If you’ve read any of Carl Hiaasen’s other novels, you know what to expect from Skinny Dip:  oddball characters, witty dialogue, ridiculous circumstances, and more than a little of an environmental bent.  (And, if you haven’t read any of his stuff, then now you know what to expect.)  Joey Perrone’s douchebag husband (yes, Joey’s a woman — this book takes place in Florida, not New England) tries to murder her by throwing her off a cruise ship; she spends the next 300 pages surreptitiously getting even (he thinks she’s dead, of course).  And we get some Everglades history as a bonus, too.

Spirits in the Wires was the first Charles de Lint book I’ve read (thanks, Lisa!), but it surely won’t be the last.  de Lint’s particular brand of urban fantasy hit just the right notes with me, especially given the focus on the Internet in this book: a website existing as an actual place in another dimension and sucking people into itself through the ‘net?  Ridiculous, maybe, but exactly my kind of ridiculous.  His characters (many of whom, it seems, were supporting players in his other “Newford” novels) all feel like real people with real lives dealing with extraordinarily unreal circumstances.

Grade: A-

Ben: so far, i’m doing a pretty good job of not picturing the actors when i read the books [the Harry Potter books, which Ben has only recently begun reading] Allen: That’s difficult. It’s commendable you’re holding out. :)

Ben: alan rickman is tough to displace

Ben: though if i try really hard to forget he’s involved, then in my head snape looks an awful lot like doc cochran :-)

Allen: Now THAT would’ve been some casting.

Allen: Damn them and their British bias!

Allen: So does Snape sound like Doc Cochran when you read? “Harry F!%ing Potter, you co%&!@&er, who the f&!k do you think you are?”

Ben: lol

Ben: great, now i have an image of him mixing up anti-crotchrot potions for all the school whores

Okay, I’ve got a question that’s been bugging me for three years, and I think you people reading this site are just the ones to help me.

For the first ten years of my Neil Gaiman Fandom, I pronounced his name in my head so that it rhymed with “Hey, man!” Never once did it occur to me that this pronunciation might not be correct — the word “aim” was right there in the middle of his name, so GAYM-en it was.

But shortly after I started at the job I have now three years ago, one of my coworkers insisted (with some vehemence, I might add) that Gaiman’s name was pronounced so that it rhymed with “Pie, man!” I didn’t feel I had any grounds to be able to argue my opinion with any certainty, as I’d never heard his name spoken by anyone I could think of as an authoritative source on the matter. So I did what I frequently do in arguments: I shut my mouth and let the other person continue in his belief, whether said belief was correct or not.

Since then, I’ve heard the name pronounced both ways. The Wikipedia entry on Neil backs up my long-held supposition, but I don’t consider the Wikipedia infallible with this kind of info. I know that at least a couple of my friends have seen the man speak live, so I’m hoping you folks who have done so can give me something definitive — did he speak his own name? And if so, how did he say it? Is he the HEY-man or the PIE-man?

OK, maybe everyone else who’s read the Harry Potter books caught on to this fact before me, maybe I should have noticed this or thought about it more or what-have-you — Terry says she knew this somehow, but isn’t sure how or why she knows it. But I hadn’t realized that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is located in Scotland.

Makes sense, of course, especially when you see the mountainous landscape as represented in the movies; that’s certainly not the gentle rolling hills I have in my head as making up most of England. And that train ride from King’s Cross Station to Hogsmeade sure does take a while. It had just never occured to me and kind of threw me for a bit of a conceptual loop when I saw a reference earlier today to “Hogsmeade, Scotland.”

Sort of like when I first read that Metropolis is supposedly is in Delaware. I mean, c’mon… that’s almost as bizarre as saying that Paragon City, the setting of City of Heroes, is in Rhode Island. That’s just ludicrous, right? Right?

Thanks very much to everyone who suggested books to add to my reading list. Pretty much every recommendation you gave me has gone on the list; how soon I get to start working through those books, I don’t know. Probably depends on when I can get to the library.

In the meantime, I’ve started (for the third time) a book I’ve been meaning to read forever-and-a-half: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I keep starting it and losing the thread of it–not out of lack of interest, but just because my ADD self hasn’t quite been able to keep my head in the book. But I’m hoping this time to stay with it and finish it. Maybe telling all of you that I’m reading it will help keep my head in it.

