Revisiting the Classics

I've done it again.  I've fallen behind with this blog.

It always happens the same way.  I'll read a book that I like so much that I avoid reviewing it, for fear of not getting down in words how I felt about it.  And then I read more books, and I tell myself that I can't write any more reviews until I've reviewed The Book I Really Liked, and so on.

And now it's nearly May.

I've read 16 books since my last post - and some of them didn't have any pretty pictures in either!  And for the past month, I've been revisiting some of my favourite graphic novels.  It wasn't by choice, but it just turned out that way that I'd checked 2 or 3 stone-cold classics out of the library at the same time.

Firstly I've been rereading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, 1969, the 2nd part of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's tour de force of fictional worlds and characters.  I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the first volume, and from then on the books have got more and more convoluted with a range of increasingly obscure references.  It's a bit over my head to be honest; I'm not well-versed in 60s culture and literature - but that doesn't affect the plot too much and it's still a great read.  The final part of the trilogy is set in 2009 and will be published this Summer.

After that I read Maus, one of the first graphic novels I ever read.  I've always been grimly fascinated by Holocaust narratives, although they tend to leave you upset and guilty and a little bit ashamed to be part of the human race.  Maus is the record of Vladek Spiegelman's experience of the War and time spent in Auschwitz, as well as the story of his strained relationship with his son and wife in present-day New York.  It's based on one simple idea: each nationality is depicted as a different animal.  The Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Americans dogs - the French are frogs.  It all sounds very cutesey and even a little disrespectful, but Spiegelman's work doesn't make light of the horrific things his father lived through.  Disney it ain't.  An accessible, moving read, Maus is one of those books that give the lie to the idea that comics are for kids and 40-something Batman nostalgics.

I just finished reading Blankets (Craig Thompson) a few days ago.  It's been nearly a decade since I last read this novel (and Maus), so I was interested to see if my reaction to it had changed at all.  Clocking in at just under 600 pages, Blankets is an absolute brick of a book - "it was Professor Plum, in the library, with the paperback edition of Blankets!"  More than anything else it's a coming-of-age story, as much about brotherly love and the joys of growing up in a small town as it is concerned with the central story of young love, and its inevitable death.  It's a very teenage book and I wasn't quite as bowled over by it as I remember reading it when I was 17 or thereabouts.  The story is still incredibly touching, tender and funny.  Among other things, Thompson writes convincingly about the loss of faith in organised religion without ever coming across as preaching or dogmatic.

So that's what I've read in the last week or so.  I'll try and fill in the gaps in my reading record sometime soon...

Come Armageddon, Come

The title of today's blog comes from a song I've been listening to on repeat recently: Everyday Is Like Sunday by Morrissey.  There's a great video on YouTube here - a strange juxtaposition of the song with footage of ultra-violent video game, Grand Theft Auto 4.  (Which reminds me again of my favourite quote about video games:  Charlie Brooker once described Call of Duty as "the Citizen Kane of shooting people in the face", but that's another story...)

That song always reminds me of Cleveleys, a town not far from me which many local people like to think of as a picturesque and traditional seaside resort.   I like to think of it as the arsehole of the north-west, although to be fair there's probably a lot of worse places I have yet to discover.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I've just finished reading BPRD: Plague of Frogs, a graphic novel with strong overtones of The End of The World, Doomsday and all of that nasty stuff on the horizon.  Those of you with normal social lives who do not read comics will probably recognize the character Hellboy from Guillermo del Toro's film adaptations.  Well, the BPRD is sort of a spin-off comic from Hellboy.  In the books, Hellboy starts off as a member of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence until he gets tired of the administration's interfering and strikes out on his own leaving the team to soldier on without him.  Think X-files, if Mulder and Scully each had a supernatural ability of their own.  The BPRD are a rag-tag bunch of misfits who investigate paranormal activities and crimes.

