April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Novels/prose books:

Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Second: The Reptile Room.

Stephenson, Neal: The Big U
(the wheels fell off somewhere in this book. It's still an enjoyable read, but I can see why he was reluctant to let it be brought back into print; god forbid someone should read this and imagine that this level of writing is what made Stephenson famous. Obviously, this is not as ambitious as one of the monster tomes, like Cryptonomicon, or the Baroque Cycle, but as a shorter work, it doesn't live up to the tighter, more focused plotting of Zodiac. Maybe I should excuse the lack of grounding as probably being intentional--it's very much about the university as a place that's insane and closed-off from the real world, higher education as a mental institution--but it was hard to connect to the book because of that).


Graphic novels:

Lemire, Jeff: Essex County vol. 3: The Country Nurse
(Top Shelf).

Campbell, Ross: Water Baby
(Minx. Wow, creepy. Campbell, doing that thing he does, so weirdly compelling and so well-illustrated).

Abel, Jessica, and Warren Pleece, artists (?), Gabe Soria, writer (?), Hialry Sycamore, colorist: Life Sucks
(First Second. Cute, but not exactly a work for the ages. I vastly prefer Abel's other work--La Perdida, Artbabe--which are better written, and frankly, much better illustrated as well. Abel's linework suffers from the coloring here).

Novels/prose books:

Larson, Erik: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
(yeah, I'm so on top of the bestsellers. After three years of stocking this on the paperback favorites table and finding it for customers who needed it for their book clubs--book club customers are always women; do men not join book clubs? why not?--I finally read it now. A hundred times, I have been asked, "Have you read it? Is it good?" and I, being unwilling to repeat a petty lie a hundred of times, always honestly answered, "No, but I've heard it's good; it's popular and sells well and everybody I know who's read it loved it." And they'd always pull a disapproving face, because people who don't venture past the bestseller racks are nervous about booksellers who don't read books they've heard of. (I feel bad for them; they're uncomfortable readers, and they want reassurance that they're reading something worthwhile. Lacking the experience in reading that will help them judge whether or not they'll enjoy a book, they ask, "Have you read it? Is it good?" as if the only possible answers are "yes" or "no.")

It is good, and attention-grabbing, and it is easy to see why was a bestseller that morphed into a very strong book club favorite. I decided to read it after reading the Rick Geary graphic history of H.H. Holmes, A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Beast of Chicago, and what surprised me the most was that Larson's account of Burnham and the building of the Chicago World Fair was as captivating as the gruesome horror of Holmes and the architectural details of the Murder Castle. I feel a keen interest in 19th century America right now; I'd like to read more about it).


Graphic novels/comics:

Johnson, R. Kikuo: Night Fisher
(indeed, not your average cliched high school story. It contains many of the recognizable elements of the high school story, but the setting and the execution are refreshingly individual, and it feels emotionally real. It is depressing, though. Fantagraphics).

Eisner, Will: Last Day in Vietnam: A Memory
("A Purple Heart for George" just about did me in. The staggering amount of death in that war, in any war, ought to render George's drunken foolishness and his friends' efforts to protect him from himself meaningless...and yet it still hurts. I understand why Eisner felt he had to include it here...it's just the kind of story that ought to be told).


Abel, Jessica: Mirror, Window: An Artbabe Collection
(my introduction to Abel, and I like it. All the pieces are good; my favorite story is the second one, "Chaine," which is about a 22-year-old professional ballet dancer taking a day off to meet up with a friend she hasn't seen in a while; they discuss the ballet dancer's career, which is going nowhere, and the dancer makes a realistic, rather downbeat assessment of her career prospects, which her non-dancer friend is incapable of understanding or accepting. I love the dancer's internal monologue, which flits between her musing on her past and future in ballet, fretting over needing to clean up her apartment after a break-in from a few days ago, and memories of a friendship with a former roommate and fellow dancer that apparently went sour. It's a rich character study, and a melancholy wag at what it means to be only moderately talented in the field you love).

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