In a stunning display of sheer nerve and terrible judgement, Brian Bendis devotes almost all of the latest issue of The Pulse to clip scenes from the first three issues of Secret War. There’s very little new material in the comic, except for an oblique opening sequence between Jessica and Wolverine and some moments told from a slightly different perspective. (We see Jessica leave the phone message for Matt Murdock… the phone message we heard from Matt’s perspective in Secret War.) I suppose one could at least credit Bendis for truth in advertising, as he’s said Pulse readers don’t need to read Secret War to understand what’s going on. What he neglected to say is that Secret War readers don’t need to pick up The Pulse at all.

As if to emphasize the issue’s superfluity, Marvel re-released the first two issues of Secret War yesterday, presumably so readers can compare and contrast. (Honestly, does anyone really think there isn’t a significant overlap between the audiences of Pulse and Secret War?) This is an amazingly lazy turn of events for what was the last Bendis book I’d been enjoying without reservation. But why focus on your flexible premise and interesting cast when you can do a Cliff’s Notes version of a half-finished mini-series that barely has enough material to crib?

The Pickytarian takes this turn of events as the perfect jumping-off point:

“I feel like a heel and a sucker for buying it. And do you know what? I’m getting off the train. That’s it. No more buying The Pulse, no more buying Secret War, no more buying any of this flimsy drivel that is being passed off as comic book entertainment.”

Even the Bendis Message Board can’t muster their usual enthusiasm:

“For a bimonthly book that offers my only real Jessica Jones fix, it’s kind of hard to deal with material that I’ve mostly seen before. Not really happy here. I miss Alias.”

“kind of pointless. Didn’t add anything to secret wars 1, at least not to me. I do like Brent anderson art though. Overall Meh””Too much retreading here for me. Needed a little more substance to it.”

“Also known as Secret War #1.5. On the plus side, Brent Anderson’s art is a lot more suitable for this book than Bagley’s was (well, Bagley did great action scenes). On the other hand, it’s a lot of retread stuff from the Secret War issues I’ve already read.”

And in another thread:

“Meh. We’ve basicaly had 4 issues of Secret War, and still have no answers. Half this issue was stuff we’ve all ready seen anyway.”

“It’s way loose and lacks organization. It’s a total throw-away issue for those of us reading Secret War, and we’ll have to wait 2 more months for another slow-ass issue. “

Bendis responds:

“there are a total of three pages that were secret war related material. not half. everything else was new. wolverine, the mystery man, ben, the hospital,”

but it isn’t quite cutting it:

“Okay. I just thought you’d be more clever than to take your script from another issue and paste it word for word. I feel you could have given us the same information in completely new scenes.”

“What did Wolverine and the mystery guy explain? Nothing. Because the mystery guy was a mystery, and Wolverine just got mad then cried.”

(Apologies to Graeme for stepping on his turf, but this just irritated me beyond all reason.)

I was going to do horror today, but the National Book Awards have distracted me. The organization has given its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Judy Blume, and that makes me glad on so many levels I don’t even know where to start. Coincidentally, Blume has also earned the dubious distinction of being the most censored writer of the last 15 years, as determined by the American Library Association. And that’s the kind of street cred you just can’t buy.

Like she needs it. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t read Blume. Or, if I knew such creatures, I promptly pretended not to. She talked directly to adolescent experience without the filter, without metaphor to make it somehow acceptable. Boys could learn the mysteries of the period from a much more reliable source than a film strip. Her books were filled with middle-class misfits just like me, running up against those withering moments of childhood and surviving. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone triumphed in a Blume book, but sometimes scraping through seemed like the best one could hope for.)

In her acceptance speech, Blume said, “It makes me sad and angry that encouraging young people to think for themselves makes you subversive.” Let me tell you, it was a rite of passage to get your hands on one of the “restricted” Blume books, and I didn’t know anyone who didn’t manage it. (My parents were pretty lax about what I read. If the television wasn’t on, they were happy, so I could wander through the house with my nose in East of Eden without incident.)

