I have to admit I was moved to read Noogie’s Time to Shine by the admittedly shallow reason that I found the cover art and the name Noogie interesting.  Who would want to read a story about someone named “Noogie Krapczack?”  So I pulled it off the TBR pile and dove in.

As you might expect from someone with that name, nickname actually, things aren’t going to well for Noogie.  Starting with the fact that everyone insists on calling him by his childhood nickname.  He is living at home with his cranky mother and working a dull job stocking ATM for a company called PiggyBank.

Despite a degree from NYU in film making, Noogie doesn’t even watch movies - his mother forbids it - let alone make them.  But his life begins to change when he basically stumbles upon the idea of slowly siphoning off cash from the machines he is supposed to fill.

Surprisingly, it takes a while for the folks at PiggyBank to catch on, but eventually an accountant figures out that something is wrong. When the president of the company calls Noogie to try and get to the bottom of it, he panics and hits the road with the money - nearly $5 million - a suitcase, and his Siamese cat Dillinger.  What follows is a rather odd ball road trip as Noogie drives from New Jersey to Florida trying to figure out exactly what he should do next and thinking back on the turns his life has taken.

Noogies Time to Shine is an oddly charming and humourous story of a bumbling loser who pulls off an amazing caper only to find himself asking “what now?”  But despite this charm it runs out of steam and ends with a confusing change of perspective.

For more click below.

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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has an excellent archive of various lectures and symposium online.  One of which is Russell Kirk talking about ghost stories and then reading one of his own: A Long, Long Trail A-Winding.  You can listen to it here.  Seems appropriate on Halloween.

For more on Kirk and ghost stores see my review of his Ancestral Shadows and his Gothic novel The Old House of Fear.

What seems like an eternity ago - newborn children will do that to your sense of time - I read the first two books in the Looking Glass Wars series by Frank Beddor. The idea was to have a contest, book reviews, maybe even an interview with the author. I even contemplated re-reading the Alice in Wonderland series to compare and contrast. I had high hopes of an interesting and entertaining coordinated roll out of content. Well, as you are all aware - or maybe you aren’t - life intervened and none of this happened. OK, we had the contest and a winner, but nothing else. I have, however, regrouped somewhat and will now offer my review of the books. Better late than never, right?

The first book in the series is The Looking Glass Wars.  As is my habit, I am going to be lazy and use the School Library Journal summary:

When her parents, the king and queen of Wonderland, are killed by her Aunt Redd, Alyss Heart escapes by jumping into the Pool of Tears. Her jump takes her to Victorian Oxford, where she emerges from a puddle, lives as a street urchin, and is eventually adopted by Reverend and Mrs. Liddell. Unable to make anyone believe her fantastic story, she finally confides in Charles Dodgson, who says he will write a book about her. When she discovers that Alice’s Adventures Underground is full of make-believe, and not her story or her real name, she sadly resigns herself to life as a Victorian girl of privilege. Meanwhile, back in Wonderland, the Alyssians form a resistance movement and attempt to overthrow the despotic Redd. For years, Hatter Madigan searches the world for Alyss so she can return to Wonderland as Queen. In the end, the Alyssians prevail, but only after much graphic bloodshed and many brutal battles involving card soldiers who transform into warriors, chessmen, blades that whirl and slash, vicious Jabberwocks, and even carnivorous roses.

The tale is clever and flows like an animated film where action is more important than character development. However, it bears little resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s original story. Beddor has usurped the characters and setting and changed them for his own purposes, keeping only the story’s frame and not much of that. Still, the fantasy will appeal to those readers who like battles and weapons and good vs. evil on and on and on.

For my take on the book read below . . .

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- The Ghost by Robert Harris

Publishers Description

Adam Lang has been Britain’s longest serving and most controversial prime minister of the last half century. And now that he’s left office, he’s accepted one of history’s largest cash advances to compose a tell-all (or at least, tell-some) memoir of his life and years of power. As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this magnum opus, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal, secrets with the power to alter world politics, secrets with the power to kill.

