Following on from not having a clue about what graphic novels to buy, Nerve have a 20 Comics That Can Change Your Life. Amusingly, the two I most want to read on this list are the two I've previously dismissed in the bookshop after looking at their covers: Persepolis and Fun Home.
"This all started when I inherited a literary agent upon signing with the Writers And Artists agency in LA for film and tv work, years ago. Unbeknownst to me, W&A had a lit agency in New York, and one day Lydia Wills phoned me up to tell me that, now I was with W&A, she was my lit agent, and when was I going to write her a novel to sell? This went on for months. I nearly had her legs broken twice. Until, one day, I thought to myself, let's just shut her up. And I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone.
Thinking, obviously, that she'd decide I was insane and never bug me again.
Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she'd sold it to Harper Collins in New York.
It's one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris."
Sometimes I just can't read books anymore. Something about reading becomes very oppressive. This is usually when I retreat to reading graphic novels instead - same amount of cerebral clout but more easily absorbed. I've recently discovered that Kinokuniya, the English language Japanese book chain in Bangkok, has stacks of graphic novels, half of which is manga but the other half of which is not only Men In Tights Doing Good Things but some of the more left field, intellectual graphic novels too.
The thing is, I have no idea about what to buy when it comes to graphic novels anymore. Unless it's got Alan Moore or Warren Ellis or Frank Miller written on it, I am clueless as to its contents. So I literally judge graphic novels by their cover. Being completely without preconceptions is a really pleasant way of buying graphic novels, although turkeys are inevitably purchased. Being impatient, I like the speed of reading graphic novels. Because a graphic novel takes a couple of hours tops to read, I still get from one end to the other even if I don't think it's much good, whereas with a normal prose book I just put it aside.
The cinematic story arc that virtually every graphic novel adheres to means there's a plot engine pushing the narrative along rapidly and there's the simple fact of being able to turn the page every couple of minutes, plus you get to see the whole of what the writer was on about, not just the not-very-good beginning as with an uneven prose novel. The totality is important, I think, and it's something that a back cover blurb is always useless at conveying, as they invariably describe the plot, which rarely has anything to do with the reading experience.
I also like the high production values and glossiness of graphic novels, which seem to be getting ever more opulent. Ooh, shiny.
That longwinded intro aside, here's what I read last month:
But I Like It - Joe Sacco I picked this up because of its R. Crumb-esque artwork. I had no idea who Joe Sacco was but it turns out he's written some hefty political graphic novels like Palestine, which I'd like to get hold of. But I Like It is an odds'n'sods collection of Sacco's work that wouldn't fit anywhere else, and so it suffers from being a collection of shorts rather than one sustained piece. The main story is Sacco's recollection of being in the van on a European tour with The Miracle Workers, and the other is about his love affair with the Stones. His style, both artistically and prose, is very similar to R. Crumb to my mind - and that's no bad thing. He's incredibly self-flagellating and self-obsessed too, with himself as the main character of most of the strips. If, like me, you can't get enough about life on the road in rock'n'roll, you'll enjoy this, but it's hardly an essential purchase.
American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang I wanted to read this since seeing a preview in publisher First Second's catalogue last year. (I reviewed another of their titles here). It was worth the wait. Yang's book does indeed tell the story of being a Chinese kid growing up in America, with the culture of his homeland still very much in his everyday life. The narrative segues in and out of the legend of the Monkey King, which is a Chinese legend of sorts - and also the impossibly outrageous Chinkee, who is the personification of every possible stereotype Americans have of the Chinese. The result is a riot of a book, one which mashes together numerous complex riffs on culture, myth and identity and plays it for laughs without losing the seriousness of these themes. Discussion of these sorts of ideas and cultural themes tends to get bogged down in earnestness and a fear of offending which makes for dull reading - Yang goes the opposite way and creates a genuinely fascinating, provocative and very funny book.
