Volume 6, Issue 6
August 26, 2010

The Latest

Saturday (8/28) is Read Comics in Public Day. Not that we've been hiding our love of comics, but Scott will celebrate by reading stacks of classic comics on a downtown San Jose park bench.

Thanks to our volunteers, we've cleared out nearly 1,600 of our older and lower priced items. Bargain Hunters, do not fret. We still have over 2,250 clearance items each priced under $10.00 (before s&h, etc).

Next up: building a photo tent to improve the lighting and white balance of our book photos. Anyone have any advice to share?

Since our last newsletter, we've attended 6 signings/events (see our Just Arrived page), and posted countless new items to our inventory.

We now have nearly 10,000 items available through Biblio and over 7,000 through Amazon.

Scott & Tammie
Handee Books, LLC

• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Weatherford
• The Carpet Makers - Eschbach
• Genghis Khan - Lamb
• The Chymical Wedding - Clarke
• Out - Kirino
• Weathercraft - Woodring
• Now, Endsville - Lay
• Japanese Short Stories - Akutagawa
• Memoirs of an Anti-Semite - von Rezzori (set aside)
• The Word of God - Disch (set aside)
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• The Passage - Cronin
• Four Freedoms - Crowley
• Lady Chatterley's Lover - Lawrence
• Star Island - Hiaasen
• The Spies of the Balkans - Furst
• Objects of Worship - Lalumiere
• Batman: Digital Justice - Moreno
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

First, our apologies to Nik Houser for misspelling his name in last month's column. Check out Nik's work at www.nikhouser.com and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007.

Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan & the Making of the Modern World is one of the most captivating books I've ever read. It is the very model of how to popularize history. Well written, with a smoothly designed narrative, it tells of Temujin's rise to power, his forging of the largest empire in human history, and of that empire's eventual collapse.

The book is well researched, drawing on numerous sources, most prominently the portions of The Secret History of the Mongols which have been translated. There's an excellent bibliography at the back of the book. Still, the question of historical accuracy arises. “History is written by the victors”, but in the case of Genghis Khan, with the exception of portions of The Secret History, there are no contemporaneous accounts of his life. Most of what is known of him comes from the writings of traveling clerics, or Marco Polo, or the oral tradition. This, or any other work of history, is suspect. Weatherford, however admits to supposition if pieces of the puzzle are missing.

The most fascinating element of the book, however, is the cultural legacy of Genghis Khan's rule: diplomatic immunity, passports, ground meat, pants. Genghis Khan certainly was the brutal ruler we learn about in fourth grade history class, but there's more to the story than that and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is an exceptionally enjoyable work of popular history.

Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, recommended to me by Nik Houser, is one of the strangest SF novels I've read in a long time.

Twenty years after the collapse of an immense galactic empire, a survey ship comes across a long forgotten planet, the only product of which is elaborate carpets woven from human hair. The carpets are so intricate and occupy such a fundamental place in society that each carpet maker is able to produce only one in the course of his lifetime. The mystery of the hair carpets deepens as other worlds are discovered whose inhabitants' only purpose is to weave hair carpets.

Eschbach tells a sweeping story in very individualized terms, focusing not only on those who have helped topple the empire but on the carpet makers, their scions, the Guild Masters and other members of this seemingly primitive society.

Eschbach writes in German, and this is likely an adequate translation, but it doesn't feel like an excellent one. I look forward to more of his books, and recommend The Carpet Makers as an excellent example of worldbuilding to those who've enjoyed Dune and the novels of Samuel R. Delany.

Started, but unfinished: Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, recommended by Alan Furst, and The Word of God by Thomas M. Disch. I read 50 pages of each without getting into either. The Disch not grabbing me was especially disappointing as I've recently enjoyed numerous short stories by him. I admit I may not have been in the mood for either book, and will return them to the “to be read” pile for now.

I read Lindsay Clarke's marvelous 2nd novel, The Chymical Wedding, in the mid '90s. Though I tend not to re-read things – there's too much I haven't read yet out there – I recently picked up a paperback copy and gave it another read. I liked it even more this time.

In the early '80s poet Alex Darken travels to the secluded town of Munding in the west of England to escape the dissolution of his marriage and a bad case of writer's block. He meets Edward Nesbit and his assistant and lover, Laura. As Alex' relationships with Edward & Laura deepen he finds himself drawn into their principal interest, the lives and work of Sir Henry Agnew and his brilliant daughter Louisa, who had apparently uncovered the secret of alchemy. Clarke jumps between the Alex/Edward/Laura story, and Sir Henry and Louisa's tale as they draw nearer to the completion of Sir Henry's and Louisa's life's work.

Comparisons to The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles are inevitable; Fowles even blurbs this book. This doesn't lessen the impact or pleasure of Clarke's work. The resemblance is superficial, in format only. In the end The Chymical Wedding is a beautiful and erudite work, and re-reading it has inspired me to search out Clarke's other books. Recommended not only to readers of Fowles, but to those who enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell as well.

