Why Am I In This Handbasket?

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I follow Neil on Twitter and Tumbler and I read his blog. I read his various posts when he was writing this and when it came out and when it won awards. I somehow managed to remain at least 80% spoiler free and I had NO idea what this book would actually be like. EVEN THOUGH I realized as I was reading it that Neil had totally given it away in a subtle way more than once. I don't want to spoil it for anybody else because it was a lot of fun following the twists of the story and situation so I'll leave it at this:

If you haven't read it I recommend it. It isn't my favorite Gaiman but he is just that good that he's written so much good stuff that something this good only comes in around 5th. It's a very compelling story. I picked it up from the bookmobile after work, stopped to get something to eat on the way home and started reading it, got home and finished the whole thing before I went to sleep. A lot of the pleasure I got was slowly realizing how this book connected with one of my other favorite books by a different author and starting to actively make comparisons between them.

If you have read it I'd love to discuss it with you but please use big spoiler warnings or Rot13 for your comments.

Death Masks by Jim Butcher
Book Five of The Dresden Files

****SPOILER ALERT****
Spoilers for events through Ghost Story not just this book.

( Read more... )

I ended up rewriting a good 80% of this from when I reviewed it over at FOAF. Then I had to fix the mess copy/pasting from a Google Doc made of the HTML. My love for LJ's new code continues to grow.

( Click to read the review )

This week has ended up having a sort of theme. I read Storm Front, the first Dresden Files book and followed it up with The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Both are urban fantasy and are about as different as can be and still be in the same sub-genre. And yet...

( More review plus how Death is a theme in real life this week )

Translated by Andrew Bromfield.
Audio book read by Campbell Scott

I wasn't aware that this was the third in a series when I picked it up but I had no problem following the story. We learn all we really need to know to follow as the story progresses without any infodumps to kill this story's momentum. According to Wiki each novel in the series emulates a particular mystery novel genre and Leviathan is Akunin's take on Agatha Christie and her imitators.

The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

One day at Buckingham Palace the Queen's corgis make such a racket that she goes to see what is going on. She finds that they are upset by the appearance of a book mobile parked near the kitchen dumpsters.

Being the polite soul that she is Elizabeth goes inside to apologize and in so doing starts on a path that will have consequences for the entire world.

She gets introduced to reading for pleasure.

Her guide to this new world is Norman, a gangly "ginger haired" dishwasher whose main criteria for selecting the books he reads is whether or not the author is gay.

She soon promotes Norman upstairs over the objections of Sir Kevin her private secretary and a battle of wills begins between Sir Kevin and the Queen over her new hobby.

This is a 120 page novella with good-sized margins so you can easily get through it in one sitting but it holds up well to reading in several smaller gulps. There is a lot of subtle humor and a great deal of philosophical reflection on reading, literature, authors, writing, and the role of the Queen.

There are a lot of great lines:

"'Am I alone,' she wrote [in her journal], 'In wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?'"

"Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in the pages of their novels, and as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them."

This is the second book with a really killer ending I finished this week and while Kim had the best ending line, this had the best ending punchline. I laughed so hard I scared the cats.

Origin is the long awaited revelation of Wolverine's past. Ever since the character was introduced in the seventies there has been a deliberate air of mystery about him. Little clues were dropped from time to time and we learned a good bit of his recent history but where he came from and who he really was remained the subject of fanfic, not canon.

Until now.

I'll take the fanfic please. I haven't actually read any dealing with this topic but I am pretty certain that I can find at least one fan written story that would be better. It shouldn't be hard. Really good fanfic authors tend to be careful about stealing large chunks of plot from other stories for a start. The lifts from The Secret Garden and Rurouni Kenshin are the most obvious to me but other bits of the plot seem just a little too familiar as well. There are echoes of a classic Batman story at one point, hints of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and just a touch of Huckleberry Finn. I could probably figure out a few more "homages" if I wanted to reread the thing and do some searching but it's not worth the time.

Now, a reused plot can still serve as the basis for a good story if you have good characters but the reason that the reused plot stands out so much here is that even the characterization is lifted from the very stories that were plundered. Unfortunately instead of being the vivid, real, people they were when they had other names from other authors, these characters are bad photocopies.

As the story goes from one plundered plot bit to another they change to fit their analogs not necessarily in the manner the people they were at the beginning would change under the circumstances. A character will be filled with anger and the need for vengeance and then without explanation soften toward the object of his rage and spare him, or help him. People do stupid OOC things just to advance the plot.

The art is not that great either. Richard Isanove did an outstanding job on the coloring. I love the warm firelight on skin that he does. The problem is that they went from Andy Kubert's pencils directly to the finished art without an inker to clean things up. The result looks unfinished at times. Faces can be cartoonish and scenes with a lot of visual elements often seem muddy and unfocused.

I would recommend checking this out from the library if you spot it, just to stay up to date on one of the most popular Marvel characters, but unless you absolutely have to have anything Wolverine related save your $14.99 for something more worthwhile. The classic Chris Clairmont Wolverine series is being offered in  collected volumes and it would be a much better use of your time and money.