How pottery tells us how much we don't actually know

Book: A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

Author: John Romer

Published: 2013 (Penguin)

Pages: 395 (not counting end notes)

Not going to lie here, y’all – you need to be already interested in ancient Egypt before you start this book. Otherwise it’ll be hard going. There’s a lot of pottery to sift through.

But that’s the good part; Romer is excellent at talking about what those pottery shards mean and how they, along with other stuff that you might recognize from conventional Egyptology tropes, piece together a very faint picture of an empire everybody thought they knew.

This ain’t your grandma’s ancient Egypt, though. He dissects the modern, Western lens through which we’ve all been trained to look at the pyramids and archaeological finds and basically says that, look, we really have no idea what these mean, and what we’ve been using as facts are actually pretty bad guesses, so here are some better ones that come with giant caveats all meaning DUDES, WE WEREN’T THERE.

I want Romer to do this sort of check on like all known knowledge, just to make sure. He seems really good at it, and his writing is academic but not overly so. And this is just the first motherfucking volume, with another one to come, and I can only hope that he wrote all at one time and split them up because otherwise he’s probably sweating over a laptop with a doomsday clock ticking down on his wall right this second. I don’t wish hard deadlines on anyone, especially dudes who look like Elaine’s dad from Seinfeld and live in Italy (check the bio, yo).

This is a library book (picked fresh from the liberry tree!), so it’s going back, and I don’t think I’ll put it on my to-order list. It was good, I enjoyed reading it, but it took several breaks for lighter fair and never really felt fun enough for a re-read. I may or may not check out volume 2. We’ll see.

I feel like I have to put a disclaimer somewhere that I am not actually a librarian. I work in HR at a library, which is still awesome, and I plan on getting my MLIS eventually, and I can help you look something up on our online catalogue but…not a librarian. I mention this because I tried to distinguish it during a drunken discussion while watching a football game with people on Saturday, and I fear that was the worst possible scenario to get my point across.

But I’ll totally answer to librarian. Miss Bookstacks if you’re nasty, heh.

To tide us over until November

Book: Doctor Who Omnibus 1

Authors: Gary Russell, Leah Moore, John Reppion, Tony Lee, John Ostrander, Richard Starkings, Rich Johnston, Charlie Kirchoff, Tony Lee

Artists: Nick Roche, Jose Maria Beroy, Stefano Martino, Micro Pierfederici, Ben Templesmith, Paul Grist, Kelly Yates, Adrian Salmon, Eric J, Tom Mandrake

Published: 2013 (IDW)

Pages: 416

Dragon*Con loot, you guys! Actually my only piece of it besides the tract marks on my left elbow and the free t-shirt I got for giving platelets. That, by the way, is a terrible way to get over squeamishness of needles and blood. It took over an hour and I almost threw up.

Anyway, so continuing the trend of buying a book at each place I make a trip to, I bought this Doctor Who comic book, got one of the artists to sign it, and read like twenty pages the entire weekend. But when I got back, I had half a Labor Day still to kill so I celebrated by doing absolutely no labor except getting through these stories.

And I wish they had been selling a volume of just the six one-shots collected for the Through Time and Space section because those were all gorgeous and different and provocative in examining humanity. My favorite was the one where there’s a planet that’s being terrorized by a monster that feeds on empathy so the aliens have trained themselves to show no emotions but then when they die they record their last words onto these portraits that they hang in this gallery and they’re all emotional things they wished they had said to each other and Martha Jones gets all achy about how uselessly complicated they made things like that, and the art is this blurred-background-sharp-doodle-lines stuff that brings just the right things into focus.

Also they bring in Donna for a couple one-shots. OH YES. Except the one about the planet that treats its womenfolk as subhuman is a bit too on-the-nose when the crowd who buys this probably descended from the first 20^th century ladies lined up to gain the vote.

The longer two stories that sandwich the one shots – eh. The first one’s got a convoluted plot about giant cat alien guardians of the universe, or something, I couldn’t work that out even as I was reading through it, and the second one’s guilty of leaning too heavily on nostalgia to solve its plotline, although it does use the TARDIS’s organic nature in a slowly revealed, brilliant way that gets ignored a lot.

