By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Tuesday, Apr 24
• Comments • Share
Daniel Pinkwater, a much-loved living treasure of children's literature, has a new book out today. It's called Mrs Noodlekugel and it is a simple, silly pleasure that feels like the end-product of a lifetime of telling children's stories, carefully removing all the elements that are extraneous to young readers' enjoyment until nothing but the essentials remain. I like to think of Pinkwater's books that way, a kind of skeletal Jenga tower, every extraneous block removed and used to make the structure taller.
Nick and Maxine live in a high-rise apartment building, and one day they discover that one window overlooks a tiny, old fashioned cottage in a small green between their tower and several others. The building's janitor tells them that this is Mrs Noodlekugel's house, and when they quiz their parents about it, they are forbidden to go there.
So they go there. And Mrs Noodlekugel is a sweet old lady who has a talking cat and four nearly-blind mice who get the crumbs from their tea-parties, and she is perfectly pleasant and tells them they're welcome the next day for a gingerbread baking project that the talking cat is undertaking. When the kids tell their parents about this, their parents reveal that they knew all about her, and that she is their new babysitter, and the kids realize they've been tricked.
But they don't mind. They've got Mrs Noodlekugel and the baking. The mice help. And the gingerbread mice -- which the real mice roll around on -- come to life when they come out of the oven. Everyone's delighted by this, and then the crows eat them. But that's OK. They were only gingerbread. And besides, it would be unsanitary to eat cookies that the nearly blind mice rolled around on.
The End.
Adam Stower's illustrations are just a little old fashioned, enough to make them seem, you know, a bit classy, but without losing any of their kid appeal. And Pinkwater is, as always, the Fred Astaire of weird, making the fantastic seem effortless. Reading Pinkwater as a boy made me the happy mutant I am today. Reading Pinkwater today keeps me happily mutated in the face of the world's relentless insistence on normalcy.
Mrs Noodlekugel
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 7:50 am Monday, Apr 23
• Comments • Share
Jon Chad's Leo Geo and His Miraculous Journey Through the Center of the Earth is a kids' comic story that blends science and fancy to tell the story of a scientist who goes all the way through the Earth's center from Argentina, headed for Taiwan. The long, skinny book is meant to be read "vertically," and instead of panels, the action proceeds directly across a series of two-page spreads that are dense with clever and fun details, from the realistic to the fantastic. This device is extremely charming, especially when Leo Geo reaches the Earth's center and begins his journey "up", and the pages suddenly change direction, requiring the reader to turn the book upside-down and read from bottom to top.
Leo Geo's journey is peppered with encounters with fantasy underground monsters and heroes, including some beasts that plot the downfall of the surface dwellers (that is, us). But Leo beats them all with science, and his travelogue is peppered with scientific observations that are interesting and informative, and provide a crunchy counterpoint to the gooey made-up stuff, like four-eyed quadclops monsters (Leo Geo is eaten by one of these, but beats it "with science" by travelling through its digestive tract and escaping through its "ileum and colon").
Chads art is fab, with a good, confident line and a lot of zest and silliness. The line-drawings cry out to be colored in by the reader, and the whole book makes a fabulous entertainment and distraction for the kids in your life, with its mix of science, storytelling, art, and humor.
Leo Geo and His Miraculous Journey Through the Center of the Earth
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 8:01 am Thursday, Apr 19
• Comments • Share
Another great game review from Greg Costikyan and his Play This Thing! blog: this time, it's the 2010 IGF China Best Game winner Sugar Cube, a platformer with a novel and ingenious (and addictive!) mechanic:
At various points on the level are hidden items -- often platforms -- that are revealed, and switch "on," only when you pass through or near them. As you move about, the four squares immediately around you are tinted, and show the hidden items. Frequently, there are small "lights" on the screen that show the hidden items, in ghosted form, until turned on; but often, items are revealed only when you activate them. Finally, by holding "shift" while jumping, you can prevent items from "flipping" from active to inactive state.
The result is that each level holds surprises, and you have to learn how to time and use activations to get to the level end (represented by a door); sometimes you want an item to flip to inactive state to get through its location, while often you want to turn it on, to provide a location or item you can use.
Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:31 pm Wednesday, Apr 18
• Comments • Share
While reading the first few chapters of The Conundrum
—David Owen's book about energy, resource consumption, and conflicting values in American life—I kept running into moments where I wanted to yell out, "Preach it!"