- The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis

Publishers Weekly

This laugh-out-loud, darkly intelligent debut suggests that Thewlis might meet with considerable success should he decide to quit acting and take up the pen full-time. London artist Hector Kipling paints huge canvases dominated by a single head. He’s doing well, but he’s not nearly as famous as his best friend, conceptualist Lenny Snook. Eaten up by jealousy, Hector believes that Lenny has made his fortune with stolen ideas. As Hector struggles to cope with an absent girlfriend, his parents’ insane expenditures and a vandal attacking his most valuable painting, things begin to go very wrong indeed. Readers who have mourned the end of Sue Townsend’s wonderful, long-running Adrian Mole series will find solace of a sort here, as will anyone who enjoys a thought-provoking skewering of modern art by a knowledgeable writer and an inescapably doomed but appealing hero.

- Kerplunk!: Stories by Patrick F. McManus

Publishers Weekly

This gently humorous essay collection by Outdoor Life columnist McManus (The Bear in the Attic) explores hunting and fishing in the Pacific Northwest. As he wryly explains in The Kind of Guy I Am, McManus’s literary persona is an aw-shucks middle-aged married guy with four daughters who dreams of his flies, reels, waders and snowshoes while on vacation with his wife in Venice. Hoping to someday be like Rancid Crabtree, an old man who lives in a slab shack against the mountain and does nothing all day but hunt and fish (The Ideal Life), McManus and his buddy Fenton Quagmire jettison the high-tech camping gear and attempt to rough it Thoreau-style (Back to Basics), with predictably hilarious results. Other tales involve learning how to be patient while fishing (A Dimple in Time) and enlightening one’s fishing partners on how the moon determines the tides (Where’s Mr. Sun?). McManus narrates his woodsy stories with a laid-back style that will earn many smiles of fond recognition from anyone who’s heard a guide say, I know there used to be a trail here.

- Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind by Paula Kamen

Publishers Weekly

Bestselling author Iris Chang’s 2004 suicide at age 36 so shocked friends and colleagues that some initially claimed that Japanese extremists had murdered her to avenge Chang’s acclaimed exposé in The Rape of Nanking of atrocities against Chinese civilians perpetrated by Japanese invaders in 1937-1938. Lacking the artistry of Ann Patchett’s recent portrait of her friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, this effort by Kamen (All in My Head) is a tedious, obsessive, exploitative effort, drawing on her Salon.com eulogy to Chang. Kamen, who had known Chang since college, repeats some of the far-fetched, irresponsible conspiracy theories before settling on the sad truth that Chang, suffering from bipolar disorder, shot herself in the head with an antique pistol after much planning. Kamen describes her admiration for and jealousy of her rival, Chang’s grating ambitiousness and the first-generation American’s attempts at being a real American, epitomized by her campaign to be college homecoming queen. Kamen also probes the stigma of mental illness in the Asian-American community, Chang’s sense of guilt over her son’s autism, her veneer of perfection and the deterioration of her mental state. Despite its flaws, this could find a sizable audience among those Chinese-Americans who lionized Chang.

- Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library by Don Borchert

Publishers Weekly

Jack-of-all-trades Borchert shares wholesome, guardedly witty dispatches from the suburban L.A. library system in this charming tell-all. For 12 years the family-man author has held the post of assistant librarian, keeping a wary eye on unruly kids, mollifying mystified parents and repairing sadly manhandled materials. Borchert relays a conversation with an aged librarian who reveals how it was in the good old days (staff lunches used to be served with wine), then contrasts that account with modern-day multicultural crayons and the preponderance of latchkey kids abandoned in the library for long, numbing afternoons. A few of the regular patrons are inspiring Renaissance types, but most are unsettling and unsavory, such as intensely reclusive crossword-puzzler Henry hounding the reference desk; loser Max looking futilely on the Internet for a South American wife; or the drug dealers working the restroom. From patrons who rack up hundreds of dollars in fines to missing pet rats and fist-fighting mothers, Borchert has seen it all, and his account gives a human interest spin to this undervalued profession.