I am glad I bought this, and I love the cover, and I read some of it while eating the best pulled pork and pecan pie in Atlanta at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack waiting for the blues band to set up. So of course I’m keeping it.  

The men and women next door

Book: Home Town

Author: Tracy Kidder

Published: 1999 (Washington Square Press)

Pages: 417

A policeman is a great person to focus on for the story of a town. A policeman who’s lived his whole life on the same street, knows the place inside and out, loves his job, but is getting into the first stage of possibly moving on to bigger things is even better.

The perspective of a poor single mom who came to the town on its university’s older student scholarship program is also really valuable. She’s got that outsider view of both sides – the elite Ivy League and the shitty by-the-month-apartment part of town – and how they interact with each other.

The small town lawyer whose OCD is rapidly getting the best of him…well, I mean he’s part of the town and its structure, too.

But the problem is the story never gets past these characters. It’s supposed to be the story of a town, specifically, and what the concept of “home town” means in general, and it barely touches on either of those, like at all. There’s some smattering of Northampton history at the beginning of a few chapters, and I guess I could argue that the policeman, single mom, and crazy lawyer all talk about their places in town in the natural order of talking about what they do in it.

I’m not going to argue that, though, because it doesn’t work. All of this is well-written and well-researched and well put together and I liked reading it, but I’m giving it away because I wanted it to be a lot heavier on the sociology of the concept of a town as the center of people’s lives. It fails in that.  

Journey through the Caped Crusader's...something

Book: Batman R.I.P. (Deluxe Edition)

Grant Morrison and Tony S. Daniel

Published: 2009 (DC)

Pages: We’ve been through this before, guys. I don’t know.

…so what in the hell did I just read?

 

A.      A psychological tour of Batman’s deepest fears being used against him but then him also using that to turn into another Batman that he created specifically so he could punch his fears in the face and then use a bullet when they won’t stay down.

B.      Half flashback, half…present-back?

C.      Darth Vader-level daddy issues?

D.      A world without Batman! But don’t worry, it’s not real.

E.       The Joker playing these dudes, or the Black Glove playing the Joker?

F.       Batman going all Inception to get into the Joker’s head.

G.     And it works, right? I’m pretty sure it works in the end.

H.      Robin’s Greatest Hits.

I.        Dynamic artwork and creepy-ass Thin White Duke Joker.

J.        Obligatory feminist gripes: of COURSE the women are either helpless (Batman’s drugged-up mom) or faithless power-hungry backstabbers (his girlfriend).

I think all this adds up to something comprehensible, and I liked reading it – I’m just not sure if I caught all I should’ve from the storyline, because even though it’s a collected story arc, it feels like I jumped right into the middle of something and never really found my narrative footing.

Oh well. It was good Monday night reading. Back to the Graphic Novels shelf at the library.

The true new South

Book: Loookaway, Lookaway

Author: Wilton Barhnhardt

Published: 2013 (St. Martin’s Press)

Pages: 359

New book time! Woo! I checked this out because I read the synopsis on our library’s website and man, I can’t pass me up a passable satire of modern Southern life. I think that’s because I’ve always lived in the south, have rarely even traveled out of it, yet I don’t feel or sound like I’m a native around here. So if someone wants to tell me how my fellow below-the-Mason-Dixon-ers connect with their homeland, I am all for hearing how the hell they do it.

This isn’t so much a satire – which, okay, thank goodness, because I have a terribly tin ear when it comes to rooting out that stuff – as the slightly ridiculous way of life being revealed through different family members of a North Carolina legacy way past the time when anyone except the mother pretends the old ways are better. And even she’s just finishing-school old-school, with a steel spine to keep the good china as long as possible before they have to sell it to make the mortgage on their inherited mansion.

 

So there are various family adventures that start with the most boring one, with the spineless of the children, the youngest daughter, going away to college and making a really weak, clichéd attempt to become a party animal. And then I feel horrible for describing all this like I am because she gets assaulted, but…there aren’t any personal details that makes it feel real, so even that scene was very by-the-numbers.

