Volume 7, Issue 1
January 26, 2011

Happy New Year!

Thank you for your continued support in 2010; we wouldn't be here without you.

The Latest

It's been busy around here. We've been working hard (with the help of some really amazing volunteers) on our own e-commerce site and are pleased to announce that it's now live! Only a small portion of our inventory is listed there for now. In future we plan to add more items, add additional payment options (we only offer PayPal there at present), and add international shipping. Those of you that Facebook will also notice that we've added a "shop" tab that links to the new e-commerce site.

Since our last newsletter, we've added over 100 photos (browse newly photographed items here), attended 5 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

• The Mockingbirds - Whitney
• Watchmen - Moore & Gibbons
• Freedom - Franzen
• Quest for the Spark - Sniegoski & Smith
• Thieves' World - Asprin (ed.)
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Rowling
• X'ed Out - Burns
• With or Without - Dickinson
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Larsson
• Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles - Andrews
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

C.S. Lewis said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more- worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond”.

There's a lot of great new work being published in the Young Adult (YA) category these days, and though Tammie's more up on the genre than I am, I've just read one I believe should be at the top of the list. It's The Mockingbirds, the first novel by Daisy Whitney, and it's also one of the best books I read in 2010.

Alex is a junior at the exclusive boarding school The Themis Academy. She's the “music girl”, a gifted pianist on the path to Julliard. As the book begins she wakes up naked in the bed of a boy she met the night before. But something's wrong; she can't remember what happened, can't remember how she even got there. It quickly dawns on her that she's been date-raped. As details of that night become clearer to her, Alex' desire for justice builds. Afraid the faculty, and the law, can do nothing for her and of the repercussions of even admitting she was raped to her parents, Alex turns to the Mockingbirds, a student-run court, for help.

The Mockingbirds is a special book because of it's protagonist. Whitney has created a character who is smart, talented, determined, and in the end strong. The story is told in the first person, from Alex' point-of-view, and is never less than engaging. The book rarely descends to “Afterschool Special” level, and the Mockingbirds' brand of justice is reasonable and appropriate. Finally, Whitney is to be commended for her supporting cast which is so well-delineated - even Alex' rapist, who insists he's done nothing wrong, right up until the end.

The Mockingbirds has been the subject of criticism because of its graphic sexuality (much of it actually implied) and its endorsement of vigilante justice. This is no “Death Wish”, however, just a well thought-out treatment of a difficult subject. Read it yourself. Feel comfortable handing it to others, of all ages. It's that good.

I've been in a re-reading mood the last year-and-a-half, since I read an article on the the subject in the “What to Read Now” issue of Newsweek. I used to have a shelf of comfort food I returned to again and again (Escape to Witch Mountain was a favorite when I was eight). Now, even though I'm an avid reader, with so much stuff coming out (not to mention classics I haven't read, or backlist titles by favorite authors, or...you get the idea) I tend to be focused on the new. I'm slowly re-reading my way through Ian Fleming's James Bond and Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, but its a rare occasion I'm prompted to read something again.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is perhaps the most lauded graphic novel of all time. It's been adapted into a weak (so I've heard) movie, won the Hugo award and been named one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels since 1923. I read it in its original serialized presentation back in '86-'87 – in retrospect a banner year for the advancement of comics as a literary art form – but have read it only once in the intervening years. Though I still admire it greatly the profusion of graphic novels influenced by or imitative of Watchmen has diluted it's impact.