Sloth - Gilbert Hernandez This is the one that I didn't really get. It starts off with a good premise - a teenager wakes up after a year in a self induced coma back to his old life in smalltown America - but then it does something weird in the middle and it went straight over my head. So if someone can explain it to me, maybe I can re-read it and enjoy it. It's written by one of the guys who wrote Love And Rockets, although I've never read that either.
Shenzhen - Guy Delisle The sort of sequel to Pyongyang, Shenzhen is another travelogue from 3 months spent living in the city by French Canadian animator Guy Delisle. It doesn't quite have the same impact as Pyongyang because it's essentially the same book, but it's still highly enjoyable. I reviewed both Pyongyang and Shenzen more fully on my travel website Travelhappy.
Latest additions to SpikeMagazine.com, thanks to Ian Hocking and James McConalogue:
The Samplist - Francis Ellen "...its appeal will be limited to those like a good fart joke to round off a discussion on Bach as the composer's composer..."
The History Boys - Alan Bennett "...As the boys see their new tutor as simultaneously avant-garde, refreshing, inspirational and even as a sexual object, the film's story offers a wonderful portrayal of that tragic and comical void between teacher and the pupil..."
Also, Steve wrote a spectacular post last November which I've just read about the genuinely life changing impact books have had on him over the last couple of decades.
Simon Sellars, creator of ace JG Ballard site Ballardian.com, also regularly writes for Lonely Planet. He's contributed sections to the Lonely Planet Japan and Micronesia , and has now co-authored one of LP's first forays away from the guidebook format with the quirky Micronations.
I've reviewed Micronations over on my travel blog Travelhappy, which has had a bit of a makeover as well.
Currently planning to move all of Spike onto Wordpress - if anyone knows someone who can cut and paste 600+ pages into a database without fucking it up for a pittance, let me know.
Discovered Strange Attractor through The Midnight Bell. Looks lovely. Might be able to find a copy in London while I'm back in Blighty for Christmas. (From 30 degrees to 3 degrees. Deep joy).
Strange Attractor reminded me of the three Rapid Eye anthologies edited by the late Simon Dwyer, which had a big impact on me when at university. My friend Mal brought the first two volumes home one day and the pair of us couldn't stop reading and talking about the stuff in them for weeks afterwards. Rapid Eye 3 was perhaps the best of the lot in its big art book format, but sadly Simon Dwyer was hospitalised as it was published, missing the launch party and dying not long after due to complications from AIDS.
Rapid Eye was pre-Internet days for me - or just as I was discovering the internet - and the range of voices assembled in these books seemed, at the time, not only rare but difficult to find, stuff that Dwyer had dug up and made easily available again or published for the first time. While there was a fair bit of the "covered in shit and blood in the name of art" brigade featured in Rapid Eye, which I personally always found a bit dull after the initial shock value had worn off, the majority of these books featured really interesting writing - as in, cogent, articulate arguments, polemics or considerations about people, art, music and culture. That Aldous Huxley featured on the cover of Rapid Eye 1 to launch the series was significant, I think - there was little posturing and no ageism or wilful trendiness to RE, more an interest in well-expressed, different ideas and positions wherever and whoever they came from.
So, this is a very small, very belated thank you to Simon Dwyer for Rapid Eye. Creation Books still publishes a Rapid Eye anthology, but get hold of the originals if you can. They might make that funny exploding noise at the back of your brain too.
Bonus links: Alexander Laurence's interview with the gentlemen behind Creation Books, which mentions Simon Dwyer; and Pan's review of the Rapid Eye books who had a similar experience to me with them. I couldn't find any old interviews with Simon Dwyer which was a shame.
I wrote before about the Hunter S Thompson Death Industry - and it grinds on with the showing of the documentary "Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride" on American TV (tonight, I believe, on Starz Pay TV channel) and the publication of the staggeringly unoriginally titled Gonzo, a deluxe photobook accompanying the exhibition of the same name that retails for $300. Even with Amazon's usual hefty discount, it's still $225. Ouch.
