Under darkest night

Book: Absolute Batman Hush

Writer: Jeph Loeb

Penciller: Jim Lee

Inker: Scott Williams

Letterer: Richard Starkings

Colorist: Alex Sinclair

Original Batman creator: Bob Kane

Published: 2005 (DC Comics)

Pages: not numbered. Lots, again.

I like to tell myself that I’ve started reading comics to study epic, crime-fighting story arcs. You know, for the superhero novel that’s my own current writing project. Research!

But it’s really because I like the big exciting pictures, I have A Source who hand-picks his best series for me to borrow (hi Thomas!), and sometimes I’m tired and my head hurts and I just want to watch Batman kick ass or chase Catwoman for a couple dozen pages before I go to sleep.

And Hush is a great vehicle for that. I think the darker, lined art style really helps reflect Batman’s hero persona; there are rough edges and complex details that go into both to bring to life a regular (well, sort of) guy who hones his own skills and his own motivations to get shit done. That’s why I like Batman.

Favorite enemy, based on their linear meet-greet-‘n’-mess-the-streets appearances in this series: the Joker. He’s a little bit too fond of bad puns, but he’s drawn as absolutely maniacal and it’s awesome. Least favorite: oh, Harley Quinn. I wanted to love you, but every time you said something, your written speech pattern made me hear it in the most obnoxious fake Brooklyn accent ever. And again with the not-so-funny one-liners.   

I am glad I was able to borrow an omnibus copy of all the issues because I could plow through the whole storyline and get to the reveal at the end which, for me, as a new reader to the specifics of Batman’s universe and rogue’s gallery, felt much too shallow to hold all the intrigue and misdirection that went into it. Minor spoiler: I was so hoping Thomas Eliot was gonna go evil in a much bigger way.

And I read the extra material, the notes on creating each panel and the IM conversation with DC and the notes on what they had to change. Normally I love peeking behind the curtain. But when the curtain is hiding non-gems such as, “We made this guy Hush because I like him so much as a character” and not, like, a detailed, foot-noted explanation of why said character fits perfectly into the story they wanted to tell, the ending I didn’t like got spoiled just a little bit more.

Also. DC Comics. I am calling you out for letting a series sell out a few times over with AN IMPROPER USE OF ITS/IT’S RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. SHAME.

Ahem. But carry on the good storytelling.     

Dark tea-time of the soul

Book: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Author: Douglas Adams

Published: 1987 (Pocket Books)

Pages: 306

Ah, humorous British sci fi. I will always compare you to Dr. Who. But don’t worry, Douglas Adams; I’m pretty sure you taught the Doctor a thing or two about looking adorably incompetent while actually knowing exactly what’s going on.

I found this paperback in my dorm’s “library,” by which I mean one of three bookshelves shoved into our common room along with the old (comfortable) furniture and boxy non-HD TV that nobody wanted out in the open. I went down there a lot of Friday nights last semester to soothe my raging weekend boredom and loneliness and also to watch The Soup.

A friend of mine introduced me to Adams in high school by lending me a giant paperback edition of all four (five?) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. I loved them. I loved the absurdity-driven adventures and I loved the characters who seemed so human even if they were two-headed aliens and I loved Adam’s apparent delight in playing with logic—really playing, as in having fun with it and writing all this fun down in a way that only seem like random tangents until you get to the end of them.

He brought a lot of this to this book, minus a little bit of the wacky. This is a mystery about who killed a not-so-well-liked computer company CEO; was it his cellist sister, or her forgetful awkward boyfriend who writes music using intervals found in nature, or his old (very, very, old) professor who’s afraid to use his time machine apartment for more than petty magic tricks ever since he accidentally caused the extinction of the dodo, or the stupid magazine editor who loved his work but was pushed out of it when his dad the owner died, or the detective Dirk Gently himself while denying his psychic abilities and trying to tie everything in the world together while eating other people’s pizza? Or possibly the Electric Monk that’s programmed to believe everything?

SPOILER ALERT: It was aliens. In ghost form. Uh huh.

I liked this story, but my favorite part is the author photo, in which Adams is holding a tea cup and saucer and looking like he wants to shove said tea cup and saucer up the bum of whoever suggested it. I like to imagine him thinking, “I’M BRITISH WE GET IT.”    

What a buck (and 7% sales tax) can buy you

Book: This Must Be the Place

Author: Anna Winger

Published: 2008 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 303

What do you get when you put a fading, discontent actor who now earns all his fame from being the voice of Tom Cruise in the German versions of his films and a fading, discontent wife of a business man who recently lost her baby and managed to convince herself to follow her husband overseas but now barely wants to get out of her bathtub in the same Berlin apartment complex?

Answer: a good peek into the workings of dubbing Hollywood movies into native languages, a small roundabout way on how porn can save a local economy, a radically optimistic plan to go back to L.A. on Tom Cruise’s approval, a slowly discovered neighborhood, a lopsided crush, a midlife crisis that doesn’t know where to go when it’s already got a sports car and younger girlfriend, layers of wallpaper, another pregnancy, a post-war German who transcends the cliché of discovering his Jewish roots, and a very good reason why the Dollar Tree should advertise its book section more.