By the end of the book, though, I was treading water, just waiting for Owen to finish telling me why everything is pointless so I could wander off and wait for the inevitable heat death of the universe in peace.
Between the bang and the whimper is a book that I think needs to be read, but with a caveat. The Conundrum is a very contrarian book. Contrarianism presents itself as the smartest, most honest version of reality. But that isn't always the truth. On an emotional level, a contrarian perspective feels authoritative. It says, "This is what THEY tell you, but they're wrong!" The trouble is, while the contrarian viewpoint usually does point out important details that need to be discussed, it is often just as myopic as the perspective it's trying to upend. You can't assume it represents the big picture.
After spending two years immersed in energy and climate science, I feel comfortable saying that the message on those issues could use a dose of contrarianism. But the dose makes the poison. Apply too much contrarianism, as Owen does, and you go from making people question themselves to making them give up.
Read the rest
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:46 am Tuesday, Apr 17
• Comments • Share
After I read Gonzo: the Life of Hunter S. Thompson a few years ago I figured I knew everything I wanted to know about the famous journalist. But then I received a review copy of Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson by Will Bingley (author) and Anthony Hope-Smith (illustrator). I was attracted to its bright orange cover and the drawing of the long-legged Thompson clutching a satchel, running away from something. It was enough to entice me to crack open the book. I didn't stop reading until I was finished, past my bedtime, a couple of hours later.
180 pages isn't much room to examine a life in minute detail. Instead, Bingley tells a story (as if it were written, quite convincingly, by Thompson himself) of Thompson's frantic search to find meaning in the turbulent era he lived in. Bingley's story is about a passionate, rebellious genius who sprinted too fast at the beginning of a long-distance race, collapsed early, and spent his remaining decades burnt-out, crawling bewilderedly.
The book's forward, written by Thompson's longtime editor, Alan Rinzler, is especially revealing. Rinzler believes that Thompson could have been the "heavyweight champion of American letters," but his self-destructive behavior, which got worse with each passing year, ruined that opportunity.
I was interested to read how Thompson and Rinzler worked together:
In order to make the deadline for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, for example, we set up an old Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder in his room at the Seal Rock Inn, and I'd pepper him with questions, which he'd answer profusely. Then we'd have it transcribed, edit me out, and polish up the remaining text for the book itself. It took three days and nights but turned out pretty well in my opinion. After that we did Amerika, The Great Shark Hunt, and The Curse of Lono using better hardware, smaller machines, ending up in 1981 with a tiny hand-held table-top micro-recorder.
After
Lono, says Rinzler, "Hunter's substance abuse, writer's block and brief attention span were increasing exponentially. He's slip out to see his dealer and come back so tanked he couldn't think straight." Thompson's work became a series of "repetitious, mediocre, regurgitated articles and books and collections he allowed to be issued and reissued over the last 30 years of his life."
The Curse of Lono was the last book by Thompson I read, but I don't doubt Rinzler's assessment of the quality of Thompson's books that followed. (Thompson's awful "Hey Rube!" columns for an ESPN website were enough to keep me uninterested in his newer books). But his earlier work, especially
Hell's Angels, is so good that I will always admire Thompson as a heavyweight contender who showed a very promising start. Bingley and Hope-Smith's book reinforces that opinion.
Buy
Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson on Amazon
By Cory Doctorow at 6:08 am Tuesday, Apr 17
• Comments • Share
My four-year-old daughter and I love to read comics together. Having thoroughly enjoyed the Hilda comics and gone absolutely bananas over Giants Beware, I stopped in at London's wonderful GOSH! Comics (recently relocated to a fantastic location in the heart of Soho) and asked the clerk for a recommendation. The gentleman behind the till recommended Explorer: The Mystery Boxes, an anthology of short stories aimed at middle readers, edited by Kazu Kibuishi (the creator of Amulet, who also contributed the final story in the book).
Each of the stories in Explorer relates to a "mystery box" -- a cubic mcguffin that each creator is free to interpret in his or her own way. The contributors display enormous ingenuity and range in their responses to this challenge. Emily Carroll's "Under the Floorboards" is a spooky, Twilight Zonesque take; Rad Sechrist's "The Butter Thief" is a great cross between Japanese legends and Grimm fairytales; Johann Mate's "Whatzit," is a madcap science fiction comedy; and Kibuishi's "The Escape Option" is a beautifully illustrated environmental parable. There are seven stories in all, and we read them together over three bedtimes. Though the book is aimed at middle graders, Poesy really enjoyed it, with a little bit of translating, explaining and narrating from me. As soon as we were done, she wanted to hear the stories over again, which is always a good sign.
