Hot Rewrites at Midnight

Well, it’s not quite midnight -- yet. That’s when my GLW post is due, at the (theoretical) latest, so it appears, as agreed upon, on the anointed Tuesday.

I even have a book I want to review -- written by an author pal here in L.A. I’ll caveat and disclaim my familiarity with the scribe when I actually do write it up -- next month.

Right now though, in the sultry L.A. night, I’m in the midst of rewrites for one of my own books, coming up briefly for some air (well, it’s not officially a book yet -- manuscript?). My agent has been waiting for it for months. Her wager was that if I had it finished by Comic Con, she’d buy me a drink. If I didn’t, I’m picking up the tab when I see her.

Well, though I’ve made it close, I think I’ll be buying the drink. Unless the next 24 hours are somewhat miraculous. There’re a final two-four chapters to write, and about 100 pages to rewrite, (or “polish,” as we like to say when we want to make it sound less daunting).

Carter's Big Break by Brent Crawford

One of my favorite books of 2009 was Brent Crawford's Carter Finally Gets It. Carter was a high school freshman trying to get along with girls, terrible nicknames and his attention deficit disorder. I was beyond excited when I saw the sequel, Carter's Big Break, come into my library.

The new book covers Carter's summer after his freshman year. Things are looking pretty good for Carter. He is going to be a lifeguard at the local pool and he can hang out with Abby, his girlfriend, all summer. Unfortunately, he is too young to get the lifeguard job and after an awkward moment atop a rocket-ship slide he is girlfriendless. So now he is stuck building a deck with his dad and figuring out how to properly apologize to Abby.

When a local author returns to Merrian to produce the film version of Carter's favorite book (and only book he has really read) Carter and Abby have shots at being in the movie. It turns out that Carter gets a role and is playing opposite Kidz Channel star Hilary Idaho. Carter and Hilary bond, but does he do the right thing when he suspects she has a substance abuse problem?

This is just about as funny as the first novel. Carter's Big Break is full of great characters between Carter's friends and family. The best part of these novels is the realistic portrayal of how guys interact and communicate with each other. I think Steven Goldman's Two Parties, One Tux and a Very Short Film about the Grapes of Wrath is the only other book as good as these are at portraying teenage boys and their friends.

Even though I don't even remotely care about the world of celebrities, watching Carter interact in it was quite amusing. Crawford definitely leans on his experience in film and television for this book. It doesn't seem as well thought out as the original as this volume was a bit disjointed and fantastical compared to the realism of the first Carter book. It still stands up quite well and I hope there are more Carter books to come. Besides Steven Goldman's novel, I would also recommend this to fans of The One Where the Kid Nearly Jumps to his Death and Lands in California by Mary Hershey.

Grayson

Lynne Cox is the sort of person who makes you feel like you need to do more with your life. Not only has she set records for open-water swimming all over the world (beginning at the tender age of 14), she's been inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and in her free time, she's written two remarkable, best-selling books. One of them is Grayson. It is a thrilling adventure, a dear fable, and a remarkable true story, and it kind of makes me wonder what other tremendous things have happened to Lynne Cox that she just needs to write down.

Grayson isn't a long book, which makes it perfect for reading in one sitting. (I did, and I think you will too). In the opening chapter, Cox describes a training swim she completed very early one morning when she was 17 years old. It was no ordinary swim because something was in the water with her, swimming close by. Something big. Turns out it was a baby gray whale who had lost his mother somewhere in the vast Pacific. The whole of the book focuses on Lynne's experience swimming with Grayson, as she tried to help him to find his mother. It's magic. Really. If you are at all inclined to enjoy an animal story, or you're up for some brilliantly evocative nature-writing, this book is exactly what you need.

What was so great about that Alexander guy, anyway?

When I teach ancient lit, I have to cram 3000 years worth of culture, history, storytelling, geography, politics, art, religion, and on and on--all into fourteen weeks, give or take. It's a big task, hampered by the fact that, anything my students know about any of the works in question is usually heavily layered with a big fat "who cares?"

