The Unwritten Vol. 1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I don't remember where I first heard about this series... one of those blogs or podcasts or something that tells me what's good. I don't remember what I was promised, either, but whatever it was I liked it enough to give it a shot.

That forgetting posed a bit of a problem in the first few pages, which I read and thought, "Whaaaaaaaaat is this? This is not very good. What's with all these words? It's a graphic novel!" And I really almost gave it up right then, but I said to myself, I said self, you've done this before and maybe you should just give it a little bit longer.

And of course, I was right. The second time, with the reading just one more page. Because it turns out that first three pages or whatever are meant to be pages from a not-graphic novel series that is like Harry Potter et al. and therefore is written as a send-up of Harry Potter et al. And once I figured that out, I was much happier!

The real novel, the graphic one, is about this fella called Tom Taylor whose father wrote the aforementioned series that instead of Harry Potter is Tommy Taylor. Tom is emphatically not Tommy, but is still making a living going around to all the cons and whatnot signing Tommy Taylor signatures and talking about his father's work, which his father can't do because he's gone mysteriously missing, or possibly just abandoned everyone. And right now Tom has two opposing problems causing him no end of trouble — a group of people who think he's not really Tommy Taylor but some kid his father absconded with to make himself look good, and another group that thinks he's totally Tommy Taylor, magical wizardry and all. And some people in that last group would really rather him dead...

There's so much to this story, I've barely cracked the surface of it, which makes sense considering these are just the first 5 comics of an ongoing series. But other interesting things so far are Tom's obsession (given to him by his father) for literary locations, a mysterious staircase that has more stairs going down than coming up, people possibly made of words, and some revisionist-history backstory involving Rudyard Kipling.

I may or may not have gone right out the day after reading this volume to get the other two that currently exist. I might have to track down a comic shop if I get through those too quickly...

Recommendation: So far, I'd recommend for people with a good sense of humor about fantasy conventions and a slightly strong stomach.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

Fragile Things Read-Along, Part the Fourth

What an odd week of stories. We've got two ostensibly true stories, one story broken up into several even smaller stories, and another one of those stories that seems to require a little bit of homework to understand. Also, the return of the sodium yellow light, which really needs to be retired. On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I liked all of the stories this week, though I have yet to match my love for the first week's. A girl can dream...

"Good Boys Deserve Favors"
I can totally get behind this story, about Gaiman as a double-bass-playing tiny person who didn't like to practice. I never liked to practice my instrument as a kid, either, although I never had the opportunity to sneak a book into my "practice sessions" and I feel a little gypped. (I probably shouldn't say that.) The climax of this story is interesting — the young Gaiman finds himself chosen to play his double bass in front of a potential school donor, and he just makes something up and manages to please most of the listeners, though it's not clear just how good this made-up piece is. The fact that his headmaster described it as "modern, yet classical," leads me to believe that it was probably very very weird, and that possibly the story is really about how Potential School Donors are not terribly discerning in their music.

"The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch"
Okay, this is another ostensibly true story, though in this one I think that "ostensibly" is the key word here. Ostensibly. Because what we have is the story of Ostensible Neil Gaiman getting dragged to the circus with some Ostensible Friends and an Ostensibly Crazy Person called Miss Finch, and then ending up (beginning up? Gaiman starts the story with the ending) without Miss Finch but with some delicious sushi. The circus is no regular circus, and no Night Circus either, but some odd conglomeration of things like knife-throwers and trick motorcyclists and fake hand-losers who take their guillotined fake hands and chase people around with them to the Benny Hill theme, apparently. But the real story part of the story is that geobiologist Miss Finch, who has all night been bitching about the circus and also the dangers of sushi, gets picked to have her wishes come true and suddenly saber-toothed tigers exist and the circus disappears. And even in the story, it's not clear exactly why this happens... did Miss Finch really get her wishes? Was she a well-done audience plant? Was the whole circus some sort of elaborate joke on the Ostensibles? At first listen, I was a bit annoyed with the story for not giving me any useful exposition, but after reading it again I'm content to come up with elaborate exposition of my own and call it canon.

