* if anything, Ibbotson might have influenced Rowling; not the other way ’round. Unless one of the authors has a time machine

needs more demons? no.

It doesn’t go deep. It mentions typeface classifications like “Didone” and “Garalde” without exploring the distinctions. The authors frequently discuss the mood or tone of a group of typefaces but rarely discuss the elements of the font that establish the tone; when listing similar fonts they seldom explicitly discuss the differences between them.

Although I read the second edition, updated in 2002, the section on web typography is, perhaps inevitably, dangerously out of date.

Overall this was substantially more useful than Never Use More Than Two Different Typefaces. It should help an amateur do a less amateurish job of laying out type; and it should enable a design professional without a solid typography background to talk with one who does.

I liked it a lot. I thought Carriger mostly did a good job of incorporating some old-time flavor into her prose while keeping it streamlined enough to appeal to the modern escapist reader, viz:

The hackney rattled through the darkened streets. Miss Tarabotti, mindful of her hat and hair, nevertheless drew down the window sash and stuck her head out into the night. The moon, three-quarters and gaining, had not yet risen above the building tops. Above, Alexia thought she could make out a lone dirigible, taking advantage of the darkness to parade stars and city lights before one last load of passengers. For once, she did not envy them their flight. The air was cool and probably unbearably chilly so high up; this was no surprise, as London was generally a city not celebrated for its balmy evenings. She shivered and closed the window.

although sometimes characters’ diction struck me as not believably Victorian, with the utterance, “Plus, they are scheduled to return at any moment,” the construction that felt most glaringly anachronous.

While one might criticize the characters for being thinly drawn, the plotting is exuberant. And I definitely give Carriger credit for not only adding a significant variation to her creatures-of-the-night variation, but also for incorporating a legendary element that’s not fantastically overexposed.

Soulless kept me absorbed enough that I was able to read it on the subway without getting motion sick. That doesn’t work with every book by a long shot.

needs more demons? no.

I fared better with it this time around, although I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success. It opens with the world in a Cuban Missile Crisis-ish moment of nuclear terror. Charles Wallace, with the aid of yet another otherworldly companion, must avert catastrophe through an arduous series of jaunts through time (with some of the might-have-been aspects of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol).

The villain with his finger on The Button is one of a pair of brothers, one peaceable and noble, one hawkish and power-mad, who cyclically reenact their conflict throughout many generations. Charles Wallace must restore the balance to save the world.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is far more ambitious than A Wrinkle in Time or A Wind in the Door — it has a rigorous formal structure derived from a medieval prayer. L’Engle uses legends of ancient Welsh visitors to the New World to symbolize clashes between innocence and worldliness.

The characters enmeshed in similar conflicts over the centuries also have similar names, and sometimes I had a little trouble keeping the generations straight. (Then again, so does one of the characters in the story.) As on a my first reading, I thought it was a bit heavy-handed, rather obvious, and a little repetitive. I also think that some of L’Engle’s pasts are portrayed more convincingly than others.

But this this time around I was more aware of the music of L’Engle’s prose — there are some lovely and vivid moments, and overall I found it more satisfying.

needs more demons? possibly.

(This may be partly the collision of my expectations as a speculative fiction genre reader and Notaro’s perception of her (predominantly non-genre, I presume) audience — as an sf reader I place a premium on internal consistency, and generally expect (and prefer) quick-on-the-uptake characters. If those aren’t issues for you, you might like Spooky Little Girl better than I did. But on the other hand, I also found the characters a bit thin, and the prose a bit flat, which has nothing to do with genre.)

On the positive side, it did make me chuckle a few times, and it was kind of refreshing to read a mainstream novel with supernatural elements that didn’t go through all the pro forma paranormal romance moves.

needs more demons? Yeah.

I feel like this book wants to be a social climbing satire, but it isn’t barbed enough to qualify. Its critiques of modern life in Los Angeles seem a bit familiar and comfortable (although maybe as a non-Angelino there are subtleties that elude me).

needs more demons kinda sorta

The Surf Guru’s range is impressive, encompassing an impressionistic* portrait of Van Gogh’s physician (and portrait subject) Paul Gauchet; a tale set against the backdrop of an unspecified conflict with dreamy, almost Garcia Marquez-like, overtones of magical realism; a slipstream story; a satire of an academic history; and a brief piece possibly inspired by John McCain’s campaign.

The stories I liked best were contemporary, predominantly naturalistic stories of people whose lives are not quite staying on the rails, but everything more than held my interest. Dorst has a particularly strong line in first sentences, like “The candidate is so tense he cannot walk without crutches,” and “I drove Trace to the hospital the day they tried to fix his eye.”

The Surf Guru easily lived up to the (high) expectations set by Dorst’s debut novel Alive in Necropolis, and leaves me similarly impatient for his next book.

needs more demons? negatory, good buddy.

* Sorry. Just not sorry enough.

I think near-future satire of social technology is very hard to pull off right now: if Where The Ladies At? is real, how can you exaggerate it to a humorous extreme? Some of Shteyngart’s concepts read more as bluntly predictive than satiricial; a few already sound almost passé. (I first heard one of his supposedly edgy future slang terms in the eighties.)

