reading: 2009

January 27th, 2010

Way back in my undergrad days, when I was incredibly depressed and rudderless and desperate for some sense of meaning or achievement, I started keeping track of what books I read and what movies I watch.

It’s something I’ve stuck with because the items on the list turn out to be convenient fenceposts along my memory: I watched this with her; I saw this one right after I moved; I watched this one abroad with family, etc.

At any rate, as a librarian it’s worth some reflection on the books I’ve read.

Death Note vol. 5 – 12
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius: 2.0
Skim
The King of Mulberry Street
Deogratias
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Good As Lily
Bound by Law?
The Complete Concrete
The Book of Lists: Horror
Squirrel Mother
The Bloody Streets of Paris (graphic novel, not prose)
The Pride of Baghdad
Stray Bullets v. 1
Dignifying Science
Queen Bee
Fax from Sarajevo
Aya
Nation
Notes for a War Story
Mom’s Cancer
Sentences
Into the Volcano
Astro City: Life in the Big City
Ghost World
Artemis Fowl (graphic novel)
Rapunzel’s Revenge
Yossel. April 1943
Y: the Last Man, v. 1 -10
Dogs & Water
The Eternals
Blue Pills
Same Difference & Other Stories
Artemis Fowl (prose)
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code
Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception
Superman for All Seasons
Tales from the Brothers Grimm (graphic novel adapation)
Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony
Why I Killed Peter
Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox
Invincible trade paperback: v.1 – 11 (and, later, Ultimate Invincibles 1-4)
Jellaby: Monster in the City
Fade
Queen & Country: Operation Broken Ground
Swallow Me Whole
Chicken with Plums
Don’t Look Behind You
The Graveyard Book
The Artemis Fowl Files
Street Angel
Blueberry Girl
Crazy Hair
House
Debbie Harry Sings in French
Grammar of the Shot
Hatter M: v. 1 in the Looking Glass Wars (graphic novel)
Creatures of the Night
The Facts in the Case of the Disappearance of Miss Finch
A Wrinkle in Time
A Wind in the Door
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
The Strain
The Beast of Chicago: the Murderous Career of H.H. Holmes
The Secret Science Alliance and the Copy Cat Crook
Johnny Hiro
G-Man v. 1: Learning to Fly
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg Heffley’s Journal
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
Daredevil: Echo / Vision Quest
Asterios Polyp
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Monster
Little Brother
Smax
Animal Man
The Professor’s Daughter
The Goon: Chinatown
Channel Zero
Desperadoes: a Moment’s Silence

When I read Nation in May I thought it would be the best book I read all year–and it was, until December, when I read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read ever.

On this list, it’s worth noting the works which hinge on older technology or culture in a way that serves as a detriment to the story: the Complete Concrete suffers from its cultural references, many to people younger kids wouldn’t know; Johnny Hiro is moving in that direction; the plot of Channel Zero relies on obsolete technology; and while I enjoyed Little Brother, I expect that in twenty years it will look quaint.

Smax and Animal Man were both terrible books by good comics authors, and from the Neil Gaiman books I read this year–all of which struck me as slight, including The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbery–I’d like to say that I’m done with his work. But I’ll probably keep reading them as they come out, in vain hope that they’ll be worth it.

The Strain was a terrible book co-written by a decent director (Guillermo del Toro).

Diary of a Wimpy Kid didn’t amuse me, at all. To me, it just seemed like the same joke over and over (look: Greg Heffley is self-centered and oblivious!) and I chose not to read the next two books although I’d already bought them. The library was happy to have them.

The Artemis Fowl books are good individually, with probably The Opal Deception the strongest among them, but reading them all within a short span makes their weaknesses show: each one depends entirely too much on that same tired ace up Colfer’s sleeve.

Y: The Last Man was very good, in spite of some spots that strained suspension of disbelief, but the ending was crap. It, like Asterios Polyp, works much better if you ignore something big that happens at the end (except with Y there are two of those somethings, one pointlessly cruel and the other frankly impossible).

Invincible was another good find. It’s a rare treat to find a fresh voice in superhero comics which isn’t in the vein of Alan Moore or Frank Miller, too macho to show warmth and too cynical to show hope.

Of all these, it looks like less than 20% were written or co-written by women authors (and since most of the books here are comics, it just reinforces the notion–correct, in this case–that comics are a boyzone). Interestingly, I liked 3/4 of the books by women, which has the men beat by far.

The memoris ranged from good to very good. The non-memoir non-fiction books were more uneven. And I still don’t know what to make of Crumb’s Genesis, except that I wanted to like it more than I did.

Fantastic Contraption

September 24th, 2008

As an undergraduate and right afterwards I was irresponsible with video games, often playing them all night when I should be sleeping, blinking and looking around in the early morning, bleary-eyed and dazed as if all of the world outside of the computer were something new and alien.  On these occasions I’d usually  order pizza and call it a night, but it didn’t stop me from the occasional realization that something was seriously wrong: that my eyes were solid red from iris to eyelid, that I had an intense headache, that I’d been hungry for five or six hours but that it hadn’t been enough to prompt me to get up and find something to eat.

