Watership Down by Richard Adams

Most of my friends look back to JRR Tolkien or George Lucas as the authors of the greatest epic fantasies ever created, but for me, it is Richard Adams. His Watership Down is the epic fantasy to which I compare all others. What’s that? You thought Watership Down was just that cute book about rabbits? Just one of the first in a long line of anthropomorphic fiction? No, it is so  much more—more than the allegorical implications of Animal Farm, more than the quest and adventure of Erin Hunter's various series,  and more than the rich characterization and world-building of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows. No, Watership Down is complexly written, intricately plotted, and emotionally nuanced novel about a bunch of rabbits. I swear it’s awesome.

ARES: Bringer of War by George O'Connor

George O'Connor has been busy retelling the Olympic myths using graphic novels for a while now, and the good folks at First Second books have been doing a great job getting the books out. They even have a website for the entire collection. What O'Connor is doing is fascinating. He's not just telling the original versions, but through his artwork and dialogue, is reimagining the stories in a more fleshed-out way.

I am obliged to say that when it comes to Ares, a bunch of the flesh ends up dead in the battle of Troy, since O'Connor chose to inject The Iliad into this book as a means of focusing on Ares, the god of war. While the "facts" from The Iliad are there, rather than focusing solely on the actions of the men on the field, O'Connor focuses on the proxy battles being fought among the gods and goddesses, with an emphasis on their desires and interferences. Further, in an interesting take, O'Connor tackles "daddy issues" in this book by depicting Ares's uneasy relationship with his father, Zeus, and the relationship between Askalaphos, a son of Ares, killed in battle. Whereas Ares thinks Zeus doesn't like him much, and gets confirmation from Zeus, Askalaphos thinks Ares is indifferent to his fate, but we see Ares both mourning and enraged by his son's death in battle.

"Something Wicked This Way Comes," by Ray Bradbury

Young people want to be older. Older people want to be young.

It's an old story. It's life. Every teenager knows it well. They feel it in their bones, the constant rage at a world where everyone is trying to tell them what to do; the hunger for that seemingly-infinitely-distant day when they'll be able to drive a car, buy alcohol, vote, move out, make decisions, be happy. But teenagers see the other side of it: the adults who ache to be young again, who are trapped in miserable lives and punish young people for their youth and freedom and the possibility that maybe they'll be able to make their own dreams come true.

Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is a masterpiece of dark fantasy, about a mysterious carnival that comes to town, run by a man named Dark, who can give you what you most want - at a terrible price. If you're old, a ride on his magic carousel can make you young again.Young... and monstrous. And if you're young, the carousel can make you older.

It's the story of two boys, best friends, thirteen years old - inches away from fourteen - who are poised at the perilous brink of becoming men. Will Halloway is a bookworm, fond of reading about the big wide world but not in too much of a hurry to get there. His friend Jim Nightshade, on the other hand, already has his heart set on grown-up things. There's a darkness in Jim, and that's what the carnival calls out to.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Ian Culbard

Lovecraft has always been a subject of interest for folks looking to adapt works to other media. He’s probably the literary figure of the last century who casts the largest shadow, in terms of direct and indirect influence. I’m thinking of this, in part because of my fascination with the new HBO series True Detective and its allusions to Lovecraft with images of “a spaghetti faced man” and “the King in Yellow” (by way of Robert W. Chambers). But Ian Culbard’s series of graphic novels adapting Lovecraft consumed me even more when I encountered them recently, and they are perhaps the finest adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories I’ve yet seen.

Youth and War

John Knowles' A Separate Peace is classic literature, the kind of book you might be assigned at some point to read for school. But if you're not, you should read it anyway, and if you are, you shouldn't let that keep you from seeing what a fantastic book it is.

Gene Forrester is a student at Devon, a New England boarding school in the early years of US involvement in World War II. His life is punctuated by stunts and pranks, such as leaping from the high branches of a tree into the depths of a river, an act of daring which the boys imagine will serve as training for their own inevitable involvement in the war. As Gene narrates is life at Devon, he speaks mostly of his relationship with his roommate and best friend Phineas, or Finny, a boy of incredible athletic talent and personality who has such ease among the other boys and the teachers at the school that it leaves Gene feeling estranged and envious. As his story unfolds, Gene's uncertain feelings toward Phineas become so twisted and confused that they ultimately lead to tragedy.

