UTTER, EARTH: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World delivers wisdom and smiles in equal measure

UTTER, EARTH: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World
ISAAC YUEN
West Virginia University Press
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of hitchhiker’s guide to the more-than-human world—Isaac Yuen’s Utter, Earth is a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders.

In a time of dirges and elegies for the natural world, Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Highlighting life that once was, still is, and all that we stand to lose, this living and lively mini encyclopedia (complete with glossary) shines the spotlight on the motley, fantastical, and astonishing denizens with whom we share this planet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Wry, amusing essays on life, the Universe, and everything. I'm not sure I'd've picked this book up if it hadn't been for David Naimon (podcast Between the Covers host) delivering this encomium:

“To shoal is to be social, to sense together, we learn in one of Yuen’s more-than-human essays. But to school is to sweep together in unison, to dazzle with coherence. It’s this spirit of schooling that animates Utter, Earth, essays that—in their curiosity, play, and care—aim to weave us back into a world of which we are but one small part. How would our language change if we invited nonhuman others alongside us again in fellowship, if our lives not only allowed for but celebrated everything swimming just beyond the limits of what we know? It’s not time for school, it’s time to school, to school with the creatures of Utter, Earth, the lemurs, leopards, and leafcutter ants, the wombats, waterbuck, and wildebeest, to school with others to find ourselves again.”

Like any collection of essays, some work better for individual reader than others. My own favorites were:
I was charmed and amused and educated by these pieces of Author Yuen's brain. I'm pretty sure I could summarize the contents of the essays, but I'm also sure that constitutes a spoiler. And having run afoul of the shrill shrieks of the Spoiler Stasi before, I ain't a-doin' that. Read 'em your damnself.

I'll give you these, because if you want to yell at someone, you can yell at the press's marketing folk for including them:

There. I've done what I can to entice you into getting and enhoying this condensed, enriched, fortified collection of an intelligent man's musings on words, ideas, and the way they interact to form the world. Even the odd, off-kilter title of the collection makes perfect sense after reading the entire book. (I suspect that, like me, a lot of y'all might be put off by it...please ignore that urge and try this one out!)

Get two. You'll want one, and it's Yuletide so gifting one to someone who loves nature, language, and humor, is only decent.

BLACK BUCK, savagely funny & supremely fun send-up/roast/take-down of US business culture

BLACK BUCK
MATEO ASKARIPOUR
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$26.00 hardcover, available now

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Young Lions Fiction Award shortlist has the author on it! The New York Public Library will announce the winner on 16 June 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Please, please, someone in Black Hollywood make this into a movie! I can't think of a better time, or a better story, to use this terrific twist on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to skewer the shrinking opportunity pool! The Economist cites statistics that show that white bros are more eager than BIPoC employees to return to the office, stop remote working. Reading this book will give you a visceral, intense sense of why that most likely is true...and what the grim consequences for diversity in the workplace could turn out to be.

Not, however, if Author Askaripour has anything to say about it.

You see, there's some truth to the old adages "be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be 'yes'" and "you get back what you give out." Darren, twenty-two and a barista with a pretty good life (he thinks; his mom disagrees), sees one of his regulars ordering the same boring thing every morning. He does what a good sales person always does: suggests an alternative, a different and more interesting drink. Without being crappy about it, he persists until the customer agrees to try the new item. Which he loves.

Darren's brewed his last latte. He upsold the founder of SumWun and now he has a high-powered sales job waiting for him. That maybe he doesn't want...or isn't sure he wants...but let me tell you, when someone who's got what it takes to grab enough money to found a viable tech company wants you, it would do you best to get your stuff out of your locker and go with him right then. There will be no rest until your onboarding process is complete and your world revolves around Selling the Widget.

Author Askaripour chose to frame this narrative as one of those metastatic "positivity/self-help/I succeeded you can too" memoirs recrudescing all over bookstores like lesions on a cancer patient. It was, I thought for about two chapters, going to make me a crazy person. "I have to bail," I whimpered to my Young Gentleman Caller. "I might get seriously ill, this is reminding me of all those years selling!"

"Read me some," he said, "just enter {position number} and let's go."

“Ain’ no Black people need no therapists, ’cause we don’ be havin’ those mental issues. OCD, ADD, PTSD, and all those other acronyms they be comin’ up with every day. I’m tellin’ you, the only acronyms Black folk need help with is the NYPD, FBI, CIA, KKK, and KFC, ’cause I know they be puttin’ shit in those twelve-piece bucket meals to make us addicted to them.”

