The Black Letters

The Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku (1994) E

Date read: 12.27.09
Book from: Personal collection, via Vertical, Inc.
Reviewer: Emera

Translated 2009 by Alexander O. Smith & Elye J. Alexander. Original title Ubume no Natsu.

“Concerning the Ubume –
Of all the tales told, that of the ubume is the most confounding. It is said that when a woman who is with child passes away, her attachment to the babe takes physical form. She appears then as an apparition, drenched in blood from the waist down, and crying like a bird, saying “wobaryo, wobaryo.” Presented with stories of people transforming into such creatures after they die, how can we truly believe in Hell? It is beyond understanding.
Report on One Hundred Stories
Yamaoka Motosyoshi, Junkyo 3 (1686)”

In the classic mode of the genteel ghost story, a man visits his friend, and shares with him a strange tale: the daughter of a distinguished family of medical practitioners has been pregnant for twenty-one months without giving birth – a pregnancy that was discovered soon after her husband inexplicably disappeared from a sealed room. Scandalous! Throw in Japanese folklore, Gothic dread, and way too much pop psychology, and you have The Summer of the Ubume.

Continue reading The Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku (1994) E

Nurk, by Ursula Vernon (2008) E

Date read: 2.18.09
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Nurk, a timid but sensible shrew, one day receives an urgent letter addressed to his famous grandmother Surka, the warrior, pirate queen, and general adventurer. Unfortunately, no one has seen Surka for seasons, and so Nurk packs Surka’s diary and some clean socks into his trusty snailboat, and heads off in search of adventure for the first time in his life. Dragonfly royalty in distress, perilous climes, and strange beasts aplenty await him.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ursula Vernon for years now, both of her vibrant, wildly imaginative artwork – she created the cover and interior illustrations for Nurk, of course – and of her equally weird and hilarious life and writing, as seen in her blog.

Nurk is her first mainstream published book, and is par for the Vernon course, combining a deeply practical, deeply likable hero (à la the protagonist of her long-running webcomic Digger, in which grandmother Surka is a character) with earthy wit, tooth-shattering cuteness, quick pacing, and occasional jolts of very enjoyable, very deeply creepy imagery. As a sampler: unripe salmon growing on trees; silent, voracious, cow-sized caterpillars…

Though for an adult reader, the plot is rather unmemorable (predictable twists, there-and-back-again structure), the individual elements are sufficiently weird and entertaining to make it worth the read. I do wish I knew some young persons of an age to be suitably gifted with it. Well, in a couple of years some of my cousins will be thereabouts, and in the meantime, it’s a quick, fun, slightly twisted adventure for readers of any age.

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Ursula Vernon

Bad Book Cover Fridays: Chapter the First

Being the inaugural post of a feature that Kakaner and I have wanted to launch, oh, for about as long as we’ve wanted to have a book blog on which to launch it. Bad Book Cover Fridays! A weekly injection of terrible, calculated to help us crawl that last, gasping distance to the weekend. Most of our subject matter will be fantasy and sci-fi, given our typical reading patterns – and yes, it is almost depressingly easy to make fun of genre covers in general, but some are really asking for it – but of course we’ll probably end up dipping our toes in other suspiciously murky bodies of water, too.

And now for exhibit A, the original American cover of Robin Hobb’s Mad Ship (1998):

Would you like a little homoerotic with that rearing sea serpent and straining, tufty-chested figurehead? Oh wait, the person hanging off of his rigging is actually a woman. She seems to be a good hand with that phallic I mean boathook though – plunge it straight into the pink, fleshy folds between Nessie’s lips, that’s it.

Continue reading Bad Book Cover Fridays: Chapter the First

Solar Storms, Energy Shortages, and an Overloaded Internet…

… are three reasons why Margaret Atwood believes we should keep the paper book.

There’s a little bit of a spat going on in the comments of Margaret Atwood’s blog concerning the digitalization of books. While many people do fervently agree with Atwood’s reasoning (well, if they’re reading the blog they probably enjoy reading good literature and therefore probably appreciate books), people are accusing those against ebooks for not realizing the vital advantages of the cyberbook.

No one is contesting the advantages, convenience, and necessity of digitalizing information. With online text we can use Ctrl + F and access all the information of the world using a 1-5 pound laptop. When it comes to books, the appeal of being able to download another form of media for free is too tantalizing, even for those who would prefer to read a physical book.

Atwood uses the reasons cited above as the pragmatic basis for the argument in support of books. Although these occurrences are unlikely and probably far from anyone’s list of immediate concerns, let’s see what does hit home. How many times have you accidentally scratched a CD, or come home to find your harddrive corrupted? Blue screen of death anyone? It doesn’t work quite the same for books They’re pretty durable– they can withstand many scratches and beatings, and I doubt anyone has come home to find that their book suddenly won’t open or the words have turned into some Wingdings jargon straight on the page.

