The Written Nerd

There is a disturbingly large and teetering pile of books on a chair in my kitchen. They are books that I have read in the last couple of months, that I hope to one day get around to writing up for this blog. Many of them deserve lots of thought, ideally before I forget the reading experience. Also, maybe 50% of the pile is comics -- because I read them faster than straight prose, or because my reading is getting decadently image-dependent, or because it's summer and comics are my beach reading, I don't know. Anyway, despite the fact that several of these are serious books that could totally justify their own post, I'm throwing them together in a roundup, in the interest of getting them off the stack and saving the legs of my kitchen chair. Superman: For Tomorrow Volume 1 and Volume 2 By Brian Azzarello (writer), Jim Lee, and Scott Williams (artists) The ALP, a much more serious comics reader than I, is of the opinion that this one-shot Superman story is about how sca...

Shop Indie Bookstores The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti (Random House, $25.00) This novel contains an orphan, a con man, a giant zombie, a mad doctor, a dwarf, and a sinister factory. If that laundry list excites you with prospects of strange and uncanny adventure, or reminds you of childhood afternoons curled up with Robert Louis Stevenson, this is the book for you. For me, it's a reminder of when I was very young and my mom used to read "chapter books" to me before bedtime, chapter by excruciatingly suspenseful chapter. Now, my husband and I have been reading The Good Thief aloud to each other. It's the first time as an adult I can recall saying "please, just one more chapter." It takes a pretty incredible writer to write a 19th century boy's adventure story with a wry 21st century sensibility. Hannah Tinti gets everything right, sketching scenes with the smallest of telling details, letting the character's moral evolution reveal itself in their...

Shop Indie Bookstores Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre (HarperCollins, $24.99) This book was put into my hands by one of my mentors and favorite booksellers, Toby Cox at Three Lives & Co. It took me a couple of weeks to get to it, but when I did it proved the rule that you should always trust your local indie bookseller when they tell you you're going to love something. This is the best straight-up novel I've read in a long time. No fantasy, nothing meta, no structural trickery or experimentation -- just character, story, place, metaphor, incredibly well-observed and perfectly described, so that you sink deeper and deeper into the author's world, and your heart aches for the story's people long after you've left them. Vestal McIntyre is a contemporary George Eliot (this book reminded me more than once of Middlemarch ), capable of capturing the truths about a community and an entire society in individual moments and interactions. McIntyre understands each of...

I have two reasons for starting a new series of The Handsell today. 1) I have less than a month left as an employee at McNally Jackson, so I feel I ought to poach my own staff picks from the store website before I'm no longer a MacJack (as we call ourselves in uninhibited moments). 2) If you're like me, the situation in Iran at the moment is incredibly compelling, filling us with hope and fear. Marjane Satrapi is, I'll admit, the one Iranian writer I really know, and she's been involved in speaking out for the opposition movement . It seems like a good time to revisit her work. Shop Indie Bookstores Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, $12.95) I waited a long time before picking up the newest work by the author of Persepolis , fearing she was just cashing in on her fame with a fluff followup. But it's wonderful, of course; I actually think this book is even more nuanced, moving and illuminating about Iranian life than Marjane Satrapi's original ...

Some of the good stuff I've been reading lately... The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press) If you like your mysteries with a bit of meta, but still insist on being richly entertained, you are so in luck -- this is the book for you. Rain-slicked streets and wood-paneled halls, sinister carnivals and decaying mansions, trench coats and fedoras and femmes fatales -- the iconography of the genre makes up the dreamlike landscape of this tightly structured and chaotically effulgent novel. Yet it's also a moving story of a humble Everyman trying to make his way in an incomprehensible system of institutions and obligations, and filled with both pathos and humor. My tagline: Chandler meets Kafka for whiskey-laced tea at G.K. Chesterton's house. I'm one of two booksellers at my store who LOVE this book to the point of obsession. And now I'm starting to see fedoras and pin-curls, mysterious briefcases and memorable umbrellas on my rainy commute to work....

