blog: reviews

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I like to make year-end lists of the books I read in the previous year! Now that it’s the end of March, it’s probably time to do so for 2015. (Here are earlier lists, representing books read in 2012, 2013, and 2014.)

The usual caveats: I track my reading on Goodreads, and I am happy to friend you there, but I don’t rate or review books there (or do much of anything). You can also find my own books on Goodreads, and if you have read them, feel free to add them to your own library!

I do, in these annual roundups, discuss the format I read the book in; how I came across the book; and briefly (edit: or not), what I thought of it. I think you can distill out a recommendation from that, if you need to see an up-or-down vote from me.

In 2014, I set a goal for myself to read at least a book a week (52 books over the year), and I hit that goal, ending up reading 57!

I would have liked to keep up the pace in 2015, but I didn’t set a specific goal for myself, and looking back at the list now, I will be honest: I didn’t end up reading many books.

Instead, I read a ton of articles, essays, and some short stories — in other words, things from a browser, rather than a bookshelf. I added links to my Instapaper left and right, and read in little bursts that way, leaping like a flea throughout the year. This is reflected in the lists of article recommendations I’ve shared with you previously.

I think the reasons for that have to do with:

• Social media (the more time one spends scrolling through a timeline, the more links one will see posted);
• The charged political climate, presidential and otherwise, which both causes more thinkpieces to be written, and also stokes a desire to want to read more about what’s going on (the latter is definitely true for me);
• The fact that my leisure reading time is limited almost exclusively to late at night. Because I keep the light off to keep from disturbing my wife, this means I’m usually reading on my iPad, and when it comes time to loading it up with things to read, articles are free while ebooks usually cost money.

I regret not spending the time to really dig into many good books in the past year. And while I don’t think reading articles and essays is bad or a waste of time (I wouldn’t post lists of recommended articles if I did think so), I do think that reading longer, sustained narratives is a good muscle to keep exercised as a storyteller.

Now that I have a functional workshop, on my list of doodads to build is a light-isolation chamber that I can use to read hardcopy books in bed. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll report back if I end up staying married.

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Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert & Richard Isanove
Format: Hardcover purchased from comic shop
This comic is from 2003; I’ve had it for about that long, but only sat down to read it recently. It’s an alternate-universe story placing the icons of the Marvel Universe (Spider-Man, Captain America, etc.) in Elizabethan England, and the original series by Neil Gaiman went on to be followed up by several more installments by other writers. I probably don’t know enough about obscure Marvel trivia to have caught all the details, and as the story itself went (if one ignores the central gimmick) it’s fine, I guess.

I do remember thinking that the 2003-era gradient-filled digital coloring by Richard Isanove was a little out of control, and didn’t much fit the period theme. (I am not very forgiving of clunky comic art.) But the chapter-heading woodcut-style illustrations by Scott McKowen are a real highlight — check out his portfolio.

Saga Volume 4, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Format: Trade paperback purchased from bookstore
I raved about this series in previous installments of this list, as I’ve continued to rave as I’ve read the successive trade paperback volumes! The comic continues to amaze. Fiona Staples proves she can draw anything and make it look incredible.

The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; Or, Working With Wireless, by Captain Wilbur Lawton

The link above goes to a scan of this book on the Internet Archive; it’s also on Project Gutenberg and Google Books.

Last year I talked at length about my specific guilty literary pleasure: early-20th-century youth-adventure books about teenaged aviators. Some people read trashy romance novels about vampires; I read about rich kids from New England who invent impractical flying machines to hunt down bank robbers in mountain hideaways.

I mean, come on, check out this blurb for the prior volume in the Boy Aviators series:

The Boy Aviators in Nicaragua; Or, Leagued With Insurgents
The launching of this Twentieth Century series marks the inauguration of a new era in boys’ books — the “wonder of modern science” epoch. Frank and Harry Chester, the BOY AVIATORS, are the heroes of this exciting, red-blooded tale of adventure by air and land in the turbulent Central American republic.

The two brothers with their $10,000 prize airplane, the GOLDEN EAGLE, rescue a chum from death in the clutches of the Nicaraguans, discover a lost treasure valley of the ancient Toltec race, and in so doing almost lose their own lives in the Abyss of the White Serpents, and have many other exciting experiences, including being blown far out to sea in their air-skimmer in a tropical storm. It would be unfair to divulge the part that wireless plays in rescuing them from their predicament.

In a brand new field of fiction for boys the Chester brothers and their aeroplane are destined to fill a top-notch place. These books are technically correct, wholesomely thrilling and geared up to third speed.

This is the first of the Boy Aviators series I’ve read. (I’ve read plenty of Motor Boys, both the Flying Girls, the occasional Girl Aviators and Rover Boys, and I’ve finished all the Aeroplane Boys. Up next: Our Young Aeroplane Scouts.) With the exception of the Flying Girl pair of books — which were written by L. Frank Baum under a pseudonym and are actually quite good — these series are uniformly terrible.

But, hark, an achievement: this one is the worst of the bunch!

The plot is as follows: After their prior victory in Nicaragua (detailed in the volume above), the Chester brothers are contacted by the government to help find a missing military scientist. The Secret Service (which is apparently the agency on the job) has deduced that “a far Eastern power” has kidnapped the scientist to steal his secret formula for explosives, and the enemy agents may be hiding in “the untracked wilderness of the Everglades”.

The agent recruiting the boys describes the predicament thusly:

“It is useless for the secret service men to attempt to explore what is still an untapped labyrinth of swamp and jungle and above all it would occupy time. What we have to do is act quickly. I racked my brain for days until I happened to come across a paragraph in a newspaper calling attention to your wonderful flights in the Golden Eagle… It struck me at once that here indeed was a way of locating these men that might prove feasible.”

The problem is that the Golden Eagle, the Chesters’ wondrous airship, was destroyed in that previous adventure. However, the boys secure funding to build a new, improved craft, for the construction of which the military is more than happy to wait for nearly a month: “I suppose we shall have to exercise patience,” says the same man.

This is the first of a series of completely nonsensical contrivances in this book — and so far it’s only page 11.

The boys go on to build the airplane, and then have it shipped in pieces by train to Florida. They encounter some suspicious characters on the train, and in a restaurant near the train station, and once they charter a boat into the Everglades they get waylaid on an island overrun by moonshiners…And then they encounter Indians, and hide out in an old shack… All in all they don’t actually fly the airplane until over halfway through the book.

It’s also, regrettably, the most terrible-racist-caricature-filled book of this type that I’ve read so far. There are not one but multiple “wacky Negro” characters, whose dialect is rendered in a sort of pidgin, and who serve as cowardly comic foils to the ever-assured, infallible white kids. Few other chapters go by without the presence of “sallow-faced” villains, or savage Seminoles, or mincing “Orientals”.

I didn’t notice until I thought back on the book as a whole, but all the “othered” characters are represented specifically as superstitious. A plot point revolves around a villain’s minion betraying his master, and pledging his life to our heroes, in exchange for a “sacred” jade Buddha figure. Meanwhile, the boys calmly shoot panthers, brave windstorms, and are the only ones unfazed by a “voodoo totem” left to frighten their troupe.

I’ve now given this book more ink than it deserves. It’s got some evocative descriptions of the Everglades, but otherwise this was a real disappointment. There are only a few scenes of flying, and even the titular “wireless” set is used just once and then dumped overboard to lighten the aircraft’s load. I don’t read these books for the plot, of course… But this one is hard to recommend on any level, mainly because of how repellent the racist stuff is.

The end of the book teases the next volume in the series: The Boy Aviators in Africa; or, On an Aerial Ivory Trail. I think it’ll be best to give that one a miss.

Michelangelo, by Gilles Néret
Format: Paperback purchased from museum
I got this book probably 20 years ago on a visit to a museum, and it hung out with my art reference books. I looked at the pictures a lot, but I never sat down and actually read it cover to cover until now, and I’m glad I did.

Michelangelo was an immense talent, as we all know, but this book explains how his ambitions were even grander, and how in the end, he took so long doing the work that he was never able to get around to the biggest and most elaborate sculptures he had planned out in his sketchbooks.

A bit of a cautionary tale, perhaps? You can read that a few different ways. Don’t get hung up on perfection, you’ll get more done??

OR, better yet — spend all your time being perfect, and be remembered for centuries for the masterpieces you did finish! I’ll tell that to my to-do list, next time I can unearth it.

The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History, by Erik Durschmied
Format: Hardcover from library sale
I was intrigued by this book’s subtitle — who doesn’t like to read about stupidity? And the premise is appropriately interesting: how single events affected the direction of history from that point forward.

The book is a slog, though. I guess I had pictured something like a Malcolm Gladwell book: theory peppered with examples and case studies. It’s nothing like that. Instead, it’s a dense military history. The author focuses on a handful of battles, including instances from Troy, the Crusades, the Civil War, Crimea, and the wars of the 20th century.

Each battle is recounted in painstaking detail. Military terminology often goes by without definition. In a few cases, quotes or messages in foreign languages are written out in their entirety, but not translated into English.

Each chapter begins with a Microsoft-Word-clip-art-level diagram of the battlefield at the start of the account; there are no other graphics or illustrations.

