The Doctor's Lives and Times

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Doctor's Lives and Times (Harper, 2014).


I loved this book completely and enormously! The Doctor's Lives and Times is a ridiculously fun book of found objects from another world - objects from the fictional universe of Doctor Who. Its breezy, photo-filled format makes it a great gift for readers of all ages; younger readers will be captivated by all the illustrations, and even the nerdiest of us will thrill to all the connections between stories.

James Goss and Steve Tribe have created a collection that includes an example of the "Karkus" comic strip that Zoe Herriot mentioned in 1968's "The Mind Robber," conspiracy buffs debunking some "cheap" 8mm color film footage of the Loch Ness Monster the same way that people in our world debunk the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot film from '67, blog posts from Mickey complaining about Rose going off into space with that Doctor, K-9 obliviously breaking Sarah Jane's heart by telling her about the companions that the Doctor took on board after her, and dozens and dozens of other things.

Each Doctor gets a chapter of fiction, followed by a few pages and photos of production information about their era, informed entirely by quotes from actors, writers, and producers. The authors intrude so little that their own opinions are not seen at all, which is a really novel approach to a Doctor Who book these days. The approach is one of tribute to the whole program and its narrative, not picking favorites or torching anything. It's a sweet and loving 50th anniversary book. Happily recommended for anybody with an interest in the show, of any age.

Cassette From My Ex

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves (St. Martin's Griffin, 2009).


I had a really good feeling that I'd like this book. Jason Bitner used to run - or perhaps "curate" is a better word - a blog at cassettefrommyex.com, but it's been down for quite some time now. There, he got submissions from all over the map from people who'd held onto old mix tapes from old flames, and sent in photos and stories about them.

I wish that I had seen the blog before it vanished, but happily, the project did net Bitner a book deal. While the hardcover collection is out of print, it's easily obtained and definitely worth a look. It's just so fun, touching on all of these wonderful shared experiences with other people from the 1980s and 1990s who somehow knew all the same "rules" for making mixtapes as I did.

The last time I made a mix tape was the last day of 1999. It was kind of bitter. I made a second copy for myself and rediscovered it this past summer, cleaning out the basement of my childhood home. I have no way to play it any longer, which is probably for the best, because that is one mean, hurtful, heartbroken, dagger of a tape. They were always more than the sum of their parts, weren't they?

The book is full of essays and track lists, with lots of photos of the surviving tapes, track lists that double as love notes, and all sorts of heartbreak and blissful memories. Most of the writers were not known to me, but Claudia Gonson of the Magnetic Fields contributed a great story, as did - kind of unsurprisingly - Rob Sheffield, who's probably more responsible than anybody else for keeping memories of mix tapes alive all these years after we quit making them.

It's very fun, although probably not a book that you can expect to read in one sitting. It's fun to linger over, a couple of stories a night, while reading something a little heavier on the side. Recommended for readers who made these.

The Country of Ice Cream Star

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, my wife Marie contributes a brief review of The Country of Ice Cream Star (Ecco, 2015).

The Country of Ice Cream Star is only superficially described as "post-apocalyptic." Most post-apocalypse books talk about either the survivors in the immediate aftermath or shortly thereafter, and there are people with living memories of the event. This book is set in the new normal that has emerged multiple generations after the event...but it's only eight decades after, because 21 is an advanced age in those who survived.

This book reminds me strongly of the description of The Princess Bride as presented in the narrative; it is terribly tempting to say "...Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion..." But that only works once. Besides, there are differences - this book has child soldiers
instead of pirates, and a living saint instead of a princess. Nevertheless, this book shares the essential lesson that life is beautiful and painful, full of adventure and fighting and love, and also deeply and painfully unfair, and scattered in among the tragedy and beauty, there are some really good funny bits.

There are two main stumbling blocks that I see for the reader in maintaining suspension of disbelief, rooted in difficulties of our culture rather than any flaw in the writing, and they are well worth getting over. First, the author, Sandra Newman, has given each group in the book a distinctive voice and dialect, especially the main character's, and that requires some getting used to. Second, our culture does not permit children of the ages in this story the power, agency, and capability that they show; but without what we would consider adults this world works and makes sense. Even so, the practice of using "every child" instead of "everybody" and "my children" instead of "my people" draws an emphasis to the essential youth of all the actors that the characters are all blind to. This is especially marked when an actual adult is dropped into the action as the event that breaks the initial equanimity, and the main character calls him, too, a child.

