Girl Detective

I wrote last week about how I read a Shakespeare play, since I was about to see a production of As You Like It, and wanted to read the play in advance, to have a cushion of understanding to underpin my viewing experience, though a good production will make the Shakespearean prose accessible by the acting.

We saw a show by the group Ten Thousand Things, which we love for several reasons. They offer ticketed performances, but also offer free community shows for low-income, rehab, and prison populations. They feel Shakespeare and live drama shouldn’t be a privilege. Back in Shakespeare’s day there were cheap seats, but those are hard to come by today, and easy to see why in the audience, where my husband and I, 40 and 45 respectively, were in the tiny minority of “young” people.

Ten Thousand Things also performs in the round in a big room, so there’s a square of seats around the central play area, which was in a big room, not a “proper” theater. The lights are up, the actors regularly break the fourth wall, and the audience is not just up close, but often IN the performance. They also use a minimum of creative props, which really differentiates the experience from seeing a movie, urging me to use my imagination to bring closure to the settings.

So, the text of As You Like It, then. The play has a lot of similarities to other comedies, especially Twelfth Night: cross dressing, banished Duke, pastoral setting. And of course, a bunch of marriages at the end.

Here are the lines you already know that you might not remember came from THIS play:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players. (2.7.140-1)

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4.1.97-9)

An interesting exploration of women, and gender roles, plus it’s fun and funny to boot.

I organize a local book group, and while researching our January book, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, I came across this blog entry by author Marlon James. I’d heard of him the year before when his Book of Night Women was a contender in the Tournament of Books and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Macalester, near where I live, and one of my writing friends is working with him in a writing program through the Loft. So picking one of his books to follow O’Connor’s Wise Blood seemed an obvious choice, and John Crow’s Devil, with its dueling preachers in 50’s Jamaica, made an excellent contrast.

No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, shed and tree, machine and vehicle with a blanket of gray. Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.

Gibbeah, named after a town in the book of Joshua from the Bible, is a tiny town on a small island, ridden with poverty and secrets. Two men occupy the foreground of the book, while two women support them in the background.

Pastor Bligh is also known as the Rum Preacher, though his drink of choice is whiskey. Yet they were “relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior…So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs.” The pastor is a drunk, but not a bad man. “In a town that preferred things black or white, grayness such as his was not welcome.”

It’s no surprise, then, when the villagers are swayed by the appearance of Apostle York, “the other, who led them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness” and who “came like a thief on a night colored silver.” He preaches fire and brimstone, and literally kicks Bligh out of his own church.

York is abetted by Lucinda, whose history of abuse and ill treatment makes her worship of the Apostle easier to understand. Bligh is taken in by a widow who feeds him and nurses him as he detoxes from alcohol.

Mr Garvey is the town’s owner, “new kind of Massa”, a “black bastard” who “still had a birthright to money.” Prior to the conflict, Garvey appeared at the church, five mornings a year plus at “funerals of those of stature or those who died under tragic circumstances. Funeral was spectacle in Gibbeah.” Once York appears, Garvey is nowhere to be seen. Is he awaiting the outcome of the clash between York and a soon-rejuvenated Bligh?

Throughout, there is a chorus of town voices, written in a challenging-to-parse Jamaican patois. This shows the town’s point of view, while also injecting the grim narrative with some much-needed humor. Also throughout are birds that are not what they seem. John Crows are vultures, not crows, and its hard to know whose leadership they support. Doves, too, defy expectations in this violent and surprising story.

This is an extraordinary violent story set in Jamaica, which has one of the highest murder rates and is known as one of the most homophobic places on earth. Any redemption in the story comes at great and terrible cost, likely a result of the prejudice and poverty that pervade the fictional Gibbeah of the 50’s and, it could be argued, the Jamaica of the present.

Reaction to the book in our reading group was split, with most disliking it and criticizing it for its unrelenting violence. Yet I appreciated reading such an in-my-face novel of racism and religion after O’Connor’s different take on similar themes of leadership, religion, sin, and redemption.

