I started reading Neil’s work right before I moved to London for a brief spell – Neverwhere seemed the perfect read to start the night before I left – but I always felt that its US cover was a bit lacking, especially when compared to the (typically uniform) UK covers that gave a bit of a sense of mystery and grittiness.  As I continued through the Gaiman literary oeuvre (that is to say, not his children-children books or his extensive work in comics), I found myself picking up those UK covers and feeling moderately satisfied by the way they sat on my shelf.

But the one thing I never felt like they truly accomplished was the sense of magic inherent in Gaiman’s work.  The UK cover for American Gods might be completely fitting for the content of the book itself… but it does lack a little sense of magic.  So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Neil’s American publisher – Harper – would be rejacketing all of his books in a uniform style, beginning with American Gods (just in time for the anniversary). In fact, it was only the American Gods rejacket that I noted first – and then Neil tweeted (or perhaps blogged) about all of them eventually getting the rejacket treatment and I got quite excited.  I mean, look at these:

 Obviously, I’m a sucker for a well-done uniform cover series (see both previous entries in The Art of The Cover) – but these capture the sense of child-like wonder that is inherent in all of Gaiman’s books.  They evoke Halloween as a child, they evoke that slight terror of growing up, and they evoke that mysterious sense of things “other” that seem to inhabit a world just next to ours.  Each image evokes a major theme or item from the books in question (Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors obviously exceptions – short story collections and all) in a simple but powerful fashion: the doors (slash Door) from Neverwhere, the falling star from Stardust, the angel grave statue for The Graveyard Book.

Even the newest addition to the covers, that for “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, carries a weight that belies its tiny size.  Isn’t that the best thing about stories, though?  They can pack an immense punch.  These covers started only available on Kindle/e-readers but I’ve seen them (beginning with American Gods) leak slowly out into the universe - and I do hope that next year’s paperback release of The Ocean at the End of the Lane (I know, I know, it just got published today!) will match as well.  Not to say that the covers for Ocean (especially the mysterious and gorgeous US cover) aren’t amazing – but this is, after all, all about the set.

***

This concludes this edition of “The Art of The Cover”. Check back soon for more features and editorials from the Raging Biblioholism staff.  

The Review: The ARC for Tampa showed up this weekend with (as you can see) a big “CAUTION: EXPLICIT CONTENT” sticker smacked on the bottom, as though this was the new Eminem album or something and this was the late 90s, when those things actually made objects seem taboo.  But I give Harper/Ecco props – they’re clearly trying to sell this book based on its racy, explicit, downright disturbing nature.  I don’t think they intend to put that sticker on the hardcover but maybe they should, for the heck of it – guaranteed to get people to pick it up for at least a look, that’s for sure.

Readers, reviewers, and publicity people will read this book and equate Celeste with our rarer literary monsters, like Humbert Humbert or Patrick Bateman (whose novel gets trotted out in the advance blurb, setting up unfair comparisons).  They’re not wrong, I don’t think – her sociopathic, single-minded pursuit of sex (with barely-pubescent minors) and sex (with barely-pubescent minors) alone is both monstrous and captivating to a reader – but the thing is, Celeste never really achieves a richness as a character to be placed into that twisted pantheon.  She feels – indeed, the whole book feels (with one exception, which I’ll come to) brushed with the broadest strokes.  She is Really Attractive and seems to have all of the characteristics you would expect from a Sociopathic Attractive Woman.  Her husband is Rich, Boorish, and Dumb.  The one major supporting female character, another teacher at Celeste’s school, is A Middle-Aged Mess.  They all just feel very capital letters and Nutting never does anything to make them seem more interesting.

Of course, even a cursory read of the first ten or fifteen pages will tell you: that’s not the point.  She doesn’t intend to make these characters seem interesting – she just needs to get them fully formed enough to engage the reader to get to the sex bits.  Because for a book about a pedophile, the sex is (as, I’ll admit, it was at times in Lolita) downright erotic.  And good lord is there a lot of it.  In fact, although it’s being marketed as lit fic, I’d really honestly put this book in erotica.  There is a LOT of sex and it is graphically described.  Celeste sets out to seduce her target, succeeds…. and then it’s sex, in lots of places and lots of styles.  Nominally there is a plot – trying to keep this a secret from the boy’s father, from her husband, from the world at large – but that really seems to be a secondary consideration to the sex scenes.  Hell, major plot points (if they can be said to be that…) usually turn on sex and sexual manipulation.  This would be interesting if the reader wasn’t pretty numbed to it by about page 100.

The thing is, Nutting is doing something interesting here.
(SPOILERS may ensue beyond this point – there’s not a lot to spoil, but just giving fair warning.)
We rarely see a female pedophile in literature – although it seems that there’ve been plenty of young teachers with a taste for their young students.  And, at the trial (because, obviously, that was where this book was headed in one way or another) at the end of the book, one of Celeste’s young paramours seems to want to brag about it – and wouldn’t you?  I don’t know a straight boy who hasn’t had some fantasy, at some point, about a teacher – hell, one of the best Van Halen songs of all time is “Hot For Teacher”.  It’s a tried-and-true fantasy – and Nutting dances around the issue just enough to get readers thinking/talking.  These boys might not be “mature”, but what does that mean, exactly?  Are they being taken advantage of by Celeste in a predatory manner?  Or are they just living the dream?  You want to say, “No, she’s a sex offender, you can’t do that with kids under 18″ – but the fact that you’ve paused to consider before knee-jerk spouting that societally-enforced response means that Nutting has scored a palpable hit.