"Strange Little Girls"
This story did not come across at all in audio, so I just skipped it and read through it later. The reason it fails in audio is that all of the pieces in it are just paragraphs, and you don't get the print formatting that tells you, hey, these are all separate little stories and not actually about the same person. So it's a bunch of little stories about different people, and actually they're less "stories" than "snapshots" or whatever the print equivalent is. So, difficult to describe. I'll just stick with saying that my favorites are "Love" (in which a woman totally gets a man in trouble with his wife) and "Heart of Gold" (whose structure just amuses me).

"Harlequin Valentine"
I liked this story a lot, even though I know nothing about harlequins outside of Harley Quinn and it is obvious that I am missing a lot of the subtler points. But with my second small-but-literal spit take of the book, at the point when I realized that was no paper heart pinned to Missy's door, I couldn't say no to the rest of the story. I really liked the Harlequin character, who is completely ridiculous and well-rendered by Gaiman on audio, and who gives his heart to a human called Missy for funsies, apparently, and then follows her around to see what she'll do with it. Well, once Harlequin makes the mistake of telling her whose heart it is, Missy becomes my favorite character as she takes the heart and eats it with ketchup and hash browns so that she can become Harlequin herself, and leaves the erstwhile Harlequin to the human life. Ketchup and hash browns, people. I love it. And now I must go look up this commedia dell'arte stuff, because it is apparently delightful.

Black Plumes, by Margery Allingham

Well, I mean, let's be real. After that whirlwind romance with The Night Circus (which I just very reluctantly took back to the library), no other suitor was going to compare at all. So it might be that. But I really did not like Black Plumes.

No, no, it's not that I didn't like it, it's that I didn't like it, and in fact really it's that I was and am completely apathetic toward it. I read the book, I learned whodunnit, and I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's cool, I guess."

Maybe I've been spoiled by the other "Golden Age Girls"? Sayers, Christie, and Marsh (or really just all the authors of the period that I've read) have given me some crazy death or other that seems impossible or is really weird or has, like, twelve people who could have done it. The murder in this novel just sort of happens and then someone comes to investigate and then everyone suspects everyone else and then at the end it was some other guy who was never suspected, which, I guess I should have called that?

And there was this sub-plot-line with a pretend engagement that I actually didn't like because it was just kind of annoying, and I didn't care about either of the parties or any of the parties in the whole book and I couldn't even tell you what the inspector's name is or anything about him besides that he doesn't say "just" or "joke" but rather "chust" and "choke" because apparently that's what they say wherever he's from and man that accent as done by this narrator was very distracting. So maybe it's an audiobook problem?

I don't know. I have really nothing else to say about this book, and that makes me kind of sad. Should I give Allingham another chance? Is this actually her worst book and I chust made a terrible decision? Please say it's so!

Recommendation: I just... I don't know.

Rating: 4/10
(RIP Challenge, Vintage Mystery Challenge)

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

I don't want to talk about this book. I want to snuggle with it. Snuggle snuggle snugg—ow, those are some pointy edges! Okay, book, you can just stay over there a minute.

Okay, so, this book. I heard some folks bein' real excited about it earlier this year, and I was like, magicians? Circuses? Secret plots OF DOOM? I am so in. And so I put a hold on it at the library, some ridiculous amount of time in advance. And then in the intervening weeks this book seemed to get ALL the publicity, showing up on lots of blogs and in newspapers and on NPR, and everyone was like OMG THIS BOOK IS TEH AWESOMEST and I was like, ohlord. Because I've read those books before, and I have not liked them.

But as you can tell, this book I liked a ton, possibly because all those things that drew me into the story, and that made me worry that they would not be as good as everyone was shouting about, were really not that important. Yes, there are magicians. There is a mysterious contest so hush-hush that even the competitors have no idea what the contest is or how to win it. There is intrigue and subterfuge. But what I cared about was the circus.