Also: A Bit of a Pickle; Painted Myself Into a Corner; Bit Off More Than I Could Chew; or It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

I am forever admonishing female friends who call themselves selfish, stupid, lazy, mean, bad mothers, etc. that this kind of self-denigration is hurtful because it’s not true. (Ironically, it’s the exceptional few who are selfish, mean, etc. who never make jokes at their own expense, and instead trumpet any good deed while never admitting a foible. Blergh, and get more therapy, are what I have to say to that.) How many men to you hear saying stuff like this?

So, I am not going to say any of the many self-criticizing things I might about my current biblio-conundrum., I actually think I go on book benders most often when my life feels least in my control. A book bender says I hope the future has more time for reading, and backs this up by piling up evidence of the priorities in my life.

Life’s been pretty life-y around here for some time. We’ve had multiple bouts of stomach flu, lice, an emergency family trip, and I was cajoled into a volunteer gig a whole lot more involved than the one I’d hoped for. As I said, life. In the face of the recent avalanche of mostly little things, my response has been to crave more reading time and to commit to more books. So my situation is not even as it often is when I buy more books than I can read. This time, it’s that I’ve committed to reading more books than I think is possible even when life isn’t bustling.

(An aside: WHY is life bustling in February? We’re supposed to be hibernating. This is a yin, not a yang season. February around here was like December. I blame global warming and the ridiculous non-wintry winter we’re having.)

Here, then, is my To-Read pile, which doesn’t even include everything I’ve said I’d read. I’d write more, but I have 4 chapters to go in Bleak House for tomorrow.

Please understand; not really complaining. Too much to read in too little time hardly qualifies as a problem.

Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. for The Morning News Tournament of Books
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson because it was recommended by a writing teach to me in the 90’s, and has been on my shelf since then, and a friend’s reading it now
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. I pressured a friend to read John Crow’s Devil. She pressured me back to read this.
The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah. For TMN ToB
Bleak House by Dickens for this readalong (darn you, Patricia)
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories reading a story at a time to follow up on Wise Blood and Flannery from January.
The Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel. For one of my book groups. I love comics, yet I rarely even like many of the indie types usually represented in these compilations. I’m trepidatious about reading this one.

Not pictured: complete manuscript of colleague in writing group, partial manuscript of good friend, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, the ten other books from The Tournament of Books that I haven’t read.

This is how _I_ read a Shakespeare play, and I’m not necessarily recommending it for anyone else. Also, I’m not an academic, and this is not a rigorous or systematic approach, merely the one that works best for my learning style. But it works for me, and it might for you, It’s a combination of different people’s advice over the years.

1. Plan to watch a performance. I think the reading of the play should go in tandem with a viewing. They were meant to be viewed, not read, though reading them brings its own rewards. For example, I am going to see a production of As You Like It tomorrow night.

2. The edition. I prefer single plays–they’re easier on the wrists. Yes, every house should have a collected edition for reference, but I buy individual books for each play I read. Because my dear and learned friend Thalia recommended the Arden editions to me many years ago, they are the ones I favor. They have all the background I could want for and more with footnotes on the page, so helpful when I want to know what that phrase means right now. My one complaint is that there is not a big enough visual difference/divider between the text and the notes.

3. The first reading. When I was in grad school, i.e. single and childless, I would read the play the first time through from Act 1 through Act 5 (no introduction or afterward) in one sitting, looking at the notes as little as possible. I was reading to get to the end, and divine as much meaning as I could before delving deeper. This usually took about 2 hours, depending on the play. Now that life doesn’t tend to have 2 hour stretches, I just read it from beginning to end as I can, picking it up and putting it down, but not adding anything else, even magazines or newspapers, in between.

4. The second reading. I re-read the play, starting with the introduction, with all the notes (or all the notes I can handle) and on to the afterward.

5. I see the performance and re-read or re-watch as is possible or desirable.

How do _you_ read Shakespeare?

Oh, I thought I’d given up reading challenges, et al. But I’ve wanted to read Bleak House for a long time, and Patricia from O Canada Y’all linked to a readalong at The Unputdownables. Not sure this is smart, but I’m going to do it anyway. Story of my life.

I got to pick what we watched on Valentine’s Day, so I picked the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice, you know, the one with Keira Knightley. I saw it in the theater with my friend Queenie when it came out, but my husband G. Grod hadn’t seen it. He made buttered popcorn, I added a handful of spice drops, and we settled in.