Shteyngart fundamentally failed for me to deliver on the novel’s title: if it’s going to be sad, I need to be emotionally invested in the characters. I couldn’t manage to like Shteyngart’s primary narrator, Lenny Abramov, enough to care about his career struggles or his May-September romance with the Eunice Park, the other protagonist/narrative perspective. I found Park’s character (and voice) even more problematic than Abramov’s — she sounds way too much like a forty-ish man’s idea of a how twenty-ish woman would think, feel, and act (with a hefty dose of into-schlubby-older-men wish fulfillment).

But there was one dimension in which I thought Super Sad True Love Story really shone: as a cautionary fable about the risks of international debt. Shteyngart’s vision of a United States beholden to its creditors, a nation stripped of superpowerdom and emphatically not “too big to fail” rang more true than any of his characters. I thought it was all-too-credible in spirit if not in specifics.

needs more demons? “Demons” is the wrong metric, but it’s lacking something. It might have worked better for me if it were either substantially more or less compassionate to its characters.

The Secret History of Star Wars is an exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — investigation into the evolution of George Lucas’s Star Wars saga>, from two primary perspectives.

First, it examines Star Wars‘ influences, with an emphasis on Lucas’ tendency to incorporate aspects of properties that he unsuccessfully tries to license. Much has already been made of Star Wars‘ debt to Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon, Dune, and The Hidden Fortress (and Samurai culture in general). Kaminsiki goes deeper, asserting the influence of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen and Edgar Rice Burrough’s swashbuckling sci-fi, among others.

Second, it examines the changes the saga itself has gone through. Practically since the initial release of the first film, Lucas has claimed he had the whole saga worked out. Kaminski demonstrates — citing primary sources like Lucas’ own notes and draft scripts, as well as numerous secondary sources in interviews — that this was true only in the vaguest of terms. He gives particular attention to some of the films’ biggest twists. He makes the claim that when Ben Kenobi said, “a young pupil of mine, Darth Vader . . . betrayed and murdered your father,” in the original film, he was not dissembling, nor speaking metaphorically; in fact he asserts that the merging of “Father Skywalker” and “Darth Vader” happened during the script revision cycle of The Empire Strike Back. Likewise he explains that Luke and Leia did not become brother and sister until Return of the Jedi was written. Kaminski suggests that their siblinghood was introduced explicitly to tie off the loose end of “the other” potential Jedi knight mentioned by Yoda in Empire, and thereby exclude the possibility of sequels. Kaminksi devotes the most time to undermining the revisionist conception of the six films as “The Tragedy of Darth Vader.”

Kaminski provides insight not only into Lucas’ creative process, but his process for getting the films made. I had always assumed that Lucas was financially independent on the strength of Star Wars. (Famously, he had in insanely favorable merchandising deal, since the studio didn’t think the merchandising would be worth anything.) But Kaminski reveals that Lucas more-or-less bet the farm (Skywalker Ranch) on each successive picture.

The Secret History of Star Wars is thoughtfully organized and assembled, but it suffers from redundancy and some clunky phrasing. Kaminski mostly adopts an academic tone, with his sources diligently footnoted, which juxtaposes oddly with his use of geeky terms like “morph” and “port” to describe Lucas’ assorted artistic appropriations. But if you’re the sort of person for whom 600-odd pages about Star Wars sounds like an inducement, you’ll probably overlook its flaws, and — like me — read all the way through the appendices.

I’m enough of a geek myself to point out that Kaminksi makes one minor factual error that I found surprising: the first indication that Star Wars was “Episode IV” was earlier than Kamisnki says — it was first seen in the title crawl for the summer 1978 theatrical re-release, which we fanboys all went to in part for the Empire teaser attached to it.

needs more demons? where is that demon editor?

Turns out it’s not the same badass — each book starts with a (different) felon being released from prison, so the novels are thematically tied, but not necessarily directly linked in terms of plot or character, so perhaps I should have started with the most recent book. Small Crimes leaves me uninclined to investigate further. It is at least a little Huston-esque in its assured first-person voice and fetishistically lean prose, with nary a metaphor nor simile in sight. Of course, much of what made Huston’s Caught Stealing so compelling is that Hank Thompson doesn’t start as a badass; Zeltserman’s job is maybe a little harder out of the gate. But Caught Stealing also worked because it was funny, and a lot of that funny came out of Thompson’s relationship with baseball. Zeltserman doesn’t provide anything comparable to make Joe Denton more sympathetic or — and here’s the real fatal flaw — more interesting. (Denton does have a backstory, and something of an emotional internal life, but it’s strictly color-by-numbers; his most distinguishing trait is that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.) Huston’s plot played around with the conventions of noir suspense, where Zeltserman’s plays straight through them, leans awfully hard on coincidence, and has at least one twist that won’t seem twisty to any alert reader.

It’s probably not a fair comparison — Zeltersman was clearly striving for an updated take on Jim Thompson in this novel, and it’s maybe worth mentioning that my appetite for Thompson isn’t boundless either. But a point-by-point comparison with Jim Thompson’s novels wouldn’t do Small Crimes any favors either.

needs more demons? at least needs to put the demons into some less standard configurations.