Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju

I picked this up on an impulse at the half-price bookstore. I had a residual interest in the topic of the comic-book censorship era left over from seeing Weird Comic Book Fantasy all those years ago at Dad’s Garage.

The book gives an interesting background on the early days of comics. One of the amazing things was how easy it seemed to get a job in the comics industry; Apparently you just had to walk in and ask for one, and they put you to work drawing spots on Jungle Woman’s leopard skin outfit. The downside was that the industry was so looked down upon, that you couldn’t tell people in polite society what you did for a living.

While superhero comics got a bad rap, the main thrust of the book-burning and banning was geared towards the horror and crime genre that predominated. From this book, it was hard to tell if there was quality storytelling going on… on one hand the process is described as hurried and formulaic, on the other hand the comics are talked about with fond reverence for the artistry. Regardless, it sounds like the kind of stuff you hate to be on the side of defending, but know you must because free speech is sacred.

The story is frustrating at its core, because you know this kind of thing keeps happening, and will continue to happen: some group of folks take it upon themselves to decide what we can or can’t read, putting forth “protecting the children” as their rallying cry.

Makes me want to hit the comic book store and buy a batch in belated protest.

Arkansas by John Brandon

McSweeney’s was having a garage sale, $5 or less for some of their copies of books they had stored in the attic, sold as-is. The copy of Arkansas I got (ordered along with Hornby’s Shakespeare Wrote For Money) was in perfect condition, so I don’t know what the fuss was about.

I read about Arkansas when it first came out, a first novel with interesting narrative style. I was intrigued, but more or less forgot about it until the McSweeney’s sale.

I really enjoyed the style, and the story is an engaging tale of back country drug dealers. On average, I don’t ordinarily go for drug dealer tales, but McSweeney’s gave me a hard sell in their pitch, so I gave it a chance.

If nothing else, I think Brandon uses the second person narrative form better than any other example I can name. This is not much of a feat, since the only other 2nd person writing I’ve read is Tom Robbin’s Half Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas, and that one seemed like a stunt more than anything else.

The trick is that Brandon only uses the second person on a certain character, and all the other’s character’s narrative tracks are in third. It works. For me, anyway. And since those chapters were about me, I guess that’s all that matters.

Apparently my name is Frog now.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

I’m working my way through the Eliot oeuvre courtesy of Gutenberg.org.

Silas is a short, simple work, but well-written and enjoyable. Silas Marner is a weaver who moves to a new land and ostracizes himself from most human contact after being jilted in love. He remains focused on his work and increasing wealth until a robbery forces him out of his hermitage.

Middlemarch was primarily a story of the upper class (as is all of Jane Austen’s work), so it is refreshing to delve deeper into the lives of more common folk of the era.

I note that Gutenberg has a Spanish language version… there’s a lot of dialect in this book; I wonder how they handle it in translation.

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Aside from a Palm Z22 filled with Eliot, I’ve got The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu and A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey lined up for vacation reading.

Also, Diez Comedias Del Siglo De Oro should I feel compelled to really exercise the mind.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

Sometimes one abandons a book, and then later tries again. Often, the book fares no better the second time, but in this case I’m glad I gave Special Topics another go.

It’s a well written, engaging and quirky book about a 17 year old Blue Van Meer, a high-IQer who lives (or rather, travels) with her eccentric, brilliant and charming dad, an itinerant college professor.

In the introduction, Blue quotes her dad regarding speaking as a professor: “And remember. Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, wherever possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back– somewhere by the radiator– who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, ‘No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.'”

And so with that premise, every other sentence in this book is relentlessly, gratuitously annotated, and some hand-drawn Visual Aids are also presented. Really, the annotations are somewhat breathtaking in their extent, and often tangential and amusing. One imagines it doubled or tripled the length of time it took to write the novel. Of course, some of the references are invented, but still.

This book is essentially a mystery, and I’m reminded of a Northern Exposure episode where they discuss the “idealized teenage girl world” nature of Nancy Drew: Single, independent, highly intelligent girl lives only with her father (none of the teenage typical mother-daughter clashing) and solves mysteries. This book sort of takes that idealization and turns it on its head, like a grittier reimagining of Nancy.

I looked up Marisha Pessl to see what else she’s written, and discovered that she attended my alma-mater for two years before transferring to a school in New York. She studied Radio/TV/Film, which I “minored” in, albeit 5 or 6 years after I did. She said the father character was based on an amalgam of two of her film professors there, though I can’t figure out who. Perhaps they were new.

A movie is reportedly in the works.

She has another book coming in 2010, also a mystery. Given the somewhat gimmicky nature of the book, I’ll be interested to see if she can pull off another intriguing story.