Nowhere Band News

So, I’ll say this about bus commuting: you get a hell of a lot of reading done. With a pile this big, I thought I’d revive an old tradition and print out the list of what I’ve read so far, with brief comments. The thought of going through and doing proper italicization gives me hives, so we’ll just skip that.

1.    Complete Peanuts, volume 1 (Charles Schulz)- More interesting than fun, really. There’s good stuff, but the elements that made Peanuts so special aren’t anywhere near to gelling in this early stuff. It’s pretty amazing to see how rigid Schulz’s early style was, and how much more expressive he got when he loosened up and simplified.

2.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 1 (Larry Gonick)- If anyone’s ever done a better job with nonfiction cartooning, I haven’t heard of it. Gonick serves up great, great stuff—this volume gets you as far as Alexander the Great, and it’s a really informative blast all the way.

3.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 2- The Roman sections are probably my favorite stretch of any of the Gonick history books. Also really good on what was up in Asia, although some of the Chinese sections sort of blurred together for me.

4.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 3- So, if you plough through this much cartoon history, you do start to get the feeling that human beings are total shits. I’m not a big fan of Sting’s solo career, but his line about “written history is a catalog of crime” is pretty much on the mark. Still, Gonick continues to deliver the goods, with a lot of good stuff about the roots of Islam.

5.    For the Love of a Dog (Patricia McConnell)- I liked the idea more than I liked the execution. McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash informed a lot of how I deal with my dog.  This one, while intermittently interesting, didn’t feel very essential or important.

6.    The Boys on the Bus (Tim Crouse)- I guess it’s a good companion volume to Hunter Thompson’s Campaign Trail ’72 book, but the media insights are over a generation old and you might as well just stick with Thompson.

7.    Planet Love (Grant Morrison)- When I was reading it, Morrison’s Doom Patrol seemed titanically awesome. With some time having passed, I remember liking it but don’t always remember why. I’ll probably need to reread and reevaluate.

8.    Foucalt’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)- Y’know, I didn’t love this book nearly as much as a lot of my friends did. Interesting bits, but big chunks just felt like a big slog. Kind of a letdown after The Name of the Rose.

9.    Schulz and Peanuts (David Michaelis)- I had a longer reaction in the space when I read it, but here’s the short version: lots to commend it, good use of Peanuts strips to illustrate points, great pictures of mid-20th-century Twin Cities life, but ultimately the book falls down into armchair psychology. And it’s really ridiculous how little space is devoted to the last 30 years of Schulz’s life.

10.    Complete Peanuts, vol. 2- Similar to V1, although incrementally more Peanuts-y than the first volume. Things pick up a lot when Lucy shows up.

11.    All Over but the Shouting (Jim Walsh)- Walsh’s ballyhooed oral history of the Replacements. I’m glad I read it, if only because it really got me to listen to the great, great early Replacements albums with fresh ears (god DAMN it, Hootenanny’s good). But almost everybody in the book (with the exceptions of Slim Dunlap, Peter Buck, and maybe Peter Jesperson) comes off as a total asshole, and in Westerberg’s case it might be appropriate to upgrade that to “shithead.”  So I came out of it with a higher opinion of the art but a much lower opinion of the artists.

I do wish Walsh wouldn’t have stuck so tightly to the oral history format. Some brief prose sections to set up context would be nice, especially for people who don’t know the rough outlines of ‘Mats history.

12.    Little Children (Tom Perotta)- Liked it a bunch, but I wish I’d read the book before seeing the movie. The differences matter.

13.    Army@Love (Rick Veitch)- Kind of interesting and different from the rest of the stuff on the rack, I guess, but it didn’t blow me away.

14.    The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)- One of my favorite SF books, and one that I go back to every few years. And it holds up, although it does occur to me that this is yet another case of an author trying to use their own fictional, contrived creation to argue for the existence of God (another non-literary example would by M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs). Still, a good one.

15.    Fun Home (Alison Bechdel)- Bechdel’s art is wonderful, and the story’s really good. Works a little too hard on the literary references, but that’s probably thematically appropriate.

16.    Infinite Crisis (Geoff Johns)- Wow, that was a lot shittier than I remembered. Wall of suck.

17.    Black Hole (Charles Burns)- Big disappointment. It looked great, and Burns’s visual storytelling is really good. But the story itself is flimsy and unaffecting, and doesn’t really hold up if you think about it at all (where are the adults? How is it that the nerdiest kids are the first ones to get the STD?). The idea of a disfiguring disease giving solid form to teen sexual angst is a really good one, but the execution just wasn’t there.

18.    The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammet)- Fun! That Sam Spade is a bad motherfucker.

19.    Tom Cruise: an Unauthorized Biography (Andrew Morton)- I know, I know.

20.    All-Star Superman (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely)- This is how it’s done.

21.    A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury (Bill Watterson)- Great. Not much else to say. C&H is up there with Peanuts and Pogo.

22.    League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill)- Bit of a tonal shift from the earlier volumes (I’m not convinced that Moore had grand metafictional statements in mind when he started out), but the material supports it, and anyway holy shit, that was great (except for the beat novel, which my brain literally could not process).

23.    Gates of Eden (Ethan Coen)- Uneven, but fun. The first part of the title story, wherein a zealous weights and measures inspector takes the law into his own hands, is as good as any sequence in the Coen Brothers’ movies.