Books like this exasperate me because I want to see the content but I know before I even do see it that it can't be worth the money. There's some of Hunter's photos showcased in the exhibition and book available to view online at the M + B Gallery site. Pity the good Doctor himself won't be arriving in the Art Gallery to spraypaint "Fuck The Pope" on the wall.
The Starz documentary sounds a lot more promising - here's an excerpt of the blurb from their site:
Both of the actors who portrayed him on film, Johnny Depp (Fear and Loathing) and Bill Murray (Where the Buffalo Roam ), became lifelong friends, as did former Sen. George McGovern and CBS News correspondent Ed Bradley. They all appear here, along with actors Sean Penn, Gary Busey, Benicio Del Toro, John Cusack and Harry Dean Stanton, film critic Leonard Maltin, and authors William F. Buckley and Tom Wolfe.
“He was a beacon for dissent, he was a place people could turn to, to get a moral argument from an immoral outlaw,” says Cusack.
Wolfe included several Thompson essays in his 1973 book “The New Journalism,” along with pieces by writers such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, and he lauds his talent in an interview for the film. “No one categorization covers this new form unless it’s Hunter Thompson’s own word, Gonzo,” Wolfe says. “If so, in the 19th Century, Mark Twain was the King of all the Gonzo writers. In the 20th Century, it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as this century’s greatest comic writer in the English language.”
But although there are early photos and reminisces, the film concentrates on the years after Thompson became well known. It seeks to define Hunter S. Thompson the person, versus Dr. Gonzo, the infamous writer. It is a fine line at times, given Thompson’s predilection for hard living, drugs and alcohol, firearms and general rebelliousness. But the distinction is there, often framed best by Thompson himself in clips from various interviews over the years.[Read more]
I got sent a copy of the documentary on DVD which I haven't had a chance to watch yet, but it definitely sounds like it's on the right track to leaving a more fitting legacy than the crazed cartoon character that already seems to overshadow the moral imperative and impeccable writing that is HST's real legacy.
Paul Neilan, author of Apathy And Other Small Victories, has a blog that's making me want to read the book even more. I found it because he linked Jayne's review of Apathy. As well he should.
Websites, like newspapers and magazines, thrive on getting sent free stuff by companies to write about. Getting paid by companies to review stuff is considered unethical, but getting free stuff isn't. ReviewMe.com is a new online service from the people behind Text Link Ads that aims to blur the distinction, paying bloggers to review products on their site, in whatever terms they wish, favourably or unfavourably.
As you've already guessed, this review itself is a gloriously self-reflexive blog post about ReviewMe.com which ReviewMe are paying me to write. At this point I could insert some scathing criticism and it wouldn't matter - they still have to pay me. Although, admittedly, quoting Bill Hicks' spectacularly articulated contempt for paid placement - "just another corporate shill at the capitalist gangbang" - might be taking it too far.
Bloggers who sign up to ReviewMe.com have their blog assessed, and if they're admitted to the program, are then offered products about which they can choose to write paid reviews that are supposedly relevant to their blog audience. The paying company has no control over what the blogger writes - indeed, the only review stipulation for this review is that it has to be over 200 words.
What's interesting about this approach is that it signals the arrival of blogs as a recognised avenue for companies to promote their products. I can't see many book publishers using ReviewMe.com to push their new titles, but you never know. What I'm interested to see is what sort of companies start using ReviewMe.com. Unsurprisingly, the majority of blogs already signed up to ReviewMe.com are in the technology and web development areas - I can't see many arts companies coming on board with this model, as most arts companies are as hopelessly backwards as publishers about using technology to promote their work.
Therefore I don't expect to actually be asked to review anything for ReviewMe on Spike beyond this, but I'm hoping it might lead to some interesting stuff for my travel site Travelhappy. Really I'm hoping ReviewMe might act as a conduit to tell me about useful stuff I didn't know about before, because it will be products et al supposedly tuned to my interests. Plus act as a conduit to pour booze down my throat thanks to easy beer money for writing about stuff I think is interesting.
