Books I've Read: June

Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams. This is a dorky fantasy novel about talking cats who go on a quest. It was my friend Lindsey's favorite book as a kid, so I read it, and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. It's like Watership Down with cats, and I do love cats. It also had a fascinatingly down-beat ending. It totally skips the standard fantasy-trope "Everything is all right, here's your reward in the form of a title / a love interest / a big wad of magic or money" ending and goes for something really ambiguous and cool. I won't spoil it in case you ever read it.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner. This is the biography of John Romero and John Carmack that I think I mentioned earlier. It was really interesting, full of cool details of video game development in the early nineties, and a blow-by-blow description of how these two titans of game development fell out (Ion Storm--yikes). I was thinking about this and the Salinger biography, and it's fascinating how often geniuses are douchebags. John Carmack was the worst kind of programmer-nerd--no social skills whatever, he talked like a robot for years just because he thought he could, lived in an empty apartment with a computer and a mattress--and made a habit until his late twenties of just being a dick and generally mistreating people. This guy was also singlehandedly responsible for creating the PC gaming industry in the early 90s. Every single graphical breakthrough came from his brain. Odd how often genius and douchebaggery coincide.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley. I had never heard of this series of graphic novels before I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie (which could either be an awesome guilty pleasure or just really, really, really, really bad), and I was intrigued because of how they were supposed to treat video games, anime, and nerd culture--as an integral part of the narrative and visual style. I loved them for their witty banter and jokes about NES and Genesis games that made my childhood nerdiness feel hip. They're quite funny, and total fluff. I read all five books in about seven hours. The sixth comes out in a few weeks, and I intend on parking my ass in a Barnes and Noble and reading the entire thing to find out how it ends. Highly recommended.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Okay, this one is in progress, but I felt guilty about how little I've read this month, so I'm putting it on here to make myself feel better. This book is crazy! It's set in an alternate history where after World War II, European Jews sheltered in Sitka, Alaska instead of Israel. And it's a Chandler-esque literary crime thriller, full of hard-drinking, fast-shooting, Yarmulke-wearing police detectives and black-hatted, side-curled, corrupt Orthodox Jew crime families. Pretty awesome stuff. I won't say too much about it, since I'm only 2/3 of the way through, but I'm really enjoying it so far, and I know I'm missing out on a ton of awesome stuff because I don't know that much about Judaism. There are whole paragraphs that I just don't get at all, which is kind of too bad.

Josh, you're next.