Before I saw it way back when, I was prejudiced against Keira in the role of Lizzy. (I was going to refer to her by her last name, Knightley, but found that confusing in a review of an Austen-related work, no? Such a geek am I.) While Keira does have a pair of fine eyes in a pretty face, as Lizzy is described in the book, I think she’s perhaps beautiful rather than pretty, and thus takes away some of the every-woman aspect so important to the character.

But that was before I saw the film. Keira won me over. Her Lizzy has an infectious laugh, and her knowing glance at ironies is true to the character. Alas, the irony over class and social mores is more limited than in the book, and the movie focuses more on the romance between Lizzy and Darcy. And Matthew McFadyen, whom I loved in MI5, doesn’t seem quite up to the challenge of a complex Darcy. His Darcy shifts suddenly from grouch to suitor. I would have preferred a more gradual transformation. And the beginning, which lacks the famous opening line, and the end, which panders to ’shippers rather than Janeites, are serious drawbacks, to me. That said, many of the supporting cast is terrific–I like Sutherland as Mr. Bennet, Blethyn as Mrs., Dench as Lady Catherine is about as perfect casting as there is, and the little guy who plays Collins is hilarious. Additionally, I like the realistically grubby look of the Bennet’s home. So, good enough, but my favorite is still the 1995 miniseries with Colin Firth–more hours to do better justice to the text.

Released to tremendous reviews last year, Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is a contender in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books and was nominated for the National Book Award, which went to another ToB contender, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward.

The Tiger’s Wife is narrated by Natalia, a young female doctor on an aid mission in the still contentious area of the Balkans in former Yugoslavia. She is informed over the phone by her grandmother that her beloved grandfather is dead, somewhat mysteriously in a small town not far from where Natalia will be working. The narrative is split in many directions. We have Natalia’s memory of her grandfather, her present situation as a scientist dealing with local superstitions, a girl-detective aspect as she tries to learn the details of her grandfather’s death, and two stories from her grandfather’s past, one of a deathless, the other of the titular character. It’s ambitious, and intriguing in its contrasts of modern/historic, scientific/mythic, young/old, all grounded in a country ravaged by war and conflict. But in the end, I don’t think the book succeeded.

Despite many characters and countless sad circumstance, I never felt greatly moved. There were myriad characters, many of whom got pages of backstory, yet I didn’t feel particularly engaged by any of them, even the narrator. As I read through the book, I found myself reading to finish, not reading to read. The stories were fine, and I was mildly curious about the details of the grandfather’s death, but that was about it. My impression by the end was that it is a book by a talented, ambitious author who does not yet have the sophistication and maturity to pull off a work of satisfying depth. In this, it reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, in which a violent history is retold through the modern young narrator by a modern young author.

I suspect that the hype over this book makes my disappointment in it a bit more keen, and I wonder, as I did with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, how much the youth and beauty of the author contributed to the hoo-ha.

There have been several articles in recent months on willpower and decision making, all of which have intrigued me. This is from “Why willpower matters — and how to get it” at The Guardian, link via The Morning News

Baumeister’s big idea, now borne out by hundreds of ingenious experiments in his and other social psychologists’ labs, is that willpower — the force by which we control and manage our thoughts, impulses and emotions and which helps us persevere with difficult tasks — is actually rather like a kind of moral muscle.

I recently gave up my morning toaster pastry, and I’m still pretty bitter about it. But perhaps I’ll be a better person for it since I’m applying considerable willpower every time I pass them in the grocery.

OK, who can tell I’m catching up on my feeds? But there was a reason I left these for myself to read later with time–I’m unearthing some fascinating stuff!

When I was in middle school, one of my favorite books was Moviola by Garson Kanin*. It was an utterly enthralling, trashy, historical novel about Hollywood. I loved it. I read it again and again. One of the stories that moved me most was about what happened to the actor Fatty Arbuckle, once famous and now obscure.