The circus is this nearly completely black-and-white affair, with dozens of little tents with your usual circus fare and a few tents with really magical things — a magician disguised as an illusionist, a labyrinth, a wishing tree, a landscape made entirely of ice but still realistically aroma-ed. And what makes the circus truly special is that the author makes sure you know exactly what everything looks like and smells like and feels like and all those other sensory things. About a bonfire:

"As you walk closer, you can see that it sits in a wide black iron cauldron, balanced on a number of clawed feet. Where the rim of a cauldron would be, it breaks into long strips of curling iron, as though it has been melted and pulled apart like taffy. The curling iron continues up until it curls back into itself, weaving in and out amongst the other curls, giving it the cage-like effect. The flames are visible in the gaps between and rising slightly above. They are obscured only at the bottom, so it is impossible to tell what is burning, if it is wood or coal or something else entirely."

Morgenstern intersperses short sensory passages like that throughout the novel, but she writes all of her scenes in a similarly opulent way. At first I was a bit put off by this seemingly over-verbose writing, and in a few places it sort of gets away from Morgenstern, but in general she makes it work fantastically and it is absolutely my favorite aspect of the book. I really want to get my hands on the audiobook so that this writing and Jim Dale's voice can make beautiful babies in my brain.

Ahem.

If you're more of a story person, I'm not sure you'll be as enamored with the book; the plot is fairly simple, starts off quite slow, and ends abruptly AND with a not-declared-as-such-but-it-totally-is-and-can't-deny-it epilogue, but though I found myself saying more than once "If this goes one step farther I'm calling shenanigans," the book managed never to take that step, at least by my measurements.

I wrote on Twitter the other night that "I've read through the last page of The Night Circus, but I'm certainly not finished with it..." and that holds true today. I spent more than a week reading this book not because I didn't have time to devour it in one sitting but because I didn't want to. I wanted to savor that writing and put off leaving the circus as long as possible. And I'm not kidding about the audiobook. My library doesn't have it yet but when they do, you'll be seeing another post about The Night Circus right here.

Recommendation: If you like shiny pretty things or magic or clown-less circuses, you'll probably be happy here.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

Fragile Things Read-Along, Part the Third

Well, I am pleased to report that we do not have a repeat last week's intense befuddlement and annoyance. These stories are certainly not any more cut and dried, because that would be no fun, but at least I feel more internal sense-making and also some intrigue. I like to be intrigued.

Here's where we stand:

"Going Wodwo"
I liked this the least of this week's stories, probably because it's one of those poem things and I'm still working on being a poetry person. It may happen, someday, but it hasn't happened yet. But anyway, this twenty-line poem describes a person, well, "going wodwo," or becoming, as the intro says, "a wild man of the woods." I don't quite follow the path of the story of the poem, nor does it have the delightful cadence of "The Fairy Reel", but I will give the poem props for imagery. The first stanza reeled me in — "Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life / Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves / Going in search of food and for a spring / Of sweet water" — and even though I don't really get it, I really like the phrase "My skin will be / my face now." Well, if by "like" I mean "am sort of really creeped out by." Which I do.

"Bitter Grounds"
There is a lot going on in this story. The main plot, I suppose, is that there's a fellow who up and runs away from his life, stops running temporarily to help out a random guy who subsequently completely disappears, then sort of decides to be this guy for a while. As you do. But there's so much interesting stuff to think about as this plot moves along — the disappeared guy leaves behind an abandoned, totalled car that our narrator minutes previously had seen as intact if broken down. Disappeared Guy was an academic writing about zombies. Our narrator, while pretending to be DG, makes a new friend who also disappears, and some other new friends who may or may not exist. Like last week's "Closing Time", this story has an ending that I don't quite understand, but this time I felt like the confusing ending at least fit with the story, instead of being completely jarring. Or possibly I am more forgiving when there are potential zombies involved.

"Other People"
As soon as I heard Gaiman say, in his fantastic voice, "'Other People,'" I said to myself, "Hell is?" And I was SO RIGHT. I love it when that happens. There are no "other people" in this story, but there is Hell, and it is very hellish. There's a guy, and he wanders into Hell, and he meets a demon who proceeds to beat the crap out of him with 211 different instruments of OW. And then, for good measure, the demon forces the guy to admit to himself every bad thing he's ever done or said or thought or probably thought about thinking, over and over and over again. And from what I can tell, that is a LOT of bad things. Interestingly, I missed the important point of the story while ears-reading because I apparently had the attention span of a goldfish that day, but as soon as I started eyes-reading it yesterday I decided that this story was fantastic. This week's favorite!

