Category Archives: books

Regular readers here (hi, you!) know that I am reading the Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins with my youngest son. We have just finished up the fourth book — Gregor and the Marks of Secret — and are now starting the final book in the series, Gregor and the Code of Claw. The Marks of Secret has been the darkest of the bunch, no doubt about it. A quick summary of the series: Gregor is a 12 year old boy who falls through a grate in New York City, finds an entire underworld of humans and creatures below the surface, and is hailed (and feared) as the Warrior of various prophecies carved into a wall.

The rats emerge as the clear nemesis in this fourth book. Collins also alludes to the Holocaust in no uncertain terms, as the rats (the gnawers) are driving the mice (the nibblers) to their death by forcing them into a volcanic area known as the Firelands where the poisonous gasses are killing the mice by the hundreds. Gregor and his friends are on a mission to the stop the rats, and save the mice. There is no resolution of that storyline in the fourth book, as Collins is clearly setting up a confrontational plot line for the end of the series.

I think I mentioned last book: I am ready to leave the Underland, but my son isn’t, so I am staying with it. The writing is fine, and Collins does a decent job with character development, but the dark overtones of the setting and story weigh on me as a reader.  The death of characters in each book is sad. And although the book has not crossed any lines for the young ears of my son, I worry about it. He seems fine, though, and is rooting on Gregor and the good guys with all of the enthusiasm of a good listener/reader. And so, I keep going.

Peace (in the overland),
Kevin

This upcoming graphic novel from First Second Publishing provides an alternative look at the early days of The Beatles. Told mostly through the experiences of photographer Astrid Kirchherr and her love affair with the so-called “fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe, Baby’s in Black by Arne Bellstorf brings us into the club scene of Germany where the future pop stars of the world would begin to hone their skills. Sutcliffe came on as a bass player at the invitation of his friend, John Lennon, but he really wanted to be an artist.

Kirchherr would help him find his muse in the time before his early death, which was probably due to some brain hemorrhage (the exact cause was never fully determined). Strains of the cover songs that The Beatles were playing filter in and out of this love story, told entirely in black and white graphic illustrations. There’s a sort of melancholy feel to the story, as Sutcliffe is tired of playing music, drawn into his love for Kirchherr (a photographer who tastes fame herself with her images of the band), and ragged from an unknown illness that eventually takes his life.

Most of us music fans know parts of this story from the Lore of The Beatles, but Bellstorf does a nice job of keeping the graphic novel lens on Kirchherr, and we see German youth through her interactions with her friends, one of whom is a diehard fan of The Beatles who drags as many friends as he can to the bars to see them play.

I have a friend my band who is a crazy Beatles fan. I’ve passed this one along to him and he was very interested. He even knew who he was going to pass along to once he was done with ut. (It looks like the graphic novel gets published sometime in May, by the way.)

Peace (in the music),
Kevin

The blood of American Tall Tales runs thick throughout this first book of a young adult series called The Clockwork Dark, which centers on the adventures of a 12-year-old boy, Ray, and his new magical friends who must battle an evil creature who seeks to destroy .. the world? Well, it wasn’t exactly always clear to me what the GOG wanted to do, to be honest, (nor why he needed a Siren to do it). While I was drawn in by the use of tall tales (particularly the fable of John Henry, and his son, and the nine pound magical hammer from which the book gets its name), I kept losing track of the story and the characters.

(And I appreciated the author’s notes at the end of the novel, as writer John Claude Bemis explained how he came up with the idea for the series after singing the traditional song about John Henry, and wanting to make a story that did not use European-centered themes of knights and quests, but one that tapped into Americana.)

I kept reading The Nine Pound Hammer, though, because I wanted to like the story (it helps that Bemis is a former teacher), and I would get rewarded at times with action and suspense, and interesting characters. It just felt unfocused and muddled one time too many for me. I wanted to be more centered on the John Henry angle, and I didn’t always get that. Darn it. (And the cover is so intriguing).

