The Rough Guide to Superheroes

I have to be up-front about this: I can't stand stories about guys (and gals) in tights and capes with super powers battling super villains in city-destroying battles. I never could identify with anyone in those comics, I never felt there was anything noble in the secret identities of the do-gooders, the peril of the planet was always so artificially ridiculous.

Which isn't to say I don't know the Marvel and DC universe down to every Kirby crosshatch and Ditko posture, that I didn't watch reruns of Batman religiously on TV, that I haven't cringed in anticipation over who would be cast in every movie adaptation of every superhero movie. It's gotten that you almost -- not quite, but almost -- are not able to claim a full cultural literacy if you can't defend your preferred Batman, Superman, or Hulk.

But there are more superheroes than the ones in comics, and some of those I can get behind with just as much fervor as any comic book geek (which I once was, I must also admit). There are superspies with and without class, vampire slayers of many ages who aren't all named Buffy, superchickens and ape-men, bionic men and women, flaming carrots and men of concrete, and a whole pantheon of intergalactic star warriors. The universe has become so think with superheroes and villains that sometimes it's impossible to tell all the players without a score card of some kind. And to the rescue come the good people at Penguin books who publish a whole collection of titles under the moniker of Rough Guides.

Specifically, The Rough Guide to Superheroes.

Originally begun as a series of travel guides aimed at the backpacker set, Rough Guides have since come to include many cultural reference titles that include movies, music, and food. Among them is this overview of the world of heroes (and villains) in popular culture. In the chapter on the origins of Superman in 1931 is an historical overview of how history has shaped superhero stories. The mythology of superheroes is rich -- a life-saving journey as a baby works for both Moses and Superman. In fact the Bible is full of characters with superpowers. And what, exactly, is the difference between Arthur's Excalibur and a Jedi's light sabre? Masked identities cover everyone from Batman to Zorro to the Lone Ranger, and they're all mentioned here as well.

The Rough Guide to Superheroes isn't exhaustive, but in its compact 320 pages it can give any novice a fairly complete picture of the major players, while providing the expert supertracker with a quick reference to their favorites. Separate sections for villains as well as for TV and movie heroes prevents the book from being based entirely on comic books, and a great many literary figures appear as well. It might have been nice to have an index for speedier reference, but part of the joy of book like this is being able to flip it open to any page and learn something new. There's more information per page than many books twice its size.

If there is a downside to this book its that it was published in 2004 and doesn't include all the recent developments in superhero movies and their sequels. And with the publishing industry in peril -- Penguin shuttered its New York office of Rough Guides last month -- its doubtful this book will receive the sort of updates the annual travel guides receive. That said, this is still a great collection of facts, trivia, history, and all-around scorecard for all the player in the superhero universe. And it fits easily in the back pocket of your jeans.

The Rough Guide to Superheroes
edited by Paul Simpson, Helen Rodiss, Michaela Bushell
Penguin Books
2004

Deciding the Next Decider by Calvin Trillin

Since next week is the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, I thought it seemed like a fitting time to take a look back at the election that brought us to this point.

Calvin Trillin has written religion columns for Time (which he tried to get out of by inserting the word "alleged" before things like the word "crucifixion" and "parting of the Red Sea"), food columns for The New Yorker magazine, and humorous political columns in rhyme for The Nation. He is on record as saying his interest in writing about food has nothing to do with an interest in restaurants, per se. " I’m not interested in finding the best chili restaurant in Cincinnati," he said. "I'm interested in Cincinnatians fighting about who has the best chili." (From an article in the NY Times in October of 2008.)

In June of 2004, he released a humorous book of politically-oriented rhyme entitled Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme. The title of the book comes from this rhymed couplet: "Obliviously on he sails/With marks not quite as good as Quayle's." (For those who miss the reference, Dan Quayle was the Vice President of the U.S. under George Herbert Walker Bush from 1989-1993; Quayle had a reputation as a poor student and was ridiculed for misspeaking in public). In 2006, in time for the mid-term elections, Trillin released a second book about the Bush Administration: A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme.

In November of 2008, Random House released Trillin's follow-up title, Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme. In this volume, Trillin examines the 2008 U.S. Presidential race starting as far back as the mid-term elections in 2006, when names started to be bandied about of various candidates in 2008, including a number who shot themselves in the foot (metaphorically) by dint of involvement in various political scandals.