Plague of Frogs is an omnibus edition of the first 3 BPRD graphic novels (The Hollow Earth, The Soul of Venice & other stories and Plague of Frogs.  In other words, it's a real brick of a book.  Now the Hellboy series is notable for two big reasons: the intricate mixture of folklore, myths and legends to create a truly twisted world - and secondly Mike Mignola's crisp art and uncanny ability for drawing nasty monsters.  BPRD plays to the strengths of its parent title and the first storyline, The Hollow Earth, is fantastic.  By the time of the second volume, Mignola was hard at work on both the monthly Hellboy title and the Hollywood film adaptation.  He took a risk and let other teams of writers and artists take on the BPRD for a series of short stories.  As a result these tales are choppy - some brilliant, some no more than brief diversions that just serve to emphasize how strong the first story arc was.

By the last third of the book however, the BPRD have found their groove.  At this point, Mignola is back writing and Guy Davis does the artwork (Dave Stewart colours the pages).  The final story in the omnibus is the titular Plague of Frogs, a story that sets up plot-lines for years to come by introducing the frog-monsters.  And if you feel your eyes rolling around in your head at the mention of the word "frog-monsters", you're not alone.  Believe me, I was very cynical about the notion of a race of mutated frog creatures as the main baddies.  I don't really associate frogs with anything scary or supernatural, but Mignola manages to make even a innocent frog in the background of a panel really unnerving.  And by the time the frog-monsters appear, there's nothing funny about them at all.

Just to recap:

Good Frog

Bad Frog

If there's one writer that's influenced Mignola with these stories, it's H.P. Lovecraft.  Plague of Frogs is rife with cults, conspiracies and acolytes.  The crazed servants of the Ancient Gods walk among us and work tirelessly to prepare the way for their arcane masters, who will awaken before we know it.

And then we're all for it.

Mignola walks the same path as Lovecraft, albeit with less casual racism.  And that's a match made in Heaven Hell.

The Girl With The Midas Touch

I recently finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, (2005, first translated into English in 2008).  It's the first book of the best-selling Millenium Trilogy, but the series was originally planned as a series of 10 books featuring the financial journalist Mikhael Blomkvist and his unlikely aide Lisbeth Salander, the be-inked character that gives the book its title.  The novel has been everywhere recently and the Hollywood adaptation has just been released.  So it's fair to say this novel has been on my radar for a while.



I'm pleased to say that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely lives up to the hype.  On paper, it  shouldn't work: a thriller about a disgraced journalist on a sabbatical who attempts to solve a 30-year old family mystery sounds dull and dreary.  But Larsson is a master of drawing the reader into the story and it doesn't take long to get hooked.  In Lisbeth Salander, Larsson has created an instantly classic character.  Surprisingly, Salander doesn't play a huge part in this first book (although I think it's safe to guess that she steps into centre-stage later on, as the next two books are also named after her).

Another reason I've finally gotten around to reading this one is that Vertigo comics have just announced their adaptation of the book coming out in November.  If you can't wait that long, then a special preview is going to be published in time for Free Comic Book Day 2012 (May 5th this year, put in your diary now, fellow nerds!).  Vertigo have had mixed success recently with their line of stand-alone crime graphic novels, so it should be interesting to see how this one works out.  It's a major coup for them to get the rights to the novel.  Denise Mina is an interesting choice for a writer (a successful crime novellist, but a less-than-successful comics writer) but I'm more excited about Leonardo Manco's artwork.  Manco's pairing with Mike Carey on Hellblazer is probably one of my favourite comicbooks of all time.

Leonardo Manco's John Constantine, Hellblazer

Here's the cover to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, coming this Winter:

And - quelle surprise! - they've gone for the sex angle.  In fact if you view the covers of the novels, you can almost see the progression from the original Swedish covers to the slightly sex-ed up but still demure British ones - culminating in the above monstrosity.  Lee Bermejo is one of my favourite cover artists and the above image is great: I just don't feel like it's right for this book.  The original title of the book roughly translates as "Men who hate women" and the book deals unflinchingly with sexual violence.  So, to me at least, it's wrong to play on the sex-angle too much to attract attention to the books.  Interestingly enough, the movie promo images are quite subdued - I expected the American screens to turn Salander into a blonde bomb-shell.  Salander is portrayed by Larsson as a severely damaged individual: not conventionally attractive and it appears the film has stayed true to the character.



