Reading for July -- and the Switch

July

33. Jim Butcher: Fool Moon
34. Christopher Moore: Fool
35. Daniel Wallace: Friends Like These
36. Kim Harrison: For a Few Demons More

Started A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle; stopped because of the Sign.

Fool Moon

Pick:
I wanted to grab up my next Vine choice, since it sounds really interesting, but the last one was a wee bit of a slog, so I wanted something more fun, more casual, that I wouldn't have to worry terribly about reviewing -- because that last review was a real bitch to get right. So I went for the Simon R. Green Nightside book I just picked up -- I have three to read now, books 5-7 in the series -- but I wanted to check the ending of the previous book, which I read last year, because I remembered being pissed at the last line of book #4. I read it again, and then realized I didn't remember the background leading up to that line, so I looked back through the book a little. And realized I remembered almost nothing about the plot, even though it revealed quite a few things about the main character. And I said, "I'm going to have to read this again." At which point the wind wailed past the house, and the trees groaned like tortured souls; the sky turned black and I heard scrabbling in the wall like rats or locusts or the fingernails of the damned. And Toni turned to me with shocked eyes and said, "No! You can't! Dusty, don't do it -- you'll doom us all! NOOOOOOOO!!!!? and then ran from the room.

And I said, "Okay, fine, I won't read these then. Geez." And all the noises and portents stopped.

Then Toni, calm and serene once again, said, "Why don't you read a Harry Dresden book instead?"

So that's what I did.

True story.

Story:
Fool Moon might be the only Dresden book that isn't better than the one before it -- though that judgment will have to wait until I finish the series to become codified and definitive. It's a good book, but it's too damned busy.

There's that great scene near the beginning, when Harry and Murphy realize they are dealing with werewolves, and Harry asks Bob about them. It's great because Bob gives a wonderful answer, one that shows Butcher's imagination: there are several different kinds of werewolves. There are werewolves, who learn to transform themselves into wolves with magic; there are Hexenwulfs (Nice German usage, there), which are people who gain a magical talisman of some kind that allows them to transform into wolves; there are lycanthropes, which are people with the souls of beasts, who don't transform at all, but who can commit acts that might seem wolfish and who have some of the attributes of classic werewolves -- rapid healing, pack mentality, lose control around the full moon -- but are actually more like Viking berserkers; then there is the loup-garou, the most dangerous kind of werewolf, which is someone who has been cursed to turn into a wolf-like monster every full moon.

That's a great answer, which makes the old werewolf trope seem far more interesting and realistic than having werewolves adhere to the stereotypes. Butcher does the same thing with vampires, giving them three different breeds that each take on some, but not all, of the standard vampire attributes. The problem with the book is, every single kind of werewolf makes an appearance, along with one other kind that Bob doesn't mention: a wolf who has the mystical ability to transform into a human. Which is also damned clever.

But the sheer variety of werewolves is too much. It's like Butcher had a checklist and he made sure to hit every one: werewolves, Hexenwulfs, lycanthropes, loup-garou. Check, check, and double-check. It made it so there were too many bad guys -- especially since Gentleman Johnny Marcone is also involved -- too much danger, and it muddied up the waters and made it hard to enjoy. It also meant that things that would have made a great villain/enemy -- specifically the lycanthrope street gang -- get shorted, because there's not enough room in the story to really deal with them. The same goes for the werewolves, the Alphas, though at least they come back in subsequent books. The novel would have been better if he could have found a way to stick with the Hexenwulfs and the loup-garou.


Thoughts:
On the plus side, it's still a fun book and a good read. It was a nice break from Vine books, and I think I'll read the next one soon.


Fool

Pick:
Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday from Toni here's the newest book by your favorite author, Happy Birthday to Me!

And many moooooooooooooore!

Was it serendipity that I finished the Jim Butcher book on the morning of my birthday, when Toni gave me the newest book by Christopher Moore -- a story based on one of my all-time favorite literary characters, the Fool from King Lear? Or was it destiny? The will of the gods? Nah.
"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

Story:
The book is brilliant, of course. The writing is hilarious -- right up there with Lamb and Dirty Job, much better than You Suck; this is one of Moore's best -- and the story is the right kind of multi-layered satire he does so well when he finds something he can sink his teeth into.