Continue reading Solar Storms, Energy Shortages, and an Overloaded Internet…

“New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More”

Katherine Paterson has been appointed the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature:

“New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More” (via the New York Times)

Hooray! And a lovely, Matilda-ish quotation from Paterson:

As the daughter of missionary parents in China, she read her way through her parents’ library of children’s classics by A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame and Frances Hodgson Burnett. “That is where the friends were,” she said, evoking her lonely childhood.

Also, raise your hand if you cried when you read The Bridge to Terabithia. (On a side note, I’ve heard that the 2007 movie was actually quite good – it was simply very poorly marketed, as its trailers appeared to have confused both fans and those unfamiliar with it.) I also cried A Lot when I read The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jacob Have I Loved, and I’m pretty sure also during Of Nightingales that Weep.

– E

Most memorable reads of 2009

Plain and simple, our favorite reads of the year. What were yours?

Emera’s most memorable reads

In the order in which I read them, with review links where available, and blurbs where not. First, novels and graphic novels (with one manga series snuck in):

The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008)
The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb (1995-1997). My first epic high fantasy in forever; mediocre stylistically, but the plot, characters, and attention to detail are captivating.
Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner (1987). Swordplay, intrigue, and one of my favorite fictional couples. Exquisite, witty, bittersweet.
The Etched City, by K. J. Bishop (2003)
Battle Angel Alita, by Yukio Kishiro (1990-1995). Gadgets! Grunge! Explosions! Indestructible heroine, outrageously good art, and outrageous cyberpunk melodrama!
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (2008). Classic Gaiman goodness. Yearning, dark, delicate.
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-1987). Hmm, too obvious an inclusion? Almost relentlessly artistic, with unforgettable characters.
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (1928). Literarygasm! History, sexuality, and textuality.

Runners-up (enjoyed, but didn’t make as much of a personal impact) were Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2006) and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003).

And my favorite short fiction reads this year:

“Carmilla,” by J. Sheridan le Fanu (1872). Lesbian vampire + weird Gothic eroticism = yes please.
“Over the River,” by P. Schuyler Miller (1941). Beautiful concept, beautiful execution. One of my favorite vampire stories; masterful use of perspective.
“Unicorn Tapestry,” by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980). Same as the above. Great characters and atmosphere.
“Anna,” by Isaac Marion, illus. Sarah Musi (2008)
“Stone Animals,” by Kelly Link (2004)
“My Death,” by Lisa Tuttle (2004)
“This is Now,” by Michael Marshall Smith (2004)
“Exhalation,” by Ted Chiang (2008). Both meticulous and quietly wondrous.
“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2008). Playful and luminous.

Hm, somehow that came out to 9 each. Overall, I read 59 books – not too shabby. Also, 2009 was a big year in that Kakaner and I started seriously book-collecting. And – clearly – we started The Black Letters. Bookish goals for the coming year are to continue to attack both of those pursuits with vim and vigor – and, for me, to start using Librarything again to track my acquisitions. Happy 2010!

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Kakaner’s most memorable reads

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) Robert Heinlein. An obvious classic for well-known reasons.
Requiem for a Dream (1978) by Hubert Selby Jr. A slip-through-your-fingers look at life for those caught in the downward spiral of drugs and addiction. Jarring, haunting, dark, and a harsh reality.
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden (2006) by Catherynne Valente. The meta-fairy-tale to end all meta-fairy-tales. It’s exactly what I suspect it set out to achieve– enchanting and breathtaking.
The City & The City (2009) by China Mieville
Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft (2008) by Joe Hill. A masterful graphic novel debut that is just strange enough to mess with your head.
Kick-Ass Vol 1 (2010) by Mark Millar. Loads of fun and full of potential– yet another anti-superhero miniseries.

Other enjoyables but not overwhelmingly impactfuls: The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Waters and The Icarus Girl (2006) by Helen Oyeyemi.

The short fiction:

“Exhalation” (2008) by Ted Chiang
“Urchins, While Swimming” (2006) by Catherynne Valente. Beautiful modern interpretation of the rusalka myth.
“304 Adolph Hitler Strasse” by Lavie Tidhar. The funniest (and most offensive) thing I’ve read in a while– Holocaust fanfiction anyone?
“The Third Bear” by Jeff VanderMeer. Powerful and provoking.
“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Mattheson. An intense, short tale of a mutant locked in a basement– a horrifying classic.

I am deeply embarrassed to admit I read a painfully small amount of books in 2009. Precisely 27. Compared to the 91 I read in 2008 and 100+ in 2007, this is like a punch to the gut. Usually Decembers are marked by furious reading, but seeing as I had no cushy winter break or finals period this year, December was marked by no reading. I’m going to chalk it up to graduating, finding my own place, working full time, and starting Real Life.

Resolutions? READ. MORE. Consistently update TBL. Make enough headway on Bokoclient to produce a passable GUI. And slow down on the book purchasing. Look out for an enticing upcoming book giveaway! And Merry New Years!

Additions to the horde

Since gifts inevitably and wonderfully mean new books. (Also, when it comes to books, I feel like there’s not that much of a difference between a horde and a hoard.)

