Matters of the heart

Book: Vital Circuits: On Pumps, Pipes, and the Workings of Circulatory Systems

Author: Steven Vogel

Published: 1992 (Oxford University Press)

Pages: 269 (not including glossary or index)

This is the first hard science book I’ve tried reading in a long while, and I liked it, but I won’t pretend I absorbed all of it and now have a perfect understanding of how circulatory systems work. But that’s not Dr. Vogel’s fault.

He’s good at explaining and keeping interest through metaphors, personal opinions (which are blatantly labeled as such so as not to slip into the undisputed facts), and antidotes gained through his own teaching career and biomechanical experience. Those parts read easily, until I smacked up against walls of scientific text that I had to work through at about half speed. Most of that was about the pure biomechanics of circulatory systems, so I retained more of the sideline stuff than the main subject.

Here are the peripherals of what I learned:   

Science!

• Squid and octopuses have three hearts, a central one and one for each set of gills. 
• Biology is essentially a feminist, putting way more care into the structure of females and using males as sort-of useful afterthoughts. 
• Narrowing a pipe increases the speed of flow of liquids going through it and that widening a pipe decreases the same thing, an effect you can also achieve by making a branching system from your original pipe. 
• Speed is distance over time, area is distance squared, and so volume flow rate must be distance cubed over time. 
• Chickens have white-meat breasts and wings because those muscles are only used for brief movement and don’t need the oxygen supply that the breasts and wings of real fliers like ducks need.      

Not really science!

• Collagen is too fibrous in a ropey way to roast or grill but makes a heart good eating meat if you soak it in cool water, then hot (he includes a recipe). 
• Don’t make your pet iguana dive.
• There’s such thing as the Antiacrimonious Acronymical Accreditation Association. 
• I’m never using swizzle sticks again because some are made from the os penis bone of raccoons.

I’m also proud of myself for getting through an entire book about blood and veins without going squeamish. Onward!

When bear and chicken part ways

Book: Fuzz and Pluck: Splitsville

Author: Ted Stearn

Published: 2008 (Fantagraphic Books)

Pages: They weren’t numbered and I didn’t count them. A lot. Ish.

I was going to draw a review of this book, then spent the last three days realizing that no, I still can’t draw in any recognizable form. So!

This is a comic about Pluck, a chicken with no feathers, and Fuzz, a stuffed bear, as watched by their guardian angel doppelgangers, as they start off working at Mr. Lardy’s fast food restaurant. They get separated when Fuzz goes to run an errand for Mr. Lardass and gets chased away by a dog and then rescued by an old dude who’s obsessive about making his ferry run right between two (perfectly good but don’t tell him that) bridges, and Pluck gets fired when he beats up an insulting customer and ends up joining a gladiator team that battles for their own jobs on a floating stadium. Pluck is a runaway success and ends up getting chucked overboard by a jealous teammate (a boxing rabbit) and rival team manager (a sentient lemon half) into the very river in which Fuzz floats in the ferry after accidentally killing its owner.

…Actually, I think my drawings made just as much sense as this.

• Engaging story that didn’t make sense but didn’t act like it had to.
• Cool pen and ink drawings, especially of Sourpuss (the lemon).
• Not really funny; not sure if it was supposed to be or not. Not sure how or if this was broken down in another medium (ie, strips or pages posted on a website); seemed designed for a straight through read.

And ye gads and little fishies, another yellow book cover. This is seriously and for real the second-to-last library book I will ever read until I get done with my other books. I SWEAR. *puts hand on copy of White Teeth*   

Gritty reboot: flimflam edition

Book: Matchstick Men

Author: Eric Garcia

Published: 2002 (Villard)

Pages: 228

I can sum up this book in five words: gritty reboot of Paper Moon. That, my friends, makes a very enjoyable read.

Seriously, it’s a little eerie. Both books are about con men who are estranged fathers of young daughters who end up coming with them and show precocious knacks for helping with jobs. Even a couple of the cons are the same, most notably the one where the con man (or girl) goes to pay for something cheap with a twenty-dollar bill. The clerk gives back $19.50 or whatever in change, but just before the con man (or girl) gets out the door, they say, “Oh hey look, I do have the exact amount,” and give the clerk that in exchange for the twenty-dollar bill. If they keep the clerk chatting or flirting hard enough, the con nets the $19.50 in change the clerk doesn’t think to ask back.

It works stupidly well in both books.

I like both of the girls, too. They’re written as bright stubborn things who use their wills to get what they want done in matter-of-fact ways that betray fierce loyalties to their dads as the first grownups who’ve shown them any kind of respect.