The first candidate to announce a bid for the presidency was Barack Obama, who threw his hat into the ring in February of 2007. In a poem called "Obama, Rising", Trillin talked about how Obama had electrified the Democrats in his speech at the 2004 Presidential convention, and how conventional wisdom at the time was that he might someday be a good presidential candidate, but needed more time before running. The poem concludes as follows:

He went to Springfield, where he could invoke
The spirit of Abe Lincoln as he spoke
To thousands, cheering in the bitter cold.
He may have been by many fans extolled,
But pros said it was still a long-shot bet
To think the nomination's what he'd get.
When faced with Clinton's powerful machine,
They said, he might collapse, like Howard Dean.
Experience was what he seemed to lack.
And to be frank, they pointed out, he's black.

A few chapters assess the various candidates that entered the ring. About McCain, Trillin noted (in the midst of a poem entitled "Pacifying Preachers"):

So John McCain now seemed to be at bat.
The Christian Right was less than pleased by that.
He's pro-life, but they tended to believe
He failed to wear his Jesus on his sleeve.
Before, when his cup ranneth to the brim,
They'd slaughtered both his family and him.
McCain, who'd finished number two to Two,
Believed his turn was now long overdue.
As he assumed the role of Bush Two's heir,
A somewhat different John McCain was there.
No longer did he seem the same man who
Had charmed the voters (and reporters, too)
With candor as he'd cheerfully express
His willingness to call BS BS.

As the primaries went along, Trillin documented them in rhymes and song parodies. After the primary reached South Carolina, John Edwards dropped out, leaving Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the last viable candidates standing for the Democratic nomination. In the midst of a chapter entitled "Just the Two of Us", Trillin said this:

Obama's rhetoric, she said, was lofty
But unsubstantial air, like Mister Softee,
Unanchored to the details it omits –
Precisely what was said of Hart by Fritz.*

Experience, Obama said, was nice,
But seasoning alone does not suffice,
And, given some decisions Clinton made,
It's clear that wisdom's not just time in grade.

*Gary Hart campaigned against Fritz Mondale for the Democratic nomination in 1984. Mondale defeated Hart after he used a popular ad slogan from Wendy's ("Where's the Beef?") during a televised debate. Mondale, in turn, lost to the current incumbent, President Ronald Reagan. Hillary Clinton's claims about Obama were similar to those Mondale made against Hart. Come June, 2008, however, it became clear that Clinton would not be able to secure her party's nomination, and she stepped out of the race to back Obama.

Trillin levels criticism at unsavory campaign tactics, at television pundits (dubbed "Sabbath gasbags" at least twice), and at various smear campaigns that spread virally.

For a primer on campaign strategy, it's hard to beat the chapter entitled "Defining". Here are a few excerpts from the primary text in that chapter:

The strategy is old: You must define
Your rival first, as somehow not benign.
Barack? The GOP implied that he
Was something other – not like you and me.
The right-wing blogs invented facts about him
Designed to cause Americans to doubt him:
A terrorist who's playing us for fools?
At least a guy who went to Muslim schools?
. . .
The Democrats' one over-arching aim?
Maintain McCain and Bush are just the same.
To vote McCain, they said, was to confirm
George W. for yet another term.
For all his maverick talk, they said that he
Was, in his heart, the same as Forty-Three.

As the parties went to their conventions, and McCain came out with Sarah Palin as his running mate, Trillin turned his focus to the influence of Karl Rove's style of campaign management. In the past, McCain had decried Rove's tactics, but during the summer of 2008, he employed a number of the same consultants that Rove had hired to propel George W. Bush to victory in 2002 and 2004. The chapter entitled "Fundamentals" begins as follows:

As Rove-o-Clones in deepest mud were slithering,
The criticism in the press was withering.
McCains ads, many said, were a disgrace.
The View called him a liar to his face.
At one point, slime-campaigning's reigning star –
Yes, Rove, the master – said they'd gone too far.

And then, the economy went south. Noted Republicans started backing Obama, McCain failed to score an "October surprise", and come election time, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States.