Blume even played a direct role in my development as geeky social outcast. One of my junior high arch-nemeses (everyone had a couple of those, didn’t they?) had a birthday party that was attended by Blume, and Susan, the dark one, invited virtually everyone at my school but me. (Susan disapproved of my corrective orthopedic shoes and superior achievement test scores, and I thought she was the poster child of money overcoming overwhelmingly negative personal qualities to ensure popularity.)

But junior high school was all about reading as subversion. Being a geek and finding anything preferable to spending unsupervised time with my peers (study hall), I volunteered at the paperback library. The teacher who ran the little room paid absolutely no attention to what her volunteers did, so co-worker Robbie and I would spend the hour searching through the shelves for every salacious passage we could find. And there were lots of them. They couldn’t have actually read the novelization of Grease before they put it on the shelves, could they? By my seventh-grade standards, it was the best kind of filth. In a collection of short stories, we also learned that sometimes people wore pants without underwear on beneath them. That was worth an entire semester of horrified speculation. In the book of “kid-friendly” urban legends, we learned just how much people suck with our first exposure to the Kitty Genovese story. (The author didn’t skimp on the stabbings, let me tell you.)

Besides Blume, my favorite books growing up were generally about misfits. I loved Madeleine L’Engle’s books. The Chocolate War was a revelation. Other favorites were The Chronicles of Narnia and Encyclopedia Brown. I keep meaning to see what’s out there in terms of contemporary kids’ fiction, though I generally have such an daunting “to read” pile that I never quite get around to it. One book, though, made it into the rotation, and I’m so glad it did. Louis Sachar’s Holes is one of the best books I’ve ever read, no matter who its intended audience is. It’s one of those perfectly constructed stories that just takes your breath away with its craft and heart. And it has that “misfits triumph” structure that I can’t resist.

In other Book Week News, Ed Cunard busts out the love for pop culture tomes and lit crit.

Wow. It’s almost Strong Women Protagonists Week at the comic shop!

DC offers Birds of Prey 76, Catwoman 37, Manhunter 4, and Wonder Woman 210. (For balance, DC is offering you the chance to watch Sue die all over again with a third printing of Identity Crisis 1.)

From Marvel, there’s Pulse 6 (a Secret War tie-in guest-starring Wolverine, so don’t get too excited) and She-Hulk 9. (For those of you wondering, yes, the bracelet on my ankle will explode if I don’t plug She-Hulk every time it ships. I would do it anyways, though.)

If you’ve forgotten what the heck was happening in Secret War, given how long it’s been since the last issue shipped and how very incrimentally the plot is moving forward, Marvel feels for you. They’re re-issuing “Book One” and “Book Two.” (Calling these rather slim outings “books” seems like a flagrant insult to the spirit of Book Week.)

I’m also looking forward to Ed Brubaker’s first issue of Captain America which, coincidentally, is the first issue of Captain America… again. Madrox 3 also arrives, a book that could actually sustain variant covers from a thematic standpoint but will probably never get one. And Viz busts out with the second volume of the gimmicky but charming Case Closed.

I’ve been trying to pin down what bothers me about the cover of Green Arrow 44. I liked the story itself, and I think Judd Winnick has some admirable and dramatically interesting ideas of what to do with the character of Mia who, as the cover communicates so subtly, is HIV-positive. Winnick has said in a variety of interviews that he wants to write Mia as a character living with HIV, and this is where the twitch comes in for me. The cover looks like a mug shot, or worse, an “In loving memory” poster that you’d see after someone has died. And if the story is about living with HIV to the best of one’s ability and making the most of the time you have, the stark, convict-or-corpse cover composition is just… discordant. Maybe it’s just me.

Of course, I’m completely flummoxed by the cover of What if Jessica Jones joined the Avengers? (posted at Jinxworld, found via Fanboy Rampage). Beyond the terrifying prospect of seeing Brian Bendis write another “classic Avengers” story (no doubt with Extra Krazy Wanda hint-dropping), what’s the deal with those guns Jessica’s toting? Apparently, the answer to this comic title’s rhetorical question is, “She’d become an overcompensating Black Widow clone who moonlights at the Clinique counter and steal lots of product during her shifts.”

