Funny You Should Ask... Volume 2 from Thomson Gale

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Thomson Gale is a publishing company best known for its database resources for librarians. They have a weekly e-mail newsletter named Funny You Should Ask..., which has an assortment of odd questions that librarians receive. This collects some of their favorite questions.

That is about as far as a summary can go. The book is 64 pages of "Why in the world would anybody want to know that?" Some samples:

• My daughter's high school senior project is due Monday morning. She needs to compare Europe and the United States. Do you have that on video?
• Do you have any books to read in here?
• What color is water after it evaporates?
• We need an autobiography about a bear.
• Was Pearl Harbor a famous black American? I have to do a report on one.
• Do you have a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phonics?
• Would you please pop my popcorn?

I seem to have picked several student questions. The best ones are always parents coming in the night before a report is due, without the kid. No, ma'am, the reference librarian cannot type that up for you.

I am not really sure if you can get a copy of the book anywhere. I got it from Thomson Gale directly. The book seems unsure of its title: the spine reads, "Funny You Should Ask... Volume 2"; the cover is, "Funny You Should Ask... Return of the Grin (Real-Life Questions from the Reference Desk) Volume 2; and the title page says, "Funny You Should Ask...: Real-Life Questions from the Reference Desk Volume 2." No ISBN, but the code "TRADEFYSA06" appears. Good luck! Maybe just try the e-mail list if this sounds amusing.

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

As a story or a form of entertainment, this book fails. As an idea or a catalyst for interesting thought, this book succeeds. You will need to do much of the mental work yourself after the path has been sketched.

A. Square lives in a literal two-dimensional world. He is a four-sided regular polygon, the proud father of several pentagons, and a mathematician. First, he would like to tell you about his world, and how one gets along without having an up or down. Next, he would like to tell you about our world, and the wondrous revelation this third dimension is.

Let us be clear from the start, there is only the slightest plot here. The structure is much like Gulliver's Travels, in which we meet a new world, have its interesting notions explored, then we have a little adventure there. That little adventure could be adequately summarized as "I met someone from the third dimension, and he showed me what 2-D and 3-D mean." This is not a gripping yarn or a rollicking tale.

Instead, we face the difficulties of being two-dimensional. We the 3-D think of two-dimensional space like what we see on television or in video games. One must remember that we are looking from without, perpendicular to their world. We see a plane; they see only a line. So that is hard.

We see the society, culture, and history of Flatland, where a caste system divides people based on their numbers of sides. If you have more sides, you are a better person, and you will be educated and treated accordingly. Families are upwardly aspirational, seeking more sides and more regular angles. Women are carefully controlled, being dangerous two-dimensional figures.

"Women" must be a broad metaphor, since a line cannot be pregnant with a hexagon or such. The assignment of sex is arbitrary, although it suits the satirical purposes. Also like Swift, Flatland's society is a mirror of Britain and modern man; despite my edition's introduction, many things have not remained timeless and relevant to the modern day. Still, most of the allegories are sufficiently obvious.

There are two main ideas to play with here, which I will characterize as philosophical. First, what would it be like to be two-dimensional? A. Square notes many aspects that he skips over, and indeed many things of the story would seem impossible given the constraints of living polygons. Methods of movement, reproduction, and communication are at best non-obvious. We deal with most of it by hand-waving and suspension of disbelief, but this is a notion you can play with.

Second, what would it be like to be four-dimensional? Alternately, how would we recognize being in a 4-D universe? Despite A. Square's experience, it seems unlikely that a 2-D being pulled into a 3-D world would know what he was seeing, even if his sense organs were up to the job. If you had never seen anything, it would take you a while to connect your previous sensations to your new sights, especially if you could not interact with them.

But I go astray. How would one demonstrate being a four-dimensional being to your satisfaction? How would you deal with the influence of beings who violate your notions of space through some interaction with time or probability or whatever fourth dimension they use to circumvent your three? Practically, yes, we now believe that we live in four-dimensional space-time, but time seems not quite the same as the rest, and at worst we push it back to questions about a 5-D world. (General case: "n+1 dimensional world, discuss!")

In many ways, Flatland accomplishes what God's Debris does not as a primer to thought: "Here are some notions about the nature of the universe. Go play." Wikipedia lists several books that have played with the idea.