Pretending to Grow Up

Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play -
The lad I used to be.

And yet he smiles so wistfully
Once he has crept within,
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.
- Sometimes by Thomas S. Jones, Jr.

Earlier this month, I posted this poem at my blog, Bildungsroman, after discovering it at Bartleby.com.  I think any adult, male or female, can relate to this - be it wistfully, happily, regretfully, or any combination of emotions that childhood memories and adult aspirations can create. When I was little, I read and enjoyed all of L.M. Montgomery's novels about the life of Anne Shirley, but I always preferred the earlier volumes - especially the first book, Anne of Green Gables - to the later volumes in the series. Earlier this year, I read Now I'll Tell You Everything, a novel in which the main character chronicles her life from her late teens all the way into her sixties. (See my post about the Alice McKinley novels by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor for more information on the entire series.)

But back to the poem Sometimes. With the piece being written by a man and specifically using male pronouns, it made me think of books with male protagonists  - modern classics like Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and the Matthew Martin books by Paula Danziger. What happened to them after those books? What were they like at age 20, 30, 40? Did Encyclopedia Brown become a bona fide private detective? A cop? Is Maniac Magee a teacher? A father?

When I interviewed Judy Blume in 2008, I figured out how old Fudge, Peter, Sheila and Tootsie would be, based on the publication year of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and asked the author, "Do you ever consider what they would be doing in their adulthood, their middle age?" She responded, "Peter and Fudge can never grow up!"
 
But in my mind, other than Peter Pan - which is an entirely different post - it's interesting to consider how our favorite fictional characters might turn out when they grow up. The triumphs and the tragedies of childhood undoubtedly shape the lives of real people, and a lot of wonderfully written middle grade and young adult books capture these experiences. So...what happened next?

What do you think happened to your favorite characters? Who became the men and women they thought they'd be? And who always smiles when they think of the child they used to be?

Don't Trust your Parents, Avoiding Murdering Anyone and Prepare for Anything

Fairy tales are all the rage of late, especially dark versions which are retold on film and TV -- Disney's Maleficent and ABC's Once Upon a Time being just the latest manifestations. Of course these tales are many times removed from their source material, primarily the European folk tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

There's no need to rail against modern reinterpretations of the classic fairy tales. In fact it's very much in the tradition to retell fairy tales and to change them in the retelling as Philip Pullman reminds us in the introduction to his collection Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version which he published last year on the 200th anniversary of the original. There is nothing sacred about the contents of these stories. Each teller (or TV producer) can take them and change them and make them his or her own.

Still, going back to the "original" tales is simply a lot of fun. Pullman's collection is a great book for this. First of all, his selection includes most of the classic tales that appear in modern renditions, but it also includes rarer stories and some really strange ones like "The Juniper Tree." Secondly, his translations are clear and direct and when he adjusts or embellishes, it's for good reason, usually to make the telling a bit more entertaining. Also they come with informative, amusing notes and enlightening references to similar folktales from other traditions.

So let's review: what do the original tales tell us that the new versions don't?

A Night to Remember

A Night to Remember is the definitive tale of the sinking of the Titanic. Walter Lord interviewed more than sixty survivors. And he wrote this minute-by-minute account of the collision with the iceberg, and

the experiences of passengers and crew.



In 1898 a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg. This somehow showed the futility of everything, and in fact, the book was called Futility when it appeared that year...

Fourteen years later a British shipping Company named the White Star Line built a steamer remarkaby like the one in Robertson's novel. The new liner was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson's was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24-25 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number, But, then, this didn't seem to matter because both were labeled "unsinkable."

On April 10, 1912, the real ship left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. Her cargo included a priceless copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam and a list of passengers collectively worth two hundred fifty million dollars. On her way over she too struck an iceberg and went down on a cold April night.

Robertson called his ship the Titan. the White Star Line called its ship the Titanic.

Get Out of your own Backyard

There's a whole world out there. You probably already knew that already, but in case you are like I was in high school, I thought I might make the point directly.