So it was with geeky delight that I found a story about this, “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Destruction of Fatty Arbuckle” at The Hairpin, linked to from ALoTT5MA

“Fatty” was just Arbuckle’s picture personality, the name given to his various characters in their endlessly hilarious approaches to “hayseed visits big city; hjinks ensue.” Off-screen, he refused to answer to the name, making explicit the distinction between textual and extra-textual persona that studio publicity worked so hard to obviate. Yet it was this off-screen persona that would eventually lead to his demise, when an alcohol-soaked weekend led to the most dramatic fall from grace in Hollywood history. I am not being overdramatic. This guy was ruined. On the surface, Arbuckle’s actions were the scandal. But as the details surrounding the event and its handling have come to light, it’s become clear that the true scandal was the willingness with which the studio heads threw their most prominent star under the figurative bus.

I would bet a dollar that Lizzie Skurnick, who wrote Shelf Discovery, read this too. This was part of the Judith Krantz/Jean Auel/VC Andrews/naughty Judy Blume stuff that I was devouring at the time.

From Blog of a Bookslut, to this, to this story at the Independent about how a creepy review by Graham Greene of a Shirley Temple movie got him sued for libel, which spurred him to flee to Mexico, where he wrote The Power and the Glory. Wow. Just, wow.

I recently read/wrestled with Flannery O’Connors short, brutish novel Wise Blood. Researching it, I was surprised at its influences on bands as diverse as Ministry and David Bazan in Headphones. Then today I read kind-of-review/personal-musing (what is with these, today?) by Bill See of Heart of Darkness, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by David Burke, at Popmatters, link via ALoTTFMA

It cannot be overstated just how jarring a release Nebraska was in 1982. The charts were being ruled by such vapid banalities as Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”, Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. Then along comes a quiet folk record made on an old 4-track, basically just voice and guitar about killers, small-time thieves and other forgotten souls. It took some major stones to release it.

What Springsteen gleaned from the songs of Woody Guthrie, the writings of O’Connor and Steinbeck and filmmakers like Ford, Huston and Terrence Malick was a humanity and a curiosity about why certain people lose connection with themselves, their families, their community, their government. And what then happens when that kind of alienation infiltrates the subconscious. Further, the profound effect that has on the people that love those alienated and disconnected souls.

From “Shelf Conscious,” by Francesca Mari at The Paris Review, not so much a review as a broad overview/appreciation/personal musing over Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books by Leah Price, via The Morning News:

My boyfriend was ruthless. He chucked a book if he thought it’d be easy enough to get again for a dollar. ….

I’ve always felt an obligation to keep any book with which I’ve had some sort of relationship, even if it was an insignificant one–an assignment for a short review, for instance.

My husband is a hoarder. I’m a purger, perhaps because I’m a binger with a well-developed sense of buyers’ remorse. We’ve reached a sort of equipoise where I can get rid of some books, and I’ll store others instead of getting rid of them. Thus far, we have enough room to do this.

I simply CANNOT imagine not having organized shelves. Bizarre. That being said, organizing books is crazy and involves weird personal decisions, such as: most of my graphic novels are organized by title (e.g., Sandman by Gaiman is under S), except when they’re organized by author (anything by James Kochalka is under K). Other books are in 2 main groups by size: MMPB get their own shelves as I have bookcases well suited for their short selves. And then TPB and HCs get bigger shelves, but both groups are separated into read/unread.

What I believe my shelves say about me: I believe in organization, and succeed to some degree at a macro level but fail at a micro level, then just start stacking books here and there. Which is pretty much how I manage life.

My husband went DVD shopping a few weeks ago, and brought Scott Pilgrim vs. the World home for me. I had started to watch the Lonesome Dove miniseries, which many of y’all had recommended, but it wasn’t working for me. The overwrought music and the hammer-heavy foreshadowing, and then that closeup of Sean in the river that freezes at the end of Part 1 combined to make me less than eager to finish.

So instead we watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I loved it, again. That may be because I’m a comic book geek and loved the series of graphic novels. Help me test this theory. Did you like the movie without having read the books? But anyway, read the books. So much geeky goodness to be had in them!

At The Composites, Brian Joseph Davis takes book descriptions of characters like Madam Bovary and Rochester, combines them with law enforcement sketch software, and voila, you have truly creepy images of some of the most famous people who never existed. Via The Morning News.

Guppy turned 6 this week! I showed him the cake section of Joanne Chang’s Flour, which I received for Christmas but had not yet worked up the gumption to cook from. Guppy, who knows his own mind, passed by the chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, the chocolate cupcakes with magic frosting, and said he wanted the lemon-raspberry cake. The recipe is in small type over three pages. I asked, “Are you sure?” and showed him the picture of the cupcakes again. He was sure.