The accounts themselves have some interesting details, but they’re buried beneath a labored writing style. I pushed through and finished because I didn’t want to lose the battle with this book, but it was a real chore. I wanted to quote some passages for you, but I can’t find the book, I think I probably already gave it away. SORRY.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, by Judi Barrett
Format: Hardcover from 826LA
Having seen the movie of the same name, I flipped through this book to see how it compared. If you haven’t seen it, the illustrations are wonderful. They have a sort of woodcut texture, while still being cartoony.

Avengers Assemble: Science Bros, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Christos Gage, et al.
Format: Trade paperback from library
Kelly Sue DeConnick is a name I’ve started hearing a lot, but I hadn’t read anything of hers, so I decided to see what titles my library had on hand. This one came up in the hold queue first! It’s a Tony Stark/Bruce Banner story. I liked it all right, I think, although I don’t remember it well now. (Honestly, I’m starting to realize that it takes a lot to get me to invest in a superhero story.)

Embassytown, by China Miéville
Format: Kindle ebook
China Miéville is another name I’ve heard a lot, but this is the first of his books I’ve read. It’s another of the “language” books I talked about last year — my attempt to seek out speculative fiction specifically that explores how differences in languages can impact differences in thought. It’s a subject I find fascinating! And this book definitely fits that description.

The Embassytown of the title is a human settlement on an alien planet. The planet’s intelligent natives, the Ariekei, don’t have a concept of language per se; they are able to communicate in a way that expresses their thoughts directly. This means that they cannot say something they don’t believe — they cannot lie, and have no conception of lying.

Humans, of course, can lie… But this means that humans can’t easily speak the Ariekei language. Difficulties arise in a number of ways, as they often do in books, and the main character develops a unique perspective on how to bridge the gap between cultures. (I don’t want to give too much away about the plot, because there are some surprises in how it unfolds.)

It’s a lovely book; the aliens are truly alien, and the challenges of sustaining human life on their planet are significant. It was one of the first books I recall reading in a while where as I got closer to the end of the book, I got legitimately worried because I honestly couldn’t see a way out of the heroes’ increasingly-dire predicament. Miéville is not one to pull punches, at least in this book, and I found the whole thing both wrenching and fascinating.

Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dexter Soy, et al.
Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster, More, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, David Lopez, et al.
Format: Trade paperbacks from library
Two more DeConnick books! I’ve heard a lot about her run on Captain Marvel in particular.

In Pursuit of Flight sees Captain Marvel travel through time to help some WWII-era commandos fight off a threat. The art changes midway through this book, from one style to a wildly different one, and it’s pretty jarring. And here’s the thing: I am an airplane snob. There are a lot of airplane drawings in this book. And they are almost good.

I enjoyed Higher, Further, Faster, More, uh, more. Captain Marvel travels to another galaxy and helps some aliens who are being forcibly resettled to another planet. It was zippy and fun and had the Guardians of the Galaxy in it, who are fine in and of themselves, but whose presence I think helped set the tone for the whole book. I liked it!

Jar Jar Binks Must Die… And Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies, by Daniel M. Kimmel
Format: Ebook from Hugo Awards packet
As a member of Worldcon a few years back, I received a Hugo Awards packet, containing nominated titles (in electronic form) for voting consideration. I ended up not voting that year, but I did read through this particular book, which was nominated in the “Best Related Work” category.

It’s a collection of essays about science fiction films. The author writes for various publications, and this book is a compilation of columns written at different times for different venues. So — as the author even acknowledges in the introduction — it’s a bit disjointed; better for bathroom reading, perhaps, than start to finish.

Mainlined all at once, though, the book reads like an extended conversation with someone who is way more into science fiction than you will ever be. (I’ll speak for myself, at least.) Kimmel begins by defending science fiction fandom from a culture that is both mainstreaming and, in his view, dismissing it. It reminds me somewhat of a conversation I overheard at Worldcon a few years back, in which two older fans lamented Hollywood’s attempts to “make sci-fi safe for normals”.

You can also sense a snideness in the title of the book itself — like, sure, who hasn’t thought that, but to put it in lights on the cover of the book strikes me as a bit pompous. The author wants you to know exactly how he saw through the saccharine charms of E.T. — “When the houselights came up in the screening room, I was appalled. This was a movie that lacked any depth or subtlety whatsoever” — and ends that chapter with the stern admonition “Call me a curmudgeon if you must, but that’s why I continue to feel that in any serious study of science fiction films, E.T. should just go home.” You can almost feel the Well, actually seeping up through the pages.

All that said — Kimmel knows a lot about movies, and he moves through the canon of sci-fi films in chronological order, spending as much time on forgotten classics of the mid-century as he does on Alien and so on. I appreciated the spotlight on stuff I wouldn’t have known about save for his thoughtful descriptions.

The Five Fists Of Science, by Matt Fraction & Steven Sanders
Format: Trade paperback from library
As a fan of Sex Criminals, I sought out this earlier work by Matt Fraction. In it, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla team up to stop the supervillainy of Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan. It’s a less-accomplished League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that’s silly enough to be hard to take seriously, and not quite funny enough to enjoy as farce. I was also not a fan of the art. I’d give this one a pass!

The Sea Fairies, by L. Frank Baum
Format: Project Gutenberg ebook
The first of two Baum books on the list this year — after enjoying his Flying Girl books so much, I thought I’d read more of his other (non-Oz) work. The Sea Fairies features characters who would later show up in The Scarecrow of Oz: the young girl Trot and her old pal Cap’n Bill. (The Boy Aviators also has a side character named Bill, but the salty seaman in that story is named Ben, for the record.) In this book, the two humans take a magical voyage to the land of mermaids, where they are ultimately imprisoned by a bad sea dude and held in a bad sea castle until they manage to escape.

Most of it is very dull! The mermaids are devoid of personality and the book has no conflict to speak of until the final act, when they are imprisoned in the castle by the evil magician Zog. Even then, they aren’t in much peril, because the mermaid queen can instantly use magic to thwart almost any hazard. ALL IN ALL this book was pretty boring!

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Format: Hardcover from library
Another notch in my attempt to become an Ursula K. Le Guin completist. This is a fairly recent (2005) collection of her short stories, including a few that take place in her Hainish universe (also seen in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc.).

As with all story collections, I liked some more than others, but there are some real gems in here. I love how her science fiction is more concerned with people than science; even in stories about heady theoretical physics, the actual physics is pretty immaterial. The Dispossessed, after all, featured a character inventing a whole new branch of physics without ever quite describing what it even was! And that’s just fine: her mastery of character and the depth of her world-building is plenty to enjoy and all that’s needed.

Sex Criminals, Vol. 2: Two Worlds, One Cop, by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
Format: Trade paperback purchased from comic shop
This series continues to be great! Though I admit to becoming slightly distracted by the fact that Chip draws the therapist character as himself. How can we focus on the story when we’re constantly aroused, Chip???

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo
Format: Kindle ebook
This book was really everywhere last year! (And a sequel came out this January.) I read a review and bought the Kindle version; it’s a quick read.

You can find articles and reviews everywhere online if you want to know more about Ms. Kondo’s decluttering philosophy, which she calls “KonMari”. For me, working through the book was a challenge: not because the language was difficult, but because its directions and recommendations ask a lot of a person. (Especially someone like me, who likes stuff.)

The simplified core idea of KonMari is that (a) you should own the things that spark joy in you; and (b) an object can fulfill its purpose in your life by allowing you to get rid of it. Even if it’s something you think is “still good”, or that you would feel “wasteful” throwing out — she recommends a practice of holding it in your hand, thanking it for being part of your life, and allowing yourself to draw your connection with it to a close.

She goes into a lot more philosophy than I can summarize here, of course. It’s a very interesting read. Her manner of personifying objects has a reverent quality about it, which makes her methods take on the air of a pilgrimage or spiritual renewal.

I will say, even if I never will get around to quite decluttering everything around me, I did take away one good tip, which is to sort through EVERYTHING of something at once: if you’re going to sort through clothes, for example, pull them ALL out. That way you can see, and feel in your hand, exactly how much stuff you really have.

The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, by L. Frank Baum
Format: Project Gutenberg ebook
The second of the two Baum books on this list! I actually enjoyed (a lot of) this one.

The story focuses on a young mischief-making boy, Rob, who’s interested in electricity, a fairly new thing at the time. By accidentally crossing some wires, he releases the spirit of the Demon of Electricity, a sort of genie who gives him various electrical devices to use on adventures — a wristwatch that allows him to travel through the air; a weapon for defense, and a force field for offense; special scopes to see other places in the world; and so on.

A lot of them anticipate inventions we now know well, such as cell phones, video feeds and stun guns. The story’s themes are mindful of how technological progress might be used for either society’s benefit or its harm. I found Rob’s various adventures around the world with the inventions more or less thrilling. He’s pretty insufferable as a character, and can be mean-spirited, but I found some charm in watching him blunder around and be dumb.

There’s more unfortunate racism in this book (Rob at one point finds himself on an island of cannibals, and he later fights against “savages” in Central Asia). It’s not as pervasive or disparaging as in The Boy Aviators, and I’m willing to cut Baum some slack because I know his other work, but it can still be jarring.

Cats in the Sun, by Hans W. Silvester
Format: Paperback received as gift
We got this book as a gift, I think, and have often flipped through to see the lovely pictures it contains of pretty kitties, taken on the Greek Cycladic islands. I have been to Santorini myself, and I have seen cats crawling through the streets and sitting on ledges and rooftops. They are everywhere!

