New books for the summer

Another indecisive week for our weather. Cool and rainy, hot and rainy, cool and not rainy, hot and not rainy. I'm kind of over it and would like to pack my jacket away ...

Anyway, to insulate myself from the vicissitudes of our weather, I injected some heat into my life by picking up Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. No nonfiction, no "serious" fiction -- ha -- just flat-out mayhem. It's the story of a magician who is torn away from the woman he loves and tricked into Hell by his friends, where he spends eleven years fighting -- and defeating -- the worst monsters the abyss can throw at him. He finally escapes into modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that things have changed. Not only can one "have Internet" on one's cell phone, but his girlfriend was murdered shortly after his exile, and the leader of the group that sent him to Hell has become something rather godlike.

Upon realizing this -- which involves our main character digging himself out of a grave and immediately robbing a young businessman of all of his money and clothes -- he embarks on what could be called the quintessential rampage and seeks revenge, starting with decapitating one of his old friends within several minutes of his emergence on Earth and keeping the severed head alive for information and abuse as he searches for the people responsible for what has happened to him. Along with an immortal Frenchman, a contemporary punk, a fallen angel, and a few tricks up his sleeve, he tears up LA, leveling city blocks, making friends with the local bartender by tearing apart the neighborhood skinhead extortioners, and discovering the real story behind the creation of the world.

In a nutshell, it's Constantine without the lousy acting and paper-thin plot and with a much, much higher body count. Totally brainless and it doesn't demand anything from you except a little credulity, so it's a good read for when you want a break from the heavy stuff.

As promised, here are a few more breaks from the heavy stuff, fresh off the book-cart and wrapped in today's newspaper:

Graphic Novels

Fables: Legends in Exile
The first installment of the popular Fables series, this volume introduces the reader to the world of the Fables, living storybook characters that have been exiled to our world following a huge war. When I say "living," that's what I mean -- the characters you normally associate with Disney are here turned into gangsters, prostitutes, power-mongers, dictators, and cops, among many other things. The adventure begins with the murder of Rose Red -- Mayor Snow White's sister -- and the subsequent investigation by the Big Bad Wolf. All the volumes are fantastic reads, and we have several available on the shelf.

Y: The Last Man
This series is set after a mysterious plague kills every single male mammal on the face of the Earth -- except two. Yorick and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, find themselves navigating a world desperate to ensure the perpetuation of the human species, whether through medical advances or sheer bloody-minded conflict. It's fascinating to look at the author's conceptions of a world run by women, and the social upheaval this implies. Gender roles are upended for a certain segment of the population, and interpersonal interaction becomes very different. It's definitely not a graphic novel for chauvinists!

Black Hole
A small town in the 1970s is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious disease of unknown origin. It's a fairly typical premise, except that this particular disease is sexually transmitted among teenagers, and it causes their bodies to mutate in unpredictable ways. The mutations vary from the barely-noticeable, like an extra mouth in your clavicle that can be disguised by a t-shirt, to the dramatic, which can alter your entire appearance and turn you into something that resembles the walking dead. The infected are perfectly healthy (except for The Bug) but are ostracized by their town, for both their physical appearance and what that appearance signifies in terms of their morality, and forced to live in the woods. Black Hole follows the stories of two of those students: a young, attractive woman who sleeps with the wrong boy and finds herself shedding her skin on a weekly basis, and a young man who can't ever seem to get laid -- until he does and grows tentacles out of his sides. It's surreal, sweet, and incredibly disturbing; the art is spooky but the story is engrossing.

Britten and Brülightly
A noirish detective tale, this graphic novel follows Britten, a private-eye who looks French but is actually South American, as he investigates the apparent suicide of his client's husband and uncovers a creepy family conspiracy with ties to organized crime. It's a thin book, but the plot is appropriately moody; so is the art, which is fantastic for this genre. The capper, of course, is that his partner is a talking teabag that lives in his coat.

A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
A nonfiction graphic novel that tells the story of several New Orleans residents and their lives after Hurricane Katrina, this book is, in a word, incredible. It only takes the author a dozen panels to fully depict what happened to the city in the hurricane. It's an unbelievable representation of one of the worst -- if not the worst -- natural disasters in American history.