I don’t expect to keep reading the series, but maybe I will find a reader in my class who will be drawn in by the legend of Tall Tales and the sense of adventure.

Peace (in the hammer-time),
Kevin

My son and I continue to delve into the Underland with Gregor and his crew. In the third installment of the series — Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods — a plague has been let loose on the Underland (that city beneath the city) and so, yet another adventure begins as 11-year-old Gregor must find a cure to save not only his friends, but his mother as well. In doing so, he must venture into a strange and forbidding forest growing underground, with giant plants not quite as timid as they first appear and some other creatures we have heard about but have not yet seen in the books before.

Writer Suzanne Collins continues a dark allegory of storytelling here, this time around how nations sometimes develop weapons that rub up against our own morality and ethics. How far is too far?  I won’t give the story away, except to say that Gregor sees his Underland companions in a different light by the end of this novel. We are also introduced to a few new intriguing characters — two humans who have been living outside of the safe city of Regalia in exile, and we lose a few friends along the way, too.

I have to admit: I am ready to take a break from Gregor for a bit, but my son has us now starting the fourth book (which we have been warned by a neighbor friend may be the darkest book of the five-book series). We’ll see where Gregor takes us, and whether we can climb back out of the Underworld, which is becoming increasingly tense and claustrophobic.

Peace (in the world beneath),
Kevin

I grew up on science fiction, devouring stories of space and machines, but it was discovering the early works of William Gibson in my 20s that opened my eyes and sparked my imagination on the ways in which technology and the digital world still yet unfolding at the time might become the setting and center of storytelling. Novels like Neuromancer and Virtual Light and Burning Chrome were wonderful immersions into possibilities, for good or ill. Over the years, I’ve followed and read Gibson as much as I can — some books I found more engaging than others, but perhaps that may have more to do with me as a reader than him as a writer.

His most recent book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, is not a novel but a collection of non-fiction essays and talks and magazine pieces that he has written over the years. While not nearly as strong as his fiction, the pieces in this collection give us an interesting view of Gibson, the writer, as well as Gibson, the reluctant futurist. For the novelist who is credited with coining the term “cyberspace,” Gibson has long harbored doubts about technology, and even admits to not using a computer or even the Internet for a long time (and then when he did, he discovered eBay — and that’s an entire story here). Those seeds of distrust spring up amid his early philosophy that technology would eventually create fundamental changes in culture, and his exploration of what the world would look like and how would character react to it.

What’s fascinating to me was to notice the publication dates on the pieces, and to try to place myself in the time when Gibson was writing some of these pieces. Some of articles and talks are about 20 years old now. He was thinking about what we now take for granted — all-the-time access, convergent informational flows, immersive worlds and more — before there was any reason to be thinking about it. I guess that’s what good writers do, though. And Gibson makes it clear here that while his stories might have been set in the future, the world and themes he was writing about were about the current times, and that had me trying to remember back to the storylines of the novels that captured my attention.

Distrust That Particular Flavor is somewhat uneven at times — even Gibson notes that he repeats similar themes and I found myself shuffling a bit through some of his pieces — but I always enjoy a journey into the mind and thinking, and craft, of a writer I admire, and this collection did that for me.

Peace (in the times),
Kevin

Spend some time watching Sesame Street or The Muppet Show and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are very human people behind, or beneath, those puppets. It’s also easy to lose track that behind those people with those puppets, there is also a team of writers working hard with words to keep the illusion of character alive on the stage … eh, television screen.

Joseph Bailey, who pennedMemoirs of a Muppets Writer, is one of those scribes.

His book, which seems to be self-published, is an inside look at his career with Jim Henson and the company of writers and performers who worked hard to create a unique slice of comedy that entertains (and in the case of Sesame Street, educates) with wide appeal. Bailey brings the reader into the world of the Muppets, but his own career began first with Sesame Street, and it is fascinating to see what went on beyond the curtain as writers sought to create scripts with educational goals as well as entertainment value.