Recently I actually sat down and read the text in this book; the author talks about these quasi-feral cats, and their habits, and their hierarchies, and how they live, owned by the population of the whole island and also by no one. It’s really touching and strangely inspiring — it endows their experience with a certain nobility. I had to apologize to my kitties afterward that they live small, mundane lives inside a house.

Before the Golden Age Book 2, by Isaac Asimov
Format: Paperback from my mom’s house
This is Part 2 of the trilogy I began last year! Part autobiography and part story collection, in this series Asimov describes stories that stuck with him as a younger person, then digs them out of whatever moldy magazine they first appeared and revisits them.

The stories proceed through the 20th century chronologically, so in this volume some of the tropes of sci-fi are starting to solidify, and some of the complete pulp wackiness is starting to flake off. I don’t know that I enjoyed the stories themselves a great deal, but I appreciated reading them as artifacts of their time, and the meta-experience of Asimov’s descriptions and recollections is very interesting. (At one point he even says “Yeah, that one’s not as good as I remember.”)

There’s a third and final volume on my shelf, I hope to get to it this year!

All This and Snoopy, Too, by Charles M. Schulz
Format: Paperback from personal collection
These little Fawcett paperbacks are the best. We had dozens of ’em when I was a kid, the paper all browned and crunchy, the color cracked to white on the spine. I have some of the beautiful Fantagraphics Peanuts books too, but these little ones are more fun to pick up and leaf through. Doing so is a required recharge for me, every so often.

I had the idle thought yesterday that it might be nice to do a Complete Reread of Peanuts, all the strips from 1950 to 2000, and blog about it as I went. I’ve read a lot of the early stuff a bunch, but I never had any collections of strips past the mid-’80s, and so I only ever saw what I came across in the newspaper, and even then just the one time. (I didn’t read hardly any of the ’90s run.) I can’t claim that it will all hold up, especially near the end, but examining whether it did, or what other observations might arise, would of course be the point of the re-read.

I’LL ADD IT TO THE TO-DO LIST *rolls up a giant scroll to see if there’s any room at the bottom*

The Enthusiast, by Joshua Fruhlinger
Format: I designed this book from scratch
Josh, whom you might know as the Comics Curmudgeon, and I have occasionally crossed paths over the last 10 years or so. His blog is great, and when he contacted Make That Thing (for whom I sometimes design books) about producing his first novel, I was excited to be a part of it.

The Enthusiast is a novel about Kate, who works for an agency that attempts to get people excited about things. Sort of like grassroots marketing, but ideally without anyone knowing that they’re being marketed to. Two of Kate’s projects involve helping someone who wants to make a movie out of a mid-century soap opera comic strip, and helping a train manufacturer win a bid to make new train cars for the DC metro system.

So she gets involved, deeply involved, with the people who love those things. She immerses herself, simultaneously, in the weird disparate worlds of light rail enthusiasts and soap opera comic strip fans. She meets strange characters along the way, of course, who help her see the world a little differently, and she comes to know herself a little better too.

I will be honest with you: this book is great. It’s really smart, and funny in all the right places, and it lives in the world we live in, in a way that’s both relatable and surprising. It’s insightful and it’s dramatic. The link above goes to the Amazon paperback/Kindle versions, but Josh has a roundup here of links to all the different formats available (including the limited hardcover editions that I helped to make).

Normally I wouldn’t count a book I worked on for the “read this year” list, but I genuinely liked The Enthusiast, and I hope you read it too.

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That adds up to 21 books in 2015. It’s the lowest count since I started keeping track in 2012… But I wrote way more words about the books I read this year than I did back in 2012. Some of my absolute favorite books ever are on that 2012 list, and I’ve said more about them in this post than I did there! A TRUE OUTRAGE.

I will see you in 12 months, when I guess I will write 10,000 words about the one book I’ve finished so far in 2016!!

Trailer for DreamWorks’ upcoming Home

It’s the third and final part of my 2014 reading list in review! Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex
Format: Paperback borrowed from 826LA
Above I’ve embedded the trailer for the upcoming DreamWorks animated movie Home, which is adapted from this book. The author, Adam Rex, illustrated the picture book Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem by Mac Barnett (which I raved about last year). The illustrations in that book are amazing, and after learning that Adam had written and illustrated a novel of his own, I kept my eye out for it.

I found it on the shelves of 826LA, the writing & tutoring center where I occasionally volunteer. The staff kindly let me borrow it, even though I did not have a library pass from my tutor.

So…here’s the thing. I wanted so badly to like this book. But there were a few things standing in my way. This particular copy, I learned, was an advance readers copy (ARC) — that’s the early version of the book that publishers send out to reviewers, while the actual books are on the press and being trucked around to various warehouses.

Unfortunately, that meant that the illustrations weren’t all finished, which was a big shame. In some places there were thumbnail sketches; in others, it said “Illustration to come.” So, that was disappointing — but hardly the fault of the book itself.

I also really hated the typesetting. I couldn’t figure out if it was just in the ARC, or if the finished book was like this too… It was typeset in an ugly sans serif, which made it look like a book self-published by someone who doesn’t know anything about type, which is most self-publishers, which is why a book can look “self-published” and have that be a recognizable attribute.

Protip: never set a novel in a sans serif typeface. Set it in a serif — and not Times New Roman; Palatino will do in a pinch. Garamond if you’re Robert Jordan or trying to be Robert Jordan. Also, don’t single-space your novels. That wasn’t a fault of this book, but just as a general piece of advice for trade paperback publishing. Mass market paperbacks can single-space and use Times, but who among self-publishers is making mass market paperbacks? I am literally the only one I know of.

I digress. So, there were things about the book that made it less than comfortable to read. I could have gotten the finished version of the book from the city library, I guess! I could have done that, and I didn’t, and that’s just a failing I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

The story is about a girl named Tip who, after the world is conquered by the alien Boov, embarks on a cross-country trip to find her mom. She encounters and falls in reluctant cahoots with a hapless, fugitive Boov named J.Lo. The two travel from New York to Florida to the Southwest, hiding from the other Boov, as well as even bigger threats.

As I said, I really wanted to like this book. And I’m…not totally sure I didn’t? It’s got lots of things in it that I like: crazy cobbled-together vehicles; characters that speak in mangled English for comic effect; even a social consciousness. Tip is biracial, and that fact informs her character in specific ways. Along their journey, they encounter various characters (such as some American Indians) whose political struggles are mentioned bluntly and explicitly. The book isn’t about politics at all, it just doesn’t blink when the topic comes up.

That and some frankness about swearing (not reproduced in text, but alluded to) are small things that startled me in a kids’ book that I guess I had expected would be more…toothless? Those aren’t bad things for a book to have, in general, so I’m trying to figure out why I’m having a hard time saying I enjoyed the read.

Maybe because it reminded me a little of Dave Barry: super hilarious when I was eleven, but upon re-reading as an adult, way more self-consciously wacky than actually witty. This book is very self-consciously wacky.

I’m super happy for Adam Rex that the book was bought to be made into a movie; that’s a huge thrill. Home, the movie version — which is a much worse title in my opinion — looks like it’s taking some liberties with the story. The trailer shows them flying all around the world, which I guess is more interesting than Florida and the Southwest, and the Boov character’s name has been changed from J.Lo to Oh (although the real Jennifer Lopez does voice a character in the movie, funnily enough).

I worked as a trailer editor for long enough that I can usually tell what compromises go into making a certain trailer look the way it does, and this movie…doesn’t look very good. I also can’t stand Jim Parsons’ voice (he plays Oh). So, I’m sorry Adam Rex, but I will probably not see this movie.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
Format: Hardcover from library
This was one of the books I alluded to in the last part of this interminable series — recommended to me as one that uses language interestingly. It’s a fantasy novel, about a man from an agrarian island who visits a fabled far-off continent and becomes embroiled in a religious conflict. That’s a pretty cold way of describing this very poetic, character-driven book, but it’s the barest outline of the plot.

In this book, the agrarian society has a spoken language, but no concept of writing, beyond simple maps and counting marks. However, the people on the foreign continent do speak a language that has a written form, and they have a long history with books. In the course of the story, the religious authorities on the continent attempt to suppress various factions by outlawing their books — which, to the main character, is horrifying, because he’s only just discovered books, and they are precious to him.

So the book, in its way, is a love letter to books. It’s slow in parts, drifting down its own rivers of lyricism, but it’s an affecting read. It also has ghosts!

The Wish Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree by Bill Brittain
Format: Hardcover from library
I picked this up because I like browsing the YA stacks and grabbing stuff I’d never otherwise know about. The reads are pretty short and I like to think it broadens my horizons. This is apparently a classic of sorts, a monkey’s-paw type story about kids in an early-20th-century farm town whose magical wishes go awry in quasi-predictable ways.

Okey doke! It was fine. I don’t think I’d read it to my kids, but they could read it themselves if they wanted to.

Garage Band by Gípi
Format: Paperback from library
This is a graphic novel, originally published in France, about some grubby teens and their misadventures putting together a garage band. Gípi also authored the better-known and more recent Notes for a War Story, which I haven’t read. The dreamy watercolors are pretty neat, and the story is more a slice-of-life character study than, like, a thrusting narrative, but I was happy to have read it.