He said in his Author's note that he wanted to write about a jester because he loves writing rascals; when he asked his agent if he should do any random Fool or the Fool from Lear, she said, "Definitely Lear." I'm sure any fool would have worked fine, but I love that this one was based on the Shakespeare play. I won't say that Moore is anywhere near as good a writer as the Bard, but he has many of the same strengths: he can write a funny scene that has a touching undercurrent; he can switch from personal to universal from sentence to sentence and make them both work; he truly knows how to make a story his own. This is King Lear, but it's also not -- because it's Christopher Moore's King Lear, not William Shakespeare's.

Pocket is a wonderful character. I loved that we heard his entire life story, in flashback and out of order, because it all connects: his childhood and upbringing do much to explain the way he is and the way the other characters treat him; in addition, the way that Pocket's life has been intertwined with Lear's since before his birth gives a great view of the two sides of Lear: he is a cruel tyrant who deserves what he gets, and he is also a foolish old man who makes what would be an innocent mistake in anyone younger, but is either insanity or stupidity in him. I always felt that way about Shakespeare's Lear, and the character of Pocket gives a new lens to see Lear through, without changing the basic character of the king.

The other characters have been largely replaced with Moore's own: the women are classic Moore, smarter, wiser, more mature and much sexier than the men, except for the villainesses, who are still smarter than most of the men, but are cold and self-serving as well. The men are generally bumbling children, except for Pocket, and Kent, the one loyal man in the kingdom. Drool is a hilarious character, an excellent sidekick for Pocket, and Edmund makes a decent villain, though he could use some more fleshing out. The real villain, though, is Lear, and he is perfectly done -- and interestingly enough, he's not played humorously, even in this comic novel. Lear remains the same tragic, flawed fool he is in Shakespeare's play; this is much of what creates the multiple layers in the book, with the humor coming from the general cast, the serious notes from Lear and Cordelia, and Pocket working as the bridge between the two.

Exactly what a Fool should be.

Thoughts:
Great book. I loved it, I loved that it was the story of Lear with the right hero and the right ending. I do want to read Lear again, I think -- and I know I'll want to read this a second time, and a third, and probably more after that.



Friends Like These

Pick:
The last Vine Voice book I've got right now -- one apparently got lost in the mail. But I picked this one because I liked the idea, and because I looked up the author on Amazon UK and found that he has five bestselling books in Britain, including Yes Man (which the movie is based on). I love the concept, and I love that this guy started his own cult -- I'm going to have to look for that book now, too.

Amazon Review:

I'm sure that after reading this book, most people will want to imitate the author, and try to reconnect with old friends. I don't. I want to be Danny Wallace's friend, and have him come find me. Hopefully wearing a giant bunny head and a t-shirt with my face on it. And we'll say, "Potaaaatooooo!"

Wallace makes an excellent case for reconnecting with childhood friends. He has twelve that he seeks out, and though he does not have a joyous reunion with each and every one of them, he does have just such a reunion with most -- and the ones that don't work out quite so well are still a source of valuable insight. If I may simply list adjectives: the whole story is funny, poignant, and sweet, and heart-warming and thought-provoking as well. In fact, it is hard to say what is the most inspiring and fascinating part of this book: it could be the boundless optimism that informs both Wallace's actions and his writing; it could be the humor, which is simply wonderful -- there are many moments that made me smile, chortle, and even laugh out loud (a rarity when I read), but I think my favorite is Wallace's impression of a ten-year-old British boy's image of America. Apparently we all have guns, say things like "Hold the rye!" and use "a$$" in every sentence; the example given is the insult, "A$$ off!" Which I'm now going to start saying, of course. But the most fascinating part of the book could also be the insight into growing up and being a man. It is never preachy or artificial; it feels very much like a peek into someone else's mind as he goes through the watershed moment when he decides that he is ready to be a grownup, that he will not abandon his childish ways, but is ready to stop clinging to them. It's very sweet, and thoughtful, and, yes, inspiring.

