March
19,
2005
A quick graphic novel round-up:
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Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Single Green Female
isn’t a book I would normally read — She-Hulk is kind of the definition of lame — but Jim Henley said good stuff about it, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. Verdict: It’s okay, but not great. The problem is that it sets up a character arc that it never quite resolves (She-Hulk starts off as an arrogant bimbo, and by the end... hasn’t changed much), and in general just sort of amiably flops around pointlessly. Call it competent fluff.
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Mike Carey’s My Faith in Frankie
is something I definitely would never have read without a recommendation, because the packaging aims it squarely at teenage girls — it’s even in a weird small-paperback format, rather than the normal graphic novel binding. I’m glad I did read it, though, because it’s fun. The premise is that a now-college-age girl has a personal god, and there’s a bit of a conflict between her devotion to her god and her newfound interest in boys; complications, you may be sure, ensue. Not super-great maybe, but enjoyable enough to be worth getting past the pink, heart-speckled cover.
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Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street and Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life
are the first two volumes of, yes, Transmetropolitan. The books have interesting stories that are nearly fatally drowned by a toxic injection of lame attitude. The protagonist is one of those idealistic-cynic types who are all pissed at the world because it’s corrupt and blah blah blah, and Ellis is far too eager to be cheaply transgressive. There’s all sorts of elaborate vulgarity, there are people giving the finger (frequently), there are steaming piles of shit, and pretty much all the other stock icons of lame-ass teenage transgression. (Why, yes, there is an episode where the protagonist gets all pissed-off at religion! How did you know?) It’s tired and tedious, which is a pity, because there occasionally seems to be something interesting struggling to get out from underneath all the calculated punk attitude. Probably not worth wading through the sewage for the occasional good bit, though.
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March
11,
2005
So here’s a paired reading of sorts: Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street
and Andrew Tobias’ The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need
. Apparently now it’s Personal Finance Month on Weasel Words.
Readers with a good memory will recall that I’ve talked about Tobias’ book before, but this is actually a different edition. It turns out that I re-read the book approximately annually (which is a testament to its breezy readability), so I figured I’d shell out for the new edition, which brings it up from 1998 to 2004. There’s not much different — a lot more URLs, a few more recent anecdotes, a graph or two with more current numbers on them, and updated information on relevant policy and tax changes — but that’s pretty much the point. An investment guide that radically changed at the turn of each business cycle would be worse than useless.
In this edition, as in (I assume) all the previous editions, Tobias’ book is a superb beginner’s guide to personal finance. Writing a book for people who don’t know anything about the topic at hand and are a bit scared of (or bored by) it is difficult to do well, but Tobias has just done an amazing job. The light, breezy style and illustrative anecdotes make the book a pleasure to read (and re-read), but don’t get in the way of substantive content. The book somehow manages to get across almost anything you could reasonably care about, assuming a base of total ignorance, inside of a couple hundred pages.
Tobias’ accomplishment is all the more noticeable when set next to Malkiel’s book. I don’t mean by this to suggest that A Random Walk Down Wall Street is bad; it’s not, at all. In fact, it’s also excellent. But, unlike Tobias’ book, it requires you to know a thing or two — nothing too complicated; if you read the WSJ regularly, you’ll find nothing to confuse you, but it’s definitely not interested in catering to complete neophytes.
Which, really, is to be expected, because Malkiel is writing a book that digs deeper than Tobias’. The main point of the book is to explain and defend the efficient market theory, which (loosely) states that it’s essentially impossible to consistently predict the future in such a way that you can get more return for less risk than you could with the aggregate market. The first edition of Malkiel’s book was written before the existence of index funds, and in a sense, the prevalence of low-cost index funds today is due to this book. (In another sense, the prevalence of index funds is a testament to the essential truth that this book explained.)