"Keepsakes and Treasures"
Oh, goodness, I am turning into one of those Parents Television Council people, aren't I? I was all for the story when I thought it was going to be violence and sloppy eating, but then it took a turn toward the sex intercourse and I was like, "Oh, that's gross." I mean, I still read the story, but I really wanted more gruesome killing. Please don't tell me what that means about me. Ahem. Anyway. Here's an example of a story where I don't know any of the background (Gaiman notes in the intro that this story is based on characters from a comic that I've never heard of), but the story was just fine anyway. To spoil everything, there's an unnamed dude who works for this guy called Mr. Alice, and Unnamed Dude spends a lot of time and effort and Alice's money to procure for Alice the most beautiful boy in the world for the sex intercourse and then after not very long the beautiful boy gets the flu and dies. And so this is really just a very rated-R way of telling a very universal truth, and even though I was like, "ew, cooties," the way that Gaiman wrote the heck out of this story really sold it to me. There's the setup of our unnamed narrator being a bit of a serial killer (sidenote: I did a small but very literal spit take at the dissonance between these consecutive sentences: "She was a looker, my mum. I didn't know which one of the four was my dad, so I killed all of them." FANTASTIC), and so also really completely disaffected by all the bad and/or weird stuff Alice has him hired to do, and there's one scene that Gaiman wrote where I read it and I was like, "That's weird, a little bit," and then a couple pages later Gaiman writes this other little scene where I'm like, "Ew," and then I remember that first scene and I'm like, "Okay, now I need to go take a shower, euucchh." In a good way? I don't know.

I'm not quite hooked on Fragile Things again, but I am feeling much much better about its chances for being awesome. How about you guys?

Eight further reasons to lock up my library card

I mean, there are WAY more than eight reasons. My husband just gives me a Look every time I bring a new library book home now, because he's bored of admonishing me. But whatever.

Here are eight more books that I have collected from the library solely because I saw them while cataloging, in roughly chronological retrieval order. Again, I have failed to read any so far, but that's not the point, right? The point is pretty books!



1. These Children Who Come at You With Knives, by Jim Knipfel. Nuts! I'm only one book in, and already there's an exception. Technically, it doesn't count because I didn't catalog this book, but I'm counting it because I only heard about from cataloging anther Knipfel book I don't recall anything about. I was wondering if that other book would get a genre label, so I looked up the author, and then I saw this title and I was like, "OoooOOOOoooh." Short stories? Retold fairy tales? I was intrigued. And then it promised me "a magical snowman wrestling with the horror of being alive," and I was like take THAT, evil snowmen, and put a hold on it. I should be reading it for RIP, so maybe you'll hear about it soon?

2. Mice, by Gordon Reece. This could probably go for RIP, too! This one has fog and a lone tree on the cover, combined in a deliciously creepy way, and the jacket copy promises more creepy: "At first, they [the main characters] flourish in their cottage haven, drinking hot chocolate and listening to Brahms by the fire. But on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Shelley wakes to hear a creak on the stairs. Someone is in the house...." Augh! Someone in the house! Interruption of BRAHMS! It is meant to be both scary and funny, so I'm intrigued.

3. The Edinburgh Dead, by Brian Ruckley. I might be sensing a theme here. Whatever. The back cover offers grisly medical experiments on corpses, and also more "sinister" forces, but it's really the tagline on the cover that got me here: "There is a law against murder. But there are no laws for the dead." What does that even mean? I must find out! Also, it's got an 1820s setting and is allegedly gothic. They've got me!

4. The Postmortal, by Drew Magary. I almost set this book aside because it has a bit of a trying-too-hard cover and a blurb from the Shit My Dad Says guy that includes a reference to facial urination. Riiiiiight, moving on? But then I read the book's description, which basically describes the most recent season of Torchwood without all the parts I hated — the world figures out how to stop aging, although death is still allowed, and it leads to all sorts of weird stuff like religious cults and government euthanasia. Please, tell me more.

5. Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward. Confession: even though I was intrigued by this book from the moment I saw it, when I found out that it was going to get an "African American" sticker, I got the image of all those terrible-looking romance novels that plague that section and I very nearly put this book right out of my mind. But then I was like, "ALISON. BAD." So here it is! Salvage the Bones is, according to the dust jacket, a book about a poor family in Mississippi threatened by an approaching hurricane and also dealing with a crap father, teen pregnancy, a lack of food, and a new litter of pit bulls. The book spans only twelve days, so I'm anticipating a very suspenseful read.

6. Death of the Mantis, by Michael Stanley. It's a murder mystery. That's all I really know. But the writers (Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip) are out of Johannesburg, so this is totally going to count for the Global Reading Challenge, and that (along with, you know, MURDER) is good enough for me!

7. Paper Covers Rock, by Jenny Hubbard. Huh. The back cover of this book doesn't really tell me anything about why I put a hold on this book... but if I recall correctly the answer is twofold: a) boarding school, and b) mysteriously dead person. I am so easy to please. Also, the guy on the cover is wearing a knitted tie. I have no idea why.

8. My Beautiful Genome, by Lone Frank. Look! A book with no death in it! It's not even fiction! WHAT. This is a book all about genomics and designer babies and what your genes can really say about you, and I kind of adore Gattaca and if there's no reference to it I'll be quite sad. Also, Mary Roach says (of her own free will, I presume) that it's "sharp and funny." So that's a bonus point right there.

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Here's a true story for you: The Hobbit is the first book I ever lied about reading, way back when I was but a young Alison looking to score some Summer Reading Club points. My parents totally did not believe my lies, but they allowed said lies to stand anyway, leading to DECADES of shame and regret. Well, not really. Most of the time I forget it even happened. But I've never lied about a Summer Reading Club book since! (Summer reading in general, yes, totally.)

But now I have read it, and I can speak with authority on the subjects of Misplaced Heroism and Wizards That Are Not Very Nice. Seriously, I had no idea Gandalf was such a jerk! Blah blah blah, grand adventures, blah, self-confidence, blah, endless treasure, whatever. No means no, Gandalf!

I know I'm not the last person to read this book, so here's the plot: jerky wizard recruits homebody hobbit to go help some dwarves steal all the treasures from a talking dragon. Said gang wanders toward dragon and gets swept up in some side-quests along the way; a ring is tricked away from a creeper. The gang finally gets to the dragon and fails at stealing all the treasures until someone kills the dragon for them. There is fighting. Eventually, Homebody Hobbit returns home with a handful of treasure, which doesn't last long for an amusing reason.

So. It's a Quest Novel. I'm not always a big fan of these, and I'd have to say this one is all right, I guess. The scrapes they get into are interesting, especially when they ignore directions and go wandering in the woods, and of course I was intrigued by the Gollum aspect of things having seen the LOTR movies (I'll get around to the books someday, maybe). I was a little concerned by the GI-Joe-like refusal to let anyone die, but then everyone started dying and I was like, hey, hold on, this is going a little overboard. But it's really not a quest until someone dies, right?

Of course, the best part was that the audiobook cover had the same picture that graces my engagement puzzle (read: the puzzle my then-boyfriend and I were putting together when I completely ignored his proposal [accidentally, I swear!]), so when things got boring I could just think back on adorable times. I may be a huge sap.

The second-best part was that ears-reading the book meant that the narrator SANG to me, which was absolutely fantastic because a) I always want to know how songs in books go and b) Rob Inglis is probably a way better singer than those dwarves and goblins and whatnot. If he could have sung the whole book to me, that would have been just fine.

And even though I wasn't a huge fan of the book, I liked it enough that I am very interested in seeing the movie — I was going to watch it eventually if only for Martin Freeman, but now I might actually pay to see it, which is just ridiculous. There had better be singing!

Recommendation: You probably already know if you want to read it, but if you're on the fence you should think about how much you like quests, goblins, and riddles.

Rating: 7/10
(TBR Challenge)