Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy), a compendium of essays on fatherhood headed up by Dooce's Heather Armstrong, hits stores today. I contributed a chapter, with the caveat that it not follow any of those of the other writers (as they are all so astoundingly talented that mine would pale in comparison), and also not come first. I'm not sure how Heather pulled this off. Stayed up late last night, printing out copies of my piece from her home PC and stapling them to the back covers, is my guess.

So I'm at a get-together the other day, and someone mentions The Beatles, and someone else asks, "When did 'The Beatles' really start to exist? Is it when Ringo joined the group? When John, Paul, and George got together? When John and Paul met?"

And I said, "Really, The Beatles, as an entity, consisted of five people, and would be 'The Beatles' in name alone without any one of them. Those five people were John, Paul, George, Ringo, and George Martin, who produced most of their albums, as well as scoring the orchestral backups and often playing instruments on individual songs. Martin enters the equation in 1962, and The Beatles' first recording session with him was in November of that year. One month later the "Love Me Do" single was released. So, in my opinion, The Beatles, as we now know them, began in late 1962."

Whoa! Check out the big brain on Baldwin!

It helped, I suppose, that I'd just finished reading the book A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles the day prior to this conversation. Truth be told, a month ago I knew pretty much nothing about The Beatles. I was born a year after McCartney announced the dissolution of the group, and although I owned the White Album while attending college (as required by law), never really listened to it much.

In fact, it was the commission of a mortifying Beatles-related faux pas on my part that inspired me to read the book in the first place. I casually mentioned that I thought "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" was pretty catchy and received a fusillade of derision, with comments ranging from "you know, that's pretty much universally acknowledged as the worst Beatles song" to "I really like McCartney, but that one makes me want to beat him with a tire iron."

Humiliated, I resolved to listen to hundreds of hours of The Beatles compositions until I, too,developed a highly refined appreciation of their discography and legacy. Or, read a book about them. One of the two.

Fortunately, in opting for the latter option, I picked a book that served as a passable substitute for the former. Author Mark Hertsgaard bills A Day In the Life as the only book that focuses foremost on the music, rather than the celebrity, of the Fab Four. He does this by alternating between chapters devoted to specific albums and chapters covering some other aspect of Beatology. For example, chapter 13 covers the Rubber Soul album, chapter 14 discusses the role George Martin played behind the scenes, chapter 15 looks at the 1966 release Revolver, 16 investigates their drug use, and so on.

Though the topics are arranged semi-chronologically (their experimentations with mind-altering drugs really did began between their Rubber Soul and Revolve LPs, for instance), each chapter is largely self-contained. Thus, the book reads like a collection of essays rather than as a single narrative, a format I preferred. It's unlikely I could have pulled off that "let me tell you a little something about George Martin" stunt if all of the information pertinent to my argument has been strewn over 400 pages instead of confined to chapter 14.

Hertsgaard sometimes gets a little carried away in his enthusiasm for the band--reading some of his fervent descriptions of their early pop singles and then listening to the songs in questions is like a summer of overhyped blockbuster movies that fail to meet you wildly unrealistic expectations. And his "album-chapters" occasionally got a little too in-depth for my liking, sometimes going so far as to rhapsodize about a single note or passage in a song. And yet the non-album chapters were uniformly riveting. In fact, A Day In The Life was a compulsive read for me. When the fractures between The Beatles began to appear, I was less sad that the band was going to break up than I was that the book was going to end.

In conclusion: YOU SHUT UP OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA IS A GREAT SONG!!

Red Mars, the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's sprawling epic about the terraforming and colonization of Mars, is epitomized by two passages.

The first is found on page 102, shortly after the first settlers arrive on the barren planet:

The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander. They didn't look strong enough, but that was the gravity again.

Nadia had turned on the tractor's heating system as soon as she could reach it and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unreliable. She still found it almost impossible to think in terms of martian g, to trust the designs that took it into account. The ramp just looked too flimsy!

Robinson hasn't just written a saga about people who go to Mars; he contemplates what it would actually be like to live there. Each of the book's eight parts are told from the point of view of one of the "First 100," the team that makes up the initial landing party. Made up of geologists, biologists, physicists, architects, agriculturalist, and others (there's even a psychologist to keep them sane), the First 100 is tasked with paving the way for future settlement, by transforming the planet into something habitable (if only bearly) to humans. This project is so monumental that only the first stages are documented in Red Mars; the sequel is called Green Mars because of the establishment of flora; and the thickened atmosphere gives the final book, Blue Mars, its title.

Here's the second passage, which appears two pages after the first:

Now [Nadia] could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, a11 kinds of tape, a plumber's bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow ...

Despite Robinson's occasional bouts of logorrhea, I quite enjoyed Red Mars. One thing I noticed: as the chronology of the book got farther and father from the present, Robinson has to rely more on imagination than research, and the novel feels less and less like a textbook. Thus, about halfway through, the nitty-gritty of terraformation begins to take a backseat to the politics of the burgeoning Martian society. By the final 200 pages, it's almost pure space opera. "Science-fiction" is not only the genre to which the novel belongs, but an apt description of its progression: it starts as science, and slowly slides across the spectrum to fiction.

Written in 1993, some of Robinson's predictions already look naive in retrospect. The chances of us settling Mars by 2026, for instance, are slim indeed. But in other ways, the book feels perfectly suited for the times. Much of the book grapples with the positive and negative effects of globalization (though the "globe," in this case, is only half the diameter of our own). Not to mention the difficulty imperialistic powers have in occupying a distance, sandy land occupied by people who object to the interference of outsiders and trans-national corporations. The book would be an allegory for the early 21st century, were it not written in the late 20th.

In many ways, Red Mars reminds me of its fantasy counterpart, The Fellowship of the Ring. To appreciate both, you have to wade through a lot of sometime laborious backstory, and many times you can't help but think that you'd rather have read the book than to still be reading it. But your appreciation for the sheer amount of effort and inventiveness the author put into the story keeps you turning pages, and, by the time you're done, you feel like the novel was more of an experience than just a read.

Or perhaps it's just enough to say this: though getting through the first 600 pages of the Mars trilogy was sometimes a chore, I am still eager to read the remaining 1,400. That's saying something right there.

Some people like books about cats that solve mysteries. Some people like books about rugged individuals wandering post-apocalyptic America. Me, I like books about magicians, escape artists, and mediums, set in eras when such professions were respectable. Thus my fondness for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Carter Beats the Devil, Girl in the Glass (and why I will presumably love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, if I can ever overcome my crippling fear of its sheer enormity and actually attempt to read it).

So picking up The Prestige was a no-brainer. Feuding magicians in the late nineteenth century, each desperate to discover the secret of his rival's greatest illusion? What's not to like?

After a brief introduction set in modern times, the novel is epistolary, supposedly the journals of Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, illusionists who plied their trade in turn-of-the-(last)-century London. An altercation between the two men in their youth snowballs into lifelong tit-for-tatism, each oscillating between desire to see the other ruined and remorse over how prolonged and petty the grudgematch has become. Each man has a signature trick that involves teleportation: in The New Transported Man, Bordon steps into one cabinet and instantly emerges from another across the stage; during In A Flash, Angier disappears in a surge of electricity and re-enters the theater moments later, from the back of the galley. Though the tricks are nearly identical, their central mechanism are starkly different; the crux of the book is that each man is ignorant of how the other does his version of the illusion, and is haunted by the knowledge that his opponent might have a "superior" method.

Having quite enjoyed the novel, I picked up the DVD for the 2006 film and prepared for disappointment. Surprisingly, the movie was as good as the book, as the screenwriter and director chose to adapt the story for the screen, rather than slavishly adhere to the source material. The framing device for the book (a man in contemporary time who is given the journals to read) is jettisoned entirely, and some aspects of the relationship between Borden and Angier and changed as well. I wouldn't say that the film's revisions were necessarily better, but they are certainly more cinematic. Thus, neither pales in comparison to the other, as both are sufficiently distinct to stand on their own.

Still, despite their difference, both the novel and the film tackle the same central question: what will a man do to be the best in his profession? In the case of Borden and Angier, it's not only a question of what they will sacrifice to perfect their own illusions, but to what lengths they will go to destroy their rivals. Like master magicians adept in misdirection, both author Christopher Priest and director Christopher Nolan have crafted thrillers that keep you so engaged that you don't even realize the profundity of the questions they explore, until you find yourself ruminating about the story in the days and weeks to follow.

Hey, great news! My pal Goopymart--the guy with whom I collaborated on Files Are Not For Sharing--just illustrated a new book: Mad Tausig Vs the Interplanetary Puzzling Peace Patrol.

Actually, two (count 'em: two) of my friends were involved in the creation of this book, as another buddy of mine, Darkpony is a co-author. Sweet.

The book is full of puzzles for kids: crosswords, anagrams, cryptograms...even some newer kinds like Sudoku, and a bunch of original kinds too. A little advanced for Squiggle, but the sort of book I would have loved when I was nine or ten (as a devotee of both GAMES magazine and science-fiction). Readers work to unravel riddles and stop the Mad Tausig (holder of the world record for "Most Evil Inventor") from hatching his master plot. And, of course, Goopy's drawing are hilariously absurd, as always.

