Volume 7, Issue 2
February 24, 2011

The Latest

In addition to the obligatory tax prep, we've been continuing to work on our e-commerce site. Only a small portion of our inventory is listed there for now. In future we plan to add more items, additional payment options (we only offer PayPal there at present), and international shipping.

Since our last newsletter, we've added nearly 100 photos (browse newly photographed items here), attended 9 signings/events (see our Just Arrived page), and posted countless new items to our inventory.

We now have nearly 10,000 items available through ABE & Biblio, over 7,000 through Amazon and nearly 100 available through our new e-commerce site.

Scott & Tammie
Handee Books, LLC

• Incompetence - Grant
• The Witches of Eastwick - Updike
• The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles - Andrews
• X-ed Out - Burns
• Stitches - Small
• Ignition City - Ellis
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Larsson
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Rowling
• With or Without - Dickinson
• The Town That Forgot How to Breathe - Harvey
• All Clear - Willis
• Swamplandia! - Russell
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

Rob Grant is the co-creator, with Doug Naylor, of one of my favorite TV series ever, Red Dwarf. He is also the author or co-author of several books including Incompetence, which I recently finished.

Incompetence is a mystery novel set in a near-future reality. The essentially unnamed protagonist (he identifies himself with ever-changing aliases; we never learn his real name, but for much of the book he is “Harry Salt”) is a member of a shadowy organization, the mandate of which is never revealed. At the beginning of the book he is summoned by another operative to Rome; when he arrives he finds his contact has been murdered. As he pursues an investigation into his fellow operative's death “Harry” is forced to confront incompetence at nearly every turn. Whether it's the obvious stupidity of the police, or a stationmaster's inability to sell our hero a train ticket, or Social Services' unwillingness to recognize an old man as living, the book's examples of human stupidity are aggravating but just as frequently hilarious. I particularly enjoyed Harry's encounter with an elderly couple, the male half of which has been classified “deceased” by his government. The explanation of the mistake, and the couple's reason for making do with the situation is funny, well-reasoned and strangely true to life. I also enjoyed the Italian police inspector with anger issues. His rants are written in that distinctly British manner and would sound perfect coming out of John Cleese's mouth. The only downside to this fast-paced, highly enjoyable novel is the snarky tone throughout. Though perhaps appropriate to a story whose theme is stupidity I found it wearying. Interestingly, the final 40 pages display a darker, more straightforward tone and it's in those last pages that the book took off for me, making me appreciate elements of the first ¾ of the book. Certainly Monty Python or Red Dwarf fans will likely enjoy this book. I also recommend it to those who enjoyed Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein.

I started re-reading John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick over a year ago, when the very very bad TV series based upon it premiered. The show got everything wrong except for the premise: the devil comes to a small New England town to tempt with delight three middle-aged women who have been dabbling in witchcraft. The book is so much richer than that simple plot and never descends into “Desperate Housewives” level soap opera the way the show did. Each of the women in the book is so well rounded as a character, their pasts so well delineated, their motivations clear. In addition, the character of Daryl van Horne, the tempter, is certainly sinister as well as coarse, impulsive, and sexist, a sly example of suburban American male chauvinism. Updike's probably reaching here, as far as getting into the heads of his female characters, and I've certainly read criticism of him labeling has a sexist. But even if he doesn't get it right 100% of the time the attempt is admirable and the book is magical. The Witches of Eastwick is one of Updike's bestselling books but it's regarded as lightweight, possibly because of the fantasy elements and the hit movie of the same title. It is one of Updike's most accessible books while showcasing his brilliant writing. If you haven't read Updike this is a good place to start. Read it if you like Jonathan Carroll or even Alice Hoffman.

Julie Andrews has written several books for children, at least two of which, Mandy and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (which I've just read) are regarded as modern classics. Whangdoodles is set in the present and was published recently enough to qualify as “modern”, but seems like a book curiously out of its time. For one thing a major element of the story is the friendship between the three Potter children, Lindy, Tom and Ben, and the eccentric Nobel Prize-winning scientist Prof. Savant. It's a relationship that between an adult and otherwise unsupervised children one doesn't encounter in YA fiction much anymore. Second, the story is about the use of one's imagination and is completely divorced from the everyday concerns of the current generation, which is probably one of the things that adds to its classic status: its timelessness. It's a gentle, innocent, suspenseful and, by today's standards, sort of naive book. It's a good choice for those who have read through the Narnia or Oz series.

