Freaks and Geeks

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga

The Fanboy is a Bendis-obsessed comic book-loving maladjust with one friend in the entire school (really, more like half a friend since Cal is a lacrosse player who usually hangs out with popular jocks). The Goth Girl is Kyra, a Sandman-obsessed, somewhat unstable chain smoker. They meet when Kyra takes pictures of Fanboy being beaten up in gym class, and from there, embark on a friendship that is by turns, confusing and exciting.

Fanboy is working on a graphic novel (that has, I might add, a very cool-sounding plot involving an ordinary woman who can make people's hopes, dreams, and fears take corporal form), and he's hatching the following plot:

1. Take graphic novel to comics convention and show it to Bendis.
2. ???
3. Profit!

From the plot, you'd expect giddy fun, but the book is quite a bit darker than that. Kyra shows Fanboy scars from where she's cut her wrists, and Fanboy entertains more than a few Trenchcoat Mafia daydreams. bookshelves of doom's problems with Fanboy and Goth Girl are completely on target; however, there were a few things about the book that impressed me enough to recommend it anyway:

1. Lyga's portrayal of high school bullying is frighteningly realistic, and his characters aren't "outsiders" in the typical misunderstood, secretly super-cool way. They are really losers. They're frustrating, annoying, and damaged by the abuse heaped on them by their peers; however, it's surprisingly easy to relate to them, and sometimes, even to like them.

2. In lesser YA books of the dark variety, the worst thing that can possibly happen will. If real suburban life was like a YA novel, no one would get out alive. In the hands of a lesser writer, Fanboy would shoot up the school and Goth Girl would OD on sleeping pills. But Lyga realizes that saying you want to do something and actually doing it are two different things. Lyga's characters talk about a lot of hot button issues, almost casually. However, Lyga is more interested in exploring his characters than in manipulating them into living out 20/20 nightmares. Sure, real tragedies happen in high schools, but not every ugly adolescent thought ends in tragedy.

3. Outrageous Bendis cameo.

So, despite the whole "goth girl/comic book guy books are, like, so 2003" thing, the book has an interesting, fresh take on these kinds of characters that's worth checking out.

Stocking Seams and Lipstick Traces

The Song Is You by Megan Abbott

I don't usually recommend books I haven't read yet, but based on the subject matter and the strength of Abbott's previous book, Die A Little, this seems as surefire as Clive Owen playing Philip Marlowe.

The book was inspired by the real-life disappearance of Jean Spangler, an aspiring Hollywood starlet. Her purse was discovered in Griffith Park, and in it, a note reading, "Kirk – Can’t wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work out best this way while mother is away…" Spangler was rumored to be linked with Kirk Douglas, and there was some suspicion that she was pregnant at the time of her disappearance. The case also included an ex-husband, a jilted lover, and gangsters, and was never solved. You can read all about it here.

If you need more convincing, check out Die A Little, a Los Angeles noir worth its weight in shell casings. Lora King is a chaste Pasadena schoolteacher who lives with her brother, Bill, a rising star in the district attorney's office. Bill falls in love with Alice Steele, a costumer at a film studio, and for a time, Lora falls a little bit in love with her, too. The women become the best of friends, hosting parties, sneaking out for drinks, and exchanging confidences. But gradually, Lora begins to catch glimpses of Alice's shady past. At first, she fears for her brother, but as Lora becomes more and more obsessed with tracking down Alice's secrets, her own life is put in jeopardy.

A dark, seamy, lurid little piece of heaven. I can't wait to read Abbott's new book, and am kicking myself for missing her reading last Saturday at The Mystery Bookstore with Charlie freakin' Huston, of all people. Grrr...

The Soundtrack of Your Life

Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song At a Time by Rob Sheffield

During our courtship, Mr. Potts had a morning drive-time show on the Memphis City Schools radio station. The station's format was crap adult contemporary, but he started sneaking in songs he thought I'd like hearing on my way to work. The station was really so awful that for all he knew, I was the only one listening to his playlist. However, these morning love letters to me developed a cult following among the Memphis hipster working stiff contingent, as well as some virulent detractors.*

People who love records have better relationships, because their love lives get soundtracks. And I'm sure that most of those people have great songs they can never listen to again or bad songs that they've put on pedestals simply because the music gets all tangled up with the relationship. When someone makes you a mix tape, it means "here's some music I thought you'd like" on the surface, but it can also mean anything from "let's be friends,"** to "I have a major crush on you," to "this is my freaking soul laid bare."

Love Is a Mix Tape is a memoir about Sheffield's wife, Renee, who died of a pulmonary embolism in 1997 at the age of 31. It's about how they met, and about the years they spent writing freelance music articles, DJing at the local college station, going to shows, and being young, broke, and in love. And making a lot of mix tapes.