The problem for me is that it came too late.  It’s only in the last 50 or so pages that she takes any sort of stab at dealing with the actual issues beyond presenting the reader with some pretty hot sex scenes, which just happen to be between a 14-year-old and a 26-year-old.  But once Celeste is caught (in a pretty contrived sequence of events leading to a truly impossible breakdown of all common sense), then we’ve got the whole issue of a trial and people asking her “why” and I suppose this is where the Bateman comparisons come in because she’s still thinking about sex and just responds that it’s what she likes – there’s no remorse, no apparent understanding that what she’s done is/was/continues to be wrong.  And that’s a fine choice to make – but don’t deprive the reader of a literary forum where these issues are going to be hashed out.  The trial slips by in the blink of an eye and the end of the book finds Celeste living a new, lower-key life – and still cruising for boys when and how she can.  It’s the last page where she brings up the fact that she’s only going to get older and it’ll become more difficult for her to succeed at this game in her late 30s, 40s, 50s, etc - that is an interesting thought, no?  The hot young teacher screwing a student is more titillating but also, for whatever strange reason, a touch more acceptable than an older woman screwing a student – isn’t it?  What does that sliding scale of morality mean (this is bad, but that’s slightly less bad than this) and how are we supposed to feel at the end of this book?

Rating: 3 out of 5.  I walked away numb, to be honest.  Celeste’s sexual rapaciousness definitely provides some intense reading – and Nutting does a far better job at capturing sex than most authors (I sure hope Harper does something like “hey housewives, you think Fifty Shades was hot?”) could ever hope to do.  But what are we, as readers, supposed to take away / think about with this book?  The sexy sex-times – or the fact that our main character is a sociopathic, pedophilic sex addict?  Celeste Price, while as bad as they come, just isn’t bad enough to be memorable.

Rating: 6 out of 5.  It is so rare anymore that a reader can walk into a book knowing nothing about the contents – and part of this book’s greatest pleasures came from exactly that.  Thus, the break in my format.  I encourage you to simply take my word that this book is an absolute delight, one that simultaneously wants to be immediately devoured and approached with lingering restraint. I cannot remember the last time I wanted so desperately to know more and all the while make sure I soaked up every single drop of one page before moving onto the next.   I am tempted to pick it up again, right now, and start once more from the top.  It is harrowingly intelligent and vividly realized – just close your eyes and leap in.

The Review: My imagination feels enriched and nourished after reading this book.  I will talk very little about the plot or the characters – because I want people to be as unblemished as possible when they get into the story.  Let me dispatch of such concerns with a quick, defacto statement: the plot is terrifically twisting, the characters unique and full of life, and there are moments that will make your heart swell and moments that will make you jump out of your skin.

Now.

I have not read Special Topics in Calamity Physics, although I’ve heard marvelous things.  No idea what it’s about – but, then, I had no idea what this was about either.  I had heard bits and bobs of buzz around the internet over the course of the last year or so but I didn’t really register it until, as I prepared for the BEA, I saw the book on the signings list and saw a ton of buzz about people desperate to get copies.  So, I hopped in the queue and got my copy and I immediately felt… something.  Curiosity, I suppose, in its strongest form.

The cover – striking and simple, with the washed-out lettering, the mysterious girl’s face, the film-emulsion bubbles and scratches.  The pages – what were these darker black/gray stripes scattered throughout the ordinary white?  The synopsis – simple and yet a hint of something more lurking just below the surface.  And so, on a gray night with a storm brewing, I opened the book quietly during a commercial break on the Tony Awards.  An hour later, I came up for air and realized that I had stumbled – quite happily and by the simplest of luck – onto an untarnished snowbank of a story.  One where the author’s imagination had created an almost punchdrunk-esque experience, but packed into the pages of a book.

Several times during my experience reading this book, even long after I knew better, I found myself going to my computer to look up something.  To see if I could track down some evidence that this Cordova was a real person.  That these films, described just tantalizingly well-enough to make your brain scream with desire, could potentially be real.  That this man who had inspired such devotion and created such horrifying and beautiful things might be out there somewhere.  In the process, I managed to discover lots of other things – the “TOR” sub-internet, for example, is absolutely a real thing and whoa… – but Cordova remained just out of reach, much as he does for our hero.  He’s a bit like Kubrick, a bit like Lynch, a bit like Brando, a bit like, a bit like… but he manages to remain an entirely original creation – and one our world would, I think, be all the better for having been real.

Moving on, smething about the decision to include screenshots, paper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera in this book actually worked here.  So often, the inclusion of trinkets and things feels like a gimmick (see: the enjoyable, albeit completely flawed Personal Effects: Dark Art novel/failed-series-starter).  J.J. Abrams is apparently doing it with his new novel and I just have the strangest feeling that it will feel corporate, sleek, and lacking in any sort of humanity.  Whereas this, for whatever reason, feels organic.  It feels like a part of the story – actually, that’s the best way to describe it.  These pieces aren’t incidental (with one possible exception, at the end) but rather integral.  They are the story as much as the regular prose – it’s just being funneled through a different medium.