My non-fiction reading list isn’t filled with what you’d call rigorous scholarship. It might be, but the authors generally have the decency to hide it under engaging writing.

What do architects and America’s first serial killer have to do with each other? They all found their turning points at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Erik Larson (not Erik Larsen) tells their stories in the fascinating The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. As architect Daniel H. Burnham tries to bring prestige to his chosen profession and the Second City, Henry H. Holmes uses the brouhaha surrounding the Fair to find victims. The stories don’t intersect perfectly, but each is interesting enough to sustain its own book. (Holmes was also the subject of an original graphic novel in the Treasury of Victorian Murder series by Rick Geary. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard good things about the series.)

Armchair travelers get to go around the world and back in time in Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horowitz. The author retraces Cook’s explorations and their impact, which was often devastating for indigenous cultures of the South Pacific. Horowitz has a balanced view of Cook’s legacy, mixing admiration for the man’s vision, wonder at the contributions to science and society, and horror at the destructive consequences of some of his stops along the way. Civil War buffs might enjoy Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. I got pretty impatient with it by the end, particularly with Horowitz’s boy-crush on re-enactor Robert Lee Hodge.

I love Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil for a couple of reasons. One, it was one of the first gifts I received from my significant other. Two, it’s beautifully written. Author John Berendt combines travelogue, social commentary, and a murder mystery to wonderful effect as he succumbs to the charms of Savannah, Georgia. It got turned into a blandly awful movie by Clint Eastwood (what is it with him and books I enjoy?), but save yourself the time and grief and enjoy the story in its original form. I don’t care how much of a crush you have on John Cusack. There’s no point in being a completist if it’s only going to cause you pain.

From the Book Week News Desk, today will bring announcement of this year’s National Book Awards. Which Manhattanite will take the fiction award? Will the entire 9/11 Commission take the stage if they win the non-fiction category? Can you stand the suspense?

… kick ass.

Or that’s what I anticipate the new season of The Amazing Race will do when it gets its two-hour debut on CBS tonight. The New York Times has a nice piece on the show’s progress from under-viewed critical darling to certified hit (registration required).

This has been a weak season for both Survivor and The Apprentice, so my hopes are high for this perennial favorite. If nothing else, I’ll get a weekly dose of adorable host Phil. As an added bonus, the show comes with marvelous recappery from the estimable Miss Alli over at Television Without Pity. (And if you question the “Without Pity” part of the site’s name, keep in mind that Miss Alli recaps all three of the shows mentioned in this entry.)

Meet the racers at the CBS site.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, still droning on about mysteries, here are some from the menfolk that I really enjoy.

In the hard-boiled private investigator genre, you can’t go wrong with the Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro series from Dennis Lehane. Kenzie and Gennaro operate out of a down-on-its-heels Boston neighborhood and run afoul of all manner of gangsters, psychopaths, and other urban detritus. Like all good noir, these novels put the characters in situations where they run the risk of becoming what they despise. How many moral compromises can you make before you’re just as bad as your opponents? And how do you move on from mistakes and traumas that haunt you? Lehane is also the author of Mystic River, and if you haven’t seen the movie, I’d suggest you read the book. It’s a lot more affecting on paper than in Clint Eastwood’s overwrought movie version.

Another P.I. favorite is Donald Strachey, the sleuth in a series by Richard Stevenson. Strachey is smart, sexy, and gay, and works out of Albany, N.Y. Stevenson’s stories are often topical (or were when they were published), always slyly funny, and have enough of a noirish edge to keep the stakes high and the suspense humming. Strachey’s longtime companion, Timothy Callahan, is a treat. Educated by Jesuits and a Peace Corps veteran, he tries to keep Strachey’s unethical impulses in line, with varying degrees of success. Their relationship is a highlight of the series; it’s a pleasure to watch a loving, functional couple hash out differences of opinion like adults. The appallingly named Death Trick is the first in the line. Less luridly titled but equally entertaining are Ice Blues and On the Other Hand, Death.