James Gleick in the NY Times on the Oxford English Dictionary's quiet revolution to keep up with the incredible speed of change in the English language.
"The scouring of the Internet for evidence — the use of cyberspace as a language lab — is being systematized in a program called the Oxford English Corpus. This is a giant body of text that begins in 2000 and now contains more than 1.5 billion words, from published material but also from Web sites, Weblogs, chat rooms, fanzines, corporate home pages and radio transcripts. The corpus sends its home-built Web crawler out in search of text, raw material to show how the language is really used." (via Kottke).
I reviewed Gleick's Faster a long time ago. "That Gleick avoids hectoring the reader to slow down makes the book’s impact all the more pointed, especially when he indicates how timesaving techniques can become counter-productive. It makes our continual rushing around seem faintly ludicrous - or as one time-use report put it, "Sometimes American culture resembles one big stomped anthill"."
If you're an author with a book who doesn't have the time, money or inclination to set up your own blog or website, Squidoo.com provides a free, quick method of at least having one page on the Net about you and your book. You don't need to know anything technical - simply sign up for an account and follow the instructions.
Squidoo has a dedicated page to explain why it works well for writers - see Authors On Squidoo. Squidoo's editor in chief is Megan, who previously worked as an editor at Random House, so she is an uncommonly sympathetic ear to the needs of author self publicity within the internet/tech sphere.
Don't expect a page on Squidoo to bring you Da Vinci Code like sales. But at least give your potential readers the chance to find you and your book on the Net if you don't have your own website.
Apathy and Other Small Victories - Paul Neilan "...Angst plus equal parts sublimated anger, life seen through the grime of a Greyhound bus window, disposable culture and disposable life..."
Jack London - The Iron Heel "...As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in many ways more prophetic than either 1984 or Brave New World...."
Bukowski: Born Into This "...a documentary that follows the trajectory of the writer's life until his death in 1994. Directed by John Dullaghan, what we encounter in this film is an unadulterated and edgy look at the writer of Post Office..."
Charlatans - Simpatico "...You know what these songs are going to sound like before you hear them. And you're right...."
Plus a ton of music reviews courtesy of Eric Saeger.
is the bona fide name of a website. A refreshing marketing perspective, that. On there you can find this article by Danny Bernardi about finding a publisher for his Birmingham-set novel, Under The Rotunda. It's another "publishers are stupid" story, but it's worth saying again and again...
Here's the opening of the article:
"Love the story but why on earth have you set it in Birmingham of all places? No one wants to read a novel set in Birmingham!" my editor announced in despair. "Any chance you could set in London, preferably Islington?" she pleaded.
This conversation was repeated more times than I care to remember as my novel, Under the Rotunda, was undergoing the tortuous process of being written and rewritten at the behest of this London obsessed editor. There are, however, times as a writer when you just have to stand by your artistic principles whilst remaining aware that, in reality, such high-minded stances rarely pay the rent. Over the two years it took to write Under the Rotunda I was bluntly informed that I'd sell more copies if the book was set in London. Trouble was nobody seemed to understand that I didn't know the geography of London too well, having only ventured down there for meetings and interviews. Furthermore, as a native Brummie I wanted to write about my city and it's recent renaissance. I don't know whether it's possible to claim Birmingham is actually cool but it's probably safe to say it's cooler now than it ever has been and I wanted to shout (or at least speak loudly) about it. They always say you should write about what you know and as I've lived here all my life I do know about this place, warts and all. I've watched Birmingham transform itself from a dying conurbation, reliant upon manufacturing and heavy industry into a vibrant, service based economy where knowledge is the new currency. Furthermore, at the risk of sounding shallow (never a good trait for a writer) I'd got this snappy title, 'Under the Rotunda' and it rhymed! Under Big Ben or Under the London Eye didn't have quite the same ring.
