This was fun, but somebody shoot me if I ever embark on a another theme week. For the wrap-up, random favorites:

Ian McEwan writes fascinating novels that focus on a turning point, an otherwise innocent moment, and the disturbing and tragic consequences that spin out from there. Enduring Love turns a chance encounter into a dangerous obsession. (It’s just been turned into a movie that’s gotten excellent reviews.) In Amsterdam, a woman’s death leads to tense games of revenge and scandal. Atonement is the longest of McEwan’s novels I’ve read; the other two are practically novellas in length, but this story has more scope and sweep. In it, a young girl oversees something, misinterprets it, and sends the lives of her family spinning into some very dark places. Briony, the girl in question, is an amazing character, both sympathetic and disturbing.

Living in a state that gets the brunt of Appalachian stereotypes, I’m happy to see the region and its culture treated with delicacy and heart in Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Novels. McCrumb tells overlapping stories of contemporary Appalachia (in and around a small town in the mountains of eastern Tennessee) juxtaposed with thematically resonant stories from history and folklore. The Ballad of Frankie Silver is probably my favorite. As present-day Sheriff Spencer Arrowood waits for the execution of a criminal he’d caught early in his career, he looks into the story of Frankie Silver, the first woman to be executed in North Carolina. The past informs the present in lovely, unexpected ways. Other highlights of this series include She Walks These Hills and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, which is just unbearably sad and hopeful at the same time. (McCrumb has also written a series of conventional mysteries, which aren’t bad. My favorite of her non-Ballad books is probably Bimbos of the Death Sun, an affectionately scathing tale of murder at a sci-fi/fantasy con.)

Two of the funniest books I’ve ever read come from Joe Keenan, creator of Frasier. In Blue Heaven, two gays run afoul of the most conniving woman alive, who uses them to try and scam money from the mob with a sham wedding. It’s filled with terrific characters, sparkling dialogue, and wonderfully constructed screwball comedy. With the popularity of The Apprentice, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a re-release of Putting on the Ritz. It spins from the not-at-all-implausible premise that an Ivana Trump-ish social climber wants a singing career. Only her lack of talent, philandering husband, bitter business rivals, and hapless lyricist and composer can keep her from triumph, surely. These books fall squarely into the “laughing out loud” category, and I can read them again and again.

So, that’s it for Book Week. Not to worry. I’ve got prose out of my system for a while.

What is Geoff Johns thinking? I don’t mean this in a “This is a travesty!” way (like I would with certain other creators who shall remain nameless). I’m genuinely curious as to what he’s got in mind with the “Titans Tomorrow” story that continued this week in Teen Titans 18.

For those of you not following the series, the current Titans get sidetracked during time travel and meet future versions of themselves who are very dark. (Even Raven added “Dark” to her name, which struck me as hilarious, because she wasn’t exactly a sunbeam before.) They kill villains and torture captives and posture.

As Batman (who was once Robin) says, “Things got so dark. The world got so dark.” (Poetry… sniff.) None of the dark Titans articulate any specific turning point where things went dark, though Batman throws in a teasing reference to “the crisis.” This could be a nod to that current mini-series where everything is revealed to be much darker than readers thought, or it could be a catch-all tease to an as-yet-unwritten dark crossover blockbuster. (Maybe things will be clarified in next issue’s conclusion.)

The implication of the arc seems to be “Dark Is Bad,” which is an odd message for a DC title at this point in time. And, since Johns has pretty much been the Identity Crisis crossover bandwagon, and since his own titles take a healthy pleasure in dark material (teens getting kneecapped, teens getting brainwashed by their creepy fathers, then mutilating themselves, women miscarrying twins, heroes staging bloody coups, heroes getting disemboweled, heroes getting parts of their faces bitten off, heroes forced to marry their “brothers”, heroes committing suicide, issue-long autopsies, coke-snorting rogues), he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of credibility as the messenger.

