I spend a lot of time staring at screens, so I’m always a little nervous when we head off on a vacation with limited internet connectivity and no television. In a place as beautiful as Zion National Park, it’s hard to care, and I always get a lot of reading done.

Best of the pile of prose was Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Penguin Group). It’s all sloppy and raucous on the surface, but mythic and almost perfectly constructed underneath, and it’s got incredibly memorable characters. For a novel that’s ostensibly about a fat geek who wishes he could get laid, that’s saying something. But Diaz has apparently never met a digression that he couldn’t tweak into something intelligent and thrilling, and his protagonist’s nerdish obsessions are just part of the tapestry. I haven’t had much success with geek tragedy, but this book is an absolute thrill.

Not in the same league as Diaz’s book but wonderfully readable and smart, Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin’s Press) humanizes those irritating culture wars that make us all froth. In it, a sex education teacher pays for a moment of frankness by having an abstinence-only curriculum forced upon her by an activist congregation and a craven school board. Then she finds out that a member of the congregation is the coach of her daughter’s soccer team. Freedom, faith and sex mash together in appealingly messy ways, and the characters are uniformly well-rounded and endearing. It’s nice to see an author strike a balance between “flawed” and “intolerable,” which Perrotta manages quite neatly. There are some easy marks in the cast, and the book is much funnier for it, but there’s an overall generosity to Perrotta’s approach that’s really rewarding. If it sounds like an HBO original picture, it probably will be at some point. Fans of the novels of Stephen McCauley will feel right at home.

And because you have to read some laughably improbable crap while on vacation, I was really happy that my partner had brought a couple of books by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child along, The Book of the Dead and The Wheel of Darkness. They both star that most ridiculous of Mary Sues, Special Agent Pendergast, and they’re complete hogwash, but they’re amusing all the same. As in all Preston-Child novels, vague supernatural menaces and staggering authoritarian incompetence conspire to put hundreds of indifferently characterized extras at risk, and only Special Agent Contrivance can save them. How these two authors have managed to avoid being burned in effigy by whatever professional organization exists for museum curators I don’t know, not to mention any secret society that exists for the defense of narrative plausibility. But when your plane has been delayed for two hours and your mind is already running to thoughts of homicide and widespread mayhem, it’s good to have one of their books handy.

I read some comics too, but I’ll get to them later.

I was really looking forward to Hero, Perry Moore’s novel about a teen-aged, gay super-hero. After reading it, I’m a little disappointed by some of the messages I took away from it.

The intentions of the book are obviously good, but it’s so polarizing. Almost all of the straight people are judgmental or hypocrites or both, and I found that really depressing. It’s just not the way the world is.

I have a pet peeve, and I’m wondering if it bothers anyone else. Does it ever irritate you when a publisher puts “A Novel” on the cover of… well… a novel? Like, “Oh, thank heavens, I would have mistaken it for a cookbook that had been mistakenly shelved here in the fiction section if it weren’t for that thoughtful note.” It’s kind of like when a store adds “-pe” to “shop,” just in case nobody could figure out it was supposed to be quaint.

It’s just me, isn’t it?

And here are five things I didn’t love about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Again, seriously, if you haven’t read it and are planning to, DON’T PROCEED TO THE JUMP. There are big honking SPOILERS. I MEAN it.):

1. Forgetfulness: This one’s probably caused by two factors. One is that Rowling’s books are generally so fluid and tightly plotted that I’ve never really noted any continuity errors. The second is a lifetime of nitpicking through Marvel and DC comics and developing highly defined but ultimately useless continuity muscles. Anyway, in an early chapter, Hermione explains what she’s done to her parents to get them to safety, which included significantly modifying their memories. Later, she says she’s never performed a forgetfulness charm before, even though she’s made her parents forget they had a 17-year-old daughter. I finally wrote it off as a difference between memory modification and simple forgetfulness, but I did spend a fair amount of time assuming that Hermione was under the Imperius curse or something.