Why would you care about the Booker Prize when you've got this?
From all the drugs the one i like more is music From all the junks the one i need more is music From all the boys the one i take home is music From all the ladies the one i kiss is music (muah!)
Music is my boyfriend Music is my girlfriend Music is my dead end Music is my imaginary friend Music is my brother Music is my great-grand-daughter Music is my sister Music is my favorite mistress
From all the shit the one i gotta buy is music From all the jobs the one i choose is music From all the drinks the one i get drunk is music From all the bitches the one i wanna be is music
Music is my beach house Music is my hometown Music is my kingsize bed Music is my hot hot bath Music is my hot hot sex Music is my back rub Music is where i'd like you to touch
The reviews for Kingdom Come have been almost universally lazy hackwork ("Seer of Shepperton", blah blah, "Shanghai internment", blah blah, "Crash very nasty book", blah blah - gimme a break). The drubbing Ballard's latest received from Michael Portillo on The Newsnight Review surely signals its importance all the more. Some have said it's badly written - because it doesn't bother describing character's hair colour or similar - and others have said it's a heavy handed and absurd attack on consumerism, mainly because it mentions the word "consumerism" in the text numerous times. (I wish reviewers what they posit as a good book when they make value judgements like that, so we know where they're coming from).
Steven Shaviro has, thankfully, written an excellent review of KC on his site. Shaviro gets the point - Kingdom Come is not simply an attack on consumerism but an attack on the absence of meaning in 21st century life. Shopping is an affect of this absence, not the cause of it.
There is nothing to do in the suburbs except root for the local sports teams, and go shopping at the Metro-Centre, a vast indoor mall whose enormous dome dominates the landscape, and whose central atrium is dominated by three enormous bears who inspire veneration from the shoppers. Everyone’s life is dominated by the twin vicarious activities of consumerism and sports fandom; and there’s a strong synergy between the two, since the Metro-Centre sponsors special sports nights, and organizes its promotions around the matches.
Ballard presents consumerism as an ever-accelerating, positive-feedback cycle. Shopping is immediately satisfying; but once you bring the products home, you feel empty and disappointed. Consumerism thus gives rise to disaffection and boredom. But the only cure for such dissatisfaction is still more shopping. And so the cycle replicates itself, on an ever-expanding scale.
Sports fandom, meanwhile, works as an intensifier. “People don’t know it, but they’re bored out of their minds. Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture” (67). Destruction and violence are just the flip side of accumulation. Where Bataille and Baudrillard seem to imply that excess, expenditure, and violence mark a line of escape from the sterility of bourgeois accumulation, Ballard is far more pessimistic. Expenditure, or potlatch, is really just another part of the same logic.
What, then, do the white, lower-middle-class British suburbanites do, after getting pumped up by an afternoon of shopping, and an evening of rooting for their team? Why, they go out and engage in a racist mob rampage — targeting South Asians and Eastern Europeans — under the cover of that old British standby, football [i.e. soccer] hooliganism. The police basically stand by during these riots, and do nothing. For they, and the politicians who command them, know that such outbursts are, ultimately, useful to the social order. “Secretly, they [the police and the town council] want the Asians and immigrants out… Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet — they hide the sound of the cash tills” (169)....
The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have.
Simon Sellars has done an excellent interview with the man himself over at Ballardian.com - easily the best of the round of interviews to appear along with KC - and you might enjoy the more lighthearted post-apocalytic photo essay I put together last week called Ballardian Bangkok too. Plus of course, all the distilled JGB goodness at JGBallard.com.
Oh yes - if anyone knows how I can get signed up to UKNova.com so I can download the torrent of JGB on the South Bank Show, please drop me a line. Thanks.
"...it's about time that a different - non-sexist, non-passive, progressive female - perspective on sexuality broke though into the mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better..."
"...Although a fair amount of football knowledge is assumed, Burksey isn’t about football per se, it’s also a broader satire on celebrity and contemporary society..."