Trillin closes the book after Obama's victory speech in Chicago, Illinois, with a short poem about race relations.

"Race in America, November 5, 2008"
by Calvin Trillin

The curse is not broken, as some would deduce.
The curse is so strong we may never break loose.
But now, at this moment, we cling to the theme
Set forth by the man who said, "I have a dream."

If you're looking to purchase any of the three political titles referenced in this post, check the HUMOR section of the bookstore first. Although Trillin is discussing politics using poetry, humor seems to be the #1 takeaway when reading these books.

Listening to Summer

Why Summerland in the middle of winter (winter in my part of the world, anyway!)? Several reasons. I wanted to write about listening to books, and also wanted to explore a bit how I find things to read. It’s also to amuse myself—winter is just beginning as I write this, and when you read this, I’ll be enjoying the heat and humidity of tropical Brazil.

I was aware of Michael Chabon’s Summerland when it arrived at my library in 2002, but mostly because it was a big deal that this adult author had written a teen book (this was before the current craze of seemingly every author writing a teen or children’s book). I was a bit curious, because it seemed to involve baseball, but there was also what looked like a flying car on the cover, and it just didn’t seem like my thing. Fast forward to 2008, when I met my new friend Aarrun. One of the things I ask when meeting new people (particularly guys) is what they like to read, and if I’m not familiar with the author, I take the recommendation as an opportunity to try out a new book and get to know a new person better (I first read Kurt Vonnegut due to recommendations from friends, and thank them for it). Aarrun mentioned Chabon as one of his favorites, and the audiobook version of Summerland happened to pass through my hands shortly thereafter, so I decided to give it a try.

I don’t have a long commute, but find listening to books generally much more satisfying than trying to find something on the radio to hold my interest. I’ve particularly liked listening to books that might be slightly outside of what I normally read. Listening to a book seems to make it a bit easier for me to try something new—maybe it brings in that comforting feeling of being read to as a kid, I don’t know. I don’t read much fantasy (I prefer sf), mainly because I have a hard time keeping what always seems to be the cast of thousands of characters straight, and because the names are, for me, usually hard to pronounce, which jars me out of the reading experience. With an audiobook, at least I know how all the names are said! I figured if I was going to like a fantasy novel, one with baseball as a major component had a good chance. I grew up in Massachusetts, and still consider myself a member of Red Sox Nation, even if I’m deep in Rockies country now. I cried in 1986. I rejoiced in 2005 and 2007. Baseball has a great nostalgia factor for me.


Summerland is basically a fantasy quest novel. Our very reluctant hero is Ethan Feld, who is recruited for his save the world mission by the Farishers, residents of the Summerlands (a parallel world to the Middling, which is where we are, and the Winterlands). Ethan becomes more determined to complete his mission when he finds out that his inventor father is in the clutches of Coyote, who is trying to use his skills to bring about the end of the worlds. Along with his Little League teammates Jennifer T. and Thor, Ethan picks up help along the way from a Sasquatch that they liberate, a werefox, a tiny giant, and other assorted characters–all who make up the baseball team charged with saving the world. Over the course of their journey, they play many games (and meet many American folk heroes) and encounter numerous other challenges, but the final game, the one against Coyote and his team, will determine the fate of the worlds. I loved all the little character things (Ethan’s Little League teammates & competitors call him Dog Boy, because whenever he goes to the plate, he’s hoping for a walk), the detailed descriptions of the worlds, and the rhythm of the book—you can feel the pace pick up as they go from the top of the first inning to the bottom of the ninth. Chabon has his own take on baseball history, including things like the origin of the DH rule. The audio version of the book is read by the author, and he does a great job (alas, not all authors do), and you know you’re getting exactly the meanings and pronunciations that he meant. Even the fun word play comes across well.

If you’ve never tried out an audiobook before, take a chance. The next time you’re going on a trip, check one out from the library, or download one (many libraries are starting to offer this service for free!), load it onto your MP3 player, and experience a book in a whole new way. If you’re having a hard time with an assigned book, try listening to it and see if that helps. I’ve even gone back and listened to books I’ve already read and enjoyed, just to experience the book again. Summerland is a great choice, but there are audiobooks out there for whatever your taste is (I’ve recently enjoyed listening to John Green’s books). Check out the Audie Awards for the names of some of the best ones, and for the names of some of the excellent readers out there. Audiofile magazine also has reviews of various titles as well as interviews with readers and producers that talk about the process of translating a book to the audio format.