The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've been making an effort to update this here blog more regularly.  I'm doing my best at the moment and I'm never short of stuff to ramble on about so, if you're still reading, thank you.  I'm doing my best to redesign this site too (with precious little proper techie knowledge) and make it a bit more attractive and accessible.  To this end, I've also listed this page with Technorati, the techno blog. As part of this, I'm obliged to published the following token code to register this blog: Y27T625J3PQ8.  There we go, all done.

I've also realised that this is a bit of a one-way conversation at the moment, so I thought I'd ask what are you reading right now?  I've altered my blog settings so that anyone can add comments and you no longer have to sign up for a Google or a Blogger profile, so feel free to leave a message.  I might have to revise that when the Viagra adverts start rolling in...

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention:  happy birthday Charles!  You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to have noticed that this year is a special one for Charles Dickens: he was born 200 years ago today.  The BBC have been making sure no-one forgets, with their Dickens series of programmes and today Google have jumped on board.

Walking With Zombies

And now back to our scheduled viewing.  I may have mentioned once or twice how much I love The Walking Dead (Image Comics).  Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have created a modern classic with their ongoing story of survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.  On the surface, the story seems trite and cliched: "something bad" has happened - nobody knows what! - which has left the world overrun with perambulatory carnivorous cadavers and the few humans who remain must fight for their existence.

All horror fans know how that story goes: usually badly, ending with a fade-out to the credits as the zombies finally break through the shopping mall.  After 90 minutes or so of struggle and strife, the characters we've come to know and love inevitably meet their sticky ends in an all-you-can-eat zombie buffet.  Right?

Not so in The Walking Dead.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of the tried-and-tested plotpoints are present here, but this series has been running for 90+ issues.  At a rate of 1 issue a month, that means this story has been unraveling for nearly 8 years.  And it's still being published today.

Playing cowboys and Indians for real: Carl in The Walking Dead

Kirkman's elevator pitch for The Walking Dead was a "zombie movie that doesn't end" and that's what he and his co-creators have produced.  This is a story about the constant pressure of survival and how living through a zombie apocalypse affects the characters in the long-term.  It's about the cumulative psychological traumas and tragedies the main players have endured, the tough choices they've been forced to make and how it all affects them, every day.

Oh, and it's also about how the real threat to survival is other human beings, not the flesh-munching zombies of horror movie fame.

But you already knew that, right?

Battlestar Zero

One of the first books I've read this January was Battlestar Galactica: Season Zero. This graphic novel reprints the 12-issue series by Dynamite comics, and takes place prior to the events of the TV series. So that means that Caprica is still a thriving civilization, the colonial military still has an armade of Battlestar spaceships and one Bill Adama and Saul Tigh have been assigned to command the Galactica.

I picked this one up from the library mainly out of curiosity: I don't want to spoil the TV show for anyone who hasn't yet seen it, but the on-screen drama comes from the paranoia that anyone could be a Cylon, the constant battle for survival in the depths of space with little resources, and the ongoing search for a new home. How would they conjure up any of that interest in a time-frame that preceeds the Cylon holocaust?

Well, the writers of this series have plumped for another of the show Big Themes: corruption within the military. The plot follows Adama's earliest missions as he uncovers some home truths about the top brass: controversial black ops missions and dubious decisions in the name of The Greater Good. The Cylons even crop up here but they are in no way the main storyline.

Don't worry, plenty of familiar faces show up: Dualla, Helo, Chief Tyrol, and of course Starbuck, to name but a few. Often for no particular good reason, but the characters are all still there. (Lee 'Apollo' Adama has a much smaller role than in the show, but for good reasons). The writing is choppy but has some really good scenes. The art too is inconsistent, with some of the pages on the early issues looking particularly poor. Even A-list characters - such as Bill Adama - are virtually unrecognizable in some panels - not good for a TV tie-in.