The games were mostly built towards a specific end, with a handful of goals laid out and specific techniques left to discover.  Then once you knew that on the “survive 30 minutes” map you’d need three or four turrets and at least two barracks constantly training marines, the map held little challenge or even fun.  That was the problem with most of the games: there were finite discoveries trailed along a very few pathways where victory was possible.  The games were not much like life, which is generally brimming with possibilities (though many of them unrealized); instead they all worked as a Socratic method in service of a dull and often non-transferable lesson.

It was partly the realization that I was giving myself the equivalent of a hangover without having been drinking, and partly the realization that the games were fundamentally flawed, that led to my quitting games for a few years.  I uninstalled all of the games from my PC and deliberately did not upgrade it so that I couldn’t play the newest ones.  And somewhere along the way they’ve mostly lost their lustre.

The distance has been useful: I’ve rediscovered my love of reading and of music, I’ve adopted and completed various projects, I’ve learned CSS, PHP, and MySQL.

Lately I’ve begun playing games again, but in moderation and only for free.  One of the games that I’ve found lately that I like a lot is Fantastic Contraption. It’s a crude physics engine with about two dozen levels and a very simple goal: get the dark pink object (often a ball, sometimes a square or rectangle) into the area marked “goal.”

There are only five possible building elements but any number of ways to reach the goal, and one of the brilliant touches of the game is that the creator lets players save their solutions for others to browse.  So one person might bulldoze a wall between the start location and the goal, whereas another might build a slingshot and launch the ball over it.

Some of the contraptions built are crude and ungainly, some are elegant and clever, some are unlikely and hilarious, many give that odd frisson of discovery.

For all the game’s attractions it’s worth saying that the physics on show are far from perfect–the game doesn’t handle tensile strength realistically, nor does it take friction into account nearly enough (especially in regards to large objects rolling up a hill).  Still I’m willing to accept those both shortcomings as authorial choice: the graphics are cartoony and stylized, implying that suspension of disbelief should be a given.

Still, it’s my new favorite game. Taking a break from web work, I solved level 19 with a Rube Goldberg machine, and here’s how someone else solved it much more simply.

Reviews

August 29th, 2008

Years ago, shortly after Crash came out (the one about racism in L.A., not the one based on the bad pun on auto-eroticism), I wrote a piece about the film.  It was a strongly felt criticism of the film as absurd, crass, predictable, and manipulative; and while I was pleased with my writing at the time I realized later that it had some serious failings.  The most serious of the failings was that the review was as much about my reaction to the film as it was about the film itself.

Recently I fell into nearly the same trap in reviewing the graphic novel The Walking Dead on my library’s internal forum: I judged it predictable and overwrought, glossing over important ethical concerns while pretending to take them seriously.  The criticisms engaged with the text more than in the piece on Crash , but I still judged the work against my expectations rather than against what we can determine about the author’s.

I don’t want to get into the ‘death of the author’ debate, though it’s certainly worth acknowledging that the author’s intentions aren’t always clear, even to him- or herself.  What I do want is to give authors a fair shake.

I’m not a fan of the Pauline Kael approach to criticism, where the writer is as forceful a presence (and sometimes more forceful a presence) as the subject.  But apparently I’ve been writing with that same approach without realizing it.

It’s retrospectively obvious that everything said says something not just about the subject but also about the person who says it.  If you’ve read much of their work you’ve probably noticed Leonard Maltin’s aversion to violence, Roger Ebert’s occasional free pass to derivative storylines in films on uncommon subjects.

In both of those cases I accept the author’s personality as part of the review, but what I want for the things posted here is to determine as much as possible what the work is trying to do and to judge the work against those intentions.  I’m puzzling over how those reviews are best written, not at all sure if or when I’ll find out.

King: a Comic Book Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

August 3rd, 2008

King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King: A Comic Book Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • Ho Che Anderson
  • ISBN: 1560976225

Anderson’s work chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., from boyhood as a son of a pastor to his increasing prominence as an agitator for civil rights, to his assassination in Memphis. Unlike many works on King, this one does not present him as a saint, instead painting him as a bold and eloquent speaker who is also a womanizer, more than a little vain, and occasionally forced to compromise against his better judgment.

The story is somewhat episodic, presenting relevant events and maintaining them long enough to give a sense of history and import, then leaving them as soon as the purpose is served–in many cases in the middle of a conversation or even the middle of a sentence.

The book is notable not only for its even treatment of King but also for its considerable research and its general historical accuracy, including its mention of COINTELPRO and police brutality and its representation of schisms with strikingly different views on how to proceed towards civil rights and even whether the struggle is worth it.

Still I suspect that at least one of the conversations in the book is fictionalized–the private discussion between JFK and MLK while walking through the gardens at the White House–but the work as a whole remains both educational and entertaining as well as emotionally involving.

Anderson’s art takes a number of different styles, starting off fairly stark and realistic (as shown above) and introducing splashes of color and increasing experimentation as the story continues. The layouts become more fluid and vivid as the artwork ranges from iconic, approaching abstract, to paintings made over photographs. The final section of the book is remarkable for its intensity as the Memphis hotel nears: the art is impressive but also very much in service of the story.

In spite of these strengths the book does have its flaws, including a half-dozen typos, mostly in the middle of the book, and one of them inexcusably during the “I Have a Dream” speech (specifically, the mention of “farmer slaves”).

The book remains worth reading: the writing is compelling and the art shows a talented and creative mind at work taking no artistic choice for granted.