The storyline, even though it begins as a simple murder mystery, is too complex to encapsulate here. On the face of it Watchmen is a superhero story, albeit a very dark and complex one. What separates it from a typical story arc of X-men isn't just its themes of retribution, loss, betrayal – angsty themes of the modern superhero comic – but its even tone, its well thought-out details and its utter lack of bombast. Gibbon's art is beautiful, realistic but still just cartoonish enough to draw you and keep you in the story. In fact, I found myself lamenting the lack of “cartoonishness” in American comics in favor of a more representational, almost photo realistic approach. I even found myself growing nostalgic over Gibbons' hand-lettering and John Higgins' hand-coloring. I especially love Gibbons' graphic design. The original twelve covers, now used as the chapter headings, have been imitated hundreds of times. The bloodstained smiley is iconic. Watchmen is worth many of its accolades, and its influence on mainstream English language comics is undeniable. It's a thrilling read, for its intellectual invention and its moral ambiguity, but it's not the one comic I'd recommend for non-comics readers (that would be “Love and Rockets” or “Bone” or even “Omaha”). If you've enjoyed such revisionist superhero novels as Soon I Will Be Invincible or the recent Batman movies you should read it.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the most hyped and possibly most polarizing novel of 2010. It took me a while to get through it, but I'm squarely in the “it's one of the best of the year” camp.

Walter and Patty Berglund are long-married college sweethearts, successful in their fields (Walter's an environmental lawyer, Patty a homemaker) with two great kids, living in a suburb of St. Paul. The first third of the book is Patty's “autobiography”. In it she recounts her mild attraction to Walter, her lust for Walter's musician friend Richard, and all the mistakes she can see in her adult life. The remainder of the book describes the decline of the Berglund family as a unit even as its four members adapt to their changing realities.

What makes Freedom a special book is how acutely observed the Berglund's world is. And Franzen's way with dialogue is unparalleled. Much has been made of how unlikable Patty is. I didn't find her so, and my enjoyment of the book wouldn't have been affected if I did. She's an unhappy person, clueless as to how to make things better. Though she does some unlikable things I ultimately found her sympathetic. I also enjoyed Richard's story arc, but I found those of the two Berglund children less compelling. Particularly fascinating for me, though, was Walter's transformation from idealist to compromiser to zealot.

Franzen's taken heat for writing another book about a family in crisis. So what? He writes so convincingly, so well, that it shouldn't even enter into the equation. Plenty of lesser writers write the same book over and over again without making any artistic headway. In Freedom Jonathan Franzen has written a book about people we know, who may be us. It's the type of fiction that helps us understand the society in which we live.

Quest for the Spark by Tom Sniegoski is the first “Bone” prose novel. It's illustrated by Jeff Smith, and produced in the same format as Grafix/Scholastic's “Bone” re-issues. It's set after the conclusion of the graphic novel series, it's undemanding reading and that's about all there is to say about it. Pick it up if you really love “Bone” but be forewarned: it's the first in a series.

More re-reading: the first Thieves' World, edited by Robert L. Asprin. This shared-world anthology contains stories by Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lynn Abbey, John Brunner, Joe Haldeman and others. Best of the stories: Lynn Abbey's “The Face of Chaos”, concerning a fortune teller's attempt to save the life of a woman who is to be sacrificed; worst: John Brunner's “Sentences of Death” which felt bashed-out and unedited, a disappointment from an author I admire. Unfortunately it's also the first story, after Asprin's introduction.

I enjoyed these books in High School, reading through the sixth (there are twelve in all, plus several novels set in the same world) but I lost interest in the mid-'80s. I suspect I'll pick up further books in the series if they fall into my hands but on the whole this is more undemanding reading not warranting much effort to acquire.

BEST OF THE YEAR

I read a lot of great books in 2010. I finished a few that were just ok and finally admitted that it's fine to not finish something if it's not great. I found at least two authors I'll read anything by (Eric Puchner and Jonathan Barnes) and a book which will stick with me for years (The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach). But the best book I read in 2010 was Daisy Whitney's The Mockingbirds. Thank you, Connie at Books Inc., for recommending it to me. [Read the August 26, 2010 edition (vol 6, issue 6) of our newsletter for Scott's review of The Carpet Makers and the July 13, 2010 edition (vol 6, issue 5) for Scott's review of Eric Puchner's Model Home]