Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Not much there there. No opening quip. It is a slim graphic novel.

Kim, called "Skim" because she is not, is an Asian-Canadian (do they use those hyphenated terms in Canada?) high school girl and aspiring Wiccan. School is various shades of horrible and awkward with classes, classmates, and attempted romance. Why do the counselors start worrying about the outcasts when one of the popular kids commits suicide?

As a sketch of high school life, it is spot-on. Awkwardness abounds, in the things you cannot say and in the paralysis of transition. The fringes are a great place for perspective, even if everyone looks at you funny. Not that posturing at Wicca is less vapid than popular conformism, but that weakness of the unexamined life is sufficiently visible.

Skim is at its best in crossed-out and half-finished lines. They show the things that Kim is desperate to say or unwilling to admit to herself. It makes good use of the book's format.

The artwork is a weakness. Maybe we are all that ugly in high school, or maybe it is meant to be symbolic of how everything looks that way, but the faces are poorly drawn. They have strange shapes and knobs. It keeps the art from carrying much of the weight. The style for Kim's face settles about one-third of the way in (and looks good), and others are better towards the end. The backgrounds and non-human objects are good.

Amazon link

Kin by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh

The Good Neighbors, book 1

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

Cute punkish faeries? Sure, play right to my predilections.

Her mother's a faerie, now disappeared. Her father is framed for murder. Now she's seeing faeries everywhere. What's a girl to do?

This is a black and white graphic novel. The art is not quite my thing. Most of the human faces look a bit off. In context, making the humans a bit alien works. It helps make the faeries look more natural, and some of them look more conventionally human anyway. Minus some talons and wings, of course.

Oh, and I am getting away with all of these without even a mild spoiler tag. If it can be spoiled by the cover and first few pages, I get to say it. Not spoilers.

It is good as an introductory tale. There is not a lot going on beyond introducing the setting and dealing with her father's murder charges. And really, how much more can you ask for in 120 pages than a main cast, faeries, and a murder mystery? The mystery is in last place in terms of importance, motive power for the plot while the focus is on faeries, and it mostly resolves itself. So let's talk about faeries.

There may or may not be an explanation for the different types. That may be it: different types, and they can all be related at random. Magic faerie genetics, I'll accept it. Her grandfather looks like some sort of wolf spirit, her mother was a flighty dryad sort, and there are more traditional winged faeries, beast-headed humanoids, and other horned things. It's classic.

The tone is dark, if disappearance and death did not tip that off. Lots of grayscale, lots of smudges, lots of shadow. Despite the cover, faeries rarely glitter. Just so you know that this is more "emo" than "pony princess," despite a flashback that includes a unicorn shirt. Her mother, contrarily, is that spot of light, appearing in flashback and contrasting with the present. She is happiness and blissful obliviousness, and things brighten around her. It helps the contrast when the lights go out.

The romance setup is a bit transparent. That might be a head fake. I will leave it at that.

This would do well as an anime. I cannot compare it to many manga, but the pacing, tone, and lighting feel a lot like some anime. The faerie have an otherworldly sense, and the minimal use of internal monologue lends itself to a film adaptation.

When I picked up the book, I flipped at random to page 32. That scene lasts to page 37, and it is emblematic of the book, if a lighter version. (You can turn another page to get the usual tone.) That scene also has a bit of exposition, and it is nice to have someone who will explain things to the main character. If that scene appeals to you, the book will; if not, probably not.

I also just like that faerie. It is a classic look with a touch of modern, and she brings a bit of light into the story. It is nice to have someone who seems entirely outside the plot, not hostile or conspiring, just there for a bit of fun. She returns for my favorite single page, 88. In a few frames with a few words, that page expresses loneliness, compassion, bittersweet sadness, alienation, and a sense of being lost between worlds. Again, the bit of light helps the contrast.

Doing all that in one page is a good sign.

Amazon link

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Rating - 3.5: worth reading, parts worth re-reading (borrow or buy it)

I could easily recommend this to someone who is not a science fiction fan. It is speculative fiction in its best sense, with humans and big concepts rather than aliens and spaceships. This is not a space opera with magic disguised as Science! and fireballs disguised as plasma rays.

Tyler is the housekeeper's son, friends with the twins in the Big House. One night the stars go out. Earth is caught in the Spin, a bubble that filters energy, matter, and time. The twins take different paths to deal with Earth's sudden loneliness and potential doom; Tyler loves one, follows the other, and holds himself apart from the crisis and from people. They send something into the blackness above. What do they do when something comes back?

Like many of the best science fiction stories, this is a human story. It is a drama of family and friendship set against the background of a world in a bubble. The Spin is always there, as a plot driver, but the story could work just as well with another catalyst.

