The Written Nerd

Review of an imaginary book As I was delaying getting out of bed this morning, I had one of those weird morning dreams. I was reading a YA comic book about a boy and a girl who were left in the woods for dead. They somehow returned to civilization with a mutant superpower: if you got too near them you sickened and died. But it worked very slowly, so for most people it just manifested as a faint nausea. Then the boy and the girl became rockstars (apparently inducing nausea added to their mystique), and played a kick-ass show in which one of them played a Smashing Pumpkins song and the other simultaneously played some hip hop anthem, producing a harmonious chaos. As the kids were both either black or Latino, it was in a weird way a positive depiction of teens of color, influenced perhaps by Ivan Velez' Dead High Yearbook , and maybe by the animated comic (the ALP says "We used to just call it 'cheap animation'") in the extras of the Hellboy 2 DVD I watched last...

You know how some books take over your life, so when you're not reading them you're thinking about them, and looking for spare moments to sneak in a few more sentences, and all kinds of other projects fall by the wayside? The last book that did that to me was Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , which took over three or four days I had set aside for other work and left me stiff in weird places from being immobilized in my bed reading (or actually, lying on my stomach with the book on the floor and my head hanging over the edge of the bed -- I didn't intend to stay that way, but once I started reading I couldn't stop to change positions). Before that it was Adam Mansbach's The End of the Jews , which didn't make quite the splash in the larger world that Oscar did -- no Pulitzer or anything. But one's own obsessions are not always everyone's, and I wrote here about the effect that book had on my social life. The book currently ruining...

The ALP and I rarely read the same books. This is both practical (because we talk about everything we read, it's like reading twice as much) and a matter of taste (mine tend toward mainstream-ish literary fiction, his toward the weirder ends of the spectrum, from tales of con men to experimental novels to mass-market horror. Go fig.) But there is occasionally some overlap, often with books that fit into more than one category. One recent example was Toby Barlow's werewolf-novel-in-free-verse, Sharp Teeth . (Check out the very cool animations on the book's website -- props to HarperCollins for a job well done). We were both intrigued. My enthusiasm for the book led to a paragraph-long staff pick . The ALP was inspired to write an exploration of experimentation in genre fiction using metaphors from evolutionary theory . I kid you not. And it's good reading. My boy's wicked smart. What's your relationship to books and your loved ones? All the same books, ...

I've resolved to do more book reviewing around here, if in smaller snippets. Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (Del Rey, October 2007) I spent the holiday weekend with Michael Chabon's brief novel Gentlemen of the Road , and it was the perfect curl-up-in-bad-weather sort of book: bloody and daring adventures in exotic lands are immensely appealing when you are avoiding bad weather and extremely comfortable and cozy yourself. Though I'm one of those few odd souls who has never read the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I've been a fan of Mr. Chabon since he edited the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and asserted that there's no shame and indeed some honor in literary writers working with genre fiction -- that is, with plot and action, as well as realism and character and all that stuff. He's also one of the few authors whose blurbs I trust -- every book he has bothered to endorse has become a favori...