The book is also a fantastic reminiscence about the 1980's and early 1990's, although the difference between a British boy's experience of youth and pop culture and my own American memories made it a little less than perfect, for me. But still: I remember the first time I heard Michael Jackson's music (It was "Billie Jean," in my case -- and I thought that light-up sidewalk was totally cool), and I remember being obsessed with "Ghostbusters," and I remember the Atari 2600 era and the rise of Nintendo, so there was a lot for me in this book. Even more than popular culture, though, the book is simply a tour through childhood and friendship, and those memories are universal. Anyone who has been a child, who had those short-lived but perfect friendships, with people who then disappeared from your life, should read this book. Anyone who worries about growing up, either too quickly or not quickly enough, should read this book. And really, anyone who likes a sweet, funny trip through the life of a bright, sensitive, quirky person -- you should read it, too.


Thoughts:
It didn't really make me want to track down my old friends. Partly because I have already looked up some of my old friends (Shoutout to Hotpants!), partly because I was never as social or as friend-oriented as this man seems to be. But it did make me want to reminisce with my old friends, to try to rebuild the memories of myself and of them at that age, and it gave me a clue (or maybe even an answer) to the question I've always had about memories: I don't recall very many specifics about my own childhood, and so many other people seem to remember more about their own lives than I know about my own. Maybe the details, the real specifics, need to be remembered through collaborators.

I also wondered, after reading this, why I didn't have the same crisis of confidence that Danny Wallace has just before his 30th birthday. Almost every person in the book has the same sort of issue with growing up and looking back at that same age, but I didn't. But then I remembered: I turned 30 in 2004. Which was the year I got married, after watching my wife go through more than a year of agonizing pain culminating in major abdominal surgery, and also the year we moved from California to Oregon, after our house in Escondido flooded when the pipes burst. My 29th year, when Wallace goes through his quest, was also when the 2003 San Diego wildfires happened, with fifty-foot-high flames within half a mile of my house. So maybe I was a little distracted.


For a Few Demons More

Pick:
Wanted to get back into my beloved fantasy books after reading a memoir, and I want to get through this series and finish reading the new one. Only one more book left to re-read.

Story:
This one has a strong story. Rachel has an incredibly powerful and turbulent artifact, and everybody comes after it, and her. Newt is the first to appear, and she shows Rachel (and the readers) that demons are much more than we might have thought, that many of the things we think they can't do, are simply things they don't do -- and Newt does them. After Rachel manages to get out of that pickle, with the help of Minias -- an interesting character, but I don't like that they played up Rachel's attraction to him. I know, she's attracted to dangerous men, but this is not a man, this is a demon: the association with Al and Newt should be enough to cool her ardor before the thought even crosses her mind. Is anybody really that much ruled by their gonads?

Oh, wait. Rachel wants to find a blood balance with Ivy, and even though she has not an inkling of homosexuality, she decides in this one that maybe a gay relationship, y'know, wouldn't be all bad. So apparently Rachel is completely ruled by her id, by her desire for complete and total pleasure. She's totally a Sim with the pleasure aspiration -- which would explain why she can be exasperating, just like Sims with the pleasure aspiration.

Anyway, there's the storyline with Trent's wedding, which is a hoot, especially the way it wraps up with Rachel coming to the wedding on a city bus, and not for the expected reasons; I'm extremely happy with how the Piscary storyline wraps up, but not for the events with Kisten. It annoys me that Kisten is so absent from this book, even with the explanation for it. I sort of think Harrison didn't know what to do with the relationship between Rachel and Kisten, because Rachel is not supposed to be seriously involved -- pleasure, not commitment -- but Kisten is too perfect for her in too many ways, just because of the way the character was written. So I wonder if she went this way with it to get out of the corner she wrote herself into. The mystery will be solved in the new book, when I get to that one -- so we'll just wait for that.