2. One locket to irk them all: I know the books are packed with homage and that they’re basically a patchwork of children’s fantasy literature, but this Lord of the Rings stuff was such a direct lift that I half expected one of the characters to reference it. Hermione reads everything; surely she’s gone through some muggle literature? She seems like the type to have read the complete works of Austen by the time she was nine.

3. Career women are bad: This might be an overreaction, but all of the women characters who favor work over marriage and family are really, really evil (unless they’re nurses or teachers, who are basically acting in loco parentis). Rita Skeeter, Umbridge, Bellatrix – all of them suck without mitigating factor, and it strikes me as too coincidental that they’re all focused on their work. (Yes, being a Death Eater is a job.)

4. Moms are great: This is essentially just the flip side of that, but fortune favors the fertile in Rowling’s novels. I strongly suspect that Mrs. Weasley (the best mom ever) got to take down Bellatrix (the worst of the career gals) just as an object lesson that, even the most enthusiastically sadistic of Death Eaters is no match for a mama lion in a rage.

5. That epilogue: I really wanted to learn what the kids were doing with their lives, beyond being married and having kids. Aside from Neville, there was no suggestion that any of them had jobs or interests or things to occupy their time other than being married and having kids. I suppose it’s unlikely that we’d have found out Hermione was running the Department of Mysteries and Ginny was an internationally famous quidditch player while Ron and Harry were happy, stay-at-home dads, but come on. Throw me a bone.

Here are five things I loved about Harry Potter and the Deatlhy Hallows. (Do I even need to specify that there are spoilers after the jump? Seriously, if you haven’t read it and are planning to, DON’T CLICK. I MEAN it.):

1. Luna’s eulogy for Dobby: I’ve made no secret of my abiding fondness for Ms. Lovegood, and this little scene just typifies everything I admire about her. She’s such a wonderful combination of dottiness and unexpected emotional insight. She just breaks my heart.

2. Hermione’s stylish accessory: Is there a major character in the Harry Potter books who wouldn’t be dead were it not for Hermione’s cleverness? That traveling bag of hers is kind of the supreme example of her intelligent competence and preparedness. I would also like to note that, while Ron seemed to learn absolutely nothing in six years at Hogwarts and Harry seemed to focus on disarming, stunning and shielding to the exclusion of everything else, Hermione did the reading and learned how to apply the knowledge in day-to-day life. I hope she got an honorary degree.

3. Just about every moment with Neville: I sort of wish that there was a companion book to Deathly Hallows that showed what was happening with Neville, Luna and Ginny at Hogwarts while everyone else was off recreating Lord of the Rings. Catching up with Neville late in the game, we didn’t really get to see the last bits of his evolution from ineffectual, good-hearted nebbish to can-do, good-hearted nebbish, and I frankly feel a bit cheated by that. The bits he did get were absolutely golden, though.

4. Very little Hagrid: There were a number of teachers I missed in this installment, but that big, lumbering, secret-blabbing, friend-endangering idiot wasn’t one of them. He’s essential absence from the proceedings was really, really welcome, and it probably kept a cap on the body count. Nothing’s more dangerous than Hagrid trying to be helpful. The big dolt.

5. The Snape revelations: They weren’t surprising, and I felt they got short shrift, but it was satisfying to be ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. (I always love that!) Okay, I didn’t suspect the childhood friendship or anything, but I was very glad to see that my beliefs about his essential nature were correct, and that Rowling resisted the urge to over-sentimentalize them in any way. He was still a bastard, but he was doing the right thing. (I’m reluctant to admit this, but I often found myself agreeing with Snape about Harry. He really was mediocre, lucky and profoundly disrespectful.)

I stopped by Barnes & Noble yesterday to pick up a copy of Otaku USA, and I got a pleasant surprise while looking through the new paperbacks display. First of all, there are new editions of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, which look nice. Second, every one of the new covers announces the imminent arrival of a sequel, Michael Tolliver Lives (from HarperCollins).