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin
City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin
Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
Format: Hardcovers from library
These three books — which I read in separate volumes, but which are also available in a combined edition — are Ursula K. Le Guin’s first published novels, all set in the Hainish universe.

All three are about outsiders on journeys of survival, and in fact parts of Rocannon’s World foreshadow themes also found Le Guin’s other, later works, The Word for World is Forest and The Left Hand of Darkness.

These are not her strongest works, naturally. Rocannon’s World, the first, feels like a much more conventional Fantasy Novel™ than even her fantasy books that would follow, or the other two mentioned here. It’s got elves and fairies and dwarves and sword-slinging heroes. But a Le Guin “not her strongest” is still head and shoulders above the average, especially considering the other sci-fi and fantasy being published in the sixties.

Of the three, I think I liked City of Illusions the best, because its conflicts and challenges didn’t devolve into a climactic fight (like the other two). The plot follows a man who’s found in the woods without his memory, as he makes his way across a post-civilization, re-wilded continent toward the last city left.

In Planet of Exile, the dwindling population of a human outpost on a distant planet faces the onset of a years-long winter, and comes into conflict with members of the native population. The story alternates (primarily) between the point of view of a human man, Jakob, and a native woman, Rolery, who of course fall in love… But each character has a culturally-informed point of view and a different frame of reference, so, in a subtle touch, each character refers to their own race as humans, and the other race as foreigners or aliens.

Hawkeye Vol. 2: Little Hits by Matt Fraction, David Aja, et al.
Format: Trade paperback from library
The next volume of the Hawkeye series mentioned in the last post. I’m liking this book, bro. Come at me, bro.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Format: Hardcover from library
Joining A Stranger in Olondria on the “language” list, this is the type of story that drops the reader utterly into a foreign world, and lets you catch up in time — it doesn’t define its jargon or hold your hand.

So, it was a little hard for me to build up speed with it, but once I did, it was super interesting, and in fact I think that’s the advantage of that approach: once you’re on the book’s wavelength, you get immersed in it, and now you’re exploring and enjoying a unique new world that only that book can show you. (Well, plus its upcoming sequels.)

The main character, Justice of Toren One Esk, lives in a galaxy-spanning empire called the Radch (although we first meet her on an outworld). I say her because it’s the only pronoun she uses, although very little indication is given as to whether the character is biologically male or female.

In the Radch, there are no sex distinctions in society, nor in language — so there’s only one pronoun. I find the decision to render it in this book as “she” super interesting, because the more common default, he, I think would reinforce the “male as default” mental picture in the reader. Whereas, using she in unfamiliar contexts forces the reader to slow down, and provides the same sort of “I can’t tell whether this character is male or female” confusion that the character also experiences (at least outside the Radch, on foreign planets where those distinctions matter).

And of course using it would feel very impersonal, and I think an argument can be made that using a nontraditional or made-up gender-neutral pronoun could have been distracting in its own way. (Though I’m sure over the course of the book the reader would get used to it.)

But the book uses she. So even characters that various contextual clues have established as male are referred to as she, because it’s the only third-person personal pronoun at all in the book, and used for everyone. I thought it was a very elegant way of putting the reader in an unfamiliar head-space.

The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
Format: Hardcover from library
The long-awaited finale to the Magicians trilogy. I got the first book for free as a promo at some event, and only idly cracked it open, without knowing much about it. But I ended up really enjoying it, and read the second and third volumes as soon as they were released.

This series has been called a “grown-up Harry Potter” for obvious reasons: the main characters are teens who go to an enchanted boarding school (here called Brakebills) to learn magic, but they also drink and sleep around and are generally much ruder than Harry and Hermione and Ron. There’s also Fillory, a Narnia analog (in that it’s a magical land first discovered by English kids mucking about in an old house) that becomes an important setting in all three books.

A major complaint of some readers is that the main character, Quentin Coldwater, is whiny and selfish, and that it’s no fun to be in that person’s head for hundreds of pages. I’ve got mixed opinions about whether or not that character’s intended to be unlikable, or if Grossman wrote that character seriously without realizing how insufferable he comes off to other people.

Personally, I wasn’t that bothered by Quentin, which makes me worried that I’m somehow also insufferable without realizing it?

I like the world of these books; I like the ornateness and fiddly-ness of the magic system (it’s affected by the environment, the caster’s state of mind, the location on the earth, etc.) and it’s nice to feel that the story has edge; that punches aren’t being pulled, and that unpredictable things can happen at any moment.

The second book, The Magician King, was half told from the perspective of Quentin’s childhood friend Julia, who sees Quentin disappear into a world of magic that she can never be a part of. For quite a few chapters, it followed her struggle trying to learn magic in back alleys from (and with) dangerous people. It was a very different type of story from Quentin’s, and the Julia voice was a nice way to experience the world without seeing it through Quentin’s eyes. The third book could have used more of Julia’s voice, in my opinion.

It’s a popular book and series, so it’s easy to nitpick! But I tore through this book in two days, and the last book on this list was the same length and took me like six weeks, so that’s a point in this one’s favor, for sure. This series is also supposedly being developed for TV.

Letter 44 Volume 1: Escape Velocity by Charles Soule, Alberto Alburquerque, et al.
Format: Trade paperback received for free
I actually got sent a copy of this book from its printing company, in order to illustrate a foil technique on the cover. It looked interesting, though, so I read it.

It’s a comic book series (collected here in its first trade paperback) about a newly inaugurated president who takes office to find a secret letter from his predecessor, reading, basically, “Now that you’re president, you should know that we found an alien spaceship out by the asteroid belt. We sent a crew to go check it out a couple years ago; they should be getting there soon. Best of luck!”

It’s an interesting premise that’s dealt with…kinda interestingly. The story alternates between the president’s political entanglements and the bickering crew on the spaceship.

A big problem I have with it is the way all the politicians are drawn in superhero style, full of bulges beneath their puckering three-piece suits. That and the president’s name — Stephen Blades — make it hard for me to take the political drama at all seriously.

The art style better suits the spaceship parts, and the cliffhanger at the end of the series is the astronauts’ first approach to the alien craft, which (till now) has simply been sitting silently out in space.

The series is continuing; I think the second trade was just released. Will I read it? If the printer sends me another for free, sure!

Impro for Storytellers by Keith Johnstone
Format: Paperback from Amazon
Keith Johnstone is a Brit living in Canada who is the originator of the concept of Theatre Sports; that is, improv comedy with a scoring system, performed for judges. The sport-ification of improv (or as Johnstone refers to it, “impro”, performed by “imps”), it seems, is just a series of constructs intended to keep shows interesting; there aren’t really any stakes to it.

I perform longform improv here in Santa Monica, and longform as it’s practiced at our theater is very emotion-based, with emphasis on character relationships and honesty. It’s a really rewarding way to play, but also very difficult.

Theatre Sports is surely difficult as well, but it’s at least deliberately livelier. For example, Johnstone’s theater performs with props — something most improv teams don’t. This book is full of his exercises, games, practice techniques, and acting tips, often prefaced with explanations like “I came up with this technique in order to stop our performers from getting tripped up by this certain habit” or “This is a good gimmicky way to get the audience riled up, but only use it sparingly as it doesn’t get you very far.”

In other words, it’s very nuts-and-bolts oriented. I found it interesting because I think not enough of that style of improv is taught at more character-based schools — it’s assumed that you’ll pick up good habits as you become a better and more experienced performer, but Johnstone’s exercises attempt to drill in the habits first, and trust the performances will follow. I can’t say I disagree with the approach.

This is a followup to another Johnstone book, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, which I haven’t (yet) read. For improv fans, I have read and do also recommend Mick Napier’s Improvise.: Scene from the Inside Out, and I haven’t read — but I have flipped through with interest — the newer Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvising Manual.

The Story of the Orchestra by Robert Levine
Format: Hardcover from library
I read this while writing the 2015 Wondermark calendar! I was in band in middle school, but otherwise don’t know quite as much about orchestras as my 100% factually accurate calendar might imply. I figured a kids’ book about music would give me a nice overview of the subject while still being a quick read, and I was right!

BONUS: It comes with a classical music CD, and there are passages in the book that explain some interesting fact about a particular piece, then encourage you to listen to a certain track on the CD and try to pick out the strings doing such-and-such the way they described. Pretty cool for kids, I think! If kids still know what a CD is!

Hawkeye Vol. 3: L.A. Woman by Matt Fraction, Javier Pulido, et al.
Format: Trade paperback from library
This volume of Hawkeye follows the other Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, on an ill-conceived trip to Los Angeles, where she declares herself a private eye and inserts herself into some dangerous business. I’m not as familiar with this character, so it took me a little to get into it, but it’s breezy and fun like the previous volumes, and maybe a bit freer for being outside of New York and anything resembling Avengers canon.

I’m not a super fan of the Chinatown, L.A. Noir type story that this is trying to be a sunnier take on, though, so I think one volume is sufficient for me, and I’ll be happy to read more about Clint.

Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock
Format: Downloaded ebook
Kate Beaton mentioned these on Twitter and I read ’em up! Originally published in 1911, this is a series of humorous short stories (not really novels), each parodying a stereotypical fiction trope of the time. So there’s a parody Sherlock Holmes story, a parody gotta-save-the-farm story, a parody aristocratic romance…They’re pretty short and they’re great, if you’re at all a fan of Victorian/Edwardian literature.