The day before Guppy’s birthday, I made a trip to our grocery co-op, since I did not have on hand the requisite: cake flour, nearly 2 pounds of butter, 14 eggs (for 14 whites but only 12 egg yolks), bag of lemons, nearly 5 cups of sugar, and 2 boxes of very lovely, organic, USA, on-sale raspberries.

Day one. On Guppy’s birthday, his older brother Drake vomited for the second morning in a row. Dealing with that left me less than energized to start a major baking project, but I rallied in the late morning and made the three cake layers and the homemade lemon curd. The cakes involved whipping egg whites then folding them into a very thick batter. The lemon curd used up my bag of lemons and I needed more to make the lemon syrup, so I asked Guppy if I could finish his cake the next day if we got dessert out that night. He graciously agreed, and I was able to procure more lemons.

Day two. The recipe says to make the buttercream frosting before the lemon syrup, but since I read the recipe beforehand, and the syrup needs to cool to room temp, I did it in reverse order.

Here is lemon syrup cooling in back and sugar syrup in front. Buttercream frosting involves making a sugar syrup heated to a certain temperature, then taking the warm syrup and adding it very slowly to an egg mixture, and then adding a $hit-ton of butter and whipping for a long time. Note candy thermometer, one of those kitchen tools that denotes this recipe as hard core, IMO. It’s a kitchen gadget I use about once a year, if that, but I always feel competent that I have it when it’s called for. Also, my neighbors know that I have one, so they borrow mine when needed.

This is the egg/syrup mixture, before I added butter and whipped it to a total end volume of about six cups. I nearly forgot to put in a pound of butter, as putting in half a pound made me think I was finished. Silly me.

To assemble the cake, each layer needed to be brushed with about 1/3 cup of the lemon syrup, then topped with a cup of buttercream, to which a flood barrier of frosting was adding around the edge to prevent the subsequent raspberries and lemon curd from oozing out. Which they did anyway in a few spots, so I should have been more aggressive in my frosting flood barriers.

So then, lemon curd inside barrier, topped with raspberries, next layer, soaked with syrup, frosting, flood barrier, lemon curd, raspberries, and that got me here:

I topped that with the third layer, brushed it with lemon syrup, then the whole thing needed to refrigerate for at least an hour to firm up. I took a nap.

Now firm, the cake needed a crumb coat–a thin layer of all-over frosting to make sure the crumbs stay under the outer layer of frosting. This took another cup of frosting, then had to refrigerate for 30 minutes, during which I washed some of the eight zillion dishes and tried to wipe up some of the butter, which seemed to coat every kitchen surface now.

Next up was the all-over frosting, about a cup and a half, and then the remaining lemon curd, spread on the top. By this time, the boys were home from school, and big brother Drake said he wanted to put the raspberries on top of the cake. I asked that he test his design on the bottom of a cake pan before transferring it.

He wanted a ring around the cake, and I suggested using the few remaining berries to make a 6, which conveniently also looked like a “G.”

Here is what it looked like once we cut into it

And on the plate

Throughout the two days of making this cake, I was fearful that it would not be good, that it would be too sugary, soggy from the syrup, etc. I knew as I was doing it that it was way too much work unless the end result was going to be delicious. But it was. So: giant pain in the butt, yes. Worth it for a special someone on a special occasion, like my very happy six-year-old boy? You bet.

If you were reading to the end of this hoping for the recipe, sorry. It’s three pages of tiny type. No way am I transcribing it. I spent 2 days on the cake (and probably more hours making it than I did laboring to have Guppy himself), and all morning uploading the photos for this entry.

Daily Delicious has the recipe with European amounts here. But I suggest you borrow the book from the library, or just buy it. I think it’s worth it for the photos alone, but it’s full of other recipes I want to try too, like home-made Oreos

A fixture on many of last year’s Best-of lists, Swamplandia! was going to get read sooner or later. But when it was picked by both Books and Bars and The Mornings News, well, that just made it jump the queue.