Thoughts:
This one was better than the last, except I don't like Rachel's confusion from kissing Ivy -- I think her sexuality should be pretty straightforward, since she is old enough and experienced enough, and adventurous enough, to know if she has interest in women, and I don't think any kiss no matter how good can overcome one's natural inclinations -- and I'm not happy with the Kisten story yet. Though reading this when I know the ending showed me that Harrison did an excellent job of writing Rachel's mental block concerning what happened.




When it's time to change, then it's time to change!

Going to a new system here. My goal now is to read all of the unread books I currently own, before I go out and buy any more. Exceptions will include the Wheel of Time, new installments on favorite series, maybe a graphic novel or two. I will also continue the re-reads I started on Butcher and Harrison, leading up to the new books.

But from here, I won't be numbering from the beginning of the year. I will be numbering from the Sign, the day my bookshelf collapsed under the weight of the books that I kept accumulating faster than I could read them -- a habit I always criticized my mother for, when she did the same with newspapers that she would save to look through, which ended up in six-foot piles of moldering yellow fire hazard. Well, I'm not going to do the same with my books. I'm going to read what I've got before I get more, and I'm going to get rid of all of the ones I don't finish. I am going to include the unfinished ones in the count, because now I'm trying to count just how many unread books I bought before I did this. But for the sake of my sanity and in order to not overcomplicate this, I'm going to keep the total for the year count in parentheses with the ones I finish.

So:

1. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Unfinished)


Pick:
The story sounded interesting when I picked this one up, and it was very popular when it was new, so I've always wanted to read it. I've had it for probably two years without touching it until now because it is a massive tome: 800 pages in hardback, small print. I picked it first because it was the heaviest book on the shelf.

Story:
Too heavy. Too slow. 200 pages in four or five days, and I hadn't gotten to the main story line yet. I looked at the dust jacket again, and the story still sounded interesting, but the description of the book called it "exquisitely detailed" and "magisterial." Yeah. Sounds riveting, doesn't it? Enough already.

Thoughts:
The author was too self- indulgent. I think of long backstories for my characters, too -- but they stay in my notes, where they belong. The stuff that gets into the book is the stuff that is necessary for the story I'm telling, not a cycle of stories like a complete mythology of a time and a place. She picked scenes to include as if she was creating an entire world, but the story line is just a story line. Or maybe the problem is that the place she is creating is just too fucking boring all by itself -- high society 19th century England not being the hotbed of action-packed excitement. A whole lot of visiting and etiquette, fashion and frippery. This thing made the Silmarillion seem like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

2. Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye 7/21 (37)

Pick:
I stopped reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell because it was too dense and slow and boring, so I wanted to go for something easy and fun and light. Hey, how about a book about where bad kids go when they die?

Story:
Milton and Marlo Fauster. Milton because John Milton wrote Paradise Lost about Lucifer's fall from Heaven, Marlo because Christopher Marlowe wrote a famous version of Johann Goethe's Faust, about a man who sells his soul to the devil; Faustus because of same. These are cheesy names. They are not good names. They are not good because a large number of people wouldn't get the references, and cheesy because the people who do get the references don't think these names are clever. Anyone who does think these names are clever had it ruined when the author included a small ferret named Lucky as the pet of Milton, and who had Lucky wear a collar that had a small set of dice hanging from it, and who had Lucky lose that collar solely so that he could have Milton post a sign that said, "Milton's Pair of Dice: Lost."

That is a bad pun. It isn't clever, it's totally labored, and it isn't funny. It also repeats the same joke made by choosing this kid's name. And that's the best example I can give of this book.

The concept is wonderful. The adventure story isn't too bad, really, though there's some things that make no sense whatsoever, and there's far too much time spent on poop. But the writing is not good, and the humor is terrible: dull, cliche, lame, reliant on gross-outs that aren't too terribly gross and puns and references as irritating as the names of the two main characters and Lucky's collar.