The Tales books were tremendously important to me when I first read them, way back during my college years. They were the first books I’d come across that didn’t present homosexuality as a problem or an issue. They were also the first books I’d read featuring gay and lesbian protagonists that were actually funny. They portrayed people of all sexual orientations living alluringly rounded lives in relative harmony, and their soap operatic structure certainly didn’t hurt. (The first four books were originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle.) Reading them was like receiving dispatches from the interpersonal Promised Land.

I haven’t read them in a long time, so I have no idea how they’ve aged or what my current reaction to them would be. I’m a little reluctant to do so, for fear that their initial impact and my nostalgia for them led me to enshrine them beyond their actual merit. And I’ve found that I haven’t been able to fairly evaluate Maupin’s other novels, Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener, probably owing to my fondness for the Barbary Lane crowd. (I think they suffer from a case of Serious Novelist Syndrome, and sly callbacks to the Tales books didn’t make me any fonder of them.)

But it will certainly be interesting to reacquaint myself with the Tales cast and to see how Maupin approaches them. And in a summer that doesn’t promise new installments from some of my favorite mystery authors (Elizabeth Peters and Tony Hillerman, for two), the book will nicely fill a gap in my summer reading.

One of the benefits of living in a university community is a rich range of cultural events – lectures, recitals, and so on. Okay, so most of the time my appreciation of these opportunities is theoretical, as I’ve decided to sit on the couch and make fun of David Caruso’s acting in reruns of CSI: Miami. (Seriously, he’s like watching Danny Kaye try his hand at film noir.) But even I can be motivated to pry myself off the couch from time to time, and a lecture by Sarah Vowell was more than lure enough.

Vowell is an essayist and radio commentator. I first encountered her on National Public Radio pushing her book, Take the Cannoli. She struck me as a less self-involved David Sedaris (not that his self-involvement is bad – it’s just that it’s inspired too many inferior imitators), and I enjoyed the book a lot. I caught her from time to time on NPR’s This American Life, and I really loved her third book, Assassination Vacation. Like Sedaris, she’s got a funny voice and a wry sense of humor, but unlike Sedaris, she has expansive interests and peculiar but illuminating obsessions. In other words, she’s a big geek, which makes her barbed perceptiveness all the more appealing.

Last night’s audience was almost precisely what you’d expect – liberals and graduate students, gathered to pay tribute to our nerd princess. She did not disappoint. Her extemporaneous speaking is as delightful as her writing. (Any evening that concludes with a detailed differentiation between apathy and quiet despair is my kind of evening.) When asked who her current presidential candidate of choice was, she thought for a moment and said, “Gee, I’m just so un-picky these days.”

For whatever reason, I’d passed over The Partly Cloudy Patriot, but the opportunity to get it signed was too good to pass up. It proved, yet again, that I should not be allowed near any level of celebrity, because I always get weird when I actually interact with them. But hey, I have an autographed book by one of my favorite essayists, and I’m sure she wasn’t too alarmed by my complete lack of social skills.

One thing – I can understand the desire of professors to expand their students’ horizons by requiring them to attend events like this. And maybe a small handful of them come away better informed and more curious than they were before. But for the most part, no one is happy with this arrangement. The students are clearly unhappy, judging by their sighing, talking and compulsive peeks at their cellular phones to see if that undoubtedly life-changing text message has arrived at last. And the people who attended the event in question are unhappy if they have the bad fortune of sitting next to the students and are forced to try and tune out their ostentatious ennui. Just make them watch a video in class, or something.

But back to Vowell. Wikipedia has a terrific collection of audio and video links to her appearances on various radio and television programs. If you listen to only one, make it this episode of This American Life, where she confesses to actually enjoying marching band (see? big geek!) in a performance that led David Sedaris to insist that “She must be destroyed.” Oh, and she said her next book will be about the Puritans. I can’t wait.