The Secret World of Arrietty was terrific

I'd heard The Secret World of Arrietty was good, but I hadn't expected to enjoy it so much. As good as any other Studio Ghibli movie I've seen. My 5 and 7 year old boys liked it too.

Comic book review roundup

1. Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder, Jock, and Francesco Francavilla: Jock's covers and Francavilla's interior illustrations (especially his colors!) are terrific. But the story's a lackluster rehash of Batman stories I've read many times before, and if all of the issues had been drawn by Jock (he drew about half of the issues), I wouldn't have even bothered finishing it. Certainly not bad, but it's been grossly overpraised by critics (or the praise reflects how terrible the vast majority of comics were in 2011).

2. Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba: Why are all the good non-super hero comics emotionally devastating? If that's what you're looking for, you'll enjoy this. I'm not looking for misery in my recreational reading.

3. Ultimate Comics Avengers: Blade vs. the Avengers by Mark Millar and Steve Dillon: I love everything by Steve Dillon, and this was no exception. Really fun.

4. Hellboy Volume 11: The Bride of Hell and Others: Just the latest solid collection of Hellboy short stories illustrated by various all-stars. Hellboy in Mexico, illustrated by Richard Corben and starring a battle between Hellboy and a demonic luchador, is the standout.

5. X-Force: Sex and Violence, Deathlok Nation, and The Dark Angel Saga, Book 1: I loved, loved, loved The Apocalypse Solution, so I went and bought every other collection I could find. These were all fine, but none were great. I found Deathlok Nation to be more confusing than fun, and I never cared for the Age of Apocalypse storyline or character designs (Wolverine especially looks like an idiot), so it was tough to enjoy The Dark Angel Saga too much.

Book review roundup

1. Dune by Frank Herbert: I watched the movie when I was too young and thought it was weird and dumb. But Rob Beschizza's post about Dune without dialog interested me enough that I decided to read the book. It truly deserves its fame. More like Game of Thrones than Star Wars. $10 at Amazon.

2. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman: Pleasant all-ages novella starring Thor, Loki, Odin, and a seemingly unremarkable boy. I look forward to reading it to my sons. Not crazy about the illustrations, though. Currently $6 at Amazon for the hardcover.

3. I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen: With a $16 cover price, I can't bring myself to recommend this since you can read the whole thing in about two minutes (even if you go slow) and it's basically the same drawing over and over. It really should be a board book at half the price. But. The illustrations are charming, and the book has a very, very funny (and dark) conclusion. I strongly recommend you borrow a copy from the library, or grab the $6 used copy currently at Amazon.

Book review roundup

1. Dune by Frank Herbert: I watched the movie when I was too young and thought it was weird and dumb. But Rob Beschizza's post about Dune without dialog interested me enough that I decided to read the book. It truly deserves its fame. More like Game of Thrones than Star Wars. $10 at Amazon.

2. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman: Pleasant all-ages novella starring Thor, Loki, Odin, and a seemingly unremarkable boy. I look forward to reading it to my sons. Not crazy about the illustrations, though. Currently $6 at Amazon for the hardcover.

3. I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen: With a $16 cover price, I can't bring myself to recommend this since you can read the whole thing in about two minutes (even if you go slow) and it's basically the same drawing over and over. It really should be a board book at half the price. But. The illustrations are charming, and the book has a very, very funny (and dark) conclusion. I strongly recommend you borrow a copy from the library, or grab the $6 used copy currently at Amazon.

Win a copy of the Baghdad Country Club

UPDATE: Pippa won and has been contacted.



Usually I find nonfiction to be desperately in need of a good condensing, but Joshua Bearman's new Kindle Single Baghdad Country Club is so polished and focused that it's like a handful of diamonds. Here's the official description:

Welcome to a place where even beer runs are a matter of life and death. As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant tale of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict's bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.

And here's a taste from the beginning:

A few weeks later, James was cursing himself for getting into the bootlegging business. He had never handled that much of his own money before—$150,000—much less handed it over to someone he barely knew, in cash. His entire life savings was now denominated in liquor, which he had piled into an 18- wheeler and driven through hostile Baghdad. He wound up circling the Green Zone several times, unsuccessfully seeking entry—wrong badges, wrong checkpoints, wrong turns through the often deadly downtown—and was starting to get nervous when he eventually made it through Checkpoint 18.
. . .
And so James became an extreme restaurateur, opening the only authentic bar and restaurant in the Green Zone. It would be the one place where anyone—mercenaries and diplomats, contractors and peacekeepers, aid workers and Iraqis—could walk in, get dinner, open a decent bottle of Bordeaux, and light a cigar from the humidor to go with it. Patrons would check their weapons in a safe, like coats in a coatroom, and leave the war behind...

The book is also illustrated, but the illustrations are fairly lackluster, and really superfluous (you can get a sense by watching the animated trailer). The characters and locales leap off the page:

As the charming maître d’, it was Danny’s job to defuse any commotion. And despite his small (and clearly civilian) stature, he was pretty good at it. James thought Danny’s self-deprecating Jewish-guy-with-glasses routine helped him keep people from killing each other or getting out of control. There was, for instance, the time when Tony the Mouse, a notorious Lebanese pimp, showed up in the BCC brandishing his goods. Tony was short, sleazy, and self-confident; Danny noticed him the moment he walked in. Tony tried to dress like the contractors, but his gear was too big. Danny thought he looked like a kid in his dad’s hunting outfit. With him were several Iraqi girls of questionable age, done up in even more questionable makeup, doused in perfume, and wearing what in theory was passable Islamic dress but in material looked more like harem couture. “You smelled the girls before you saw them,” Danny recalls.