I asked Poesy if she thought that other kids would like having this read to them, and she was very enthusiastic in her recommendation!
Explorer: The Mystery Boxes
By Cory Doctorow at 6:07 am Monday, Apr 16
• Comments • Share
Tim Powers's latest novel is Hide Me Among the Graves, and it is a fine example of the work of a much-beloved author, and a spooky ride through Victorian London to boot. In Hide Me, Powers retells the lives of pre-Raphaelite sculptor Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his siblings, notably the poet Christina Rossetti. Powers is justly famed for his secret histories, fictionalized accounts of real historical persons that turn the coincidences of their lives into deep mysteries to be plumbed for stories. Here is a near-perfect example of how well this trick works, especially for Tim Powers, whose special gift is to be able to write about superstition and the supernatural in a way that literally raises the hairs on my neck and puts gooseflesh on my arms, though I am as staunch an atheist materialist as you will ever meet.
Here, the spookiness revolves around two ancient vampires -- one of them having started her life as Bodicea -- who haunt London, and whose bite and blood grant poets and painters access to surpassing beauty and art. These two beasts are working to destroy London, to call down an earthquake that will kill everyone in the city, and their plan requires the blood and cooperation of the Rossettis, who are -- at times, and always motivated by access to the numinous -- willing accomplices to this plan. As a variety of personages fictional and real chase each other through the superstition-steeped cobbles of London, and through the ancient and haunted cloacae that run beneath the streets, we're exposed to a dreadful and terrifying Victorian world.
Powers's treatment of superstition works so well, I think, because he deals with it without apology. There's never a sense that superstition is just a kind of alternate physics, with its own rules that are different from the ones we're accustomed to. The supernatural world of Tim Powers has an internal logic, but it's the logic of dreams and the id, not the logic of the scientific method. Powers's work engages with something prerational that is buried deep, deep in our brains, and that won't be bullied into submission by mere reason.
If you'd like to know more about Powers's work, have a look at our other mentions of his work.
Hide Me Among the Graves
By Cory Doctorow at 6:35 am Friday, Apr 13
• Comments • Share
On the surface, David Rees's How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants is just a protracted mockery of the mania for "authenticity" and "artisanship" -- poking fun at the pretense of snobbish reworking of everyday objects and tasks into extremely precise and expensive amusements for the bourgeoise (ultimate milkshakes, high-priced hand-roasted coffee beans, small cask liquor). John Hodgman's very funny and acerbic introduction certainly hints at that, and by the book's end, that's what Rees is getting up to, with chapters like "How to Sharpen a Pencil With Your Mind" and "Mastering Celebrity Impression Pencil Sharpening (CIPS)."
And yet. The first 100+ pages of this book are, for the most part, an incredibly detailed and often loving obsessive's guide to putting a really, really fine point on a pencil. Notionally this is the outcome of Rees's "Artisinal Pencil Sharpening" business in Beacon. But there's just a little bit too much detail in these sections to just be a parody. I'm left with the inescapable conclusion that Rees just fucking loves sharpening pencils. Really.
And like everyone who puts a lot of attention into something that we do without any conscious thought, Rees has, in fact, found something marvelously obsessive and fascinating at the heart of the everyday. As silly as it seems, there really is something deeply satisfying about a really sharp pencil.
It's this genuine obsession at the heart of the mockery that makes How to Sharpen Pencils more than a predictable, bitter indictment of "hipsters" and the world's delight in hand-crafted, attentive care in the everyday. Because for all that Rees is poking fun, he's also there, at the coalface, unquestionably putting dozens (hundreds?) of hours into getting his writing implements into a state of deadly pointfulness. From his vantage-point atop Mount Obsessive, Rees is able to see far and wide, and the picture he paints there is both true and very, very funny.
If Rees's name sounds familiar, it's because he's the guy behind Get Your War On (AKA "My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable" and "My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable") -- one of the greatest political webcomics of all time.
Rees's publisher, Melville House, was kind enough to supply a PDF of chapter 2 for your delectation and edification.