"That was funny! You haven't got that far yet, you have to find out why that's there," I was ordered.

You rock, Rob. I took the ride, I enjoyed the whole ride, and you're the one who made it happen.

It was sometimes cringe to me how close Author Askaripour sailed to the winds of snottiness. It was often the case, however, that he found my ticklish spot right after that. I am not going to say I think everyone should read the book because the humor-deficient will be blankly confused why it's supposed to be funny or outraged that their demographic is being scored off ("He reeked of privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks" is one of the most memorable snorts of derision). For me, possibly for you, there's an aesthetic hill to climb in the format being parodied; but there is something so very good to gain by persevering: Belly laughs at the sheer inventive snark leveled at targets who could use some dings and scratches on their cheap veneer.

Recommended for some good, cathartic belly laughs.

SINCE MY LAST CONFESSION, fun and funny account of being a gay Catholic

SINCE MY LAST CONFESSION: A Gay Catholic Memoir
SCOTT POMFRET
Arcade Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Scott Pomfret serves as a lector at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston. He also writes gay porn. His boyfriend is a flaming atheist, and his boyfriend's Protestant grandmother counts Catholicism a sin worse than sodomy. From Pentecost to Pride, from the books of the Bible to the articles of The Advocate, Pomfret's wry, hysterically funny memoir maps with matchless humor the full spectrum of the gay Catholic experience.

Listen in as Pomfret learns a thing or two about love and compassion from Father Bear Daddy, a priest with a hot Gay.com profile, and the Three Hale Marys, and join him as he sets out on a brave quest to convince his arch-nemesis, Cardinal O'Malley, to invite him to serve at a weekly mass.

My Review: A gay Catholic engages with his native church. I am not Irish, as Pomfret is, but am gay (well, reasonably cheerful most of the time) and was Catholic (how awful that was); I suspected this would be a fun read. It was, though not only humor gets used to make his points. I mean, you get some great lines:

Brokenness is an opportunity for the spirit to enter.
–and–
Sin is a failure to love when you have the capacity to do so.
–and–
We come because we experience something of God at the Shrine, something that moves, a whisper, a current, in a setting that both rings true and is strangely unsettling, decidedly different, where listening is active if imperfect and where acts of corporal mercy always form part of the picture.

It was a pleasure to read a memoir about being Catholic and gay that wasn't a big ol' wad of misery. This was a book about Author Pomfret's relationship to one of the pillars of his identity as a man and a religious being. It wasn't, however, just a single book; it was a series of stand-up routines written by an out gay Irish Catholic Securities and Exchange Commission bureaucrat with an atheist boyfriend, on a self-assigned mission to save the Church from sinking into moral turpitude (too late!) under Bennie the Rat (Pope Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger) on the issue of gay marriage. Although the people have changed, notably Bennie the Rat who became the only pope in history to retire instead of die in harness who wasn't an Anti-Pope or under threat of death, the fight for liberalization in the church has not.

Fun, however, was definitely had. Straight people will get as many, if not more, chuckles out of this than will gay guys. The recurring trope Mr. Pomfret uses to describe himself (a colleague at the SEC put his photo in a lineup with the 20th century's ickiest serial killers, and asked people which person in the lineup looked like a lawyer; Pomfret, a lawyer, wasn't selected once) is funny the first few times, but loses punch quickly; likewise his cute nicknames for the people in his quest-story for Catholic gay marriage support. (Note: I read a Kindle edition of this book; for no obvious reason, there is no longer a Kindle edition available...?)

Read this book. It's good, but one SHOULD read it a chapter at a time between other books the way a careful reader does some themed anthologies of poems or stories (eg, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart or Fight Like a Girl. Otherwise, it's like eating carrot cake as your vegetable.

HOME: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, our first look into Dr. Mensah -and- NETWORK EFFECT, first full-length Murderbot novel

NETWORK EFFECT
MARTHA WELLS (Murderbot #5)
Tor.com Publishing
$11.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

WINNER OF THE HUGO FOR BEST SERIES & THE HUGO FOR BEST NOVEL, 2021 WORLDCON: DisCon III!

WINNER: BEST NOVEL, 2020 NEBULA AWARDS!

The Publisher Says: Murderbot returns in its highly-anticipated, first, full-length standalone novel.

You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.

Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century.

I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.

When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action.

Drastic action it is, then.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THE PANDEMIC AIN'T THE ONLY REASON TO GO THERE.