Take a break from winter. Visit the Summerlands.

Ode to the Pulps

Where do you figure the name Clark Kent came from? Consider two Jewish kids from Ohio, the children of working class immigrants. Did they pluck the most WASPiest name in the world out of thin air? I don’t think so. Before the comics were really comics and before these two Jewish kids from Ohio created the super-hero, the closest thing anybody had was in the pulp magazines of the 1930’s. The two biggest characters in the pulps: Doc Savage -- full name: Clark Savage, Jr. -- and star of pulps and of the most popular radio show of all time, the Shadow -- real name: well, on the radio it was Lamont Cranston, but in the original pulps, Cranston itself was just an alias. His real name was Kent Allard. So, you've got Jerry and Joe thrilling to the adventures of a pair named Clark and Kent . . .
All of this is just to illustrate what a debt that comics in all their multifarious genres (super-hero, crime, romance, horror) owe to the pulps, which comics themselves made obsolete.

If you’d like to see where all the supery, batty and spidery guys came from, you’re in luck. Nostalgia Ventures is reprinting the original adventures of Doc Savage and the Shadow. Doc, the philosophical and tonal antecedent of Superman was a “physical superman” trained from before the day he was born to the peak of human perfection for the exclusive purpose of making a finer world. The best place to start with him would be Volume 14: The Man of Bronze & the Land of Terror (by Kenneth Robeson aka Lester Dent). This includes Doc’s first adventure and introduces his motley crew of assistants and his fast-paced “science adventures.” The Shadow was a darker, nastier Batman right down the line. If you’re just jumping on board, start with Volume 3: the Red Blot & the Voodoo Master (by Maxwell Grant aka Walter Gibson), which features the Shadow’s showdown with one of his greatest foes and showcases his merciless and disturbingly efficient methods.

You better believe that comics return to their forebears with tokens of homage quite often. The very best of these (and I’m not exaggerating, this thing is fantastic), is Lobster Johnson Volume 1: the Iron Prometheus (by Mignola, Armstrong and Stewart). A spin-off of that big red galoot Hellboy, Lobster Johnson was a mystery man 100% in the tradition of the Shadow, taking on mysticism, science gone bad and Nazi spies with two swift fists, a blazing .45 and his burning Lobster’s claw. This volume (the first of many, I fervently hope) has cybernetic hoodlums, giant apes, hooded assassins and a Fu Manchu mastermind. It also has the pared down story-telling and breakneck action the pulps were famous for, but fused with a sophisticated modern perspective which creates multiple levels of engagement and offers some intriguing, and genuinely creepy moments.

More than almost any other art form, comic books are linked with their past in a way which makes an examination of said past all the more enlightening and meaningful. Have a look.

Just Say "Know."

Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen Braun, is one of the two best drug-education books I know of (From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs is the other.) Braun, an award-winning science writer, blends science with colorful lore. He tells about research on these psychoactive substances and what happens when they are ingested. A lot of recent research goes against conventional wisdom: alcohol is not simply a depressant, but is instead "a pharmacy in a bottle.” At low doses, it increases electrical activity in the same brain systems affected by stimulants, influences the same circuits targeted by Valium, and causes the release of morphine-like compounds known as endorphins. Alcohol can produce reactions from euphoria to dark, brooding hopelessness. Braun reveals why wood alcohol causes blindness, and explains the one-drink-per-hour sobriety rule (It takes the liver an hour to disable the half ounce of pure alcohol found in a typical drink.).

More than 100 plants produce caffeine, the most widely used drug on the planet. It occurs in tea, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, soft drinks, and more than 2,000 non-prescription drugs. We read that distances between Tibetan villages can be reckoned by the number of cups of tea needed to sustain a person (three cups equaling approximately 8 kilometers). Braun also explores the role of caffeine in creativity: Johann Sebastian Bach loved coffee so much he wrote a Coffee Cantata. Balzac would work for 12 hours non-stop, drinking coffee all the while; and Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire loved it, too. But, “When patience and calm are required,” Braun writes, “I have found caffeine to be of dubious utility.” And on caffeine withdrawal, one person wrote, “I felt like I had the flu, a severe headache, extreme fatigue.”