How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants
By Cory Doctorow at 6:30 am Thursday, Apr 12
• Comments • Share
Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre's Giants Beware is an absolutely delightful kids' graphic novel about a brave young girl who dragoons her friends into going off in search of giants to hunt. Claudette and her friends live in the fortress town of Mont Petit Pierre, whose most famous story is of how the old marquis vanquished a horrible giant who terrorized the town by feasting on babies' toes, chasing it back to its mountain lair and then building the walls around the town to keep it out (and the people in) forever. Claudette can't fathom how the old marquis could have been so irresponsible as to leave the giant alive and still a threat to Mont Petit Pierre, and she is determined to hunt the giant down and kill it. She enlists the aid of her little brother, a timid boy called Gaston (who yearns to be a pastry chef) and her pal Marie, the current marquis's daughter, who plans to become a princess some day, and trains for it by lying on piles of mattresses with peas beneath them and suchlike.
Claudette and Gaston's father is the town blacksmith and a former hero himself, until a misadventure with a dragon cost him his legs and one arm. Now he works with a stoic (but kindly) assistant, and is gruff and fierce, and somewhat disapproving of his son's lack of machismo. The kids conspire to distract him so they can get into his secret stash and raid his hero supplies and equip themselves to stalk and kill the giant of the mountain. The smith's assistant catches them at it, and gives them a bag of magic to help with their quest. Only he takes them seriously -- everyone else assumes they're only playing when they say they're setting off to find the giant, until it's too late, and everyone realizes the kids have gone outside the town walls. The smith and his assistant set off after them, as does the current marquis, a fat bourgeois who promises the local farmers a daily stipend to help him.
What follows is an utterly charming, action-packed quest story with loads of surprises, and high and low comedy, and bravery and tension. The kids are really likable, and the action and humor are both broad enough to amuse even small children and witty and sly enough to keep their parents laughing and gasping too. I read Giants Beware aloud to my four year old, along with her nine-year-old friend, and they demanded a re-read. I was only too happy to oblige -- there was plenty more to enjoy in a second look at the terrific art and the joke-packed layouts.
The story pays off in lots of ways. There's a nice little moral about the dangers of provincialism, a good message about living up to one's fears, and a lot of hints at a broader story about Claudette's father's tragedy and the loss of her mother that make it clear that this story doesn't inhabit a vacuum, but rather is situated in a big, thought-through world. As a graphic novel, Giants Beware fires on every cylinder: comedy and story, art and layout, surprise and characterization. It's one of those rare books that kids and grownups can fully enjoy together -- a real treat.
You can get a taste for the book at the Chronicles of Claudette blog.
Giants Beware
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 6:20 am Wednesday, Apr 11
• Comments • Share
Back in 2010, I reviewed Mary Robinette Kowal's extraordinary debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, a Regency drawing-room novel reimagined as a fantasy novel, where "glamour" -- the ability to weave illusions from "folds of aether" -- is part of the repertoire of any well-bred young lady.
Now, Kowal returns to her world with a sequel, Glamour in Glass, and outdoes herself in every way -- no mean feat, considering the many virtues of her freshman effort. Glamour and Glass opens shortly after the conclusion of Shades, and quickly moves from the close confines of the drawing-room to the open road, as a pair of newlywed glamourists are first feted by the crown prince and then head for a honeymoon in Belgium, where they hope to confer with a French glamourists of their acquaintance. This visit to the Continent is made more exotic by the only-just-recently-ended war against Emperor Napoleon, and will coincide with the celebration of the newly formed United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Set free of England's shores, Kowal's characters are now able to compare their behavioral norms and rigid self-discipline with other places' sensibilities, and to reflect on the opportunities and restrictions of both. Thus, Kowal is free to explore the value of a constrained, highly circumscribed approach to life, and to really and plausibly inhabit the psyches of the sort of people for whom avoiding offense and spectacle is the highest virtue.
Kowal is deft and subtle, able to capture the drama of a first-rate war novel while maintaining the calm, mannered form of Regency romances.
Glamour in Glass
By Cory Doctorow at 5:53 am Tuesday, Apr 10
• Comments • Share
The brilliant popular engineering Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material has just been released in the USA. I reviewed this book last November, when it came out in the UK. Here's a brief excerpt from then:
We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.
Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.
