Rocks yes, Awesome no

Attention to any elementary school students who may be reading this: you shouldn't be reading my blog it's full of cursewords; but also you should know that the children of your teachers TOTALLY read your book order books.

I'm sorry, kids. I couldn't help myself. I've got a problem with rocks. When I cleaned up my childhood bedroom recently I found approximately four pounds of pebbles in there. I pick up river rocks and pretty rocks and put them in jars and never do anything with them. I used to set big smooth rocks next to the burners on the stove and sometimes they'd get dirty so my mom would put them in the dishwasher and then my sister would find them and decide that my mom and I were both crazy.

This book about (and including) rocks has been sitting at my parents' house for the last two weeks and taunting me so last night I broke down and read the damn thing. It was disappointing. There were some good basic facts about rock types and properties, and it did in fact include rocks, but it also had the cheapest, shittiest magnifying glass I've ever seen, a totally superfluous pipette, and one of the rocks wasn't in the book (they talked about the properties of and tricks you can do with talc but included a sample of graphite instead). The printing was also really reprehensible, so smudged and offset in some places that the words were difficult to read.

So boo on you, Scholastic. Someone here made some bad choices. And stop trying to make books like this hip and in-tune with kids these days. Clearly your cool-kid-ese dictionary was printed in the 70's and no one has bothered to make a new once since, which I know because I remember the same cringe-inducing, over-excited language in my own book fair books.

And to the kid who ordered this book: some of the safety measures in this book are good (don't go exploring around mines and try to stay away from poisons) but some of them are bad and I feel like I, as a responsible adult, need to tell you that you do not need an adult to help you bang two chunks of quartz together in a dark room.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Merrill, Robin. Big Box of Awesome Rocks. Scholastic. New York: New York. 2011.

Okay but not great

I was usually pretty good about reading books for school and as time passed I actually got better about it instead of worse. I read more of the assigned reading at the community college than I did in high school, more at the university than I did in the community college, and if I was in grad school I get the feeling that I would read every work by every author we discussed in a class because, holy shit seriously, books are so awesome you guys.

But there are periodical exceptions. I can't hang with Faulkner or Wolfe and so whenever I was assigned one of those books I'd make a token effort then give up in exasperation about fifty pages in. I was, however really surprised when the same thing happened with The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Calvino was the only author we really examined in my senior symposium and I adored If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and some of the other books we'd gone through, so it was a bit of a shock when Crossed Destinies didn't really grab me.

Now that I've finally worked my way completely through the book (three years after I was in the class) I can sort of see why it didn't call out to be read. Crossed Destinies is playful and very, very funny, but it's also contrived and pretty damn boring. Calvino himself said that it was a book he only wrote to be rid of it - the idea of making a tarot deck into a story generator had fascinated him for years before Crossed Destinies was published so he wrote the book in order to stop fixating on it. If the book was tormenting the author before it even went to print I can understand why it might be frustrating to readers as well.

The problem with the book (is it a novel? two novellas? a collection of short stories) is that Calvino's writing is brilliant but the device of using tarots is almost too twee to tolerate. The concept of a mashup between Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth is AMAZING but when it's set to a tarot deck instead of its own damn story it's really irritating instead of really awesome.

I kind of get why Calvino wanted to do this - it's so freaking tempting. Tarots are made up of recognizable archetypes and filled in with lovely little details that seem like the perfect plot outline for a story. But they only seem right for an outline - they're incomplete (which Calvino is quick to note over and over and over in the book) and unsatisfying.

The best piece in the book is "I also try to tell my tale," which is written from the perspective of a writer, or Calvino, or a King or someone who creates. It doesn't really matter who, and the details don't really matter either; what does matter is its examination of what writing is, which is the entire point of the story, the book, and the contrivance behind the whole thing.