Bonus topic for discussion: compare and contrast the King of Pointland with an omniscient, omnipresent God.

You do not need to be mathematically inclined to get it. There is no math as such in the book. If you know what a hexagon is, you should be good to go.

Free online edition 1
Free online edition 2
Free online edition 3
Amazon link

Dead Men Kill by L. Ron Hubbard

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This book epitomizes why the pulps were looked down upon. It is bad in the way only a period piece can be, perfectly fulfilling all the stereotypes without a hint of irony. The storytelling is workmanlike and the story is poor. As such a pristine example of a pulp novel, however, it may have some interest.

Lane is a hard-boiled detective on the trail of a murderer, a murderer who is already dead. Two rich men have been killed by the zombies of their servants, and Lane knows this mysterious Loup-Garou behind it all. He meets a beautiful woman with a heart of brass, but will she bring him to the mastermind behind this fiendish plot or to his own funeral?

Someone had the idea of re-issuing all of L. Ron Hubbard's old pulp fiction. The last quarter of the book is a listing of them, and presumably these "Stories from the Golden Age" will be re-emerging, if they are not already available.

If you were making a parody of the pulps, you could use this as your basis. You only need to push a little harder to make it work. It has everything you need! Steely-eyed detectives who don't take no guff! Exotic foreign mysteries -- from Haiti! Zombies! Murder -- with zombies! Unexpected shootings! Beautiful birds with gorgeous gams -- with zombies! There is even a two-page gratuitous racist joke. Throw in some Nazis and you are there; sadly, Nazis were not a popular antagonist in 1934.

The prose is straightforward enough to make Hemingway look eloquent. If you want hard-hitting action without all that shilly-shallying around with mental acrobatics, than this! Is the book! For! You!

In fairness, that mocks it in entirely the wrong tradition. This is in the noir voice that looks upon zombie attacks with a grimace and a scowl, not a field of exclamation points. Oh, they are there, how they are there, but they are used selectively to mark scenes.

You could make a shooting script from this almost directly. Everything is pretty clearly described, and it already reads a bit like a story where important information has been edited out for the screen. Wherever you see an exclamation point, cut the scene and/or go to the rising music. You know the flourishing music that accompanies a Surprise! Revelation! Whoa, who expected that knife to appear there?!

The scenes are described so clearly that you can see bad acting under poor direction in your head. Loup-Garou in the car is just a perfect nickelodeon serial villain, filmed on the first take.

This is exactly what you should expect from a pulp novel. As a work of literature? Poor, very very poor. On the other hand, the novelty and the paucity of it can carry you along. Writing the review was more fun than reading the book, but I could not have done it without you, L. Ron.

This is normally where an Amazon link would go, but I cannot find one. I cannot even find a link on the publisher's site. Much luck to you.

Soccer Chick Rules by Dawn FitzGerald

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Tedious.

Tess Munro is a middle school soccer player. The school needs to pass a levy if funding for her assorted extracurriculars (and some academics, unimportant) is to continue. Tess plays soccer, talks to friends and enemies, and tries to bolster support for the levy.

Not a lot here to comment on, really. It is not compelling.

I have always been suspicious of the reluctant readers project. Books written for people who do not read must have a limited audience. Most big readers do not care much for sports; most big athletes do not care much for books. The target audience is a narrow convergence of gender, reading level, and interest in the subject matter. There are better books, both for people who read a lot and for those who do not.

Maybe my niece will feel differently, since she seems to be the exact target audience. Of course, if she feels the same way, that pretty much knocks the rating down to a 1. It could be useful for athletic female middle school-age non-readers who need a short book for a book report, since even they could get through it in a night.

Amazon link

Expected publication: September 2006

Mindful Politics edited by Melvin McLeod

Rating - 1.5: parts of it are worth reading once (maybe borrow it from a library)

The unique feature of government is a monopoly on the legal use of force. A law means, "Do this (or do not) or else men with guns will take away your life, freedom, and/or property." Saying "there ought to be a law" is a naked show of aggression, with legislation serving as a fig leaf over the gun. Just so we all know what we are talking about when we discuss politics.

This is a collection of essays on Buddhist politics, how religion can inform politics and how to be engaged in the world. It has significant representation from the Engaged Buddhism movement.

There are some good essays in here, but mostly mediocre and quite a few that, if practiced, would actively increase suffering. At the very least, much of this would serve as a primer on how Buddhism can be useless to political consideration.

