reading notes

by Jenny Diski

ISBN: 1862072507

This is a collection of essays, most of which were written for the London Review of Books, and so masquerade as meandering book reviews. Diski sets up the reader to believe in meandering with her preface, saying that one “of the great pleasures for me of writing is starting out in the wrong direction and discovering how all points can eventually lead to home.”

I have read one of her novels (Like Mother) and I’ve looked for others from time to time, but as she is British, she is much better known in England than she is here and I haven’t had much luck finding them. Most of the books she uses for talking points in this collection I have not read. Many I still have no interest in reading; not because she trashed them, but because the pleasure in this book was in listening to her think, not in getting excited about new things to read.

Diski has some great lines and good points. Of Oliver Sacks, she says he “acts is the non-fictional conscience of imaginitive art.” She dismisses the idea of diagnosing dead artistic geniuses, setting aside the issue of whether or not Blake would have written the same way on lithium, and instead says “I would sooner know in what way we think we benefit from pathologising the extraordinary.” “The Illusory Game” is not based around a book, but in the idea of fame; she points out that the glare from the cameras “isn’t love, its wattage.” The only problem was the times I felt there were too many pages between moments like this.

Diski comes across as smart and more skeptical than cynical. For all that she reveals (a breakup, depression) she does maintain a distance from the reader — it may be all about her, but not really. The book is organized well, divided into five more or less thematic sections. Maybe it would have been better to dip in and out of this book, rather than read it straight through. I’m at a loss as to say exactly why that is, other than to say this is probably best read as an “in-between” book, the kind of thing that is a pleasant enough way to spend time but nothing to get revved up about. Look for it in the library and flip through it with a cup of tea.

by Neil Gaiman

illustrations by Dave McKean

ISBN: 0380807343

I did not consider black button eyes to be creepy or malevolent. Then I read this book, and marvelled at Gaiman’s ability to invest the everyday and ordinary with dark possibilities.

Coraline is a smart girl; she’s just moved into a new flat, the school year has yet to start, and she likes to explore. Like many smart kids, she’s bored. Her parents, ironically, are distant — though they work at home, telecommuting to the office.

Coraline’s world is small but well-drawn. There are her parents, the house, the surrounding grounds, and the neighbors and not much else. Well, there is the not-quite-right parallel world Coraline discovers when she unlocks the door to the bricked-up empty flat next door and the brick wall separating the units is gone.

The smallness of the world works because it doesn’t feel small; it feels right. Every detail fits, Gaiman makes things matter. For instance, he is wonderful with names. Coraline’s neighbors (who don’t listen well and call her Caroline) downstairs are retired actresses Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. They have dogs with names like Hamish. The upstairs neighbor is Mr. Bobo, and he is training a mouse circus. I mean, Mr. Bobo? Coraline thinks, “if she’d known his name was Mr. Bobo she would have said it every chance she got.” You know something has to be up with people like these.

The most interesting characters, as well as the spookiest ones, don’t have real names, though. There is the “other mother” and “other father” and the rats, and a disembodied right hand. There are also three souls and a cat. The only one with an explanation for namelessness is the cat. He tells Coraline: “Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

The story is a puzzle, one that isn’t all that hard to piece together (the book is aimed at younger readers, after all) but the joy of it — if I can use the word joy about a creepy book — is in seeing the whole picture and letting yourself get a bit scared along the way as the pieces fall into place. You have to want it to happen; you can’t steel yourself against it, just like you can’t insist time travel or space travel can’t exist if you are going to enjoy much science fiction.

The story is also a bit bigger than that. There is humor to balance the fear, for one thing: when her parents go missing, Coraline tells Miss Spink “I think I’ve probably become a single child family.” Then there are the menacing yet nursery rhyme-like “songs” of the rats, which go without a full explanation and get stuck in your head.

Dave McKean’s illustrations (generally appearing one per chapter, plus the cover art) are angular, and seem to vibrate with a strange energy. They strike a balance between showing story elements and leaving the best parts to the reader’s imagination.

I have to say, the only thing I didn’t really like about reading this book was that I waited for the paperback to come out. Sure, it was only $6, but I’m thinking the quality is such that it isn’t going to hold up over the long term. I’m going to have to keep an eye out for a used or remaindered hardcover copy, because this is one I’m going to want to pull down off the shelf and read again. Maybe even to a kid, who knows. Highly recommended.

by Timothy K. Beal

ISBN: 0415925886

This book is divided into two parts. The first half deals with monsters in religious texts — mainly the biblical stories about Behemoth and Leviathan, and their cultural antecedents. The second half is more concerned about monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, Lovecraft’s Cthulu) and their religious/spiritual implications.

Beal clearly loves what he is writing about. He knows what he is talking about, and he is more caught up in the excitement of exploring monsters than he is in sounding like an Important Academic. He occasionally gets a bit too invested in what seems to me like repetitive minutiae in his zeal, but that could just be because I wanted to hear more about different monsters.

This book is not meant as a compedium of monsters: Beal is more interested in the ideas generated by the appearance of monsters than he is in individual incarnations. He writes about the part chaos monsters play in theology, instead of writing about every strange beastie that might show up in the Bible. He looks at how Dracula plays into a sociocultural and religious framework instead of tracking down multiple supernatural creatures. I found his arguments compelling. His real question is “what do monsters mean?” and he spends this book laying out the answers as he sees them.

If you have an interest in monsters or in horror that goes deeper than B-movies, you will probably be interested in this book. I’ve never read Stoker’s Dracula or any of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories (both of which
Beal talks about) and now I think I will. Recommended.

by James Kochalka

ISBN: damn good question

When I met James Kochalka at MoCCA, he said that these diaries were his best work.

Being a Kochalka fan, I’m not going to argue with the man. (Though I will add that I really like his graphic novels.) This is the most recent volume of the diaries; it covers the time period January 2001 to January 2002. When I reviewed Volume Two, I said: “The continuing daily adventures of Magic Boy, Amy, Spandy, and assorted friends are amusing, strange, and recognizably true, sometimes all at once. If you enjoy peeking inside someone else’s head, you will probably like this.”

The same goes for this volume. Kochalka has an amazing ability to share his daily life in a way that doesn’t seem pretentious, arty for its own sake, or otherwise artificial: he sketches real life as he feels it. Maybe that is why reading his strips from September 11th and the days afterward didn’t bother me the way most things about September 11th do: he wasn’t trying to be profound, or arty, just real — confused, upset, then noting when he had that first day afterward when he was happy. (I remember that day for me; we went to see the musical based on Abba songs, Mama Mia.)

So in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit part of the reason I like his comics so much is because I recognize much of my own life in them. Not because our lives are so much alike — that isn’t the case — but because I identify with the feelings and weirdnesses Kochalka depicts in his daily strip.

Reading his diary creates this strange sensation of knowing but not knowing James Kochalka. The last panel in this volume finds Magic Boy worrying “what if it doesn’t love me” about the baby he thinks about having every day. This summer, I eagerly checked his website (American Elf, where the current daily sketch appears) to see if he was a father yet. The baby he worried about in theory in Volume Three is now real live Eli, elf baby.

I highly recommend the Sketchbook Diaries. Go ahead, get sucked in: it is tremendous fun to watch somebody do something that they clearly love doing, and are so good at.