So should you read it? Bits and pieces. When I first read it for school I think I got as far as the Vampire Kingdom and after that I lost interest. The first book of the two books (Castle as opposed to Tavern) has the more interesting and coherent stories while the second book (Tavern as opposed to Castle) is made up of more murky literary introspection. In the end all of it is worth reading, but some of the book is more fun to read than all of the book. If, however, this is your first time reading Calvino put the book down, back away and go get a copy of Mr. Palomar or The Cloven Viscount.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Harcourt Brace & Company.
     San Diego: California. 1979.

USDA certified cruelty-free porn

I think porn is just peachy but sometimes I have trouble finding ethical porn. I know that a lot of the actors in pornographic films are exploited or addicted or not given too many choices in life outside of doing porn, and so porn with real people in it is kind of a hard pill to swallow. So if exploitation kills your lady-boner (or regular boner) what can you do? Well, one option would be to pick up this excellent collection of pornographic short comics by some of my all-time favorite webcomic artists.

There are actually only a few of my favorite artists featured in Smut Peddler but pretty much all of the art is fantastic. The stories are erotic (and graphic!) while still being silly and sweet and funny.

There's not a hell of a lot to say about this book because so much depends on the audience when you're talking about porn. If you like porn there's a good chance you'll like Smut Peddler but if you don't like porn the book isn't for you. There are a variety of relationships illustrated, from m/m, m/f, m/m/f, to m/tentacle robot and f/android. It's all very fun and sex positive, there are no non-consensual pairings, and pretty much every comic features a moment that's just completely adorable. It's like mixing cupcakes and boners and I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Cheers,
     - Alli
(added bonus - if you flip to the acknowledgements in the waaaaaaaaay back of the book and look under M you'll find MissDemeanor, which means you can thank me for donating money to bring this wonderful book into the world)

Ed. Spike. Various Authors. Smut Peddler. 2012.

Viva Vonnegut

At some point or another someone described Slaughterhouse-Five to me very badly. They told me it was the story of the Dresden firebombing reinterpreted as an alien attack by soldiers who were too shell-shocked to cope with the actual firebombing.

I don't remember who gave me this description but I do know that it prevented me from reading this awesome book for at least a decade.

I'm pretty disappointed in myself for letting someone else's interpretation of a book keep me from reading that book but so far that behavior has served me pretty well - if a book can be tidily explained in a sentence or two I probably don't want to read it unless it was written by Stephen King, is about Harry Potter, or is non-fiction. SciFi and fantasy books that can be explained in the same space as a fortune cookie are even worse than normal books that have short summaries because I don't really think SciFi or fantasy can be engaging unless they're too complicated to explain.

One of the best ways to convince me not to read a book is to tell me what it's about; conversely the very best way to pique my interest in a book (or movie, or TV show) is to say "I can't really explain it without telling you the whole thing - you'll just have to read it." YES. That is what I'm looking for. I want something immersive and complicated and beautiful that relies on each little piece inside the whole to hold it up and make it hang together. If you can cut out huge plot points and whole characters and get the same story out of it you're not reading a book, you're playing Jenga with words. This, by the way, is why so many people get pissed off when movies are made out of books (if you cut out the secret keeper huge chunks of the rest of the series don't make sense and it makes a bunch of other characters look really stupid *cough*AlfonsoCoron*cough*) - because you can't make a move, even a really long and expensive and well-done movie, and have it be the same thing as the book.

But that was all tangent. What it really comes down to is I read Slaughterhouse-Five and I fucking loved it. I'm still doing plenty of kicking myself for not reading more Vonnegut sooner but, damn, I really wish I hadn't gotten spooked all those years ago.

Slaughterhouse-Five isn't about a firebombing, it's about how nothing is about the firebombing, not even the bombing. This book is about coping and questions and reality and it's funny and dark and sad and sweet and it feels like it festered inside Vonnegut so long that it had to hurt its way into being.

I really like it when I read books that remind me to be a better person. And I think that's exactly what Slaughterhouse-Five did.

So it goes,
     - Alli.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. Dell Publishing. New York: New York. 1966.