What the Spin adds is a sense of scale and of impending doom. When the sun could die within your lifetime, seize the day. Tyler does not: he continues with life as usual, a frame of the ordinary around whatever the camera shows. He is a mostly passive narrator. Jason rages against the dying of the light. He pursues knowledge, hope, and humanity's promise even as the curtain closes. Diane pursues faith, acceptance, and turning within in the face of the end. (This is not her story. She is the contrast, with the sense that hers is a poor choice but one she had to make.)

The frame story mirrors themes well. Tyler experiences time erratically. Off-hand comments foreshadow events in the main narrative. One looks forward to how the past converges. As the convergence begins, the frame story becomes a problem: the foreshadowing was too strong, the tension is relieved by partial knowledge of the outcome.

The frame shrinks over time, an increasingly small percentage of the page count as the stories converge. This is a good thing. The main narrative is the more interesting one. The problem is that the reason for the frame falls away as the frame advances: it starts as Tyler recounting history due to a manic need, but the recounting continues after Tyler stops.

As time passes, it becomes more of a science fiction book. Childhood stories are childhood stories, and talk of the Spin could as easily be talk of their parents' work undersea. It could be any large project driving events in the middle. As the end of the book approaches, worries about the end times approach, and the impending end brings the larger themes of knowledge, faith, hope, and despair explicitly to the fore.

If I may take issue with a small event in the book, it postulates that the Chinese government becomes insane and incredibly stupid. They plan to fire a nuclear missile at the enemy? Said enemy has encased the planet in a slow-time bubble that selectively filters mass and energy. If this technological superiority were not enough, said bubble gives them approximately two centuries to react for every minute of Earth time, more than 10,000 years if it takes the missile an hour to launch and reach its target. How can someone who thinks that is a good plan get to lead a country?

Some nits aside, it is a well written book. It is quietly philosophical, manipulating ideas and expressing a sense of life without becoming didactic. Tyler's psychology is similarly quiet, hidden but clearly visible.

I would have gone with a 4 rating, but I do not expect to re-read the frame story. It helps some ideas and structure in the main narrative, but it has little value on its own. The story might have been stronger without it, but having it is a better way of getting to the ending than having it in a huge block as a denouement. Alternately, the frame and the last chapter could be cut, leaving a hopeful but more uncertain ending. That would have helped at the points where the frame was a minor impediment or spoiler, but I would need to re-read to see how it would affect the early narrative. The first chapters might have seemed very slow without the en medias res spectacle.

Contrarily, having Tyler's ordeal in the frame kept it from appearing when other characters went through it. It would have affected the telling in unfortunate ways if it were recounted then. Notably, it lets the focus stay on Jason when Diane is going through it; I was worried that it would break the narrative just when it needed to be focused on Jason, but having already shown the full version and a briefer version, there was no need for any the third time around.

On a final note, the recurring return to the childhood home adds circularity and strength to the storyline. Our story begins at the Big House and it reappears at critical plot points. It is the sign of change, that an important bridge has been crossed in the characters' lives, but it represents continuity through that change. It works.

Amazon link

Okay, there are a few spaceships and a kind of alien, but no Spaceman Spiff or Bug-Eyed Aliens.

Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem by Mac Barnett and Adam Rex

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

I have not reviewed a picture book in a long while.

Billy Twitters's mom tells him to clean his room, brush his teeth, finish his peas ... "or we're buying you a blue whale." And then she does. Antics, such as they are with a 100' long cetacean, ensue.

I was reminded of most articles from The Onion: once you have seen the title and the cover, you have most of the book. Not that you need a deep plot for a picture book, but it is the same joke repeated a few times. A blue whale...at school! A blue what...at the park! A blue whale...needs a lot of shrimp!

And that works, particularly for the target age group. Giant whale on a skateboard, tee hee hee. For the grown-ups, there are retro touches: whale-related advertisements and a pamphlet that looks like in-flight safety instructions.

There are some rather good details. Billy tries to hide the whale behind a few branches. Whale graffiti. The girl at the park with her giant squid.

Billy, sadly, gets the worst of the art. He look blocky and blotchy. So do most of the faces, so it is best that he has faceless parents.

The whale seems to be taking the whole thing gracefully.

If your kid really likes whales, this could be one to buy.

Amazon link

Expected publication: June 2009

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? by William Poundstone

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

A better question might be why you would move Mount Fuji. It is an active volcano with several nearby cities. You could kill millions. This assumes you were not yourself killed or jailed for trying for defiling a religiously significant location and national treasure.

William Poundstone organizes the history and (lack of) science of job interviews and intelligence tests around the puzzle interview, popularized by Microsoft. He discusses corporate culture in the face of rapid innovation. He provides tips for interviewers and job candidates. And, in the piece you are probably here for, he lays out some common questions and good answers.

This is worth reading if you expect to conduct or face many job interviews. I am told that Microsoft does not do this anymore, but odd case questions are still around. The book may not be of real interest to you unless you are interested in its many parts.

And it does have many. It is usually a bad sign when a book covers so much ground that it needs two subtitles. In this case, Fuji does a good job of hitting several topics with some details, rather than one thing in-depth. They are a related cluster of topics that hang together as a book.