In fact, that particular factor is one of the most admirable part of the storytelling, how the author does such a good job of showing things that the main character does not see, at least at first. She does not talk down to the audience, either. Even minor characters have depth and humanity. There are few clear-cut bad guys, even when individuals are in conflict and even when they do evil things to one another. People have motives for what they do that make sense and conflicts arise from those motives. The main character is permitted to make poor decisions, learn from them, and feel guilt which changes her priorities. And there are some horrific things done in this book; it is not a light read for a lazy day at the beach. The characters learn and grow, quickly (perforce) but with natural arcs that allow initial imperfection either to become a hard-won positive or to grow into a deeper flaw - it is refreshing to see both options available.

Also, as is typical in real life, alliances change, sometime rapidly, as circumstances change, Today's enemy is yesterday's friend, with all the grief and rage that comes from that. And when yesterday's enemy is today's friend, earlier conflicts are not allowed to disappear either just because the alliance is needed.

Love is not a simple thing either. In this way the story differs from The Princess Bride. Although characters love each other deeply, there is no uncomplicated feeling. While people do heroic and horrible things because of it, love is still only one emotion and motivation among many.

The cast is large, but so well introduced and so well marked by the language, names and behaviors that it is easy to keep track of them. Sandra Newman has written a truly remarkable, compelling and vivid story. It is highly recommended.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Judge Dredd: Dark Justice

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Judge Dredd: Dark Justice (Rebellion, 2014-15).


John Wagner did not make this easy on himself. In the 1980s, the supernatural Dark Judges were recurring, albeit overused foes in the Judge Dredd strip, culminating in the epic, gruesome 1990 serial "Necropolis." That really should have been the end for the characters, but they spent the 1990s showing up way too frequently, their horror sidelined for broad black comedy. They've only appeared very sporadically since, played straight and played horrific, but the malady lingered on, you know? I mean, did the world really need another Judge Death story?

Well, Death and his gang have returned in an eleven-part story that began last month and is about at the halfway point now, and it's amazing. The art, very old school fully-painted, is by Greg Staples, and it's just gorgeous. This story was announced in 2013 and some of us - like me - started grousing about the time it took to appear, but this was really worth the wait. It's exceptional work across the board.

The story picks up some dangling plot threads and, halfway through, has just barely addressed them, leaving me hungry for more backstory. Judge Death himself was last seen nuked into another dimension, but a brief flashback showed him back in Mega-City One, looking for his trapped brothers. There's a world of intrigue behind that that I could go into but won't; briefly, he pilfers their spirit forms and takes off on a colony ship bound for a distant world.

Judges Dredd and Anderson are about two weeks behind, unable to stop the carnage when Death and his gang all resurrect themselves with their bizarre superpowers and start mass slaughter. At about the halfway point, our heroes finally catch up to them, but too late to save the colonists, and are trapped on board the spaceship, cut off from resources and help, surrounded by the dead...

It's not all doom and gloom, but in this story, Wagner very sensibly let the humor arise from the colony ship and their foibles, keeping reader attention and sparking some smiles before things go straight to hell, and it's been a mean and ugly action-adventure thriller ever since the third episode. As things get bad, there are still dozens of questions to be addressed, including the whereabouts of another one of Dredd's old enemies, who I'd have guessed would have appeared in this story by now, and what the Dark Judges were thinking, engineering a ssssssituation where everybody's trapped on the stranded colony ship. I have the ugly feeling that this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

"Dark Justice" is appearing weekly in 2000 AD, beginning in Prog 2015 and continuing through progs 1912-1921. Click the image above to visit the comic's online shop and order your thrillpower!!

This story is written in memory of my pal, longtime squaxx dek Thargo Mike Horne of Boston, who passed away last weekend after suffering a stroke in November. Mike wasn't able to read any of this story, which is a damn shame. We'll miss you, Mike.

PDFs of these issues were provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Quigsnip: The Untold Tale of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Quigsnip: The Untold Tale of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (self-published, 2014).

