Two videos, one related to last year’s book (Feynman, with Leland Myrick) and one related to the upcoming Imitation Game (with Leland Purvis).
2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%
Stephen King calls that The Formula in his excellent book titled On Writing. The first draft of my first attempt at long form writing is 43,838 words, so if I do what Mr. King says, I’ll have a novella (prose! fiction!) starring the character I get asked about the most often at comics conventions.
Whether it will remain at 39,454.2 words after additional and inevitable rewrites is a mystery to me. But for now, I’m happy that I got this far, and wonder what it will look like to me after it stews in its own juices for six weeks or so…
Feynman, week #10, at #10
The book Leland and I made continues to do well, and has now made it to double digits on the New York Times Best Sellers List.
Barely, but no complaints…the top three (Tintin, Habibi, and Hark! A Vagrant) are all great and the Twilight and Walking Dead juggernauts are tough to beat as well. Even for Richard Feynman.
The Year in Running
Around March I wondered if 2010 was my last good year of running. Not that it was brilliant — I had my share of injuries and didn’t meet my own expectations in any but one race. And no elite Kenyan runner ever gets a worried look when he or she sees me limbering up near the starting line. But still, it was pretty good, and I was pretty healthy. No ankle sprains, for one thing.
In 2011 I had more than my share of injuries, assuming my share is zero. Which it isn’t. So the one big one that got really…chatty with my hip and lower back, and which has nagged at me for almost two years, and which has resisted both rest (to be fair, I’ve probably not given it enough of that) and physical therapy (more than enough of that, darn it, and more than enough ibuprofen too!) coupled with a couple of minor re-sprains, made me melancholy. But all in all, I shouldn’t complain. I got three decent trail races in, taking home an age-group mug in two of them and a gigantic glass for completing all three in the Running Fit “Serious Series.” And Dances With Dirt, always fun, was, well, fun! Thanks Sarah, Merry, Julie, and Dave!
The day after Dirt I left for the book tour, and that meant too many cities with too many unknown routes and having only bits and pieces of days that were my (in theory) own to fit a run in. So training for the Detroit half-marathon became dicey. But I stayed healthy throughout (a miracle given the number of planes I flew on and hands I shook) and mostly pain-free (thank you, naproxen) and was able to get maybe 75% of the work in that I needed. And that included lovely runs in Los Alamos, where the air is thin, along the Hudson and Charles Rivers in NYC and Boston, a lovely trail in Durham, and a long, hot, and dry 9.5 miles of road in Austin that surprised me by not killing me.
So, Detroit arrived and Dave wasn’t there to stop me from going out too fast. (His nagging injury this year was worse than mine.) Without the voice of reason I went out…you guessed it…too fast, and was at about last year’s pace at the 10K mark without last year’s training to back it up. That yielded predictable results: I was already fading during the international underwater mile, and stayed slow for the next five. If the splits are to be believed, I actually picked up the pace again at the end — the race photos show me grimacing at the finish, so maybe I did — but a smarter overall run would have netted me a better time. Still, I was about 5 minutes faster than I had predicted for myself the week before, and snuck in under the wire to finish within the time range I predicted in January. By one second, but I’m grateful for that second!
I haven’t run since because it’s really and truly time to try to heal the tendinosis and the tear underneath the left Ischium. By spring? Here’s hoping, because I miss it. Right now.
Something(s) to read, 2011: Graphic Novels
Up here above the 42nd parallel the weather is such that I’m staying inside and reading more, and you might also plan to spend extra time indoors in the next few weeks. Or months. So in case you wondered, here are the best books-without-many-pictures I read in 2011, complete with my brief notes to myself about them. They’re in no particular order; they’re all good and some are even better than that. I hope you find something here that you like!
Fiction
Finder: Voice
McNeil, Carla Speed
Dense and entertaining, as always!
Anya’s Ghost
Brosgol, Vera
Excellent. I’m not sure why the colors shifted in places, but if it’s on purpose I’ll find out upon re-reading, and if not it doesn’t detract. Really well done.
Shapes and Colors
Thompson, Richard
Keeps getting better.