It is short. The book proper ends about halfway through, with most of the second half being detailed answers to the puzzle questions. I found the explanations far too long, but they will help you get the idea behind the puzzles so that you can successfully face variations on them. "Here is the trick, here is how you apply it, here is the theory behind it."

If you like logic puzzles, you might enjoy this without the interview considerations. But if you enjoy logic puzzles, you may already read Raymond Smullyan, which should take you through at least a third of the puzzles. If you really expect to face a puzzle interview like these, you should definitely read some Smullyan puzzles. They will give you far more explanation and practice, along with a more intuitive sense of how to apply the concepts.

I found the book interesting, enough to read the ~150 pages plus skim for the tricks to the puzzles I could not get on my own. If you are actually interviewing at Microsoft, you might be better served with some of the other books in the Amazon link below. Or take the Lemony Snicket route: "Read Everything -- Just In Case!"

Amazon link

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by Andre Jordan

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

The cartoon equivalent of cutting yourself, with art below xkcd standards. A couple of doodles are inspired, but I cannot recommend this many pages for so few successes. It might resonate more if you are depressed, but just read PostSecret for your dose of "I am not alone."

Amazon link

Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin

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

It is important to remember at times that we the neurotypical can be huge jerks to people who think differently, and not just in the autistic sense.

Jason Blake, our first-person perspective narrator, is an autistic middle-schooler. He has all the social and anxiety problems that entails. He is also a writer of short fiction. At the board where he posts his stories, a girl likes them (and maybe him). But how could that survive actually meeting each other?

Autism is the childhood psychological disorder of the moment. To the extent that this is a crisis of over-diagnosis, it is hiding and trivializing the difficulties of real autistic people. Not too long ago, every child with a reading problem was "mildly dyslexic," and then every behavioral problem was ADD for a while. Today, children with social problems gets noted as "autism spectrum disorder" and anti-social types online self-diagnose as "mild Asperger's," while parents are fed junk science about vaccines. In a few years, Americans will pounce upon some new hope of solving childhood through pharmaceuticals.

Jason, displaying all the common characteristics of autism down to every category of repetitive behavior, has problems but does not see himself as something to be cured. First, this is who he is, how he thinks, and he is not less intelligent or emotional than any other adolescent. If people would give him some time and not expect everyone to conform to the same social expressions, they would get along fine. Second, he really does have problem understanding others and expressing himself, because his brain does not work quite the same way as everyone else's. This makes things hard.

Jason wants people to be happy. He wants his mother to understand that he loves her. He wants friends and maybe a girlfriend. This is all very difficult when he does not naturally express his emotions the way others do. Emotions are something you feel, he explains, not something you say. Even confirming to people that he is listening to them takes a conscious mental effort that does not always work. No one wants to hang out with the hand-flapping kid who does not perform the normal kabuki dance of social pulp.

His view is anthropological. He is trying to understand human culture from the outside. It is a great view for realizing how strange our social norms can be. It is not terribly helpful for him in conforming to those norms, to the extent that he might want to.

One of the most important differences is what is important or relevant. Looking at someone while listening can be more distracting than helpful: there are facial expressions and hand gestures that might send conflicting messages, and the forest can get lost in the trees of noticing all the hairs and pores and smells and how fabric folds and... Representations do not always make sense to Jason, because the world exists in a million details. :) does not look like a human face.

Combining all these, Jason thinks beyond the moment. You (should) think faster than you speak, and he does not pause to inform his listener of what other topics have been brought in. He might circle back around to the original topic, and his side might sound entirely disjointed. It all makes sense from the inside.

As a writer, Jason is genre savvy. (I am often annoyed by authors who make their protagonists writers, but it works well here.) He remarks on story structures, sometimes to understand how the narrative of his life is going. He professes his own theory of literature early on, that things happen and there is little point looking for a forest beyond the trees, but he seems capable of structuring a plot. Given time and the ability to write it down, he can make his thoughts clear.

The telling of events mixes this up. Jason is a somewhat unreliable narrator. He follows his own thoughts, and they make clear what is going on, even if he misunderstands it. He tells us events the way he sees them, which follows that sometimes odd path through details. It is clear to me, but it might be disorienting for some younger readers.

I cannot say if this is an accurate view of autism from the inside. It sounds right, and it meshes with the comments from autistic people I have read, but I do not fully trust my ability to empathize that far that accurately. Comments are open for autistic (or spectrum) readers.

I might have rated the book a 4 with a different ending. (Not the exact last lines, which are good, but the resolution of the conflict.) There were several ways to end the story, as Jason notes, and the one chosen was a perfectly fine and valid one. It was just not what I needed to make me want to re-read it. I might later give this an upward revision to 3.5. To me, the most valuable parts are Jason's introspection, which work even without a plot.

Amazon link

Expected publication: March 2009