Books Read in 2022 - Part 2

More books!

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Noir (Christopher Moore)

Christopher Moore did an interview during the first wave of the pandemic where his publisher hooked him up to a remote camera and he talked about his books, and one of the things he said was that if he were going to do a sequel to any of the books that were out there at the time he’d probably write it for this one. And he did. So to get myself back into the story I decided to read this again, because there is never a bad time to read a Christopher Moore novel. This is an odd combination of genres set in 1947 San Francisco – a “perky noir” in Moore’s own words – and it features all of the things that make Moore’s books fun to read: tight plots, interesting characters, a general sense of melancholy underneath it all, and laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue. Nobody does dialogue like Christopher Moore. This is the story of Sammy, a bartender at a dive bar run by Sal (a lowlife). He has a good friend in Chinatown (Eddie Moo Shoes) and another (Lone Jones) in the black neighborhood of San Francisco at the time, and if the cultural attitudes are more 1947 than 2022 well that’s the story isn’t it? Into Sammy’s life walks a dame – Stilton, otherwise known as The Cheese – and from there the story spirals out into Bohemian Grove, federal Men In Black, and the subject, which is where it really gets weird. It moves along quickly and while Moore is never afraid to do bad things to characters it ends mostly if not entirely well, as you know it will. If you haven’t read Moore, you need to.

Razzmatazz (Christopher Moore)

This story follows the continuing adventures of Sammy and the Cheese, though she is given more agency here and Moore widens his world out to show off some of the minor characters from Noir. Uncle Ho (“Catfucker”) has his backstory told here, for example – an immigrant from a poor Chinese village, he ends up as a member of the fighting tongs in San Francisco (“Big Town”) in 1906 but eventually he gives that up to protect an enslaved prostitute (who, it turns out, is surprisingly handy with a hatchet). Meanwhile Sammy, Lone, and Eddie are joined by Mabel (a brothel owner), Jimmy Vasco (who owns the drag king bar frequented by lesbians such as Stilton’s friend Myrtle – the variety of sexual orientations of the people in Sammy’s life is a running theme throughout both of these novels), and a host of others. There are three plots in this book. One centers on the efforts of the new head of the SFPD Vice Squad to shut down all of the drag queen/king bars. The second is a string of murders that are happening around those bars, which somehow gets Sammy into the private eye business. And the third – a much larger story – involves both Uncle Ho and the Rain Dragon as well as the subject from Noir and a very large metal contraption welded together by Stilton, Myrtle, and Doris. All of this comes together at a Christmas party at a hospital for physically and mentally disabled children (mostly), and how you get to that point is an entertaining story indeed. This is full of Moore’s trademark snappy dialogue (the word “mook” actually does appear in this one) and melancholy undertones, and it is a darker story in many ways than the first book though not quite noir dark. It is a worthwhile follow up to Noir.

The Last Dragonslayer (Jasper Fforde)

Continuing with my theme of “oh, look, there’s a sequel that I have just acquired so I need to go back and reread the first book(s) so I know what’s going on,” this is the first book in the story of Jennifer Strange – foundling, almost-sixteen-year-old, manager of the Kazam Mystical Arts Management company in the absence of the Great Zambini, and, eventually, the Last Dragonslayer of the title. Jennifer lives in a Britain that is divided into any number of states and referred to as “the Ununited Kingdom” and resides in the Kingdom of Hereford, which is near Wales. In this Britain magic is just a skilled trade and a declining one at that. King Snodd IV is a greedy, grasping twit eager to make war on his neighbor, and the impending demise of the last dragon on his border between them – and the land rush this will create once the Dragonland is opened for human settlement – is his opportunity. Jennifer must navigate the perfidy of the adult political world while dealing with the prickly personalities of Kazam’s wizards and sorcerers, the burdens of being a foundling apprenticed out with no real rights or recourses, and the responsibilities given to her by her new position. As always Fforde populates the book with wordplay, throwaway ideas, and a rather skewed but infectious sense of fun. It’s a YA novel and as such focuses on the coming of age of the protagonist, but in Jennifer Strange Fforde has created a strong, intelligent, and humane character who can handle it. Mostly. And it is that “mostly” that makes her such a great character.

The Song of the Quarkbeast (Jasper Fforde)

Every victory leads to the next crisis as Jennifer Strange and Kazam will find out in their continuing adventures. She has Kazam moving into the field of civil engineering in order to make some money, but their foes at iMagic and in the royal palace are not going to make that easy. At the beginning of the story the wizards find a missing ring for a client that Jennifer does not trust, a ring that ultimately comes back at the end as a key part of the story. In between there is a magical challenge between the Amazing Blix and iMagic on the one hand – aided by the perfidy of King Snodd – and Kazam on the other. The quarkbeasts figure into this in odd ways, and the Great Zambini remains just as out of reach as before. At the center of it all, as always, is beleaguered, resourceful Jennifer Strange, who just might make it to the end of her indentured servitude if all goes well.