Hug Machine by Scott Campbell
Format: Hardcover from bookstore
This book is super adorable and every kid should have a copy. We got one for our goddaughter, mainly so I could read it before we wrapped it. Your kid will love this.

Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer
Format: Downloaded ebook
Here’s the pitch: Aliens land on Earth, and peaceful communication is established. But a human is murdered, and one of the aliens is the likely suspect. Now, the alien must stand trial in U.S. court, accused of murder.

Pretty good pitch, I thought, so I sought out the book. (I think it was mentioned in an article, or something else I was reading.)

Here’s the part that isn’t clear just from the pitch: this book was published in 1997, and is obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial. It’s clear that the trial was the inspiration for this story — it’s “what if O.J. had been an alien”.

And it’s not just using the trial as a template; it also mentions the trial a lot, and in conversations between the main character and the alien’s defense attorney, specific events from the O.J. trial are referred to and explained.

So, if you haven’t heard the name Mark Furhman in 20 years and were itching to sink your teeth back into that meat, this is a good book to read. It is not what I would call a timeless book; it’s very much of the era in which it was conceived and written — and not even just with respect to the plot. It feels like a nineties book, and it is.

That said: is it a good read? The legal stuff is fairly dry. Sawyer seems to be running his high concept through the motions to see how it pans out. Various characters are prone to soliloquizing at length about, say, civil rights, and sometimes when they talk ideas at one another there’s nothing that really distinguishes the voices from one another. The characters are mostly caricatures that exist to ride the clockwork arms of the plot. I guess you could call it the “airport novel” style of fiction writing.

That clockwork itself, I thought, was interesting enough. I honestly couldn’t predict the outcome of the trial, and it was neat seeing the various clues eventually click into place. The aliens are cool too; they’re quadrilaterally symmetrical.

EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches by Dave Ramsey
Format: Audiobook
I got this from the library a while back and resolved to read it seriously, taking notes and everything. It’s a business book that’s positioned not really for folks just starting out, and not really for corporate middle managers, but for people like me and a little bigger: been running a small business for a while, interested in getting bigger, don’t have a huge staff above or below me, but willing to take on responsibility as an owner to work and build the business.

I didn’t get very far before I had to return it to the library, so later on I found the audiobook, and much later on I decided to put it on while I was doing a bunch of rote work — I think I was filling greeting card and calendar orders.

I like filling orders. I do it around a big table, and I’m standing up and moving around, and it’s kinda mindless but it makes me feel like I’m doing something, like I’m earning my keep. It’s not sitting in front of a computer, it’s manipulating objects. It’s mailing you things you ordered, like a businessman does.

So I put the audiobook on and listened as I worked. I didn’t know much about Dave Ramsey going in; he has a podcast and a radio show I guess, so he’s got a good voice, and he’s reading his own work so of course he’s giving it the proper inflections and putting meaning behind it. It’s a good listen, as far as the vocal quality goes.

My metric for business books is, can I pull out one, or two, or a handful of ideas to help me do something a little bit more effectively? If so, then it’s worth the couple hours or the twenty bucks or whatever. By that test, I don’t regret listening to it.

But my giant problem with most business books is that they’re written from the perspective of a person whose business is writing business books.

In other words: Dave Ramsey sells seminars and books about how to succeed in business. Okay, fine. Then he takes his experience selling seminars and books, and running the business that sells seminars and books, and distills them into advice about how to run a business. So what you get is advice that’s super great if you’re selling what he’s selling.

Of course, he’s quick to generalize: “All business is sales,” he says (I’m paraphrasing). “Every business has to sell itself to its customers. Sales tactics will serve you in every business.”

I guess it’s possible I don’t know anything about business! Dave Ramsey is more successful than I am, after all. My business is making dumb products and selling them to people who think they’re fun. I don’t really think that cold calling 100 prospects every morning is a good way to spend my time.

Ramsey also talks a lot about his faith, which I’ve learned is a huge part of his brand, although this book seems to be very deliberately aimed at the secular market. He places a premium on his notions of integrity — he fires employees that he finds out are unfaithful to their spouses, for example. He has a strict “no gossip” policy in his offices. He says a good hiring process includes “going to dinner with the candidate and his wife”, because one can “learn a lot about a person by observing their family life.” (It’s always phrased as “the candidate and his wife”.)

An impression is strongly given that he preferentially hires people that share his faith, not because he discriminates per se, but because non-believers wouldn’t fit in with the (faith-infused) culture at his company, so why would they want to be there?

As this strong paternalistic streak emerged in his advice, I found myself getting a little mad at it — but also starting to wonder about my mettle. Does it take a strong, uncompromising hand to run an empire? Is that the nature of prospering as a capitalist?

Or is that the simple version, what people want to hear? Business advice has to tell you to work harder, or smarter, or something — because you’ve already tried the alternative.

I finished the audiobook, and I’m trying to think now of some good, concrete advice that I took away from it and can agree with. Don’t be arrogant? Stay in tune with what your employees are doing? There’s a touching story about how Dave chartered a private jet to fly an employee home when his family members were in an auto accident. Maybe I should charter more private jets?

I did a little Googling. Not everybody enjoyed being one of Ramsey’s “team members.”

Treating the confrontation with his critics as an attempt at spiritual reconciliation was consistent with what numerous employees described as the typical Ramsey approach, one familiar among evangelical institutions who blur the boundaries between church and business. Leaders like Ramsey often refuse to see disagreement as anything but spiritual rebellion. When Ramsey learned I was reporting this story, he invited me to meet him and a pastor at Lampo [Ramsey’s company]. “I hope you have the courage to sit with me as a man,” he wrote in an email. […]

Current and former employees say that, though they believe in the Lampo mission and felt like Ramsey’s team was a “family,” their daily experience of working for him and his leadership staff was dominated by fear.

“There are plenty of former employees recovering from the abuse there,” said one ex-employee, “similar to my fundamentalist upbringing.” A current Lampo employee who hopes to leave soon, added, “This place is awesome as long as you never complain and never tell anybody you’re thinking about leaving.”

Yeah, OK. That squares with the vibe I got from the book. Sounds like a great way to run a business.

Translating History: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of Diplomacy with a Top Russian Interpreter by Igor Korchilov
Format: Hardcover from Amazon
I thought I got this book from BookMooch (which I love), but I went to look up the Amazon listing in order to post the link above and I saw the note “You purchased this item on January 1, 2004.” Fair enough. It’s been a while.

At the time, I was doing research for a screenplay I was writing featuring a character who was an ex-diplomatic interpreter from the Soviet Union. So the title of this book really leapt out at me — that was exactly Igor Korchilov.

(Something I learned from this book: translating refers to text; interpreting refers to speech.)

Korchilov (who’s still alive, but who’s no longer a Soviet interpreter, for obvious reasons including that there is no more Soviet anything) was one of the interpreters assigned to Gorbachev and other dignitaries at various points in the latter days of the USSR.

This book is his memoir, of sorts. I had expected it to be an overview of his life, with maybe some talk about the politics of interpretation and so on, but it’s actually an extremely focused, extremely detailed account of six specific summit meetings between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George H.W. Bush.

(Something else I learned from this book: Condoleezza Rice apparently speaks, or as of 1990 spoke, perfect Russian.)

Korchilov kept elaborate journals during these meetings, during which he was one of two staff interpreters that shadowed either a member of Gorbachev’s cabinet, or Gorbachev himself. So the book is full of stuff like:

When the Gorbachevs arrived, they were met by the Reagans at the entrance to Spaso House. Reagan looked well rested and in high spirits after his tour de force at the university; Nancy looked somewhat tired after her lightning trip to Leningrad. Mikhail Sergeyevich was bubbling with energy, and always, and Raisa Maximovna looked very dignified. Reagan shared his table with her, Alexsandr Yakovlev, chief editor of the Moscow News, and a few other officials…

After the dinner was over that night, on the way home I bought a couple of plain Russian pirozhki in Arbat Street, for twenty kopecks (about fifteen cents at the time) each, to assuage the pangs of hunger I had felt the whole day. The lone but daring entrepreneur from some cooperative was doing a brisk business. Hot stuffed pastries, or pirozhki, in the Soviet Union were the equivalent of hot dogs in America. Perestroika was beginning to bear tangible fruit.

I was just checking my website stats and I see that every one of you fell asleep halfway through reading that. That’s okay. This is why this book took me six weeks to read. It’s like a parody book from an episode of Parks & Rec, but four hundred pages long.

But I was determined to do it! I never ended up going far with the screenplay, but I’m still mildly interested in the politics of that period of history, and this book definitely provides a detailed look at the intricacies of diplomacy, down to who said what in what order during a specific meeting about a specific subject as part of a specific treaty negotiation.

There are some human moments, such as when Korchilov is riding in a car with Gorbachev down a highway in California and they discuss the cities they’re passing through, or in the few cases when there’s some error in interpretation that leads to a minor misunderstanding.

But even those are quite dry and recounted with formality — such as the two paragraphs he spends describing how he told Billy Graham that his fly was open at a state dinner. It’s also very polite, which leads to a lot of rather uninteresting passages like this:

The new chief of U.S. state protocol, Amb. Joseph Verner Reed, was bustling about showing everyone where to stand. As I would discover, he was Mr. Perfect Courtesy. I had never met anyone who lavished so much solicitude and attention on people with whom he came in contact as part of his professional duties. He was the right man in the right place.

I’m spending a lot of time on this book because when else am I going to talk about it? It’s literally my only chance to say anything about this book to anyone. I tried reading it to my wife in bed and we almost divorced.

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That’s it! I read 57 books in 2014, which beat my one-a-week-average goal of 52. I’m super pleased with that!

Now it’s March 2015 and I’ve finished…four so far this year. This post next year might not require three parts.

I can’t really tell how much this long, eclectic list represents my taste in books, but if based on reading these posts, you think you know a title I might like, feel free to leave a comment! I’m always looking to add to what is already the unending to-read list that will never end.

On to Part 2 of the books I read in 2014! (Here’s part 1. It is somewhat 100-year-old terrible-youth-adventure-novel heavy.)

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Format: Hardcover from library
Above in this post I’ve embedded a TED talk by Jonathan Haidt (one of three that he’s done) that lays out in simplified form the “moral foundations” theory that he explores in detail in this book. I heard Haidt give a radio interview on the topic, and after trying unsuccessfully for quite a while to guess the spelling of his last name just by hearing it (Haight? Heit? Hayt?), I found the TED talk and watched it, then visited his website and read more about this book and his research into the social psychology of morality.

Philosophers and theologians have argued about how to define morality, but in this book Haidt attempts to do no such thing: instead, he describes how existing groups of people define morality, through surveys and research and statistical analysis, and from that data he attempts to describe the basic building blocks of morality.

Without hyperbole, The Righteous Mind is a book that changed the way I think. Haidt describes a series of studies, conducted by himself and others, surveying different cultures’ concepts of morality and distilling the common themes.

These commonalities, he argues, represent the things that we as humans choose to value, because they may be the things that helped our social species flourish where other evolutionary groups of humans did not. Chiefly, he claims, these core values are what help bond large groups of non-kin together, and inspire them to act cooperatively for mutual benefit.  We survive as descendants of the groups that figured out these values, which is why we see these common threads in many different cultures.

The thing that I really love about this book is that it presents a compelling rationale for why intelligent people can disagree about moral matters. Political arguments can provoke a feeling of disdain — how can those idiots think that way? Can’t they see the facts? — and Haidt’s theory explains how people can have sincere political differences without being unintelligent or uninformed.

Which I like — because personally, I want to believe that people I disagree with politically are still fundamentally moral people who have the best interests of others at heart. Believing one’s opponents to be vile hatemongers solves nothing — it just makes it harder to work together with others, which is something we all have to do to survive.

Here’s Haidt’s theory in a nutshell:

Human beings from different cultures around the world tend to build their idea of morality on six “moral foundations”: care for the weak, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, respect for sanctity, and freedom from oppression.

Haidt’s research found that these are the basic ingredients for a culture’s idea of moral behavior. But — and this is where it gets crazy — different groups make different moral recipes using those same core ingredients.

For example, according to Haidt’s surveys, people who identify as “liberal” in America tend to place a high value on caring for the weak and seeking fairness. People who identify as “conservative” care about those things too, but place an equal or higher value on loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. This explains why conservatives as a whole can seem to care more about ideals like patriotism, or various forms of “purity”, that liberals don’t give as much credence to.

Both views on that axis — “patriotism is moral” and “patriotism isn’t necessarily important” — make sense to people operating within their own respective morality (or “moral matrix”). But to the conservative, the liberal hates America, and to the liberal, the conservative is a blind jingoist.

It’s not that one is wrong and one is right, or one is moral and the other is immoral — it’s that to each person, the other person’s beliefs fall outside their moral matrix. So the other person’s beliefs don’t make sense.

I’m just scratching the surface here. There’s also a whole other bit about how we tend to make snap decisions in concert with our existing moral matrix, but then unconsciously rationalize them — even when we think we’re being objective and logical. If you’ve been reading Wondermark for any length of time you know that these types of ideas are fascinating to me.

Anyway! I recommend that you read this book, or seek out Haidt’s TED talks or many published articles on this subject. I’m not kidding when I say it changed how I think — I started visualizing everyone acting within their individual moral matrix, and the odd decisions that other people made suddenly started to make sense. I also started to notice when people debating were lobbing dud arguments that they didn’t realize the other person would have no chance of taking seriously.

It’s nuts how much internalizing this “moral foundations” theory can change how you see the world — and I believe for the better; in a direction that increases the chances for cooperation and profitable discourse between even people who disagree. Read it!

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
Format: Paperback from library
I read Krakauer’s Into Thin Air a few years ago and found it super gripping and compelling. So I picked up this other book by him, about the history of the Mormon church in America, and certain individuals and communities that committed terrible atrocities — that, of course, the contemporary Mormon church doesn’t have much of an interest in discussing. I guess if I were a Mormon-hater I’d really lap up all the juicy details, but even ignoring the finger-pointing, it’s interesting enough as history.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
Format: Downloaded ebook
This is another of those books that I thought “I should probably read this some day.” I think I was actually prompted by someone’s offhand mention of a plot point — it was one of those situations where you hear an idea, and get mad because someone else already did it before you could! So I thought I should read the book to see how he did it thirty years ago or whatever, and as it turns out, his treatment of the minor idea was totally different from the story idea I’d had.

Anyway, this is a classic of sci-fi, and it’s certainly distinctive in its way. It’s hard to tell from this vantage point how groundbreaking it must have been at the time.

Saga, Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Format: Trade paperback borrowed from friend
This is the latest volume of the series I raved about last year! Continues to be good, continues to be recommended for fans of character-driven space opera.

Snowpiercer Vol. 1: The Escape by Jacques Lob & Jean-Marc Rochette and
Snowpiercer Vol. 2: The Explorers by Benjamin Legrand & Jean-Marc Rochette
Format: Hardcovers borrowed from friend
These two Snowpiercer books (from which the movie was adapted, of course) were recommended to me by a comics-loving friend before I even heard about the movie. When I eventually went to see the movie, I got to tell a different, movie-loving friend that the movie was an adaptation — he’d thought it was original.

After we both watched the movie, he came up to me and said “I kept wondering how the comics treated those certain scenes!” And I had to break the news to him that those scenes weren’t in the comic, because nothing survived the adaptation besides the most general premise. The comics are very different from the movie, slightly less bonkers perhaps, or at least bonkers in a less flashy, more mud-spackled way.

Again, it’s hard to tell how reading this must have felt when it was originally released, decades ago. Turns out the original author died after writing the book, but the second volume was released a decade later with a different writer. I guess this would be like packaging Watchmen and Before Watchmen in the same slipcase.

Before the Golden Age, Book 1 ed. Isaac Asimov
Format: Paperback from my mom’s house
We were cleaning out my mom’s house this summer and I came across these three paperbacks. Part autobiography, part anthology, the three books (originally issued as one large hardcover) were Asimov’s chance to reprint the early sci-fi stories that he remembered reading and being inspired by as a kid. He’d read pulp magazines at his father’s newsstand but never got to keep them — so these are the stories that stuck in his memory all the years later, and he revisits them here for the first time since then.

I really liked both his reminiscences and the stories themselves. I finished the first paperback and opened the second, but it was missing the first 14 pages. So, I got a copy from the library and photocopied out the missing pages, then taped them into my copy of the book…but by the time all that got done, I’d already started reading the next book on my list. I’ll probably come back to this series in 2015.

The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
Format: Hardcover from library
As I mentioned last year, I think I’d like to eventually become an Ursula K. Le Guin completist. This is another of her Hainish novels, the loosely-connected but functionally independent series that’s usually about ambassadors visiting new planets. In this one, a woman from Earth visits a planet that’s recently undergone a cultural revolution, and she tries to seek out traces of the older culture that’s being erased by the new regime.

One of the things I really liked was the way Le Guin made each culture’s language shape the way those people thought, and even the kinds of things they thought about. I asked on Twitter for recommendations of works that explored matters of language in similarly interesting ways, and a few titles lower on this list are the result of that request. (Linking it here for my own reference — and yours!)

The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser
Format: Hardcover from library
I checked out this book because I got on a jag about the voyages of Sinbad for some reason, and this collection of short stories contains one called “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad”. This is also the book containing the story “Eisenheim the Illusionist”, which was adapted into the Edward Norton movie The Illusionist, which I created some TV spots for back when I worked for an ad agency. These two tenuous points of contact with my interests made it worth reserving the book at the library.

Those two stories stick with me well enough, but in general I decided I wasn’t a fan of Millhauser’s dreamy writing style. I also had to bail on one of the stories in order to return the book on time, so, like, I guess when the rubber hit the road I decided it wasn’t worth 15 cents in overdue fees. I’m very sorry for that, Mr. Millhauser. I’m sure you’ve done many wonderful things in the years since this book was published.

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero
Format: Kindle
If you’ve seen the movie The Room, this book will probably be hilarious. If you haven’t, or have but don’t understand its appeal, it might not be.

As for me, I drove by Tommy Wiseau’s leering black & white face on a billboard every single day on Highland Avenue in Hollywood for years, wondering who in the world would pay for a billboard for an independent movie for that long. I even remember the day when the billboard was updated to add a neon yellow drop-shadow to the title.

One slow day in 2004, working the night shift at the ad agency, I convinced my co-worker to go to a late screening of The Room on Sunset Boulevard. Tommy Wiseau was there, sunglasses at night, and I asked him why the guys in the football-tossing scene are all wearing tuxedos, since there’s no wedding in the film.

