The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

by Rebecca

The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker
1986, 1988

This is a very odd book. I did enjoy but also, just, huh. It’s a first-person demonstration of overthinking everything, while also just letting it all flow past.

The plot, such as it is, is that the narrator rides an escalator from the lobby to the mezzanine, returning to work after his lunch break. The style however is a detailed and rambling documentation of his thoughts as they veer from the immediacy of his current sensations to memories both recent and long past to considerations for the future and back again. His thoughts would be tripping over themselves with how many and how rapid they are, overlapping and given depth from history, except that Baker has given them space to be fully articulated in a 135-page novel with a multitude of long footnotes such that he describes both a three-minute experience and the entirety of a character.

This book also reminded me of how journals kept by the most obsessively boring of individuals can be the most valuable to historians as they’ll document details that other diarists don’t bother to mention. Most books skim past a character going from point A to point B, with a single line or phrase. This book makes it clear that such a phrase can be treated like a fractal: the closer you look, the more details appear. There are a thousand questions: how did he come to be at point A? why is he going to point B? What is the process of going to point B? Why that process? What sense memories are attached to the process? What history? What is he bringing with him? Why those items? How did he come by those items? etcetera ad infinitum.

I have previously denigrated the literary genre, but this is actually really good despite being very much within that genre. I think the difference is that in so many literary books there is a scene in which the narrator looks at other people in a crowd and think to themselves: those people don’t have interior lives like I do. This book has as it’s very premise that each and every person has a rich interior life. The narrator in this book is no different on the surface level from any of the others, and yet, he is uniquely strangely himself, and so too would be every other person if one looked as deeply.

Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife

by Anna

By Eric Schlich

This book is an utter trip! (Pun semi-intended?) Eric Schlich captures and satirizes, with what I can only assume is great accuracy, what he calls the heaven tourism genre: Heaven is for Real and books of that ilk. Though I haven’t read any of those purported nonfiction books, this novel has enough similarities to the description of Todd Burpo’s book that I’m guessing the publisher had to brush up on the fair use rules for parody.

At age 4, fictional Eli Harpo had emergency heart surgery, and told his parents of visiting heaven while under anesthesia. His dad has since written a book about it (Heaven or Bust!) and ekes out a living selling and giving talks about the book. Eli happily supports this relatively small potatoes endeavor, but when a renowned televangelist comes calling and the publicity blows up, Eli is faced with increasing doubts. 

The chronology jumps around a bit, with most of the book being a flashback as middle-aged Eli is revisiting Bible World, the Christian theme park where his budding fame came crashing down at age 13. Most of the book details how Eli and his family got there, both physically and mentally, with some flashforwards to college, where he rebuilt his nonreligious life. The book pointedly does not reflect Eli any younger than 13 because he himself cannot remember any of the original pivotal near-death experience that has brought them all to this point.

Described as “witty, satirical, and profoundly big-hearted,” it was that, but the praise didn’t mention that it is also utterly mortifying. I don’t suffer from second-hand embarrassment as much as others, but I was both agog and cringing at most of the scenes in the novel. Which I mean in a good way — if it wasn’t so well written, it wouldn’t have nearly the impact! I didn’t relate especially closely to any of the characters (though other reviewers who experienced much more stringently religious upbringings than I have said that it is quite accurate), but I found it all fascinating. They could have so easily been caricatures, but truly each character contained unexpected dimensions. Schlich details each scene which such realism and matter-of-fact first-person narration from Eli, that I periodically had to check that this was in fact a novel and not a memoir.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

by Rebecca

Fourth Wing
by Rebecca Yarros
2023

I enjoyed this book, and I do recommend it, but it was good enough that its flaws stood out. I was frustrated that it wasn’t better. It felt like an amalgamation of Iron Widow, The Hunger Games, A Deadly Education, and Dragon Riders of Pern, rather than entirely it’s own unique thing. The plot arc was also similar enough like The Poppy War that I was nervous that it was going to get overwhelmingly gruesome at some point. It didn’t, which was a relief. By about page 100 I had a basic concept of how the plot and characters would develop and what kind of twist there would be at the end. It’s not a subtle book. I still blasted through all 500 pages in two days.