Also added to the list was the book Terry got me for Christmas: The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini, which I hadn’t even heard of but sounds fascinating. I’m not completely sure what it’s about just yet, though I know it deals a lot with the situation in contemporary Afghanistan. Tell you what: I’ll give you guys a full book report when I’m done.

I foolishly stayed up until 2:30 last night (ugh sleepy ow) finishing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, meaning I’m now stuck in the same boat with the millions of Potter addicts counting down the days until that last fix comes out (which probably won’t be until at least 2007). But that withdrawl isn’t the biggest problem I’ve got about being done with all of the extant Potters.

The real crisis lies in the fact that I don’t know what to read next.

It took me about five months to work through the six Harry Potter books. [1] Would’ve been a lot quicker, I’m sure, if the first five hundred pages of The Order of the Phoenix hadn’t been quite such a chore to get through. [2,3] That means that for the last five months, I haven’t had to decide on a book to read. Now I do, and I have nothing lined up. Oh, sure, I’ve got plenty of books sitting around the house that I haven’t read, but if I really wanted to read any of those, I’d have done so already.

So this, my friends, is where all’a y’all come in: I’d like some suggestions for new reading material.

A couple of pretty loose guidelines:

• Fiction preferred, but certainly not required. I tend to go for crime fiction (usually with a healthy sprinking of humor), contemporary fantasy and straight-up bestseller mainstream fiction, but by no means is that all I’m looking for.
• I’m looking for something a little bit more intellectually challenging after the mental popcorn of the Harry Potter series. Mindless entertainment is fun from time to time, but sometimes I actually do like to use my brain when I’m reading.
• That said, if you have some empty-calorie suggestions you think I’d like if I dug the Harry Potter books (which I did), bring ‘em on.
• Pop culture commentary works well for me–know any good books about movies, television, music, sports? Or the mechanics behind pop culture–know any good books about what goes on behind the scenes in those industries?
• I’m always up for good graphic novels or comic book collections. Always.
• Guidelines aside, suggest anything you think I might like–the worst I’ll do is not read whatever you recommend, which wouldn’t be any different than if you hadn’t said anything at all.

So…what’cha got for me?

Fret not, all of you fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower–the series of novels might be done, but he’s going to be writing a number of limited series and original graphic novels for Marvel Comics fleshing out that world and much of Roland Deschain’s yet-untold backstory.

I’ve never been as a big a fan of the Dark Tower books as some others, though I have liked the ones I’ve read (only the first four so far). I know that there’s an enormous contingency of people who regard the Dark Tower series as the apex of King’s work; I suspect that King himself might be one of them.

What excites me more than anything else about King’s continuing the story at Marvel, however, is the number of potential new fans he could bring to the medium.

If these new Dark Tower comics can get even a small fraction of King’s readership into the stores, then that’s a pretty sizable number–likely a larger number than read even the top-selling comics published currently. And that potential for new readership encourages both other comics creators to up their games and retailers to promote the books properly so that the industry keeps these new readers. These rookies just need to be shown how much worthwhile, entertaining work is out there to be had. There’s every chance that someone looking for the Dark Tower comics could find other comics they’d like just as well–Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, for instance, or Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, just to name two.

MAYDAY! Initiating awkward narrative transition in 3, 2, 1…

I first became a Stephen King fan when I was thirteen–it was Halloween night, 1984, when I bought a paperback copy of Pet Sematary from the 7-Eleven near my house. [1] I tore through that book pretty quickly (I still think Pet Sematary has one of the creepiest, most perfect final pages I’ve ever read, though a lot of that could be 13-year-old me talking), and then I devoured almost all of the King I could get my hands on after that. And I’ve continued to be a faithful reader during the 21 years since. I can’t say I’ve read everything he’s published, but there’s more of his oeuvre that I’ve read than I haven’t. [2]

And I’ve been a fan of comic books for even longer, since I was ten. I’ve gone through various stages where I’ve been more or less excited about the form, including some periods where I was flat-out embarrassed about liking them (when I was a teenager and really concerned with being thought of as cool), but comics are still the storytelling medium for which I have the most love and affection.

All of which means, of course, that Stephen King writing any comics, Dark Tower or otherwise, is pretty much guaranteed to get my geek up. It’s actually been something of a surprise to me that he’s never really done any comics-related work before; he’s never made any secret of the fact that he’s always been a comic-book fan. I wonder if it’s just that no one ever asked him before?