Still, Season Zero is a perfectly acceptable addition to the world of Galactica and will please fans who can't get enough raptors, vipers, Cylons and frakking. For those new to the series, this is not a good starting point and doesn't begin to reflect the complexity and depth of the TV show.

2011: The Wilderness Days Part 2

The next book I read (or recorded having read) in 2011 is #9 on my list: Stranger in a Stranger Land (Robert Heinlein, published 1961). This was part of my reading resolution to spend more time reading science-fiction: Stranger is a stone-cold sci-fi classic. Heinlein needs no introduction to sci-fi fans, but other readers will probably recognise him as the author responsible for the original Starship Troopers, the novel which influenced the 1997 film.

Stranger is about a man who was raised on Mars and his subsequent culture shock on return. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the novel is for the most part a satire of the world the author saw around him at the time, and includes swipes at organised religion, the legal system, contemporary sexual politics and the absurdities of bureaucracy and administration. It's also gone down in history for introducing several new pieces of slang into the English language: most notably Grok, meaning "to know, to comprehend/understand". It's hard to hear the word grok today without connotating it with the 60s counter-culture and the hippy stereotype.

I digress but I'm glad I read this book, although at times it was hard going and the copy of the novel I had seemed overly long. (Not surprising, seeing as I read the recent expanded edition published after Heinlein's death; he'd cut swathes of material from his original manuscript when he published the story in the 60s).

Book #10 is Love and Rockets: Ghost of Hoppers, a graphic novel reviewed here, along with #11, JSA: Black Adam & Isis (a DC graphic novel by fan-favourite writer Geoff Johns, now of Green Lantern fame).

Book #12 was a special one for me, a book that's been in my mental "to-read" pile for at least 6 years: The Call of Cthulhu (and other weird stories) by the inimitable H.P. Lovecraft. This collection was special for me because I had chosen it as a prize for an award I won in 6th form.v I distinctly remember the head teacher speaking to me after the ceremony. When I showed him the book, his only comment was "Never heard of him" (despite being an English graduate himself). (As an aside, he also looked at my friend's choice, Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustara, and responded with a long whistle: "Looks like heavy stuff." I wouldn't have made anything of it, but earlier in the term he'd emphasized how important it was for us Oxbridge candidates to be well-read).

All this is preamble. Cthulhu has been on my bookshelf for ages and last year I finally got my first taste of Lovecraft's writing. It's impossible to be a horror fan without hearing second-hand about this strange introverted man who's contributed so much mythology to the genre. Similarly it would take a couple of hours of solid writing to adequately express my feelings about Lovecraft's writing, but let me just say that every second-hand rumour and observation about his stories is completely true: his stories really are that mind-boggling, archaic, verbose, terrifying, mystifying, paranoid and down-right racist.

Stephen King described Lovecraft as "the dark Baroque prince of horror fiction", and he's spot-on. Despite finding modern-day acclaim and ubiquity (I can probably rattle off 4 or 5 films/novels/comics coming out in 2012 based on his stories), he was also the repressed bastard child of the genre. His works are repetitive and easily open to parody: there is always a terrible, unspeakable evil - and you can score bonus points if it "writhes horribly" ...in the shadows, naturally. It always seemed strange to me that King champions him so highly, when in his "Memoir of the Craft", On Writing, he often attacks writers who can't find the right words: if you can't find the right words to paint a picture for the reader, then maybe you should, sort of, almost like, be in another job. I'm paraphrasing, and I'm sure Stephen King would be horrified to see his own criticism used against the Baroque Prince. (Howard Phillips, to his friends.) Having said that, Lovecraft's stories are still a must-read for any horror fans.