As promised, I'm catching up on reviewing some of the many comics I seem to have been reading lately. This will be Handsell style: just a quick description/pitch. A note on linking: I'm trying something new. I'm using my own images and linking them directly to the IndieBound book info page, rather than using the affiliate links, which require an extra several clicks before you get to the book. It takes a bit longer for me, but seems more likely to be click-through-friendly for you. Let me know what you think. Miss Don't Touch Me by Hubert & Kerascoet (NBM/ComicsLit) This graphic novel is a study in contradictions: it combines a somewhat lighthearted tone - "prudish girl finds herself working in a high-end whorehouse, bring on the sex comedy!" - with some rather grisly plot points, including some pretty dark perversions and more than one bloody murder. The very French drawing style -- quick and flowing, almost sketchy, a la Joann Sfar of The Rabbi...

I've spent an amazingly satisfactory day cleaning house, cooking soup, and enjoying the sunlight through the windows. Before I go in to the bookstore to host tonight's event , and while I wait for booksellers' reports on WI4, there's time for a book review or two. Neither of these books have been published yet, but they were both miss-my-subway-stop compelling January reading, so I wanted to talk about them now while they're still fresh in my mind. Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard (Doubleday, July 2009) The jacket copy on this beautifully designed ARC (it looks like a Mexican Day of the Dead woodcut, very creepy/fun) suggests that Johannes Cabal should be compared to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or Wicked . After we both read it, the ALP and I agreed that a more apt comparison would be Good Omens , the apocalypse comedy collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. You've got your self-important forces of evil arrayed, co...

Readers, forgive me, for I have slacked: it's been over a week since my last post. Summer lethargy and typical busy-ness means things may continue like this for a while, though I've got chronicles of publishing panels and NAIBA board meetings to report. In the meantime, here's a little rec for your short-attention span summer reading. The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith (Penguin paper original, January 2008) Anthologies are typically hit and miss, but when you've got Zadie Smith and all her friends writing short stories that are each a character sketch, it's hard to miss. My favorite "other people" are (of course) David Mitchell's insufferable/funny/sad matron looking for love, and Jonathan Lethem's savant/otaku/eccentric Perkus Tooth (whom I'm told features in his upcoming novel). Wonderful for dipping into over a period of time, and for the beautiful/creepy Charles Burns cover.

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie (Penguin paperback, 1991 reissue) Agatha Christie is my guilty pleasure, though I secretly think she's got a lot more serious stuff going on than is commonly acknowledged; if I ever go back to grad school I'll write about her sly sophistication about class conflict, ageism, xenophobia, etc. This Hercule Poirot case, involving a series of murders in alphabetical order, takes on class assumptions, the fine line between homicidal mania and just being a bit nutty, and some unexpected romance as well. Read in an afternoon, then ponder or discuss. A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Signet paperback, 2001 reissue) Another sign of my weakness for Christie, this mystery celebrates small town life while skewering it mercilessly. It's also yet another instance of the impossibility of guessing the culprit -- I once read Christie would write the novel almost to the end, decide who was the most unlikely suspect, then go back and "fr...

Here's a tip for a great read from a great American author for the long Independence Day weekend. It's also one of my staff picks at McNally Robinson right now, which means you can get it there for 10% off all month. Happy 4th! The Handsell #2: You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage paperback, April 2008) I picked this up after meeting Jonathan Lethem in the store, and it's the perfect intellectual summer read: witty, topical, sexy, and light enough that you can read it in a weekend. Lethem's story of would-be musicians in contemporary Los Angeles deals with issues of intellectual property and creative commons, and the fine line between artistic/daring and pretentious/exploitative -- but you'll gobble it up for the great rock set pieces, sexual shenanigans, and sun-soaked hipness.

It's been tough to find blogging time around here lately. With meetings both business and social, I feel like I'm only home to eat and sleep (and debrief with the ALP). So I'm instituting a new little feature that I hope will be interesting -- and importantly, that I can almost do in my sleep. It's called The Handsell , and it's basically the bookseller's job distilled. Not quite a review, this is more like the 30-second version of my experience reading the book, pitched toward the kind of reader I think might enjoy it. It's what we do when a customer asks for a recommendation, and what we do when writing staff picks for displays. I think it's perfectly suited to the blog format. So, you'll be seeing more of them around here, in between longer and more in-depth posts. I've got a serious backlog of books I've read this year, so it will be a while before I catch up to my current reads. Hope you find these interesting -- maybe you'll...