Things get better, though, and if the author would’ve started with the mom of steel and used her actions to hint about what happened, that would’ve been so much more effective, because that’s how all the other scandalous family secrets (don’t worry, I won’t tell you what they are, but also don’t worry because they’re fairly standard but still impactful) come to light.

I will say this: load Civil War muskets figure prominently into two separate climatic scenes. It’s a little redundant. Possibly trying to show how history repeats itself and nobody really learns, but I think that message could’ve been a lot subtler or at least more imaginative.

However! I enjoyed this overall. No punches pulled but nothing exaggerated into cartoons of Rhett and Scarlett. Families are weird, and in the South if we don’t like you we will polite you to death (I have learned that art).

Back to the library ASAP so the next person in the holds queue can get it.

Outclassing Mrs. Robinson

Book: A Boy’s Pretensions

Author: Anthony Giardina

Published: 1988 (Simon and Scheuster)

Pages: 335

Let’s get one thing out of the way; this book is not The Graduate, and I am very glad it’s not. I think it might want to be, at least at some level, but it’s got so much more going for it – the acute existential agony of trying to talk to your parents about leaving home when you know it’s all a selfish act that they’ll say they’re happy about because it’s what’s best for you, the restless aimlessness of love that you can’t untangle from lust, the heavy sense of dread of locking yourself into a moral decision that you know will make you miserable – while still resting on the general framework of young man is conflicted but he doesn’t know why and tries to find solice in older woman who only makes him more agitated.

This kid has to come home from college when his dad has a heart attack and can’t run the family laundrymat anymore. He’s an only child, an only son, but he’s gotten his first taste of freedom at school. And oh yeah he has the hots for his poetry teacher, who is married but agrees to advise his private project on Anne Bradstreet.

 

So, he sort of flip-flops between worlds, not doing well in either, until he finally gets to bed with the lady but then his dad calls him home for real this time, so after a lot of soul-searching and declarations (I love how the teacher calls him out on most of his romantic bullshit, especially when he’s all “I want to give you a baby!” and she’s all, “No twenty-year-old really wants a baby”) he goes back home for good.

Kind of a bum ending, but it felt true to life, like life wants him to see exactly how much his philosophizing means in the real world, and it’s full of more human emotion between the stilted lines of dialogue (oh, the visits from the relatives who are close enough to judge but not close enough to really know him! How they say so much when they’re talking about brown pajamas and meaning why doesn’t he help his poor old dad already!) than any of the shrill shrieking I read in The Graduate.

I’m sorry but I hated that book. It took away all my sympathy for Benjamin in the first few pages, and it never gave that back. I liked this dude, and I understood him, even as he made sort of stupid, grandiose mistakes that ultimately didn’t mean anything.

This one goes back to the library too, but not onto my Amazon list. It’s a good read and there’s emotional truth in there, but not enough for me to want to read it again.  

Pulling the curtain back

Book: Drama

Author: Raina Telgemeier

Published: 2012 (Graphix)

Pages: 233

The last thing teen fiction needs is condescension, so I will swear on my two library cards that when I say this graphic novel is adorable, I don’t mean it that way. I mean it in the “these bright colors and fun lines warm my heart to the approximate setting of ‘fuzzy’” way.

This is about a young high school kid who loves being on the tech crew in drama club, and she’s so comfortable and happy in her setting that it’s a joy to watch (literally, on one level) her navigate her crush and invent ways for a fake cannon to really go boom for their latest production. She’s so comfortable in her own skin that all the issues are refreshingly about, like, actual personalities and how they get along, with a gentle, non-explicit but obvious dose of sexual identity thrown in.

 

I shouldn’t say “thrown in;” the sexual identity thing ends up being a bit of a driving force, but as a completely normal obstacle that isn’t weird or icky, just a little unfortunate when it doesn’t match with her own romantic expectations of her crush.

And it also saves the play in – here is this word again but you put rounded edges and magenta on enough bits of a drawing and I will keep using it – adorable way that I won’t tell you about because you really should read it. So: read it!

This one goes back to the library. I’m going to start making a list of books I check out from the library and like enough to keep so I can go Amazon crazy one of these days.