James York Glimm: FLATLANDERS AND RIDGERUNNERS- FOLKTALES FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF NORTHERN PENNSYLVANIA

I can understand, first of all, why this book would seem rather uninteresting to, well, most people. Northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains aren't exactly the Alps. Or the Rockies. Or the Adirondacks. Or the Catskills. They're not even, let's face it, the Poconos. Truth be told, they're ignored by most of the world, and contain (I'm pretty sure) all of Pennsylvania's least-populous counties. But they also contain my grandmother and various other relations, living and dead, on my mother's side of the family, so to me at least, there's a reason to be interested in this region. Other things contained in the six counties profiled by Flatlanders and Ridgerunners folklorist James York Glimm? The birthplace of Stephen Foster, Camptown Racetrack, Mansfield University and the first drive-in fast food restaurant I ever ate at. Still, I can see why you probably haven't read, considered reading, heard of, or considered hearing of this book. It's not J.K. Rowling, I admit it. But still--it's really, really good. Great, even. In fact, I would say it's (and this isn't a trifling statement, although it might sound like one) one of the absolute best collections of American folklore I've ever read. Glimm, a Long Islander (and thus a flatlander) who wound up teaching at Mansfield and thus living in this region, really got to know the people who told him these stories (they're the ridgerunners), and made sure that their voices came through in these stories. One of the most interesting aspects of this book: he includes a section for true stories, really momentous ones that have been told and retold and no doubt fictionalized to some extent, but that can still be held up against the facts and judged to be, relatively speaking, true. What really gets me about these stories is, once again, something that won't really apply to anybody reading this--they sound just like the stories my grandmother tells. Apparently, I've got some ridgerunner in me. Enough, at least, to rate this book an A+.

Neal Adams: THE "DEADMAN" COLLECTION

It fills me with a great sense of pride to announce that I have, without a doubt, decided on the identity of my all-time favorite comic book artist: Mr. Neal Adams. My (conscious) introduction to Adams came earlier this summer (you'll find it profiled on this blog, actually) with his work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, was followed up a short time afterward with a (not profiled on this blog, because I forgot to) three-volume collection of his Batman work, and has most recently manifested itself in my completion of The "Deadman" Collection, a compilation of some of Adams's best work. And that, my friends, was a very long and complicated sentence that needn't have been so long or complicated. But you've got the story now, and I can start talking about Deadman for a second. Deadman is the name of a DC Comics superhero who happens to be, brace yourself, a dead man. Boston Brand, famed aerialist, is shot and killed by the mysterious "Hook." He dies, but doesn't quite die, no...instead, he's allowed to stalk the earth and seek revenge on his killer, thanks to the intercession of eastern deity Rama Kushna. You've called it already: no, this is not your typical superhero series. But it gets better: Deadman can't even touch the various evil-doers he must thwart as he continues his quest. All he can do is inhabit the bodies of living people, controlling their actions for a time. It is, at the very least, an extremely unlikely superhero concept--but in the hands of Neal Adams, it turned out to be a surprisingly good one. Adams's art helps to drive the story: it's realistic enough that you actually can suspend your disbelief in a story that requires quite a bit of disbelief to be suspended, and nice to look at on top of that. This whole collection, in fact, is really quite a beautiful volume (it's my father's, not mine; my father, who sells books, owns a lot of nice ones; I, who only buy them, own a lot of shoddy, used paperbacks that smell faintly of cigarettes, old men, or cat urine, if I'm lucky), and one I'd count myself lucky to own. And, since I haven't had a single bad word to say about it, I think I have to grade this on an A.

A list? A list.

Reading what I have to think about the-book-I-just-read-that-you're-probably-not-interested-in-reading-anyway might, I started to think not long ago, get a little bit old after a while. I mean, if you're not interested in myths/folklore, noir fiction or comic books, well, the last month-plus has been a little dry for you. But what else is there to do? For a time, I tried reprinting older book reviews I wrote whilst still a gainfully employed literary critic, but that, let's be honest, might be (is) much worse. Then there was that silly post about Marcel Proust's birthday--don't ask me why. So here's the Next New Thing, a list. A short list, but an informative one (I hope). And while it might be such a massive departure from writing about detectives, let the list of my Top Five Most Enjoyable Espionage Novels of all time serve as a harbinger of better, more different things to come:

