BUFFY SEASON 8: TIME OF YOUR LIFE

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 4: Time of Your Life, by Joss Whedon, Karl Moline, and Jeff Loeb: Not the strongest part of this series (it doesn’t really further the overarching plot, nor did it have me as enthralled as the awesome return of Dracula in Volume 3), but even if the plot machinations that get Buffy to the future are iffy, I enjoyed the chance to see Fray again—and Karl Moline, the Fray artist, returns to draw that part of the book, making me extra happy. I still wish Season 8 was a TV show, even though I know the whole point of the comic is to do things that would never work on TV. Maybe it’s just that I’m still a comic-book newbie, but I find reading it in comic form awkward; I like the writing, but I’d prefer to see the actors acting it out. Oh god, is that how non-readers feel whenever they’re forced to read a book? Now I’m ashamed.

FRAY

Fray, by Joss Whedon, Karl Moline, and Andy Owens: Damn you, Joss Whedon, for everything you touch is brilliant and leaves me wanting more. Your shows get canceled too soon, or teeter on the brink of cancellation. Dr. Horrible is only 45 minutes long. You make me start reading comic books just so I can get Buffy Season 8. Then I hear that Volume 4 features a crossover with one of your earlier comics, Fray, so now I have to go get that out of the library because apparently I have become a feverish fangirl, in thrall to your every whim. And of course I end up loving Fray by the time I finish it, only to discover THERE IS NO MORE FRAY. What kind of sick game are you playing, Joss Whedon? Anyway, if you can stand the frustration and are a Buffy fan, you should read Fray, which takes place hundreds of years in the future, when slayers and demons have been forgotten; there are still vampires, but people assume they’re just homicidal mutants, which apparently is nothing to get too worried about in the future (Whedon’s vision of the future: the rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and there are flying cars). It’s the typical reluctant-hero scenario: Malaka Fray is a thief who discovers she’s a slayer and has to learn to become one without the help of a watcher or the usual prophetic dreams and visions (there’s a very good plot twist about why she doesn’t have those). I really liked the art, more so than in the Buffy Season 8 comics—especially the fact that Mel has a more realistic body (a deliberate request on Whedon’s part, as he discusses in his foreword), whereas the Season 8 people look like comic-book versions of the actors from the show (in other words, uniformly boobtastic).

THE BLACK HOUSE

More scariness from Patricia Highsmith. You know she’s good because she has a story called “The Terrors of Basket Weaving”—this lady can make anything foreboding. Still, I didn’t like this collection quite as much as Slowly, Slowly in the Wind…or maybe there’s such a thing as too much Highsmith?

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill: Meh. Alan Moore really, really loves to mimic different literary styles, eras, genres, and media. His imitations are spot-on, and they can be brilliant when woven into a story, but when he layers disembodied supplementary material into his books, it’s often just TOO MUCH for me—from the pirate comic and birdwatching article in Watchmen to Allan Quatermain’s crazy drugged-up vision at the end of the first League volume to…well, most of this book. I appreciate the idea of it, but it loses me in practice. I mean, there’s no question Moore is a genius and I don’t want him to dumb himself down, but for me there’s a point at which being ambitious and challenging just crosses a line into being exhausting and boring. I’m pretty damn detail-oriented and a freakin’ English major to boot, but I also like a good story, and when I have to wade through page after page of densely written, eye-numbingly typeset, and—in my opinion—frequently tedious pastiches, it smacks of authorly self-indulgence. It’s just telling, not showing. I’m happy for the diehard fans who will love delving into all the minute clues and references, but this casual reader did a lot of skimming and eye-rolling. The book (really just a little appendix to the series, meant to lead up to Volume 3) fills us in on Mina and Allan’s doings in the twentieth century (they’ve become immortal), allowing Moore to move forward from Victorian literature (sigh; I liked the Victoriana) to 1984, Jack Kerouac, and Orlando, as well as glancing backward to Shakespeare and Fanny Hill. The framing device, in which Mina and Allan steal the dossier documenting their adventures back from the government, is pretty amusing, especially the highly unflattering portrait of James Bond as a brutal, corrupt misogynist. The dossier itself is what tested my patience, though of course I loved the P.G. Wodehouse parody, “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss,” in which Bertie Wooster narrates how the League narrowly rescued his Aunt Dahlia and her friends from a monster out of H.P. Lovecraft. The book ends with a rather loony but visually awesome 3D sequence, and I was pleased to discover that the 3D glasses were still carefully tucked away in my library copy of the book. I now await Volume 3, Century, with mingled anticipation and trepidation.

OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS

At my last job, I spent five years editing young-adult biographies of scientists, politicians, business leaders, inventors, explorers, and other high achievers, and I couldn’t help but notice an eerie similarity among their life stories: they all seemed to have enjoyed extraordinary strokes of chance, coincidence, and good luck (those little frissions of “It almost didn’t happen!” were always one of my favorite things about reading history). Studying so many remarkable lives made me realize that the old saw is really true: a lot of success comes from just showing up and being in the right place at the right time (of course, when the time comes, it helps if you’re smart and talented). (This was illustrated for me in another way by working with the authors who wrote for that publisher—they weren’t always the most talented writers, but they were the ones who were out there hustling, working hard, doing their research, sending us their ideas, and cranking out manuscripts; for a first job out of college, that was a good lesson to learn.) This fascinating book (Malcolm Gladwell’s books are always like catnip to me; I’m all, “Yes, please, tell me more about the results of that sociological experiment! Ooh, and this neurological research!”) bore out my casual observation with study after study suggesting that the factors that create success may be more complex than most people realize—for instance, it really is possible to be born at the right time, whether you’re a Canadian youth hockey player or a nineteenth-century industrialist; and practice (10,000 hours of it) really does make perfect, whether you’re Bill Gates or a Beatle. I realize there are flaws in Gladwell’s logic (he tends to be anecdotal and oversimplifies things at times, so I understand why some people think he’s overrated), but maybe because it tapped into my previous musings on biography, I found this book pretty thrilling.

SLOWLY, SLOWLY IN THE WIND

I didn’t get around to reading any of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories during last year’s Month of Highsmith, but I had heard good things about them. I don’t usually read short stories, but I have enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s, and these were right up that (dark, scary, twisted) alley. Even the title is disturbing. Recommended for fans of psychological horror.

THE CHILDREN OF MEN

Reading this, I realized that the movie version (which I really liked when I saw it in the theater) drew little from the P.D. James book beyond the names of the characters, the situation (in the distant future, humanity can no longer reproduce), and the basic plot (reluctant hero must help a mysteriously pregnant woman while evading the authorities). The book’s protagonist, Theo, is a history professor (in the movie, he is a government worker/ex-activist); the book’s pregnant lady is a dissident named Julian (in the movie, she is Kee, an African refugee; confusingly, Julian still exists in the movie as the non-pregnant character played by Julianne Moore, but she is also Theo’s ex-wife, which she is not in the book); in the book the baby is a boy, while in the movie it’s a girl (interesting corollary: in the book Theo’s dead child is a girl, killed when he accidentally backs over her with a car, while in the movie it’s a boy, killed in a flu epidemic—what does all this gender switching signify?). The movie is grim and action-packed, with undertones of the Holocaust and the war on terror. The book is quieter and more subtle, less a plot-driven narrative than an exploration of what a world without children would really be like on a day-to-day level. The answer: outwardly more pleasant than in the movie, but still basically hopeless, with disturbing delusions (women push baby carriages with dolls in them down the street and have kittens baptized) and an underlying foreboding that the race will die out (a deer breaks into a church, presaging that nature will soon reclaim the empty cities, while the government encourages elderly people to commit suicide because there aren’t enough younger people left to care for them). As in the movie, Theo must shake off his cynicism and complacency and learn to hope for the future, but in the book the emphasis is much more on his relationship with his cousin, who has risen to become the totalitarian ruler of England, and his spiritual awakening through his love for Julian (James called the book a “Christian fable”). I thought the book was more thought-provoking and, in an odd way, spookier than the movie, even if less dramatic (the end is a little unsatisfying). But I was relieved to find that rewatching the movie after finishing the book didn’t give me a V for Vendetta reaction: I still liked the film version as much as I had before (of course, the presence of the gorgeous Clive Owen certainly didn’t hurt). The book and the movie stand as good examples of how you can create two different types of dystopias from the same premise.

FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY

I thought Frankenstein was boring when I read it in high school, but I developed an appreciation for it in a world-rocking class on “The Condition of England Novel” during my semester abroad at the University of East Anglia, where the professor interpreted it—in the light of the history of anatomy, dissection, and grave robbing in the nineteenth century—as an extended class metaphor with the monster representing the lower classes rising up against the aristocracy. Even though I still don’t love the novel, it’s clearly rich source material that’s generated an enduring myth, so I was interested in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s light but informative survey of the many ways in which Frankenstein has been reinterpreted throughout history. I knew that the popular image of Frankenstein bore little resemblance to the original book, but I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t the sole fault of the Boris Karloff movie—in fact, thanks to lax-to-nonexistent copyright laws, Shelley’s novel was already being bastardized in other books and plays during her lifetime. This wasn’t an essential read, but I liked its blend of biography, literary theory, film history, and pop culture, and it did inspire me to rewatch the 1931 film as well as the excellent Gods and Monsters—which then led me to start reading the novel on which it was based, Father of Frankenstein.

HEAVEN TO BETSY

A couple of weeks ago I was at the library, looking for a book by Madeline L’Engle in the always-disorderly Juvenile section. It wasn’t on the shelf, even though the library catalog said it was (See? Always disorderly), but while I was searching through the “L”s, my eye fell upon an old Perma-Bound copy of Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace, the same vintage (1960s) as the library copies I read when I was a kid. It looked lonely and I suddenly felt nostalgic (the musty smell of a library does that to me), so I checked it out.

I’ve read this book at least six times. The series is right up there with the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books in my “beloved childhood reading” pantheon. My mother read them when she was a little girl, I have read and reread them throughout my life, and most of my grade-school friends read them, but when I grew up, and especially when I moved to California, I realized that Lovelace never quite hit it big outside the Midwest the way Laura Ingalls Wilder did, and most people I know who aren’t from Minnesota haven’t heard of her. Which is sad, because these books (originally published in the 1940s and early 1950s) are delightful. The first four are sweet kids’ books, but it’s the later six books, which follow Betsy Ray through high school and beyond, that I especially love. Written in a more complex style, they’re equally as enjoyable for adults as for kids and teens, so if you haven’t read them yet, it’s not too late to start.

Like the Little House and Anne books, the Betsy-Tacy books lovingly and loosely autobiographically document the life of a smart, stubborn, spirited girl in a particular time and place—in this case, the early 1900s in Deep Valley, Minnesota (a fictionalized version of Mankato, where my aunt and uncle live). As in the Little House books, there is an emphasis on family coziness, but unlike Laura, Betsy faces little in the way of material hardship (no blindess, locusts, or nearly wandering out to die on the prairie in the middle of a blizzard here). As in the Anne series, Betsy is has a “bosom friend” (devoted redhead Tacy), aspires to be a writer, and competes academically with her future husband (the blond, poor-but-proud Joe Willard), but unlike Anne, Betsy isn’t enough of a drama queen to get into serious trouble with her temper or imagination. Mostly, she just has fun. I loved all three series equally, but this was the one I wanted to live in.

Betsy wrestles with some issues in Heaven to Betsy, which covers her freshman year of high school in 1906. Like Laura wishing for blond hair and blue eyes or Anne wishing for violet eyes and an alabaster complexion, Betsy wishes she were prettier, despairing over her freckles and her straight hair (which she curls every night on Magic Waver rollers). She gets homesick while visiting the country, is sad when her family moves out of her childhood home, wants to convert from Baptist to Episcopalian, has an unrequited crush (or, as they called it in 1906, a “case”) on bad-boy-lite Tony Markham, says goodbye to a few friends who move away to distant cities, and gets so caught up in her social life that she neglects her writing and loses the school essay contest (topic: “The Philippines: Their Present and Future Value”) to Joe Willard. But her problems rarely get in the way of wholesome, old-fashioned good times with her cheerful family and madcap crowd of friends: eating banana splits at Heinz’s soda fountain, making fudge, singing the latest songs around the piano, having sleepovers, joining school societies (the Philomathians and the Zetamathians, which compete throughout the school year in a Hogwarts-reminiscent rivalry), making up catchphrases in Latin (“O di immortales!”), taking surrey rides, going to football games, eating the onion sandwiches Mr. Ray makes for Sunday night lunch, going to Presbyterian youth group, popping popcorn, drinking cocoa endlessly, playing with Ouija boards, going ice skating, having winter picnics, building bonfires, and throwing innumerable parties. The Crowd is coed, but there is no dating (only one girl, Carney, gets to have a lone real date, attending a play “with Larry…in the evening…alone,” and it’s a special concession from their parents because his family is about to move away to California). Boy-girl relations are refreshingly easygoing, cheerful, and innocent: The boys tease and banter with Betsy, walk her to and from parties and other events, kiss her on the cheek under the mistletoe, and drop by the Ray house to eat the delicious food cooked by Anna, the “hired girl” (who, judging by the illustrations, is at least in her 40s). Like the Little House books, in retrospect this turns out to be a slightly food-porny series; the food isn’t described in any great detail—except perhaps those remarkably tasty-sounding raw onion sandwiches sprinkled with salt and pepper—but it is omnipresent, and always delicious. No wonder I grew up to have a food blog if this is what I was lovingly rereading as a kid.