But also, as a result, the book’s images seem to pop so much more vividly in my mind than nearly anything else I’ve ever read.  The opening images of a red coat glimpsed under a streetlamp on a rainy evening around the Central Park reservoir, the flickering light bulb in a bathroom, the strange catacombs, the little shops and restaurants in New York City, even locations as simple as McGrath’s West Village apartment… they all feel beamed straight into my imagination, saturated like a Bryan Fuller TV show.  It will come as no surprise that the book has already been optioned for film – it is tailor-made to be (potentially) one of the best thrillers since Hitchcock – but it doesn’t ever feel as though it’s just the primer for the film.  Instead, it feels (when you’re reading it) as though the film is being projected inside your head as you read.  I realize that this is usually what the experience of reading feels like – one’s imagination taking hold and the neurons firing to create the (when you think about it) strange and surreal sensation that you are seeing whatever you’re reading – but this is that feeling times a hundred.

The best way to describe it is (and I shake my head admiringly at Pessl for planting this claim so brazenly and then having the talent to’ve pulled it off, in regards to how a reader would experience her work) to use a quote from the book itself – a Cordova actor explaining the experience of returning to the world after working on a Cordova film:

“When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if the colors had been turned way up in your eyes.  The reds were redder.  Blacks blacker.  You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen.  You dreamed.  And what dreams.”

The whole thing is an experience I will not soon forget – and one I will continue to contemplate the meanings and complexities of for a long, long time.  Pessl pulls off another impossible trick when she has a film buff explain how Cordova’s films “work” – and you realize, as the reader, that this is exactly what the novel is building towards.  This is the arc we’ve been on and this is how this is going to go.  But the minute you achieve that self-awareness, you are looking for ways for it to fail.  Inevitably – that’s just human nature.  But when you reach the end of the novel and – well, the best example I can give is Inception.  The top is still spinning – did it wobble?  Was it about to?  Cordova’s films end like that, only moreso – and that’s exactly what happens here.  It is sovereign, deadly, and (indeed) perfect – as all of our rarer monsters are.

The Review: So we reach the midway point of Austen 2013 and I have to say, this one will be intensely more difficult to complete than Dickens 2012 if the remaining books are more like Mansfield Park than Emma.  I have been told that Mansfield is perhaps the least-likable Austen novel and I take some comfort in that… but good god, this one seemed to have little of the joyous comforts I’ve just begun to warm up to.

First and most importantly, Fanny Price. Could not be. A bigger drip.  Wet blanket.  Party pooper. Etc etc etc.  My god, she’s the most passive ‘heroine’ in the history of literature and she’s such a prig to boot.  I’m not going to support the scandalous behavior of most of her relations (we’ll come to that in a moment) but at least they seemed to be living life and having a bit of fun doing it, whereas Fanny just can’t abide a single thing.  She goes on walks and complains of being tired, she doesn’t want to do the play because she thinks it’d upset her uncle in some hypothetical sense (seeing as he hypothetically would never have KNOWN ABOUT IT, had he not magically returned just then), she takes the verbal abuse from her other aunt without ever really putting up any sort of fight, she allows herself to basically be bundled into the next step of life without ever so much as considering anything for herself.  Hell, in the end, she only ends up ‘happy’ because Edmund was like “oh, well… I guess there’s Fanny!”

If you couldn’t tell, I was confused by this book.  Here’s an author who has developed a reputation over the last 200 years as having been one of the first real writers of strong female characters.  I mean, obviously within the socio-political strictures of the day – it’s not like Elizabeth Bennet was going to be Prime Minister (although I’d read the hell out of that fan-fic)… but I digress.  She has this reputation for writing strong female characters and then she presents us with a novel in which the main female character is anything but strong.  Unless you consider her strong in her steadfast opposition to things like “fun” and “joy” and “anything remotely resembling an active engagement in life”, in which case sure. Go ahead.

Everyone in this novel seems a little skeevy, to be honest.  We’ve seen elopements and such scandalous behaviors before (hey, younger Bennet sister whose name I never remember!) but this book seemed to have a bit more of a moralistic bent.  We see (or rather just hear) about a woman leaving her husband for another man, the husband getting a divorce; meanwhile another woman elopes.  And Fanny ends up with the upstanding soon-to-be-pastor – and their lives are probably upstanding and moral and God-fearing, amen.  Where’s the romantic spark of such so-wrong-they’re-right couples as Bennet & Darcy or Woodhouse & Knightley?

All of this vigorous confusion and distaste aside, there are things about this book to recommend it as an interesting addition to the canon.  Firstly, as you can tell, it seems to stick out like a sore thumb and thus one could have a critical field day comparing it to the rest of Austen’s works.  But secondly, I wonder what old Dickens would’ve thought of this book.  The section (unnecessary and far too long, honestly) near the end where Fanny is sent back to Portsmouth – presumably to show her where she came from / how terrible it is to be poor – was incredibly Dickensian.  Or, to put it more chronologically accurately, Dickens’ work shows roots in this passage of Austen.  The children running around, the quirky lower-class lives… it felt like something out of an entirely different novel and moments like Mrs. Price explaining why they have the young ones run around with messages because they haven’t gotten the bell fixed… pluck the Prices out of this novel, drop them into any Dickens novel, and I dare say you’d have a seamless fit.  It’s like Thursday Next had to patch up a text-hole and the only thing available was a third-tier Dickens family (hey, Jasper Fforde, if you read this?  I want a shout-out for that idea).