24.    Maus (Art Spiegelman)- Impressive, but I don’t know that it would be as landmark if it came out in today’s comic environment. But, then, you could say that about any pioneering work in any medium, I guess.

25.    Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)- Wow, I hated this. Hated, hated, hated. Self-indulgent, poorly-written, and just fucking annoying. I’ve liked some of Tomine’s past work (“Bomb Scare,” in particular), but this was just one man’s decently-drawn expedition up his own asshole.

26.    Hollywood Babylon (Kenneth Anger)- My favorite trashy book! If I can ever figure out a way to base a comics project on this book, I’m going to be all over that.

27.    Agent Zigzag (Ben Macintyre)- Fascinating as a real-world story, but a little blah as a book.

28.    Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)- As good as I remembered it. Funny, and surprisingly deep and shocking when it starts to pay off towards the end.

29-35. New World Order, American Dreams, Rock of Ages, Strength in Numbers, One Million, Justice for All, and World War III (Grant Morrison et al)- The Morrison JLA run isn’t perfect, but it’s got a lot of highlights. Porter’s art is pretty nasty most of the time, though.

36. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little World (Bryan Lee O’Malley)- Really, really good. I almost didn’t start Nowhere Band because I was worried that O’Malley was saying everything that needed to be said about music through comics.

37. Justice (Alex Ross et al)- Bleh. Alex Ross is the best at what he does, but what he does ain’t pretty. Zing!

38. Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)- Another book that I theoretically should like (world war 2! cryptography! computers!) but actually hate. Stephenson’s good at nonfiction, but his fiction is terrible—almost all of the action happens off-page in between chapters, and no character ever shows anything resembling human emotion. And the ending is pure shit.

39. Exit Wounds (Rutu Modan)- For some reason, I thought this was about American indie rock. So I was, um, a little surprised. Sadly, I have to give it what feels like my standard review for recently-lauded graphic novels: looks great, but I didn’t think it was all that well-written.

40-41. Winds of War, War and Remembrance (Herman Wouk)- I still think Wouk doesn’t get enough respect anymore now that historical fiction’s been ghettoized as its own genre. These two books add up to a couple of thousand pages of awesome.

42-43. The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One (Frank Miller)- Yep, still pretty good. I prefer Year One, but it’s on the margins.

44. The Ultimates (Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch)- Now here’s a series that’s not aging well. It was a fun read, and Hitch’s art is generally gorgeous, but really Millar’s all cynical style here with no heart at all.  Often clever, but never really arresting.

45. In the Studio (Todd Hignite)- Enjoyed it more than I thought it would, especially the Clowes, Crumb, and Hernandez sections. Hignite’s into made me want to punch something, though.

46-48. Essential X-Men vol 1-3 (Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne)- Pretty hit-or-miss, but, then I knew that. More hits than misses, I guess, especially when Byrne or Paul Smith were drawing (Byrne/Claremont is one more weird case where two guys can’t stand each other but unquestionably did their best work together… it’s strange how common that is).  Good plane reading, even if a lot of planes get smashed up in the pages.

49. The Eve of St. Venus (Anthony Burgess)- I liked Clockwork Orange a ton (the book’s way better than the movie, and that’s not something you get to say a lot when Kubrick’s involved), so I checked this out to dig into more Burgess. And Orange it ain’t—more like Burgess channeling the fluffier parts of Oscar Wilde. Not bad, but not great.

50. Checkpoint (Nicholson Baker)- Similar case; I liked The Fermata, and grabbed this to see how Baker’s other stuff is. It’s a little bit of a writing stunt—the whole book is a back-and-forth dialog in a hotel room as a guy tries to talk his friend out of trying to kill George Bush—but Baker pretty much pulls it off. Good, quick read.

51. The Abstinence Teacher (Tom Perotta)- The weakest Perotta novel I’ve read, mainly because of the ending. But still worth your time.

52. Essential X-Men, vol 4 (Claremont, Paul Smith)- God damn it, Paul Smith rules. And the black-and-white format is really kind to his style. As far as I’m concerned, the X-Men franchise stopped being interesting when he left, and didn’t pick back up until Morrison started writing in 2001.

53. Our Band Could be Your Life (Michael Azerrad)- One of my favorite rock books.  It’s really well-done, and the chapter length seems about right for the bands—no padding required to fill things out to book length. The Replacements and Husker Du sections make nice companions to the Walsh book listed above, but the one that really sticks with me is the chapter on the Minutemen. Their music has never really worked for me, but D. Boon and Mike Watt come off as the coolest guys in music.

54. Budding Prospects (T.C. Boyle)- Not as polished as some of his later stuff, but really good. Not too many writers of Boyle’s stature would include a scene where the sympathetic main character goes to a glory hole.

55. Dune (Frank Herbert)- Yep, still awesome. I wish the dialog was a little better, and I wish the second half flowed a little better, but this is still a motherfucker of a great book.

56. The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)- Really good, although I liked The Right Stuff a lot better. I guess Wolfe originally wrote it as a serial, and that shows in a weird tonal shift about a third of the way through—it starts out as an episode of Seinfeld, just about, and then turns into The Wire.

…and that’s what we’ve got so far.