Another example: the idea here is that these two kids die, and because they are bad kids, they get darned to Heck, a piece of Limbo a step short of Purgatory, where bad kids go to pay for their sins. Actually, only Marlo is a bad kid; Milton gets dragged down with her because she made him her unknowing, unwilling accomplice. Beggar the fact that even the Old Testament God wouldn't have damned the kid for that, it happens. And we could live with that -- except Marlo thinks it's funny, and Milton is vaguely annoyed with her for a page before he forgets about it. No, I don;'t think so. If my sibling got me killed (Also Marlo's fault, largely) and sent to an afterlife of torture, I wouldn't think it was funny, and I wouldn't just let it go. Which makes these characters unrealistic, and since we are already suspending our disbelief for the sake of accepting the existence of Heck, there's very little left in this book that we can believe in, now that we've lost both the setting and the characters. Oh, and the plot doesn't work either, but I don't want to give that away. Anyway, the pun I was going to describe is the name of the demon in charge of Heck, which is ostensibly a school (though that makes no sense and isn't well handled in the book, either), and thus she is the principal. Her name is Bea "Elsa" Bubb. Get it? Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, one of the chief lieutenants of Hell or another name for Satan himself, depending on your source? Well, if you didn't get it, don't worry -- the full name, Bea "Elsa" Bubb, is repeated throughout the novel. I must have been forced to read that awkward phrase fifty times. Rarely Principal Bubb, never Elsa; over and over again, Bea "Elsa" Bubb. A joke that wasn't that good the first time and was annoying every time after that, repeated fifty times in a two-hundred page book. I felt like I was in Heck. And I wanted out.

Thoughts:
As Toni said, so I repeat: this is a great idea, I just wish someone else had written it, because this guy sucks. We'll try reading the second installment and see if he has taken any writing classes in the meantime.


3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon 7/23 (38)

Pick:
After a pair of clunkers, I had to read something good. So I went for a book that I was sure would be well-written; luckily for me, this time I was right.

Story:
Christopher John Francis Boone hates metaphors, because they are a kind of lie. He doesn't like lies or people who tell them. So for his sake, I will try to refrain from reporting anything about this book but the facts.

Christopher is special. It is never spelled out in the novel, but I believe he is autistic. His symptoms and behaviors match that diagnosis, to the best of my knowledge. I do not know if he has Asperger's Syndrome or one of the other autism spectrum disorders that have been recently described, because I do not know very much about autism. I do not believe that autism has increased in frequency lately; I think the diagnosis is more common now than it used to be, but the syndrome does not occur in a greater percentage of the population than it ever has. That is my opinion. It is also a tangent, because it is not the main purpose of this writing.

Christopher's neighbor had a dog named Wellington. Wellington was murdered, stabbed with a garden fork. Christopher discovered the body. Because Christopher admires policemen and Sherlock Holmes, and because he likes dogs more than people in most cases, Christopher decides to investigate the dog's killing. In the course of his investigation, he discovers many things other than who killed Wellington (He also discovers who killed Wellington.). Some of the things he discovers are very surprising, because they are not expected. Some of them are very sad, because the things that happen make Christopher very upset, and that made me upset when I read this book, because I liked Christopher. It made me feel sad for him. Some of the things that Christopher discovers are not so sad, and some turn out to be very happy. I should say that things that happen make me happy, because the events themselves are not happy or sad, they are simply a series of occurrences.

It is a very fun book to read, and a very good look at an unusual mind. I enjoyed it very much.

Thoughts:
It's not easy to write like that and make it come out right, and I'm sure I screwed it up. But Mark Haddon didn't, so I really did like this book. I even liked the maths. Though I hated both of Christopher's parents, the big idiots. I liked Siobhan, though -- but what really matters is, I really liked Christopher.


** The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison (re-read) (39)

Pick:
Last one before I read the new book, which I'm excited about -- and I have to get off the TBR shelf. I also want to finish this series and get it out of the way, and move on to other books I want to read. Oh yeah: and I do like Rachel and Jenks and Al and Ceri and Quen -- but not Trent, the big dipstick -- and I wanted to read about all of them again.