Our heroine Violet is forced to enter the training for dragon riders, which has something like a 25% survival rate, and where the students are not quite encouraged to kill each other but certainly not discouraged from doing so. It makes me wonder how much the current real world trend of extreme bullying in schools is coming out in fiction. In theory every student is a volunteer, since dragon riders are highly honored, but Violet’s mother is the general in charge and demands Violet enter despite her having a congenital condition weakening her bones and joints. The children of the executed traitors of an earlier rebellion are also required to enter. Notably the children of traitors who were executed by Violet’s mother.

The students are all in their early twenties and training for peak physical fitness and constantly in mortal danger and are completely horny with it all. There are two students in a classic love triangle with Violet — one is her best friend from childhood and the other is the son of the executed rebellion leader. This is not a subtle love triangle and had me rolling my eyes at the introductions (they’re both so strong and sexy!), but I was really impressed with how the relationships develop and how the situation concludes. Also, a special call out to how well done the sex scenes were, at being character and plot significant and also both sexy and hilarious. Special kudos on those!

The part of the world building that I particularly love is that the dragons are large vicious beings who are not just sentient but actually the ones in charge of the dragon/rider relationship. The dragons pick their riders and they kill the ones that annoy them and no one gainsays what a dragon decides. The humans are essentially familiars to the dragons who can use them to access magic in a way that they can’t without a rider. It’s a fabulous premise that I adore and wish had been fully developed and integrated into the rest of the societal world-building, but it’s just not. The demonstrated command structure is still very much human-oriented, although maybe that will change in the sequel.

Bodies

by Anna

By Si Spencer

This is a new(ish) program on Netflix, which looks both intriguing and confusing. The graphic novel it is based on turns out to also be intriguing and confusing. It is set in London but over four different years: 1890, 1940, 2014, and 2050. Investigators of each time period are faced with the mysterious appearance a brutally murdered corpse with no identification. The thing is that it is the same corpse for all of them.

I don’t have great facial recognition in general, so was impressed that I was vaguely able to recognize the reoccurring corpse, even across the different art styles. Each year has its own artist, all significantly distinct and all quite good. The art complements the writing in capturing the cultural changes of each time period as well. All that to say, it is a beautifully done graphic novel, and I still have only the vaguest sense of what it is all about.

I think it is probably very British? It reminded me a bit of Watchmen and V For Vendetta in overall style, though Bodies is generally more optimistic. Each year is a time of upheaval for England, highlighting different threats, both internal and external, that England has faced. It ends in a very English-centric declaration that I assume might resonate more if I were English.

… I decided I should probably at least watch the first episode of the show so that I can give my two cents on that, fully expecting to be unenthusiastic, but the show is actually really good! It takes significant divergences from the source, but they mostly improve the suspense and pacing to my mind, as well as making the characters a little more nuanced, though I’m still only halfway through the series. Rebecca pointed out that the cinematography is so good that it surpassed the illustration for her.

The show also made a theme more explicit that I’d initially missed from the comic: that all four investigators from the various time periods are various degrees of acab, exerting their power over vulnerable characters, but they are also each from a discriminated population themselves, possibly using their borrowed authority to balance.

How to Give Up Plastic

by Anna

By Will McCallum

Like a lot of people I’m sure, I’ve been reflecting more and more lately on how much waste and plastic in particular there is in my life. It feels really daunting though, to try to cut it down, so I jumped on getting some clear guidelines on where to start. This turns out to have been a very timely read, since I just learned about the Plastic Free July campaign, started in 2011.

Will McCallum is Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK, so feels VERY strongly about all of this, naturally. He begins by making the case for trying to eliminate plastics with some rather harrowing stories of natural devastation that I kind of wish I hadn’t read. I gritted my teeth and got through the first two chapters, though I wasn’t sure why I was pointing myself through the stress of it all, since I was already on board. However, I began to understand later why McCallum hits it so hard. A lot of the approaches toward eliminating plastic are going to be annoying (to you and others), inconvenient, and a little confrontational at times, so it is important to keep in one’s mind the criticalness of the endeavor. I also found some resolve in the idea of fighting against the notoriously anti-environment petroleum companies, who are incredibly invested in continuing to escalate plastic use for their own profits.