Duh.   

Pretty but not much else

Book: Come Together, Fall Apart

Author: Cristina Henriquez

Published: 2006 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 306

It’s nice.

I wish I had more to say about this book. But really, “nice” is the only word that fits. These short stories and novellas are about relationships between lovers, families and, occasionally, a little bit, about the political upheavals going on around them. They’re all set in Panama, which is the most interesting thing about them and saves them from collapsing under all the symbolic weight placed on such light words. These are the kind of stories that are meant to Mean Something.

I’m talking like I didn’t like them. I did. I thought they were…nice. There’s that word again. They’re floaty and dreamy and don’t leave much behind but they’re nice to read.

A note on the tag “old books:” When I use that, I’m not necessarily talking about books written twenty or more years ago (although there are a fair number of those in my reading pile); I’m talking about books I’ve personally owned (one way or another) for at least nine months and have yet to read because of everything else that distracts me. This book is one of those, a small hardback priced at $2.99 from a warehouse sort of store in my college town that was labeled with a giant banner that just said BOOKS and contained massive amounts of discounted, well, books. I went into that store once or twice, went into spasms of glee, but now they’re closed, so no more from them.

A brilliant scattered mind

Book: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Author: David Foster Wallace

Published: 2005 (Little, Brown and Company

Pages: 343

David Foster Wallace’s “Host” (about talk radio and how it got to be such a broadcasting juggernaut) is the only essay to use these box-and-arrow digressions instead of footnotes. But it illustrates perfectly what it’s like to read his writings.

“Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?”

No. No, I did not, but now I do, and it’s this ability to deeply mine such subjects with such a fiercely churning analysis and absurdity detector that makes David Foster Wallace one of my new favorite authors.

Yeah, this book was dense as hell, but it was worth the work and the headache I nursed after gorging on it.

(A bookstore clerk from a Charleston trip I took told me that Consider the Lobster is the best gateway into DFW’s writing. That was a couple years ago; cut to last weekend when I went with my boyfriend to the Boarder’s out here. It’s closing, which means everything’s on sale, which means you better believe we combed that entire place of half-empty shelves, which meant I found this book and decided it was time. When I run out of books from my old pile, my been-waiting-patiently-for-who-knows-how-many-months-slash-years pile, I’m going to find Infinite Jest and the three bookmarks it requires.)

His literature and language essays are the most…straightforward isn’t the right word. The most linear, I think is better. He talks about the Great Male Narcissists in a review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time; he talks about Kafka’s humor (did you know Kafka even had any humor? I sure didn’t) in written speech; he talks at very long, interesting but also long, lengths about authority and usage of American English; he gets right to the heart of why sports memoirs are so disappointing but why he keeps buying them anyway: he keeps looking for the transcendence he sees in the great athletes when they’re playing their game, convinced their physical eloquence will translate to the written word.

YES. That. *nodsnods* I kept doing that while I was reading.

I’ve wanted to read DFW since I read an article in Rolling Stone about his suicide. He just seemed so passionate and talented and like he was actually doing something to combine those two strengths. And then in a reporting writing class I took, our first assignment was to read a commencement speech he had given; it was about trying to find the transcendent in every day, and, frankly, it’s the best advice I’ve gotten about how to deal with the real world.

So I respect DFW, a lot, as a writer and as a thinker. His writings make me feel justified and hungry about finding pathos in the deep meanings of things. No, it’s probably not a good idea to take comfort from a suicidal artist of any sort. But I do.

  

The story of a beastlet

Book: Marley and Me

Author: John Grogan

Published: 2005 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 289

Anytime an author writes about a pet, I go “Awwwwwwww…” without thinking, okay? And then I reach down to scratch my own furry bundle of neuroses behind her ears, maybe feed her a piece of sandwich because that’s really all she wants in life.

So I didn’t go into this book objectively at all. But I still wasn’t impressed.

It’s a good portrait of life with a dog. Grogan knows how to place the right amount of importance on ordinary things to make them important details in the story he’s telling. But it’s really obvious that he used wry jokes to gloss over some of the tougher details that might’ve made this less generic. He and his wife seem to lead a fairly (but far from completely) charmed life in which Marley the overzealous lab wrecked playful havoc, which sounds adorable on the page but probably was a pain in the ass to deal with in real life.

The biggest example that jumped out at me was their professional lives. They were both newspaper reporters in Florida, and he does wax nostalgic about it, but he never gave me any sort of picture of the office or work he loved so much except near the end when he confessed to using his work gathering column ideas as an excuse to wander around the state while getting paid.

That DOES sound like an awesome job. Tell me more about it, and tell me anything—anything at all!—about how you dealt with such a time-consuming bundle of puppy while both of you were working full time. I got none of that, except about how his wife Jenny would come home for lunch and play with the dog then, prompting me to wonder what their hours were. And there is one sentence—ONE—that talks about how Jenny struggled to balance raising two young children and a dog while downshifting her work to part-time and home-based.

I just spent more words on their careers than Grogan did.

Anyway, it was cute and read like the wind after my two weeks of struggling with cardiovascular biomechanics, but it wasn’t original. That’s a bit of a cardinal sin around here.  

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!