The Complete Peanuts: 1979-1980
Schulz, Charles
Still has it — a couple classics (“Have you ever considered you might be wrong?”) and a revealing sequence about what must have been a summer bible camp. Revealing in that I’d like to know what prompted it, at least…
Love and Rockets: New Stories 4
Hernandez, Jaime; Hernandez, Gilbert
Once again, Jaime H. knocks it out of the park.
Infinite Kung Fu
McLeod, Kagan
Almost perfectly evokes the best of kung fu movies. Terrific characters, intricate and goofy plot, spot-on dialogue. Great.
Hark! A Vagrant
Beaton, Kate
Extra commentary, hardcover, fun, hilarious, hurray.
The Complete Peanuts: 1981-1982
Schulz, Charles
Particularly good material here. Some of the funniest I can remember, in fact!
Dear Creature
Case, Jonathan
Unique and beautifully drawn. Charming too — a great debut.
The Storm in the Barn
Phelan, Matt
Really good art and effective wordless pages and sequences, simple story, beautifully done all the way through.
Zahra’s Paradise
Amir; Khalil
Tragic and moving. Fast-paced and educational as well. Up there with Persepolis as an introduction to another culture.
Non-Fiction
Dar (vol 1-2)
Moen, Erika
Honest and charming and funny.
The Stuff of Life
Schultz, Mark; Cannon, Zander; Cannon, Kevin
Well drawn and fun, even if the abundance of facts slow down the narrative a little.
Evolution
Hosler, Jay; Cannon, Zander; Cannon, Kevin
Excellent.
Cancer Vixen
Marchetto, Marisa Acocella
Much better than anticipated, with lots of narrative invention and a not-at-all-sappy (which is what I was betting on going in) throughline.
Paying for It
Brown, Chester
Clinical and rather ugly, and the end-notes are not convincing to me. (Lots of straw men standing around.) But an interesting book about a taboo subject, and it will stick with me.
Vietnamerica
Tran, GB
Wrenching, and beautiful on a formal and storytelling level.
The Influencing Machine
Gladstone, Brooke; Neufeld, Josh
Excellent. It’s much like an episode of “On the Media” in print form, with visuals. Josh does a fine job, of course.
Missouri Boy
Myrick, Leland
Well described on the jacket as a poem, and the last chapter ties things together beautifully.
Manga
Gogo Monster
Matsumoto, Taiyo
Challenging and complex. Beautifully drawn as well. An exploration of what it’s like to have and lose (on purpose?) childhood wonder. I didn’t like this nearly as much on first reading as I ended up after the discussion in book club — there’s a lot of depth here.
Something(s) to read, 2011: Prose
Up here above the 42nd parallel the weather is such that I’m staying inside and reading more, and you might also plan to spend extra time indoors in the next few weeks. Or months. So in case you wondered, here are the best books-without-many-pictures I read in 2011, complete with my brief notes to myself about them. They’re in no particular order; they’re all good and some are even better than that. I hope you find something here that you like!
Non-fiction
Stuff of Thought
Pinker, Stephen
Full of interesting ideas, examples, and facts, but I didn’t understand the throughline and don’t think it held together as a complete thesis. Maybe it wasn’t intended to, and maybe it’s an affect of it being an audio book, so I may need to read this again. It was certainly more fun than I anticipated.
Stiff
Roach, Mary
Excellent, as usual, though I got a little tired of corpses. I read it while eating, mostly, though, so that might contribute to that feeling. It’s her first book, and you can see her style and sense of humor develop and mature through the course of it.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Pollan, Michael
The best book about food, in all its aspects, that I expect I will ever read. Well written, researched, and lived. In the top five I read all year.
Proofiness
Seife, Charles
Though too fond of trying to coin new words, this is a good book about how math and numbers (not just statistics) are misused, particularly by politicians. His bias is clearly against the conservatives, but I didn’t mind that. He’s particularly harsh on Scalia.
The Making of the The President 1960
White, Theodore H.
The writing, and some of the ideas and attitudes, is dated. But this is still much more fascinating than I thought it would be, and the chapter on television and Kennedy’s speech on religion are classics.
Sleights of Mind
Macknik, Stephen; Martinez-Conde, Susana
The neuroscience of magic. Entertaining and light, but also interesting. It inspired me to want to learn more about magic.