Anyway, it’s all a bit strange, this book.  Weird sudden appearances, major plot points delivered (and then expounded upon) via letters, and a main character who couldn’t have less agency if she tried.  Actually, that’s quite true – because if she tried, she would inherently have agency.  And she does not try in this book, really, at all.  To do anything.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.  I just can’t get past the fact that Fanny is such a drip.  As a result, everything about this book feels long and frustrating and dare-I-say “wrong” – because our main character thinks its all wrong in one way or another and we’re stuck with her point of view, so inevitably it all feels off.  I truly hope that this, this halfway mark of Austen 2013, is the low-water mark – and that it’ll only be uphill from here.

(ed. note – I’m well aware that many people dislike Northanger Abbey even more than this book.  And I disliked it when I ‘read’ it my freshman year of college – BUT I’m now prepared [literally; I have a degree that entitles me so] to look upon it as Austen intended: a send-up of the Gothics.  So, come October, I’ll have a ball. Slash it can’t be any worse that this.)

The Review: Well, that escalated quickly.

The sometimes rocky first entry in the AtWQ series felt, at times, a little forced and a whole lot of artifice with a lack of much plot to drive it – beyond the MacGuffin of the Bombinating Beast statue.  Only now, and with a single line in this book, we learn that it might not be such a MacGuffin after all.  That and we now find that the first book was really more about setting up our main characters and giving us a sort of intro-adventure, in order to get used to them.  Snicket spends very little time here reminding of of who’s who or what’s what – a fact I ordinarily bemoan when it comes to series that are drawn out over time (the drawbacks of being a voracious reader: sometimes series get shoved to the side or lost in a mental filing cabinet) but one that here doesn’t seem to bother me.  Perhaps it’s because, as the best children’s authors manage to do quite a bit more frequently than their grownup counterparts, these characters are so simple and yet so unique that they cannot easily be forgotten.  Moxie Mallahan, Pip & Squeak, Ellington, S. Theodora, even young Lemony himself – they’re all just so delightful.

But beyond the delightful cast Mr. Snicket has assembled in his deliciously dank and despondent setting (the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea already looms large on my mental map of eerie places after only two books), we have a plot that practically sings.  Snicket himself references, several times, how over-his-head he felt at that age with all of these things swirling around his brain – and he really does have a lot on his mind.  The mystery of the missing girl scientist is the primary thrust of the plot but the discoveries come hot on each other’s heels in this book, revealing more details of the Inhumane Society and the villainous Hangfire without ever actually revealing anything too, well, revealing.  Put another way, it’s not that Snicket is answering questions and wrapping things up – oh no, there are probably more questions now than there were before – but simply that there’s a confidence here that shows in how the reader interacts with the newly raised questions.  The book ends with Snicket in just as much confusion as he began it in, but we’re right there alongside him now: we’re set and ready to figure this all out.  The reader feels like one of Snicket’s trusted associates and that’s a lovely thing to feel.

The ending, speaking of (no SPOILERS, don’t worry), more firmly establishes the context of where this series fits into ASoUE – because, at times, you can forget that Snicket is only 13 in this book.  He’s a smart and thoughtful young lad, though, and it’s clear that his strength inspires others.  The team he’s put together in Stain’d-by-the-Sea believe in him, believe in the cause – and that’s enough to make (as he says in the book) not anything possible, but at least this thing.  

My favorite thing about these books – about Snicket books in general – is that he doesn’t pull any punches for his target audience.  It isn’t quite the same as a book like The Fault in Our Stars, written for a young audience but without any pretensions and thus feeling far more honest because of it.  Instead, there are plenty of pretensions and “learning moments” (a phrase here that means “cleverly disguised ways of teaching readers young and old what a word or phrase means without really letting them know they’re being taught”) – but Snicket, like Green, doesn’t hide the fact that the world can be a confusing, frustrating, and even sometimes terrifying place.  It’s important to remember, actually, that Snicket is 13 in these books – and then realize just how brave he truly is.  The adults in this series (as with the series before) are almost entirely either clueless or villainous – and sometimes both.  The kids are the ones with more shading, more nuance, more humanity – and what a thing for a young kid to read, you know?  It might be subtle or subconscious even, but a kid who reads a Snicket book will come away with the sense that they aren’t “just a kid”.  Some people might take umbrage at the darkness, saying we should be telling our kids its all happiness and sunshine and ponies.

But maybe that’s just because we want to keep these delightful books for ourselves.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  Leaps and bounds of improvement upon the first book of the new series, thrusting the reader forward into the next adventure and building up a whirlwind of mystery and intrigue surrounding… well… pretty much everything, I guess.  What’s going on with Kit?  Why does everyone want that Bombinating Beast statue?  Who IS Hangfire?  Will that invisible ink ever work?  I don’t know if these are the right questions or the wrong questions… but I can tell you one that I absolutely know to be a “right” question: how long do I have to wait for the next book?