As an adult, I also can’t help exclaiming over all the period details. The Rays’ new house has all the modern conveniences: a bathroom (“no more baths in a tub in the kitchen”), a bedroom for all three girls (no more sleeping “in the same room, in the very same bed”), a gas stove (“no more horrid wood fires to build”), gas fixtures (“no more lamps to clean”), and a furnace (“no coal stove in the parlor”). Betsy wears sailor suits and shirtwaists, wears her hair in a grown-up pompadour for the first time, affects an “Ethel Barrymore droop,” and pins starched ruffles across her chest “to give her figure an Anna Held curve.” All-girl parties are called “hen parties,” and for Halloween there is a “sheet-and-pillowcase party” (everyone dresses as ghosts). The Crowd plays intriguing-sounding games like Consequences and Fortunes; Ruth and Jacob; Going to Jerusalem; Bird, Beast, or Fish; Jenkins Says Thumbs Up; Pass the Ring; and Prisoners’ Base. On Halloween, the girls drop apple peelings, snap apple stems, and walk backwards down the stairs with a mirror to try to foretell their future husbands. But gender roles never seem too oppressive, even if Betsy comes off as rather coquettish and boy-crazy in this book (a late bloomer myself, I always sympathized with the shy, more sensible Tacy, who doesn’t really see what all the fuss over boys is about). Still, Betsy’s dreams for the future always revolve around her career:

Not that she was anxious to get married. Far from it! She had been almost appalled, when she started going around with Carney and Bonnie, to discover how fixed and definite their ideas of marriage were. They both had cedar hope chests and took pleasure in embroidering their initials on towels to lay away. Each one had picked out a silver pattern and they were planning to give each other spoons in these patterns for Christmases and birthdays. When Betsy and Tacy and Tib talked about their future they planned to be writers, dancers, circus acrobats.

See? Fun people.

For some reason, I never owned these books when I was a kid, instead just checking out the same dogeared copies from the library over and over again. Little did I know at the time that I was missing my chance. In my adult life, they’ve fallen in and out of print in dismaying cycles, and even when they’re in print the new covers have been loudly flowery, modernized, and…let’s face it, pretty lame-looking, without the charming Lois Lenski illustrations of the earlier four books or the classy Vera Neville drawings of the later six (which that made them seem so sophisticated to me as a child and shaped my mental images of all the characters). Used copies of the older, more attractive editions are hard to come by in used bookstores outside of Minnesota (I’ve only managed to find Betsy in Spite of Herself so far), and even on the Internet they often sell for as much as $80. As soon as I started rereading Heaven to Betsy this month and remembered just how much I loved it, I became determined to acquire the entire series at any price and promptly started Googling. Imagine my delight when I discovered that HarperCollins is not only finally putting the later six books back into print this fall, but it’s giving them the deluxe treatment, in beautiful grown-up editions featuring the original cover art, with forewords from writers who are fans of the series (Laura Lippman, Anna Quindlen, and Meg Cabot)! You can be sure I’ll be snapping them up this time around.

Despite having spent my childhood visiting the Little House sites within easy driving distance (Pepin, Walnut Grove) and yearning to go to Prince Edward Island, I’ve never visited any of the Betsy-Tacy sites in Mankato, but I’d like to try to the next time I’m in town. The Betsy-Tacy Society has purchased and restored the “Betsy House” (Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthplace and childhood home) and the “Tacy House” (the home of Frances “Bick” Kenney, on whom the character was based), and placed a bench at the spot where the real-life Betsy and Tacy would sit and eat their dinners on “The Big Hill.” You can also see Tib’s house and many of the other sites mentioned in the books, as well as visiting Lovelace’s grave. Later this month, there’s actually going to be a Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, with a keynote speech by Meg Cabot, walking tours, picnics, an essay contest, and a re-creation of Heinz’s ice cream parlor (and on the same weekend, a tour of the Betsy’s Wedding-related sites in Minneapolis and dedication of a Maud Hart Lovelace memorial in Mueller Park)! If I still lived in Minnesota, that’s totally the kind of dorky thing I would want to go to. But I’ll have to content myself with rereading the familiar old library copies and preordering the new editions.