1.) The Quiet American by Graham Greene: the biggest question, as I prepared this list, was exactly how three Englishmen--Graham Greene, John Le Carre and Eric Ambler--would fit into it. Only five books, why, I could've filled it up with...well, really with just any one of their works, but that wouldn't've done, would it now? In the end, it came down to a Greene-Le Carre contest for first. With the two books being compared so very, very different, however, there was no easy way to compare them, and I began to expand just what I was looking at. I wound up balancing each author's entire repertoire against the other's, and deciding that, on the whole, I'd rather wind up reading the wrong Graham Greene book than the wrong John Le Carre (without even considering the extremely high quality of Greene's more literary works). So what's this book about? Well, it's not your typical spy story, that's for sure. Set in 1950s Vietnam, it's probably the most artful depiction of a country on the brink of war that I've ever read. The ending doesn't resolve the tension, really (the ending, actually doesn't really come at the end; temporally, the book is a wonderful, wonderful mess), as it historically couldn't have done. Oh, and the quiet American himself? Not very quiet. Greene's a great writer, so there's plenty more, espionage and non-espionage, where this came from.

2.) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre: I once read a similar list in which Le Carre's entire Quest for Karla trilogy--this one, plus The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People--were considered as a single book (and thus topped the list, since the overall arc of this story is quite amazing). I thought about doing that, then decided against it, since what I really needed to do was weigh Tinker, Tailor against another of Le Carre's George Smiley books, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I must say, Spy, if only because it was my introduction to the author, nearly won; would've won, in fact, had this book not had the personal touch. John Le Carre, real name something like David Cornwell (his son writes under the pseudonym Nick Harkaway, and recently published an excellent post-apocolyptic novel called The Gone-Away World which was highly recommended by erstwhile Temple News literary critic Peter Chomko [that's me]), was one of the confidential British intelligence agents outed by the English-born Soviet agent Kim Philby (Philby's true story is quite amazing in itself, and was also drawn upon by Greene in his masterful The Human Factor). Tinker, Tailor is based on the extraordinary Philby scandal, albeit in a heavily fictionalized manner. Still: great, great stuff. Read this, and more, please.

3.) A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler: before there was a John Le Carre, there was a Graham Greene. Before there was a Graham Greene? Eric Ambler. Ambler's spy novels do, admittedly, lack some of the moral depth that you find in the more philosophical writing of the other two, but more than make up for that in pure action. An Ambler book reads like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and Coffin is the best of them that I've ever read. It all takes place, as I recall, on a boat (I should just Wikipedia it and check, but if I'm wrong, then you should read the book I'm describing), and involves at least one case of mistaken identity and that oh-so-common man who knew too much--only, when Ambler writes about him, that common man doesn't seem so common, after all. Does that make any sense? Think about any of the tropes that we're used to in our spy novels, our spy films, our spy whatever, and there's probably some primordial form lurking somewhere in Ambler. This guy wrenched the ho-hum "thrillers" of people like Erskine Childers and John Buchan into the here-and-now, and his books, while they've obviously aged, still have a certain immediacy about them lacking even in more contemporary, less well-written spy stories.

4.) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore: what's this? A comic book, on this list? You're leaving out James Bond (just pure drivel) and company for the sake of a comic book? Where's Len Deighton? Robert Ludlum? Tom Clancy? Fuck 'em all, I say, and this isn't really even a spy novel. Or is it? I'm not sure, but I'm going to start writing a little more intelligently, now. Take the cast, here--and I'll explain them, for those of you not quite up on your Victorian popular fiction. You've got Mycroft Holmes, first of all, who assembled the whole team. That's Sherlock's brother, much fatter but possibly even smarter (hard to say on the latter)? And Mina Harker, the boss of them all; she's the former Mina Murray, once infected by Dracula in that wonderful story. Dastardly Captain Nemo, he's a Jules Verne creation, from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Invisible Man is from, well, The Invisible Man, and Dr. Henry Jeckyll/Mr. Edward Hyde are equally self-explanatory. Alan Quatermain is perhaps the greatest of them all, or would be were it not for his age and late opium addiction; he's the hero of a number of H. Rider Haggard's fantastic high-colonialist boys' adventure stories, starting with She. And that, I think, is all of them. Interested, yet?

5.) The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe: you can't just read spy stories written from the good guy's perspective all the time. Every once in a while, you've got to sprinkle in one or two from the other side, and Jackal is the best of those I've read. It's set, as are many of Forsythe's works, in an interesting time period: post-World War II France, during the De Gaulle administration. Somebody's hired Europe's foremost assassin to take out De Gaulle, and the French find out about it. From then on out, it's a race to...something. The death, if you're rooting for the bad guy (and even though you know how the story's got to end, you can't help rooting for the bad guy. Call it the Wile E. Coyote effect), or the prevention-of-death, if you can't break out of your overly-moral mold. Forsythe writes popular thrillers, and this one is most definitely a popular thriller, written at a breakneck pace and without much regard for the higher literary elements. But it's also a damn good book, so what are you going to do, complain that it's not Henry James? Not everything should be Henry James, and I happen to think that this would be just the thing to read after you've plowed through (the also excellent, but very different) Portrait of a Lady.