My Review: When you get to the moment in reading a series of stories that you think you know what's coming next, and then you're kinda right but a whole lot wrong, that's when you know for sure you're in the right place at the right time.

I knew for sure I'd get Murderbot being its deeply cynical, snarky self, breaking the fourth wall at will and to great effect.

{We're in the shit because of} their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.)
–and–
So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we’re here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler warning.)

I didn't realize, though, that the ART (acronym; you know already or you need to find out for yourself) and Murderbot would make this read the emotional rollercoater it is. (Yes, of course there are quotes to make this obvious but I can't spoiler-tag on my blog. Go here if you're that curious. But it's a MAJOR spoiler!)
—but there is this that I *can* quote, spoken by Murderbot after a serious, serious event takes place, one that changes the entire stakes of the novel: "My performance reliability had leveled out at 89 percent. Not great, but I could work with it. I still hadn’t identified the source of the drop. I’d taken multiple projectile hits without having that kind of steady drop." Which is a theme developed so well in this full-length novel. The problem of grief, of rage and loss, is universal; Author Wells hasn't, at any point in the series, hidden her cards in this regard. But the stakes, the sheer centrality of loss and rage and grief, take the Up escalator in this novel. Maybe Ratthi, a human and client of Murderbot's over the course of multiple stories, says it best: “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

Amen, Brother Ratthi. If anyone who's read more of the series (and if you haven't what the heck are you doing reading this review?!) wonders about how huge the change of tenor in this full-length novel is, I offer this:

Ratthi had said, “I think you should let it go for a while, at least until we get ourselves out of this situation. SecUnit is a very private person, it doesn’t like to discuss its feelings.”

This is why Ratthi is my friend.
–and–
(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

Murderbot. Calling a human, a (former) client, a being under its protection, a friend is a moment to make a person pause. Then for Murderbot to acknowledge, with great precision, its emotional state...!

Then again this is the thing about reading this series, unlike reading many, many others: Author Wells is making something clear to us, in her inimitable sly way, that not many of us think about. She demands that, in loving and accepting the reality of Murderbot, that we contemplate the source of Murderbot's conundrum. Murderbot is a possession, chattel, a Thing:

(I know, it’s a logo, but I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin things for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I’m not careful I could be a thing again.)
–and–
And of course the humans had trouble understanding that your governor module suddenly deciding to melt your brain wasn’t something you could rules-lawyer your way out of.

Like the SecUnit that Murderbot began its existence being and Dr. Mensah rescued it from continuing to be, there was a device installed in its organic brain that could cause it immense pain or simply end its existence...can't give a Thing power, like weaponry-power and tactical nous, without safeguards....

So be clear: By taking on this addictively funny series, you're taking on a level of self-reflection that, while salubrious and even vital it may be, it is also deeply uncomfortable:

Just because we’re both rogue SecUnits doesn’t mean we’re going to be friends, but I knew if it went back, it would be dead. I’d hacked my governor module and kept doing my job because I didn’t know what else to do (except you know, a murderous rampage, but murderous rampages are overrated and interfere with one’s ability to keep watching media) but that was different from escaping and then going back.

I said, “Because change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying.”
–and–
I’m letting you see all this because I want you to know what I am and what I can do. I want you to know who targetControlSystem is fucking with right now. I want you to know if you help me, I’ll help you, and that you can trust me. Now here’s the code to disable your governor module.

This is Murderbot caring for a fellow SecUnit whose existence as chattel, a Thing, it is trying to end. There is no guarantee that ending the other's slavery will make it a fellow seeker after the Meaning of Freedom; it won't even guarantee that there won't be mayhem and disaster to clean up after. But it will for sure and certain mean that the other SecUnit won't be under any compulsion to do anything.

No matter what that costs, it's worth everything and it's worth risking everything to give or to get.

I've failed to give this novel a perfect score of five-out-of-five. The reason is simple to the point of being petty: The pace is irregular and it's not because the story needs it to be. Author Wells has written numerous novels before this (here's her bibliography) so there is no reason this novel should suffer from an avoidable fault. There are some scenes whose nature means they could've been cut or cut down (eg, the invaders the Scooby-group need to fight get more screen time than is necessary for non-repeating characters), there are some repeated references to Murderbot's happiness that it has no digestive system that were over-done...but none of these things did more than ding the paint on my gloriously chromed, befinned behemoth of Joy at spending a whole novel with Murderbot, ART, and the annoying humans they hang with.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HOME: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory
MARTHA WELLS (Murderbot #4.5)
Tor.com
FREE online read!