Buzz is an informative as well as amusing look at the two most popular drugs in the world. The book includes an excellent list of references and suggested reading. I've read it twice now, and recommend it highly.

Looking back... and then looking back further

I think my favorite book of the year was Paper Towns. I'm a huge fan of John Green and one of the highlights of my library life was driving him around for an author visit and talking about the music of Uncle Tupelo. But Paper Towns has already been reviewed here so I'm going to talk about a similar book that is a few years older. As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway.

Like Paper Towns, Galloway's book revolves around a eccentric and possibly unknowable girl and the relationship she has with the protagonist. When Anna (who prefers to go by Anastasia) moves to the unnamed narrator's small town she certainly stands out both in appearance and deeds. She wears the uniform of the outcast goth, but refuses to be labeled. She is creative and driven and curious about everything, especially what happens after you die. She is interested in Harry Houdini and writes obituaries of everyone in town.

As their relationship deepens and they grow closer the narrator realizes how little he really knows about Anna. And when she disappears a week before Valentine's Day, her dress laid out near a hole in the frozen river, he wonders if he ever will know what happened to her and why.

As Simple As Snow is anything but simple. A book of contradictions and mysteries, not just within the lives of Anna and her classmates, but in the world they inhabit. It is a clever, twisting mystery but also a tale of young love and loss and how little we know about the secrets kept by those close to us.

Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card

Around 23 years ago, Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game, a YA novel about a boy trained as a soldier to fight in a war against an invading alien species. The novel launched an extensive series of books that followed, across solar systems and centuries, not only the original protagonist, Ender Wiggin, but several other major characters from that first novel. Now, in a new story set immediately after Ender’s stint as a battle commander, Card returns to the subject of the teenage soldier and explores the years in which Ender grows into a full-fledged adult.

SPOILER ALERT! If you’ve never read Ender’s Game, and you plan to, stop reading this review now. There’s no way to discuss Ender in Exile without exposing certain plot points in Ender’s Game. So just move along. There are plenty of other reviews to hold your interest on this site. Better yet, step away from the computer, go to the bookstore or library and get yourself a copy of Ender’s Game. Let me assure you it is a far far better novel than Ender in Exile anyway.

The cover describes Ender in Exile as "The All-New Direct Sequel to Ender's Game" but it is really an expanded retelling of the final chapters of Ender’s Game, when after destroying the “Buggers” (or, more properly, the formic species) Ender departs with a shipload of colonials to establish a new human colony on a former formic world. While on this new world, he discovers hidden there a cocooned larval formic queen and establishes a psychic link with it to learn why the formics attacked humans in the first place and why they allowed Ender to destroy them. He then writes an influential work called The Hive Queen and the Hegemony and establishes himself as a sort of pseudo-religious figure called the Speaker for the Dead who reveals the truth, good or bad, of a person’s life after their passing as part of the mourning process for survivors. In Ender’s Game, all this is glossed over in just a few pages and not much of it is explored in other books in the series.

So it ought to be fresh and interesting material for a new novel. But in Ender in Exile, Card explores almost none of it, and when he does, very little is illuminated. Instead, the first fifty pages of the novel are a collage of letters and discussions between various characters trying to determine whether Ender should return to Earth. Everyone attempts to manipulate everyone else, until a great deal of tedious blathering leads us to understand that pretty much no one, not even Ender himself, thinks that his return is a good idea. Instead, at the tender age of thirteen, he will be appointed governor of a new settlement planet named Shakespeare Colony. His sister Valentine volunteers to go with him. The next several hundred pages (or is it several hundred thousand?) log the colonists two year space flight (because of relativity, the Earth and those who live there will have aged 40 years in this time). Much of this flight involves conniving and counter-conniving between Ender and the ship’s captain who hopes to steal Ender’s governorship from him once they reach the distant planet. This is all done through endless formal dialogue in which characters pretend to be nice to each other and debate about what’s appropriate speech and behaviour for various ranks and ages of military and civilian personnel (it’s like while Card was writing Jane Austen sneezed on his laptop keyboard). There’s a timid ship-board romance between Ender and one of the colonists that never threatens to go anywhere and there is a significant amount of paper dedicated to describing a production of The Taming of the Shrew that the colonists engage in to amuse themselves. A lot of people point out, over and over again, in praise and in disgust, that Ender is only a young teenager.