Each chapter begins with a mix tape playlist, some of which Sheffield made, some Renee made, some they made for each other -- music for falling asleep to, doing the dishes to, having a party to, etc. Sheffield's stories about Renee are tender, sweet, and funny, but the stories caught up with music they shared are the best ones.

Whether Renee is explaining how all girls who like The B-52s are either Kate girls or Cindy girls ("Like how all boys are either Beatles or Stones boys. You like them both, but there's only one who's truly yours"), or making up new lyrics to Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" (Out on the road today, I saw a SubPop sticker on a Subaru/A little voice inside my head said, yuppies smell teen spirit too), it's easy to see through these stories how special she was, and how much Sheffield loved her.

Of course, the book's subject matter is incredibly sad; however, the book is more a celebration of Renee's life than a meditation on her death. Sheffield tastefully blends humor with tragedy, and sweetness with sorrow.

If you like music writing with an intensely personal bent like Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live, this book is for you.
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* e.g. the woman who called in to complain about "that man with the awful voice butchering that nice Rod Stewart song" and the person who demanded to speak to a supervisor after, Elvis Costello-style, Potts pulled the plug on a Celine Dion song and said on the air, "there's no reason to play this song here."
** Oddly, I have a "let's be friends" mix tape that actually became my favorite "doing the dishes" tape.

Red Dirt Girls

On Agate Hill by Lee Smith

I bet that even Lee Smith's grocery lists are good reading. Some of them would make you feel like you were outside in springtime (orange sections; basil; 2 pomegranates; brie). Some would be straightforward (wine, fashion magazine, chocolate ice cream, pack of Marlboro Lights), and others would require you to put the pieces together yourself, however weird or disturbing the tale might be (e.g. paint thinner, diapers, hearts of palm, veal).

Smith's writing falls into two basic groups. The first involves stories of modern southern women questioning the tenets of southern womanhood, to hell with what the Junior League has to say about it. Strong, emotionally complex, charming books -- like Barbara Kingsolver meets Steel Magnolias. In the other variety, Smith writes historical fiction that conveys both the weight of the past and the arbitrary breeziness of the choices that determine it. As she did in Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith demonstrates in On Agate Hill that a life story is bigger than a single life. But no matter what she's writing, there is always a story there, and it is always a corker.

Following the success of Smith's bestselling The Last Girls, On Agate Hill was released fairly quietly this fall. However, the riveting storytelling here stands up to some of Smith's best work.

The book begins with Molly Petree, orphaned during the Civil War, and living with her dying uncle in a crumbling plantation. It's a slice of the Reconstruction Era that calls to mind Gone With the Wind without the simplistic idealism and racism of that book. Later portions of the book follow Molly to a rigorous boarding school led by an unstable religious zealot and her lecherous husband; then, to her unlikely marriage and life in the backwoods; by the book's end, Molly has faced everything from stillborn babies to murder charges.

A thoroughly absorbing read - I didn't want it to end. If you like contemporary southern fiction, and haven't read Lee Smith, well, then you can't really say you like contemporary southern fiction because you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

57th Most Literate City... Hmph!*

It's a good PR week for our respective institutions.

Susan Patron, a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, is awarded the 2007 Newbery Medal for The Higher Power of Lucky

USC sociologist Barry Glassner is interviewed at Salon about his new book, The Gospel of Food.

We may not know all the best people, but we can at least say we work with them.
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* It's a fact.

They Say It Can't Be Done

ScreenHead posted this list of the Top 13 Unfilmable Novels a few days ago, so enjoy if you haven't already.

In addition to the books, they also name the director who might could pull it off, for example:

Unfilmable: Catcher in the Rye
If Anyone Can Do It: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

Not to quibble with them, but I think I'd pick David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls) over the Coen Brothers for Dunces. That's just me.

A Tenenbaum in Tennessee

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Colin Singleton is a teenage prodigy who has just graduated from high school. He has also just realized the difference between a prodigy and a genius ("Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.") He has also just been dumped for the 19th time by a girl named Katherine. Not the same Katherine -- nineteen different Katherines.

To roust Colin from his deep funk, his best friend, Hassan, proposes a road trip. And thus, the socially maladjusted brain and the overweight underachiever find themselves in Gutshot, Tennessee*, drawn to this particular exit by an unlikely road sign that reads, "See the Grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand -- The Corpse That Started World War I."

Before they know it, Colin and Hassan find themselves with a place to stay for the summer, a job collecting oral histories, and a mathematical equation that predicts the course of relationships along a Dumper/Dumpee continuum. And of course, a great deal of the obligatory YA novel self-exploration and soul-searching to be done... although done in an illuminating and not at all sappy sort of way.

An Abundance of Katherines is excellent. It's smart and funny, filled with thorny, yet endearing characters, and addresses big issues with a light touch.

If you liked...: King Dork by Frank Portman or Boy Proof by Cecil Castellucci, this book is for you.
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* I wonder if this town name was inspired by Bucksnort, Tennessee, a place I once stopped on a road trip sheerly because of the name.