The Eye of Zoltar (Jasper Fforde)

Picking up pretty much exactly when The Song of the Quarkbeast finished, the story of Jennifer Strange takes a rather darker turn in the third installment of The Chronicles of Kazam. Two threads intertwine, the first of which being a visit to the Royal Palace where the heir to the throne – Princess Shazza, the very definition of a spoiled brat – gets transferred by the Queen into the body of a serving girl named Laura Scrubb and sent into Jennifer’s service as a handmaiden in order to learn humility and responsibility. It turns out that the princess also has a remarkable aptitude for high finance, a skill that becomes useful in the second thread. The Mighty Shandar – the world’s most powerful wizard and a genuine nightmare of a person – demands that Jennifer find the Eye of Zoltar, a powerful magic talisman in the shape of a jewel, or he will slaughter the only two remaining dragons in the world and all of Kazam with them. The Eye, it turns out, was last seen in the Cambrian Empire (southern Wales in our world), where “jeopardy tourism” and a curiously civilized kidnapping industry are the main sources of income despite the high (and openly advertised) mortality rates of the former. Into this go Jennifer, Perkins (the new wizard from The Song of the Quarkbeast), and Laura. Along the way they meet Addie (their tour guide), Wilson (an ornithologist), Gabby (who is much harder to explain), Curtis and Ignatius (assholes), Ralph (the hapless companion of Curtis and Ignatius), and any number of threats, dangers, and legendary or semi-legendary creatures. When the story ends all is in chaos, and there is much restoration to be done. It’s a wild ride, as anyone who has read Jasper Fforde’s books would expect, but a fun one.

The Great Troll War (Jasper Fforde)

Things are looking grim in the Ununited Kingdoms. At the start of this final installment of The Chronicles of Kazam, the Trolls have invaded and have rolled largely unopposed through most of the UK, with the help of the Mighty Shandar. The kingdoms have fallen, most of the wizards of Kazam are dead, and humans have been pushed into the far reaches of Cornwall to mount a desperate defense behind a trench full of buttons, which apparently the Trolls cannot bear. Princess Shazza, Jennifer Strange, Tiger Prawns, and the Quarkbeast have at their disposal a force of Marksmen (who paint marks on roads) and Worriers (sometimes spells have typos and you can’t always get warriors), two juvenile dragons, and a vegetarian Troll. Shandar’s plans are greater and more malevolent than they think, however, and when all is revealed their situation will grow even more dire. There is a real melancholy behind this story, one that squarely acknowledges the fact that the good guys don’t always win and even if they do the costs may be higher than anyone could dare predict. Characters meet their fates in this book, and while there are funny bits – Fforde himself makes a couple of uncredited appearances as a random science fiction author tasked with figuring out what the strangest possibilities facing Jennifer and her crew could be, for example, and one of those appearances is laugh out loud funny if you have followed Fforde’s career and his bouts of writer’s block – the overall tone of this story is one of bittersweet defiance and plans long laid coming to fruition at the expense of dreams long held. Jennifer does find out who she really is and who her family was, though. At least Fforde gave her that. It’s a thoughtful and worthwhile end to the series, if not quite the comic one that might have been predicted.

Bone (Jeff Smith)

     Out from Boneville

     The Great Cow Race

     Eyes of the Storm

     The Dragonslayer

     Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border

     Old Man’s Cave

     Ghost Circles

     Treasure Hunters

     Crown of Horns

When Lauren was in early elementary school she developed a fondness for graphic novels, which seemed like a good thing to encourage. She loved the BabyMouse books, for example. So when I saw the complete Bone series at the Scholastic Book Fair I figured it was something she’d enjoy. Turns out it is really a YA series rather than a series for younger kids so she never quite got into it, and when she cleaned out her room to go to college I ended up with the series. It’s a lot of fun. At the very beginning the three Bone cousins – Fone Bone, Phoncibal (Phoney) Phone, and Smiley Bone, who all look like the ghosts of Pogo in a less detailed and more rounded kind of way – have been thrown out of Boneville thanks to one of Phoney’s inevitable scams and are wandering in exile. Eventually they find themselves in the Valley, where they meet Thorn, Gran’ma Ben, Lucius, Ted the bug, the Red Dragon, and many other folks. For long and complicated reasons their arrival sets off the final battle of a long war between the Valley folk and the dragons on the one side and the Rat Creatures (sometimes referred to as the Hairy Men), the Lord of the Locusts, and possibly (it’s unclear) a giant mountain lion named Roque Ja on the other. Smith keeps his cast of characters clear and distinct – each has their own personality – and the artwork is lovely. But the story is the most compelling part, and he tells it well.

