retsuko | Book Recs/Comic Recs/DVDs, 3/18/09

In books:

Undone, by Rachel Caine: I'm a big fan of Caine's Weather Wardens series, but this spin-off book (which heralds several more volumes in a series) is better than the most recent Wardens installment. This book is what Caine is good at: strong and memorable characters, apparently insurmountable odds for them to face, and loving descriptions of magic and the settings that frame it. If you're interested in getting into the series without too much background story, this is a good place to start and then decide if you want to read the other six books.

Death's Daughter, by Amber Benson: This book was entertaining and cute, the literary equivalent of a good batch of meringue on a dry day: no weird soft parts, just a satisfying crunch of sweet batter. The plot, the hook for which is exactly what the title suggests, centers on Death's daughter, who would really like to live her life as a normal human being at a dead-end secretarial job, but instead finds herself called back into the realm of the supernatural to investigate the kidnapping of her father and the entire board of Death, Inc. The strongest part of this work is Benson's integration of Death mythology from around the world into the background of the story; her use of Indian mythology in particular is unexpected and highly interesting. Also entertaining is the description of a movie set where everything takes forever to shoot, which I suspect is Benson grinding an axe from personal experience.

Doctor Who: Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell: Of all the officially sanctioned fanfic I've read, this is the best Doctor Who book yet. I don't want to give too much away, except that the prologue and epilogue take place after the events of the book and Season 4 and go some ways towards mending what I think was a sad, sad ending for Donna.

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, by Pete Jordan: "Dishwasher Pete", as he came to be known, has only one ambition in life, to wash dishes. He wants jobs that he can earn money and walk away from easily, and eventually settles on dishwasher as a way to make money and see the country. Pete claims he's a dishwasher who happens to be a writer, but this keenly observed and funny book says otherwise. Most entertaining to me is the fact that Pete actively resisted other jobs that might have paid better or afforded more dignity. Instead, Dishwasher Pete was content to wash dishes, drink beers, and not show up to work if he felt like it as a sign that he'd quit. He was also able to fulfill his childhood dream of seeing as much of the country as possible and making lots of friends whose couches and floors he could crash on. However, eventually he comes to the realization that the job is not everything it's cracked up to be and stops short of his goal. His descriptions of people, places, and jobs make this well worth reading, and go a long way towards making the job of dishwasher more respectable than before. I need to track down his reports from "This American Life", too, which I think would be very entertaining.

In Comics:

Secret Invasion: Captain Britain and M13, written by Paul Cornell and pencilled by Leonard Kirk: With the untimely demise of

scans_daily, I've not been getting my weekly dose of cape comics, and suddenly found myself hankering for them. S. at the comic book store recommended this title based on my enjoyment of Madame Xanadu and my general feelings about character-driven works. She assured me that I didn't need to know who was who, and that the Secret Invasion plotline was mostly tangential to the story. She turned out to be half right; I would have liked to know exactly how everyone had ended up in medias res as the volume begins and the Skrull invasion plotline was more than tangential. However, the volume redeemed itself with two characters--Peter Wisdom, a mage (with a plot/past I know nothing about), and Faiza Hussain, a Muslim doctor who finds herself fighting on the front lines and suddenly gains magical powers. I was very interested that the writer/artist chose to depict her wearing the headscarf, and that she is the one who ends up holding Excalibur at the end of the story. The moral is that while Captain Britain is a handsome blond-haired, white man, the new superhero of Great Britain will be a (presumably) immigrant, minority woman. That's some serious depth that I didn't expect to read in a cape comic. I'm sufficiently intrigued to read the new few volumes.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery, written by Leah Moore and John Reppion, pencilled/inked by Ben Templesmith: The artwork in this is quite good; it's by the same guy who did the Thirty Days of Night series. At first, it seemed a little rough around the edges, but the line-heavy and dark-color style suits the story and the frenetic energy of those lines suits the Doctor quite well. Martha doesn't have a lot to do in this one-shot narrative, which is unfortunate. Well worth the price, although I wondered why two authors were needed on this when the plot was rather thin.

On DVD:

American Dream (1990): I've gotten spoiled by documentaries shot with higher quality cameras and with better film; I couldn't get over the graininess of the footage from 1984-1986. I'm also spoiled with works that clearly and definitively state who's who and what's what right away. (In one annoying case in this film, a pivotal character is only identified as the credits roll.) However, the subject matter of this film is undeniably compelling and the editing job smooth and dramatic. It's easy to see why this won an Oscar, and there are parts of it that reminded me why I love documentaries. American Dream chronicles the struggles of the meatpackers at a Hormel factory in Austin, Minnesota in the mid-80s and the four-month strike they staged to protest the slashing of their wages from $10.69 an hour to $8.00. The portrait of the people and the town they live in is subtle and affecting. (One of the best sequences is a voice over of one of the workers describing how union HQ became the social center for the town, with visuals of people meeting, distributing thousands of bags of food, making Christmas toys for children, and having a dance. Contrast this later with the shot of the same building, its doors chained shut, after the national Union took over and fired the local union leaders.) In the end, the strike is unsuccessful, and the factory hires scab workers, slashing those scab workers' salaries to $6.00 an hour a few years later. This film stands as a rather sobering time capsule of an era whose consequences we're living now. Not a "fun" film, but a thought-provoking and important work.