The Four Corners region of the American Southwest is one of my favorite places on the planet, so it’s no surprise that I’m crazy about the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries from Tony Hillerman. Methodical Lieutenant Leaphorn and impulsive Officer Chee try to keep the peace in the Navajo Nation. Leaphorn is a skeptic, and Chee is deeply spiritual, but they share a commitment to their community, constantly under assault from outside opportunists, internal malaise, and, worst of all, bureaucrats. The Nation is a nightmare of overlapping jurisdictions, which adds a wonderful underlying tension to the investigations as tribal, state, and federal law enforcement bring their own agendas to the table. Hillerman beautifully captures the setting and its disparate cultures. He also crafts memorable characters, from his central cast to the suspects and sources that pass through.

From the Book Week News Desk, Dr. Scott at Polite Dissent offers up some of his favorite mystery series and confesses his fondness for hapless bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. (I share that fondness, though I don’t recommend reading a stack of Plum books in a row.) At the Low Road, Ed Cunard admits that he’s kind of a voyeur. (Aren’t we all?)

Postmodern Barney shares more believe-it-or-not moments from the life of a comics retailer, and comics.212.net thanks Dark Horse for thoughtfully re-evaluating their price point… for Barnes and Noble and absolutely no one else.

Over at Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon takes a look at comics shops from the customer perspective. Like Tom, I find a lot of retail experiences irritating, including shopping for comics. I’m pretty fortunate in that there’s a pretty good shop in town. It isn’t perfect, but it’s new, and I think it has the right idea in a lot of ways.

As Tom points out, “the vast majority of the best comic shops get an economic lift from related items,” and the shop I frequent is no exception. The thing is, despite the fairly wide range of stock — DVDs, action figures, trading cards, etc. — the store is organized well. (They could come up with a better way of displaying new TPB and digest releases, but those cycle fairly quickly onto the regular shelves.)

The staff is friendly, and they’re fans with a fairly diverse range of tastes. They’re eager to order something they don’t regularly stock (though it can take some time), and they listen to their customers. When enough people request a title that isn’t on the shelves, you can be fairly certain it will be there before long. (The only exception so far has been Scott Pilgrim, which I did order through the store. I think I’m going to have to go all Team Comics over this, because this is a college town, and keeping a regular supply of Scott Pilgrim seems like a no-brainer to me. They know enough to keep copies of My Faith in Frankie on the shelves.)

While I try to confine most of my purchases to this shop (in part because I like these people, in part because I’d rather support a small business than a big chain), I still can’t resist the lure of the big box all the time. They have the advantage of volume and space, and they can keep more on the shelves than a small shop can. I went to Borders this weekend and, every time I’ve gone there, they’ve had a full run of Kindaichi Case Files on the shelves. And since I’ve purchased the last copy of some volumes from this same store on past visits, they obviously pay enough attention to keep popular titles in stock in as much of a full run as they can. (The sci-fi section is right next to the manga and graphic novels in this store, and my partner was gaping in horror at the ever-expanding manga shelves. “They’re eating the other comics,” he said.)

And I even got a nostalgia burst at the racks of pamphlets Borders keeps, watching little kids flip through the super-heroes and Archie Comics and what have you. But then, reminding me that it was 2004, I heard a father say to his son that he could have two of the comics he was browsing or one of “those Japanese comics upstairs… your choice.”

I love mystery novels of almost every variety, from gritty police procedurals to forensic thrillers to refined, drawing-room mysteries. I don’t think I can fit all my favorites into one post, so I’ve broken the list down by gender. Ladies first.