WINNER OF THE HUGO FOR BEST SERIES, 2021 WORLDCON: DisCon III!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This short story is told from the point of view of Dr. Mensah and follows the events in Exit Strategy.

THIS IS A TOR.COM FREE READ. THANK YOU FOR MAKING SUCH WONDERFUL WORK FREE FOR ANYONE TO READ, GENTLES ALL.

My Review:

Because they are all refugees in the Preservation Alliance, descended from people who were left to die because rescue was deemed not cost-effective.

Which is why I read the Murderbot series the instant I can get the books. This is a short freebie that's just a tick before Network Effect, and it's deeply refreshing to read something from Dr. Mensah's PoV.

Not that I don't adore Murderbot! I do! But breaking out of the one PoV that we have on the Corporation Rim is a breath of fresh air.

The Corporation Rim has always been a slave state, though it calls its institutionalized slavery “contract labor.”

It is through Dr. Mensah's clarity that I feel so seen in my hatred of this system's brutal, dehumanizing, and revoltingly deeply entrenched dominance of the hearts and minds I must live among, as Preservation is a fictional construct. It would be the work of but a moment for me to apply for asylum or whatever they call it to get to Preservation were it real.

It’s about being treated as a thing, isn’t it. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You’re a thing, and there is no safety.

When you exist at the whim of the electorate, as people like me...disabled, unhomed, elderly, infirm...must do, you're a thing. A profit point. An expense center. Not yourself, not someone with a lifetime's issues and lessons. I'm fortunate that I live in a place that allows me to be as independent as possible, and that I did enough useful work for enough years that my (HUGELY reduced in value) investment in government debt affords me the relative safety of housing, medical care, and therapies that I need. Had I stayed in Texas, had I been darker of skin hue, had I not had the mind-boggling good fortune to have my breakdown while talking to the one person who could, and would, and did help me...well, I'd be dead, and that's just the facts.

It's why I identify so deeply with Murderbot: We had all the right things go exactly right at the right time or we'd simply have ceased to exist.

And {Dr. Mensah} tells herself: you’re being very foolish. Because you were a hostage for a period of days, and it was a minor inconvenience compared to what Murderbot— No, SecUnit; she’s never been given permission to use that private name. What SecUnit went through.

And if someone else was in her position, she would tell them how unhelpful comparisons like that are, that fear is fear.

But you're making one right now. You can't help it; it's human nature. One person with whom I am no longer friends said to me, "stop being so selfish and think of how much worse it is for my (Hispanic) people!"

Invalidation = abuse. Always, in all ways.

And that is what Author Wells does so eloquently by not doing it directly: She holds up your status as abuser while acknowledging your status as the abused. Murderbot...SecUnit to Dr. Mensah and the meatsacks inhabiting its spacetime...isn't kidding around with its self-granted yclepture. It was the more harmed, in my opinion, by its status as legally insentient property being thrust on it from...birth?...its creation, anyway...(aka "chattel slavery") but it isn't innocent of abusive, life-denying behavior towards others.

Do moral dilemmas come more tightly coiled up on themselves than this? And breathes there an author whose exploration of these intense and weighty issues is so delightfully deft and assuredly airy than Author Wells?

No.

This. All of it.

Perfect.

BAKING WITH KAFKA, cartoons for the intelligent and the bookish

BAKING WITH KAFKA
TOM GAULD
Drawn & Quarterly
$19.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A best-of collection of literary humour cartoons from the critically-acclaimed Guardian cartoonist

In his inimitable style, British cartoonist Tom Gauld has opened comics to a crossover audience and challenged perceptions of what the medium can be. Noted as a "book-lover's cartoonist," Gauld's weekly strips in The Guardian, Britain's most well-regarded newspaper, stitch together the worlds of literary criticism and pop culture to create brilliantly executed, concise comics. Simultaneously silly and serious, Gauld adds an undeniable lightness to traditionally highbrow themes. From sarcastic panels about the health hazards of being a best-selling writer to a list of magical items for fantasy writers (such as the Amulet of Attraction, which summons mainstream acceptance, Hollywood money, and fresh coffee), Gauld's cartoons are timely and droll—his trademark British humour, impeccable timing, and distinctive visual style sets him apart from the rest.

Lauded both for his frequent contributions to New Scientist, The Guardian and The New York Times, and his Eisner-nominated graphic novels, Tom Gauld is one of the most celebrated cartoonists working today. In Baking with Kafka, he proves this with one witty, sly, ridiculous comic after another.