******
BEA 2013 – I’ll try not to do this too often, but when I had a particularly unique experience at the BEA with a given author, I may drop a note about it, if you’ll allow it.
Mr. Snicket, being a secretive individual, wasn’t on hand but his official representative Daniel Handler was there signing copies of this latest AtWQ books on his behalf.  I asked Mr. Handler to pass along to Mr. Snicket the message that Mr. Snicket’s dreadful books had made my childhood thoroughly despondent.
He replied that he was saddened to see that I had doubled down on a lifetime of bleak sadness by continuing to read Mr. Snicket’s books – and then he snatched my Field Notes Brand notebook from my shirt pocket, expressing delight at the fact that we share a love of those scrappy little repositories.  He briefly read aloud to the assembled line an excerpt of my notes on the ethics panel I’d seen the day before.  We were all terrified, even Mr. Handler, and he passed me the book back with a grin and a wink.  

The Review: If you’ve been a regular reader here, you might notice a trend (well, you might notice several but that’s beside the point) when it comes to locations in literature.  Places evoke certain feelings – they do that in real life, in memory, but also in literature.  The British Isles are usually pretty gray and cool, Italy just one big stretch of coast with some stepped towns & Rome in between, the South full of big trees with Spanish moss and girls with big hats sitting on porches, etc etc.  I mean, these are all generalizations, but we build these basic markers into our minds so that we can then hit the ground running whenever our imaginations are called upon to deliver us to these places.  But there’s a bit of a double-edged sword there: these places can infect the way we experience the book we’re reading just as much as the book is supposed to call up these places.

So maybe that’s why I felt like I was shading my eyes, fighting through haze, the whole time I was reading Point Doom.  Put another way: it’s too bright in LA for noir.  I couldn’t shake the brightness, even in nighttime scenes, when it came to reading this book – and it kept me just faintly grimacing a little the whole time, like a touch of a hangover on a sunny morning.

Of course, our hero seems to be suffering through basically the same thing.  He’s pretty paint-by-numbers, our Mr. Fiorella: a last bad job in New York that resulted in a lot of bodies and a lot of nightmares sent the already-a-functioning-alcoholic PI into a tailspin, one that finally bottomed out in LA.  At the beginning of the book, he’s basically being kicked out of his mom’s house – where he moved back to – and, at 46, looks pretty washed up.  He’s a pretty scummy guy, to be honest – might not drink or do drugs anymore but hookers and sleazy car salesmanship come easy to him and he’s not the sort of person you’d really probably want to spend much time with.  And therein lies a bit of a problem.  Most anti-heroes are engaging despite their flaws – but Fiorella never really got to that point.  He seemed so generic that I never really committed to caring about him or his problems.

And his problems, I’ll say, are legion.  This book has two things to recommend it: one, the languid layers of plotting that bring to life the middle-aged, washed-up lifestyle in LA… and two, the violence.  Holy shit is there a lot of really impressively graphic violence, put to the page with almost a touch of glee by Mr. Fante.  It gets started unexpectedly and at full speed with the discovery of a dead body about a third of the way into the book… and a particular excised body part that becomes nearly (emphasis on nearly) comical as it pops up throughout the rest of the story.  But it (the violence) quickly becomes almost too much – and I’m not squeamish, nor do I shy away from a good violent adventure.  But it felt too… easy for Fante to present this violence. He didn’t earn the stomach-twisting torture scenes because he never gave me anything else to latch onto – or, to put it another way, he wanted to make me sick but hadn’t put anything in my stomach first.

At the end of the novel, a twist comes into play – not a twist, per se, but a revelation at least – that felt completely out of left field.  Again, it was as though Fante neglected to develop certain parts of the story before giving us a piece of information that we probably should’ve seen as a whopper but instead I sort of thought “….well, that’s an awfully convenient and tenuous reason for all of this to be happening.”  As a result, I closed the book (a speedy read, I’ll give it that) with a sense of feeling cheated out of the full experience of the story.

Rating: 2 out of 5.  I usually don’t like to ask this question but sometimes a book makes me wonder: why this story?  It doesn’t feel much different from any number of other middle-of-the-road crime/mystery novels when it comes to plot or characters – in fact, other than the few utterly shocking descriptions of violence, I couldn’t really find anything to distinguish it at all.  That’s not to say that it’s bad, not really – it’s just that it’s not really worth your time.

So!  For those of you who happen to follow along on Twitter (coughcough @ragingbibliohol cough), you might be aware that I spent last week at the Javits Center here in New York City for BookExpo America 2013.  Yes, that’s right – there’s a BookExpo… and it is everything you’d think it would be.

A friend of mine who used to work for a small press here in NYC attended, with her company, the last two years and every June she’d tell me how crazy and amazing it was and how I really needed to bite the bullet and attend.  So, I swallowed the cost of a four-day pass and signed up as a blogger.  This entitled me to conference entry on all four days of the event but also got me into some (hypothetically) exclusive blogger-related events on Day One.  Without further ado, I’m going to ramble on for a bit about the experience.  Read on at your leisure!