Mystery novelists (and readers) everywhere owe a great deal to Dorothy Sayers, who introduced aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey to the world. Wimsey routinely gets called in to investigate bizarre, high-profile murders that are both elegantly constructed and psychologically complex. The best of them feature Wimsey’s neurotic love interest, Harriet Vane. A mystery novelist, Vane meets Wimsey in Strong Poison. She’s the prime suspect in that case, and Wimsey sets out to prove her innocence. The course of romance doesn’t run smooth between the two, as each is too guarded and troubled to trust easily, but their chemistry is wonderful. They cross paths in Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night.

P.D. James has a lot in common with Sayers, though James leans away from the foibles of her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, focusing more on her revolving casts of suspects. That isn’t to say that she ignores her sleuth altogether, but Dalgliesh’s character development is more measured. The mysteries themselves are twisty, locked-room affairs, driven by dark, personal secrets, passions, and jealousies. They can seem a bit frosty at times, but the construction is generally fascinating, and James always strikes a nice balance between deduction and exploration of character. A Certain Justice is one of my favorites, along with Original Sin.

Elizabeth Peters isn’t British, but her protagonists are, and they’re wonderful. Amelia Peabody and her husband, Emerson, are full partners in every regard. Their union is blissful, they work side by side in archeological digs in turn-of-the-century Egypt, and they foil sinister plots by tomb robbers, craven aristocrats, and murderous rivals with poise and good humor. They and their extended family are magnets for trouble, as known for their deductive skills and short tempers as they are for their contributions to archeological knowledge. There are sixteen books in the Peabody-Emerson series, and there isn’t a misstep in the bunch. I’d suggest you start at the beginning, though, with Crocodile on the Sandbank, so you can watch the clan expand. And if you like recorded books, any of the unabridged editions read by Barbara Rosenblat can make the most tedious commute fly by.

Up next, the boys.

I’ve been a Food Network zombie this morning, so I thought I’d take that as an excuse to talk about some of my favorite books about eating.

At this time of year, I almost always stock up on the better food-porn cooking magazines, and Gourmet is always a reliable choice. The magazine’s editor, Ruth Reichl, is a wonderful writer. She had a long stint as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, and she has two collections of biographical essays that are great reading, even if you think the most important ingredient to keep on hand is a selection of take-out menus. Reichl’s first is Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, where we meet her mother, a disaster in the kitchen, and see Reichl start to explore the world of food. In the follow-up, Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table, where she starts to cultivate a career as a food writer. Reichl is anything but a culinary snob, and her stories have a very warm, expansive feel.

From the snarky side of the equation, there’s Anthony Bourdain, chef provocateur. In Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, he painted a vivid and sometimes terrifying picture of what goes on in the kitchens of high-end Manhattan eateries. I normally find this kind of self-indulgent gonzo stuff grating, but Bourdain is just self-aware enough to keep things on an even keel, and he’s got a great ear for an anecdote. A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine is a different animal entirely, and it’s even more entertaining. Bourdain goes to the ends of the earth for defining dining and provides an exciting, illuminating travelogue from his crusty perspective. (And he obliquely rags on Food Network darlings like Emeril, even as he inches towards becoming one himself.)

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I couldn’t put down Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. It’s an inclusive history of the food industry’s attempts to dumb down the American palate even as it pretended to liberate homemakers from the drudgery of food preparation. That last sentence makes it sound like a screed, but it isn’t. Author Laura Shapiro has a wonderful sense of humor, a strong command of facts, and a wonderful way of analyzing events and personalities to create a terrific portrait of a transitional moment in cooking.

On the cookbook front, you can’t go wrong with Julia Child. I turn to Baking With Julia all the time, and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (with the wonderful Jacques Pepin) is a great textbook for classical techniques, but it’s completely accessible. I love the way Nigella Lawson combines flavors in no-nonsense ways, and her How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food is a pleasure to read and cook from. She’s the polar opposite of frosty Ann Willan, but Willan’s From My Chateau Kitchen is food porn of the first order, with plenty of French countryside wish fulfillment thrown in the mix. I don’t cook from it that often, but Willan’s prim, sly way of writing is a treat.