When You Reach Me

#771
Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2009
208 pages

4.5 stars for this very sweet and earnest middle reader. Though the plot is soft science fiction-ish (there are reasons that A Wrinkle in Time is invoked), this is a foil for the story of transitioning to adolescence. You might kiss someone, or have an insight about a friend, or experience a flash of satori when your brain becomes abstract enough to grasp the paradoxes inherent in time travel.

I enjoyed the chapter headings that alluded to The $20000 Pyramid, which suggested that Miranda is now able to find patterns not only in the hexagonal bathroom tiles but also in her life. I felt great nostalgia as she encountered classmates who were suddenly revealed to have spent time thinking about physics, time, and UFOs. I was pleased to encounter another sympathetic dentist in children's literature, not having seen one since Stuart Little. I was especially appreciative of the conclusion, which holds both the promise of the future and the certainty of death, not tidied up, but acknowledged as inevitable. Spoiler (highlight to read): I completely dig that the Asperger-y kid who figures out time travel uses it to go back to protect another kid from himself--he was slow to get the concept of emotion in relationships, but when he got it, it apparently really stayed with him!

Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness

#770
Title: Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness
Author: Darryl Cunningham
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Year: 2011
151 pages

Cunningham, a cartoonist who worked on a Bristish psychiatric ward, tells 11 "graphic stories" (i.e., stories in visual format) of psychiatric disorders. These are not 11 tales of people (though some include anonymized people and one describes the author's own experiences with anxiety. For the most part they're descriptions of mental health problems made more compelling with human examples. There's an over-representation of self-injury, and I don't agree with all of his assertions, but with those caveats, this could be a useful adjunct to an introductory abnormal psychology course.

Vortex (Spin #3)

#768
Title: Vortex (Spin #3)
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates
Year:2011
368 pages

Audiobook.

Not his best, I think, but not bad at all. This is the third in a 3-book series, so it has some exposition to take care of. Wilson manages this through a couple of strategies--a framing narrative, a text within the framing narrative, a person out of his time element and his cultural translator, and a character who becomes functionally omniscient. There are two main sets of characters, one in the book's present and one in the distant future. The personalities and options of each coalesce with or diverge from its counterpart as the tale unfolds.

I initially thought "uh oh" when Wilson had a character give a mini-mental state exam but attributed this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. Nope, MMSE is not described in the DSM (though it is indeed standard practice for the kind of interview the character is conducting). Fortunately, that was the big egregious psych slip-up. In its long temporal jump and some of the issues that arose from this, the novel reminded me at times of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time. The conclusion is a happier version of Bios, though by "happy" I mean "the satisfactory poignancy of the heat death of the universe and its collapse into entropy--but in a good way". As in many of Wilson's novels, part of the climax or denouement is the hero's capacity to really die (rather than dying but being stored as data, for example). I don't buy the moral argument that since a person doesn't pass through a temporal arch but is recorded and recreated, that person is not the person who entered the arch and therefore is not responsible for their own regrettable acts. This seems like space lawyer sophistry. If it were true, any evil Star Trek denizen who used a transporter could simply claim, "I'm not the guy who did that thing--I'm a very close replica of him!"

What first attracted me to Wilson was a couple of his early books where the hero's journey was inverted so that the chracters the reader identified with were those who encountered the traveler, not the traveler him- or itself. (Think Brad and Janet rather than Frank N. Furter.) Wilson's stories have become less overtly Jungian, but no less interesting. This one was more clever in its construction than some, but not his very best.

Ashfall (Ashfall #1)

#769
Title: Ashfall (Ashfall #1)
Author: Mike Mullin
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
Year: 2011
466 pages

Adding to the broadly-based pleasures of a good YA post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, Mullin includes volcanoes, scientific plausibility, incidental characters in a same-sex relationship that is presented in a matter-of-fact way, teens who want to have sex and also are concerned about the risk of pregnancy, and bad guys in the form of privatized for-profit services. Also, cannibalism. Also, volcanic ash in your underwear. Also: generalized smashing. 

The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time

#767
Title: The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time
Author: Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson
Publisher: Harmony
Year: 2010
269 pages

An amusing cross-country sojourn to correct typos, including prosecution for unwittingly desecrating an historical sign. The tone wears on one in places, but I can't fault their intentions, and do admire their discussions of descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics.

The first major typo I remember encountering in my childhood was at a mall. The signboard, which should have read "The Hecht Company Will Be Close to You" (Just like me/Hecht's want to be/Close to you) instead proclaimed "The Hecht Company Will Be Closed to You". I recall worriedly asking one of my parents to whom we should report this error. Years later, when I had mastered "squirrel" and "scissors" and was aware of Captain Kirk's bold split infinitive, I lived hard by a FURNITURN store in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and later, on my daily commute to Boston, I would pass the new Home Depot in South Attleboro that was adorned with giant letters reading MASSACHUSETT'S. I called corporate about that one, as, presumably, did many, and the offending apostrophe was removed. This is to say that I understand.

Postcards from the Grave

#766
Title: Postcards from the Grave
Author: Emir Suljagić
Publisher: Saqi Books
Year:2005
Country: Bosnia-Herzegovina
196 pages

Bosnia-Herzegovina. A non-linear report/memorial in pastiche form from a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. Suljagić was spared the fate of his compatriots because he was working as a translator for the UN forces. To understand what's happening in this collection of short essays, first read about the Serbian expansion into Bosnia in the 1990s. As I read, I kept being reminded of Elie Wiesel's holocaust narratives, and particularly of the tension in novels such as The Oath: A Novel in which telling versus not telling the story of the destruction of the community creates terrible conflicts for the narrator.

An often-occurring typo in this book is the inconsistent but frequent elision of a word followed by "I"--"promisedI", for example.

Black Swan Green

#765
Title: Black Swan Green
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Year:2007
304 pages

Audiobook.

A bildungsroman from David Mitchell, well-written though ultimately a little precious and formulaic for me. I enjoyed the narrator's voice, and don't care that it's somewhat precocious.

In some ways I wish it had been a novel with a smaller focus--do we really need lessons about racism learned from gypsies? Surely a divorce and a broken watch are sufficient? I couldn't figure out why there was so much emphasis on a couple of characters, and found by Googling after reading that they appear in his other books. That's fine with me, but just as Ezra Pound said that the reader without a classical education should be able to read a poem at face value, without understanding its allusions, so should a reader be able to read a novel without extra-textual references throwing a wrench in the works. (Neal Stephenson, are you listening?)

Listen to Pink Floyd's album The Wall before you start reading this, or read a chapter or two of Lord of the Flies to get you in the mood for British schoolboy hierarchies and bullying. Don't pick up Skippy Dies immediately upon finishing, or you will have to set it down as soon as you get to Chapter 1 in the somnolent, annoying classroom.