Anyway, for those of you interested, the first Dark Tower comics will start coming out in March of next year. I’ll be sure to keep you updated. In the meantime, enjoy a sample of the gorgeous artwork you’ll be able to expect (courtesy penciller Jae Lee and colorist Richard Isanove):

[1] I found that very book in one of the water-damaged boxes in our basement. Luckily, it’s pretty much OK–I have more than a little sentimental attachment to that particular book.

[2] Big Steve was also the first author I cna honestly say had a direct influence on my own writing. He was the first writer I consciously stole from, and his conversational tone greatly informs much of my writing to this day.

I was reading “Curious George Goes to the Hospital” to my older daughter last night, doing the thing I normally do when reading interminably long books to her–speaking the words while letting my mind wander off to something more interesting. (Yes, I know that probably loses me Good Daddy Points, but c’mon, man, that book is long.)

But I noticed something during this read-through that I’d never caught onto before. As George and his yellow-chapeaued friend sat in the waiting room of the hospital, a little girl sits crying near George. The girl’s mother points to George and tells her daughter, “Look, dear, it’s Curious George! He’s not crying.” (Or something along those lines. Like I said, I wasn’t paying much attention.)

Setting aside the questionable tactics of using celebrities as role models for children, or the fact that no one in the hospital seemed to find it the least bit strange that a small monkey was there for treatment, I found myself wondering…

…how, exactly, did this woman (or, presumably, her daughter) know who Curious George was?

“Hospital” wasn’t the first in the “Curious George” series, of course; it was, in fact, the seventh, published in 1966, some 25 years after the first book hit the stores. So let us posit for a moment that all of George’s adventures from the previous six books–his kidnapping from Africa and forced relocation to the unidentified Big City, his job as a newspaper delivery monkey and his brief stint in the circus, his ether addiction, all of it–had happened in the same world. Let us say all of the books in the series took place in the same universe, not an unreasonable assumption to make (though we’ll be revisiting this topic later).

Would all of George’s various misadventures have made the news? Might that be how the mother and daughter knew of him? Did he find himself in the newspaper for the “escaping from jail, flying through town holding on to a bunch of balloons and ultimately causing an enormous traffic jam” incident? Perhaps he did–but buried somewhere toward the back of the paper, if at all. It’s far more doubtful that he would have ended up on the television news at that time for something so inane. There were far fewer news outlets back then, and less need to fill air time with inanity–George wouldn’t even have qualified as a human interest fluff piece.

The way I see it, there are two likely answers to this conundrum:

One. It seems quite likely that the mother and daughter both recognized George from the “Curious George” books. This scenario has interesting metatextual implications: does each new story starring George spawn its own new universe, one in which all of his previous adventures exist only as children’s books? The girl’s mother recognized George from the books she read to her daughter at bedtime, never realizing that she herself is only a bit player in one of George’s adventures.

And does that mean that those of us reading the “Curious George” books are ourselves nothing but simplistic cartoons to be found in future volumes? Might I someday see a little monkey driving a carjacked Duck Tour boat raggedly down Tremont Street in Boston, narrowly missing pedestrians and cars alike on his way toward crashing harmlessly into the Frog Pond in the Common? And then might someone ultimately turn my page?

Two. He’s the victim/focus of some spectacular merchandising in his own world. In addition to the books, George’s likeness is featured on other products directed at kids–in one particularly disturbing turn, the jigsaw puzzle from which he swallows the piece that sends him to the hospital shows the scene where he’s first captured by his “friend” in the yellow hat. Can we assume that it’s The Man who’s responsible for selling George to the youth of America (or of whatever country in which the stories take place)? Is he the Colonel Tom Parker to George’s Elvis?

And does George profit from the expolitation of his image? George seems to be a smart little monkey, and always very curious, but would even a smart monkey like George realize he was being swindled by his management? The Man does indeed buy him a new bicycle for a gift at one point (though we won’t count the gift of that fateful jigsaw puzzle–since George’s image is on the puzzle, we can assume The Man likely got it for free). How many millions of dollars must The Man have made off of this poor little monkey, this monkey he stole away from his home and family in Africa? And the best he can do is to give George a fucking bicycle? Shameful.

Whichever option above turns out to be correct (and it can only be one of the above options), I clearly cannot let my children read the “Curious George” books any longer. Doing so would either be contributing to the exploitation of a kidnapped and abused young monkey…or would mean that this entire existence is a lie. Either way, those books are going in the trash tomorrow.