Some graphic novels and comics of note: Weathercraft is Jim Woodring's first extended work, after years of short stories featuring Frank and his supporting cast. Woodring's black & white cartooning is, as usual, extraordinarily beautiful. The story flows and the rendering is lovely. I particularly like Woodring's ever-changing backgrounds and his way of rendering water and sky. The story, about central character Manhog's transformation from selfish brute to sympathetic character is laid out well but somehow obscure. I found it hard to follow the themes and philosophy Woodring's espousing and I found it difficult to get past both the (brutishness) of Manhog and the brutality he's forced to endure. In the end, this challenging graphic novel had me reading the jacket copy looking for clues to what it's actually about. Weathercraft is the sort of book I'm happy to own, if only because I'm sure I'll have to read it again to get it. And of course there's Woodring's wonderful cartooning. Recommended to fans of Herriman's Krazy Kat and...well, Jim Woodring.

Recommended with fewer reservations is Carol Lay's Now, Endsville, a collection of strips which ran in a limited number of weekly newspapers. Lay's figurework is a surreal as Woodring's: her people typically lack chins, for example, but her backgrounds are rooted in our reality, with identifiable buildings and landscapes. Now, Endsville contains one of Lay's best-known extended pieces, “Invisible City”, in which a baby broker (the wonderfully named Harry Genius) employs Madame Asgar to develop potions which will allow him to rape and pillage the earth. Traveling to Genius' privately-owned forest at the center of a South American metropolis, Genius and his companions discover an entire city, and it's inhabitants, invisible to everyone except the blind Madame Asgar. Lay's cartooning is angular and manic, sort of a slicker Roberta Gregory style. The story flows better than most that are divided into much smaller installments, perhaps because she had more space available to her than a typical single-tiered daily strip. If you enjoy Harvey Kurtzman's cartooning or the aforementioned Roberta Gregory's stories you'll like this.

I've also been reading a lot of '70s era Jack Kirby comics, specifically from his return to Marvel in 1975. I like the Black Panther stories best – Kirby's unparalleled imagination is at work and his dialog is less clunky than in his run on Captain America. In those stories his dialog reads like a 60-year-old (which he was) trying to sound like a teenager. Well worth looking at for the art, particularly with Mike Royer or Dan Green inking.

Natsuo Kirino's Out was recommended to me by Laura of Moe's Books in Berkeley. Out is a thriller about a group of women who band together to dispose of the body of a husband whom one of the women has killed. The thrills begin when the dead man's secret life intersects with actions of the group.

Out starts slow, building the characters carefully, setting up the little personality quirks which will result in important plot twists. The lives of these people, at least in the first 40 pages, are drab, and readers used to the more economical thrillers of American writers such as Stuart Woods might find Out slow going in the beginning. Stick with it. When Out gets going, it really gets going. Another caveat: there is a scene of violence 50 or so pages in that is written in a detailed but detached manner, and is truly horrific. The ending, as well, will be difficult to take for some readers. As such, Out is recommended to those with strong stomachs.

Plot derives from character in Kirino's book; she invests the first 40 pages in her characters, and it isn't until after that the plot really kicks in. Patience will be rewarded, though. For fans of Fredric Brown and the darker novels of Carl Hiaasen.

For many years Harold Lamb's Genghis Khan was the standard popular reference on Genghis Khan. While well-researched (for the time) and energetically written, with so many more modern and likely more accurate books on the subject around it's hard to recommend this to anyone other than the curiosity seekers, pulp enthusiasts and those interested in perpetuating the barbarian myth.

This is definitely a book written in another time (it was first published in 1927), and modern readers will find attitudes and specific words found unacceptable in today's polite company. But people in the future will undoubtedly be able to say the same about the literature of today, so this reason shouldn't prevent one from picking up this book.

Many individuals not mentioned in Weatherford's book appear in Lamb's. Were they real people, or merely characters of legend? Lamb makes generalizations and pronouncements frequently, such as, “Indeed, the very essence of the Mongol character is its patience”. And he applies novelistic techniques to tell the story, embellishing a piece of dialog related in The Secret History may make for a more enjoyable read, but it throws Lamb's interpretation of events into the realm of fiction.

Lamb is certainly not a great writer and in an attempt to be modern or “artsy,” he uses so many sentence fragments that his prose would give William S. Burroughs or Harlan Ellison pause. But Lamb is an energetic writer whose work rivals Robert E. Howard in excitement.

Interested in historical fiction which illuminates its protagonist while serving as a great read? Try Irving Stone. Recommended are The Origin, The Agony and the Ecstasy, or Sailor on Horseback.

I've been enjoying Akutagawa's Japanese Stories, recommended by Kevin at Bookbuyers in Mountain View. Akutagawa's best known for “In a Grove”, the story upon which “Rashomon” and its various permutations is based. Coincidentally, “In a Grove” appears in the new issue of Zoetrope All-Story, while being left out of Japanese Stories. The translations in this edition are adequate but not great, especially when compared with the version of “In a Grove” in Zoetrope. Still, there's some amazing stuff here, particularly “The Hell Screen”.