Martian Summer
Kessler, Andrew
Detailed and interesting (though narcissistic and disjointed as well) account of the Phoenix mission to Mars. If anyone needed convincing that doing science via robot is hard, this would do it. The 90 (Martian) day mission could have been done in about 10 minutes by a human. It’s a tough job. The description of NASA’s weak P.R. ability is probably the most telling, and damning, thing about the book.
Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout
Redniss, Lauren
Beautiful book — it might be a graphic novel, but it probably isn’t. Regardless, from font to the texture of the cover it’s terrific.
The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter
Davies, Russell T.; Cook, Benjamin
Writing successful TV clearly requires a great deal of ego, but there’s a great deal of insight into creativity (and work ethic) in the book as well. If nothing else, it prompted me to watch Dr. Who, which is a feat.
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
Brown, Mike
Crisp and entertaining and informative. It even has some skullduggery and suspense and some educational and confessional parts to. All in all, excellent. And…sorry Pluto! (And Xena, etc.)
Quantum Man
Krauss, Lawrence M.
The best introduction to Feynman’s technical achievements I’ve read. I need to read it again (and again).
Feathers
Hanson, Thor
Excellent book on the natural history, uses, and evolution of feathers. Feynman is up against this in the SB&F awards, and if it loses I won’t feel bad. Well, not too bad, anyway.
Lost Detroit
Austin, Dan; Doerr, Sean
Amazing stories of the ruins of the city, and the photographs are even better. “Death is the mother of beauty,” as Wallace Stevens said. Just wish there was less architectural death in the Motor City.
Fiction
The Summer Book
Jansson, Tove
Quiet and lovely; I can’t figure out why the father says only the one line and it’s that one, but that’s the only odd note in an unwonderful way. The rest of the notes are wonderful.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Shaffer, Mary Ann; Barrows, Annie
Better than its title by a long, long stretch. Nothing shocking, or even mildly surprising, but a pleasing story, well told.
The Final Solution
Chabon, Michael
A fine novella about an unnamed, late in years, Sherlock Holmes. Rich writing.
Olive Kitteridge
Strout, Elizabeth
Unsparing, and wonderfully written. It won’t make you feel good, but it will make you believe in all of its characters, no matter how briefly they appear.
True Grit
Portis, Charles
Spare and excellent. It was hard to get the movie images out of my mind, but the movie was so faithful and well-acted that it wasn’t a problem. An excellent book.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Carver, Raymond
Concise and harsh.
Science Fiction/Fantasy
The Windup Girl
Bacigalupi, Paolo
Terrific near (?…hope not!) future science fiction with fully realized characters, settings, conflicts. Genetic engineering gone awry, and our messing with the world’s seedstock comes home to roost. Really really good.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Yu, Charles
Innovative and well done sf, playing with the genre in literary terms reminiscent of Never Let Me Go, though by no means as dark or dour. Excellent.
The Algebraist
Banks, Iain M.
Huge ideas here, and well developed (see e.g. Stephenson’s latest). It felt long, but I started to feel immersed and interested before I got frustrated with the apparent digressions and slow speed. Which was on purpose, I’m sure, given the presence of the Dwellers. A good Culture novel, so thanks to Gina and Leland M. for recommending it.
The God Engines
Scalzi, John
A lot of story packed into a few words. Terrific atmosphere of horror and failure. One of his best, I think.
Young Adult
Dead End in Norvelt
Gantos, Jack
A fun book to read on a summer’s day. (And that’s what I did.)
The Implosion of Aggie Winchester
Zielin, Lara
A page-turner. Teen melodrama, and not meant for my demographic, but I enjoyed it.
Sports
Sandy Koufax
Leavy, Jean
Makes the case that he’s the best pitcher ever, and from the other things I’ve read it’s probably true. It certainly makes me wish I’d seen him play.
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
Kennedy, Kostya
Provides a glimpse at the setting and context (personal, local, and international) of the hitting streak. As often is the case, I find myself doubting some of the interior dialogue/thinking Kennedy attributes to the various main characters, but they do enrich the texture and mood. The asides as they relate to modern thinking, e.g. about the statistical likelihood of streaks like this happening, are good.
Audio
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Sedaris, David
More somber than I expected, but still laugh out loud funny often. Read by him is the only way to go, so…