Fun stuff. Check it out.

There's a whole subgenre of literature starring minor characters from classic works. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Wicked. Wide Sargasso Sea. And, of course, my novella "Alive In Here," which retells Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope from the point of view of the Garbage creature (available upon request).

Likewise, Geraldine Brooks' latest novel tells the tale of Mr. March, a character plucked from the pages of Little Women. In Alcott's novel, March has left his four young daughters in the care of his wife, Marmee, while he fights for the Union in the civil war. The girls bravely soldier on in his absence, their spirits occasionally buoyed by his inspiration letters. In March, we learn that those letters are little more than fictions. Yes, the events Mr. March writes about are real, but the optimism that infuses every word is something that he no longer feels.

As in Little Women, Peter March is here portrayed as a preacher, and it is his firmly held beliefs as an abolitionist that lead him join in the battle against the confederacy. The courage of his convictions, however, is battered as he reaches the front lines and witnesses the true horror of war. Worse still, he finds few of his comrades-in-arms share his idealism--most fight not out of revulsion of slavery, but simply because they have been at war for so long that they've forgotten how to do anything but.

Though most of the novel parallels the events of Little Women (Mr. March occasionally stops to write letters, allowing the reader to gauge where he is, chronologically, with the narrative in Louisa May Alcott's book), it doesn't confine itself to the same time frame. In fact, much of the book takes place when Mr. March was but a traveling salesman, long before he met Marmee and sired his gaggle of girls. Brooks also tweaks some of Alcott's characters--not revising them per se, but adding additional depth. In Little Women, the mother was always around her children, and behaved accordingly; in March, there are a number of exchanges that take place exclusively between husband and wife, and well as scenes from their courtship, that cast Marmee in a new light, and show that she, like Mr. March, often put up a brave front to shield her daughters from her true feelings.

Having never read Little Women, I was worried that I wouldn't "get" most of March (as might be the case if you read Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead without knowing the basic outline of Hamlet). As it turns out, the story is so distinct from Alcott's novel--in terms of tone, explicitness, and its account of Mr. March's time away from the family--as to seem almost unrelated to the classic that spawned it. Brooks' novel so completely transcends the high-concept premise as to make the back-references to Little Women seem as more of an afterthought than the original motivation.

At any rate, don't let unfamiliarity with the source material deter your from from reading the Pulitzer-Prize winning March. It's a brutal account of two concurrent wars: the American civil war, and the clash between Mr. March's deeply-held idealism and the sobering reality in which he lives.

In the week since I finished Jhereg I've plowed through the next two volumes in the Vlad Taltos series. I'm not really a "two books in a week" kind of reader these days, but as each of the novels is just a shade over 200 pages and written in the same breezy, compulsively readable style of the first, getting these two off my "to read" pile was as easy as knocking back beers.

Yendi manages to avoid seeming like a sequel in a couple of ways. First, it is set a number of years before the events of Jhereg. Second, it doesn't duplicate the plot of the first book, instead spinning a more straightforward adventure / fantasy yarn: Vlad, a younger man and still fairly inexperienced in the business of organized crime, finds himself in a turf war with a neighboring Boss trying to horn into his territory. And, third, the narrative actually has a romance component. The story lacks some of the inventiveness of Jhereg, but the first set the bar on "clever" pretty high, so it can certainly be excused for failing to clear it.

Teckla, the third book in the series, takes place after Jhereg. This book does suffer from some sequel-itis -- the central story is about yet another turf war, just as Yendi before it. It's also the gloomiest of the three by far, with Vlad moping about for the final half of the story. I hated the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books for exactly this reason, but at least when Vlad gets depressed he goes around stabbing people in the heart with stilettos -- a vastly superior coping mechanism to whining, if ya ask me.

As I mentioned before, each of the books is entirely self contained. You could read them in reverse chronological order and everything would still make perfect sense, though Jhereg is indisputably the best introduction to the series. And all three can be found in a single volume, called The Book of Jhereg. If you're like me you'll have a hankering for more Brust the moment you finish Jhereg, so you may as well get the compendium to ensure that you don't go hungry for a moment.

One nice thing about getting older: it's easier to pick out a book that I know in advance I'll enjoy. I just select any novel that I read before 1997 and vaguely remember liking the first time; my lack of long-term memory (which appears to max out at about a decade) ensures that the ending will still be a surprise.

And so I recently reread Jhereg. Actually, I was doubly sure I would enjoy it, as I'd read it twice before -- once shortly after its initial release in 1987, and a second time in the Peace Corps, some 10 years ago. It's not one of my all-time favorite works of literature or anything, but it certainly lends itself to rereading: it's short, it's funny, it's clever, and, despite the fact that it's the first in a series of novels, it's self-contained.

Though set in a fantasy world (and fond in the "Fantasy" section of your local bookstore), Jhereg is more of a mystery novel. In fact, it's really two separate mysteries. The first revolves around a thief named Mellar, a former member of the Jhereg high council who embezzled an obscene amount of money and then promptly vanished. Another member of the council contacts the book's protagonist, Vlad Taltos, and charges him with the task of tracking down the missing man and funds. Though this proves to be fairly easy, Vlad must still unravel the intricacies of the heist, to learn how and why Mellar committed the crime.

The second mystery is inverted and stacked atop the first. Because, you see, Vlad isn't a private detective -- he's an assassin. He has been hired to bring Mellar to the authorities, but to very publicly kill him, to ensure that no one ever dare steal from the Jhereg again. To that end, Vlad must endeavor not to solve "the perfect murder," but rather to plan an execute it. And Mellar does his best to make Vlad's task difficult, setting up a Doomsday device of sorts, which prevents Vlad from striking even though he knows exactly where to find his target.

The is a rich backstore to Jhereg -- about the 17 ruling houses, the difference between sorcery and witchcraft, and a complete bestiary of exotic creatures that inhabit the world -- but author Steven Burst only reveals what you need to know to understand and enjoy the current chapter, never letting the narrative get bogged down in lengthy exposition. There is plenty of humor in the story (mostly witty repartee between Vlad, his assistant, Kragar, and his familiar Loiosh) but this isn't one of those "comic fantasy novels,' a la Terry Pratchett or Piers Anthony -- though the characters joke around, their work is (literally) deathly serious. And Burst has written each of the nine books in the series such that no one book is a prerequisite for another, and each can be read, understood, and enjoyed independently.

I'm not really a huge fan of fantasy novels, so don't let the genre deter you. Jhereg is a light, funny, inventive, and engrossing book, and one I look forward to reading again in 2017.

Shortly after Mr. and Mrs. Girl visited Seattle, Maggie wrote about her husband's hithertofore secret addiction to Harry Potter on her website. I dropped her a note to sympathize:

Me: If we'd known our spouses shared the same affliction we could have gotten them going on Harry Potter and then slipped off to catch a movie.

Maggie: The Queen too, eh?

Me: And how. Fortunately she has lots of friends who also suffer the ravages of Pottermania, so I am spared the coerced conversations. But if she ever decides to attend an event that starts with some word coined by J.K. Rowlings and ends in "-con," we should get together, the four of us, and stage a group intervention.

Maggie: If you think Bryan would help us stage a Potter intervention, you're nuts. They'd be much more likely to overcome us, tie us to a sofa, and read aloud until our eyes glazed over.

Me: No no, by "group intervention" I meant you and I could get intervention for both of them at the same time. I figure we could get better rates that way.

Maggie: Bulk-rate Harry Potter intervention ... now there's a potential gold mine.

Me: Hey, yeah. We could stage a fake convention called MuggleCon or ConWeasley or somesuch, and people would urge their Potter-addled loved-ones to get all dressed up and go. And then, after everyone arrives, we would seal the doors and have a bunch of specialists would come in and intervene the shit out of everyone. PROFIT!

Maggie: However, as a conscientious business partner, I should point out that we could make a lot more money just organizing Mugglecon, and then robbing people blind for stuffed toy owls and boxed lunches. Of course, it would be tough to shower away the stench of shame afterwards...

But then I found myself between novels, and Half-Blood Prince was laying around our house, and I figured I'd just read a few chapters to tide me over until my next trip to the library. And then ...

Um, intervention for three, please.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is easily the best of the series, and the first I thoroughly enjoyed reading. And I'll tell you why, too: J.K. Rowling's publisher finally decided to assign her an editor. Her fourth and fifth books (Goblet of Fire and the aforementioned Order of the Phoenix) were released at the height of her popularity, at it was clear that no one dared edit The Sacred Word of Potter; as the result the books were long, rambling, unfocused, and boring. Worse, Rowling decided to make Harry act like a teen in the last few books, apparently forgetting that everyone hates teens for good reason. Half-Blood, on the other hand, while only slightly shorter in length than the previous book, has a much tighter narrative, one in which every scene actually advances the storyline (unlike earlier novel, where entire chapters could have been excised). And Harry stops acting so insufferable, so the whole thing doesn't come across as a 800 page LiveJournal entry.

I'd recommend you read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The problem is that I cannot, in good conscious, recommend you read all the books that come before it.