What is most disappointing about the book, overall, is its lack of vivid imagery. Ender’s Game is a memorable book because it is full of images that sear themselves into the reader’s mind. There are the brutal encounters of Ender’s childhood, the stark descriptions of Battle School, the range of Battle School students, the glimpses of the Buggers themselves, and the strange and vivid dream-like landscape in Ender’s leisure-time escapist video game (to name but a few). Ender in Exile, by contrast, almost manages to avoid creating any visual images at all for most of the book. Card doesn’t even give us a decent picture of the colonists’ ship. Finally, about two-thirds of the way through, we’re introduced to an intelligent grub which metamorphoses into a metal mining beetle. Ender hones his telepathy by speaking to these beetles, which prepares him for meeting the hive queen. That part is kind of cool and there are a few other surprises in the waning chapters, but, unless you have an extreme tolerance for the tedious, you’ll never get there.

Given that you are not an absolute die-hard Ender fan, I’d say it’s safe to avoid this latest installment. If you’ve read every other book in the series and you want to make it a clean sweep, pick this novel up and see how far you can get before you are driven mad. It’ll make for a new kind of Ender’s Game.

The Six Million Dollar Gossip Girl

Halfway through Robin Wasserman's novel Skinned is a passage that may be the most frightening thing I've read in ages. I don't mean "scary" in the sense that monsters or violence are scary; I mean terrifying in its implications, both for the characters in the immediate story and the society they live in, which is our society pushed forward a few nudges.

Lia Kahn (although the name is vaguely ethnic, it's clear from both the cover and description in the text that this is a blonde, white beauty) is the elder daughter of a wealthy businessman in the near future. When she is horribly injured in an accident, her personality is downloaded into an anatomically correct android body, and she becomes a "skinner," one of a growing subculture of similarly recreated teens. Some, like Quinn (left physically ravaged by an accident when she was three) embrace this new existence and turn it into a typical teenage clique, modifying their artifical bodies to denote their independence from "orgs." And of course, religious fanatics claim these beings are abominations and protest their very existence.

As part of her recovery, Lia attends a group therapy session with other skinners. One of them, Sloane, had attempted suicide and says this about her current condition:

"They [her parents] let their daughter die, I'm just some replacement copy. And if I do it again, they'll make another copy."

My life has been directly touched by suicide, and I have strong feelings about it. What I don't believe is that anyone, parents or otherwise, should have this level of power. In a way, the thought of being forced to live is almost as awful as being deliberately killed. This is the core idea at the heart of Skinned.

But I can't recommend the book whole-heartedly. It has the same central flaw I see in a lot of YA books: the assumption that their target audience is only interested in stories about rich, beautiful teens. Lia is a daughter of privilege as both a human being and a skinner, and all her worries are separated from any sort of concern about day-to-day survival. As I read, I could only think how much more powerful the story might have been had it happened to a daughter of the middle class, or even the child of a monetarily poor family. What if resurrecting their daughter wiped out the family's income? What if they had to make payments, and she could potentially be repossessed? This opens a wide vista of ways to comment on our current society, but Wasserman instead gives us a Bionic Gossip Girl, watering down the premise with the implied assumption that Lia, no matter what, will be taken care of. It's The Hills crossed with Monster Garage, with those shows' same sense of entitlement. There is a subplot about the first skinners, black inner-city kids given Caucasian bodies because that's all the corporation makes, but the "rich white girl learns the sufferings of the dark-skinned poor" trope is as trite as they come.

Still, the heart of the story remains utterly, totally frightening. And Wasserman, a prolific author of YA novels', nails the character's voice and mileiu with broad strokes and telling details. This is the first of a trilogy, and I'm intrigued enough to check out "Crashed" when it appears in the fall.