The biggest differences between these books are the settings, the group dynamics, and how that affects the outcomes. In Matchstick Men, Roy has a partner he works with long before his daughter comes into the picture. This is important to the natural progression of the twist ending that, by the end of everything, seems inevitable.

I can’t get over how smooth that twist is. It’s the best I’ve read in many a book. No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Go read. Or watch the movie. This is one time I’m comfortable with recommending both adaptations equally.

Same for Paper Moon, actually. So…bumping around through the Depression stealing cotton, or twitching around a modern city processing art forgeries? Colorful Southern expressions or flinty Yankee curses? Ryan O’Neil or Nicholas Cage? Both. ALL. 

Notes on my people

Book: Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd

Authors: various (edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci)

Published: 2009 (Little, Brown and Company)

Pages: 403

This was another book that had me before I opened the front cover. As soon as I read the subtitle, I wanted to read the whole thing.

It’s a collection of stories, I think written especially for this, about being a nerd. All kinds of nerds are represented, neatly classified into their own subgenres and lovingly drawn as real people who just want a little bit more in life than their peers.

Since this is a YA collection—it is, isn’t it? It was on the YA shelf at my library and has a big YA sticker on its spine, which I realize doesn’t have to mean doodly-squat, but it’s the best classification system I have access to—all of the protagonists are high school age or younger. Almost all of them have those high school problems that seem so vitally important until you get away from them; yet I got caught up in everything and didn’t once feel the urge to scream 

“It won’t matter!”

Because these guys are wrestling with nothing less than their identity. And I know how they feel. It does matter.

Now for the less philosophisin’ stuff. I didn’t like the geek references that were thrown in for no better reason than “Hey! Look! TV show/movie/book we all like! Inside joke about that!” There was a couple. I didn’t especially like the cheerleader-learns-from-nerds setup of the second story, but not because it was written badly; it just used too much of popular versus non-popular high school cliché.

“The Truth About Dino Girl” appalled me. Its setup was good—geeky girl loves popular girl’s boyfriend, popular girl finds out and makes mild fun of geeky girl, tells her boyfriend. Geeky girl is mortified. Very, very understandable. But then she retaliates with just pure cruelty. I’m torn. Points for making the geeky girl worse than the popular girl unexpectedly, but points taken away for how unnecessarily vicious it was. One big reason that outcasts make good protagonists is their finely honed sense of justice, which is completely skewed here.

But I really liked how the authors in this collection showed how varied and interesting geeks and geek interests are. Yes, we’re weird kids, but we’re better people because of it.

Also, comics by the guy who does Scott Pilgrim.          

False titling

Book: Absolute Truths

Author: Susan Howatch

Publication: 1995 (Knopf)

Pages: 560

Religion. Hoo boy.

You need to know this is a touchy subject for me. I’m not religious, but a few people I love are, and that divide’s made things difficult.

It’s made me want to understand other people’s views on religion and why they think and feel the ways they do. I know your basic Southern-kid-who-went-to-church theology, but I want to learn about the human side of it. Unfortunately, this book kept me at arm’s length.

Despite spanning over 500 pages, the story never gets anywhere. It’s about a senior clergyman in the Church of England—a bishop who’s sort of like the CEO of this small town’s church system, although I never got a clear picture of the whole infrastructure so that metaphor might be off—who has to juggle his job, his God, and the death of his wife as intermingling factors he has to deal with at the same time to get some peace.

Cool! Ripe for some heavy philosophical discussion and reflection! I mean, we all know it’s going to end in a deeper appreciation of God because that’s just how these things work, but still—interesting journey is still worth the trip! Yes?

No. Not when everybody lectures instead of speaks; not when the protagonist has such a talent for drowning the truly scandalous (interesting) bits in wordy paragraphs that start with sentences like, “This is too irredeemable for me to even consider to put on paper, suffice to say”; not when the rest of the prose reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel only without the murder or quirkier human details. 

I had such high hopes at page 39, when the bishop’s wife asks him, “What happens to the people who just can’t fit into this neat, orderly world designed by the Church?” YES. What DOES happen to them?

I still don’t know. He just says that surely it’s in his favor that he has no idea what it’s like to be a homosexual, and then dodges the rest of her questions until she gets too exasperated to keep asking. And the big, scandalizing secret about his adopted son’s father (who had an affair with the bishop’s wife right before she became the bishop’s wife)? He was actually a good man instead of a bastard.

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS. THAT…wait, that’s not worth any of this massive pile of angst you’ve put yourself and your reader through. There are a couple more anti-reveals like that instead of a satisfying wah-bam climax. Shhffft. (That’s my frustrated sound, blown through pursed lips while scowling.)

No absolute truths are ever revealed. I call out Howatch for false titling. 