So here's my Harry Potter Reading Plan, similar in spirit to my How To Watch The Star Wars Prequels primers.

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: The book is relatively short and you'll breeze through it in a couple of bus rides, so you might as well read it. It's enjoyable in a "kids book" kind of way, even though I was pissed that the "logic puzzle" the kids have to solve doesn't make a goddamned bit of sense. The movie was also okay, though if you've seen any of the Lord of the Rings flicks you are bound to be disappointed. Just read the book, you pansy.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: If you read the first novel, you've already read this one too, as it has pretty much the same plot structure. The film too is rather lackluster. My advice: skip them both, read the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Wikipedia entry and call it a day.
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: I actually liked this one quite a bit, and it was my favorite before I read Half-Blood Prince. Rowling starts introducing darker themes, and drops the standard Scooby-Doo plotline that she structed the first two novels around. The film is also pretty good, so take your pick.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Oh dear, here's where everything goes pear-shaped. Entirely too long and utterly lacking in internal consistency, Goblet of Fire contains a couple of important revelations, but the story arc as a whole is sound + fury = nothing. Paradoxically, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the best of the four movies, so watch that instead.
• Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix: AVOID. There's no film yet but the Wikipedia page is exhaustive, so just read that.

Now, if I could only get this stench of shame out of my clothing.

Last year I embarked on an ambitious project to read the finest contemporary fiction, an endeavor I dubbed The 2005 Booklist Project. And it worked, for a while: I read House of Leaves, perhaps my favorite book of the last decade; I read other experimental fictions such as Cloud Atlas and The Time-Traveler's Wife, as well as more traditional narratives such as Blindness and Oracle Night. And I loaded up my bedside table still more recommendations; Wicked, Gilead, Life Of Pi, etc.

And then, like a drinker who resolves only to drink only the finest Bordeaux and Pinot Noir, I rediscovered the joy off getting buzzed off of a $4 bottle of drugstore merlot. Or, in this case, I discovered Hard Case Crime.

Hard Case Crime is relatively new publishing house, one that specializes in new and vintage "hardboiled" pulp fiction novels. I've always been a fan of the genre (as a teen I read scores of Earl Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane), but, in the last decade, I had found my noir in cyberpunk, steampunk, Frank Miller comics, and films in which the cinematography is best described a "caliginous." Hard Case Crime novels, though, are the real deal, full of deeply-flawed protagonists who reach for a .45 or a fifth of whiskey at the drop of a hat, and make unironic references to molls and mooks.

About half of the books in the series are reprints of classics for the form, and the others are brand new works by contemporary authors (though typically in the classic hardboiled era and tone). As most Hard Case Crime novels are around 200 pages, full of dialog, and compulsively readable, I can usually plow through an entire title in two evenings. Here are the five I have read since discovering the line:

• 361 by Donald E. Westlake: 361 was my first, and a perfect introduction to the series. It's a reprint of a classic by one of the masters of the hardboiled form, and served as a good primer on the genre. The hero finishes off a bottle of liquor on about every third page, tangles with the mob, and carries around a piece as nonchalantly as you or I might carry around orange Tic-Tacs. 361 isn't especially well written, but I was nonetheless putting holds on every available Hard Case Crime novel at my local library moments after finishing it.
• Plunder of the Sun by David Dodge: I don't know if it's because I spent a few years in South America, or because I had never read a "treasure hunt" novel before, but I enjoyed Plunder quite a bit. Like an Indiana Jones sequel written by Raymnd Chandler, Plunder has an archeologist hiring a petty criminal to help him locate a lost Incan fortune. Dodge manages to cram a surprising amount of ancient South American history into the book, too -- enough that you feel like you're learning something, but not so much that the story ever becomes academic. Plunder is a reprint, and recommended.
• The Colorado Kid by Stephen King: Yes, that Stephen King. Apparently the editors at Hard Case Crime sent a few novels to King and asked if he would supply cover blurbs; instead he said he opted to write an book for the series. Colorado Kid is polarizing -- lots of people hated it, many thought it pretty good. I'm in the latter category, though I'll concede that the book is essentially a 70-page (and perhaps 20-page) short story padded out to 180 pages, the first third of which is undisguised throat-clearing.
• Grifter’s Game by Lawrence Block: Block is one of my favorite modern dark mystery writers, but, honest to God, I can hardly remember a thing about this book, even having read it only few months ago. I don't recall disliking it, but I don't recall thinking it was anything special, either (despite its winning an Edgar award). Chalk it up as forgettable -- though that's not exactly a scathing indictment in a genre as light as this one.
• Fade To Blonde by Max Phillips: The copyright date on Blonde in 2004, but Phillips has the classic noir style down so pat that I had to double-check online to convince myself it wasn't a reprint. He's especially skilled at writing snappy patter, and the characters routinely exchanged banter that made me wish I was even half as clever with my own ad-libs. The story is kind of weak (and falls apart near the end), but the atmosphere, pacing, and dialogue are top-notch.

Note: This review is part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

The Time-Traveler's Wife is full of surprises, but three of them are exceptional.

The first comes a few pages into the novel, when you discover that the titular time-traveler isn't some aging jock reminiscing about the glory days or a widower who often gets lost in memories of happier times, but a man who can literally travel through time.

"Oh," you say upon this realization, "Judging from the cover and the blurb on the back, I thought this was contemporary fiction or romantic drama, and that the phrase 'time-traveler' was metaphorical. But apparently not." So you shift gears and adjust yourself to the fact that you are reading a sci-fi book.

The second surprise comes 100 pages later, when you realize that The Time-Traveler's Wife is an contemporary fiction / romantic drama, in addition to being a sci-fi novel as well. "That's certainly ambitious," you think. "But there's no way the author will be able to pull it off successfully."

The third surprise is that, somehow, she does.

Henry De Tamble is the time-traveler, albeit an unwilling one. At seemingly random moments in his life he is abruptly flung to some other date -- usually in the past, occasionally in the future -- where he arrives, naked, onto or close to some scene relevant to his own life. Sometimes he winds up in his own house, and whiles away a few hours hanging out with a younger version of himself. Sometimes he goes far enough back to visit his own mother, who died when he was a boy. Usually he goes back and meets up with one Clare Abshire, the woman he will eventually marry.

He rendezvous with Clare so often that her entire childhood comes to revolve around his visits. Then, iat the age of 20, she bumps into the real-time Henry and, recognizing him as the man who will some day become her husband, invites him out for drinks. One thing leads to another, and the two are eventually hitched.

I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but only those that get it right. By that I mean that the story needs to have an internally consistent set of rules that the universe adheres to, even when folks are popping into the past and theoretically influencing their own present. Sadly, very very few time-travel stories have met my high standards -- Twelve Monkeys is honestly the only one that leaps to mind. In most, the sort of causal loop described above (Henry and Clare get married because Clare knows that she will eventually marry Henry) would pretty much torpedo the entire premise.

But author Audrey Niffenegger has done the near-impossible with The Time-Traveler's Wife, writing a near-flawless time travel novel that sets ground rules and then scrupulously sticks to them. I would have liked it for this alone, and the fact that the literary romantic fiction half is pretty damned good too is icing on the cake.

Best of all, this is the kind of book that can be safely enjoyed by pretty much anyone: those who typically steer clear of sci-fi will appreciate it as contemporary literature; those who favor Greg Bear over Don DeLillo will groove on Niffenegger's intriguing and well-executed ideas. In fact, I can see The Time-traveler's Wife becoming my default suggestion when asked for a recommendation, and one that I foresee loaned out more often than it sits upon my shelf.

Counterpoint! The Queen's succinct review: "The frickin annoying love story ruined the book for me." Such a romantic, that gal o' mine.

After I raved about House of Leaves, a reader suggested I check out Blindness by Jose Saramago, describing it as "another freak-out book." I wasn't really in the mood for another freak-out book, honestly, but I found Blindness at the library and brought it home with the intention of putting it on the bottom of my "to read" pile. But then -- whoops! -- I read the first chapter, and all of my queued up books were forgotten.

Blindness tells the tale of a great epidemic that sweeps through a small town (and perhaps the world, though the scope of the book is provincial), leaving its victims sightless but otherwise unaffected. The first few chapter trace the web of contagion as the disease is transmitted from one person to the next; then, about a third of the way through, the focus shifts to a small group of the infected who are struggling to survive while quarantined in an abandoned mental institution along with scores of similarly afflicted inmates.

The book was originally written in Portuguese, and translated into English. And I have a confession to make: I have an irrational aversion to translated novels. No matter how accomplished the "About The Authors" blurb claims the translator is, I always feel that I am missing out, that something must have surely been lost in the shuffle. Why can't these author just learn to speak English as second language more fluently than most of us speak it as a first? You know, like Nabokov did. That said, the language in Blindness is rather stark and straightforward, almost Hemmingwayian, so this aspect of it didn't bother me as much as it otherwise would.

What I did find somewhat irksome -- until I grew accustomed to it, at least -- was Saramago indifference to punctuation and grammatical rules. Entire conversations in Blindness are often contained in a single sentence, written in a "He said this and then she said that and then what do you mean?, he replied" manner that eschews quotation marks or any other devices that would aid the reader in determining who said what. Some have pointed out that this style mirrors the plight of the protagonists -- that we, the reader, must suffer like the sightless, unable to determine where those voices are coming from in the absence of any visual cues.