Wednesday, May 29
So, a little before 9am, I found myself walking down 37th St towards the Javits Center.  Within minutes, I had a spiffy badge and was headed down into the bowels of the building – a proper conference it was to be, with continental breakfast and large windowless rooms.  After some always-slightly-awkward first-day-of-school introductions to new blogfriends at the table, the day got underway.
A somewhat dull keynote (in which we were implored to be nicer in our reviews – yawn) led into a choose-your-own-adventure series of breakout sessions.  First, some editors from Tor, Mulholland, and Harlequin chatted us up about some exciting upcoming books. Then some blogging pros discussed how to make the most of one’s blog – my favorite sentiment being that you should just be yourself and do what you do best.  Nice to remember that sometimes, you know?
Lunch was an ethics panel, full of really pertinent and important information but delivered (unfortunately) in the driest of tones.  Still, I managed to stay awake and pick up a few important pieces of information – including the idea to add a little disclaimer on the site to say that none of these reviews are biased based on how I received the book (a gift, an advance copy for review, etc.) or who wrote it and so on.  The afternoon brought some fascinating technical jargon – that blog-platform panel gave me so many ideas and spurred my belief that I probably need to move to WordPress.org – and some ideas on how to expand a blog’s reach.  It concluded not with the Blogger Keynote but I trotted down the hall instead to catch the Buzz Panel presentation.
I then dropped by the Harper Collins Blogger Appreciation party in Midtown but slipped away after a drink and a brief (strange) interview – needed to rest up for the following day, I’d been told.

Thursday, May 30 – Saturday, June 1
No matter how prepared I thought I was, I was unprepared for the first day of the proper exhibition hall, take-no-prisoners BEA.  I mean, holy shit.  The exhibitors are rushing around to get their stalls finalized and then they let the masses in – and it’s a free-for-all.  I had a vague sense of what events I wanted to see but mostly I knew that there’d be galleys and that I wanted to get my hands on many of them, so I just started trotting up and down the aisles.  First off, the place is huge – there was a whole section I didn’t even discover until after my first signing of the day.  But secondly, people were going crazy, jostling for position and grabbing books and acting nuts.  I got caught up in it, I’ll admit, grabbing any galleys I could find… but then, after the initial rush died down, I realized that it was silly to just grab books I wouldn’t want to read.  I would be a discerning attendee, that I would!
And so over the course of the three general conference days, I wandered around the space picking up galleys here and there, chatting with publishers (so lovely to put faces to names, especially with some of my favorite small presses), and often queuing for upwards of 30 minutes to get things signed.

By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around (I’ll freely admit to leaving early on Friday, too), I had racked up an impressive (by my standards) number of books.  In fact, I just about doubled my to-read list, going from 29 to 56.  Here’s a photo of much (but not all) of the damage:

Some are signed, some are not; some are proper already-published books, some won’t be out until well into 2014 (2014!!); some are books I knew I wanted to read from long ago, some are brand-new finds.  I can honestly say that I’m excited about all of them (or at least intrigued) and I’ll be tagging all of the reviews with BEA13 here on the blog in case you’re interested in seeing what looks good in the coming months.

And if you’re even remotely interested in seriously reading lots of books, the BEA is worth your time.  The prices may seem a little high but considering how many books you can get (and how many of them can be signed), you quickly realize that you’re coming out ahead in the deal – and if you’re a casual reader, curious but not yet ready to fully commit, I met several PowerReaders on Saturday (the only day open to the “public”) who definitely got their money’s worth.

So, BEA, until next year – I will most definitely back (even though I’ll probably still have books left to read from this year).

The Review: I’ve never read Jess Walter before, despite his having been one of those authors who people continually say “oh, you really ought to read him” – not in the way that they look at me with horror when I say I haven’t read a particular classic author (and, hey, I’m working on it) but just the casual recommendation of an author has achieved that particular status, if you know what I mean.  So, when he finally cracked the ToB, it seemed like fate had brought us to that crucial moment.  Of course, it ended up being a delayed moment – I wanted the really lovely Penguin UK paperback cover (see above) as opposed to the still-lovely but somewhat meh US cover, so I had to wait for it to come out and then to arrive, etc etc.

Anyway, not the point.  The point is… I feel, with this book, much like I felt with Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You.  I think it was the movie-esque feeling about the book, although this one also very much leans into that in an almost potentially winking way.  See, most of the characters are in pictures!  And as a result, movies are sort of an inescapable “write your final paper on this” sort of thing in the book.  So, yeah, I naturally would be curious to see the actual film of this story – because it’d probably be a decent Thanksgiving-release good-for-the-fam sort of movie.

But that also… I wouldn’t say that’s a good thing, necessarily.  I didn’t dislike the book – far from it – but there’s a level of split focus that bothered me a bit.  Walter does some really cool stuff here, like spinning off entire chapters (or sometimes less) to explore excerpts of certain other fictional creations from the world of the story.  That was actually undoubtedly my favorite part of the book: flipping to page to find the first chapter of Alvis’ book or of Deane’s book or the pitch of Donner! – it showed Walter’s faculty with form and I, as a writer of different things from time to time, really enjoyed it.  But it also, in a way, undercut the potential power of the book and drove home its vaguely gimmicky – no, that’s the wrong way to put it, I’m sorry… its vaguely commercial appeal.  We’re not talking Nicholas Sparks commercial but… this feels like the sort of book my old bosses at CAA would read and say “hey, let’s make a picture!”