Story:
I wrote this up just last year, so I don't have a lot to add. It was easier to follow having the rest of the series fresh in my mind; I remember finding the Kisten subplot a little annoying in this one because I didn't like how everything that Rachel and Ivy did revolved around Kisten's death. I know how much it affects your life when somebody close to you dies (especially today) but the problem with this one is that they don't make any progress. They don't decide to deal with it, they don't come to terms with it, and while Rachel recovers one vague memory -- and finds out that she probably doesn't want to try the spell that will bring back other memories (Pandora Charm -- good name) -- and Ivy tries to investigate throughout the book, it doesn't go anywhere. At the end of the book we're as much in the dark as to what happened to Kisten, and what they will do about it, as we were at the beginning. It does make sense to me this way, because this book deals with all the other loose ends: the elves get what they want, Rachel has (presumably) come to a final settlement with Al, and we find out what seems to be the final solution to the puzzle of witches and demons and Rachel's blood disease. Now that all that's handled, I know from Toni that the next book deals with Kisten's death, which is completely resolved by the end. But in the process of dealing with this stuff, the Kisten stuff kept coming up over and over and over again, and it made me irritated with their grief. Not a good feeling.

Thoughts:
I did like this one more than the two before it; I hate the one with the almighty Piscary doing anything he wants, with absolutely no repercussions. I thought Rynn Cormel's appearance here was interesting; it was good to find out the limitation on undead vampires -- glad to know they actually have a limitation -- and I do like their need for love and inability to create it. That makes sense. But otherwise, the vampires are still way overpowered here. Ah, well. These things seem to get dealt with, after all. I wonder: after she's whacked Piscary, dealt with Kisten's killer and come to terms with Al, who's going to be the major villain?

Newt, anyone?


** School of Fear by Gitty Daneshvari 7/31 (39)

Pick:
Vine choice; I liked the cover and the concept. Short and simple after a long read.

Amazon review:
I picked this book out because I liked the cover art (That's right -- I judge books by their covers. What's it to ya?) and I decided to read it because I very much liked the concept: I thought a lot could be done with the idea of getting a group of children to get over their fears. I was hoping to see some basic psychoanalysis, some exploration of where phobias come from, and some depictions of various ways to get over them. I was hoping that, since this is a children's/YA book, the exploration of phobias and their treatments would be basic enough for me to understand, and also fictionalized and imaginative enough to keep me interested.

Unfortunately, what the author seemed to want to do was show, over and over and over again, how strange and quirky someone can be when he or she has a severe phobia and lives in an imagined world. Two-thirds of this book was descriptions of the characters' quirks, their strange behavior and appearance and obsessions based on their pathologies; unfortunately, each character is fairly flat and simplified, and so the descriptions of their eccentricities become very repetitive, very fast. The worst part is that when the phobias were insufficient to make the characters wacky enough, they were simply given wacky and eccentric traits, just because.

There are eight main characters if you count the dog (and I do). Four of them are the kids with their phobias: Madeleine is afraid of bugs, Lulu is claustrophobic, Garrison is afraid of drowning, and Theo is afraid of death. Then there are the three adults in charge of the School of Fear: Mrs. Wellington, the headmistress; Schmidty, her handyman and major domo; and Munchauser, her lawyer. Mrs. Wellington's beloved bulldog, Macaroni, is the most likable of all of these, mainly because he's just a dog who eats too much. With the rest of them, it got extremely tiresome to read about Madeleine's constant overuse of bug spray, and Garrison's copious sweating (inserted presumably because he could not freak out about large bodies of water at all times), and Lulu's annoying sarcasm and eye-rolling (Again, her claustrophobia is not general enough for her to be dealing with that all the time, so instead she says "Whatever" in almost every conversation. and yes, that is like many teenagers, but these are not realistic characters, and if you want to include one example of verisimilitude -- why that one? Whatever.). The worst, though, were Theo and Mrs. Wellington: Theo because he is made obnoxious in every way, whiny and weak and also precocious and very, very precious. He's a 17th century fop reduced in height and given a morbid fascination with death, and he is the most vocal and therefore the central linchpin of the phobic students. And all he does is whine, whine, whine.