Much of the novel plays out like a modern-day adaptation of Lord of the Flies, when men, severed from their old lives (here by the loss of a sense, rather than geographically) revert to their bestial natures. Indeed, the middle third of the book is mighty grim, so much so that, at one point, I almost abandoned it, wondering why I was voluntarily subjecting myself to something so depressing. Fortunately, the story already had its hooks in me, leaving me no choice to persevere.

I did not find Blindness to be a "freak-out book" -- not on par House of Leaves, at any rate. For one thing, I was unable to suspend my disbelief enough to completely buy into the premise. But, to be fair, Saramago doesn't try to make the narrative believable, choosing instead to write the story more as an allegory. (None of the characters have names, for instance.) Consequentially, I felt a few steps removed from the action. And while it bummed me out at times, freaked out I was not. Still, an excellent and gripping read, and one I would recommend.

Gringos is a novel. It is by Charles Portis who lives in Arkansas, where he was born and educated. Thr book is about brightly painted walls and men in hats reading books. Just regular men wearing hats, not the 80's pop group "Men In Hats." If I had to describe Charles Portis I would agree with Ron Rosenbaum of Esquire who called him "perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America." Though, to be honest, I have no idea what "sui generis" means ...

Okay, okay. I didn't finish Gringos like I said I would. but that's okay, because you didn't either. So everyone gets another week before the review -- huzzah!

Note: These reviews are part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

The Queen read CivilWarLand In Bad Decline before I did, and when I finished the first short story in the collection I was eager to discuss the book with her. "What did you think of it?" I asked her.

"Eh," she said. "It was kinda repetitive."

"Repetitive?!" said I. "Are you kidding? This is one of most original books I've read in a long time, and the author, George Saunders has a remarkably distinctive voice. I'm really enjoying it."

The Queen just shrugged -- her way of saying, "Come talk to me again when you realize I've won this argument."

So I read the rest of the stories. And, yeah: kinda repetitive.

The stories in CivilWarLand remind me of those found in Barrel Fever, the first book by humorous David Sedaris. Before he started writing exclusively about himself and his family, Sedaris cranked out a couple of very funny fictional stories (including one of my all-time favorites, "Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2"), full of cynicism and characters that act in widely inappropriate ways. But unlike Sedaris, most of Saunders' narratives have a science-fiction cast, set in a near future where business life and American life have become synonymous and the public vernacular has become infested with self-help affirmations and corporate jargon.

In almost all cases, the protagonists in the tales are average people struggling to stay afloat in Saunders's dystopia. And while each provoked me to laugh out loud a time or two, I did feel like I was reading the story over and over again by the time I reached the novella "Bounty." It didn't help that, halfway through "Bounty," I realized that I had read it before, ten years ago when it first appeared in Harper's.

An Amazon.com reviewer advises suggests that you read no more than one CivilWarLand story per month, and while that might be a little overboard, I'm inclined to agree that spacing them out somewhat is probably wise. Still: very funny in small doses.

Also set "five minutes in the future" is Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (which you can read for free, along with all of his other works, at craphound.com). While humorous, the setting for EST is much less absurd than that found in CivilWarLand, and the author seems more intent on provoking thought about the ramifications of our current technology than in waylaying the reader with non sequiturs in the hopes of generating belly laughs. But then, having laid the groundwork for a philosophical thriller, the book abruptly becomes conventional, alternating between a rather standard swindle story and a conundrum lifted straight from 'Catch-22' (so much so that even the novel's main character remarks upon the similarity).

EST is short, which is both its failing (in that it doesn't deliver on the promise of it's opening chapter) and its saving grace (as once the plot devolves into something unremarkable, the hasty conclusion keeps it from outstaying its welcome). I quite enjoyed Doctorow's writing style and there were plenty of great ideas to be explored in this book (even if, ultimately, I felt like they got the short shrift), and I look forward to reading more by him. If Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom is as good as I've heard, EST will have served as a nice appetizer.

As I mentioned in my House of Leaves review, the Booklist 2005 Project is going swimmingly. So in case anyone wants to play along at home, here's what's next:

• Gringos by Charles Portis, to be reviewed on June 13;
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, to be reviewed in late June.

Note: This review is part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

Wow, the Booklist 2005 Project is working out great for me. It's led me to three of the best books I've read in years: Cloud Atlas, Oracle Night, and, most recently, House Of Leaves. In fact, House of Leaves has hit the "favorite books of all time" list, right up there with A Prayer For Owen Meany and The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

House Of leaves is a bit hard to describe -- not only because if defies description, but because it's one of those "revealing anything about it reveals a lot about it" books, and you want readers to go into it cold if at all possible. It is often compared to The Blair Witch Project, as both are about fictitious documentary movies that start out mundane and then abruptly veer into the weird and supernatural.

Another reason why House of Leaves is hard to describe because it contains an almost sadistic number of levels. Let's start at the innermost one. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Will Navidson decides to make a documentary about his family's move into a new home, and, to that end, wires the whole house up with cameras and audio equipment. Later, after the house's bizarre qualities have been revealed and documented, Navidson splices together his footage into a full-length motion picture called The Navidson Record. Several years after the movie's release, a man by the name of Zampano writes a scholarly examination of the film, drawing on the documentary itself as well has hundreds of secondary sources to completely analyze the events depicted. Zampano never publishes his work, but it is found posthumously by a young punk named Johnny Truant, who then heavily annotates the manuscript, supplementing the tex not only with additional information about Navidson and Zampano, but about his own life as well. Truant eventually gets this version of the book published -- complete with all of Zampano's and his own footnotes intact -- and this is the book that we, the readers, are supposedly holding: a book about a book about a movie about a house. And then, having built all that up, the foundation is removed: one of the things that Truant reveals in his footnotes is that Will Navidson and The Navidson Record don't actually exist.

I'm one of those people who loved The Blair Witch Project, because I totally bought into it. One of my superpowers is the ability to completely suspend my disbelief when the circumstances warrant it, and I managed to convince myself that I was watching an actual, terrifying, found documentary film. A know a lot of people who hated Blair Witch, and I sympathize with them. I can't imagine enjoying the film if I hadn't swallowed it hook, line, and sinker -- it would have seemed pretentious, gimmicky, and obnoxious.

I've heard a lot of people use those same three words to describe House Of Leaves. And it seems like half the people who start the book give up on it before the end. Again, I understand completely. I would have done the same thing, if I hadn't been utterly ensorceled by the premise. Despite the fact that author Mark Z Danielewski put four layers between me and the house at the heart of the book and went on to emphasize that the house was fictional even within the context of the story itself, I was still riveted. I read House of Leaves every chance I got: before going to bed, on lunch breaks, even at stop lights when I had the book with me in the car. In the first case, when I'd read House of Leaves at night, I would often lay awake and think about the book for a while before drifting off to uneasy sleep. I mean, I'm not kidding: I loved this book. And I'll probably read it a second time before the year is through.

As with movies, there's an order of magnitude between books I'd rate a 9 and those I'd give a 10, some magic line that separates the "great" from the "holy smokes amazing!" It's not for everybody, but, for me, House of Leaves fell squarely in the latter category.

Note: This review is part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

I hailed Cloud Atlas as "the best book I've read in years." For a week, at least. Then, seven days later, I finished Oracle Night by Paul Auster, and that novel usurped the "best book" title. I'd never heard of Auster before, but after mentioning my admiration for the novel to some friends, they replied knowingly that he's one of the best in the business. I'll have to read a few more tomes by the guy to determine if I agree with that assessment, but I was certainly taken with the the way Night was written.

The story is set in 1982, with protagonist Sidney Orr recovering from a near-fatal illness. An author by trade, Orr has been unable to muster the energy or inspiration to write during his recuperation. But his muse returns in force after Orr wanders into a paper store and purchases a mysterious blue notebook. Here the focus of Night shifts to the story-within-the-story, as it devotes several dozen pages to describing the narrative that Orr is jotting in his notebook. From this point on the novel switches back and forth between Orr's reality and the fiction he is penning (and sometimes even to stories within Orr's story), and curious parallels between the two begin to emerge. That an author's work would mirror his own life is of course unsurprising, but the stories that Orr writes in his blue notebook are not only reflective of his past, but, in some cases, also eerily predictive of his future. In fact, soon after he resumes his craft, Orr's life becomes as convoluted and intriguing as that of the characters he's created.

Oracle Night is written in first-person, as if in a journal or a letter to a friend, with Orr relating the tale several decades after the events occur. This informal tone makes the book feel unusually intimate. Though the story is rife with odd coincidences and forces that appear to be borderline supernatural, we understand that Orr is providing us with an honest -- albeit subjective -- account of the events, and that he has no more insight into the strange occurrences than the reader does. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed the unresolved ambiguities in Night, whereas I criticized Cloud Atlas for same. Night is like a ghost story told to you by a friend -- you don't know whether to believe every element of the tale, you only know that he believes them all. And this aspect adds yet another layer to a book that already has more levels than a parking garage.