The third chapter gives some hope with initiatives that are beginning to work around the globe, primarily government and policy interventions; the fourth on the impact that individuals can make, both in their own actions and influencing their community and local government; and finally in the fifth chapter we get down to the nitty gritty of tracking down plastic alternatives. Luckily, the easiest replacements also seem to be the most critical. The book mentions the Big 5 of disposable plastics, those plastic items that we use for mere minutes one time and then throw out: cups and lids, straws, water bottles, plastic cutlery, and of course plastic bags.

A quote by oceans activist and actress (Ginny Weasley!) Bonnie Wright sums it all up nicely, “If I had a message, it would be that yes, it is very overwhelming and it is a really big issue, but these small changes that you are making are significant. It can be hard, so just choose one part of your household—like food, or cleaning products, or toiletries—to tackle first.”

Mystery Comics

by Anna

A friend asked me for a recommendation for a graphic novel to introduce her to the medium, which is always a fun challenge. She stumped me, though, when I asked her preferred genre, and she said ‘cozy mystery’! I would have previously thought that graphic novels covered pretty much all genres, but I couldn’t think of a single cozy mystery. I sent her Jason Little’s Shutterbug Follies, which I would classify as more of a quirky mystery than cozy (a fine distinction), while I did a deeper dive through my library stacks.

The Good Asian by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi

This is very much noir, and not cozy, but is also super interesting! Starting with him stuck in an immigration detainment camp, Edison Hark is a Chinese police officer working in San Francisco in 1936. Tracking down the missing Chinese maid of a millionaire family takes him through all levels of society. The author and artists capture classic noir perfectly in both narrative and style, and weave in an impressive amount of historical detail. My only complaint is a common one with graphic novels, that is was just too abridged. The characterizations and plot felt rushed to the point that I had some trouble keeping track of the investigation, which certainly blunts the suspense and reveals a bit. Even with the compression, volume 1 ends on a cliffhanger with no solution yet in sight.

Continue reading →

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

by Rebecca

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
read by Merlin Sheldrake
2020

I adore this book! It is fabulous! It made various lists in 2020 and I’ve been sort of vaguely meaning to read it since then, but only just recently got to it when I was looking for an audiobook for a road trip. But it is so good!

Sheldrake is so deeply delightfully peculiar, surrounded by similarly peculiar researchers, that the most shocking point, beyond even his loving description of zombie ants as fungi who have temporarily become ants, or his musings on the heat produced by decomposition as he stewed himself at a fermentation spa, is when he refers to someone else as “eccentric”. I’m just like: “Sir!, you are not in a position to call someone else eccentric!”

He has a wide range of stories from his studies, his life, the studies and lives of his friends and peers, and from world history about how people think of and related to fungi, and they are all fascinating in ways I hadn’t previously imagined.

Sheldrake reads his book with a soft melodic voice that soothes the reader into an understand of the world from his perspective, from the fungal perspective, and makes a convincing argument for how important that perspective is.

He reminds us that there’s still a lot of unknowns in the world, and scientific theories are only as good as the phenomenon they explain. For any given law of nature that we think we know, there seem to be a variety of exceptions and ambiguities, and this book is focused on a huge category of beings that are pressure testing much of our current understanding of the world, and have been for as long as we’ve been aware of fungi as something to study. For example: the very word “symbiosis” was only created in 1876 to describe lichen, and “symbiotic” is even more recent as it became evident that the relationship was more common than just in fungal scenarios.

This book is fascinating and funny while giving an accessible overview of the current state of fungal studies. (Just take a moment to consider that sentence: fascinating! funny! fungal studies?) It also introduced me at least to the existence of a community of professional and amateur fungal enthusiasts I had not previously been aware of. They sound delightfully bonkers while still having some very real ideas and possible solutions to saving the environment and showing that both humans and fungi have a role in a sustainable ecosystem.