The reason Mrs. Wellington was equally obnoxious as a character is that she stood in my mind for everything wrong with the School of Fear itself. Because she was obsessed with beauty pageants. Not fear, not dealing with fear, not teaching children, not even the money she is paid for her services: beauty pageants. And Casu Fragizu -- maggot cheese -- which she loves so much that she insists that every piece of food she eats be flavored with maggot cheese. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either, but there's that wackiness for the sake of wackiness. She calls the kids "contestants," and makes every piece of advice connect to being a beauty queen. She wears prodigious amounts of makeup, yet she allows Schmidty to put it on her for no good reason other than a vague joke about the old man's poor eyesight, and because it makes Mrs. Wellington quirkier. You'd think a woman obsessed with her own beauty, and a lifetime of beauty pageant experience, would wear makeup well, but apparently she's too quirky. Munchauser suffers the same fate: he is shown in the beginning of the book as the scariest, most ruthless lawyer imaginable -- it is he who keeps the School of Fear secret, by threatening legal action against anyone who whispers a word of it in public. But when he appears, he is a destitute compulsive gambler who talks about nothing but betting and trying to wheedle his way into Mrs. Wellington's fortune.

Oh, and then there's Abernathy. Mrs. Wellington's sole failure, the one child she could not make better (Apparently psychoanalysis with a beauty pageant theme couldn't reach this one child. All the others, though -- works perfectly.). That's all I can say about him, because even though he appears twice in the book and is talked about several times in very ominous tones, there is nothing else that happens concerning him. He's her failure. That's it.

So much time is spent on the characters that the plot suffers; there's a weak twist at the end, but the resolution of the phobias is a thorough letdown. Really the most interesting part of the book was that every chapter starts with the official name of a phobia, and after reading this book, I'm glad to know that I have hydrophobia and mottephobia. And that's all I'm glad about.

After all of that, I must add that some people will probably think the characters are funny, and in that case, they will probably like the book, because the characters are almost the only thing in it. So if you like reading about wacky characters in wacky situations, maybe you'll enjoy this one more than I did.

Thoughts:
Yeah, it was crap. First Vine book I didn't like. Had to happen, I guess.


4. Bigfoot: I Not Dead by Graham Roumieu 7/31 (40)

Pick:
I wanted something simple and mindless to read, because yesterday was a very hard day.

Story:
This book is a sort of comic strip: every two-page spread is a single stand-alone bit, combining art and writing to show a vignette about Bigfoot. Bigfoot is a savage man-animal, who has become a celebrity; the humor of the book is in the combination of animal traits and Hollywood sellout values. Bigfoot advises other forest beasts not to give their work away for free, because he regrets now the video of him "shaking his junk" on the internet from his youth; he also gives us the inside scoop on the other animals of the forest, because Bigfoot knows all the dirt -- apparently Danny, the Eastern Gray Squirrel, is a fuckwit. There's not an actual plot, just a collection of Bigfoot's musings and advice and memories. But of all the celebrity memoirs that get published every year, this is probably the only one I'll ever read -- and I have not doubt that it's the cream of the crop.


Thoughts:
It's pretty damn funny, though there are some poop jokes that are pretty dumb and some very uncomfortable off-color images -- I have no idea why the songbird Bigfoot interviews for his Action News segment has a large human penis, but it does. Hey, it probably seemed funny at the time. My favorite part? The off-Broadway musical based on Bigfoot's life. The wolverine neighbor was funny, too. And really, Bigfoot gives some good advice. My favorite piece of advice is this:
"Well, if want truth, Bigfoot have bad days too. Not always feel like rainbow and sparkle inside. When feeling blue always find good belly laugh and beat something to death brighten day. Just pick weakest in pack, stalk mercilessly, catch and bash all me blues into they face. Think, not so much helpless victim; rather, Moist Towelette For The Soul.
(Note: no eat thing after therapy kill, it now be full of evil spirit. Evil spirit taste like artificial watermelon. Nobody likes this.)"