Bone: Rose (Jeff Smith)

The problem with prequels is that you know they’re not going to end well, because if they did the plot of the main series wouldn’t exist. This prequel tells the story of Rose – Gran’ma Ben – and how things got to where they were in the Valley when the Bone cousins stumbled into it. It’s the story of Briar and the Lord of the Locusts, of the Red Dragon and the River Dragon, and how choices made out of compassion can go awry in the long run. In the end it drops you off some time before the events of the main series, but the gaps are fairly easy to bridge. The storytelling and art are up to the high standards of the Bone series, but the lettering is in a slightly different and significantly less readable font.

Bone: Tall Tales (Jeff Smith)

This is an origin story in a way, though sufficiently far before the main story that the connections aren’t really obvious. It’s told as a campfire story, with Smiley Bone and Bartleby leading a small group of campers into the woods and then telling the tall tales of the title. The tales center around Big Johnson Bone, the root’n’est, toot’n’est Bone in the land, and they have a general flavor of Daniel Boone or similar tall tale heroes of the Old American West. There’s a tale covering Big Johnson’s birth, wherein he fights Old Man Winter within the day. There’s another covering an eating contest. But the longest story is how he fought the Rat Creatures and founded the trading post that eventually became Boneville – the town that Fone, Phoncibal, and Smiley got thrown out of at the beginning of the main story. It’s a story of outsized deeds, over the top narration, derring do, improbable acts, and ultimate victory, as such tall tales generally are, and you can see it being told over a campfire.

The Sandman (Neil Gaiman)

     Books 1 through 4

Many years ago my mother gave me a literary biography of Neil Gaiman for my birthday, which I started to read but quickly put down again when it became clear that none of it would make sense to someone who hadn’t read The Sandman. But I have never been much for graphic novels – I read the words and skim lightly over the art and that always struck me as a waste – and even if I wanted to read the entire collection, all 75 issues of it, it was neither within my price range nor at my library. So I stuck the book on a shelf and resigned myself to keeping it as a memento. But when Netflix came out with a television series based on the comic I figured they’d publish a new and affordable collection, and my sense of the opportunism of American capitalism was right on the button here. This is the story of Morpheus, the Lord of the Dream, one of the seven Endless along with his siblings Death, Delirium, Despair, Destiny, Destruction, and Desire. Originally a minor DC Comic character, Gaiman was given free rein to reinvent him for a new series and the end result was one of the landmarks of the genre, a long and often phantasmagorical swirl of a story of death, dreams, power, and madness, and perhaps above all the power of story. It took me a while to get into it – the first arc is not an easy introduction and it lasts for nine issues – but it gets clearer as you go, and it builds on itself as former characters and events return to new prominence and meaning. My favorite stories were the arc of the Worlds’ End, where travelers stranded at an otherworldly inn by a reality storm trade stories to pass the time, and the occasional issues involving Hob Gadling who becomes immortal, especially the epilogue story of Wake, where Hob muses on death and history having no small knowledge of both. The Sandman is not a series for the faint of heart – it deals squarely with disturbing and mature themes and has a lot to say about identity and our place in the cosmos if you are open to seeing it – but it is astonishingly well done. I can see why this was so popular and it was definitely worth reading, though now that I have finished this and the Bone series I suspect I will return to the world of words rather than images.

Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, & Stephen Bissette, with a Foreward by Terry Pratchett)

There is a fine line between a literary biography and a fanzine and this book pretty much straddles it. The authors are perhaps Gaiman’s biggest fans – rather an achievement, given the devotion that Gaiman’s fans have for him – and their adoration permeates every page. On the one hand they had an incredible amount of access to their hero and they filled this rather long book with pretty much every story they could find about everything he ever wrote, thought about writing, or tried to write but got dissuaded out of somehow. On the other hand, it does get uncomfortably fawning at times. But there is a lot of useful information in here, for all that. This is the book mentioned above, the one my mother gave me as a birthday present back in 2008 when it was published, and the first thing I figured out about it was that if I hadn’t yet read The Sandman I really shouldn’t read it as it gave detailed synopses of every issue. So having now read The Sandman, in I plunged. Those synopses were in fact very helpful it turns out, as I discovered many things about The Sandman stories that I had missed. There’s stuff in here about every comic book or series Gaiman wrote, most of his short stories, all of the novels up to that point, and a surprisingly detailed account of some legal battles he fought over the rights to a particular comic character, as well as some biographical material and a lengthy and fascinating interview with the man himself. It’s a book designed for fans who are more hardcore than I am, but it was a gift and I wanted to finish it. And now I have.