One thing I disliked: the book is infested with copious footnotes, some of which run for several pages. I guess they were intended to further the illusion that Orr was providing us with as full an account as possible, but they only served to pull me away from the main story and send me off on tangents. And I didn't have the willpower to simply not read them. Aside from that, though, I thought Oracle Night was fantastic, and I look forward to reading more by Auster. If his other novels are as good as this, I'm sure I too will be raving about him in the near future.

Note: This review is part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

In case you missed it, Cloud Atlas won the The Morning News' First Annual Tournament Of Books. As a contributing writer for TMN, I was asked to participate in the tournament, but I declined because I had an upcoming trip to D.C. on my calendar, and assumed I'd be too busy to read. As it turned out, I spent pretty much the entire trip devouring the very book I would have been reading otherwise. I started Cloud Atlas on my flight East, read it during every available moment while there, and finished it on the plane home. Something of a page-turner, that book.

Cloud Atlas a book of short stories, or a novel, or maybe both at once -- it's hard to tell. It has a very peculiar narrative structure, that much is certain. The separate stories (or are they separate stories, hmm?) take place in different time periods, and each is told in the tone and vernacular endemic to the era: the first story, set in the 19th century, has an ornate, Heart of Darkness feel to it; a later story takes place in the 1970's, and bears a striking similarity to the pulp thrillers of the era; and so on.

What's amazing about Cloud Atlas is that each story seems completely authentic for its time period, and (with the exception of one misfire) each is enthralling. The voices of the stories are so distinctive that, were the names of six authors listed on the cover instead of just David Mitchell's, the reader would never suspect that they had all come from the same pen. It seems more like an anthology than the work of a single, amazing writing.

Unfortunately, the sum is somewhat less than the parts. I don't want to go into too much detail about the "peculiar narrative structure" I alluded to above (although I will in the comments), but it hints at a much bigger payoff than the book ever delivers. My assumption was that all of the stories were in the service of the structure, and that the connect between them would ultimately be revealed; alas, in the end the mystery is not only unsolved, the reader is left wondering if there ever was any mystery at all, whether the structure was a means to a deeper novel or simply an if end in itself. Or as one character puts it, "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished." I'll confess that I did not know when I finished, but the more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to believe it's the latter.

Even so, it's one of the better books I've read in a while, despite the disquieting feeling of disappointment I felt as I neared the end and realized that the questions it raised were not going to be answered, or even addressed. But make up your own mind. Revolutionary or gimmicky? You won't know until you're read it yourself.

Note: This review is part of the Booklist 2005 Project.

Note: This review contains minor spoilers for Curious Incident ... but you may enjoy the book more for knowing them.

Do you ever do that thing where you make a to-do list, and you intentionally include a few tasks that you have already completed so you can have the satisfaction of crossing them off immediately?

I do that. In fact, I did it just last week.

When I recently groused that "I can't say that I read any particularly outstanding fiction books in 2004" and asked for recommendations, so many people mentioned The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon that I felt obligated to add it to the Booklist 2005 Project. This, despite the Curious Incident is one of the books I read last year that left me undazzled, thus inspiring the B2K Project in the first place.

Christopher Boon is a 15-year old boy with a form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome. Unable to relate to human beings, Christopher has a special affinity for animals, who don't baffle him with the subtleties of facial expressions, voice inflections and body language. So when a neighbor's dog is brutally murdered and he is initially accused of committing the crime, Christopher resolves to apply his (overly) analytic mind to the task of deducing the killer's identity.

Curious Incident is written in first person -- at one point, a teacher suggests to Christopher that he keep a journal of his investigation, and this book is the supposed result. Haddon does a remarkable job of showing us the world through Christopher's eyes, while still allowing the reader glimpses of how someone without Asperger's would see the situation. As Christopher interviews his neighbors, for instance, it becomes clear to the reader that many of them know much more than they are telling, even while Christopher -- unable to spot or even suspect deception -- takes their statements at face value. The author does a masterful job of weaving together these two concurrent two stories -- how Christopher sees things and how everyone else sees things -- into a single, cohesive narrative.

So I loved this book, right? Well, I did ... halfway through. At that point I told The Queen that Curious Incident was the best book I'd read in years, and that I couldn't wait to finish it so she could have a crack at it. [Spoilers begin] But shortly thereafter Christopher suddenly abandons the mystery and sets off on a journey by himself, thereby eliminating the two things I had been enjoying most: the aforementioned "parallel stories" (once he's on his own, it's pretty much all Christopher's POV all the time), and my curiosity as to how the crime was going to be "solved". Worse, Christopher's Asperger's becomes heightened as he becomes increasingly anxious during his travels, which means that the story becomes ever more packed with trivia and tangents. I appreciate that Haddon was trying to convey to the reader how the autistic mind thinks (Haddon has real-life experience working with autistics, so presumably knows of what he writes), but at one point Christopher laments about his obsession with minutia, and by then I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. [Spoilers end]

I didn't dislike Curious Incident, I just felt a little cheated by a perceived bait-and-switch. But if you ignored the spoiler warnings and read the above paragraph, you may be avoid my fate and love the book as much as most other people appear to. (Though, truth be told, I think I would have found the last 50 pages a tad boring under any circumstances.) Recommended, if only because it's well-written and an interesting experiment.

As as long as I'm damning books that invite comparisons to Catcher In The Rye with faint praise ...

Vernon God Little caught my eye because it won the 2003 Man Booker Prize and because a blurb on the cover compared it to the movie Rushmore. It's not a bad book, but by the end I thought both the award and the comparison were unjustified.

Also written in first person, Little follows the adventures of Vernon, a teen whose best (and perhaps only) friend just went on a Columbineesque shooting rampages and killed 16 classmates before turning the gun on himself. Without a living person to blame for the atrocity, the town starts casting about for a suitable substitute, and much of the story revolves around Vernon's efforts to avoid becoming the designated scapegoat.

In many ways Vernon is as inept at dealing with people as Christopher, though his anti-social tendencies seem the result of choice rather than biology. Written in Vernon's voice, Little is full of slang and the obsessions of young males -- at one point the word "panties" appears on eight consecutive pages. This makes for some tough reading -- it's no A Clockwork Orange, but turgid nonetheless. And if it has been the same length as A Clockwork Orange (i.e., 100 pages shorter) it might have been worth the effort. Instead, it feels somewhat rambling and unfocused. And author DBC Pierre can't seem to decide how broad to make his satire, so the book oscillates from subtle social commentary to situations so hyperbolic that they could work as second-half-of-the-show Saturday Night Live sketches.

As with Curious Incident, I didn't dislike Vernon God Little. But I finished both in 2004, and my assessment that I read no "outstanding fiction" that year stands.

In the past, this has been my method for determining my reading list:

1. Go to library
2. Wander over to "new releases" section
3. Judge books by cover

One of those stretches was the year affectionately known as 2004, and I said as much in my annual recap. But then, as an afterthought, I asked readers to send me recommendations for future reading.

And boy-howdie, did I get 'em. And it would be a shame to let them go to waste. So this year I'm going to try the Booklist 2005 project, and try and plow through the majority of the books that were endorsed by dy readers. And although I was terribly lax about writing book reviews last year, I intend to comment on every B2K Project novel I read on these virtual pages.

Here is my current list of a dozen (Update: now 20) books. Below it are some 25 more, that I will add to the list if they receive seconds from commenters. And if you know of something that really, really ought to be on here but isn't mentioned at all, you can put that in the comments as well. (Although, given the rate at which I read books, the list as it stands is probably sufficient to keep me in fiction until 2008).

The Current List
(i.e., books that received a second and/or intrigued me)

• Annals of the Black Company, Glen Cook [Read first 20 pages, didn't like. May try again later.]
• Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders [Done!]
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell [Done!]
• The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon [Done!]
• Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow [Done!]
• The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
• Freedom & Necessity, Stephen Brust and Emma Bull
• Game of Thrones, George Martin [Have -- trying to find a sufficient block of time to read]
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
• Gringos, Charles Portis [Don't like -- abandoned.]
• Hardboiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, Haruki Murakami
• House of Leaves, Mark Z. Dainielewski [Done! One of my favorite books of all-time!]
• An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
• Oracle Night, Paul Auster [Done!]
• Oryx and Crak, Margaret Atwood
• Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke [Yeah, it was okay ...]
• The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon [Enjoyable, but not fantastic]
• The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger [Done!]
• Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West, Gregory Maguire

Candidates
(i.e., books in need of a second)

• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
• Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
• Dirt Music, Tim Winton
• The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, Minister Faust
• Facing the Music, Larry Brown
• The Fermata, Nicholson Baker
• Little Children, Tom Perrotta
• The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
• McCarthy's Bar, Pete McCarthy
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
• Pest Control, Bill Fitzhugh
• The Plot Against America, Philip Rothv
• Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman
• Sock, Penn Jillette
• Star of the Sea, Joseph O'Conner
• Sunshine, Robin McKinley
• The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay
• When the Nines Roll Over, David Benioff

P.S.1. These are all fiction recommendations, because that's what I specifically asked for in my recap. But, if suggesting brand new titles, non-fiction is also welcomed.