I think it's wonderful that Charles Dickens is still inspiring writers to create their own pastiches and fanfic. Sometimes, it's the way that his novels were originally written that has given writers that inspiration, by way of little unplanned plot holes. Almost all of what we perceive today as stand-alone novels originally appeared as serials in magazines. Oliver Twist, one of his best-known books, took 26 months to tell, and there are traces in the completed tale of side stories and characters that might have developed differently had Dickens not been hammering out chapters directly for immediate publication. Academic types have been noting these little curiosities in his plots for many decades.

One of those coulda-been avenues in Twist concerns a possible villain, a strange humpbacked person who enters the narrative for a few paragraphs and is never seen again. Writer Sean Phillips has grabbed that character, or rather that possibility of a character, and turned him into the villain Fagin's unseen boss, the vulgar and nasty Mr. Quigsnip, and has created a fun, albeit ungainly adventure in which Quigsnip goes after Oliver for some revenge.

I call this ungainly because it is a self-published book that could use an editor to clear away some misspellings and formatting issues, and so what the novel feels like is a promising first draft. The structure of the story is well-paced, exciting, and some of the research seems very thorough. The late 1830s saw Londoners finally start reacting against the workhouses that had sprung up around the capital years previously, keeping the city's underclass in a permanent state of thrall and poverty, and this story reflects the beginning of this social change.

The prose is clear, and I was never confused by the events. Given a little more work, this could be developed into a good adventure story. With a pair of exceptions, I thought this was a well done first effort, and I certainly enjoyed the climax, which incorporates the "ghost" stage effect that unnerved so many theater-goers of the period. Unfortunately, I was not sold on a plot strand that required Oliver Twist to be hypnotized. A strong editor could have provided a good deal of help to Phillips, building something promising into something satisfying.

Nevertheless, despite these quite major fumbles, the book was an entertaining diversion. It might have helped that Phillips is clearly paying tribute, not just to Dickens' characters but to his worldview. Dickens, for all his melodrama and romanticism, was a critic of society's failings and of inequality. The heroes of Quigsnip are continuing to make the changes in their world that Dickens had them striving toward in his original novel (probably all of his novels, actually), and so the story certainly rings true and may appeal to Dickens' fans and collectors. Given the hiccups of the formatting, and that hypnotism malarkey, I can't give this a very strong recommendation, but I would encourage the author to keep at it, and possibly hire an editor to help beat this edition into better shape for a revised version that may find home with a publisher and a larger audience.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds (Rebellion, 2014).


I have not been as engaged with 2000 AD in the last couple of years as I had been for a really, really long time. Part of that's because while the comic is, bluntly, the very best comic that money can buy, there's been a certain staleness to the procedural routine of it, and I've become bored, not with the stories, but with the experience of how they're presented. I never wanted to turn into "that fan" who's constantly moaning about how imperfect it is not making special snowflakes like me happy as clams (although I sort of did), so I kind of shut up about things. I just read quietly to myself these days, mainly.

That said, when a series comes along that partially addresses one of my complaints, I feel like I owe it to the comic to brush myself off and tell the world how good it is. It's called Brass Sun and it's very special and often amazing. It's written by Ian Edginton and drawn by INJ Culbard, who's given the pretty thankless chore of redesigning environments and technology several times over the course of the three stories-so-far. Culbard basically has one hell of a tough challenge and meets it beautifully. There are maybe four panels in this entire book (195 pages of story, plus endpapers and backmatter and such) where Culbard's solid and vivid coloring might have benefited from something more subtle. Otherwise, this is a remarkable story that looks amazing.

Brass Sun is set in a clockwork solar system, an orrery with dozens of full-sized planets connected to each other by metal spars. Centuries before, there had been travel and trade between the planets, but most have been cut off for so long that their populations know nothing about anybody else. And the system is slowing down; winters are getting longer. The story begins on one particularly backward planet, the sort of boring place you've seen in stories before and never enjoyed. Strict religious orthodoxy rules, science is outlawed, heretics are burned alive, the religious nutball in charge talks in "Bad Shakespeare" - you know the language; it's when the bad guy uses phrases like "Speak not to me of--" instead of "Don't talk to me about--" - and you, the reader, will want to leave this silly place as quickly as possible.