Let us start with the good.

• Charles Johnson's "Be Peace Embodied" is like an academic review of potentially useful Buddhist thoughts for politics. If you want the quick summary, read this and be done.
• Richard Reoch's "A Buddhist Brawl" (filed under "Nowhere to Spit") is an excellent story for contemplation and discussion. The presentation is spot-on perfect.
• Ezra Bayda's "The Path to Forgiveness" has helpful thoughts on dealing with strong and negative emotions. I have successfully taken a similar approach (although not specific to forgiveness).
• Thanissaro Bhikku's "The Buddha's Advice on Healing the Community" takes the next step in discussing reconciliation and how to approach it.
• Margaret Wheatley's "Four Freedoms" unblinkingly approaches the implications of emptiness, although the essay is incomplete and lacking.
• Sam Harris's "Killing the Buddha" is excellent, a non-sectarian beginning to applying Buddhist thought. I should read The End of Faith sometime.

So there is a mix under "View," some good stuff in the "Practice" section, and a mess under "Action." Politics is the realm of the possible, a subject focused on application, and the only essay I can endorse from "Action" calls for an end to Buddhism as a religion and "Engaged Buddhism" in particular. Given the value of some of the "Practice" essays, I presume that there has been a lack of mindfulness in translating this into action, although I presume they would think the same of me. What are some of the principles and actions espoused?

• The proper response to terrorist attacks is group breathing exercises;
• Third-world despotisms that suffer under a lack property rights or the rule of law are victims of "free market fundamentalism";
• Korea's reunification is being held up by unreasonableness on the South side, a view that conceivably held more weight when the essay in question was written 24 years ago, but looks a bit silly when one considers North Korea today;
• The proper use of armies is to build bridges and mediate conflicts, which explicitly "is not idealistic thinking";
• We need more open dialogues on race, the sort where one side puts forth that Kanye West is understating his case while the other admits that Condoleeza Rice is ignorant of how race affects society.

These are representative statements from the essays, albeit some of the more outrageous ones. Some of them.

The distaste for economics is throughout the book, with a few who seem to consider the notion that we might want to look beyond good will to the actual outcomes of policies when deciding what to do. That you do not like what you are mistakenly calling capitalism does not remove the obligation to mindfulness.

David Loy has a quote in the book that summarizes capitalism nicely: "A third basic principle, from a Buddhist perspective, is that our social engagement is not about sacrificing our happiness to help unfortunate others who are suffering. That just reinforces a self-defeating (and self-exhausting) dualism between us and them. Rather, we join together to improve the situation for all of us." One should not confuse a system of voluntary trade for mutual benefit with the kleptocracies that run a great many suffering nations.

Similarly, since we are told that only bodhisattvas can kill with compassion, that pretty much leaves pacifism as a response to aggression. If the Dalai Lama cannot make loving-kindness work as a solution for Tibet in half a century, the application elsewhere is going to be a hard sell. It is difficult to find useful application if you need to assume that someone whose plan A is suicide-bombing can be talked into coming to a meditation retreat in good faith.

I am intrigued by the comments from Shambhala and Vinaya, and I must pursue those at some point. Much of the rest seems to assume that the audience already agrees with everything the author says, which probably works better at the meditation session than as a persuasive essay. I am pretty sure there is a Buddhist guideline against using arguments that sound this much like, "if you meditate enough and see clearly, you will see that I am right."

"Mindful Politics transcends Right and Left," the rear cover explains, "progressive and conservative, to get to the heart of what matters: how we can all make a positive difference in our complex political world." I would say that no part of that sentence is true in any meaningful sense. From this collection, I have learned about one author and two bodies of teachings to pursue. I have also learned that Engaged Buddhism has nothing to offer either Buddhist or people engaged in politics. Perhaps these are not its best representatives.

Amazon link

Expected publication: July 2006

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days Volume 1 by Fumino Hayashi

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)*

If you have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion, this gets a 3. Evangelion the TV series is probably a 2.5 or 3, much of it worth seeing (it's cheap via that link or Netflix). I will write on assuming you have seen Evangelion.

Remember that bit in the last episode, where they show what Evangelion would have been like as a normal anime? They made a manga out of that.