P.S.2. Feel free to warn me away from any books I am considering if you're so inclined. You guys are picking these, so the more input the better.

"Hey, whatcha reading?"

"Oh, you know: a book about corpses."

I'm tempted to immediately reread this, just so I can keep saying that.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is 300 pages about dead people. Or, rather, it's not about the people at all, but what they leave behind. In fact, one of the first things author Mary Roach does is emphasize the distinction between the quick and the dead.

But once she has made her point -- that that "dead people" are best regarded as 100% dead and 0% people -- she launches into a gleeful account of what ghastly things are done to their remains. She begins by covering what most people think of when they consider life postmortem: medical research and organ donation. But from there she catalogs some of the more exotic adventures a cadaver could undertake during it's detour from the morgue to the graveyard. Car manufacturers, for example, have yet to build a crash test dummy that simulates a human body as accurately as a, well, a human body. And when trying to determine what kind of footwear mine sweepers should use, nothing works quite as well as an actual, severed foot.

The most interesting chapter, to my mind, covers about the role in corpses in determining the cause of plane crashes. By noting the composition (and decomposition) of the bodies, investigators can infer a remarkable amount about what transpired in the final moments of a doomed flight. If some (but not all) of the cadavers have burns, for instance and they can identify the remains, the can use the blueprint of the plane and the seat assignments on the tickets to determine where the charred passengers were located, and perhaps pinpoint where an explosion or fire began. And did you know that people who fall from a certain height or higher will have all their clothes knocked off when they hit the ocean, while people who fell from below that height will be recovered clothed?

Despite the macabre nature of the subject matter, Stiff is remarkably funny. Yes, you heard me: funny -- even, at time, snort-out-loud-while-riding-the-bus funny. Throughout the book, Roach employs a tone that's breezy and matter-of-fact, and throws a joke or two into every paragraph. But this doesn't mean the book is light: in fact, it struck me as so meticulously researched that I found myself questioning the sanity of any author would delve into a subject to such a depth. But by injecting liberal amounts of humor into her narrative, Roach makes what could have been a grim and depressing tome into a eminently readable page-turner, the kind of book you could read and enjoy on vacation. (In fact, I took Stiff along during my recent trip to D.C., and even wound up reading the chapter on plane crashes while on the plane.) More impressive still is the fact that the use of humor in no way detracts from the profound sense of respect for the people who donate their bodies that the author manages to engender in the reader.

By the end of Stiffed I kind of felt like Roach was padding the book a little (a chapter on cannibalism goes into an extended digression of how the author was sent on a wild goose chase by an urban legend, for instance), and the humor occasionally gets a little wearying, like reading a forensic textbook written by Dave Barry. But by and large Stiff manages to blend informative and entertaining prose into an engrossing read (emphasis on the "gross"), and it's the best non-fiction book I've read this year.

Say you arrived at work one morning to find a dead critter in the parking lot of the office building. A possum, let's stipulate -- one that had perished recently, but not too recently. Morbid curiosity might get the better of you, and you might stop for a moment to look at the corpse, maybe even going so far as to turn the thing over with your foot so as to see it from all vantages. But would you then go into the office and urge your friends and coworkers to go outside and check it out? Probably not.

Likewise, I find it difficult to recommend Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, one of the most aggressively unpleasant books I've read in a while. Seriously, portions of the book caused me to physically wince as I read them. It was one of those novels where, when I read it on the bus, I would turn the book so the spine pointed at the person sitting next to me for fear that they might glance over, inadvertently see the wrong passage, and quickly transfer to another seat, as far as way as possible. But despite (or, reluctant though I am to admit it, perhaps because of) this -- I plowed though the novel in record time, reading it at every available opportunity.

The story revolves around Victor Mancini, an unlikable loser who depends on the kindness of strangers; specifically, he pretends to choke to death in restaurants and allows people to "save his life." Afterwards his would-be rescuers feel personally responsible for Victor's life (such as it is) and often start sending him checks to make sure he's doing okay. Much of the money he makes from this scam he uses to keep his debacle of a mother in hospice care -- though, when someone at the hospital proposes a treatment that might extend his mother's life, he adamantly rules it out. In his spare time he frequence sex-addiction recovery groups in search of one-night stands, and hangs out with his pal Denny who has an unhealthy predilection for rocks.

All of this would be practically unreadable were it not for the author's ability to turn a phrase -- occasionally, while rooting around in the muck of Choke, you unexpectedly discover a jewel. While I'm not convinced that Palahniuk is a stellar writer, several portions of the book -- such as his description of prayer chains as "a spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around," and a revolting yet curiously inspiring bit about a man, a monkey, and some chestnuts -- made the whole thing worthwhile.

It even got me wanting to read some other stuff my the guy, though a friend of mine, who has read many of Palahniuk's works, told me not to bother. "They're all pretty much the same book," he said. Indeed, just having viewed the Fight Club movie, I could see how much Choke had in common with this earlier work, with self-help groups, railing against conformity, and the good vs. bad duality of the pro/an tagonist. But I may read Fight Club all the same, because it ooks like it shares a virtue with Choke -- they're both relatively short. And those snappy little soundbites Palahniuk employs are as addicting as potato chips.

I haven't really been keeping up with my book reviews, but since I recommended The Last American Man over at The Morning News a few weeks back, I figure I could at do the same for my readers over here.

Those of you unfortunate enough to be adults may remember a spate of books released in the mid-90s that purported to tackle the thorny issue of "masculinity." The tomes tended to come in two varieties: those that analyzed the issue from a feminist perspective and urged readers to identify their masculine side and then quash it in favor of nurturing their inner womyn, and those that warned that the former were turning us into a nation of simpering nancyboys and encouraged men to combat this creeping menace by making more of an effort to behave like an asshole.

Since I was at Evergreen during the throes of this trend, it was pretty much inescapable for me. And, consequentially, I have an irrational fear of any book that has the word "masculinity" anywhere near it. So the only thing that's more amazing than the fact that I picked up The Last American Man from the library is the fact that I then went on to read it, despite a blurb on the front cover that declared it to be "the finest examination of American masculinity since Into the Wild." And hey, you know what? It was great -- best nonfiction book I've read so far this year.

The Last American Man is the biography of one Eustace Conway, written by his good friend Elizabeth Gilbert. Conway was literally the stuff of legends. As a teen he decided to forego a comfortable existence and live in the wilderness, surviving off what food he could catch or grow, fashioning his clothing out of buckskin, and eschewing even the luxury of matches. Unlike many hermits, though, Conway's desire was not to get away from people -- in fact, he was an extraordinary public speaker, and early on decided that it was his life's calling to proselytize this lifestyle, urging city folk to ditch the suburbs and come join him in the forest. In that end he established the Turtle Island Preserve, where he gave workshops and mentored those who wanted to learn how to live a "traditional lifestyle." He also travelled to schools and conferences as a handsomely paid guest speaker. And, between gigs, he found time to hike the entire Appalachian Trail and ride across the nation on horseback.

In chronicling the life of Conway, Gilbert makes little effort to hide her affection for the subject matter: she freely admits that she's a friend of the protagonist and is obviously not immune to his considerable charms. Even so, she's not afraid to tell it like it is when it comes to Conway's many failings. Gilbert makes it all too clear why a man of Conway's charism nonetheless winds up alienating his friends, family, lovers and apprentices. Indeed, Conway come across less as a paragon of manhood and more like a greek god: larger-than-life, but with a flaw for every virtue. That Gilbert is able to navigate the tightrope between objectivity and personalization is a credit to her skills as an author.

And while I haven't rushed out and purchased a copy of Iron John just yet, I will say that The Last American Man went a long way in destigmatizing treatises on masculinity for me. Better still, I found it an engrossing, funny, and thought-provoking book, one perfect for summer reading on the beach. Or in the middle of a rainforst, whichever you prefer.

I spent the weekend listening to the 16 CD James Earl Jones Reads the Bible Deluxe Edition. What a disappointment. Nineteen straight hours of almost complete silence, occasionally punctuated by the soft rustle of Jones turning a page.

Wow, this Best of the Blogs book is pretty good! In fact, I'll go out of a limb and say that of all the books I have reviewed here on defective yeti, it's the one I am the most in.

But don't let my staggering lack of impartiality dissuade you from buying several dozen copies. After all, my posts only comprise, like, 1/300th of the text. The bulk of the book is made up of entries from a bevy of my favorite blogs, such as Choire Sicha and Dooce and What's The Fuss. (The only bummer about being in a book with Choire and Heather and Mrs. Kennedy is that the book is not erotica.) And I've had these sites on my sidebar since forever, right? So, in a sense, it's as if I endorsed this book way before it became wildly inappropriate for me to do so.

Plus, it's got Wil Wheaton in it, the guy who was in that one movie you saw that one time! And if this book sells really well maybe they'll turn it into a movie and cast Wil Wheaton in the role of me, although I guess he would be busy playing the part of himself unless they got another actor to play the part of Wil Wheaton, maybe George Clooney, which would be totally cool because I've always wanted to be in a movie with George Clooney, except I guess I wouldn't technically be in the movie since Wil Wheaton would be playing ... okay, now my head kind of hurts.