Two pocket-sized, appropriately wintry, deliciously fully-cloth-bound-with-color-plate volumes of adorable. (Am I gushing too obviously? They really are that adorable, though.)

Neil Gaiman‘s Odd and the Frost Giants – didn’t even know it had finally been issued in a hardback edition! I spotted these for 50% off at Barnes and Nobles when snooping around with Kakaner and a couple of other friends, and predictably, both Kakaner and I ended up snagging copies.

Philip Pullman’s Once Upon a Time in the North – I love these little additions to the His Dark Materials universe. The actual story included in the last volume, Lyra’s Oxford, wasn’t too impressive (though it did hint at some awfully interesting sequel possibilities), but the presentation is impossible to resist – cloth binding, woodcut illustrations, fold-out maps and inserted postcards full of sneaky references for the HDM-obsessed… Books with personality and foldy-slidey bits, yes please.

Continue reading Additions to the horde

Antibodies, by David Skal (1988) K

Date Read: 6.27.09
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

I have finally waded out of a merciless sea of deadlines, grad apps, visiting parents, and other such nonsense to bring you a review of scifi crack in book form. So I apologize for my contribution to any recent TBL droughts.

Antibodies is the story of a pale anorexic woman, Diandra, who nurtures an unhealthy desire to become a machine. She is true in every way to the Antibodies cult– starving and draining the blood from her body to entirely prepare herself for mechanical integration. However, circumstances prevent her from completing her transition smoothly. She is captured by the notorious hedonistic psychiatrist Julian Nagy who runs a therapy clinic to heal, and eventually exploit, those of the cult. At the same time, her only guides through this process are vague and ominous directions from the Antibodies authority while contending with the resentment of the public.

I discovered this book through a Coilhouse link Emera flinged my way over a year ago and behold, it bobbed up to the surface of my 100+ TBR pool and I have actually managed to read it. Well, I was pretty hooked after Coilhouse described it as a “deeply disturbing, brutally unsparing book” which sounded right up my twisted alley.

Don’t be fooled by the summary. Antibodies certainly sounds fascinating– a solid mix of cyberpunk and cult fantasy with a generous dollop of scifi fetish braincandy– but it is altogether entirely horrific. It takes many elements of our current society and exaggerates and stretches them into a possible future universe in which people worship and want to become the technology they have created. The depravity of humanity is evident as its constituents are each proponents of some broken part of our very system. Let’s see what Coilhouse has to say:

That’s what Antibodies is, at its heart: a horror novel. There are no heroes here, only the deluded and the ruthlessly predatory. But for all its Gran Guignol touches, Antibodies hits home. In a rush to the future, it’s easy to forget or ignore the wreckage that draws in the alienated and insane into any dream that offers them easy transcendence from their previous lives.

Continue reading Antibodies, by David Skal (1988) K

“Coppola’s Dracula,” by Kim Newman (1997) E

Date read: 10.04.09
Read from: Infinity Plus
Reviewer: Emera

Will I ever tire of vampires? It seems unlikely, at this rate. Kim Newman‘s novella “Coppola’s Dracula” was my first foray into his post-vampire-epidemic alternate history. Here he reenvisions Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Dracula-style.

Protagonist Kate Reed is an Irish vampire – a contemporary of Bram Stoker, in fact – who’s been brought on the set of Coppola’s bloated, luckless production as a consultant, and bears witness to disaster after near-disaster as filming staggers onward. Interspersed with her coolly amused observations are excerpts of key scenes from the script, all paralleling Apocalypse Now (and Dracula, of course) and sharply rendered in Newman’s clipped, punchy, darkly humorous style.

I would probably have appreciated the central conceit more had I been more of a film buff, but I still found the parallels clever and entertaining, and Newman is deeply meticulous in imagining his alternate universe. However, the novella left me rather cold beyond that – though Kate is well-developed as a character, she’s so dispassionate that the story lacks emotional effect, other than conveying a lingeringly tragic kind of Cold-War disaffection. Well, that’s probably deliberate, so count that as another stylistic success for the story.

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Kim Newman

An unexpected holiday present for publishing

“Dreamy Sales of Jung Book Stir Analysis” (har)

Absolutely fascinating NYTimes article about how a hefty, pricy (list price $195), luxuriously crafted (“the book is partly hand-bound, uses two different kinds of custom-made paper and is printed in Italy”) reproduction of Carl Jung’s illustrated, hand-written The Red Book has been selling astoundingly well. It’s sold out in many locations and has garnered three more printing runs, despite understandably low initial expectations for its success. The article is a rather heartening read, even if it’s not indicative of the book industry’s success in general. Also, the book looks gorgeous, needless to say.

Alas, though, for Carl Jung, because when I think of him now, the first thing that comes to mind is his appearance as Tiny Carl Jung in the hilarious, bizarre nerdfest of a webcomic that is Dresden Codak.

I hope everyone is having a happy holiday!

– E