Later, with the Muppets in London (where The Muppet Show was produced after all the American television stations turned Henson down), Bailey brings us into the mayhem of the studio and inside the cramped offices of the Muppet writers. He brings the folks behind the scenes to life — writers and producers and performers such as  Richard Hunt, Jerry Juhl, Frank Oz, and Jerry Nelson. Jim Henson also gets some of the attention from Bailey, particularly after his unexpected death. You get the sense that Bailey was consciously not writing a “tell all” about Henson, though, and sought to protect Henson’s legacy.

Bailey is a writer, and it is inside the workings of the writing mind that he brings us in this book.

In particular, there are times in the book where he deconstructs his scripts and scenes, giving us readers an inside look at both the intent, the rewriting, the humor and more, and that kind of experience is valuable. Plus, he shares some history of various Muppet characters, and how they came to be (ie, Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle, etc.) Bailey also explains how Henson and the Muppet creators understood the medium of television in a way that many others did not, and used its elements to its full advantage.

Bailey lived and breathed the Muppet Show for many years as one of the men with pens (and earned an armload of writing awards for his work), and his memoir is a nice inside look at what that was like to be inside that somewhat crazy world as puppets took the world by storm.

Peace (inside a fuzzy puppet),
Kevin

It’s been a long time since I dipped my eyes into a good Western but I was in the mood for a little change of pace, and one should always rely on writer Larry McMurtry for good storytelling. The Berrybender Narratives, which was originally four books now brought into one large collection, is a fine example of McMurtry’s incredible talent: interesting and quirky characters, a non-romantic look at the American West during expansion, and a sweeping saga of one family’s endurance in history. There’s humor, danger, violence, compassion and true love within these covers.

American history is the underpinning, too. The impact of the travels of Lewis and Clark play out in the background and the war with Mexico at the Alamo comes into play. Historical figures come and go, or are references, in such a way as to place you in a time reference. This is history unfolding, but not from your typical diluted and sterile history textbooks.

The main story centers mostly on the Berrybender clan, a highbrow and rich family who have come from Europe to travel through the new frontier of America as tensions between the American Indians and the American government are shifting into high gear. The family is led by a drunk, and completely unpredictable, father who wants to hunt buffalo and Grizzly bear but the book really centers mostly around his eldest daughter, Tasmin, and her new American husband, Jim Snow — a trapper and frontiersman also known as The Sin Killer for his religious outbursts and justice-seeking violence. Even the indians fear The Sin Killer.

The relationship between Tasmin and Jim Snow is complicated. He is all about survival and quiet. She is all about understanding the world, and talking it through. She represents Europe; He, America. There is a kind of love but it doesn’t last, and the twists and turns in their interactions makes you never quite know where their relationship is going.

McMurtry wisely also brings us into the narrative minds of the American Indians who encounter the Berrbenders, particularly those whose suddenly realize that their time is almost up, and that the white Europeans — with their guns, and their plagues, and their sheer numbers — are about to change everything they have ever known. There’s a sadness to their plight (which we know from our historical perspective), but there is plenty of honor, too, in many of their stories. The rich tapestry that McMurtry weaves here is engrossing and powerful.

The Berrybender Narratives is no cowboys-and-indians story. It is a story with human suffering and human emotion at the center, but it is the rawness and roughness of the American West – the land, as character — that is both breathtaking and formidable to behold. The humans — of all races — never stand a chance, and yet, McMurtry allows us to see some energy of individualism bubble up through the narratives. It seems as if he is saying that partnership with the land itself will be the key to our survival.

Peace (in the wild west),
Kevin

One of the perks of being a reviewer for a site like The Graphic Classroom is that every now and then, a box arrives and it is filled with books that a publisher hopes I will read and review. The other day, this large box arrived and it was full to the brim with new graphic novels. My sons plunked down and began reading. (They get the first shots at the books that come in — a deal I am happy to have made with them.) Later, I will bring appropriate ones to my classroom and maybe donate some to our school library, or to other teachers in my building. Gotta spread the graphic love.

Peace (in the box of books),
Kevin