For the first volume at least, this is a normal teen manga, with a hint of menace in the background. Instead of focusing on the near-suicidal angst of the normal Evangelion series, we are focusing on high school life, with some giant robots expected in a future volume.

I do not read a lot of high school drama manga, but this seems well done. We have limited characterization, but by assumption you already know all these characters from watching the series so no problem. The characterization that is there is good and clear, so you should be able to pick out how the characters differ from the series. It helps to know the archetypes of the genre.

The problem is that, as far as one volume goes, it is pretty pointless. Our first volume of Runaways covered five times as many issues and had three complete story arc with a few side stories. Volume one is the start of a story arc. Volume two will be out soon and could make this worthwhile reading, but we have only the beginning of a story here.

This has a chance of being better than the original Evangelion series. Much like Marvel's Ultimate series, you can often do a better job with the story if you get to start over knowing the whole thing, rather than deciding two years into a story that you really should have foreshadowed something at the beginning. Kaworu, for example, gets to start with the rest of the cast, rather than appearing out of nowhere for an unscheduled climax; also, they get to start that gay tension right out of the box, rather than being ambiguous about it briefly.

Also, there will not be continuous suicidal depression, which completely changes the tone of the series. No one is more massively socially maladjusted than most high school students, no one is introduced with massive wounds, and no one has had to beg her mother not to kill her. So far: relatively friendly.

The tone is less silly than the brief bit from the TV series. They had to cram all the clichés into a few minutes there. Rather than go Excel Saga with that silliness, it scales things back to a normal high school drama that also has the Evangelion storyline. Until the actual story starts in a future volume, we just have that Eva aura of menace hanging about.

So if you liked Evangelion, take a look at this. If you like high school drama mange, take a look at this. If you have no idea what I am talking about, why have you read this far?

Amazon link

[/edit] I somehow failed to comment on the art. It's good. As a manga style, it is pretty common. Some bits are a touch confusing, particularly when two characters with the same hair color are in the same room ("Is that face contorted or did we shift characters?"), but it is mostly clear. The artist spends most of the time focusing on faces, which allows expressions to carry a great deal of weight. I mentioned fashion in Runaways? None of that here, since the characters are usually in school uniform; instead, we have lots of close-ups with more frames per page, moving us through things more quickly. The backgrounds are frequently non-existent, rather than depicting the rest of the cast milling about.

God's Debris by Scott Adams

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Scott Adams's thought experiment is a modern Socratic dialogue. The primary topic is metaphysics, which Socrates avoided, with a hearty dose of epistemology. What is the universe made of and why are you so often wrong?

Apart from some early Plato, Socratic dialogues are not so much dialogues as monologues with a straight man. Read The Republic sometime; it is mostly Socrates, with others tossing in, "Yes, Socrates," "You are right, Socrates," "I do not see how it could be otherwise, Socrates," and the occasional, "But what do you think of this topic, Socrates?" Anyone with a full sentence is either confirming what Socrates just said or being set up for a beatdown. This is not Hume's Dialogues.

Which is to say there is no plot, nor really any characters. This is one guy talking, with a straight man. Just so you know.

Unlike Plato, Adams is not pretending to know what he is talking about. The introduction clearly states that he has freely mixed in convincing-sounding fiction where convenient. Sophistry, broken logic, and so on are freely available in all the assertions about what the universe really is.

There are of course books that discuss you can usefully have a religion based on lies (Adams points out that given the number of religions (many) and the number that can be completely true (at most 1), you probably believe in one). And indeed, if creative fiction inspires you to think of new things, then this might have some value to you.

Mostly, it is a quick tour through a scattered variety of existing philosophical ideas (I had not heard the titular debris before, though there are variations on the suicidal deity notion). By "quick," I mean inadequate, since the shallowness of the presentation avoids any deep thought on the subject. You are invited to think, but none of the thinking has been provided for you. You are getting out of this mostly what you bring to it, maybe a little more, maybe a bit less.

If you want to think about philosophy, get some real philosophy. There will be depth to ideas, attempts to justify assumptions, buildings made of logic. Of course, many philosophers will also have fiction, broken logic, etc., but they are at least trying to establish something true.

There is value in explaining why something wrong is wrong. It can lead you to figuring out what assumption was challenged and do you really believe it. You may get entertainment in picking out the problems or seeing what castles in the clouds you can create yourself.

