The holidays are an excellent time for reading for me, a lot of publishers flood the market with some of their best books right before Christmas, and I try to share what I’m reading on the blog.
My main literary squeeze at the moment is a mesmerizing book by Douglas Wolk called All Of The Marvels, A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told.
Wolk read all 27,000 comics from the mythic Marvel series to capture their origins and evolution. It’s a wildly ambitious book and I can’t imagine how he managed to read all those comics, but I’m glad he did. The Marvel Phenomenon is one of the great cultural stories of the world, this book needed to be written.
I was a Marvel kid when I was growing up; I waited in line every Wednesday at the comic book store for my reserved and pristine copies; they changed how I imagined what is possible, what a hero was, and how even the most powerful creatures on the earth had the same doubts and fears I did.
Stan Lee has a genius for crossing boundaries – war stores, hero and superhero stories, teen angst, comic humor, and mystery, tales of epic good and evil mixed with real and decidedly non-heroic humanity..
The Marvel story, now the Marvel movies, is the most significant and most compelling story on the planet. I never imagined they would get so big or be so universally loved.
I would skip the first three chapters altogether – too much wind-up – and start with Chapter Four, the pitch. The book takes off like a rocket from there and never looks back. Wolk is a comic geek, and he gets a little too preoccupied with his process initially.
He more than makes up for it later.
It is staggering to think that Marvel comics – the source for countless movies, TV shows, toys and action figures, Video games, T-shirts, books – have inspired. Marvel Editor and genius Stan Lee changed the culture of the world and built his ratty dime store comics into a multi-billion dollar cultural behemoth.
Once we get past Wolk’s geeky throat clearing, the book takes off and is fascinating, even hypnotic. I’m almost halfway through and loving every page; it’s a mind-blower.
It’s also an excellent book for the comic geek who has everything or any Marvel or comic fan or movie lover of any age.
Wolk looks at the series as a single body of work, not as a series of different comics and stories. Somehow, it all fits together.
It’s a vast subject, from scripting to drawing to creating, and it’s worth the effort.
I also started reading John Le Carre’s last novel, a book called Silverview. I bought it warily, as a sort of goodbye and thank you to LeCarre, one of the greatest writers of my lifetime.
LeCarre never sent the book to his publisher; his son fought it in a desk drawer and decided to publish it.
I’m sorry he did, it’s not the book to cap off this amazing career; I read all of it in honor of LeCarre. It isn’t perfect, it doesn’t hang together, and is nowhere near as good as any other LeCarre novel.
I see why he didn’t turn it in. A better way to say goodbye to LeCarre is to buy his next to last book, Legacy Of Spies. It’s not Smiley’s People, but it’s very good.
I’m eager to read the new mystery by Naomi Hirahara; it centers on a young girl who is ripped out of her home with her family by the infamous Japanese Internment of World War II that displaced thousands of Japanese-Americans for no good reason.
When they finally get out of their internment camp and move to Chicago, the young girl arrives to find out that her older sister Rose has died under mysterious circumstances.
She sets out to find out why.
I haven’t read enough of the book to write about it; it’s getting much attention.
I also, just for the hell of it, ordered a used copy of Michael Tolkin’s dark and funny skewering of the Hollywood Studio culture.
Perhaps the best Hollywood book ever written, the Player spawned Robert Altman’s movie of the same name, one of my favorite movies of all time.
I read Tolkien’s book in the evening, and Maria and I watched the movie on Amazon Prime. Great movie, great book.
That will hold me for a while.