And Another Thing

I meant to include this in yesterday’s roundup, but it slipped my mind.

This week I started reading Nimona, a webcomic by Noelle Stevenson about a teenager who is sidekick to a supervillain. It’s very funny and has an interesting take on both the hero/villain idea and on the villain/sidekick relationship. Go read it!

I found out about this one because I’ve been keeping my eye on a new monthly column by Hannah K Chapman on Women In Comics. Hannah’s column is also why I decided to pick up I Kill Giants, another comic I loved recently. Check out her column (March and April for more good recommendations.

Roundup: The First

Clearly I can’t be trusted to write a book review every week. I’m thinking of just doing a weekly roundup of what I’ve been watching/reading instead, and this here is my first try of that. I’ll still do longer reviews when I can get myself going on them.

Books

1. It took me a couple of weeks really, but this week I finished reading A Hand-Book of Volapük by Andrew Drummond. The book combines actual instruction in the “universal language” of Volapük with a comic novel set in Scotland in 1889. The narrator is Mr Justice, General Secretary of the Edinburgh Society for the Propagation of a Universal Language. Justice is a keen supporter of Volapük, and spends his narrative extolling its virtues – and entirely oblivious to its flaws, which become apparent nevertheless to the reader.

Justice travels with a cantankerous, lecherous, and sesquipedalian six-hundred-year-old dead knight, which sentence should tell you something about the tone of the book.

The lessons in Volapük were genuinely instructive, and the unreliable narrator interesting, but I wasn’t quite carried away by this novel. The humour was only mildly amusing for me. But if you want to learn about an interesting and obscure constructed language, this will be more entertaining than an ordinary textbook.

2. I was in London over the weekend, and on the train there and back I read Farthing by Jo Walton. It’s a murder mystery novel set in an alternate history – one where the US never joined the Second World War, and the UK made peace with Hitler. A man is murdered in Farthing House, home to the Eversley family, who are at the centre of the politically influential Farthing Set. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is dispatched to investigate the crime. Lucy Kahn, daughter of Lord and Lady Eversley, provides an inside view of the family. Married to a Jewish man, she is somewhat estranged from her family, and the circumstances of the crime lead to her husband being a prime suspect.

This is equal parts crime novel and an exploration of privilege, power, racism, homosexuality, marriage as a political tool, the relationship between servants and masters, scapegoating, and all the things that go on behind closed doors among the upper classes. The world we’re shown isn’t some clean and polished version of the past but one where the scandals are close to the surface, known to all but simply not spoken about.

It was an enjoyable enough read, though not the most uplifting ending. There was one thing that bothered me, which is the use of the trope where a woman knows instantly that she is pregnant during the act of conception. It’s nonsense, but the book plays it straight, with Lucy deciding sans evidence that she’s pregnant and then spending the rest of the novel thinking and telling people about the baby.

Comics

1. Manhattan Projects vol. 1: “Science. Bad.” by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra. I’d heard some good things about this one, so decided to check it out. It’s a pretty out-there reimagining of the Manhattan Project, where instead of just developing the atomic bomb, the scientists are involved in all kinds of crazy science – interdimensional portals, alternate realities, aliens, split personalities, giant mechanical limbs. It hasn’t quite grabbed me yet, but I also felt the same way about The Unwritten when I read the first volume, and now I’m a big fan.

2. I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J M Ken Niimura. Another picked up because I’d heard it was good but didn’t know much about it. And I can say now, it is excellent. Highly recommend. A young girl retreats into fantasy to avoid confronting difficult problems at home. The girl in question, Barbara Thorson, is smart, sarcastic, and weird, and the story is both heartbreaking and ultimately heartwarming. The clever writing and great artwork fit together perfectly.

Read this book.

Film

1. Iron Man 3 – This was a fun film. It’s ridiculous spectacle, but it works, and it’s way better than IM2 was. The film handled the Mandarin the best way it could be done these days.

2. Argo – While I was in London I went to the cinema for this one. There was more humour in this than I expected, for the subject matter. The final chase down the runway was a little hard to believe (of course, it never actually happened), but otherwise it’s a solid film, worth seeing.

Other

Also in London, I went to the theatre for a showing of Wicked. A fun night, a great show. Particularly enjoyed Gina Beck as Galinda/Glinda.

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This post went on longer than I expected.

View from the hotel window

Or not. I did get a discount for booking a room with scaffolding, though.

Past Writing

For some reason I’ve found myself reading through old posts on the blog. I’ve come across some pieces of old flash fiction (one very short, one longer) I’d forgotten I ever wrote. They may or may not be any good, but I wasn’t mortified by reading them (which is a good start), so I thought I’d link back:

- A Whole New World (Aug 2006)
- Words (Sep 2006)

I can’t seem to write at all these days. Or can’t bring myself to try.