I grew up and went to high school in a small, highly homogenous town and while my teachers didn't exactly hide the fact that we were part of a larger, more diverse world, they certainly didn't emphasize the point, particularly not in my literature classes which featured, Shakespeare, Hardy and a slew of American writers mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not that these are bad people to read. I've grown to love Whitman and Dickinson and Hawthorne and someday I may even convince my brain to enjoy Melville. But the thought of reading something in translation or from a foreign country other than the one with the Hobbits seemed completely anathema to those creating curriculum.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars by Ian Doescher

I hate Ian Doescher. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars by Ian Doescher, like Cardboard Gods, Josh Wilker’s memoir told through baseball cards, and The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan’s story of a relationship told through dictionary entries, is a book whose structure frustrates me. Frustrates me because the latent writer in me hears about it and believes that, had I come up with the idea, I could have written this book. (And by “could have” I of course mean “should have.”) But I didn’t. He did. And for that I hate him. But don’t let my hate stop you from reading Doescher’s excellent five-act iambic pentameter retelling of the original Star Wars. If droid-inspired Daft Punk can top the charts, and science fiction icon Joss Whedon can release a Shakespeare comedy, then surely the time is right for a Shakespearean version of Star Wars.

Broken Bubble by Philip K Dick

In my head and on paper, I should love PKD. For some reason, though, I haven't been able to get into him. I don't know why-- he's everywhere. Not only are there umpteen movie adaptations of his works, but so much of today's SF and speculative fiction begs borrows and steals from his work.

But then I came across The Broken Bubble, one of his posthumously published "non-SF" novels of the 50's, and that's how I discovered the strength, wit, and verve of the 20th Century's most admired and known "unknown" authors.

How to Impress your English Teacher while Avoiding Extreme Boredom

W. Somerset Maugham is a writer with a fancy name. Writers with fancy names are known for writing books which are not all that exciting. W. Somerset Maugham's book The Magician, however, is an exception.

While it's true that much of Maugham's writing is about stormy relationships between husbands and wives living during the early part of the twentieth century -- not your typical guy fare -- The Magician is about a betrothed couple, the dull Arthur Burdon and the stunningly beautiful Margaret Dauncey, whose lives are invaded by a strange and rather unpleasant character in the form of professed magician George Haddo. Besides being unpleasant, entirely full of himself and showing a proclivity for putting down those around him, Haddo is difficult to read. It's hard to tell when he is joking and when he is boasting. He also claims to be a magician and seems to exude some sort of supernatural aura. He upsets docile animals just by standing near them and takes a snake bite from a cobra without being affected in the least by its venom. Arthur, an accomplished surgeon and man of science, dismisses Haddo's shenanigans as mere tricks. Margaret is disgusted by him.

The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn

The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn by John Bellairs

Eccentric millionaire (is there any better kind?) Alpheus T. Winterborn built a castle-like building which houses the Hoosac Public Library. It also houses a great treasure, or so the stories go. One day, young page Anthony Monday finds a gold coin hidden in the molding and begins to think there's truth to this crazy story. Unfortunately, so does Hugo Philpotts, Winterborn's greedy nephew. With the help of Miss Eells, the town librarian, Anthony races to find the treasure and save his family from financial ruin before Mr. Philpotts can get his sinister claws into the treasure.

I was inspired to pick up this book in part because I have a gaping hole in my knowledge of juvenile and middle grade
 fiction, a hole that's only gotten deeper since I moved up into the adult services division at work. I was also in the mood for a good solid mystery, and who can resist a mystery in which a plucky youngster and a librarian team up? And I think I was also inspired by previous posts here in Guys Lit Wire on the Pursuit of Lost Books.

History, Fiction and Filth

After seeing the movie, I tried to summarize Les Miserables to my son. The plot is so elaborate and convoluted that I couldn't do it. I finally gave up and said simply, "It's about dirty people singing."

If fiction and film is at all accurate, the nineteenth century was a filthy time, at least for those without money. Bad plumbing and unfettered coal burning left most people covered in some sort of filth the vast majority of the time. Like Les Miserables, Terry Pratchett's YA novel Dodger is very much about dirty people, though there's not much singing. Dodger is the adopted pseudonym of a young man who's grown up an orphan on the streets and has taken up the less-than-enviable (and somewhat less-than-legal) profession of toshing. "Toshing" is slang for collecting things that fall in the sewer. Dodger spends his days navigating bits of nineteenth century sewer, picking up jewelry, coins and anything else he might be able to use, sell, or return for reward.