Gilgamesh? Who cares? Homer's Odyssey or Iliad? I had to read that in high school and couldn't get through it, I was so bored. Shakespeare? Really? You expect us to read that guy? These are the kinds of looks I get at the beginning of the semester. It's my job to change that attitude. I have to make books and poems from 2500 years ago interesting, relevant, and worth giving a damn.

Two of the many tools I use are humor (because, let's face it, whether it's in Chaucer or Captain Underpants, farts and poop are hilarious), and analogies to contemporary life.

These are some of the same things Vicky Alvear Shecter uses in Alexander the Great Rocks the World, an emminently readable biography (and more) of Alexander the Great.

As a biography, it reads a little odd--Shecter uses a very conversational voice, filled with sarcasm and biting humor, to convey the story. She also lets you know what she thinks about these figures from ancient history. But here's why it works: she knows her stuff. She's very well read; the book is very well researched, and so you feel like your in strong and steady hands as she guides you through the details of history. And, because she's so up front about her views on how these figures played out, what history says about these events, and what scholarship is reliable or not, you as a reader feel like you're in a conversation with the author.

The art and spot illustrations are fun--kind of a Mad Magazine's Dick Berg or Jack Davis sensibility to them--but sometimes can make you wince. And, I'll be honest, there are spots where the writing tries too hard to be hip, rather than relevant. Of course, that's more due to the aging of certain phrases and expressions(it was published nearly five years ago) than any actual problems with the book or writing style.

Overall, an enjoyable biography that opens up whole worlds of knowledge about Alexander's context, the social, political, and religious standards of his day, and how he revolutionized it all. Like all great biographies, it feels both intimate (you get a good sense of what made the world-conqeror tick) and epic. This is what's great about a writer who knows their stuff and works hard to draw you into a dialogue with their subject--you become a more active reader, which means you have to figure out why the material is worth giving a damn.

Sopranos, Fantasy-style (or this isn't one of those vamp lover books, thank goodness)

My pal Gwenda Bond recently posted about Holly Black's new novel, WHITE CAT, and all the reasons why everyone needs to read it. We both thought it was perfect for GLW so here is her (slightly edited) post to persuade you to go find this one, posthaste:

"Here is what I love most about White Cat: It's filled with surprises.

This is, of course, the newest novel by Holly Black. Long time readers know how much I heart her books, and a new one is always, always a treat. And it's the first in a series, even better. I actually read it some time ago, and have been meaning to write about it ever since. It's a book that crawls around in your brain for weeks afterward--or it did mine anyway.

I'm sure you know the premise already, but just in case. White Cat features an alternate version of our world, close in many ways, but different in a major one: Magic is real, but only a small percentage of the population known as curse workers can do it. Cassel is from a family of curse workers, but isn't one. Curse work is akin to the mafia in our world, and it's accomplished through touch, which means bare hands are forbidden by society. This first in the series begins with Cassel waking up on a roof at the boarding school where he's been playing at normal, only running a light bookie racket. The implication is that he's being worked, and he finds himself obsessing over the memory of a murder, one he himself committed. The journey that follows is witty, sly, and complicated. True darkness waits in the shadows of this world, and the reader is riveted by the twin hope that Cassel will manage to both master that darkness and escape it.

Many Waters: L'Engle's forgotten Murry twins

The start of the teenage years also marks, often, the beginnings of a deeper exploration of religion. Institutionalized with bar mitzvahs and confirmation, it is part of a search to understand oneself as the definition of that self becomes less clear. So it’s no surprise that quite a number of works for this age group take religion as a jumping off point for adventures in rapidly changing worlds. Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass series is a fantasy Paradise Lost for beginners, as Lyra is swept up out of her own Eden into a rebellion against heaven.

Pullman’s trilogy was pre-dated by Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series, which approaches its religiosity at a more general level as a quest for order and against darkness. If the world were a just place, movie theaters would be packed with Team Sandy and Team Dennys tee-shirts, but it’s not and they’ve always been the neglected Murry siblings, strangely normal against the misfit and more-written-about siblings Meg and Charles Wallace.