Tommy’s slurred but confident response was that it was “so we would think about that very question.” This book, by Greg Sestero, is surely embellished and dramatized a bit, but it’s full of Tommy Wiseau moments that leave you with your jaw on the floor.

No Words by R.N. Adams
Format: Kindle
Doesn’t look like this is on the Kindle store anymore, but there’s a downloadable version at the link above. This is an erotic novella, which is not usually my cup of tea, but the author is a friend of a friend, and it was pitched as “consent-focused romance”, which intrigued me so I thought I’d check it out. It’s…super duper steamy, everyone.

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
Format: Trade paperback from library
Sex Criminals is a comic about two people who discover that when they have sex, they can freeze time. So, they use this power to rob banks. You’re either into this immediately or you’re not, I suppose; I, personally, am!

Empire by Mark Waid, Barry Kitson, & James Pascoe
Format: Trade paperback from comic store
I picked this up a million years ago in a sale, and it sat unread until I read Sex Criminals in an afternoon and raided my shelf hungry for more comics.

It’s ostensibly about “what happens after the supervillain succeeds in taking over the world?”, which is a pretty fun pitch. This book isn’t very good, though. It’s melodramatic and confusing and I really, really don’t like the art.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham by Mike Mignola
Format: Trade paperback from comic store
Another shelf raid. This is an Elseworlds story that sees Batman fight Lovecraftian horrors from the frozen wastes. I first read this years ago, before I really had any conception of Lovecraftian horrors or the tropes thereof, and didn’t really understand it. It reads somewhat better now that I know what Cthulu is, and Mignola’s art is great as always, but you really get the sense that this could have been longer than just three issues, because all the drama occurs very quickly and in abbreviated fashion, with the sense that it’s being crammed into the pages allotted.

Runaways, Volumes 1-4 by Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, & Craig Yeung
Format: Trade paperbacks from comic store
This is a young-adult-type comic about teens who discover that their parents are all secretly supervillains. Just like all teens’ parents, am I right?? I thought it was OK; it’s printed on newsprint, maybe for cost or maybe so it feels more like one of those mangas that the kids like, and I had some issues with the art. All the characters make the same sort of pursed-lip expression all the time.

I think the bar is low enough for comics that they’re often called “great” when they’re simply “not actively bad”. This book is not actively bad.

Hawkeye, Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon by Matt Fraction, David Aja, et al.
Format: Trade paperback from library
I’ve heard a lot about Matt Fraction’s run on Hawkeye (he’s also the writer of Sex Criminals, above) that paints Clint as an everyman, the non-super Avenger dealing with human-sized issues. For someone who doesn’t care about superheroes really at all, I enjoyed this a lot, and I also really like the art.

Brain Camp by Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan, & Faith Erin Hicks
Format: Paperback from library
I browsed the graphic novels stack at the library and grabbed this at random. It’s a YA-type story about kids who discover a crazy, horrible secret at their summer camp. It was a very breezy read, not quite for me I don’t think, but Faith Erin Hicks’ art is always a treat to look at.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher W. Alexander, et al.
Format: Hardcover received as gift
I found this book on Cool Tools and put it on my Christmas list…in 2011. It’s a thick book, a bit like a textbook perhaps, but I did eventually read it all, and in the end I do actually recommend it.

The book is the collected conclusions of researchers who studied how people live, work, move around cities, gather, hang out in various places, and form communities. Each section of a few pages describes some type of environment — starting at a macro level (towns) and moving down with increasing focus through neighborhoods, blocks, offices, houses, even down to individual rooms — and offers recommendations for ways to structure that environment for maximum utility and harmony.

It’s like feng shui, I suppose, except in the reedy voice of a Berkeley professor from the seventies who cites studies from Hungary in his reasoning. The first part of the book, recommendations for the structure of towns and neighborhoods, are a bit hard to implement on a personal level, but it’s an interesting introduction to the sorts of ideas at play: no concession to how things are currently, just straight instructions for how to design a town from scratch.

I don’t have the book in front of me to cite examples of that, but many of the smaller-scale examples stick in my memory because they just seem right, articulating things I’ve felt but never really put into words, or maybe never even quite felt until I saw it on the page. Some that I recall are:

• Design rooms so they have windows on, and let in light on, two sides
• Gardens and yards in the northern hemisphere should face the south
• Front yards and patios should be elevated above the sidewalk to create a separation between private and public space
• Large interior windows should contain seating nooks
• Workers at desks should have a wall at their back and one side, and be able to look out into a larger area, but be separated from it by a partition (e.g. a half-height wall, or doorway)
• An area where people are to meet should have a large number of mismatched chairs…

The recommendations are very specific, and come with various levels of urging. I was also struck by many recommendations toward the development of communal space (probably belying the book’s Berkeley origin), because they seemed like decent ideas that nonetheless are really uncommon in urban areas. For example, housing elderly relatives in a guest house on the property, so they have independence but are still close at hand; having groups of homes face a common, non-roadway area where kids can pass through or play within sight of multiple homes; or having craftspeople and workers carry on their work in areas with open doors, so neighborhood kids can observe and begin to learn about the trades.

This book doesn’t need to be read cover to cover, but if you’re designing a living or working space, it’s worth finding a copy at a library and perusing the relevant recommendations — if for no other reason than to make you consider various questions you might not have. I know I look at windows and garden paths differently now.

That’s the end of part 2! Next week — the thrilling finale to this list of books!

I like to do little year-end wrapups of the books I’ve read recently! Here’s 2012’s and 2013’s.

I keep track of the books I read with Goodreads. (If you read any of my books, those are on there too!)

For 2014 I set myself the goal of reading at least (on average) one book per week. I felt kind of like I was cheating when I read a kids’ book or a graphic novel that took me an hour, compared to some nonfiction books or novels that took weeks… But I guess it all balances out in the end! I managed to beat the goal, and now I’m gonna tell you about all of them. In a series of posts of which this is the first.

This list doesn’t include books I read for work (like Oglaf Book 2 and Three Panel Soul Book 2, both of which I did prepress on). I’ll also note the format that I read it in, or how I got the book, because I find that interesting.

First, a couple that got left off the 2013 list for some reason — Goodreads tells me I read them around Christmas of that year:

Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz by Chip Kidd
Format: Hardcover read at my in-laws’ house
This is a coffee-table book that focuses on the art of “Peanuts”, reproducing some of Charles Schulz’ originals at full size and in high resolution. The annotations and layouts focus on the drawing and design aspect of Schulz’ work over his long career. Schulz, of course, is one of the all-time masters of the comic strip form, and it’s neat to see his work up close in this book.

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld
Format: Hardcover received as gift
Tom Gauld’s cartoons appear in The Guardian and The New Yorker. They are super great. One of my recent favorites:

This is a very nice hardbound collection of his very funny cartoons. Recommended!

Goliath by Tom Gauld
Format: Hardcover received as gift
Also by Tom Gauld, obviously, this is a longform story about the quiet, unassuming Goliath of Gath, who was unceremoniously forced into battle against some foreigner named David. I love his very minimalist, almost iconographic drawing style (which you can see in the comic above, as well). His intricate textures and patterns are mesmerizing as well.

The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
Format: Hardcover purchased from publisher
I bought this nick & dent edition during a McSweeney’s sale (along with the title below, at the same time). I’m always impressed and a bit intimidated by McSweeney’s books; I get the impression that they take risks and publish challenging and atypical works, and so I approached this one with a bit of trepidation. It’s a thick novel about a pediatric hospital that becomes an ark, floating away in a flood that destroys the rest of the world, and the sort of new society that the doctors and children who survive forge for themselves within the hospital.

It’s definitely challenging and atypical — the sort of book that made me marvel that a human brain could even conceive of a work so intricate. It reminded me a bit of Tom Robbins writing a Chuck Palahniuk type story.

I…think I enjoyed it? It’s kind of hard to tell. I was bowled over by it, certainly.

Minor Robberies by Deb Olin Unferth
Format: Hardcover purchased from publisher
Another McSweeney’s book; this is a little chapbook, actually, sold in a slipcase with two other volumes, one by Dave Eggers and one by Sarah Manguso, all which contain very short pieces in a sort of poem/essay style.

I read this particular volume last, but looking back at the whole series, I appreciated them all without quite feeling like I was getting as much as I could or should out of them. I actually became frustrated while reading because I felt like the words, lovely and evocative as they were, should have been sinking in more deeply. Perhaps because I read little bits before bed and I’m not sure that that was…correct? Like I was trying to wolf down fine chocolates instead of savoring them. But they are tasty and I want to get them inside me faster.

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…And then ones that I know I read in 2014 proper:

Locke & Key Volumes 2–6 and Guide to the Known Keys by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez
Format: Comixology ebooks

Locke & Key: Grindhouse by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez
Format: Comixology ebook
I read the entire Locke & Key series in a huge, breathless run over the course of about two weeks. I’m actually very grateful that the series was finished at the time, because I don’t know if I would have been able to wait in between issues! (Surely I would have been able to, physically. But the effect of reading them all at once is powerful.)

It’s a long, self-contained story that starts a bit slow, but unfolds masterfully. It’s so nice to read something and feel like you’re in good hands; the writer knows what they’re doing; they’re taking you on a trip and they know where to point, what to show you, what to tell you, what to withhold… I really enjoyed this entire series.