If you go into A Random Walk expecting just a thesis defense, though, you’ll be surprised. In a way, it actually felt like Malkiel had glommed together three or four semi-related books. It opens with a broad overview of the principles of valuation, segues into an amazingly entertaining history of the last fifty years of the stock market (I kept quoting bits to Beth in bed), goes off for a bit to talk about risk and diversification, moves along into a spirited defense of the efficient markets theory, and ends up with some investment advice. Each of the sections is interesting and informative — and well-written enough to literally keep me up at night reading — but the flow of the thing doesn’t exactly seem inexorable. That’s a minor quibble, though, and Malkiel’s book is deservedly a classic.
My advice: Go buy Tobias’ book and read it. If you don’t know what he’s writing about, you really need to; if you do know it, you’ll probably enjoy reading the book. After that, if you find the stock market intriguing, absolutely read Malkiel’s book; but if you find the subject dull, you can skip it without feeling like you’re missing out on super-critical information that every person absolutely needs to know.
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March
10,
2005
Back when I was in junior high, I read this Forgotten Realms book called Shadowdale, written by “Richard Awlinson,” which it turned out was a pen name for an actual, honest-to-god committee. It turns out that the fine folks at TSR had decided that it was time to shake things up in their shared universe, so they all sat down and came up with a big shake-up thing, plotted it out, and then farmed it off to some schlub to write.
You know how people frequently say, “it reads like it was written by a committee” as a disparaging thing? Yeah, well, there’s a reason for that. Shadowdale was, and is, the single worst book I’ve ever read. It was bad in a lot of ways, but the single most maddening thing about it was the way that characters would do things for no obvious or sensible reason other than that the committee had decreed that they should.
With that little bit of background material starting off this entry, you might guess that my opinion of Brian Michael Bendis’ Avengers: Disassembled
isn’t very high. And right you would be. This is a totally arbitrary piece of work, and it reads like an obligatory exercise that Bendis just wanted to get done with as fast as possible. My hunch — loosely supported by the interview in the back of the book — is that Bendis really wanted to write a radically different Avengers title, but they first made him do a whole big “End of the Avengers!” event book.
So in addition to all the ways in which corporate-orchestrated Event books suck, there’s one more way that this one is lousy: The thing about superheroes is that they always face insuperable odds, and always triumph. So when you want to really bring them down for good (or as close to “for good” as the monthly comics game allows), you’re pretty much fucked. No threat is going to be plausibly awesome enough to defeat them. Planet-eating Galactus? Yawn. An entire alien race invading? Whatever. Super-ultra robots with amazing magical technology? Ho-hum. Gods? Pfft. So Bendis was basically fucked no matter what he did in picking a super-villain here; but even so, the one he did choose was exceedingly lame.
Bendis has written lots of great superhero books, but this isn’t one of them. Don’t read Avengers: Disassembled unless you’re really, really bored.
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March
3,
2005
Ursula LeGuin’s Tehanu was an attempt at writing a domestic fantasy, one that wasn’t about quests and battles, but was instead about a family and a household; Sharon Shinn’s The Safe-Keeper’s Secret
is doing much the same thing, but far more successfully.
The book starts with the standard fantasy cliché: A mysterious man rides into a village bearing a significant baby, which he hands off to a villager before going off to die. That’s about the last standard trope you’ll see, though, as the rest of the story happens when the baby is a teenager, and is an extremely well-done coming of age novel. But lest that give you the wrong idea, this isn’t the sort of coming of age that means accepting your destiny as the wielder of the magic sword and savior of humanity; this is the kind that means learning to deal with old family friends as an adult, finding a profession and purpose, and coming to terms with change.
If a small character-oriented book sounds interesting to you, give this a go; it’s charming and well-done. The Safe-Keeper’s Secret is marketed as YA, and I suppose in a sense it is; but it’s also a mature book that lacks the cheap superficiality of most YA stuff. I’m reading more and more good YA fantasy these days; ironically, the legacy of Harry Potter might be to actually put some quality stuff on the YA bookshelves just by virtue of luring any plausibly-YA book over there.
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