Prince of Cats by Ronald Wimberly

Written and drawn by Ronald Wimberly, Prince of Cats is a singular book. A graphic novel retelling of Romeo and Juliet, it focuses on Tybalt, Juliet's hot-headed cousin, who's often referred to as the "Prince of Cats." While Wimberly updates the setting to a slightly-skewed version of today's America--young men wander the streets with swords, looking for fights--he retains the poetic speech and even the iambic pentameter of the original play.

Wimberly's work is heavily influenced by hip-hop and graffiti artists. The juxtaposition between the character's stately speech and their modern surroundings is jarring at first, but he draws interesting parallels between the bombast of hip-hop culture and the swagger of Shakespeare's violent young nobles. Discussing his language choices in an interview with Comics Alliance, Wimberly said, "One of the things I like about Shakespeare's work is how there's a narrative in his application of language as well as in the story of the characters. I chose to mix it up because the mix is what a large part of the process was about. I wanted the language to reflect what I was doing. I wanted Shakespeare's original work to come in like a sample."

Prince of Cats is a unique spin on a 400-year-old classic. This is certainly one of the most intriguing, captivating books I read this year.

The Black Count, Bushman Lives, and A Wrinkle in Time

As it is the time of year people are thinking of gifts – and books make tremendous gifts – I've got a trio of titles that I've been suggesting lately that might just suit an otherwise tough-to-shop-for boy.

What if I were to suggest that the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo was partially based on a true story? Or if some of the swashbuckling in The Three Musketeers came from stories passed down father to son? And what if it turned out that much of the inspiration in Dumas' tales came from a mixed race general who fought alongside Napoleon but was despised because everyone assumed the striking black man charging ahead fearlessly on his horse he really was the one in charge?

I suppose you can guess the final question: What if I were to tell you that this striking historical figure was, in fact, Alexandre Dumas’ father? Author Tom Reiss’ delivers all this and so much more in The Black Count: Glory, Revollution, Betrayl, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, the biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. From his birth and brief experience with slavery in Haiti, to his Paris education where he learned to sword fight with aristocracy, to his rise in the French Revolutionary army, The Black Count is a biography that reads like an adventure novel. I’ll be honest, i don’t generally like biographies, but I love sweeping adventure stories and this one, steeped in Reiss’s well-sleuthed family history, feels both familiar and new at the same time.

Rebel Fire by Andrew Lane

Rebel Fire by Andrew Lane (Sherlock Holmes: The Legend Begins #2)

I am not a purist in my love for Sherlock Holmes. I adore the Steven Moffat/Mark Gatiss BBC reboot of the series. I only don't like that it takes forever for a new season to come to the US (Moffat! Gatiss! *shakes fists*) I love the Guy Ritchie movies. I love the 1980s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett in the title role, even though the episodes can be a little cheesy. I'd probably like Elementary, except I don't get the channel in my basement apartment. But I also have a strange love for books that tell about the childhoods of established characters.* Rebel Fire is, as you can see, the second book in the Sherlock Holmes: The Legend Begins series (also called Young Sherlock Holmes series). In this book, Sherlock, his tutor Amyus Crowe and Virginia Crowe, Amyus's daughter, catch up with John Wilkes Booth. Everyone thought Booth to be dead after he assassinated Lincoln, but he survived (although his mind did not) and is being used as a pawn in a plot by Confederate sympathizers to invade Canada. Like the first book in the series, Death Cloud, the plot twists are rather silly. Yes, the plot twists in Doyle's stories are also improbable, but these books really push my ability to suspend disbelief. I also fought a bit against the characterization as it feels like Sherlock is headed towards a Robert Downey Junior adulthood while Mycroft is headed towards a Mark Gatiss with a big side of mushy brotherly love that struck me as totally out of character even though I did get a case of the feels when I read those scenes. Still, the book was not short on adventure, show-offy Bond villain speeches or improbably action sequences and I enjoyed reading it, even if I couldn't quite fight the urge to roll my eyes at some of the choices Lane made. My snobby literary critic side warred with the side of me that also enjoyed Librarian: Quest for the Spear, and the cheesy action story side won the day as far as Lane's books are concerned.**

If you like this series, there are at least 5 novels and a novella, according to Goodreads. Book two was originally called Red Leech when it was released in the UK, a nod to a weird, silly and kinda gross plot twist in this book. It seems like only books 1 and 2 have been published in the US but you can get books 3-5 from different sellers on Amazon if you're interested.