The plot follows a mom and her kids who, recovering from a tragedy involving the dad, return to their old family estate in Massachusetts. The kids gradually discover a series of mysterious keys that open various doors around the creepy old house, and their explorations set into motion a series of dangerous events. I guess you could call it a horror story? It’s more creepy than gory, but there are pages that gave me a definite startle on the page-turn, and that’s a big accomplishment for a comic book (as well as a great use of the medium).

Daybreak by Brian Ralph
Format: Hardcover direct from author
I got this from the author at SPX a while back! It’s a first-person graphic novel, told from the reader’s continuous perspective as they (you) navigate a post-zombie-apocalypse world. I guess there are several subsequent volumes out as well! It is a very interesting way to tell a story, and it lends a cinematic flavor to the comic.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
Format: Downloaded ebook
Flann O’Brien is one of those writers whose name I scribbled down ages ago when making a list of stuff to eventually read, someday. This is a surreal book, sort of Borges meets Kafka in the Irish countryside. It’s honestly a bit of a slog in parts (like Kafka), but as one of the early 20th century postmodernists, it’s clear how O’Brien novels influenced many other writers to come.

Golden Age SF: Tales of a Bygone Future ed. Eric T. Reynolds
Format: Paperback from Amazon
I bought this on a whim, which I almost never do. I got it a while back, because Eric Reynolds of Hadley Rille books publishes a lot of anthologies, and I have published a few anthologies, and I wanted to see how he did it.

I like cheesy old science fiction, probably because I read a lot of my mom’s old Best Of The Year 1957 or whatever collections as a kid, and this volume promised short stories written in that style (along with a few authentic reprints from the era).

In my opinion, the reprints are great, and capture that heady, abstract feel that sci-fi sometimes had before we all got canonical aliens and spaceships pressed into our brains by movies. The others, the pastiches, didn’t quite feel authentic to the style to me, and I liked all of them less than the authentic stories (one of which was about two businessmen trying to figure out what goods Earth could possibly export to an alien civilization). A lot of older sci-fi isn’t reprinted in many places, though, so I like that this volume preserves at least those few.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Format: Kindle
I’d never read it before! Man, so great. The language is amazing; you can see some choice quotes in the general public’s aggregate Kindle highlights. It’s a public domain work, too, so you can read it for free — the link above takes you to a free Kindle edition, or it’s on Project Gutenberg too.

The Circle by Dave Eggers
Format: Kindle
I like Dave Eggers’ writing; I know his style isn’t for everyone, but I find it very readable. This is his “tech” novel, about a woman who goes to work for a near-future exaggerated version of a Google/Apple/Facebook-style social media company. It’s kind of satirical, kind of prescient, kind of curmudgeonly, kind of scarily incisive when discussing the intersection of privacy and technology in our lives… It raises all those sorts of very modern questions.

The book’s evenhanded in some ways — it does a good job, I think, of being a character story rather than a polemic — but the values of social media, and the internet commenting-and-review culture in particular, definitely come under harsh scrutiny.

My favorite part was when after finishing it, I delighted in the self-important reviews on Goodreads in which internet commenters huffily complained to one another that Eggers got that part all wrong, and in fact they themselves were cool and good.

The Aeroplane Boys Flight; Or, A Hydroplane Round-Up by John Luther Langworthy
Format: Google ebook
This title began my elaborate survey of early 20th century aeronautical-themed youth adventure fiction, aka perhaps my favorite thing?? I got a few of these books in hardcover, and found a bunch more online (the links to this, and the others of its ilk, direct you to free downloads where available).

The youth-adventure genre of the early 20th century was largely the brainchild of a savvy publisher named Edward Stratemeyer, who landed on the idea of hiring ghostwriters to crank out a ton of short, cheap books on popular subjects that would excite kids. Most children’s fiction at the time was either morality tales, instructional primers, or morality-themed instructional primers, so Stratemeyer wanted to publish the opposite: stories about kids chasing down bad guys and having thrills.

There were Stratemeyer books about kids on motorcycles, kids in the woods, kids on the high seas, kids looking for gold, kids at boarding school, kids building motorcars — every sort of adventure he could think of. He’d invent fictional “authors” with authoritative sounding names like “Captain Ralph Bonehill” (of the Frontier and Boy Hunters series) or “Lester Chadwick” (of the College Sports series).

Stratemeyer would sometimes write, but more often outline, the stories himself; then he’d hire anonymous ghostwriters to fill in the pages as needed. There were series geared toward boys and others toward girls, but the writers could be anyone (L. Frank Baum, of Oz fame, actually wrote a number of girls’ adventure books around this time, using the pseudonyms Edith Van Dyne, Laura Bancroft, and Suzanne Metcalf, among others). The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift all originated with Stratemeyer.

The Aeroplane Boys series was actually published by one of Stratemeyer’s many imitators. It’s one of a number of structurally-identical but ostensibly independent series about a plucky group of teens who use a homebuilt aircraft to solve mysteries, rout villains, and achieve fame and fortune. The books, of which I’ve read quite a few, are as a rule charmingly simple; periodically baffling; they betray either surprisingly deep knowledge of aeronautics or get everything completely wrong; and they are, of course, occasionally racist in shockingly casual ways. This last characteristic makes them very hard to recommend as anything other than historical artifacts.

I can’t even really remember what any of them were about in particular; they all mush together in my memory. The Aeroplane Boys Flight, I believe, is about the titular Aeroplane Boys, brothers Frank and Andy Bird (get it), who put floats on their aircraft to save some sailors, or something. That’s not the point.

The Aeroplane Boys Among the Clouds; Or, Young Aviators in a Wreck by John Luther Langworthy
Format: Google ebook
In this one I think Frank and Andy crash their aircraft on a mountain. Maybe during a race with their snobby rival, the rich kid with his own aircraft? There’s always a rich kid with his own aircraft, and a fugitive bank robber who hides out in an old barn, and a bunch of chance encounters that lead to the heroes’ improbable success. Or, the race might have been in another book. Again, that’s not the point.

The Rover Boys in the Air by Arthur M. Winfield
Format: Google ebook
The Rover Boys were a group of prep-school kids; in this title, they happened to get an aeroplane. The series wasn’t normally about them flying around, so naturally I jumped right to this one, because who cares about anything else besides old-timey aeroplane adventures.

I believe this is the one where, when going to confront the bad guys who have kidnapped their girlfriends and are holding them in an old mansion, the teenaged heroes land their aeroplane in a city park in order to stop at a hardware store to purchase revolvers, just in case.

The Motor Boys in the Clouds by Clarence Young
Format: Google ebook
The Motor Boys are some kids who built motorcycles, and then motorboats, and then motorcars, and eventually aeroplanes — again, I skipped right to the good stuff. I honestly don’t remember anything in particular about any of these books, except for the next one (Over the Rockies) in which they are forced to defend a gold mine that they somehow already own, but they get trapped in the desert, and they have to machine a new cylinder for their airplane engine in the desert, and they also save some settlers who had been captured by Indians.

The Motor Boys Over the Rockies; Or, a Mystery of the Air by Clarence Young
Format: Google ebook
In another one of these books, maybe this one or maybe not, the kids are flying after some bad guys who have stolen an aeroplane, and they need to get a note to the police, so they fly over the closest town that is equipped with a telephone (!), write a note on a piece of paper, tie it around a stone, and throw it into the town square. Because everyone in the town has run out to see the phenomenon of the amazing aeroplane, this plan works. Then, they chase the bad guys until both airplanes run out of gas. Apparently the bad guys’ plan was to fly until they ran out of gas, while over a huge body of water.

The Motor Boys On the Wing by Clarence Young
Format: Google ebook
I love these books. They are my stupid, guilty pleasure. I especially love when the author knows nothing about how aircraft work. It’s the same sort of naiveté that makes the golden age sci-fi so fun to read: they aren’t saddled with the burden of plausibility. In the Rudyard Kipling story “With the Night Mail,” it’s dangerous to fly airships at night because that’s when you get pelted with comets. Conan Doyle had a story about flying an airplane too high and encountering cloud monsters.

You never read about cloud monsters anymore! The mystique of the heavens has been lost to us!!

The Motor Boys Over the Ocean; Or, A Marvelous Rescue in Mid-Air by Clarence Young
Format: Hardcover from used bookstore
I have this one in hard copy! In the back there are a bunch of ads for other series from the same publisher. If the Motor Boys aren’t to your taste, perhaps check out the Motor Girls? Their premiere adventure is titled A Mystery of the Road, summarized thus:

When Cora Kimball got her touring car she did not imagine so many adventures were in store for her. During a trip from one city to another a rich young man lost a pocketbook containing valuable stocks and much cash. Later, to the surprise of everybody, the empty pocketbook was found in the tool box of Cora’s automobile. A fine tale that all wide-awake girls will appreciate.

Or perhaps you’d like the subsequent title, The Motor Girls on a Tour, Or, Keeping a Strange Promise:

A great many things happen in this volume, starting with the running over of a hamper of good things lying in the road. A precious heirloom is missing, and how it was traced up is told with absorbing interest.

I’ll leave you for now with that li’l tease!! I will continue with PART 2 of my reading list in a bit. (Update: here it is! And here’s Part 3!) It will be a fine tale that all wide-awake girls (and perhaps others??) will appreciate.