Books read in 2015 # 18 & 19 - Chick Lit?

18. Aunt Dimity: Detective by Nancy Atherton - I was using this book as a launchpad to write about how women mystery writers - especially women mystery writers who write "cozy" mysteries - get much less respect than male mystery writers since they are writing about a world that is ordered and only needs a little sleuthing to restore order to the universe. Only LJ keeps refreshing and losing my writing, so I am going to make this fast. This book is fun. It's a fun book about a woman who loves her small town life and solves mysteries with the help of her dead aunt who speaks to her through a book where she writes out helpful ideas (and shows her exasperation by cross the "t"'s in a very annoyed manner. There's a dead woman and a lot of townspeople who have secrets that really don't come out to much, but the dead woman certainly made everyone seem much worse than they actually were.

While I do love the "masculine" mysteries (the marketing of these things is hard to ignore) I definitely wish I knew more about "cozy" mysteries because sometimes you don't want a nihilistic sense of dread with your mystery novel.

19. Bride's Story, vol 5 by Kaori Mori - I feel like I really should know more about the background of this story. In fact, I almost feel like confessing that at one point in my life used the word "exotic" to describe Asian women. I lived in Minnesota - still that's not an excuse. Anyhow this is a Japanese manga about a wedding in the 19th century, somewhere in Central Asia. I think that he tribespeople might be Turks but they could be several different tribes. Anyhow, it reminds me of Jewish weddings, but more of what I heard about Sephardic weddings - with plenty of food, fasting brides and grooms and this is all arranged so that the wedding participants barely knkow each other and as soon as the wedding is over, the brides are taller than their grooms because they are all like 14. Then there's a story about one of the women trying to save a hawk and then having to kill the hawk because it can't fly rihgt and no hawk should be a pet. I would love to see more by this artist but I really need to learn more about Central Asia (especially the -stans) in order to get more oriented.

Books Read in 2015 # 20-22 - Superman vs. Batman vs. The Crypt Keeper

20. Superman: The Power Within by Roger Stern & Willam Messner Loebs & Curt Swan - There's a popular conception that cannot be completely blamed on Frank Miller that states that Batman is cool but Superman is rather lame. This was not always the case. In the 60s, Batman was cheeseball gimmicks and Superman was always having an identity crisis and dealing with ghosts or the dozen permutations of Kryptonite. By the 80s, Batman got steadily darker as a comic while Superman just faded into a representaton of America and all that smug bullshit wrought by Reaganomics.

This comic is the quintessential shitty Superman story. There are actually two stories - one that was done as a weekly comic with the same two page spread over 50-60 weeks of dreadful plodding plot about a cult that worships Superman and a second cult that thinks he is a demon. Yet they are all too dumb to figure out that Clark Kent is writing "trust this guy" in heat vision on walls in order to gain their trust. The panels are divided into the same divisions and the art is all deadly flat. By the end of the story, Apokalips shows up and not even he can make things interesting. Apparently he gave all the Superman cultists super powers because - well just because.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the next story which was done in 22-page issues is about an Arab kid (whose dad is talking about the Shah) who gets superpowers from a magic belt and everything thinking that he is a terrorist. Why is it that clueless liberals are more odioius than outright racists? I could read a ton of Frank Miller's or Robert Howard's redneck bullshit before getting sick of it, but a story that is supposed to state that Arabs are just like you and me is queasy and creepy. Call it the Aaron Sorkin effect. The Arab characters are drawn like white people but with gray color as if they are reviving the old Hulk. And that's it. I shouldn't complain that they just look like gray-skinned WASPs since the alternative is to make them look like bad Nazi cartoons of hook-nosed Jews.

I was going to end this by saying that I hoped that Roger Stern stopped stinking up comics after this, but I looked him up and he wrote the Death of Superman story. Which makes sense since Stern had rendered Superman so boring and so inane that the only way for anyont to read him again was to kill him. And still he was pretty dull (although that Max Landis vidoe is great).

21. Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City by Peter Milligan and various artists - So this is as 90s as you can get with Batman. Riddler of all characters turns out to be a murderer. There was actually a Secret Origins story where Riddler is being interviewed and crying about how everyone is so grim these days and he doesn't really have a place anymoere because he's the last of the goofy villains with a gimmick. So he's killing people in this one as part of a plot to get Batman to meet up with a weird demon bat god that was summoned by a secret society. It's actually dumber than it sounds.

Anyhow, Peter Milligan is one of those writers that impressed the hell out of me when I was younger and now I just feel sad. He's actualy not as fallen in estimation as Frank Miller or Warren Ellis, but that's only because Shade The Changing Man was only halfway a cool book and I could see him losing interest as it continued on its road. Like the Superman comic above, there is a hamfisted attempt to be socially relevant but this one is not quite as irritating - it's about a Jewish guy who makes a golem and then feels guilty for not saving his friend during WWII. When Superman and BAtman are at their best, I still like Superman better - but in the hokey monthly grind - Batman tends to win out.

22. Tales from the Crypt: The EC Archives, vol. 5 - This series owes a great deal to Frederic Wertham. Without the alarmist bullshit of Wertham and the Kefauver committee, these comics would have faded. The art is beautiful and the stories are often bloody and violent, but msot of the time the storytelling is hackneyed. At least 80% of the stories in this collection begin with a scene and then go into exposition before coming back to the scene and the shocking conclusion (holy shit everyone in the town is a werewolf!!!!) and even when they don't get into that doldrum there is still an emphasis on the shocking plot as opposed to the characters. So a guy will be henpecked by his wife and her live-in parents to always push himself. So obvioiusly he is going to kill them all with an axe. Then there's the man who exchanges body parts with a young dude only to be beaten by that young dude to the woman he wanted, because she just wanted to marry rich after all. These tropes are not just sexist; they are also pretty lazy. Still, the artwork is cool.

Books Read in 2015 # 23 - BALZAC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

23. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac - According to the afterwords on this book, this was the book where Balzac said "let's connect my books" and turned a generic young man character into the Eugene de Rastignac that had been in another book as a cynical bastard who gives evil advice. By this one action, he turned a book about a father who is way too indulgent of his two daughters (giving them funds to bail out their lovers, etc.) into a prequel of his previous book and many other books of that nature. He also introduced Vautrin, the gay Mephistopheles who shows up in later books attempting to manipulate even more people.

Actually, in my reading of Balzac, I read Life of a Courtesan first which is where Vautrin truly shines. That's a book where no one can get close to Vautrin and even when it looks like Vautrin might have to pay for his crimes, he manages to pull a neat trick and get out of it. By the end of the book, he becomes the chief of police (which is apparently based on a real person who was also the basis for Javert in Les Miserables) and the next book I read (Cousin Bette), he's got an important minor part as the agent that helps a character find a poisoner for one of the women that Cousin Bette is trying to use to destroy the family. By the time I read this book, I had more affection for the old devil and the fact that he gets caught in this book makes him all the more amusing. Knowing that this book is a prequel to both the stories of de Rastignac and Vautrin makes it all the more entertaining, even if the purposeful irony can be cute in the hands of a different writer.

Anyhow, I am one of those people who cannot recommend Balzac enough and I have a habit of wanting to read the lesser work before the greater stuff, but this is one of his great ones so now I just have to read the rest of his work.