Flamethrowers don't solve every problem

I really wish that fire could fix everything, which seems to be something that I have in common with John and Dave from This Book is full of Spiders - thankfully David Wong is well aware that fire does NOT solve all the problems in the world and writes compellingly about why we should resist the urge to break out the flamethrower at every opportunity. Don't get me wrong, there's going to be no stopping me from shooting fire out of the next flamethrower I come across, but when that doesn't fix everything I'll make a point of remembering that there are other options (hopefully before I manage to fuck up the fate of the entire world).

If John Dies at the End is a funny little monster book that happens to be chock full of human frailty and strength then This Book is full of Spiders is a goofy little book about zombies that happens to raise lots of valid questions. But I'm probably putting that wrong - there's nothing goofy about This Book is full of Spiders (that is a straight-up lie, people die with spaghetti monsters in their ass and there's a Caddie that can't stop playing Creedence even when it gets stolen by turkey monsters) because it's actually a mature and serious examination of post 9/11 paranoia and the meaning of sacrifice that also totally kicks ass and has a gun that can turn things into mashed potatoes.

If I'm not explaining this well it's because the book doesn't lend itself to being broken down into itty-bitty capsules that are easily digested. This book has edges that will bite your throat and make you choke as you try to swallow them because you're yelling at yourself inside your head "no, not me, I'm not like that, it's all those other people" and that's exactly the point.

This Book is full of Spiders is, of course, delightful but it's a lot darker and less funny than John Dies at the End so if you come into the story hoping that it picks up exactly where John Dies left off you'll be at least partially satisfied - events between the two books match up in chronology and there is, in fact, a flamethrower put to awesome use. However neither John nor Dave are the same lighthearted idiots from the first novel and the differences in their characters from one book to the next is a bit startling, though it does create a rounder read.

I enjoy the hell out of Wong's work and even if Spiders isn't as much of a page-turner as John Dies it's still great fun.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Shit the bomb, Molly!

It's really difficult to explain how much I like John Dies at the End. It seems like such a dumb, silly little book - it's full of meat monsters and demons with idiot senses of humor and assless leather chaps - but it's also full of harsh introspection and questions about relationships.

I don't think anyone looks to books like this to be anything other than ridiculous romps but I keep finding more each time I read it. It's a hefty chunk of words for a horror-comedy novel, clocking it at over 450 pages, and I guess if you're going to cover that much ground in a book a lot of it is going to stray outside of what can easily fit into a single genre or a cover blurb. But I never stop feeling surprised when I start paging through it and realizing how sad it's making me while I'm also having a great time reading it.

David Wong is one of my favorite authors at Cracked. He is one of the few writers for a failed Mad Magazine rip-off who has ever made a significant change in the way that I live my life. A lot of his articles are grounded in the way that humans define happiness and the way to make yourself a measurably better person and I suppose someone who writes those sorts of articles for a dick-joke dispensary is the same kind of person who can cram human drama and important questions about life into a book about two idiots taking a drug that lets them fight a Fred Durst fan named Shitload in order to save the world.

If you haven't read this book, please do. It's unspeakably entertaining and way more literary than it has any right to be and full of magic dark and light and all its own. I'm still kicking myself for not reading it when it was first published instead of waiting a few years because that means that I missed out on a few years of having this great story kicking around in my head.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Wong, David. John Dies at the End. Permuted Press. 2012. OP 2007.

Popcorn fiction

I can't quite tell if the Holmes stories are serious literature or something to mindlessly consume. Some of the stories are quite serious and weighty, but an awful lot of them seem too neat and twee to take up much space in my head.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes appears to have been written long after Conan Doyle was thoroughly sick of writing about everyone's favorite irregular. The stories are all okay, none are really objectionable (except for the painful racism in "The Adventure of the Three Gables") but none of them really shine either.

It may be that I make the mistake of reading huge gluts of Holmes at one time - swallowing up ten stories at a sitting and re-reading the books frequently enough that they always stay fresh (and therefore predictable) in my mind.

One way or another I'm done with Sherlock and Watson for the moment and I'm quite happy to leave them alone in their foggy London, so full of muck and mystery, until the shine has worn off and I can read them as fresh and exciting again.

Cheers,
     - Alli