Chilling Truth

Well, after I decided to review Stasiland this month, I read another book I wanted to recommend: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. It's about two guys from Baltimore, both named Wes Moore. One wrote the book, and was a Rhodes Scholar (a prestigious academic award). The other Wes is in prison for life with no possibility of parole. The author wrote to, and visited with him, before deciding to tell their stories.
For the writer, getting to know the other Wes Moore revealed some striking similarities: raised in fatherless families in poor African-American neighborhoods, both felt the lure of making money from selling drugs. The author got away from the criminal life, but the other Wes did not. Why? The author's mother and grandparents sent him away to military school. Obviously, that's not the whole story.

Dystopia, but NOT Fiction

I know that a lot of the GuysLitWire target audience is too young to remember the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its East European allies have been gone for twenty years or so. But when I read Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, I knew I had to tell you about it. In the mid-1990s, soon after East Germany had abandoned the dictatorship, Australian journalist Anna Funder went there to talk with people about life under that regime.

"The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, 'the Firm' generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometers long." (That's almost 112 miles.)

Fantastic Four Volume 1 by Jonathan Hickman

The Fantastic Four really haven't gotten a fair shake in the 2000s. Some might say that their basic premise, that of an oddball adventuring family, is simply out of date and way behind the times. I disagree. Clearly, very few writers have been able to handle the FF in the modern age of comics. John Byrne was one. Heck, Byrne is one of the main reasons why I read comics at all. His efforts on the Fantastic Four in the 80s were dead on perfect and unfortunately over before they should have been (blame creative differences - always the bane of Mr. Byrne).

There have been glimmers of hope since then, of course. Alan Davis tried, but didn't stick with the FF long enough. Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo (R.I.P.) had a spectacular run focusing on the four as imaginauts, but again it wasn't nearly long enough to re-establish the Fantastic Four as the preeminent team in the Marvel Universe (thank Marvel's ever-destructive editorial policies for that one).

And then there were the movies. Yeah...hmmmm....best leave it at that.

In recent years the Fantastic Four have been vehicles for Marvel's so-called "event" books, but the team and its core humanity has taken a back seat to plot-driven crossovers. My friends, that time is over. The FF are back and better than they have ever been, and it's all because of Jonathan Hickman.

If you're unfamiliar with Hickman's writing credentials, you've got some great reading to catch up on. One of his major projects before turning his attention to Marvel was Pax Romana, about the Catholic church sending a group back in time to right the wrongs of the church throughout history. Hickman is also systematically rewriting the Marvel Universe with his audacious S.H.I.E.L.D. series. But his Fantastic Four work is truly inspired and is a welcome return to the real meat of the series and the characters at the heart of it.

Volume one of Hickman's work has recently been released and I encourage anyone who once loved, still loves or possibly could love the Fantastic Four to read it. This arc primarily involves Reed Richards' attempts to solve every problem imaginable, which brings him into contact with a cohort of like-minded individuals. The ideas are big - monstrously big - but Hickman grounds them in an understanding of the characters that honestly has not been seen since Byrne or Waid. The focus of the series is now on family, first and foremost, and while that may seem cheesy and cornball to some, read the book before you make so many snap judgments. The FF has ALWAYS been about a dysfunctional, yet loving, family, albeit with superpowers. By drawing on that inspiration, Hickman has crafted a book that is thought-provoking and darn fun to read. I can't remember when I've enjoyed reading a comic book story as much as this.

After Civil Wars, Final Crises and every kind of Blackest Night you could imagine, it's refreshing to read a comic that inspires this much awe and wonder.

Prospero is a magician ("not the one you think" the narrator assures us) who battles a number of phobias. At the opening of John Bellairs The Face in the Frost, he is afraid of his own basement. This is a somewhat unusual condition even for Prospero, and to be fair, Prospero's house, "a huge, doodad-coveted, trash filled, two-story horror of a house," has a basement scarier than most. Prospero can't shake the feeling that something is wrong, and that he is being watched. In this he turns out to be right. His friend and fellow magician, Roger Bacon, also plagued by feelings of unease, has, practicing a regular habit of his, sneak up on Prospero and his house to observe. Once the two wizards are together within the house and set about investigating, they discover that they are surrounded by dark and malevolent beings. They plan a wizardly escape, but not before a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast.