Tales from Outer Suburbia

by Shaun Tan

(New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009)

Hardcover, 96 Pages, Children’s Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: 9780545055871, US$19.99

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: You thought you knew suburbia… Then you meet an exchange student from another world, discover a secret room that lets you escape to a place of perfect beauty, find a neighborhood where brightly painted missiles decorate every yard, and wait for a blind reindeer who demands a very special offering. … These are the odd, magical details of everyday suburban life the might forever go unnoticed, were they not finally brought to life by Shaun Tan, author and illustrator of award-winning New York Times bestseller The Arrival. Outer Suburbia. It’s closer than you think.

This collection contains the following stories: “The Water Buffalo,” “Eric,” “Broken Toys,” “Distant Rain,” “Undertow,” “Grandpa’s Story,” “No Other Country,” “Stick Figures,” “The Nameless Holiday,” “The Amnesia Machine,” “Alert But Not Alarmed,” “Wake,” “Why Not Make Your Own Pet: Here’s How,” “Our Expedition,” and “Night of the Turtle Rescue.”

My Review: It seems that a lot of books follow the same pattern for me: I am on my way out of the library and a book leaps off the shelf and into my bag. Tales from Outer Suburbia is one of those books. We were in the children’s section of our local library and I was at the self-check out and after running the books under the scanner, turned to go and I was confronted by the blank staring face of a diver’s helmet boring in to me from an endcap display. Compelled, I had to pick it up.

It sat, forgotten, amongst our library books for about a week before I finally saw it again (which seems strangely appropriate given the “found” nature of the stories in the book). I picked it up and started flipping through it and was instantly arrested by not only the artwork (which is absolutely incredible) but the stories are so … odd … that I cannot even begin to describe them. (Not good for a book review, I know, but it’s the honest truth.) I started reading them at bedtime and everybody fell in love with them. My wife and I loved the stories and my son and daughter loved the artwork.

So, as for the stories … they are so absolutely surreal that you need to experience them to fully appreciate them: a water buffalo that will point you in the right direction, what happens to all the poetry people write but don’t publish, a strange vigil of dogs, and … in my favorite … the eerie watchfulness of the “Stick Figures.” What Tan has created in Tales from Outer Suburbia is nothing short of astounding. He has taken the ennui and utter blandness of suburban life and turned it on its head; found the magical in the mundane, so to speak. This suburban landscape is still populated with cookie-cutter tract houses, and chain stores and fast food strip malls, but the vacant lot houses a water buffalo. Childhood adventures with a street map are elevated to the stature of expedition, and “keeping up with the Joneses” meets Arms Race in a very strange and also very satisfying story.

This is a truly marvelous book and would be the perfect gift for that precocious reader in your life.

Teaser Tuesdays: Something's Wrong ... Very ... Wrong ...

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My review of The Men Who Stare at Goats is still coming (I hope to write it in a little) but in the meantime, here is a teaser from my current read, Gary Krist’s historical account of the 1910 Wellington Avalanche which is considered the worst avalanche in American history. It’s a fascinating and harrowing account, and I always love reading about local history … especially those events that are largely forgotten, and in the case of the Wellington Avalanche that in and of itself is a tragedy.

The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America’s Deadliest Avalanche

by Gary Krist

(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007)

Hardcover, 315 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9780805077056, US$26.00

MY TEASER: “When Lewis Jesseph awoke on Wednesday morning, it was immediately apparent to him that something was wrong. The train he was on, which should have been rocking along the flat coastal plain toward Puget Sound, was instead standing at a dead halt” (45).

Musing Mondays: Where Do Your Visiting Books Stay?

Today’s Musing Mondays is hosted by Rebecca at just one more page… and is as follows: Where do you keep any books borrowed from friends or the library? Do they live with your own collection, or do you keep them separate? Do you monitor them in any way?

Books, right now, are kind of all over the house. Even my books don’t have a permanent place to live. They’re just stacked wherever right now, so the library books just kind of also live … wherever. We try to keep them in a logical place, but with a spirited four-year-old and a willful two-year-old, keeping books in one place is a sketchy proposal at best. The best I can hope for is to keep track of them, and I try to do that with a list of our books in Excel that I try to keep updated via the library’s online catalog and our accounts, but that, again, is a dream that has yet to come to full and complete fruition. My only consolation is that any and all late fees we pay because of the flaws in my system and the fact that we have young’uns in the house go to a good cause.

Booking Through Thursday (From 1/21/2010): Author Unknown

Well, another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading—but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not J.K. Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway—everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

This is a very compelling question because, at least for me, I have a lot of favorite authors who have seemed to have fallen off the public’s radar but who are excellent authors. These would be your Ramsey Campbells, your Robert Blochs, your Jack Ketchums, your Brian Keenes, your Richard Laymons. Granted, these are all authors in the horror genre, but they are all authors that are doing excellent work … they just are not on the public radar like, say, Stephen King or Dean Koontz.

Then there is Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist (which is the book that started all of this way back in August of 2000). Carr blew me away with The Alienist and made me want to share my reviews and thoughts on books with others, and yet, as far as I know, Carr is off of everyone’s radar. Though, it probably hasn’t helped that he hasn’t published anything in the last eight or ten years, but anyone who wrote The Alienist doesn’t deserve to disappear like that.

Finally, and this is the author I would really stump for, is Kit Berry. Berry came to my attention after a July 2007 post about books labeled “The Next Harry Potter.” I expressed some dismay about pitting books in comparison to (and competition with) Rowling’s books, and a number of the author’s on the list also expressed their displeasure at the label. One of those was Ms. Berry, who also sent me a copy of her book for review and I promptly fell in love with her series and have been promoting her books whenever I can.

Technical Difficulties

As was indicated in my most recent post, I have been in a bit of a funk in January, and have not been as diligent as I should have been in posting on this blog. I have a backlog of posts that I am going to try and work through to bring me “up to speed” and, hopefully, jumpstart my drive for this site. Anyway, stay tuned … more posts to follow shortly.

Next Up from Quirk Classics

I am a little behind in posting this (it was announced on January 12, 2010) and I chalk that up to having been in a bit of a “funk” the last week or so. Quirk Classics has announced the next title in their acclaimed mash-up series:

Android Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters

(Philadelphia: Quirk Classics, 2010)

Trade Paperback, 320 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9781594744600, US$12.95

From the Publisher: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina—an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel. As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-Century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen. Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.

Me again: Quirk has not yet released the cover art for the book hence the Abraham Lincoln steampunk picture. I have one big reservation about this book—in spite of all the coolness with which a Russian classic combined with steampunk robots is inherently imbued—and that is that Quirk’s version of Anna Karenina is only 320 pages long. My own experience with AK is that it is a much heftier novel than that, and poking around online has revealed other paperback editions to be somewhere in the range of 750-900 pages long. Winters has obviously employed some serious edits to Tolstoy’s novel and I, for one, find that to be more than a little disappointing. As near as I can tell, the Jane Austen mash-ups were in no way “abridged” and so to do so with Tolstoy seems a bit of a betrayal of the spirit in which these books began. But, that’s just my two cents. I’ll still read it of course.

Teaser Tuesdays: ¡Ay Caramba! Now That's a Demoralizing Thought!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Well, after working on it for nearly a month, and barely getting 150 pages into the 770+ page novel, I had to give up on Drood … not because it was bad or boring or any such thing, I just couldn’t get into it mentally, so I had to give it up, shelve it for another time. Maybe on audio… So, I turned to the next book in my TBR pile: Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stared at Goats (on which the George Clooney-Ewan McGregor-Jeff Bridges-Kevin Spacey film is based). I got so into this book that I probably will be posting a review of this book tomorrow (I blew through it in about three days). The book is scary, hilarious, odd, and absolutely fascinating and so, without any further ado, here is the Teaser from Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats:

The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Trade Paperback, 259 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9781439181775, US$15.00

MY TEASER: “The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on U.S. troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, ‘Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds” (130).

The Friday 56: The Moon Man, The Driver, and the Royal Woman

The Friday 56 is hosted by Storytime with Tonya and Friends

RULES

1. Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
2. Turn to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like).
5. Post a link with your post to Storytime (and here on Bryan’s Book Blog, I’d like to know what book you’ve got at hand).

For some reason, Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life is the closest book to hand … and I don’t know what it’s doing out of the office and next to my computer. I certainly didn’t bring it out (I’m still working through Drood so it’s not as if Boy’s Life is the “On Deck Book” because Drood is still in the batter’s box swinging away), it must have been one of my kids, which is even more random, because they’re four and two. Anyway, here’s the fifth sentence on page 56:

“As the Moon Man helped her from the car, the driver opened an umbrella and held it over her royal, ancient head” (56).

