Spring reading

I hate that I can't seem to get into any fiction these days. All the best-sellers are romances (not for me) or serial-killer crime novels (I read Michael Connelly's "The Poet" and that was enough for me), and the mid-list "literary" stuff I look at just doesn't grab me. I've drifted away from fantasy and sf in the last 20 years or so, and even old-fashioned genre mysteries (like Martha Grimes) don't interest me much any more. Which leaves me non-fiction, mostly history and celebrity bios and books about pop culture. Even there, I'm in a slump, as most of what I've read lately has left me unsatisfied:

"Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art" by Simon Louvish: The balance of the book is on the art, to the point where the book should have been called "The Films of Cecil B. DeMille." Though there is an almost exhaustive amount of material about DeMille's very early days, once he starts making movies, the focus shifts to plot summaries of films that run to multiple pages, and very little about DeMille the man and what made him tick.

"The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America" by David Hajdu: I very much enjoyed Hajdu's earlier book "Positively 4th Street" about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Richard and Mimi Farina, to the point where I went out and bought a CD set of music by the Farinas. But this book, which mostly covers the postwar years when comic books came under federal scrutiny, feels unfocused and disjointed. Though EC comics like Vault of Horror were at the center of the storm (and EC's publisher William Gaines rightfully gets a lot of attention here), Hajdu doesn't spend much time talking about the comics themselves, or the actual contemporary reception of them by their readers. A book about comics should have lots of illustrations, and this book has only a skimpy 8 pages of photos, and black & white ones at that. And "how it changed America" is never really addressed.

"Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography" by Richard Stirling: I opted to read this one instead of Andrews' own recent memoir because hers just covers her early years, leaving out her film career. This book is breezy and easy to read, but it's hardly "intimate"; the author has actually met and interviewed Andrews in the past, but he's not a close friend, and he obviously didn't gain her confidence for a full-fledged "authorized" bio. Still, the book does help bring the iconic figure of Andrews to more full-blooded life, and Stirling does share a couple of fun gossipy tales.

All this bitching makes me think I should end on something positive, so I'll mention "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," this year's Caldecott Award winner for best picture book for children. It's a wonderful story about a young orphan, living alone in a Paris train station, who is obsessed with trying to finish building an automaton left by his father. To quote from the ALA/Caldecott web page, "Neither words nor pictures alone tell this story, which is filled with cinematic intrigue. Black & white pencil illustrations evoke the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage." And that makes reading the book a unique experience. Still, I couldn't help but occasionally wonder about the waste of paper--almost 550 pages to tell a story which can be read in an afternoon. The cinematic swoops and close-ups and far shots are fun, but might have been more effective in a larger page format. But it's still a memorable tale, well told.