As for whether guys will like it, that's a tough call. It's a traditional girl's book, and not just because the hero is female. The issues are primarily emotional, and there's no real plot. Not that there needs to be; I was actually delighted that it didn't turn out Lia was secretly created to be a super-powered weapon, or that some conspiracy wanted her for nefarious purposes (although there's a hint that future books may, alas, take that cliche'd route). Wasserman writes as realistically as the story allows, and this works in its favor. But it's a book to make you think, not excite or thrill you.

Or, in my case at least, to terrify you.

Last Exit to Normal -- Michael Harmon

Three years ago, Ben Campbell's dad announced that he was gay and the family imploded. Ben's mother walked out and Ben was left with a father who, in Ben's eyes, selfishly destroyed the family. For two years, Ben did everything he could to drive his father crazy: he smoked pot, dropped acid, got drunk, got arrested, skipped school, smoked more pot... and was always truthful and open about his activities.

One year ago, Ben cleaned himself up. For almost an entire year, he didn't get in trouble at home or school, stopped smoking pot and was, as he said, "somewhat civil". Everything was going pretty okay. Until, that is, the incident that resulted in his father and his father's husband packing themselves, Ben, and all of their belongings into the family minivan and moving the three of them from Spokane to The Middle of Nowhere, Montana (population 400), to live with Ben's dad's husband's mother.

That's right. I said Montana.

The real stand-out in The Last Exit to Nowhere is Ben's voice. He is angry, sarcastic, argumentative, extremely bright, curious, honest, rash, stubborn, romantic, depressed, heroic, funny and honorable -- sometimes all within the space of two pages. Although a couple of the plotlines felt a bit overly dramatic/TV-movie-ish to me*, the heart of the book -- Ben's relationship with his father and his own coming-of-age -- felt nuanced and emotionally real. His relationships with the other characters, the aforementioned TV-movie plotlines aside, rang true as well, as did the interactions between the secondary characters. It's a quick, easy read, but unlike a lot of quick, easy reads, Michael Harmon didn't forgo depth for readability. There's a lot to think about here.

Highly recommended to fans of Chris Crutcher.

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Cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom.

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*And contrary to what one of the characters says, I don't think Dwight Yoakam has ever covered Pink Cadillac, though he does cover Dave Alvin's Long White Cadillac**. If I'm wrong, let me know -- I'd love to add to my collection.

**Dwight is wearing what might be the world's tightest pants in that video. Scary.

Book Review- 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Clay Jenson comes home one day to find a mysterious box full of 7 cassette tapes, each side with a number 1 to 13. After putting one in his dad's old cassette player, he's surprised to hear the voice of Hannah Baker, who had committed suicide just a few weeks prior. The tapes detail her descent into suicide, and Clay spends the rest of the day and majority of the night listening to each tape and going to the places that she describes in them. Each tape talks about 1 of 13 different people, adding up to thirteen reasons why Hannah decided to end her life.

In Jay Asher's spectacular debut, he goes back and forth in the narrative between Clay's thoughts and dialogues with others and Hannah's voice on the tapes. The book in and of itself is a brilliant premise, and Asher follows through with a great storytelling skill. Vivid details, even in Hannah's tapes when she talks about each of the reasons, and a raw realism really catapult this novel to becoming one of the best novels of 2007. I highly recommend everyone pick up a copy. It is a very powerful book.

Note: I wrote this review back in late January 2008 for my myspace blog. I am posting this review here now because of two reasons: 1) I recently listened to the audio tape version and wanted to discuss it a bit and 2) Little Willow and I are planning on doing our next He Said, She Said about it, which will be posted sometime this month.

Anyway, the audio book version is fantastic. The guy and girl who did Clay and Hannah were wonderful in their respective roles. Hannah especially was exactly how I pictured her talking when I read the book- sort of this raspy, sarcastic kind of voice. I also have to say that listening to the audio book was much more powerful than reading the book, which is quite a feat since the book itself is quite powerful. Listening to both of these characters go through their journey is heart-wrenching and emotional, especially toward the end when Hannah is nearing the end of her reasons and tapes. I was seriously about to cry, which would not have been good since I was at work at the time. I felt this tightening in my chest as I continued to listen. Like Clay with the tapes, you just can't stop listening. You need to keep going and listen to them all with very few breaks.

That's all I've got for now. Look for the next installment of He Said, She Said soon!