Friday Finds: January 1, 2010

Friday Finds (hosted by Should Be Reading)

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s hoping your 2010 is better than your 2009. Gonna keep it short for the holiday, so here you go … this week’s finds:

The Gates by John Connolly

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Trout! by Teri Sloat illustrated by Reynold Ruffins

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford

Ink and Steel: A Novel of the Promethean Age by Elizabeth Bear

Hell by Robert Olen Butler

Simone Goes to the Market: A Children’s Book of Colors Connecting Face and Food by David Westerlund

2010 Audiobook Challenge

A lot of book bloggers out there join in “Challenges” that are hosted by other book bloggers in an effort to … I don’t know what. Anyway, since I have joined in to the wider book blogger community these past five or six months, I have shied away from joining in on any of the challenges (1) because it was the middle of the year and it seemed pointless, and (2) because I didn’t really like the idea of having my reading “directed” (I got enough of that from my literature classes as it was). However, about two weeks ago, Alyce over at At Home with Books posted that she was joining the Audiobook Challenge, and that one seemed like one that I could do, and wouldn’t screw with my perceived reading autonomy, as it were. And, since I blow through audiobooks fairly quickly, it seemed like a natural Challenge for me to join up with. It’s being hosted over at The Royal Reviews this year, and this is what they have to say about it:

With most of us having iPods or MP3 players these days listening to audiobooks has become an easy activity. Personally doing housework, driving the kids to school or sitting waiting for soccer training to finish has never been more enjoyable.

Challenge Guidelines:
1. Anyone can join. You don’t need a blog to participate.
2. There are four levels:
—Curious: Listen to 3 Audiobooks
—Fascinated: Listen to 6 Audiobooks
—Addicted: Listen to 12 Audiobooks
—Obsessed: Listen to 20 Audiobooks
3. Audiobooks only.
4. You can list your books in advance or just put them in a wrap up post. If you list them, feel free to change them as the mood takes you.
5. Challenge begins January 1 thru December 2010.

I listened to 17 audiobooks in 2009, so I think that I can easily hit the Obsessed level. So, the goal for audiobooks for 2010 is at least twenty. So, with that in mind, allons-y!

The Best (and Worst) of 2009

Well, now that 2009 has come to a close, it is time to take stock. First and foremost, I fell well short of my stated goal of books to read in 2009. Out of my goal of 105 books I only read 75 this year. *sigh* I’ll have to consider what I want to set as a goal for 2010. That’ll be posted later today at some point. Now, as for The Best and The Worst of 2009, it was easy to make those decisions as this year I implemented a Ratings systems so the Bests are those that were rated as ACQUIRE in 2009 and the Worsts are those that, conversely, were rated as DITCH this past year. I noticed that after about August there were less Ditches and a lot more Acquires, and I think that comes from the fact that as we got ready to move and as I started my first quarter of my Masters program, I became a lot more picky about the books I read as my leisure reading time became a lot more precious to me, and I started picking books more discriminatingly than I did before that time (also, from January to April, I had books I was required to read for classes for my undergrad classes, and so those may not have been ones that I necessarily chosen on my own, so there was a much wider margin of books and quality during that time). So, without any further ado, here are my best books of 2009:

THE BEST

January

Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

Posted 01/05/2009 – 02:45:00 AM

The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged

by Robert Frost

edited by Edward Connery Lathem

Posted 01/26/2009 – 11:00:00 PM

February

Selected Poems

by William Carlos Williams

Posted 02/19/2009 – 02:25:00 AM

The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Tóibín

Posted 02/19/2009 – 06:25:00 PM

100 Selected Poems

by e.e. cummings

Posted 02/19/2009 – 06:55:00 PM

The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck Centennial Edition

by John Steinbeck

Posted 02/24/2009 – 06:25:00 PM

March

A Bit on the Side

by William Trevor

Posted 03/31/2009 – 09:00:00 PM

East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

Posted 03/31/2009 – 10:25:00 PM

April

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Posted 04/12/2009 – 11:20:00 AM

Brick Lane

by Monica Ali

Posted 04/30/2009 – 11:30:00 PM

May

The Silence of the Lambs (Audio): Redux

by Thomas Harris

read by Frank Muller

Posted 05/13/2009 – 08:55:00 AM

June

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Audio)

by David Grann

read by Mark Deakins

Posted 06/12/2009 – 03:30:00 AM

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible (Audio)
by David Plotz
read by The Author
Posted 06/23/2009 – 05:00:00 AM

The Composer is Dead
by Lemony Snicket
illustrated by Carson Ellis
read by The Author
with music composed by Nathaniel Stookey
Posted 06/27/2009 – 11:30:00 AM

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories
by Wells Tower
Posted 06/30/2009 – 11:10:00 PM

July
The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists
by Sean Connolly
Posted 07/10/2009 – 12:00:00 AM

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Posted 07/10/2009 – 01:50:00 AM

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
by Judi Barrett
illustrated by Ron Barrett
Posted 07/10/2009 – 02:40:00 PM