In summary: purchase!

A month ago I raved about Steven E. Landsburg's first book The Armchair Economist. I found the book so engrossing that I was disappointed when it ended, so I picked up Landsburg second (and most recent) effort, Fair Play, hoping for more of the same. Unfortunately, Fair Play doesn't exactly pick up where Armchair left off. While a quite enjoyable read, I thought Fair Play left something to be desired.

The problem lies with the subtitle: "What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics". It's not so much what the subtitle says, it's that there is a subtitle at all. The beauty of Armchair Economist was that it was free-ranging, dashing hither and yon covering a variety of economic topics. Better yet, it was one step removed from the reality. The "rational riddles" pondered in Armchair were first distilled to abstraction, and then examined using economic theory. Landsburg reminded readers again and again the many of the assumptions underlying his analysis are simplifications (e.g., all people share common preferences) but his point wasn't to provide definitive answers to the given conundrums but to demonstrate the logical process that economists use when contemplating such questions. Although the author's personal beliefs were occasionally injected into the narrative, the economics always came first.

In Fair Play, on the other hand, Landsburg's worldview seems to be driving the economics. In particular, two of his passions -- love of his daughter and dislike of progressive taxation -- provide the framework for the discussion. The central conceit of the book is we need only look to children to discern the basic economic principles that should guide our society. It's a rather gimmicky premise, but one that makes intuitive sense; if humans are essentially economic creatures, then we would do well to look at those least tainted by society to see how we should behave. Unfortunately, Landsburg is inconsistent in how he employs this economics-via-children stratagem. Sometimes he says we should look to how children act instinctively for clues as to what's "fair," saying "if this is the way we're wired, it must be a for a reason". But other times he cites how adults tell children to behave as a guide to how we should behave ourselves, implying that the standards of "fairness" we set out for our children ought not to differ from those we adhere to ourselves. By trying to have it both ways, Landsburg undermines both arguments.

The subtitular "Look To The Children" theme is then largely abandoned in the middle third of the book (an extended critique of our system of taxation), and then hastily readopted as he brings the book to a close. Scattered throughout the work are snippets cribbed from his regular Slate Everyday Economics column. The overall effect is of a recipe with a few too many ingredients.

If I'm critical of Fair Play, it's because Landsburg's first told me to do so -- now when I read economic writing I am always looking for the flaws and contradictions. Even so, Play is an fun read and left me looking forward to his next offering. If you haven't ready either of Lansburg's works then The Armchair Economist is the way to go; but if you've already devoured that one and are hungry for more, Fair Play is a worthy, if somewhat unsatisfying, follow-up.

When faced with crushing, humiliating defeat, some people shrug and move on while others are prone to dwell. Author Neil Steinberg is a dweller. It helps that the failures he focuses on are (mostly) not his own. Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runner-Ups, Never-Weres and Total Flops tells the story of those who have reached for that brass ring and toppled out of their chairs trying.

The first chapter sets the stage by chronicling the history of product failure: items enthusiastically thrust onto the marketplace, only to be greeted with apathy or derision. One vignette recounts how toymaker Ideal bought a proposal for a line of cute dolls with fluttering wings called "Fairies". One of the Ideal honchos, however, just had to put his mark on the product before it hit the shelves, and insisted they add halos and rename the dolls "Angel Babies". Unfortunately, no one would touch the dolls when they premiered at the New York Toy Fair. All the toy buyers raised the same objection, one which had never occurred to anyone at Ideal during the development process: "So let me get this straight," the buyers said, "These are dead babies?"

That's one of many laugh-out-loud anecdotes collected in this slim volume. Subsequent chapters discuss the various attempts to scale Mt. Everest before Sir Hillary actually made it to the top, the quixotic pursuit of perpetual motion and cold fusion, and the effect that Bad Timing can have on someone like Elisha Gray, who invented the telephone but filed for a patent two hours after Alexander Graham Bell registered his own, less elegant device.

Complete and Utter Failure, while enjoyable throughout, is something of a hodge-podge. At times it comes close to becoming just another Litany Book, where an author purports to "investigate" a phenomenon but actually just fills 300 pages with examples of the phenomenon (James Gleick's Faster and Randall Kennedy's Nigger are prime examples of the Litany Book.) Elsewhere, it strays pretty far afield from the theme -- I don't see how the burning of the library of Alexandria can really be chalked up as a "failure," per se.

The section on the National Spelling Bee, however, largely makes up for the deficiencies in the rest. (Complete and Utter Failure was recommended to me by a yeti reader in the Spellbound thread, by the way). This chapter is more like what I wish the whole book had been -- an in-depth look at an event that is structured in such a way that failure is a foregone conclusion for virtually everyone who competes (despite the demonstrably false announcement, at the beginning of each and every round of the National Spelling Bee the bee, that "everyone who has gotten this far is a winner"). This chapter weaves together interviews with bee participants, first-hand accounts of the event, and philosophical musings on the nature of failure into a neat little essay on the subject. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this chapter was written first and the rest of the book built around it.

The remainder of the book is quite fun to read, due to Steinberg's great (and relentlessly self-deprecating) sense of humor, and because he amusingly compares the history of failure with his own personal experience in this particular realm. (Steinberg's first brush with failure came after being hornswoggled by Captain Kangaroo). So while somewhat uneven, Complete and Utter Failure fails to live down to its title. It is an enjoyable treatise on a subject most of prefer not to dwell upon.

For a sampler of Steinberg's writing, check out his regular column for the Chicago Sun-Times.

I love riddles. I don't mean the Laffy Taffy "What kind of shoes do ghosts wear?" kind (well, actually I love those too), but the non-funny kind that crop up in daily life and require a heapin' helping of lateral thinking to unravel. This is why, a while back, I got obsessed with Traffic Flow Theory: the study of how people behave in traffic.

As interesting to me as the riddles themselves is the fact that most of us (myself included) don't even recognize them as riddles until someone calls our attention to them. Why, for instance, do we have traffic jams? It seems like a stupid question -- traffic jams results from too many cars on the road, duh -- but Traffic Flow Theory illustrates that jams are not inevitable, but occur because people behave in very specific (and often counterproductive) ways. The trick to these real world riddles isn't so much figuring out the answer as realizing there is a question worthy of investigation.

Another fascinating (to me) "no-brainer" is: "Why do people stand on escalators but walk on stairs?" As with the traffic jams conundrum, it's not even obvious that there is any behavior worthy of research here -- if people stood on stairs they would never get to the top, duh -- but that didn't stop a bunch of economists at the University of Rochester from looking into this very puzzle. Some of the hypothesis those economists cooked up were summarized here by Steven E. Landsburg.

This is just one of many issues that Landsburg has explored in a regular Slate column entitled Everyday Economics. My interested piqued by the escalator question, I went back and read his entire series of articles, which tackle pressing societal issues ranging from how to win Ebay auctions to why tall people make more money to, my favorite, why people peel bananas with the stem-end up. (Monkeys peel 'em the other way, you know.) Eventually, though, I ran out of articles, leaving me with no option but to read his book, The Armchair Economist.

Written before his tenure at Slate, The Armchair Economist serves as a perfect lead-in to his column. It comes complete with a primer on economics, gives you some idea of Landsburg's worldview, and then tackles a few "Rational Riddles," such as "Why do movie theaters charge more for popcorn?" (Oh, you think you know why theaters charge more for popcorn? Well, tough guy, what if I told you that the chapter in which this is discussed is entitled "Why Popcorn Costs More At The Movies And Why The Obvious Answer Is Wrong" ...)

When not demonstrating that the obvious is incorrect, Landsburg also takes great joy in demonstrating that some plainly ridiculous ideas are, in fact, quite sound: the best way to make drivers safer is to take away their seat belts install sharp spikes on their steering wheels; a city that spends $10,000,000 to build a free aquarium may as well buy $10,000,000 of gold bullion and dump it in the ocean; and it is posible to build a factory that converts corn into automobiles.

For me, personally, The Armchair Economist was especially valuable, because many of the myths is sets out to explode are those that I (as a self-described progressive) hold dear: one chapter is entitled "Why Taxes Are Bad," another is called "Why I Am Not An Environmentalist." He even makes a remarkably convincing argument that bipartisanships in politics is something to be feared rather than welcomed. While I often read writers with beliefs counter to my own, I rarely come across an author who not only challenges my convictions but ponies up the logical arguments necessary to make me think "holy smokes, maybe he's right!" That's what made this the best non-fiction book I've read this year, and one that I recommend highly.

David Sedaris says he read Moby Dick. The liar. Well, I assume he's lying, because (a) he's a humorist (i.e., professional liar) and (b) it's well known that 71% of all Moby-Dick-reading claims are lies. But Sedaris provides a fairly believable account of how he managed to pull it off, so, I dunno -- maybe he did read it. It's possible, I guess.