Endings

A couple of days ago, I read this article by Peter Damien on the importance of endings in fiction. I agree with a lot of what he says there. In many ways, a story can be defined by its ending – a well-planned ending can shape the entire whole that precedes it, or provide context that makes the whole more than it was (the book I just finished, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, accomplishes the latter).

In a stand alone novel, an ending is something you can be well-assured of, but less so for a novel series, a television show, or, especially, comics. Keeping with some of the examples Damien used: you can have series’ where fans are eager for resolution, the creators say “we know where it all goes, trust us”, but in fact things are changed on the fly and/or never resolved (Lost). You have ones where a creator says they have the whole story planned across x installments, who then keep expanding that “x” until it seems interminable (The Wheel of Time). And then there are the stories that have no ending, the ongoing serials.

It’s that last group that I have issues with – specifically, with comic serials. I have no problem starting an unfinished book series, because usually there’s an expectation of an eventual ending. But in comics, there’s a whole big section of the market where that’s not the case.

I started out reading comics that were most like books: stand alone graphic novels, in single volumes. It made the most sense to me – and still does. I like a complete story, a rounded whole. The ongoing comics – the ones you’re most likely to have heard of: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, countless more – felt inaccessible, because they had no end, their beginnings were in the distant past, and there was this huge amount of complicated, interconnected story surrounding them.

So I stuck with graphic novels, for years, and only started to move away from that recently. I got a hold of the Sandman series – a safe choice, as it was already finished. There, again, I found that as the story approached its definite end, it began to draw together everything that had come before into something bigger than what was. The final four volumes are masterful storytelling.

The Sandman series is one made up of several smaller stories, rather than a single ongoing story split into parts. That’s what opened me up to other comics than the completed, fully self-contained ones. It’s a compromise: the collected volumes of self-contained storylines, comics that cohere into something of a whole while still being part of the bigger series. Despite the missing context of the comic’s history, there’s something that makes these volumes work: the story arc has an ending.

Finally, I have recently begun reading a few comics that are part of ongoing series. New ones, mostly, so I don’t have a lot of catching up, but ones with an undefined ending. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, yet.

I think I’ll always continue to favour the ones I know have a limited lifespan. I enjoy the comfort of knowing that something has an end in sight.

Finally, I have to say that Damien is right about one more thing: Locke & Key is a brilliant series, and I very much look forward to its own ending.

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[On another subject entirely, my Book-A-Week posts will resume soon. I've spent much of the past couple of weeks re-reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels, and haven't cared to say much on them - they're deserving classics: read them.]

Thought for the Day

Epiphanies are easy. Realisation can come to anyone at any time. It’s following through on them that’s the hard part.

It’s surprisingly simple to realise that something isn’t right and then… carry on anyway, look past it, do nothing. To act, though, to make changes, to improve something – that takes effort.

An epiphany is worthless if it doesn’t result in a change.

Misc. Points

Various things both mine and others’, in an assorted jumble that probably doesn’t work as one post.

1.

Foz Meadows talks On Grittiness & Grimdark. Her argument in an oversimplified nutshell: Works that claim to be “more realistic” because they are gritty and dark are implicitly putting forward the idea that the other elements of the story are also realistic, when often they’re anything but. Read the full post, she says it better than I could.

2.

Everyone is already talking about Amanda Palmer’s TED speech, The Art of Asking. Here are some posts that muse on what her talk means to book-business folk:
- Chuck Wendig on The Art of Asking: For Writers and Storytellers
- Andrew Losowsky at Huffington Post Books, Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk Contains Important Lessons For Publishers

3.

Fireside Magazine is by all accounts an excellent venue for short fiction. They’re currently running a Kickstarter to fund a full year of publication, and the end date is closing in fast. If you’re interested in seeing more decent short fiction – and in a venue that pays writers better than the low standard rates – consider backing.

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And now, back to me.

4.

Writing:

- I wrote fiction this weekend. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t good, but I haven’t done it in quite some time, and lately I’ve been getting hit with the story bug. I might try to take Chuck Wendig’s writing advice, and aim for just a little each day until suddenly I’ve written a lot.

- I’ve also hit this odd point where I feel wrong and unproductive when I go a while without writing something – fiction, a review, a longer blog or forum post, anything. I haven’t got past my procrastination yet, unfortunately: this post is procrastination for writing my thoughts on Ben Peek’s Black Sheep.

5.

Reading:

- I’m falling back into my old bad habit of buying books much faster than I read them.

- I’m getting very slack on Book-A-Week, as you can tell by my blog posting lately. I want to be more relaxed about it, but not also keep falling behind.

- I am thinking of clearing a few books out of my collection that I don’t think I’ll reread. I don’t know what to do with them, however. Preferably they’d go somewhere they’d be read and enjoyed… Last time I cleared out books was the first time, and I did the wrong thing: I just allowed my sister to take away a lot of them and sell them off to some cashback website. Ugh.

6.

I’m sure I have forgotten something worth posting.