And a low-price sex act makes one hundred
(but half of this is kid-friendly)
.
095) Deeper Thoughts by Jack Handey, finished on September 23
The book is good. But, you know, so is YouTube.
not long at all
096) Lightfall: The Girl & the Galdurian by Tim Probert, finished on September 23
On the one hand, this is absolutely the trend of YA fantasy comics novels of the last decade-plus—the sort of thing born of Bone and kept popular by the likes of Kazu Kibuishi. On the other hand, this is one of my favorites.
The girl is a nervous homebody battling an intense anxiety (with one of the best visual representations I've ever seen); the Galdurian is an honestly optimistic force of simple happiness, an adventurer brave and intelligent—experienced without losing his innocence.
Anyway, adventure (in the form of a wandered-off grandfather with a suddenly mysterious past) arrives for the girl and she and the Galdurian take off together.
Meanwhile, Skeksis-like creatures are awakening from their mythic slumber. The exposition is subtle and riveting and by the end of this book we have a pretty good sense of the worries that lie ahead of us. I didn't intend to read book one of a new series but darn it I did. And you know what? It was good. I hope Kid A remember to check out #2 next spring.
an evening
097) Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, finished on September 28
I can see why this book has garnered lots of accolades. It's crafted well. It does interesting things with it's one-color scheme. It celebrates a totally normal queerness. I think this latter detail is why the book is set in Berkeley. (Neither the writer nor the illustrator are from Berkeley and it shows.)
Like a lot of YA fiction, it seems to be anxious to check as many topical boxes as possible and, like a lot of YA fiction, it overrelies on some storytelling techniques to make sure readers don't miss certain points. It sorta bums me out because I think that readers (even YA readers who, frankly, are good readers) can get the points without the flashing arrows. That said, I suppose the book's intention is to model queer storytelling. So judging it by the standards of First! I suppose it's illuminated paths that readers might otherwise not see.
So I'm not saying anything about it was wrong, just it's aimed at a different audience. Which, when you think about it, is pretty obvious.
under an hour
098) My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, finished on September 29
It's been a while since I read (mostly) Jones's first novel, which I picked up when it was still quite new and thoroughly remaindered. I feel like I remember wondering, when I called it quits, if he had written other works since then. The answer was yes. About a dozen, and another since. Good for him.
I can't speak to all the books between and his first, but I can still see the same hand at work. Even thought that first book was a mindthrottling work of magic realism in the Southwest Indian vein and this one is a slasher that doesn't reveal any supernatural cards until a brief moment near the end. This is a slasher that is also a metaslasher, ala Scream, in that characters in the book see the genre they are inhabiting and navigating the terrain by that knowledge.
I don't know if anyone's made a list of all the movies that are cited by name during the course of this novel, but it would be a long list. Jones could clearly put together a top-100 slasher-movies poster and still have to leave things off.
There are things about the novel I liked and things I was less happy about but, in the end, I like all the attempts, whether they succeeded or not.
Stephen King said (either in Danse Macabre or On Writing) that while scary is scarier when you don't see the monster, it's cowardice not to show it anyway. While the attempt to increase the scare may usually fail, it's a chance that's necessary to take for the greatest scares. And Jones takes many such chances in the novels final couple hundred pages. And his hit rate would do any Major Leaguer proud.
This is not Jones's first novel to follow the slasher formula which I (and probably you) associate most completely with the movies. I haven't seen many movies that qualify as slashers (off the top of my head, the only two I remember being mentioned in the book are Psycho and Jaws, both of which I love and both of which demand qualifications). Fun story, once upon a time, I had a dream that I was in a slasher film but every time it was about to descend into blood and death, it couldn't. Over the course of the dream, I realized that because I had never seen Michael or Jason or Freddy at work, my dreamscape could not do away with me after their manner. Haha, monsters!
Anyway, Jones has written at least four novels he considers slashers, and most of his output is horror of one type or another.
Another personal aside, the story takes place in an Idaho town next to the Caribou–Targhee National Forest. I spent the first decade of my life in an Idaho town next to the Caribou–Targhee National Forest. It's next to a dam and reservoir. So's my hometown, though not quite so closely. Thanks to one paragraph on page 252, I learned it was in Fremont County. I don't think I've ever visited Fremont County and Jones isn't from Idaho either. A spot of googling and I decided that any more attempts to make the setting match reality would be no bueno.
Which I should have known once the protagonist, thinking about escaping to the city, considers places like Boise (okay) and Idaho City (oh?).
Another thing I find interesting about this book is that while it embraces everything that movie's get wrong about high school, it finds a balance between the too-negative and the too-positive, arriving somewhere that feels almost right.
I can't I believe I read this long book so quickly. What a solid way to start off the Halloween season!
Maybe next year will be the year to finally read the book of his that's been on my wishlist for years (and which I don't think I had ever connected to that first novel?).
5 of 6 days
099) Anne of Green Gables by Mariah Marsden and Brenna Thummler, finished on September 29
So this is a beautiful book. I'm more than a bit ashamed to never have read Lucy Maud Montgomery's original novel (it's my sister's lifelong favorite) but I did see the 80s miniseries multiple times. I do have an emotional connection to the story.
I mean—otherwise, would I have wept all the way through this book as I read it aloud to my four-year-old? No, right? I don't know.
Anyway, I need to read the novel.
two afternoons over a week apart
100) The Grownup by Gillian Flynn, finished on October 1
In the back of my mind, I knew the next book I finished would be my 100th and I wondered if I should aim to make it a memorable choice. For instance, I'll shortly be finishing The Glass Looker, which certainly seems a suitable Thericonian choice. But then I picked up this slim volume and that was that. I mean---it's basically a hardbound short story. It does have a nice cover:
(It's cooler in person.)
Anyway, it was written for an anthology and won a pretty serious award and I found it at a library sale while I was on lunch for jury duty.
It's such a cool little thing, I thought I might give it to son #3 for his twelfth birthday, but having seen Gone Girl, I wasn't sure this was a good idea. I flipped through it for a while before I saw the phrase "hand job" which convinced me it wasn't for him.
Could have saved myself some time by reading the first paragraph:
I didn't stop giving hand jobs because I wasn't good at it. I stopped giving hand jobs because I was the best at it.
Oh.
Anyway, what we have here is a take on Turn of the Screw. And when I realized this, about halfway through, I started to get disappointed. I still might be? But not really. It's maybe have the length of the James novella I'm guessing? And so it doesn't turn quite so many times. But when it turns, it turns fast and it keeps turning. James stopped turning the screw at the end, we just can't tell where it stopped. Flynn's screw's still a-turning when the story comes to its end.
So yeah. I liked it.
two days
A comment on 100s:
I just went and looked. 100s of years past don't seem to show a particular pattern. 2008: Rosemary's Baby. 2009: a Batman-family graphic novel. 2013: Y: The Last Man. 2014: Paradise Vue, which I was JUST TALKING ABOUT with some AML people. 2015: A not-great spooky novel for kids. 2017: A graphic novel I didn't care for. 2018: A wordless graphic novel I loved. 2019: Classic OSC. 2020: My favorite recent YA novel.
Nine 100s, which includes four arguable works of horror, three works of Mormon literature, five graphic novels (including the heavily illustrated kids' novel). So possibly what you would get by randomly sampling? Ask your local pollster.