[Interestingly enough, the PS Publishing event I went to last night at the Lancaster Waterstone's featured a discussion on Lovecraft: Ramsey Campbell pointed out that the detractors always focus on Lovecraft's obvious shortcomings, but too often to neglect how meticulously he builds up little details in the story that add up to a terrifying denouement, or the range of forms and story structures that he employs. You can say what you like about Lovecraft's prose style, he's still essential for anyone who loves to be creeped out.]

2011: The Wilderness Days Part 1

Here goes the beginning of a countdown of everything I read last year. As I’ve said before, I don’t have dates for the books I read in the first half of 2011. However what I do have is one big long list. So the first book I read in January 2011 was…

1) The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov (published 1959). A short sci-fi novel about time-travel, memorable for the central conceit of a time-travel elevator – each floor takes the main character to a different century. I’ve only read Asimov’s short stories before, but I get the impression this wasn’t one of his best.

2) The Walking Dead, Volume 2: Miles Behind Us, by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (graphic novel).
2011 was the year that I was swept up in the modern zombie contagion, with The Walking Dead comics and subsequent TV adaptation at the forefront. (Funnily enough I’ve been reading The Walking Dead again today ). Kirkman’s elevator pitch for the comic is simple: this comic is a zombie film that doesn’t end; the characters must continue, must strive for survival, must keep going after the credits have stopped rolling. At its heart, this black and white series is about what humanity’s really like when it’s forced into a corner: the characters in this book are constantly making horrible choices in order to survive another day. If you like horror in any shape or form, this book is for you. Expect to see plenty more in the list later on…

3) The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood (published 1986).
It’s been a year since I read this book but I still remember being shocked. Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian tale that has more than earned its place on the bookshelf next to Brave New World and 1984. Atwood argued vehemently that this isn’t a work of science-fiction. She’s wrong, but that’s beside the point. Sci-fi or not, that doesn’t make this book any less gripping: the feminist story of a world where women’s lives are tightly controlled. The main character doesn’t even have a name; she goes by the moniker “Offred” to mark her as property of the man of the house.

4) The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag, by Alan Bradley (published 2010).
One of my great discoveries of 2010 was the Flavia De Luce series of mysteries. This is the 2nd in the series – start with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Very funny, very readable, these novels follow the adventures Flavia, a precocious 10-year old with a penchant for poisons and a knack for solving mysteries. Flavia was memorably described by one journalist (link lost, sorry folks!) as a cross between Nancy Drew and The Addams Family. A lot of the stuff I read is aimed at a niche audience: comicbook heroics and horror romps. But this series of books is one I recommend to anyone who enjoys reading.

Books 5, 6, 7 and 8 were Strangers in Paradise: Happily Ever After, Vimanarama, Dororo Volume 3 and Fables: The Mean Seasons – all reviewed here, here, and here – presumably early on in the year and still feeling virtuous about blogging.

So there you have it - I began the year with a mixture of sci-fi, horror, manga, fantasy and mystery. And that's just January/February...

2011 In Review

Early on in 2011 I made a promise to myself to record and review all the books I read. This blog was going to function as my personal reading diary, showing trends and themes in my reading as well as tracking how much (or how little) I was reading. I read somewhere on 43 Things how a user had set himself the target of reading 1 book a week in order to achieve the generic goal of “read more”. That seemed like a lot to me.

I vowed that I wouldn't begin another book until I'd published a review of the last one. Fortunately for me, I shamelessly flaunted that rule. If I hadn’t, I would've read only a handful of books this year. In fact I've read around 60 (including graphic novels).

About halfway through 2011, my anal retentiveness kicked in and I began to find it necessary to record the dates I finished each books, for reasons of record-keeping and general smugness. So what I now have is a chronological list of everything I've read this year, that I haven't blogged at all.

So guess what the next couple of blog entries are going to be?

You got it, a stock-taking retrospective whistle-stop tour of everything I read last year. At least then I can start to write about what I’m reading in 2012. If I make it past February 2011 that is…

To be continued.