Except no one, unfortunately, talks like that anymore.

Anyway.

The characters of Pasquale and Dee are the most interesting, without a doubt – and I think they’re well and truly meant to be that way.  They are the “main” characters, even though the book diverts us into other characters’ minds and moments.  I appreciated that, for the way it broadened the world, but as the book wound down I felt as though the main plot (or what I took to be the main plot) had gotten a bit of a short shrift.  But it’s a quibble – it’s how I might’ve written the book and so, meh, whatever.  Seeing these other characters is still mighty enjoyable and they’re all quite interesting in their own rights.  Pat, especially, would be an interesting character to see go off and do other things.  His story, which felt at first so disparate from the rest, dovetailed nicely by the end and he felt like the most changed character at the close of the book.  Claire, Deane, the writer kid, etc… they all felt a bit like plot devices.  Yes, there was character “development” but most of it felt rather signpost-y and simple.

But isn’t there a place for these simple pleasures?  I think so.  The world will not live or die based on the actions and reactions of these characters, whether in the 60s or the present – but their worlds might.  And that’s what makes it fun to read this book: we can take a true respite from the madness that surrounds us and, instead, just enjoy the simplest of storytelling pleasures: whether or not the boy and girl will get together. Because we’re rooting for them, even as heroes of life like Richard Burton make their guest appearances (hilariously, by the way) – and Dee & Pasquale make real tough choices and while they sometimes seem a bit overly cinematic… well, who hasn’t pretended they’re the lead in the film of their life?

Oh and speaking of – the ending is straight-out-of-Hollywood style “here’s what happened to the characters next”.  So I really wasn’t kidding when I said that it feels like a movie in book form.  Take that as you will.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  I enjoyed this book but I also felt it to be a bit slight – like a good rom-com that you see on a date, maybe buy on DVD for stay-at-home date-nights… but that doesn’t really change much about your life.  Walter is a talented writer, turning some beautiful and some funny phrases… but ultimately, I didn’t get much more than a lovely sunny summer read out of this. Seeing as it has been in the 90s of late, though, that feels just about right.  I wouldn’t've traded it in this moment for anything – so just time your read properly and you’ll drift away like a boat on the water off Porto Vergogna.

The Review: Jo Nesbø has managed, quite wonderfully, to keep the Harry Hole series genuinely interesting well into its ninth book.  Let’s ignore the ridiculous decision by English-speaking publishers (yeah, looking at both Harper and Vintage here) to publish the books with only a modicum of respect for the order in which they ought to be read (reading The Bat later this year will undoubtedly provide less enjoyment than if I’d read it several years ago, when it would’ve been my introduction to Harry) – and, while we’re at it, let’s also ignore the absolutely outrageous decision by a design-challenged individual or individuals at Vintage to change the covers from the dynamic black/white covers to these airport-trashy CRIME! covers – and instead look to the fact that even if books 1, 2, and 6 don’t hold up to the other books in the series, it’s a true achievement that Harry continues to be a dynamic and engaging and (most importantly) fluid character after so long.

I was worried at the conclusion of The Leopard that Nesbø had pushed our hero too far.  The brutal violence, both physical and psychological, had shattered him and it seemed like there would be no real way to stagger back to life after that.  Except I was forgetting a very important fact about human beings – one that Ian Fleming deployed so well in the Bond series – and that is that we heal.  The scars and ghosts may remain – but we can heal.  We can change.  In a shocking scene at the end of the novel, a character brings up the fact that Harry, for the longest time, argued that human beings can’t change… and Harry responds that maybe he was wrong.  He spends much of the book doggedly saying that even though he no longer works for the police, he is still a policeman – but that doesn’t disprove the assertion that people can change.  Harry has cleaned up his act, gotten healthy again – and even as he dips back into his old vices* to solve the case, he seems to have a handle on them much more than he ever did before.

*I have to insert here that the one particular moment regarding Harry and an old vice feels… it feels a little bit disingenuous and wrong of Nesbø to’ve done it.  I won’t give away the particular moment but it involves alcohol and while I understand why it happened, there’s little blowback on it – and it just felt like a BIG moment brushed aside without any follow-up.   Anyway.

There’s also a slight sense, however, that Nesbø is starting to regard his creation the way that Conan Doyle regarded Sherlock Holmes.  It started really in The Snowman – setting up a proper serial killer, starting to put Harry’s life into the ringer – and only accelerated into The Leopard.  And (again trying to avoid spoilers, although the book has been out long enough that the statute of limitations will be open soon) there’s a sense, at the end of the book, that Nesbø wants to take a break from Harry.  At the same time, however, this book feels entirely open-ended.  The main crime in the novel, Oleg’s apparent murder of Gusto, feeds up the chain into a general drug-ring sort of story… but Harry doesn’t end up putting it all together.  Indeed, several characters from the story put different pieces together without ever combining their knowledge and that leaves one considering what could come next.  It feels like it could (and perhaps should) be a major denouement – but it also runs the risk of sounding like some of the things we’ve seen before.