Novels

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
More or less self-explanatory. From the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes the story of our 16th President and his secret double life as a vampire slayer -- er, hunter. Based on "secret diaries" given to the author by a major player in the story, this book details the course of Lincoln's life as he discovers that vampires are real, and that his family has had tragic run-ins with them. As he grows older, he begins to hunt them by night while working as a lawyer and politician during the day. After he eventually becomes president, he discovers that Confederate vampires plan to set off a civil war so they can feast on the remains and decides to fight back. Truthfully, it's just a retelling of the real story, with vampires added (guess what John Wilkes Booth really was?), but it's done very well, and ends on a lighter note with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which is attended by -- well, read the book!

Backing into Forward: A Memoir
If you've ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, you're familiar with Jules Feiffer's work -- he illustrated the book. He's also been a syndicated cartoonist for over 60 years, although he's mostly done stuff that appears in the likes of the Village Voice more than newspaper comic strips. In any case, his autobiography is fascinating; if you're a fan of Kerouac and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (my review is linked), you'll see elements of both in Backing into Forward. An eminently worthwhile read.

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Chelsea Handler comes back with her third collection of essays, jokes, and stories. After the success of My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, she appears to have been encouraged to write again. And it's funny ... I just wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't into extremely, extremely off-color anecdotes ...

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
One of the most-lauded books of the year (thus far), this novel follows the story of Major Pettigrew, a sort of quintessential Englishman who is struggling against his unscrupulous family to reclaim a heirloom rifle after the death of his younger brother. Although he also struggles to pass his traditional values on to his son -- who can be most kindly described as a "yuppie" -- he falls into an untraditional friendship with a Pakistani shopkeeper from his neighborhood. It all sounds fairly boring but it's done with a terrific dry wit, and as the plot comes to a head, things get exciting. Almost a modern-day comedy of manners with a nice dash of romance.

Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
The title is fairly fanciful, and so is the book. It tells the story of a few Russian slum residents who cope with the strangeness of post-Soviet life by escaping into their dreams. There isn't much of a plot -- not a whole lot of explosions or misadventures happen -- but the fleshed-out characters and the odd natures of their individual lives make this novel an absorbing read.

Nonfiction

Love Letters of Great Men and Love Letters of Great Women
As promised, these are two collections of love letters from poets, kings, queens, presidents, authors, politicians, and philosophers. Although it can be hard to get over the sappiness of some of those letters, they offer fascinating insights into the minds -- and hearts -- of people whose names live on today. Good stuff if you're into mushy romance or truly outstanding prose from those best-suited to spout expressions of the ineffable.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
Written to commemorate the centennial of Clemens's death, this book explores the singularly crowded life of one of America's greatest authors. The book itself is written as a comprehensive overview of both Clemens's life and work, mixing analyses of Huckleberry Finn and other works with an exploration of Clemens's complex attitudes toward slavery, American life, and religion in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It's a good way to get to know the man himself and understand his work in the context in which it was undertaken. He's one of my favorite authors, although that's more because of the person he was than because of his work, and it's a terrific book.

Things That Make Us [sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World
From the founder of SPOGG comes this hilarious answer to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to grammar in the modern-day world. Although I think we can safely say that this premise has been done to death -- I've read six or seven books based on this idea since I started working here a year and a half ago -- Things That Make Us [sic] addresses more interesting stuff like spam, The Princess Bride, LOLcats, and letters sent to David Hasselhoff and George W. Bush. And it's funny; if you've read SPOGG's blog, you have a fairly good idea of how snarky the author can be, and she pulls it off beautifully here.

Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan
Published in conjunction with one of the first American exhibitions of Pakistani contemporary art, this book is gorgeous. It offers an unparalleled look at art in Pakistan today and the issues affecting Pakistani society in the wake of the past several decades of struggle and conflict in the region. It's a good way to overcome preconceived notions about life in Pakistan; complementary essays place the works in important cultural, historical and artistic contexts. It's easy to think of Pakistan in terms of news headlines, but the country -- and its people -- are so much more than that, and this book reflects that and offers a valuable aesthetic perspective.

Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
Groan-worthy pun notwithstanding, this has to be one of the most fascinating books I've seen recently. The title covers it all; this is a collection of stories associated with important pieces of architecture, which are taken as both settings and symbols of their times, places, and cultures. It's not strictly accurate, though: the book actually ends with a chapter at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, titled "In which everything, and nothing at all, has changed." That should give you an idea of the important overviews both of history and of the importance of place in individual lives offered by this book.

Sixteen books in today's post. I'm tired. No Question of the Week in honor of graduation. I'll see you next week.

Good luck to all of our graduates!