My friend Amy over at Beauty Joy Food (any of you into natural foods really, really need to go read her blog) has tagged me with the Favorite Books Meme. She did hers on cookbooks, which makes perfect sense given that her site’s about food. I’m not gonna do that, because the totality of my favorite cookbook list would likely consist of the menu at Olive Garden.

(I’d love to see her responses to this meme with non-cookbooks…she’s well-read, a helluva writer and a smart cookie. Nudge nudge, Amy.)

Here we go…

1. Total number of books I’ve owned:

Oh, god, I don’t know…somewhere between 800 and 1,000, I’d guess. Sounds like a lot to me, but I know plenty of people who’ve probably owned way more. And I certainly can’t say I’ve read each and every one of those books.

If I add comic book trade paperback collections and graphic novels, add in another 100 or so.

2. Last book(s) I bought:

Last book I bought for me: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Really, really interesting book about our ability to jump to snap decisions and the good and the bad that go along with those decisions.

Last book I bought for someone else: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King, for Terry for Mother’s Day.

Last book bought for me: Code Complete (Second Edition) by Steve McConnell. Fascinating book about software design and construction which will hopefully help make me better at the day job until I can safely give it up.

3. Last book I read:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Yup, that’s right, I’d never read it–or any of the Harry Potter books. I’ve been perfectly happy to allow myself to be surprised when I saw each of the movies. But since I’ve been considering the idea of writing some Young Adult fiction, I thought it would be a good idea to read the most successful YA books of all time.

(That last statement is pure educated conjecture; if I’m wrong about it, please feel free to slap me down.)

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. My favorite novel ever. As much as I’ve enjoyed so many books over the years, this was the only one that had me counting down the hours until I got off work so I could go home and read more of it. Just an amazingly beautiful, haunting and heartbreaking work of fiction.
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon. Chabon shined a light on the early years of the comic book industry, an insanely creative time so very few people know much about–myself included. He treated the art form with love and respect and wove an intricate story that subtly integrated elements of the standard superhero origin with real, grounded, decidedly non-superheroic characters. Classic.
• The Preacher series of trade papeerbacks by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Not only was this one fabulously irreverent and entertaining series, but it provides the exact structural template for The Most Excellent Comic Book Series I Will Write Eventually Someday. (I think that title will likely change before publication.)
• On Writing by Stephen King. Big Steve gives out some great writing advice in this book, as to be expected. Meaningful to me for the insights into the creative process of this man who’s entertained me and inspired me so much over the last twenty years. Even though I may not write horror, Stephen King’s storytelling will always be a tremendous influence on my work.
• Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler. The book itself is good but not great–it’s his first published novel, though, so by no means do I mean that as an insult. What’s inspiring about this book to me is that it’s the first novel ever published by someone I know. I don’t/didn’t know Vic well at all–I only had one class with him in college and went to some of the same English-major type of functions he did. I never actually got the chance to talk to him, but Terry and Amy both knew him pretty well. And just knowing that this guy who was once in one of my college classes is now a successful author at a major publishing house…it makes the dream seem more attainable. (That’s certainly not saying “if he can do it, I can do it”–it’s always been very obvious that Vic’s both immensely talented and quite driven. He certainly deserves all of the success he finds. And the more success he finds, the more inspiration I’ll take from that success.)

5. Which 5 people would you most like to see fill this out in their blog?

I don’t have an enormous readership here yet to know who to pass this along to, but I’d like to see what the following people who might actually read this have to say (anyone not interested in playing follow-the-meme, I won’t be offended if you don’t pick the thread up):

• Saundra at Secrets and Lies. She’s a professional writer and filmmaker and seems to be an avid reader so I’m sure she’d have some interesting answers. UPDATE: You can find Saundra’s responses here!
• Tim at Hello Cleveland! because he’ll likely have a predominantly comics-oriented response, and I have a feeling he’d pick some pretty cool books to throw in there.
• Brian at The B-Log. His responses would probably be quite varied and his discussions of the books would probably be quite funny.
• Jeff at Muse of Fire because he’ll likely have a far different set of responses from most of the others, being a professor of English and all. UPDATE: Read Jeff’s responses here.

Amy already tagged everyone else I likely would have tagged. Thanks, Amy. ;)

(No, seriously, thanks…like you, I was also a Blog Meme Virgin. Thank you for popping my cherry.)