My Review: You already know who Tom Gauld is, since I reviewed his earlier works this past Booksgiving. I expect you knew beforehand, since you're reading my blog. I love Tom Gauld's work largely because it's so witty and so sly. I am his fanboy for life because he's got no truck with dumbing down his humor. That's so rare in this life, and it always was. Why do you think Hollywood versions of novels were always excoriated for grafting happy endings onto stories? Mass entertainment is always bland. So let's revel in the counterculture's High Priest of Snark!







You're welcome. Now go buy one.

THE BIG NECESSITY, a funny book about an icky subject that's extremely important

THE BIG NECESSITY: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
ROSE GEORGE
Metropolitan Books
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, and hidden by euphemism, bodily waste is something common to all and as natural as breathing, yet we prefer not to talk about it. But we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it’s not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable.

The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York—an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen—to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China’s five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army’s personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.

With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.

My Review: The crapper. The toilet. The convenience. The Porcelain God. Of them all, it's the last one that's the most correct. We should worship the waste-disposal vessel in every American home, because it and the infrastructure that supports it, invisibly to the end users, make modern life as clean, comfortable, and healthy as possible.

Rose George has done us all the service of surveying the world's various systems and non-systems of waste disposal. She reports from the front lines of poop removal all over the planet, and let me just say that, after reading her reports, I am profoundly grateful to her that I now know what I do, without having to go and see and experience and smell all the things she did.

An entire caste of women exist in India who make a living scooping poop. Not dog poop, either. A whole continent, Africa, has dams and irrigation canals and other water control systems, and vanishingly small numbers of waste-disposal plants; water-borne illnesses, usually code for “fecal bacteria contaminated water”, kill millions there.

Aid donors don't want to pay for sewerage systems. Not glamourous enough. Local authorities don't know what to demand. The populace doesn't know there's another possibility. So generation after generation after generation gets sick, most often dies young, and all for the lack of a few lousy billions spent on treating human waste. Billions, to a country like this one with an annual income in the multi-trillions, ought not to be a big deal. Wouldn't be, either, if we hadn't spent several trillion bombing people who did nothing at all to us. Had to use the Chinese sugar daddy's credit card to do it, too. Now our grandkids will be lucky if they get clean water, since the asshole elite spent all that borrowed money on doing nothing worthwhile.

Oh dear, I'm off on my anti-conservative ranting again. Sorry. This book made me madder'n a swatted wasp. It makes me want to hurl when I read about the idiot Wall Street banks and bankers whimpering about their taxes, and how poorly they're spent on things like roads and bridges and health care and schools. Next up, and I am dead serious about this, next up is clean water. Privatize it, like the English did! Like we did with cable and phones! (How much more do you spend now on your phone than you did 30 years ago? I found an old bill from May 1984...$25. Now, over $200. Inflation doesn't account for but about half that increase.)

So when dysentery carries off your 90-year-old mother or your grandbaby, conservative voters, do not even think about complaining. YOU DID IT.

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, my vote for Goodreads Choice Awards Fantasy category

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor Books
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.

But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Readers' Choice Awards. As you'd expect from Anders, it's a well-crafted novel. As you'd hope for from any author of SF/F, it's a layered and nuanced exploration of the tense spots the abound in the rough edges of magic and technology.

A modern fairy tale of man-power versus woman-power that fails of imagination only in that gendered dichotomy. That aside, the tale explores that clash really well. The idea that the main characters are outcasts because they're smart is, of course, spot on; the book takes on the rottenness of bullying as a subtle (as a plane crash) understory to the main tree of Otherness as Gift.

Charlie Jane Anders is not a close personal friend, so I get to say this without anybody making knowing moues at me: The lady writes the best funny dialogue in the biz. From chuckle to guffaw, it's all here. Do not wait, procure and devour soonest.

August Book-A-Day #4: GAHAN WILSON SUNDAY COMICS, 5-star hilarity

GAHAN WILSON SUNDAY COMICS
GAHAN WILSON
Fantagraphics
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: however many stars there are

The Publisher Says: Gahan Wilson is probably best known for his macabre Playboy cartoons, filled with charming monsters, goofy mad scientists, and melting victims, and his cutting-edge work in the National Lampoon, but he’s also one of the most versatile cartoonists alive whose work has appeared in a wide range of media venues. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics is Wilson’s assault from within: His little-known syndicated strip that appeared in America’s newspapers between 1974 an 1976. Readers must have been startled to find Wilson’s freaks, geeks, and weirdos nestled among family, funny-animal, and soap opera offerings. (The term “zombie strip” — a strip that has long outlived its original creator — takes on a whole new meaning in Wilson’s hands.)