In any case, even if he tried he probably got further into the book than I did. Earlier this year I, too, decided that, at long last, I would tackle Moby Dick. So I checked it out from the library, brought it home, and then assiduously ignored it for a few weeks while I read Nero Wolfe mysteries and graphic novels. Finally, one evening, I decided to bite the literary bullet. As I lay in bed before turning off the light, I picked up the well-worn volume, turned to Chapter One ("Loomings"), and prepared to fulfill a lifelong goal of mine.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely --having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me ...

Unnerved, I pressed on.

... whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

The Queen gave me the briefest of glances, shrugged, and went back to reading her own book. This is why I married her.

I enjoy crossing things off my "To-Do In This Life" list, and I've been x-ing out a lot of them in the last couple years. Not accomplishing things and then crossing them off, oh no; just attempting (or mentally reevaluating) them and then announcing "Yeah, that's not happening." Like, I always wanted to run a marathon. And, point in fact, I'm sure I could do the Seattle Marathon in November if I wanted to. But I recently ran a half marathon and, oh brother, whatta freakin' drag. By mile 8 I was totally bored. By mile 10 I was wishing I'd brought a magazine. The idea of running 13.1 miles twice -- hell, if I wanted that kind of excitement I'd buckle down and read Moby Dick. Which I could also do. If I wanted to. Which I don't.

Ten years ago, if you asked me if I had read Ulysses, I probably would have just scoffed "of course" or hedged with an "I've been too busy reading Milan Kundera" or whatever. Now, at the age of 32, I not only lack the initiative to read boring classics or run marathons, I don't even feel the urge to lie about it any more. "Never read Ulysses and never will," I'm likely to say today. "I got shitfaced in an Irish bar once, and I figure that's close enough."

Some people might say that lowering your standards is no way to meet your life goals. But those people are a bunch of 20-something Moby Dick liars, so, seriously: who cares what they think?

Here are some books I've read in recent months that I thought were too short or too disappointing to merit a full-length review.

Silverwing: I can just hear the pitch for this book: "It's like Harry Potter meets Watership Down meets Incredible Journey -- kids will love it!" Kids probably will love it, and I didn't find it half bad either. The heavily anthromorphisized critters of Silverwing are bats, and our hero is the newborn Shade, the runt of the litter who is determined to prove himself but is separated from his migrating clan and forced to blah blah blah ... Well, needless to say there's nothing new in regards to plot or characters -- in fact, as I was reading this aloud to The Queen, I would occationally introduce a new character and have her say "oh, this is Professor Snape" or "aha, I knew Draco Malfoy would be in here somehwhere!" But while I'm not one to typically recommend a book on the basis of its unoriginality, Silverwing is at least as interesting as J. K. Rowling's novels (and, at 200 pages, about a third as long), so it might just be the perfect thing for you or your youngster if you need a Harry Potter fix before Order of the Pheonix is released later this month.

A Wizard of Earthsea: And speaking of Hogwarts ... After recently reading several of those wordy-to-the-point-of-prolixity Harry Potter books -- not to mention rereading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in all its verbosity -- my initial reaction to this was one of disappointment. A Wizard of Earthsea tells the tale of Ged, an usually gifted young magician who is coming to grips with his powers on a world where dry land is few and far between, and every region is an island unto itself. Ursula K. Le Guin writes the novel in a manner so devoid of description that it seems almost curt. The book was short enough to keep me reading, though, and by the midpoint I was surprised to discover that I had come to appreciate the style. Le Guin is a storyteller in the truest sense of the term: she concentrates solely on the narrative and only gussies things up with description when necessary. The result is less a story less you'd find in a 600 page tome and more like what you'd hear told around a campfire. By the end I decided that I'd quite enjoyed A Wizard of Earthsea, and I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

Legacy: I'd never read a James Michener novel before and, given that this one only runs about 150 pages, I guess you could argue that I still haven't. (Don't be fooled by the "288 pages" listed on the Amazon page; in addition to Legacy the book also contains the entire text of the Constitution of the United States and a 30 page preview of another novel entirely.) Written in 1990, the story traces the lineage of several generations of "patriots," beginning with Jared Starr (who was present at the signing of the Constitution) and ending with Major Norman Starr (who is about to be called before a Senate investigation to account for his role in the Iran / Contra Affair). I found Legacy to be entertaining, but I can't say that I feel any burning desire to grab one of Michener's 1000+ page opuses as a result. I did appreciate that the central character, Major Normal Starr, was portrayed as deeply conservative and reverential towards the Reagan Administration; as a lefty-progressive, it was nice to get a peek into the mind of "the other side".

To Say Nothing Of The Dog: I spent much of this book thinking "Wow: this sure reminds me of Bellwether." And it wasn't until I was nearly two-thirds of the way through it before I had my big d'oh! moment, realizing "no wonder: the author of To Say Nothing Of The Dog is -- d'oh! -- the same person who wrote Bellwether". The problem, unfortunately, is that Bellwhether was quite a bit more enjoyable than this congenial mess. To Say Nothing Of The Dog starts out as a book about time travel (cool!), but then becomes a book about the Victorian Era (less cool) and remains so throughout most of the middle (zzzzzzzz) before, at the very end, abruptly transmorgifying back into the science fiction novel it had promised to be. That the author tries to shoehorn a mystery story in as well doesn't help. Willis has plenty of clever ideas about time travel, but they are largely wasted in what is primarily a comedy of errors and manners. The whole thing comes off as a nice try, but Bellwhether is a essentially a refinement of the ideas within and a vast improvement over the somewhat muddled plot to be found here.

(No, it's not another weblog handbook ...)

Looks are everything. That may not be the take-home message of Jennifer Egan's Look At Me, but it's the philosophy guiding the novel's myriad of characters.

We first meet Charlotte, a model whose trade is her face -- at least until said face is crushed in a car crash and has to be reassembled with the help of 80 titanium screws. Now a woman who was recognizable to complete strangers has to identify herself by name to those she's known her entire life.

We later meet Moose, a professor hovering over the line of insanity, whose dissertation examined the invention of clear glass. When glass allowed the populace of the middle ages to see into the dirty corners of their homes and view their own visage in mirrors, and Moose argues that the result was a radical cultural transformation as society became abruptly obsessed with appearances.

Nearly everyone else who traipses through the pages of Look At Me illustrates some aspect of image consciousness. A high school student seems to be a normal teen but is actually living a dangerous double life. The identity of a teacher is a complete fraud -- in truth he is a cipher with a mysterious past. A husband works as a marketer, inventing stupid products that Americans will impulse-purchase at first sight.

By the midpoint of this book, I was ready to declare it "The best book I've read since The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay!" But my enthusiasm waned somewhat from that point on. Egan's writing is engaging, and she skillfully creates a host characters that come across as both illustrations of her central thesis and as human beings, but after spending the first half of the novel establishing them she doesn't do a whole lot with them thereafter, with the plot aimlessly zigging and zagging its way to a finale that could have come 100 pages sooner.

But despite these flaws, Look At Me is an excellent book about an fascinating topic, and is, yes, the best book I've read since The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Egan has somehow managed to write a remarkable deep book about the perils of superficiality.

This is a brief and mostly spoiler-free interview with Jennifer Egan.

This Slate article reveals some of major plot points, but does discuss a rather astounding aspect of this book's timing that I, ever the spoiler-phobe, opted not to mention here.

Our modern idea of the cape, cowl & tights superhero is often traced back to the 1938 debut of Superman. There were plenty of "superheroes" before then, of course, but we didn't recognize them as such: Zorro, Gilgamesh, Hercules, etc. But clever, clever Alan Moore has rounded up a bunch of these pre-Superman fictitious heroes and given them their own comic book entitled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; the first six issues of said series (which constitute a complete story) have now been compiled into a trade paperback, which I read over the weekend.

And what a great read it was. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins in 1898 (one century prior to the comic book's publication), and the "heroes" are taken from the literature of the time: the swashbuckling Allan Quatermain, the mysterious Mina Murry, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, and both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (If some of those names fail to ring a bell, don't worry: half the fun of the story is discovering who each person is as the tale progresses.) The five are recruited by Campion Bond, agent of English Intelligence and emissary of a cryptic figure known as "M", who has assembled the team to save Britain from a threat as dangerous as it is enigmatic. And so begins a series of adventures which brings the team into contact with Auguste Dupin, Fu Manchu, and a host of other characters throughout the Europe of the late nineteenth century.

The wonderful thing about the heroes in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that few of them are heroes, and most don't even qualify as "gentlemen". Quatermain is an opium fiend; Mr. Hyde is a (literal) monster; Hawley Griffin is, frankly, an asshole. They act not for love of England (Nemo, in fact, loathes the Empire and all it stands for), but for private motives and personal gain. In other words, the characters in the comic books are every bit as complex and interesting as the literary figures they are based on. Furthermore, the story told in the first six issues is what would have been called a "ripping good yarn" at the time, full of humor, drama, and more twists than the Thames river.

I have quite a few graphic novels and trade paperbacks on my bookshelf, but most date back to the era when I was an avid comic book reader: The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunter and the like. In the last ten years I have picked up a few more, but it's been rare to find one as good as the Silver Age classics (although a few have qualified, such as Kingdom Come and the Astro City compilations). And none that i have acquired in recent memory have risen