The entire audiobook is available for free online at the Internet Archive. I highly recommend it.

James

by Anna

By Percival Everett

James has been getting so much buzz lately, and it is all more than deserved! This retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim (James) the slave who accompanies Huck on his adventure gives so much more insight into the period than the original, honestly. Everett uses the familiar story to capture a wide range of the Black experience in America, including slavery, of course, but also code switching, colorism, and fair weather allies among a whole lot more. It would be a bit overwhelming if it wasn’t so tightly constructed around the narrative.

James overall reminds me of Longbourn, with the peek into how much else is going on behind the scenes of a well-known story, and a stunningly different perspective that gives a classic a whole different meaning. It is excellent, riveting, and also a little painful, stripping away any sort of nostalgic sentiment for a story about a boy traveling the Mississippi on a raft. That said, I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn since high school, and while I remember liking it, I don’t remember specifics about the plot. So, on the one hand, I occasionally wished I recognized more of the scenes to better appreciate Everett’s twists; on the other hand, it certainly increased the suspense having no idea how Jim’s story ends in the original. No spoilers, but I did recognize one distinct departure from the original and wasn’t sure how I felt about it, until it became clear how necessary it was in order to explain James’ later actions in a way that sort of broke my heart. All heaviness aside, and there is a fair amount of that, the overall novel is surprisingly funny as well – I laughed out loud multiple times.

So, James in particular is garnering lots of nominations and awards, but Everett’s bibliography is full of fascinating titles that I’m looking forward to exploring in the future.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

by Rebecca

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
2014

This is a fascinating premise and it’s well-written, but I had more than a few issues with it. I still read it to the end and was impressed overall.

The book is written in the first-person, by Harry August, a man who is born in 1919 and generally dies in the 1990s, and when he dies, he wakes up again, born in 1919. He’s not the only person living and re-living such recursive lives. They call themselves kalachakra. Their first lives are normal, their second lives tend to be short and filled with madness as they freak out about what is happening, and then they settle into the pattern of just reliving their lives, with both more comfort and more tedium each time through. Their society really highlights the apathy that comes from not thinking that we can do anything to effect the terrible things that are happening in the world.

At the beginning of this book, a child shows up at Harry’s 11th deathbed to explain that she’s one link in a chain of messages being sent from the future into the past, from the very young to the very old, to tell them that the end of the world is speeding up, and they don’t know what’s causing it, but it has to be something happening in the past. Then Harry dies in 1996 and is born in 1919 and he goes to find the oldest kalachakra currently living within reach of a small child, to pass along the message.

Fascinating!

Then he discovers what is causing the problem and it’s during his lifetime. So then he has to figure out what to do about it. The main plot takes place over the course of lives 12 thru 15 (which are told in order) but with frequent intermittent descriptions of lives 1 thru 11.

A brilliant idea and well implemented. In some ways, it reminded me of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a book I enjoyed a great deal. But any recommendation for this book comes with a lot of caveats.

First caveat: Much of the action takes place in the 1950s and 1960s, with all that entails, specifically: cold war era and a sense of science having all the answers. Everyone is very certain of themselves, which leads to them doing really terrible things because they don’t pause to consider that they might not know best, and simply shrug off all the harm as unavoidable consequences of progress. I don’t find any of the characters particularly likeable.

Second caveat: There’s a lot of torture. At least four extremely specific torture scenes and more than that depending on what counts, and a general sense that this is just how the world is. Characters, setting, and plot are written such that the torture makes perfect sense, and it’s an unpleasant world view that’s a bit too convincing.