August
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Posted 08/20/2009 – 04:50:00 PM

‘salem’s Lot (Audio): Redux
by Stephen King
read by Ron McLarty
Posted 08/28/2009 – 02:50:00 PM

September
Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island (Audio)
by Mike Tucker
read by Anthony Head
Posted 09/29/2009 – 11:45:00 AM

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Posted 09/30/2009 – 09:45:00 PM

Dragons of the Hourglass Mage
by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Posted 09/30/2009 – 11:10:00 PM

Doctor Who: Pest Control, An Exclusive Audio Adventure (Audio)
by Peter Anghelides
read by David Tennant
Posted 09/30/2009 – 11:30:00 PM

October
The Spellman Files
by Lisa Lutz
Posted 10/14/2009 – 01:35:00 AM

All the King’s Men (Audio)
by Robert Penn Warren
read by Michael Emerson
Posted 10/15/2009 – 01:40:00 AM

Doctor Who: Forever Autumn (Audio)
by Mark Morris
read by Will Thorp
Posted 10/18/2009 – 01:50:00 AM

The Peshawar Lancers
by S.M. Stirling
Posted 10/19/2009 – 12:30:00 PM

Doctor Who: The Nemonite Invasion, An Exclusive Audio Adventure (Audio)
by David Roden
read by Catherine Tate
Posted 10/20/2009 – 09:35:00 PM

Star Wars: Death Troopers
by Joe Schreiber
Posted 10/28/2009 – 10:15:00 PM

November
The Last Town on Earth (Audio)
by Thomas Mullen
read by Henry Strozier
Posted 11/04/2009 – 01:25:00 AM

Doctor Who: The Feast of the Drowned (Audio)
by Stephen Cole
read by David Tennant
Posted 11/10/2009 – 01:35:00 AM

December
The Terror (Audio)
by Dan Simmons
read by John Lee
Posted 12/18/2009 – 02:15:00 AM

Simone Goes to the Market: A Children’s Book of Colors Connecting Face and Food
by David Westerlund
Posted 12/31/2009 – 12:05:00 AM

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Trout
by Teri Sloat
illustrated by Reynold Ruffins
Posted 12/31/2009 – 03:50:00 PM

Wheedle on the Needle
by Stephen Cosgrove
illustrated by Robin James

Posted 12/31/2009 – 05:30:00 PM

If I was pressed to pick the Best-of-the-Best that I read in 2009, for print books it would end up being a tie between East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (with Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned coming in at a close second); as for audiobooks it would probably be another tie between All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and read by Michael Emerson and The Terror by Dan Simmons and read by John Lee (though Good Book by David Plotz and The Lost City of Z by David Grann come in tied at a very close second place).

Now, for the dregs…

THE WORST

January

Twilight (Audio)
by Stephenie Meyer
read by Ilyana Kadushin
Posted 01/25/2009 – 03:15:00 PM

February
New Moon (Audio)
by Stephenie Meyer
read by Ilyana Kadushin
Posted 02/19/2009 – 12:20:00 AM

The Pearl
by John Steinbeck
Posted 02/19/2009 – 01:10:00 PM

March
Eclipse (Audio)
by Stephenie Meyer
read by Ilyana Kadushin
Posted 03/31/2009 – 07:45:00 PM

April
Breaking Dawn (Audio)
by Stephenie Meyer
read by Ilyana Kadushin and Matt Walters
Posted 04/30/2009 – 07:30:00 PM

July
How to Draw Washington’s Sights and Symbols
by Aileen Weintraub
Posted 07/10/2009 – 03:45:00 PM

August
Dead Until Dark
by Charlaine Harris
Posted 08/23/2009 – 09:50:00 PM

September
The Science of Stephen King: From Carrie to Cell, the Terrifying Truth Behind the Horror Master’s Fiction
by Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg
Posted 09/17/2009 – 08:00:00 AM

December
The Flock
by James Robert Smith

Posted 12/23/2009 – 01:15:00 PM

Well … I guess there was a trend to the Worsts in the first four months of the year. Did you see it? What was that? You want Worst-of-the-Worst? Well, at the risk of offending, it would easily be The Science of Stephen King by Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg.

Well, that’s 2009 in a nutshell, though of course there were plenty of good books in between these. Lots of decent BACKLIST and CHECK OUT books. As I said in the previous post, Happy New Year’s to you and yours from Bryan’s Book Blog, and here’s hoping that your 2010 is full of love, happiness and lots and lots of books!

Out with the Old and Ringing in the New

Happy New Year’s to you and yours from Bryan’s Book Blog.

May your 2010 be filled with love, happiness and lots and lots of books!