An Embarrassment of Riches

Drawn To It - by Steve

I used to be a voracious reader. My time spent riding the bus everywhere usually involved a thick novel balanced carefully on my lap. However, with summer creeping slowly closer, I have been riding my bike more and my reading time has been trimmed considerably. I find myself turning to graphic novels more often to get a great story, but in a condensed version.

I discovered FreakAngels by accident. Warren Ellis is truly an icon when it comes to graphic novels. I read his first full-length novel, Crooked Little Vein, a while back, thoroughly enjoying every word. When I saw that he was working on a new online webcomic, I had to check it out.  Each Friday, I get a little delivery of genius to my RSS reader.  FreakAngels is an excellent post-apocalyptic tale of survival. The twelve main characters, each with their own special ability, were the cause of something cataclysmic for which they're now trying to repay humanity. Murder, mayhem, and community gardening: a match made in heaven. Lucky for me, the second volume was recently added to our collection.

Speaking of murder, Whiteout takes place in Antarctica where the U.S. Marshall stationed there to keep the peace has to solve a gruesome murder. Then another. Then the killer comes after her. Will she survive the incoming storm while running for her life? Yes, because there’s a volume two. Greg Rucka’s storytelling is dark, and Steve Leiber’s illustrations match the writing perfectly.

I recently finished the first volume of Bayou by Jeremy Love. Another book that started as a webcomic, this lilting story from the Antebellum South follows a special girl trying to clear her father’s name. He’s been lynched for abducting a white girl, but she saw what really happened, and knows that it was actually a monster.  She travels to a bizarre land where she befriends a hulking giant.  Unfortunately, the story ends as they start their quest together, but I managed to track down the whole story on the site where the comic first started.

I Love L.A. - by Markrid

A few things about Los Angeles.

The ocean is always cold and rough and full of riptides.

The backbone of L.A. County is made of steep wild mountains covered with sweet combustible chaparral, and sometimes also with snow, and within 20 minutes you can be right in among them from most of the 626 and 818 area codes.

Most of the movie-and-TV stuff happens in a very small part of the west side. “Everyone on the West Side is ‘on location’!” a friend said, describing the showbiz self-importance which tilts into the ridiculous.

In most of the county, though, there's a huge and vital kind of human plate tectonics going on: Latin America's cultures grinding against the Pacific Rim's. An excellent place to see this in action is at the Costco in Alhambra on a weekend afternoon.

No place else changes as fast. “I think I get it,” another friend said thoughtfully. We were sitting outside the Melrose Avenue Johnny Rocket’s, watching the highly embellished human parade. “You might as well have your art on the hoof.”

You are free to invent and re-invent yourself endlessly there, and people will mostly take you for whoever you say you are.

Poinsettias will grow into fair-sized trees, given the chance. If you spit a date pit over the side of the porch, a little palm tree might pop up. There are black widows in the garage, and in bad drought years tarantulas come out in the daytime. A flock of feral parrots can screech loud enough to blot out thought.

If you get off the freeway, you’ll find the most anonymous-looking suburbs have little time-warp Main Streets that will just break your heart.

A little more about LA:

Chavez Ravine is the area north of downtown where whole neighborhoods of Mexican-Americans were uprooted to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s also the name of two great related works, the reissued 1949 album of Don Normark’s photographs documenting the vanished community, and Ry Cooder’s 2005 music CD on the same theme.

Nobody gets LA’s smudgy pink air and belief in magical possibilities as well as Francesca Lia Block. Her Weetzie Bat books for young adults, and Quakeland for grownups, have equal parts glitter, loneliness, hope, and strong female characters.

The electrifying documentary Rize shows African-American kids in South Central making beautiful community art - the dance form known as krumping - out of nothing but passion.

Follow the rise of the Crips in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.

Carolyn See is one of those authors who immediately seems like a favorite friend.

Her look at family weirdness in her memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America is so recognizable that we all might have grown up next door to her; yet her blue-collar 1950s Eagle Rock - little stucco bungalows, cracked sidewalks, brown grass - is pure LA.

She also gives us a terrific, racy fable about art, survival, and finding one’s vocation in The Handyman, which may be the perfect LA novel: funny, breezy, and wise.

