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I have read some books lately
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:10 pm on 9/5/2005
The still-marginally-new Ruth Reichl book, Garlic and Sapphires - Mom had read and loved Tender at the Bone, and I’d flipped through it and enjoyed the grazing, but for some reason it took the promise of big-city glamour and intrigue to get me to buy a ticket. This new one is mainly the story of the odd effect that method-acting had on her as she donned various disguises to facilitate her work as NYT restaurant critic. Most of these disguises are meant to confer low status, even invisibility, and the most satisfying element is the loud, clear message that, if high-end restaurants are going to be so expensive and elitist, they had better earn it with their food - and better still if they ditch a measure of the elitism and remember that they’re in the hospitality business. But the book’s also about status itself, and the hazards of being such an aficionado that you become insufferable to others, even when you are not being negative in particular. Where’s the line between talking something up because you love it, and talking something up because other people don’t? Is that whole question just a morass that you can only really deal with by retreating to cooking for yourself? (Certainly a wonderful thing that everyone should do - that’s not my point.)
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World by Bryan Lee O’Malley - our hero is 23 and unemployed in Toronto, in a crappy band, lives with his gay friend in their one room, and is chastely dating a high school girl. His friends give him all sorts of shit for all of the above but he is pretty much okay. Then he meets the girl who’s been using his brain as a hyperspace shortcut across town, falls in love, and has to fight her league of evil ex-boyfriends. Some of them don’t even drop any items when he beats them. This could describe a dozen normal-guy-dropped-into-fantastic-world stories, but it doesn’t. What makes Scott Pilgrim great is that nobody blinks, or rather, they blink just enough and not more. It’s just autobio comix with the anime and good cheer turned up until it drowns out the masturbation and suicide. It’s like someone imagined a comic that its own lead character might want to read; it’s like a Street Fighter II clone exploded and some hipster kids stole a couple of the pieces and built a soap opera out of them. In short, this is the only superhero comic that matters. It will back up the awesome truck into your face, BEEP BEEP BEEP and unload a truck full of awesome.
Another comic I should review is Carla “Speed” McNeil’s Finder collection, Dream Sequence. On the surface it’s about VR, but McNeil is good enough at science fiction not to be all five-minutes-ago cyberpunk about it. I can say more, but I’m going to do it in a Fictionsuit-related forum because it’s relevant to that quest.
Next to come: Michel Houellebecq’s book-length essay H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life. I keep thinking it’ll be fun but every time I read a few pages I look up thinking, “Dooooom… doooom…” and probably have dark circles under my eyes. I guess that’s fun in its way.