This reminds me...

Just finished corresponding with Olen Steinhauer, author of the well-worth-reading The Tourist, soon to be a (hopefully high-grossing) George Clooney film. We talked about the book's successes and failures, as well as some of the espionage genre's most notable successes. Look for a list of my favorite spy novels in the next few hours or days, and chide me for my broken promises if you don't find one. Oh, and read The Tourist while you're at it, so that Mr. Steinhauer becomes fabulously wealthy and magnanimously decides to get me a job.

Kevin Crossley-Holland: THE NORSE MYTHS

Two years or so ago, while vacationing in southern Spain during a semester abroad (No: unlike most sentences beginning in such a fashion, this one will not go on to describe a memorable sexual encounter with a mysterious foreign woman, a life-altering bike trip, or an amusing marijuana-related anecdote. I apologize for the inconvenience), I started reading Edith Hamilton's classic Mythology. A short while later, I started drinking, which may have colored my recollection of this event somewhat, but upon my return to the US I was left with the impression that nothing makes good vacation reading like myths and folktales do. Flash forward to 2009, and you've got me puzzling over what sort of reading material I should bring to New York's Adirondack Mountains with me; since I'm already at work on the Norse myth-influenced American Gods (see previous entry), I grab my father's copy of Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Norse Myths. Result? I enjoy myself thoroughly. C-H (hyphenated names are too long to write out in full) brings these thirty-two myths to life in much the way Hamilton did so successfully with (mostly) the Greek and Romans, and The Norse Myths can hardly be described as a dry retelling of these age-old stories. It helps, of course, that Norse mythology is so character-driven, and its characters so vivid: Odin, Loki, Thor, and company are a lot of fun (at least up until Ragnarok), and many of the tales bristle with a humor that I'd have to guess C-H is responsible for midwifing through the often-dangerous process of translation. I'm currently looking for my own copy of this A+ book in Philadelphia's used bookstores, and would recommend it immediately to anybody looking for a comprehensive yet readable introducution to the Norse myths.

Neil Gaiman: AMERICAN GODS

It's difficult to describe Neil Gaiman's American Gods (the first of two books completed during a brief vacation in New York's Adirondack Mountain, a locale very conducive to reading about myths and folklore, for whatever reason) without giving anything away. As I prepared to write this review, I found myself thinking, "Well, that happens so early in the book...who can it hurt if I mention it?" The Answer, I'm afraid, is that I'm Not Sure. Each mild surprise in American Gods builds on those that come before it, so that even if you're able to guess how everything will pan out in the end (as I was, sort of?), it still comes as something of a shock to actually read it. That being said, the more you know about myths and folklore--Scandinavian, Egyptian, South Asian and American Indian in particular, although I can't even begin to guess at where the allusions I missed come from--the more you'll get out of this book. And that being said, even if you know next to nothing about any of that, I still think you'll at least get a pretty good time out of these almost-600 pages. I certainly did, so much so that one of the main characters' identities strongly influenced the choice of my next book (you can see it here already: Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Norse Myths). Just think about, say, that mythology class you might've taken in high school, but add of dash of something like, I don't know, Mad Max into the mix for good measure, and a layer of mystery on top of that. And all easy to read, very easy to read, and very entertaining. It's good stuff, really A+ stuff, and I'd recommend it to anyone both intelligent and unpretentious.

Jules Feiffer: THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES

In case you're especially slow to pick up on things, I like to read comic books. Yep, I know: who would've ever guessed it (answer: most people, sorry)? So did famed Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, only he wrote a book about it, whereas I only tend to mention it in passing on an obscure and pretty much entirely unread blog. Point is, he's legit, and I liked his book, The Great Comic Book Heroes. It's actually got a kind of misleading title; much more accurate would've been Jules Feiffer Reminisces About Reading Comic Books When He Was a Child, although that doesn't have quite the same ring to it. The book's short, and more autobiographical than anything else (although Feiffer does sidle into social commentary every now and then, and briefly into something that one might even describe as psychology), consisting mostly of reflections on what it was like reading a particular comic book rather than reflections on that comic book itself. Case in point: Feiffer mentions liking Hawkman, and talks about that for a little bit, using it as a lauching pad to talking about something else, but pretty much sums up Hawkman in, well, a single sentence (if I had the book here, I'd let you know just what that sentence was, but I don't; it had something to do with his being an Egyptian-tinged Superman knockoff, though). Did I agree with all of Feiffer's assessments? No, not at all. But I enjoyed reading every one, and that, I suppose, is what counts. So, let's say a B for this one.