I’ve wondered before if Johns isn’t trying to have it both ways… riding on the nouveau-grim gravy train while saying in interviews how readers need optimistic comics like Rebirth. Now he serves up this meta-rich meditation on heroes gone dark. I should note that I’m not a big fan of “The future is horrible!” stories. Much as I liked “Days of Future Past” at the time, its influence left me with a distinct aversion to the sub-genre.

I think you lose something when you take heroic figures and make them too cognizant of a specific, crappy future that they must prevent. (It didn’t do the X-Men any favors.) It sounds gooey, but I’d rather see them act out of more open-ended, altruistic motives than in a dogged attempt to avoid a specific, sucky outcome. And that might not be the intent or consequence of “Titans Tomorrow” at all, but the possibility makes me uneasy. There’s enough grim material in the title as it is without an underlying sense of dread and futility.

I did get a good laugh out of the cover, for entirely personal reasons. Looking at Robin-Batman sitting on Batman-Batman’s headstone with “Beloved Husband” carved in it, I immediately thought, “Oh, how sweet. In the DC Universe of the future, gay marriage is legal, and Tim and Bruce made honest men out of each other.” I don’t think many people shared that reaction with me, but it made me smile. Because I’m an adolescent, when you get right down to it.

I’m not much of a fan of prose science fiction or fantasy. (My partner corners that geek market in our household.) More to my taste are books that approach those genres from an unusual direction.

Comedy is always a reliable point of entry for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I love the fantasy parodies of Terry Pratchett. Screwball comedy and great characters combine with smart parody of the fantasy genre and humanity in general. I’m particularly fond of any book in the series that features Death, which will sound really odd to anyone who hasn’t read any of the Discworld series. There are lots of them, but highlights in the series include Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Wyrd Sisters.

Christopher Moore borrows from a somewhat wider range of subject matter — vampires, Native American mythology, the Bible, ghosts, demons, etc. — but he has a similarly skewed perspective on the conventions of the fantasy novel. The best that I’ve read is probably Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. (It’s sacrelicious!) Actually, looking through his bibliography, the only ones I haven’t read are Fluke, which my sister loved, and The Stupidest Angel, which just came out.

Gregory Maguire takes a somewhat more serious approach to his re-examinations of classic stories, and the results are usually lovely. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister places the Cinderella story in a realistic and more layered context, making sharp observations about class and power along the way. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West sets out to redeem its title character, and damned if it doesn’t succeed. Maguire paints Oz as a hotbed of repression and political intrigue and green-skinned Elphaba as a principled outcast and agitator. Elphaba’s evolving relationship with beautiful, opportunistic Glinda is a treat. (I actually don’t recommend Maguire’s other works, Lost and Mirror Mirror, but Confessions and Wicked are both tremendously good.)

Time travel is one of my least favorite subjects for fiction, but I really love To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It slides past my distaste for its subject matter by cheerfully stomping all over it, punching up its baffling tendencies while lacing it with caustic social commentary. (Time travel is managed by the touchiest kind of government bureaucracy. Victorian England takes some loving swipes, too.) I keep meaning to try some of Willis’s other books.

There is one straightforward horror franchise that I do enjoy in a guilty pleasure kind of way. The books of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are generally trash, but they’re usually sly, readable trash. My favorite is Thunderhead, partly because of its setting (the American Southwest — in a cursed cliff dwelling, no less!) but mostly for its craven, quirky cast of characters. Still Life With Crows is another highlight of their output, filled with creepy, small-town secrets. Unless you have a very high tolerance for pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, you really should avoid The Cabinet of Curiosities. Frequent Preston-Child protagonist FBI Agent Pendergast has a lot going for him, but he climbs right up his own ass in this outing and barely emerges alive.

At Polite Dissent, Dr. Scott talks about some of his favorite historical novels. And tomorrow, Book Week wheezes to a halt with an entirely random “authors I really, really like” wrap-up. What was I thinking when I started this? I’ll just blame Ed.

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?)