"...highlights the work of other people involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Peter Saville....."
Momus highlights the arrival of Rob Young's big coffeetable book about Rough Trade records chronicling the rise and fall and rise again of the label, with another one on the same topic by Paul Cox also due to be published soon. Momus gives some typically amusing anecdotes about his own oblique encounters with Rough Trade during his 80s brushes with pop stardom.
VNUNet: "Google's controversial Book Search is driving traffic to booksellers, new figures show.
According to web monitoring firm Hitwise, the top destination for surfers visiting Google's UK Book Search was Amazon UK, accounting for 8.3 per cent of visits.
Book sites accounted for 15.93 per cent of all sites visited from the Google Book Search page last week.
WH Smith was the second most popular destination with 2.08 per cent of visits, followed by Amazon.com with 1.38 per cent.
Surfers over 55 accounted for a quarter of all visitors to Google Book Search in the past four weeks. Over 55s are 69 per cent more likely to use the site than the average UK internet population, according to Hitwise." [Full story]
I hadn't mentioned any interest in it, but my dad bought me the DVD of Bob Dylan's Chronicles last Christmas, at around the same time my girlfriend bought me the book of the same. I like the unspoken symmetry of that. I like presents even more.
Unsurprisingly, it was my dad that introduced me to Dylan, requesting a new copy of Highway 61 Revisited for his birthday when I was about 10 or 11. I remember having to go WHSmith in Plymouth to order it and it taking weeks to arrive. I remember Bob Dylan looking out from the cover of that record, levelly meeting the eye of the viewer, not aggressive but not caring what you thought either. That image stayed with me, although I didn't listen to the LP til several years later. The LP seemed like something beamed in from outer space, something definitely beyond anything I knew about before.
When I did get into Dylan, my dad was genuinely perplexed that I was even listening to stuff from his generation. I had hijacked all his Dylan vinyl which he rarely listened to anymore anyway, including the copy of Highway 61 Revisited that I'd bought for him. He had a copy of Blonde On Blonde that he'd bought in America before it was even released in the UK, when he was serving with the navy and stationed on an aircraft carrier somewhere off the American coast. I seem to remember him telling me he had rushed back to the ship from shore leave clutching a copy and managing to persuade the duty officer to play a couple of tracks over the ship's tannoy... the idea of an aircraft carrier full of British Royal Marines armed to the teeth singing "Everyone must get stoned" as they strolled along the flight deck is one that appeals a lot, even if it never did happen.
Chronicles: Volume I has 7 straight pages of critical praise from every conceivable publication at its beginning, a sign of how deeply iconic and influential Dylan remains to the generation before mine who are largely still editing those publications. Most of his seminal albums were recorded over 40 years ago now, and perhaps the reason why Chronicles has been so lauded is because it is incredibly evocative of New York City in the 1950s.
While this is supposedly an autobiography, Dylan actually writes very little about himself - the entire book is about those around him who helped him or influenced him. The chronology hacks back and forth from the freezing NYC where he started out as a folk singer to his retreat from the outside world at the height of his fame to the recording of 1997 album Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois and back again to New York as he starts recording for Columbia Records. Throughout, Dylan is refreshingly oblique - while the chapter on Oh Mercy takes up 60 pages, he doesn't mention the record by title once. Dylan knows his readers will already be familiar with his chronology and his work - so instead of rerunning the usual tired narrative, he zones in on a few episodes that are of interest to him. Unsurprisingly, this approach doesn't defuse Dylan's enigma one bit - even as he tries to explain that there is no enigma and his genuine bafflement at the hordes of freaks who paid pilgrimage to his house and made his and his family's life a misery.
