Volume 7, Issue 5
June 16, 2011

The Latest

Welcome to the first newsletter where all the links go to our (little, but growing) e-commerce site! We've been working hard on the site and now have approximately 500 of our 10,000 books there.

Since our last newsletter, we've added over 100 photos (browse newly photographed items here and here), attended 12 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 500 available through our new e-commerce site.

Scott & Tammie
Handee Books, LLC

• The Alchemist - Bacigalupi
• The Executioness - Buckell
• Confessions of a Crap Artist - Dick
• The Jack Acid Society Black Book - Kelly
• Alice's Journey Beyond the Moon - Carter
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Rowling
• Troubletwisters - Nix and Williams
• The Infinities - Banville
• The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh - Cherryh
• See a Little Light - Mould
• The Rivals - Whitney
• Stacks of magazines and scads of comics

What Scott's Been Reading

The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi's first work of fantasy, is the first of two shared-world novellas created in concert with Tobias Buckell. Set in a world in which the use of magic has consequences for an entire civilization, it tells the story of Jeoz, a down-on-his-luck alchemist searching for a solution to the most dire situation of his time: the encroachment of "bramble", a virtually indestructible poisonous plant which grows at a terrible pace, devouring everything in its path. His years of research have cost him dearly; he's lost nearly all his material possessions, his wife has died and his young daughter is deathly ill. Unfortunately, the only apparent way to slow the pace of his daughter's illness is by the use of magic. And magic is what stimulates bramble's growth.

I think I've read everything Bacigalupi's published, and I've enjoyed it all. I liked The Alchemist as well, though the author's prose style in this book (he's experimenting with sentence fragments) didn't always work for me. But the story and its themes - personal sacrifice, social contracts, responsibility to one's neighbors - are compelling and thought-provoking. Recommended to fans of the author's work as well as anyone who's looking for something in their fantasy beyond questing and killing.

Tobias Buckell's parallel novella, The Executioness is also good, though it's perhaps a more traditional fantasy than The Alchemist. The title character, Tana, is a butcher's assistant who finds herself thrown into the role of town executioner because of her father's terminal illness. Coincidentally, the day she performs her first execution is also the day her town is raided and her children kidnapped. The book becomes a quest fantasy, although Tana's is a more personal quest than that found in most high fantasy.

Tammie faulted The Executioness for being too conventional (too many fight scenes) and for featuring a cardboard cut-out of a middle-aged woman as a protagonist. While I don't disagree with her assessment, I found that the violence had a greater weight than that found in the books of say, Terry Brooks. The description of Tana's first execution communicates genuine horror. In this respect Buckell's book equals those of George R.R. Martin and Robert E. Howard. That alone makes it worth reading, though I wouldn't recommend it unless you read the Bacigalupi as well.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is the only "mainstream" (read: not SF) novel by Philip K. Dick published during the author's lifetime. It's a portrait of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family in 1950s Northern California, and it is one of Dick's best books. Dick uses shifting viewpoints, alternating with each chapter, to get inside the heads of his three focus characters. The main character is ostensibly Jack Isidore, the "crap artist" of the title. Jack's a little off, though his ailment is never delineated. He has a severe case of OCD which compels him to collect things: in his childhood, it was pulp magazines; as an adult, he's graduated to rocks and grocery store newsletters. Jack is also prone to belief in crackpot science such as the hollow earth, and eventually comes to believe that the world will end on April 23, 1959.

After quitting his job re-treading tires, for no apparent reason, Jack moves in with his sister Fay, her abusive husband Charley and their two daughters. Here, Jack finds purpose and order caring for the kids and keeping house even as his sister and brother-in-law's marriage descends further into abuse and eventually betrayal. Further recounting of the plot will make the whole thing sound tawdry, but it's never that. In fact, in some places it's subtly funny; when Fay visits Charley in the hospital after a heart attack, she brings an ashtray as a gift.

Those coming to Confessions of a Crap Artist expecting science fiction may be disappointed, and at least some editions categorize this novel as SF. The book does share some themes with Dick's other work, though, such as differing perceptions of reality. Fay and Charley's marriage is clearly a bad one, and Jack and other characters can see this, but the couple cannot. In addition, they both clearly benefit from the relationship, materially and emotionally. In the final analysis it's a fascinating book which rewards patience and careful reading.

Walt Kelly's "Pogo" is one of my favorite comic strips, despite the fact that I was only a few years old when it ended in 1975. The strip has been reprinted in numerous collections and is again becoming widely available. Because "Pogo" was a politically minded strip, particularly in the later years, some of the storylines haven't worn well. One that does is the Jack Acid Society storyline, collected in The Jack Acid Society Black Book along with new poems and chapter headings. This story satirizes the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. The Jack Acids (or jackasses) believe the only true Americans are the first Americans, or native Americans. They proceed to blacklist anyone who doesn't fit their ever-changing definition. Sadly, the book's still timely. It's also hilarious in places and it's full of wonderful Walt Kelly art.

Reading comic strip collections can sometimes be monotonous. The lack of variety in panel size and layout can rob a storyline of its power. It's a fundamentally different experience reading three panels a day than it is reading a graphic novel or periodical comic book. Some cartoonists, such as Hal Foster, Milton Caniff or Berke Breathed overcome this with brilliant illustration, breakneck pacing or genius satire. Kelly manages the rare feat of overcoming the three-panel single-tier problem by re-formatting the daily strips into a more comic book or graphic novel-friendly page layout. Factor in the additional poetry, chapter headings and spot illustrations and The Jack Acid Society Black Book is a book worth searching out.

Clearly written by a Lewis Carroll devotee, Alice's Journey Beyond the Moon by R.J. Carter is presented as a recently rediscovered manuscript. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for nonsense, but I lost interest when Alice met the Man in the Moon, this book's Mad Hatter. Despite a good beginning with a truly original approach to space travel, I found the footnotes more enjoyable than the story itself.

I recently snagged some excellent ARCs, one of which I'm reading now: Daisy Whitney's sequel to The Mockingbirds, my favorite book of 2010. The copy on the back of the ARC, some of which may end up on the flaps of the hardcover when it comes out next year, make this book sound like Whitney's chosen to follow up her wonderful first novel with a hacked-out sub-Nancy Drew tale. I'm a third of the way in and that doesn't seem to be the case. The lesson? Don't read jacket copy.