I appreciated Nesbø’s brevity in this book and his restraint.  Where the last few books have clocked in at an impressive heft, this one was under 500 pages and I think it benefited from that compression.  The plot was so close-to-home that it was better to leave the bigger aspects of this crime/drug ring hovering on the sidelines: this was a book about Harry trying to atone for the past he pretty royally screwed up.  And I really loved that, that intimacy.  Harry nearly has his life “together” but he sacrifices – or is, at least, willing to sacrifice – so much just to help the woman he loves and the ‘son’ he never quite fathered enough.  It makes the end that much more potent and beautifully so.  There comes a passage at the end that punctuates several scenes that whip back and forth between different characters, between Harry and the murderer, that stops the eye for a moment… because there is no paragraph break.  It is a long, single paragraph, running from one page onto another and then to another – and it is beautiful, simple, heartbreaking.  The sort of writing that elevates this series above nearly (if not) all of its contemporaries – that and the fact that Harry, who started out as nothing more than another “anti-hero”, has become so much more realistic than we have any right to expect our crime heroes to be.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.  There are reasons that I can’t declare this book an out-and-out smash hit but I can’t really go into them without divulging some of the plot – and the plot is twisty enough that I’d really rather keep it secret.  Suffice it to say, the narrow focus is both welcome and a little frustrating at times… and at the end of the book, you have to wonder what Nesbø wants to do with Hole.  But he had the choice to make Harry a run-of-the-mill-gruff-cop-with-a-problem and instead made several more dynamic and more damning choices.  It has paid off incredibly for Nesbø, though – this series is quite possibly my favorite crime saga happening today.  Phantom is just another excellent entry and well worth any even-modest fan’s time.

The Review: After the scary conclusion of Lonely City, it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen next for Spider.  There was a real sense of… not mortality, not quite – perhaps just fear.  Real fear, for himself and for Channon and Yelena – and, just maybe, for the city (and the country) too.  So it wasn’t a surprise to see him open this collection bouncing around the apartment jacked up on a crazy amount of drugs, raving about something or other.

But that lack of surprise – that sensation that, oh yes, we know exactly what’s happening for Spider – made me a little concerned.  I picked up this volume today on purpose: it’s a rainy day here in the City and I wanted something to take my mind off of an otherwise rather irritating day.  I wasn’t – gasp – desensitized, was I?  Or worse, Ellis & co hadn’t lost their touch, had they?  I mean, there are some inspired moments (and some wonderful guest art) in that first issue – the various faux-Spiders were particularly funny – but even a few issues in, I was wondering if the shock had worn off.

I should take a moment here to interrupt myself and say that even as I was ‘worried’ about getting ‘used to’ this series… I was still reveling in the character development Ellis brings to these people.  The one-shot with Channon and Yelena going shopping – and the further hints that Yelena is becoming her own version of Spider – was beautiful, especially coming on the heels of that first-issue flashback, with the TV show about Spider’s life.  Seeing Channon again for the first time, admittedly cartooned out in every way, made me realize just how far these girls have come and almost without us noticing.  Spider’s noticed, of course – that’s probably been the whole point – but for the reader, they’ve just grown naturally.  It’s the same way that you can’t really chart your own growth as a kid – you can measure it and say “wow, I’m two inches taller than I was a month ago” but you never really feel it in the moment.  Rather, you’re suddenly six feet tall and wondering how that happened.  Same thing here.

Anyway, back to my nerves:
HOWEVER.  In the back half of the collection, the three issues that give this collection its name, I saw that my fears were misplaced: the sentiment has changed, a little, and the shock of the future-metropolis has maybe gotten a bit old hat… but it most certainly hasn’t stagnated, if that paradox makes any sense.  Indeed, Spider’s crusade has stepped up to a whole new level of depravity and insanity: he’s taking the fight to where the Smiler can’t touch him.

Also, side note: that little blip of the Smiler we got?  With the American flag?  Firstly, I didn’t even recognize him – the Presidency seems to’ve cracked that facade a bit.  But secondly?  Hilarious – and terrifying.  Equal amounts of intense emotions there.
Anyway – so we’re looking at a whole ‘nother angle for Spider now.  This is, perhaps, what Spider has been meant for the whole time, ever since Royce convinced him to come down out of the mountains.  Even that first setup, with the dingy apartment and all that… I think (and it seems like Ellis bears this out) Spider felt bored.  As though this was old hat – the same as it ever was.  But now, the stakes are raised – and Ellis leaves us at the edge of uncharted territory.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.  This one gets a happy ending, as these things go, but I’ve not got my hopes up in any measurable sense.       I fear that things are going to go dark before they get lighter for our dear Spider… but as I look into this world of present shock and idiotic media outlets, I once again cannot help but long for a Spider of our own.  Someone to shake the people up – although even Ellis manages to poke fun at himself on this one, in one of those aforementioned TV episodes, when “Spider” quells the riots because his column was **LIGHTS AND CHOIRS AND AHHHHH** THE TRUTH!!
Still, a world with Spider Jerusalem is better than one without.  Just hope you aren’t on the wrong side of his bowel disruptor.