Dylan's writing style is also distinctly off-beam for an autobiography. It's got that staccato edge of his lyrics at times, and the sense of the whole paragraph making sense, rather than individual sentences. It makes for uneven reading - sometimes, especially in the Oh Mercy section, the focus and tone gets lost and repetitious. But for the most part, especially the first and last chapters, the picture of New York seen through the prism of the folk scene then is engrossing, and, best of all, Dylan's descriptions of how he was forever changed by listening to Roy Orbinson, Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson are simply heartstopping. They're worth reading the book for alone. Dylan captures not simply their impact on him but the power of music itself, and the way hearing something can irreversibly alter your perspective. Dylan's description of Robert Johnson comes right at the end of the book, and he seems to ascribe much of his success to his own songs being infused with Johnson's influence.
There are numerous other musicians that Dylan namechecks throughout Chronicles - sometimes to the point where it feels like a shopping list of influences - and it would make a great accompanying double CD to hear the musicians Dylan writes about. I had a quick hunt but can't find any such release online, sadly.
Synopsis: "David Gaffney's compact, surreal tales are filled with poignancy and wit. Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth - comic, absurd and disturbingly true."
-- Half way through this at the moment. No story is longer than a couple of hundred words. And they are all the better for it. I want to say he's like an English David Sedaris, because he has the same lightness of tone and warmth, but he's nothing like Sedaris - much shorter, darker, and with that deadpan English sensibility that makes the grotesquely surreal seem mundane.
Synopsis: "This is an investigation and critique of the Christian right in America via "The Left Behind" series of novels. Protestant Evangelism in America is a potent cultural, historical and political force. It is an inseparable part of the national character. As a religious denomination, the personal faith of Evangelicalism brings hope to millions of followers, just as other forms of religious belief enrich and give meaning to the adherents of these faiths.
What the book reveals is that the "Left Behind" series is not a harmless series of thrillers written from an evangelical Christian perspective but the primary tool of a man of whom none other than Jerry Falwell has remarked: "He has set the agenda for evangelicalism more than any other person." This agenda, by its very own admission, seeks to bring about the end of the world. With no end on sight to the series, with other large publishers issuing "me-too" series (most notably Bantam), we trivialise these books at our peril."
-- I tried reading one of the Left Behind books earlier this year. Someone had left it behind on a dive boat. Within the first three pages, all I could think was - I would have been a millionaire if I'd thought people would pay to read this shit.
Synopsis: "Historical and contemporary American racial, economic, and social issues lie at the heart of this witty, sophisticated, candy-colored adventure, set in a utopian island community. Bertha (Birdy) Snodgrass, preadolescent daughter of the town banker, throws in her lot with a shady Chinese Mexican wizard, his golemlike assistant, and, finally, with Louis the slave. Readers with a grasp of pre-Jamestown history will have the easiest time understanding the riffs on Puritanism and the various American hypocrisies woven into this story. Racial and cultural slurs are buried beneath the surface of character interactions, and no ethnic group is spared. That, of course, is the point: to see oneself as a possible victim of prejudice, or, like Birdy, work toward changing things and make friends with people who are different. Teens (especially those enrolled in advanced-placement American history classes) as well as many adults will find a lot to enjoy and think about in this brash, fantastic tale--and they will look forward to other volumes in the planned series." (Booklist)
-- Tried to read this but found its narrative to be strangely paced and the story flow confusing - I like the idea a lot more than the reading experience. The publisher, www.firstsecondbooks.com, has some excellent graphic novel titles coming out - they are definitely a publisher on a mission to find the best graphic novels from all over the world and you can see from their beautifully produced catalogue they have a real passion and flair for what they do. I'd love to read practically their entire back catalogue
Synopsis: "From a child runaway, to a top earner in Thailand's prolific sex industry, comes the true story of a little girl from an impoverished land where girls aren't valuable enough to educate, yet are expected to become the primary income earners--responsible for the basic needs and welfare of their families.