I just read three very good and different graphic novels, all of which I recommend.

X-ed Out by Charles Burns is one of the strangest comics I've read in a long time. Being the first of several volumes, it's also somewhat unsatisfying.

The story centers on Doug, a slacker teen or twenty something into music, poetry, and performance art. He seems to have sustained a head injury, and at the beginning of the book he awakens to his cat meowing at a jagged hole which has appeared in his bedroom wall. He climbs through the hole and into a shadowy, subterranean world populated by grotesque, not-quite-human creatures. He's soon accosted by a denizen of this world who tells Doug that he doesn't belong there, and who chases Doug into a small town in the middle of a desert...

X-ed Out has the quality of a fever dream and is populated by Burns' unique grotesques. The art is terrific – no one draws like Burns; with his heavily-inked melding of bigfoot and ligne clair styles, his work looks like a cross between Ditko and Crumb, with a little Rory Hayes thrown in to accentuate the horror. My only complaint: as the first of several volumes, there's no resolution at the end of this book. I want more, now.

Second is David Small's Stitches, which was a National Book Award finalist. It's a memoir, but it's very different from the autobiographical comics which are so popular in the alternative comics scene. This book is much less nihilistic than the stories of say, Joe Sacco or Robert Crumb (both of whose work I enjoy as well) and though it deals with weighty issues such as childhood illness, parents' emotional distance and even child abuse, the book is ultimately uplifting.

As one would expect Small's art is amazing: loosely rendered, almost appearing dashed-off, reminiscent in places of Harvey Kurtzman's work. Many writers and artists who typically work in other forms find working in comics problematic. Stitches, though, is a model of how to tell a story in comic book form. The panel flow is smooth, and when Small allows himself a flight of fancy such as the sequence on pages 61-63 in which young David enters the world he's drawn, the results are magical.

Last is Warren Ellis' Ignition City, illustrated by Gianluca Pagliarani. It's a simple revenge tale, set in one of those lived-in futures a la “Alien” in which everything is grungy and feels held together with duct tape. Against this backdrop, Mary Raven comes to Ignition City, isolationist Earth's last functioning spaceport, to investigate her father's murder. The trade paperback collects a five-issue story arc, but I can't imagine reading it in the original parts was very satisfying. The collected edition flows together and presents well as a short novel. Ellis' dialogue is as sharp as ever, as are his character developing skills. Art is more problematic; he has a way with gadgets and decaying architecture, but his figure work and facial expressions didn't feel like the professional article. Mary's face is variable from panel to panel and she's sometimes only identifiable from her clothing. This may be due to poor rendering on the part of the inker. In any event, Ignition City is good straightforward adventure material, well worth setting an hour or two aside for.

Can a poorly-written book be entertaining? Sure, and I've just read a captivating one: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It's translated from the Swedish, but I don't think it's the translation that's the problem. Larsson, who died in 2004, was a journalist, and his first novel, a truly thrilling thriller, reads like the kind of book a journalist would write. If a character needs to purchase a new computer we get paragraphs of technical specs. The first 100 pages describe in exhaustive detail the protagonist Michael Blomqvist's fall from professional grace. Blomqvist's derailment is pertinent to the larger story but this section goes on far too long. Still, once the story gets started it becomes compulsive reading.

What makes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo such a memorable book isn't the story, entertaining as it is, but rather one of the other protagonists, Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title (by the way, the original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women, very apt but probably a hard sell in America). Salander is brilliant, mercurial, guarded, and possibly suffering from some form of autism, though it's never explicitly stated. She's a force of nature, not bound by social conventions, and is written with surprising finesse. The other characters are well drawn, and as mentioned before the story itself is compelling. There's just the matter of that clunky over-writing which almost sinks the book. I'll probably read the other two books in the trilogy at some point, but Larsson's books may be the sort better experienced as movies. Recommended, with reservations, to those who like the Modesty Blaise books, Carol O'Connell's Kathleen Mallory books, and Abigail Padgett's novels.