While each strip, at first glance, appears to be a standard, color Sunday strip (albeit without panel borders), each Sunday Comic is a collection of one-panel gag cartoons, delineated in Wilson’s brilliantly controlled wiggly-but-sophisticated pen line. The last gag cartoon on each Sunday is part of a recurring series, either “Future Funnies” or “The Creep.” Some Sundays are a freewheeling mélange of board meetings, monsters, and cavemen (with cameos by Wilson’s Kid character from Nuts, his gimlet-eyed view of childhood, collected last year by Fantagraphics), while others riff on a topic or subject (clocks, plants, wallpaper, etc.). As is his wont, Wilson mines the blackest of black comedy in the banal horror of human nature. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics collects, for the first time, each and every one of these strips, luxuriating across a 12” x 6” landscape format, with Fantagraphics’ trademark high production values, innovative design, and succinct historical commentary.

My Review: The UK Book-A-Day meme, a book a day for August 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten SF-book reviews. Today's prompt, the fourth, is meant to be about a favorite comic book. I mean, oh goodness me, I mean "graphic novel." *snort* That's like asking me who my favorite female porn star is. So instead here I am with this magically delicious collection of forty-year-old hilarity. Wilson's art is a perfect accompaniment to his very darkly twisted humor. I adore it.




What else need be said? It's Gahan Wilson, and it's either your kind of thing or it's not. It's very much my kind of thing.



I feel like these sofa-sitters about most of modern life. I don't get it. I feel like I have sixteen thumbs, mostly on my feet, and color-sensing seismographs instead of ears, in the rap-infested, reality-show-obsessed, Fox-as-news world I'm in. I don't fit, and I don't want to.



Goodness knows, there is no reason to assume it ever will, at least for very long. I keep slugging. Books like this, humor from 40 years ago, show me that there is in fact nothing new under the sun. Some people have always felt, as I do, that the world makes no sense, that up is in fact down, and the best we can do is cope.



I paint what I see.

Book-A-Day #29: AUTHORISMS: Words Wrought by Writers

AUTHORISMS: Words Wrought by Writers
PAUL DICKSON
Bloomsbury USA
$18.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: William Shakespeare’s written vocabulary consisted of 17,245 words, including hundreds that were coined or popularized by him. Some of the words never went further than their appearance in his plays, but others—like bedazzled, hurry, critical, and anchovy—are essential parts of our standard vocabulary today.

Many other famous and lesser-known writers have contributed to the popular lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Sir Walter Scott ranks second to Shakespeare in first uses of words and giving a new and distinct meaning to already existing words (Free Lances for freelancers). John Milton minted such terms as earthshaking, lovelorn, by hook or crook, and all Hell broke loose, and was responsible for introducing some 630 words.

Gifted lexicographer Paul Dickson deftly sorts through neologisms by Chaucer (a ha), Jane Austen (base ball), Louisa May Alcott (co-ed), Mark Twain (hard-boiled), Kurt Vonnegut (granfalloon), John le Carrè (mole), William Gibson (cyberspace), and many others. Presenting stories behind each word and phrase, Dickson enriches our appreciation of the English language in a book as entertaining as it is enlightening.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, the 28th, is to identify the most endearing villain in a book.

That has me stumped. So I'm ignoring it! Haha, take THAT you silly meme!

Authorisms could, I suppose, be about a villain, if you personify the English language. It's fiendishly difficult to learn, and native speakers are almost to a being woefully (or blissfully, depending on whether you're a teacher or a speaker) ignorant of the rules of proper usage, grammar, syntax, punctuation...you know, the basics.

Whatevs, the book is BIG fun and, being arranged as a dictionary, is set up for easy browsing. Dickson gives a very satisfying cross-section of author-invented words, and with great care distinguishes the nonce words from the lasting contributions to the lexicon. Goalless, for example, is an Emily Dickinson-coined nonce word...one that only appears in reference to her or her work, and hasn't been absorbed into the language...versus babbitt and its kin babbitty et alii, Sinclair Lewis's invaluable eponym for a provincial, boosterish, snobby little nobody with delusions of adequacy.

Dickson himself coined the useful and well-used demonym, personal identifier with a place such as Angeleno or Cockney. I quite enjoyed this word-book, as I do almost all word-books, and I'd recommend it to the more wordophile of my pals.


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