Let's See...Old Mother Hubbard... - by Nicola

…went to the cupboard to eat her curds and whey. Wait, that’s not right!  Well, it has been a very long time since I've even thought about nursery rhymes, but I did think about them a lot while reading two books in the Nursery Crimes series by Jasper Fforde (pronounced “ford” like the car).  Are these books even for adults?  Oh yes!  Many children would have trouble with all of the nuances Fforde inserts into his whimsical stories. The Big Over Easy is the first title in the series. The main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary, are head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the local police constabulary in Reading, England. Their assignment is to investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty. The second  book in the series is The Fourth Bear.  Was there a fourth bear?  Why didn’t Mama Bear and Papa Bear sleep in the same bed?  And how could Jack Spratt not look for the violent Gingerbreadman who had just escaped from the supposedly secure mental hospital?  Well, mystery readers won't be surprised that Jack will not forget the Gingerbreadman is on the loose, even though he has been suspended for screwing up another assignment involving Red Riding Hood.

Jasper Fforde’s highly imaginative books are not for everyone, but those with a sense of fun will enjoy going along for the ride with him wherever his mind takes them.  

Lives of Comic Desperation - by guest blogger Marc Acito

Our guest blogger is the novelist, humorist and screenwriter Marc Acito. He was the winner of Oregon Book Awards' 2005 Ken Kesey award for Best Novel for How I Paid for College. His latest book is the sequel Attack of the Theater People.

I'm a promiscuous library user. At any given time, I've got two dozen books out and as many on hold. I got into the habit when I was poor and couldn't afford books. I probably shouldn't say this, since it's in my best interest that readers buy books, but I never buy a book I haven't read. I figure why own it if I'm only going to read it once?

So I use the library to test drive--promiscuously. If I love something enough that I need to own it, then I buy it, underlining and scrawling marginalia as I re-read.

As a result, I'm a familiar fixture at the Hillsdale Library, my local branch. Yes, it's true. Despite being a gay guy with a trendy haircut, a ready wit and the same waist size I had in junior high, I live in Deepest Suburbia. I prefer to think of it as the Lower West Hills.

Living as I do in the burbs, I’m a huge fan of books about desperate housewives. Reading stories about smart, funny women who are miscast in their lives is like having a marathon phone call with your best girlfriend, assuming your best girlfriend is hilarious, brilliant and completely honest.

A perfect example is the compulsively readable We Are all Fine Here by Mary Guterson, in which a married woman finds herself pregnant after a liaison with her old boyfriend in the bathroom at a friend’s wedding. You know those friends who are constantly screwing up but you secretly enjoy it because it makes you feel better about your own life? That's what reading this book is like.

We Are All Fine Here delivers Hitchcockian suspense without anyone being chased by a crop duster or rappeling off Abe Lincoln’s nose. From page one, questions abound: Who is the baby’s father? Who will the heroine end up with? How much longer can she hide her morning sickness? (announcer voice) These questions and more will be answered As The Stomach Turns.

In contrast to the friend who screws up is the friend who’s got it all together. For that, you must turn to Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. Forget the melodramatic MGM weepie with Greer Garson. This slyly comic story of a well-bred Englishwoman on the eve of World War Two fascinates me with such pressing concerns as how do you find a charwoman on short notice and what do you say at a shooting party?

But Mrs. Miniver’s contentment with her privileged life is tempered by her wry observations, like how she longs to invite the scintillating half of the couples she knows to dinner, then invite the boring ones another night that she could cancel. It’s like Mrs. Dalloway for Dummies.

The best literary friend of all, however, is the narrator of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, who is the perfect synthesis of the first two—a mild screw-up who still has her head screwed on straight. Long before Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, she wanted to wring the neck of her philandering husband. Because the novel is reportedly based on Ephron’s own calamitous marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, it’s difficult to imagine anyone other than the acerbic author herself in the role, even after Meryl Streep played her in the movie.

This book proves the adage that “Writing well is the best revenge.” The heroine of Heartburn writes cookbooks—which is appropriate given Ephron’s totally edible prose. It’s a delicious book, one you alternately want to gorge on yet savor, and the kind of hilariously wise and well-observed novel that makes readers wish the author were their best friend and makes writers like me contemplate suicide.

While I lead my own life of quiet desperation, however, I depend on these fictional friends they way I do my real ones: for comfort and laughs and inspiration. I take solace in knowing that there are others in the same boat. Especially if that boat is dry-docked in Deepest Suburbia.