plenty” (16), “Deliverance” (17), and “Dazzle” (18)

September 30 and October 1

MAINLINING. Not much I can say at this point that isn’t spoilery, but I’m greatly enjoying the long smash-bang end of the arc.

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Oct. 6

BOOK CLUB, so that’s pretty cool! Max and Matt and David and Lindsey and I all read this as a group. Anyway, if you haven’t heard about this by now on account of the Wachowski movie, the gist is that it’s six novellas arranged in a nested structure — 12345654321. The first/last one is set in the 1840s, the central one in an unspecified post-apocalypse, the rest are somewhere between. Each one switches genre and voice, and each one shows up as a textual or historical artifact in the next one down the line.

The nested structure was clever, and the shifts of style and genre were truly impressive. That must have been tough as shit to do. But the trick with this kind of thing (is this a kind of thing? Let’s postulate that it’s a kind of thing) is that you have to be sufficiently committed to each separate book that you’re writing; it’s not enough to just gesture at it, because that’ll result in the whole thing just feeling blank.

I think Mitchell had mixed success on that count:

• The Sonmi 451 segment worked well as a story, and I really liked the contrast between the flat affect and quiet rage of present-day Sonmi and the rather naïve past self whose story she’s telling. But wow were there a lot of training wheels strewn about. I get the distinct impression that Mitchell expected a big chunk of his audience to have not read any science fiction since high school.
• Conversely: the Luisa Rey segment captured everything that’s good about trashy airport-rack thrillers without falling into their excesses or overstaying its welcome, and that was kind of amazing. (Said Matt: “If books like that were all that short, I probably wouldn’t feel so bad after reading them.”)
• I was really enjoying Sloosha’s Crossin’ and got blindsided by the completely embarrassing title-drop and theme-telegram at the capstone of it. It picked back up after that, but wow.
• The first half of Timothy Cavendish was just pretty bad, dude. I spent it shaking my head and asking “how did you cross fifty without walking into a pit of spikes?”
• The more I think about it, the more I think the Frobisher segment was kind of the dark horse of the lot, more independently interesting than any of the rest and also contributing something more unique to the whole.

Speaking of which, that’s the next salient question: does all of it add up to more than the sum of the parts? Well, yes. But not a lot more, unfortunately. Mitchell really shies away from making more than superficial connections between each segment — there’s a vague gesture at a reincarnation plot threading between them, but it’s tacked on and has no real repercussions, and the correspondences it implies are tenuous and not well explored. (Which makes me curious about WTF they’re doing with the repeat casting in the movie version.) I wished he had actually committed to it, because I like plots about reincarnation and second chances. (And they’re a great example of how a fantastic mode can let you get at angles of a story that just aren’t available in mimetic modes.)

Likewise, the textual incursions by each previous story are mostly just cute rather than meaningful, with the exception of the Sonmi -> Sloosha connection (and the possible exception of the Frobisher -> Luisa one, depending on how interesting you find the reincarnation angle).

The only connective aspect that really leaves is the thematic, which, because the setups vary so much, also ends up a little on the slight side. The strong prey on the weak, and that’s bad. Compassion can help, sometimes. That’s pretty much what the connecting thread of the book boils down to. And don’t get me wrong, that’s a good foundation! You can tell some good stories about nothing more than that. But I hoped the parallax of six stories would allow for some deeper thinking about what makes up the boundaries between predator and prey, how people move between the camps. Certainly for something less pat than the lazy pontification about civilization and savages in the Sloosha’s Crossin’ segment.

The Frobisher segment reaches for this, at least, which is probably why I’m starting to think it’s the best of the lot. It’s the centerpiece of the book that I was hoping to read.

All this is making it sound like I’m really down on the book, and I’m not; I enjoyed it quite a bit! It’s a page-turner, and there’s some good story in there, and I got pretty invested in some of it. But it’s ultimately fluffy, and its reputation had primed me to hope for a denser core.

G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday

Oct. 7

Hahaha, WOW, this was bizarre. I quite liked it. It came to my attention via this review, which I pretty much agree with in toto. (‘ware spoilers.)

Julia Reed – Queen of the Turtle Derby

Oct. 22

Oy.

So I’m reading Farah Mendelsohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, and there was a brief aside about Southern culture and superstition that included a really charming and wry quote from this book, and I was like A: in the mood for some light essays, and B: hoping these’d be enlightening on some level and maybe dispel a few of my lingering unfair hangups about the place. NOPE. The one quote that led me to it turned out to be the cream of the crop, and the remainder was spectacularly frustrating, wavering between dull, self-impressed, and actually surprisingly sketchy:

• Cranky defense of cockfighting and fox hunting? Check.
• I was super skeeved out by her paean to Scarlett from Gone With the Wind, but I don’t figure it’s really worth dissecting in detail. I mean, if that story was formatively important to you, then it can totally be worth talking about on all kinds of levels, but the blithe and almost totally ahistorical approach there was kind of the culmination of some majorly dodgy racial and gender-related threads running through the whole book. (There’s a whole other essay about the South’s tendency to go weirdly easy on women who murder, which cites a reflexive cultural need to protect women’s safety and honor, and although it had some really interesting material in it, I was mostly like, damn, are you sure you meant to just say “women” all those times without any modifiers? Like, all women? You sure you didn’t mean to say “white women?” Real sure? Just sayin’.)
• Glowing love letter to traditional gender roles? Check.
• Author “divides her time between New Orleans and New York City?” Check.

I don’t really know why I kept reading it after a certain point. I guess give me one and a half wry and humane essays and hope springs eternal. Anyway, here’s a snippet of what got me in the door in the first place:

[Insert story about Mike Huckabee disputing some legislative language re “act of God” in a disaster bill in a way that I can’t make heads or tails of but was probably a dog whistle for someone.] In the end, nobody wanted to hear any more about it and “act of God” was replaced with “natural causes” so that the governor would go on and sign the bill […]

Now, I have to say that I am with the legislature on this one. Everybody knows that “natural causes” are those things that kill a person who is about ninety-eight years old in his or her sleep. “Natural causes” is not a phrase dramatic enough to describe what happens when a whole trailer park is blown across the county line. Furthermore, I think if I watched my trailer being blown across the county line, I would feel like what had happened to me was a definite, big-time act of God.

Of course, Southerners tend to think that pretty much everything is an act of God. It’s easier than trying to figure out why we lost the war, why we remain generally impoverished and infested with mosquitoes and snakes and flying termites, why there is in fact “brokenness” in our world as well as plenty of tornadoes and floods and hurricanes and ice storms and hundred-percent humidity levels. Hell, it’s easier than trying to figure out what made the battery go dead or who locked the keys in the car. In Mississippi alone there are more churches per capita than any other state; God looms pretty large. Also, most of us are disinclined to blame ourselves for anything.

You see what I mean.