Happily, the way out is provided by Wren, one of far too few female protagonists to lead a 2000 AD series that doesn't have her origins in some other, male-led, series. Wren's grandfather had retired from the religious order of stereotypes, figured out something close to the truth about their world, and tasked Wren with saving the day. So fortunately, we're only on this boring, albeit beautifully drawn, backwater world for about thirty pages before things get completely wonderful and unpredictable.

I'm not spoiling much to reveal that Brass Sun becomes a travelogue, with Wren visiting other cultures and learning the secrets of the Orrery. If there's any kind of complaint to be made, it's that Wren sometimes becomes a supporting character in other people's stories, and while we accept that her mission and quest will occasionally be delayed while she gets involved with various intrigues, there are occasions where Wren is too much in the background. I do like how everybody else underestimates her, however.

For all the quickly-penned selling words of "steampunk" that some reviewers use, the real influences on Brass Sun are a couple of mid-1980s films by Hayao Miyazaki, specifically Nausicaa and Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Wren herself is very much like Nausicaa: an ordinary and incredibly resourceful young woman given a monumental task, which she tackles with resolve and intelligence. Wren is one of the best, most interesting characters in comics these days, and I hope to see her in action again soon.

Brass Sun is told in 65-page stories, serialized across eleven or twelve weekly issues of 2000 AD. We've had one story a year since 2012; these three have appeared as a six-issue miniseries in American comic size, and now this very nice hardback edition. Edginton, like Pat Mills, seems to get a pass to structure his stories this way, which means they don't always fit very well into 2000 AD's thrillpowered rocket-fuel five page chunks. There, Brass Sun is, frankly, an awkward fit, slow-moving and often confusing. Read in one sitting, as three stories rather than as thirty-odd episodes, it's a deliberately-paced gem, something unlike anything else in comics and very, very fun. I certainly hope the next story is serialized in 2015, and so on, and that we'll get a second hardback collection for Christmas 2017. Highly recommended.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Fragrant

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Fragrant: the Secret Life of Scent (Riverhead, 2014) that Marie has contributed.


We received a complimentary copy of Fragrant: the Secret Life of Scent by Mandy Aftel for review. Fragrant is a book about an exploration of scent and fragrance, primarily perfumes but secondary of culinary scents, and the love affair the author develops over the course of exploration. It is the opposite of "ignorance is bliss" as the more the author learns, the greater her passion on the subject. And, luckily for the reader, the greater her desire to share what she has found. This is a clearly written journal of a voyage of discovery.

All my life, I have had a complicated relationship with fragrances. On the one hand, on my first encounter with Vietnamese cinnamon, I could not resist going back to the pantry and opening the jar multiple times a day to have a sniff of the wonderful aroma; on the other hand, I was unable to attend high holy days at church as a teen because I reacted very badly to the incense.

On our food blog we try to experience exactly what this book is about: "the appetites that move us, give us pleasure, make us fully alive" although we talk just about the food aspect; however, she also has another thing in common, in that Ms. Aftell reads about the history of scents, and looks for the interesting and unusual. She says "I love the complicated histories of the materials and the complex characters that make the natural perfumer's palette so vibrant." And in the process, she finds points of interest to the cook, such as finding that sugar was used to scrape citrus and make essential-oil-infused sugar for cooking. I, too, love the complicated ways that simple foodstuffs interact to turn into the many things we know and love to eat; it was fascinating to read more details and it really felt like getting a more rounded view of the topic.

The author has five main aromatic compounds which she uses to shape the narrative of the book, and when I saw that cinnamon was one of them it made the book irresistible. The other four are mint, frankincense, ambergris, and jasmine. Each of the five ingredients has a full discussion of where the substance originates, how it's made and its historical place in fragrance and food making. Finally, she talks about the concept of wabi-sabi, the appreciation for the impermanence of objects. When dealing with something as transient as scent, you have to take into account the ability of each component to work together, very much like the ingredients in a recipe; you may love lemon, but if you put in too much the dish is ruined. I see an awful lot of recipes with unnecessarily long ingredient lists. Simplicity calls to me, and I feel that this book shows how simplicity, elegance and beauty intersect. Recommended.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.