But as our rating system goes, there are better books, better Scott Adams books, better philosophy, better Socratic dialogues, etc.

The "Relationships" chapter (page 105) does have some useful information for introverts on how to talk to others.

Amazon link
Free online copy

Super Emma by Sally Warner

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Meh. Not much good, not much bad.

Emma McGraw impulsively protects the littlest kid in class from a bully. This gets her ostracized from the girls and targeted by the boys. The kids exhibit the sort of conflict resolution skills you might expect from eight-year-olds.

Not a lot to say here. The world is a mercurial, unfair, and incomprehensible place when you are eight years old. The little notes about animals are cute.

I have decided that episodic television shows accurately reflect real life. You know how the coyote gets flattened and then is fine two minutes later, or how a new crisis arises every week that hits a crescendo and is resolved in a half-hour? That seems to cover quite a bit. When your emotional life is tied to events, the day goes from boring to divine to horrid in an hour depending on a phone call, a smile from a girl, a conversation that does not happen. Recent books have included a life-altering break up at the end of a three-minute relationship, a girl who is reclassified from potential killer to best friend because of shoes and a smile, and now this book. Frankly, grown-ups are not a lot more stable, just a bit more jaded.

If you run out of Junie B. Jones books and need a poorer version that reminds children that they will be punished for deviating from gender roles, here you go. I am, of course, entirely open to the contention that I know jack about what second-graders want to read.

Amazon link
author's web site

Expected publication: September 2006

The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

I am so not the target audience for this book. Does that make it less or more appropriate for me to read and enjoy it?

A novel told in verse, Penny is fourteen and headed into high school. It is not really going well, but does anything at fourteen? There are, however, worse things than having a mother who disappeared a decade ago, or getting a new one, or having a sister who is with the Wrong Sort of Boy, or being balanced between two friends headed in opposite directions. Penny will get to try some of those worse things. She will also see a lot of wonderful things, new things, love.

If art is supposed to convey a sense of life, this does so beautifully. We have a solid thread of a story, marked by the emotional highs and lows that our narrator considers important. We dwell upon seven minutes or skip most of a semester, but that is how she feels the story of her life.

The episodes feel true. This is not my life, but I can understand it, and it certainly feels like a life, not like a failed attempt to show one. Well, it is certainly not a whole life, covering as much time as it does, but it is a whole story and a picture that feels complete.

The bad decisions are told well. The mood is there: this is not a good idea, this cannot work out well, why am I doing this? It is a quick tour through a mistake, enough to feel dirty without feeling tainted. How do people deal with their pasts? Move on, it seems, and maybe look back again another day, past these covers. Maybe the time within these covers is looking back, but I hate to read too much into the author.

So it is about friends, it is about family, it is about boys and school and getting a little older. Mostly it is about how those things feel, which is I suppose what we should expect from a novel in verse about a teenage girl.

I have never been a teenage girl, and I am thankful for that. It seems like a bracing experience, but then so does a plane crash. Congratulations to the survivors of both.

Amazon link
Some other things the author wrote (screenplays).
the author's website

Far from my best-written review, but read it anyway.

The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen by M. T. Anderson

Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

In case I never get back around to it, Whales on Stilts is a 4, a brilliant book that you should order right now so that they will be mailing it to you while you read this review. It is the first one of M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales, and it is controlled chaos filled with great scenes and lines. Lederhosen is chaos with some great scenes and lines.

Katie wants a break from being a crime-fighting detective of the occult, so she, Jasper, and Lily head to Moose Tongue Lodge to get away from it all and cash in a coupon. Most of the other guests are characters from other children's series, and oh no, the Quints are kidnapped that very day! Form a search party! Oh no, valuable necklace is stolen! Whodunnit?! Will Katie ever get her normal afternoon by the pool?!?

The tone is the same as Whales on Stilts: send-up of series fiction with strong absurdist influences. Take all the clichés and push them just a bit further, and use them all at once, from several non-complementary series. It is just not done as well here, since there is more absurd than glue to hold it all together. Things get silly before they get coherent.

The later parts of the book are better. Its establishing shots are more comprehensible and the absurd parts have better-defined areas to run wild. So if you want to read the whole thing, yes, it gets better as you go along.

Ideally, you will have a group of friends who want to read the book, so that one person can read it and highlight the parts that the rest of you will want. I would normally save the .5 ratings for books of essays and such, but there are enough good parts here that it really would be worth picking them out, even if things do not build upon one another successfully. You probably do not have such a group handy, so let me identify some things you will want to read in full, and skim the rest:

• Any time the Quints appear. They are comedy gold.
• The footnotes and Appendix B. Some of the best bits in comedy or philosophy get put in the footnotes.
• At least one scene with Professor Schmeltzer. He has just the one joke, and if you think you want to read it as a running joke, then by all means keep stopping when you see his name. He will do it every time.
• Page 71 is rather good.
• Page 83 is also golden if you know the Hardy Boys.
• Jasper's plight on the mountain, which is much more amusing if you are of an age where "death by snot" instills paroxysms of laughter.
• Any time the author is talking about himself.
• Our conclusion (lots of Quints after page 200) and the contemplative denouement about age.
• Anything that looks like an ad.
• The list of previous books in the series.

That is fair number of good things for a short book. They work well on their own, with very limited building upon each other, hence the 2.5 instead of a 3. The book is more worth reading if you have read a lot of series fiction or something like Girl Sleuth, but as is pointed out throughout the book, do people still willingly read old series like the Bobbsey Twins and Boxcar Children? Goosebumps and Babysitters Club, yes, but the older ones are being mocked here.

The character of Eddie is a fun idea, as he is the star of one of those books where the pet dies. You know, if there is a dog on the cover of a classic work of children's literature, that dog is doomed. Eddie never recovered from that, but his insanity does not fully mesh with the other insanity in the book. You should get a bit of him in the conclusion. If you want more, that's the name to watch for, Eddie or Stumpy.

Lots of good moments, not a great whole. If you want an absurdist take on series fiction, bump this up to a 3. If you have never heard of the Bobbsey Twins or Hardy Boys, skip it entirely. Still, read Whales on Stilts.

Amazon link

Runaways, Volume 1 by Brian Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Slow to start with limited payoff, but a quick read with fun characters. In terms of superhero comics, this is something different and interesting, so I look forward to seeing how volume 2 is going.

This hardcover collects the first eighteen-issue run of the Runaways comic book series from Marvel, dominated by three story arcs. What do you and your friends do when you find out that your parents are supervillains?

I say it starts slowly because the first six issues constitute an extended origin story for our six misfit protagonists: here is the cast, here are their superpowers, and here are our primary antagonists. This is six issues worth of setting up. I am glad to have been able to read that all at one setting, rather than over the course of six months.

The dominant value is in the characters and their interactions, rather than the plot in which they move. As one of the characters comments, this is the Real World, only with superpowers. I am most fond of Karolina and Molly.

The plot, while interesting enough, is fairly thin and standard. The great evil gathers to destroy the world, the heroes must unite despite their differences to save all humanity, and so on. As ever, the fate of the world rests in the hands of teenagers. The heroes bicker and the villains spend entirely too much time explicitly laying out the how and why of their schemes.

Less explicitly, they have outed her by now in the ongoing series, right? I will not spoil that for anyone who missed it, but someone is playing the pronoun game. You may want to check issues 8 and 18 if you read it and have no idea what I am talking about; it explains scattered moments throughout.

The art is good but nothing revolutionary. The outfit designs are particularly good, including the teens' clothing and the villains' costumes. Jo Chen's covers are excellent, and the color work on Karolina is especially good; the connection between her look and her parents' is never stated but a nice touch.

There are two drawbacks to the artwork. First, Gertrude's size seems to fluctuate quite a bit, although some of that is probably angles; it is mostly variations in the roundness of her face, which is carried through nicely to her mother's face. More importantly, the story is carried by the text. The images support the story, but they are not allowed to add as much to the story as they do in the best uses of the medium. One way that some comics deal with the pacing problems I cited is to let the images carry more of the storytelling weight. Some scenes do this well, but this is a mostly verbal story in a highly visual medium. That makes it a quicker read, but they could be getting more out of each page.

What is on the pages is good. I would have liked to have seen more about the parents, but I suspect that their histories continue to play a part in the ongoing story.

Amazon link
This is also available as three separate paperbacks (I cannot find #2), but the hardcover of all three seems to be cheaper than the paperbacks separately.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

How does one follow up winning the Printz Award on his first novel? How about writing another one that could win it the next year?