By the time Lon was 18, she had been responsible for the sole support of her family for five years. After suffering a childhood filled with beatings, blamed for her fathers death, and denied further education at the age of 12, she ran away and soon sold the only item of value she possessed--her young and supple body. The more she earned by agreeing to the most perverted and degrading acts demanded by her foreign customers, the more money her mother demanded. An abortion at 15, followed by a suicide attempt, hundreds upon hundreds of clients, and the discovery and loss of her first love-all before she was 18-are only a part of her story. Her relentless determination to save her sisters from the same fate gave her the strength to endure, and to tell the unknowing world how the "Daughters of Isaan" must honor their family obligations, regardless of the cost to themselves."
-- Only 13 has already been a bestseller in Thailand - there are so many excellent English language books published here that never see a wider US/UK audience - and now this is its first American printing.
Synopsis: "Set in and around Clearwater, a vast, subterranean shopping centre lying on the edge of the Thames estuary in Kent, Will Ashon's spectacular debut novel constructs a story of intrigue, action and high entertainment around six principal figures. King James of Vernaland is an ex-secret service hardnut with a God complex, Binary Robert, his young companion with a genius for computer-hacking and data-harvesting; Peter Jones is a disaffected lifestyle journalist desperate to rescue his career with a scoop on the invisible workings of the Clearwater complex, and Mandy, the young shop assistant he befriends in his attempts to penetrate the vast edifice of consumerism. And then there's Jimmy Patel, a retired professional spin-bowler turned melancholic-alcoholic, about to be fingered himself for professional indiscretions. It's just not cricket. CLEAR WATER binds these five together along with the unforgettable Verna Landor - a wartime 'entertainer' of dubious stripe and King James' muse - and builds an extraordinary narrative of espionage, desire and dysfunction to a thrilling denouement. An intricately structured, deadpan exposition of contemporary life, CLEAR WATER announces the arrival of a prodigious new talent."
This has been getting rave reviews and the Amazon reader comments call on comparisons to Delillo, David Mitchell and Pynchon... although perhaps the nearest is Ballard, especially as his new novel Kingdom Come deals with a shopping centre as well! I'm getting a copy of that brought to Bangkok next week so I'll be curious to read the two and see how they compare.
Synopsis: "Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam is both a trilogy that describes what academic and professional life were like during the last half of the 20th century, and a work of wide ranging criticism of the dishonesty, failure of duty, violations of rules, elitism, bragging and celebrification that became the road to success in the last 50 years of the century. The first volume, Misfits in America, carries its protagonists through college at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s, the Harvard and Michigan Law Schools in the early 1960s, practicing law for the Department of Justice in the mid 1960s, early years in the academic world, and extensive but fruitless efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to have the federal courts perform their constitutional duty regarding the Viet Nam War."
Synopsis: Join author Regina Lynn in The Sexual Revolution 2.0 as she personally explores the new world of online romance, e-personals, cybersex, date blogs, internet-powered sex toys and on-demand porn. Along the way, meet brave pioneers who are venturing to the outer limits of the sex-tech convergence and ordinary people who are simply enriching their love life by embracing new technologies. By the end of the journey, you will understand how technology can help you achieve the one thing it can never replace: human connection.
I like Regina Lynn's Sex Drive column for Wired a lot, so I'm looking forward to finally getting to read this.
Synopsis: The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world we live in. But, almost a century after their advent, most people haven't the slightest clue what either is about. Did you know that there's so much empty space inside matter that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube? Or that you grow old more quickly on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor? And did you realize that 1 percent of the static on a TV tuned between stations is the relic of the Big Bang? These and many other remarkable facts about the world are direct consequences of quantum physics and relativity.
Quantum theory has literally made the modern world possible. Not only has it given us lasers, computers, and nuclear reactors, but it has provided an explanation of why the sun shines and why the ground beneath our feet is solid. Despite this, however, quantum theory and relativity remain a patchwork of fragmented ideas, vaguely understood at best and often utterly mysterious. They have even gained a reputation of being beyond the understanding of the average person. Author Marcus Chown emphatically disagrees. As Einstein himself said, most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. "
-- Despite the assurances this is an easy read, I am pretty sure it's going to make my brain hurt.
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