However, this is the last book in a series. Each novel is self-contained but interlocking, and I think maybe the one that describes the great spiritual crisis of 1937 might be more interesting, because that is alluded to CONSTANTLY as the start of everything. Except that book’s also narrated by the same protagonist. If it was narrated by the bishop’s wife, I would totally give that one a chance. Her name is Lyle and she’s awesome but she dies of a brain aneurysm.   

Return your books or you won't go to heaven.

Book: Library Mascot Cage Match: an Unshelved Collection

Authors: Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

Publication: 2005 (Overdue Media)

Pages: 120

When I walk my books into the library instead of using the book drop outside, I get distracted by stuff like this.

It’s a collection of the comic strip Unshelved (which is online and updates five days a week; your move, xkcd), so there’s no overarching plotline except that library life is crazy, so to sum up why I love this, just read the dialogue of this particular strip.

Patron: Those teenagers are talking on the pay phone!

Dewey (teen librarian): Sorry, that’s allowed.

Patron: And playing games on the computer!

Dewey: Also okay.

Patron: Now they’re tearing up library books!

Dewey: No they’re not.

Patron: How did you know?

Dewey: We can sense it. Part of our training on Dagobah.

Old Kentucky home

Book: Girl Trouble

Author: Holly Goddard Jones

Publication: 2009 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 322

You shouldn’t look to literary fiction to cheer you up about the human condition; it’s not going to work. Jones’s stories, all set in the fictional Kentucky town of Roma, pile common yet life-shattering pains onto regular people and make them work things out for themselves. Just like in the real world.

A high school coach has to deal with getting one of his players pregnant, a divorced woman has to deal with her husband rebuilding on the land they use to live (where she got raped in their cheap starter house), a young college-bound man has to deal with loving his buddy’s girl and not his own girlfriend, a young girl has to deal with her budding sexuality around a couple who lost their own child. There’s a trend of violence and sexuality playing off each other, on purpose but mostly accidentally, and a trend of the town elders being just as clueless, only in different ways, as their children.  

I like how ordinary her characters are. It makes them feel like real people and gives the circumstances universality they wouldn’t have if she wrote about what she calls the two Kentucky stereotypes: rich mint-julep-sipping horse breeders or feral hillbillies. I have no empathy for either of those, but I can identify really well with young people who are trying to get out of town without screwing up enough to keep them home all their lives. They fail, and it breaks my heart a little. Their parents help the best they can or know how to, and most of the time it’s not enough.

Taken individually, each story feels slightly generic in its treatment of conflict that’s been dealt with so much before in fiction. Taken together, it all gets a little heavy in a This Could Happen to You and You Would Have No Idea How to Handle It Any Better way.

These are depressing stories told well.

Attack of the shit-weasels

Book: Dreamcatcher

Author: Stephen King

Publication: 2001 (Scribner)

Pages: 617

Over the past few summers, I’ve made it a soft, unofficial goal to read all of King’s non-Dark Tower books. Dreamcatcher is one that I’ve put off a couple times for stories that looked more interesting. I wasn’t terribly eager to slough through bastardized Native American mythology or another The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. (That book was good. Let a good thing stand on its own, King.)

But this book isn’t like either of my expectations, and that was enough to keep me reading. 

Aliens and weasel-larvae who chew through humans’ intestines to spread a reddish-gold virus that grows worse than kudzu should be really, really interesting. Except the aliens have been here doing diddly-shit since the 1940s, the weasels provide way too many excuses for fart jokes, and the virus can’t survive Maine winter so it dies out without anyone’s help.

Hear that “wamp-wahhh” sound? That’s what an anticlimax sounds like.

My two main problems with this book as a writer: 

1. The dreamcatcher. It’s unnecessary. It feels like King thought he needed something specific and physical to hang all the metaphysical  stuff on, but he already had that in Duddits. Saying “This is all in the Dreamcatcher” Is actually way more confusing than just admitting, “Okay, dudes, we’re in Duddit’s mind and have to finish this quickly so shit gets done before he dies. 
2.  The women. I’m only complaining about this because I know King can write good women characters but doesn’t do it enough. In this book, every single woman is either stupid or mean. Sigh. 

There was still good stuff in here. King can write buddies like he’s taking dictation from bull sessions; he’s particularly great at getting the casual but still newly obscene rhythms of young teenage speech. I’ve gotten a few of my favorite swears from him: “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar” is one, and “bitch-kitty” always seems to sum up a pounding headache. I love his leaders gone crazy, who always pump their deranged messages like evangelical showmen. I liked that the ending to this book is both hard-earned and neatly sewn up. That’s a really difficult balance, especially for a full science fiction showdown.

I also found this quote: “Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.” It has nothing to do with any of the major themes or plot threads, but it’s great, and true, and therefore I can’t hate this book.