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.