Third caveat: The worldview is not completely convincing, especially as the reveal happens of what’s causing the end of the world. It’s written as an obvious and logical sequences that I don’t actually think works as a logical sequence. Or if it does, it’s a commentary on how time works that I don’t think the author fully intends. If it was intentional, then it would have been interesting but this book is too well written for that commentary to be so poorly implemented.*

Fourth caveat: There’s a lot of convincing by the antagonist to the protagonist. It reminded me a bit of Oscar Wilde’s the Portrait of Dorian Grey, except without Wilde’s humor and with a lot of scientific zealotry.**

The concept of the kalachakra is so cool, and the writing is really well done, but I just wish it had been explored in a less grim and gritty way.***

* In Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog (a book I whole-heartedly recommend), there’s a deep dive into discussion about how time is effected by time travel and what changes a time traveler can and cannot make, and what happens when a person tries. This book would have made a lot more sense if Claire North had made the argument that the timeline is relatively stable but can be slowed down or sped up, rather than simply saying that changes to the timeline are merely taboo due to messing things up for future kalachakra. Then there could have been a deep dive into the ramifications about that. But instead there are a few half-hearted discussions of alternate timelines and branching time theory, and protecting the future world for the kalachakra that live in those futures, but no real discussion of the stability or malleability of the timeline.

** There was not any less homosexual subtext though. I spent a lot of pages waiting for at least some seduction between the antagonist and protagonist, but it’s all very 1950s lets just sleep with women while thinking about each other but no-homo type of thing. It’s just obsession, not attraction, your honor!

*** Especially since there are at least several dozen rather delightful fanfic stories that I’ve read about people re-living their lives to better or worse effect.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2024

by Rebecca

I’ve been going to the Small Press Expo (SPX) for years, but last weekend was the first time I’ve managed to go to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and it was so much fun! We came in to Toronto on Friday and left on Monday so that we could attend the entirety of the event on Saturday and Sunday. I attended five presentations, browsed hundreds of vendor stalls, and bought 14 graphic novels. (And was tempted by a whole lot more!) I haven’t read all my new acquisitions yet, but most of the ones I have are also online so I can link out to them as well as brag about them:

Godslave
by Meaghan Carter
A nineteen-year-old college drop-out accidentally wakes up an ancient Egyptian god who looks a bit like a fennec fox (so cute!) and then gets drawn into the deadly family drama of the Egyptian pantheon. Who the good guys are is deeply in question. I bought the first two volumes, which comprise the first five chapters, but the online version has started the sixth chapter!

The Big Mystery Case: A Crime Comedy
by Luke Bruger-Howard
This is a hilarious pastiche of crime thrillers that reminds me of the equally hilarious video How To Make Blockbuster Movie Trailer. It’s a quick read (less than an hour) and a loving mockery of the detective genre.

Baggage
by Violet Kitchen
This is an absolutely beautiful poem of a graphic novel, about packing for a trip, unpacking in a hotel room, and then repacking to depart again. It’s gorgeous in the way it uses both artwork and words to evoke emotions and communicate a sense memory. The imagery is very clean and crisp while the concept is very ethereal and dreamlike, and it works together perfectly.

The Closest Thing to Living
by Ky K
They only had the prologue of this story in hardcopy, but it drew me in and included a link to the online version for me to continue following and see what happened to the woman who wakes up from her murder, discovers she’s a vampire, and decides that this is the freedom she needed to be more true to herself. She’s very nihilistic and isn’t much interested in her own past, but it looks like despite being dead, she won’t be able to actually walk away.

Autumn Wing and the Crown of Fire, Volume 1: The Sword of Red Leaves
by Brandon Hankins
Gorgeous inkbrush artwork with a limited color palate that I really love. This first chapter is about a young nephilim, who’s trying to earn the right to go on a quest to forge a crown of fire, aka a halo, and come into his full power. It did a really good job of addressing what it means to be strong, especially when other people are yelling at you for both not giving in to them and for not being strong. I just bought the first volume, but five chapters are online!

Tales from the Sixth Sun
by Dennis Moran
Absolutely gorgeous artwork and a magical world that reminds me a bit of Wakanda, with mysticism and technology integrated, set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Afrofuturism and Inca-futurism. The first half of the book is nearly word-less, and the art carries the storytelling so beautifully but also very tightly focused. The later part has more dialogue and introduces a much more complex society and history and plot. This book contains the first three chapters of the story, but the first six chapters are online!

I am extremely picky about the graphic novels I buy: I they need to have both beautiful artwork and interesting storylines, and all of these were wonderful finds. I’m really looking forward to making this festival an annual event.