The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.
From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.
But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.
Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Thursday, Apr 5
• Comments • Share
Free States Rising is the 11th (and penultimate) collection of Brian Wood's masterful (anti-)war comic, DMZ. Wood has spent the past half-decade spinning this tightly plotted, gripping, and sardonic adventure story about a second American civil war fought in Manhattan, told from the point-of-view of Matty Roth, a reporter who becomes part of the story. DMZ is a textbook example of how science fiction can provide just enough distance between the real world and the reader to allow for a critique that is trenchant, but never strident. So here in volume 11, we have drone-wars, austerity, conspiracy and crass media manipulation, and it's all allegorical as hell, but since none of it constitutes an actual accusation about the actual world with its actual wars, it's possible to consider it all at arm's length and realize a) how profoundly screwed up Wood's world is, and b) how like our own it is.
If you've been following DMZ for all these years, volume 11 will not disappoint, as Wood crashes towards what promises to be a tremendous finish. This volume also contains a two-part short prequel to the series, explaining something of the origin of the "Free States Army," one of the factions in the DMZ story. Here's my reviews of the previous volumes.
DMZ Vol. 11: Free States Rising
By Cory Doctorow at 2:43 am Wednesday, Apr 4
• Comments • Share
Step Gently Out is children's picture book in which poet Helen Frost's verse accompanies the incredible garden insect photographs of artist/photographer Rick Lieder. I've written here many times about Rick's Bugdreams photos, and they never fail to impress and move me. Lieder's photographic portraits of bugs are all the sweeter for his method, which is to patiently crouch in his Michigan back-yard for hours and hours, waiting for the shot; it's a wonderful alternative to the traditional dead-bug-on-a-pin photos I grew up with.
Frost's poem is a sweet accompaniment to Lieder's pictures, a very light narration for photos that really speak for themselves. We got this book this week, and it's a real favorite with me and my four-year-old, and has sparked many conversations and bug-watching expeditions on the way home from day-care. To this end, there's a nice entomological appendix with interesting facts about all the bugs featured in the book.
Stunning close-up photography and a lyrical text invite us to look more closely at the world and prepare to be amazed.
What would happen if you walked very, very quietly and looked ever so carefully at the natural world outside? You might see a cricket leap, a moth spread her wings, or a spider step across a silken web.
In simple, evocative language, Helen Frost offers a hint at the many tiny creatures around us.
And in astonishing photographs, Rick Lieder captures the glint of a katydid’s eye, the glow of a firefly, and many more living wonders just awaiting discovery.
For our Michigander readers, Rick and Helen will have a gallery show at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art featuring the photos, and including a signing on April 6.
Step Gently Out
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Monday, Apr 2
• Comments • Share
Today marks the publication of Fantagraphics' magnificent archaeological comicsology, The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s MAD Inspired Satirical Comics. This volume collects the rare, nearly unheard-of parody comics that sprang up in the early 1950s to jump on the bandwagon that MAD magazine set in motion. Many of the same artists who made MAD such a success (Jack Davis, Will Elder, Norman Maurer, Carl Hubbell, William Overgard, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, Al Hartley, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, Hy Fleischman, Jay Disbrow, Howard Nostrand, and Bob Powell) were represented in long-lost tiles like FLIP, WHACK, NUTS, CRAZY, WILD, RIOT, EH, UNSANE, BUGHOUSE, and GET LOST. Many of these are racier, grosser, and meaner than even MAD dared. There's also an engrossing appendix of annotations from editor John Benson, a MAD expert who wrote the additional text for the first run of MAD reprints.
I grew up on Cracked and Crazy, but these were late, late, latecomers to the MAD knockoff party, and never went as far as these lost titles.
The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s MAD Inspired Satirical Comics
Read the rest
By Cool Tools at 1:59 pm Saturday, Mar 31
• Comments • Share
Three times a week I get up early to go lift weights with a colleague. One of the main motivations for getting out of bed is the knowledge that I'll have ample coffee throughout the day to keep me going post-workout. In the past I've carried the previously reviewed
Contigo (which is still the best travel cup around) but found it held too little, especially if I share coffee with my work out partner. I've also used my fiancee's grandfather's old Thermos built around an insulated glass bottle which, while larger, is too fragile for daily use that involves rolling around in the trunk of my car. I realized I needed a replacement.
Read the rest
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.