It's just begging to be turned into a series of novels or turned into a movie.

Highly recommended. You can read a longer excerpt here, and apparently see the club on Google Maps. The full version is available from The Atavist for the Kindle, the iPad/iPhone, the Nook, or iBooks.

I also have one digital copy to give away. For a chance to win, simply comment on this post and include your email so I can contact you if you win. One comment per person, and this contest is open worldwide. I'll pick a winner on Monday.

The Magic of Reality

Above are the UK and (terrible) American covers for The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, a new basic science primer written by Richard Dawkins, and illustrated by Dave McKean. Each of the twelve chapters, on topics including rainbows, gravity, evolution, and atoms, starts with a whirlwind tour of various myths, before moving on to an explanation of the applicable science at a level I think a fifth grader could grasp (my six year old is a bit too young). The writing is uninspired, and needlessly insulting to religion - - I certainly have no interest in reading anything else by Dawkins.

But I bought the book because of Dave McKean, and I wasn't disappointed. Every one of the 265 pages features his illustrations. Below are a few samples:







The hardcover is $18 at at Amazon and a no-brainer for Dave McKean fans.

Wildwood

Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis:




I had high hopes for this one, and maybe my expectations were too high. The book itself feels special - - it's slightly and endearingly undersized, and it features a charming cover by Carson Ellis. The first 100 pages or so offer a terrific fairy tale start - - a young girl sees her baby brother abducted by crows, and sets off into the mysterious forest surrounding Portland to rescue him. You can read the first 100-something pages here.

But after that fast start, the book settles in to be little more than a competent remix of elements from the Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit. Your enjoyment will probably depend on how many other fairy tales you've already read. I was hoping for a fairy tale with a hipster edge, but really the main character is just a generic fairy tale heroine in a hoodie. $11 at Amazon.

There are some cute items at the companion webstore:




And I'm definitely now a Carson Ellis fan.

The Secret World of Saints: Inside the Catholic Church and the Mysterious Process of Anointing the Holy Dead (Giveaway)

UPDATE: Timothy won and has been contacted.

I've been trying to read Diarmid MacCullouch's heavily-praised Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, but after three months, I've made it through less than 300 pages. It's just too much of a slog, and I find I'm retaining almost nothing.

By comparison, Bill Donahue's The Secret World of Saints: Inside the Catholic Church and the Mysterious Process of Anointing the Holy Dead was a pleasure that I devoured in a sitting.



Here's the official description:

When Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian, converted to Catholicism in 1676, she did it with gusto. She slept on a bed of thorns. She had a friend whip her. She put hot coals between her toes. She suffered from smallpox, and the disease left her almost blind. Yet she still fasted, in penitence, and ministered to the sick and elderly. When she died, it was said, the smallpox scars instantly vanished from her face. It wasn’t long before people began to credit her with miracles.

Indeed, the Vatican has just announced, 300 years after her death, that Tekakwitha is a miracle worker. She will be named a saint—America’s first indigenous saint, no less—as early as next fall. But what, exactly, does that mean? How does someone become a saint? What’s the vetting process?

In this thoroughly entertaining investigation into the mysterious world of saints, Bill Donahue tells the strange and fascinating story of how the holy get their halos. The journey to canonization is long (sometimes, as in the case of Tekakwitha, it can take centuries), lurid (decayed body parts play a role), and, nowadays, surprisingly cutting-edge. Tekakwitha earned her saint status thanks to a medical miracle she allegedly caused in 2006: A boy suffering from a fatal flesh-eating bacteria suddenly and inexplicably recovered after his family prayed to the Blessed Kateri. Church experts grilled the boy’s doctors, studied his MRIs and hospital chart, and came to the conclusion that a force stronger than modern medicine saved him.

In addition to Tekakwitha, Donahue introduces us to a cast of celestial characters, from Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II—both on the fast track to sainthood—to Saint Francis, Joan of Arc, and the shady Padre Pio, who claimed to suffer stigmata and raise bodies from the dead. But it’s what happens after these holy folk die that’s arguably even more intriguing. Mixing legend and science, history and on-the-ground reporting, The Secret World of Saints sheds light on one of the Catholic Church’s most arcane and captivating traditions.

The book alternates between Donahue's anecdotes about his own life, and the history of Catholic saints. The characters he writes about really come alive.

Here's just a taste - - part of a footnote about his mother deciding to no longer display Saint Christopher in the her car:

Saint Christopher was gone from the dashboard by the time I entered first grade. And it was only recently that I discovered why. In 1969, when I was five, Pope Paul VI removed Chris’s feast day from the Church calendar. Christopher was a third-century Roman martyr. Sixties-era research revealed that almost nothing was known about him: The cult around him may have been a corny sixteenth-century invention; he was almost make-believe. My mom read the news reports and then cooled to Chris. “I got a new car,” she told me recently, “and I thought, What’s the point of carrying Saint Christopher around if he didn’t exist? Plus, having a Saint Christopher medallion was just one of those clichéd things that Catholics do—like rooting for Notre Dame. I wasn’t going to knock myself out for it anymore.”

Highly recommended, and available as a $2 download at Amazon.

I also have one copy to give away. For a chance to win, simply comment on this post and include your email so I can contact you if you win. One comment per person, and this contest is open worldwide. I'll pick a winner Sunday night.