*Although apparently I hated this back in 2011, when I reviewed  Death Cloud. Go figure.
** Lane has also written a Torchwood book! Set, as far as I can tell, sometime between series one and series two of the show! Which means Iantoooooooo! Squeeeeee!
cross posted at (Library Lass) Adventures in Reading.

What one Good Turn Deserves

Ghost stories are meant to be retold. It's a kind of ritual, adapting what scares us to fit our immediate social, technological and political environment.

Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1898. In it, a wealthy man hires a governess to look after his orphaned niece and nephew. The children live in a remote country house with a handful of servants. The man asks that he never be bothered regarding the children, no matter what happens to them. The governess finds the children rather strange (though their isolation could account for this) but then she also starts seeing the ghosts of a former governess and a former servant killed under mysterious circumstances. She begins to suspect that the ghosts are haunting the children and threatening them to keep the haunting secret.

In The Turning, Francine Prose rewrites James' story in a contemporary setting. The governess is replaced with a "babysitter" -- and a male one at that -- hired just for the summer. The remote country home is made even more remote by placing it on an island, disconnected from phone, Internet and television and radio broadcasts. The babysitter, Jack, relates the haunting to his girlfriend in a series of increasingly paranoid letters.

In a Glass Grimmly

For information on the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC, please see our post from last week. Over 100 books have been bought from the Powells wish list thus far! -CM

Lately I've been wondering if we do more harm than good by making childhood too safe. I'm not thinking about car seats or non-toxic flame-retardant materials, but a sort of intellectual safety that prevents curiosity and the development of common sense more than it protects. We would prefer to believe it is more important to teach children to fear strangers than to develop an internal sense of knowing when and whom to fear.

The problem (for those who find it a problem) is that without a hard and fast set of rules we have the dual issue of teaching the difficult (intuition) coupled with an unacknowledged root source (adult responsibility, or lack thereof). The sad thing is that there is a solution, its been with us for hundreds of years, and we take it for granted: storytelling. There's a lot that can be learned in a story, and they don't have to be overly moralistic or didactic, and they can occasionally be quite fun. Horrifying, gory, disagreeable and yet unexplainable good fun.

And the best part is that kids really like it.

For those who haven't gleaned it from the title, In A Glass Grimmly, Adam Gidwitz's "companion" to A Tale Dark and Grimm, takes as its source the folk and fairy tales once told to children back when people lived closer to a world full of inexplicable horror. Lacking medicine, much less the concept of hygiene, there were invisible things far scarier than the shadows that dwell in the nearby woods, ah, but what wonderful stories could be constructed from those shadows. As a result, though these tales were as full of the sort of caution we might dole out to our own kids these days it was done with a great deal of adventure, magic, and humorous absurdity as well.

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

For information on the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC, please see our post from last week. Over 100 books have been bought from the Powells wish list thus far! -CM It being October, it means that Halloween is right around the corner. Although Halloween has become associated with scary stories, it is more rightly associated (historically) with the telling of stories. Period. And what better stories than those found in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe?

Poe, after all, invented detective fiction in the English-speaking world with his creation of C. Auguste Dupin, the detective in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". (Dupin appeared in additional stories, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter". "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" feature a grisly double murder, made all the more baffling by occurring inside an inaccessible fourth-floor room that is locked from the inside. Ear-witnesses agree that they heard the attack, but cannot place the language used by the attacker. Dupin and his friend (the unnamed narrator) sort out what actually happened. Dupin, it should be noted, is not actually a detective, any more than Sherlock Holmes is - he is just a guy with an interest in learning the truth of the matter, who has the time and ability to track things down. Dupin is, in fact, a prototype for both Holmes and for Agatha Christie's detective, Hercule Poirot.