After graduating from high school and being dumped by a girl named Katherine for the nineteenth time in a row, former child prodigy Colin Singleton takes a road trip with his friend Hassan. Pursuit of a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke leads to further pursuit of a formula that would explain why relationships end.

Part of me wondered how many people want to read about a very intelligent but socially awkward teenager who has a great fear of rejection. Oh wait, every teen who likes to read sympathizes with that character. Fond of trivia and tangents but frequently dumped, filled with sour grapes distaste for the pretty and the popular? Yes, this is your book.

So many things in this book are fair, right, and accurate. Everything comes back around to the girl who just dumped him, by some train of thought. We nerds really are interested in those details, and we remember them because of just those kinds of connections between them. Teenagers talk like that, from the decorative cursing to Lindsey's noticeable-but-not-ridiculously-overused "like."

We have three main characters, and they are all good characters. With respect to Hassan, does John Green know what makes people likable? It seems that Hassan is universally liked by fiat, that this is some alchemy unknown to people like us but we needed a character in the story like that. This is nothing against John Green or the book, perhaps just an oddity of the third person limited perspective, but the why is missing as much as the internal life of Austen's men. As a character, he is very likable, but I am not sure why he is likable as a person in the story, other than being a funny guy.

Trivia-loving nerds really could use someone to tell us, "not interesting." I like that the history of salt was on that list, since I walked past someone promoting a book on the history of salt to get An Abundance of Katherines. And, like Colin, I thought that might be interesting.

Hollis's situation could use more consideration. This is neither the time nor the place for those microeconomics, but what happens to those pensions in five years?

The ending is weak. That last chapter or two is not as good as the rest of the book, and our concluding epiphany does not fit. I wanted to hear more about the relationship with Katherine XIX, the impetus for our story that is sketched tantalizingly.

Otherwise, the story starts good and gets better. Colin is good. Hassan is good. Lindsey is good. Their interaction is good. The gradual retelling of Colin's romantic history is good. The footnotes are good. Humorous footnotes are a classic of nerd literature. So it is good.

John Green's web site, including his noticing that I exist, wow.
Amazon link

Expected publication: September 2006

[/edit] A few things I have been thinking about An Abundance of Katherines:

First, we need to start filming the movie version about ten years ago, starring David Krumholtz. I don't care if he is too short, I do not see Shia LeBeouf carrying this role.

[It has been noted that this next bit is kind of spoilery. The text is there, in white, so highlight it if your soul is ready for such things.]

Second, how far can we run with the symbolism of Lindsey's cave? "I've never had anyone else in here, but I would like you to go in. I normally come here alone when I need some 'me time.' Yeah, I must have overlooked that opening a hundred times, but around eighth grade, I noticed something special there. It's a bit tight, but don't worry, I'll guide you." Come on, we can find more ways to play with this.

Third, John Green and I are the same age. He has two great books and I have two ill-read blogs. I am a failure.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Rating - 1: not worth considering (burn it)

What a waste.

Barbara Enrenreich sets out to explore the life of the working class by taking a series of entry-level jobs and seeing how that works out for her. Over the course of the project, she manages to sabotage any possibility of success, avoid support systems, disparage the people she is supposed to be sympathizing with, and make life harder for the rest of the working poor.

I read further in the book than I really should have. You can tell someone is not making a serious attempt to understand the problems of the working poor if step one is to get her own apartment in Key West. Why don't we try living somewhere expensive without a roommate and see how the finances go?

She has, what, seven jobs in two years? The secret about entry-level jobs is that, to improve things, you need to stick with one long enough to get the next job. No one invests resources in an employee who will probably quit within the next six months. To get off the bottom rung of the ladder, you have to prove that you can stand on it. If you quit your job every few months, you will always be at the bottom.

Why not do that little bit more to make things worse for everyone else who does not have an upper-class lifestyle to go back to? Let's reinforce employers' beliefs that entry-level workers will probably quit soon by intentionally doing so. Let's work at one place for one day, and why not walk out in the middle of a shift?

If anyone wants to come to the shelter where I volunteer and discuss the problems at the bottom of the economic ladder, come on down. If you need me to sketch out how to save money working part-time at minimum wage, come on down. If you want to see what the bottom of the economic ladder looks like outside the developed world, take burial insurance. If you want to see how to set yourself up for failure, read this book.

When you set out to fail, you can. Success!

Amazon link