Swamplandia! is a Florida novelty park owned by the Bigtree family. The park’s star is the mother, Hilola, who swims with and wrestles alligators. When she dies, the rest of the family falls apart in various and interesting ways. The chapters alternate between 1st person by thirteen-year-old Ava, the youngest daughter, and 3rd person about Kiwi, the seventeen-year-old son. A large section in the middle of the book had me anxious for a long time to see what would happen. It took some strength of will to accede to the intervening alternating chapters, and not to groan when chapters ended but the suspense was sustained. I was impressed with that continuity of tension, as well as the fully engaging characters. I also appreciated that Russell left many interesting questions open for the reader to decide.

Swamplandia! goes up against Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table in round 1 of The Morning News Tournament of Books, to be judged by Haven Kimmel. Now I’m on to The Tiger’s Wife, which my friend Amy lent me. I’m going to try not to go crazy about the Tournament of Books this year, but I really enjoyed The Sisters Brothers and Swamplandia!.

My friend Amy of New Century Reading sent me a link to 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer on The 99 Percent. I’m sure you’ve seen some variation of this article, where writers give advice on writing. It’s always useful, though, and this is a nice update with many modern writers. I’ve made good progress lately on the current draft of my novel, and these were particularly useful:

3. Esther Freud: On finding your routine…
Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

4. Zadie Smith: On unplugging…
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Once, when I was lost, I took this advice and was able to quickly get back on track:

7. Bill Wasik: On the importance of having an outline…
Hone your outline and then cling to it as a lifeline.

And #25 is a great “grain of salt.” Hope you enjoy this, too.

I put The Sisters Brothers on my request list at the library even before it was picked as one of the contenders for The Morning News Tournament of Books 2012. (I think it was recommended at Good Reads by trusted reading friends Kate and Patricia.) So I was doubly glad when it finally came into the library. (Especially as the library has now cut off my crazy requesting at the knees by limiting the number of requests to 30, down from 100. Stupid budget cuts.)

Two brothers, Eli and Charley, are on a mission in the mid-1800s Pacific Northwest. This is a western, though one blurber called it cowboy noir. Aren’t all westerns kind of cowboy noir? In any case, it has shooting, crime, horses, weird people, and only a few women. Not too different in those respects from Lonesome Dove. But where that was an epic, this is a ripping yarn, pulling me through from beginning to end at a breakneck pace. One brother, Eli, is the narrator, and for all the bad things he does, is a tremendously endearing character. This was a ripping, tragi-comic yarn. I look forward to seeing how it plays in the Tournament of Books. It’s going up against critical darling Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, judged by geek icon Wil Wheaton. (Yes, _that_ Wil Wheaton, aka Wesley Crusher and now on Big Bang Theory.) It’ll be an interesting match.

Two things: I hate the new TPB cover. I really liked the HC one. Also, by searching at Amazon for Sisters Brothers, I got the book I was looking for, and then a lot of unpleasant other books. Yikes. Don’t let the kids try this at home.

In addition to Sweet Tooth, one of my favorite comic book series in The Unwritten, a twisty take on literature and pop culture that has gone from meta to hyper meta in the latest volume 5, The Unwritten: On To Genesis.

Tom Taylor is the real human (or is he?) who inspired his father to pen a Harry Potter-esque series of novels about Tommy Taylor. Along with sidekicks Lizzie Hexam and Richie Savoy, they try to dodge the bad guys (a meta-literary cabal, enforced by a guy named Pullman, who can turn things into fiction with his touch) while attempting to figure out who the bad guys are, why they’re after them, and well, quite a lot of things. This volume takes a detour into comics history (pleasantly reminding me of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) and noir.

It’s engaging, thought-provoking, and I really hope the author, Mike Carey is going to be able to pull these many fascinating strings together, but even if not, it’s a grand ride.

I’ve told you before: you should be reading the comic book series Sweet Tooth. I just tore through volume 4, Sweet Tooth: Endangered Species. It’s about a boy named Gus. He’s a human/animal hybrid in a world that was largely wiped out by a plague, after which all children were born as hybrids. Where did the plague come from? Does it matter? In this fourth collection of the series, there’s a lot of questioning and blurriness about who is good and who isn’t. Another devourable installment in this ripping, post-apocalyptic yarn with an utterly endearing narrator. Reminds me of Y the Last Man and Riddley Walker.