- Mazel Tov: Celebrities’ Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories by Jill Rappaport, Linda Solomon

Publishers Weekly

What do Larry King, Ed Koch and Richard Dreyfuss have in common? All three, we learn in this light book of profiles, had a bar mitzvah at age 13. On the one hand, this is a fairly superficial celebrity multi-biography that almost cynically panders to celebrities, with a couple of politicians thrown in. There are very few women represented, and almost no reflection on the spiritual commitments made in the bar mitzvah. But on the other hand, there’s something to be said for the specific and focused nature of this book, with all these people chronicling a single rite of passage that has remained steadfast through centuries of change. (And of course, who can resist then-and-now celebrity photographs?) Two of the most touching stories are of deaf actress Marlee Matlin’s bat mitzvah, since she had to learn Hebrew phonetically, and of her friend and mentor Henry Winkler, who struggled through his bar mitzvah because of dyslexia. Actor Kirk Douglas had two bar mitzvahs–one at the traditional age, and the other at 83, to honor his mother. Though frivolous–the chapter on the woman who bar mitzvahed her dogs and had them read the woof-Torah adds nothing helpful–some profiles are intriguing.

I guess Michiko Kakutani didn’t care for Susan Faludi’s recently released THE TERROR DREAM Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. Here is the first sentence of her New York Times review:

This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.

She continues later:

These efforts on Ms. Faludi’s part to use the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an occasion to recycle arguments similar to those she made a decade and a half ago in her best-selling book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991) feel forced, unpersuasive and often utterly baffling.

She finally concludes:

Such errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

So you didn’t like it?

*Reference in case you didn’t catch it

In a late, but worthy, response to my Comic book contest.  I asked for a comment or post on “why you think comics are an important art form.” And Ethan offered the following:

I certainly consider comics an important artform. In fact, I find it rather difficult to explain exactly why, because they do not strike me as particularly in need of justification. The illustrations are some of the most vibrant yet accessable visual art being produces nowadays, which shouldn’t be too surprising given that the comic industry is driven by commercial popularity rather than the ideological obsessions of academic art. I think the fact that the visual element in comics is further constrained by a narrative structure also contributes to the vibrancy of the comic art medium.

As to the narrative artistry of comics, it’s nice to see a medium unafraid to draw inspiration from genre literature and other marginalized sources. Of course, this can sometimes have the effect of limiting the narrative possibilities of the medium, but many comic writers avoid this pitfall by also drawing from classic “high” literature. I’m less impressed by the “pulpification” of classical myth in something like Frank Miller’s 300 than I am with the serious Shakespearean thematic elements of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman,, but works of both types inject a much-needed sense of historical tradition into the comic medium. They also valuably remind us that old stories aren’t great because of their inaccessibility but rather because they continue to speak across different times and cultures.

I’m encouraged by the maturation that I think is occurring in the field of comics, including everything from the formal complexity of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, to the critical analysis of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, to the incredible proliferation of amateur and professional work on the internet. I’m waiting expectantly for a great work of comic art to break out of the confines of the dedicated fans of the media and achieve wider popularity, but if the ranks of comic fans continue to swell as “geek” culture gains prominence in American culture, that may not even prove necessary.

 

Thanks, Ethan, for your comments and your kind words about this blog.  The comics are on there way to you as we speak.

I didn’t intend to take the week off, it just kind of happened.  I seem to have underestimated the time and focus changes in my off-line life would eat up or over-estimated my ability to focus on writing.  It seems that a new job and a new child tends to eat up a lot of your time.  One way or the other the week got away from me.

However, hope springs eternal as they say and I have plenty of books to review and discuss.  So I will redouble my efforts to get in the habit of posting.  Here is a taste of the books I am planning on reviewing in the coming days: