Maps And Legends Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands-- Michael Chabon-- Review

Maps And Legends Readings And Writings Along The Borderlands by Michael Chabon is a collection of essays. An interesting thing about this collection is that the proceeds from the book go to a nonprofit literacy organization; http://www.862national.org I think this frees the author from commercial constraints. He is also using McSweeney's an avant garde publisher. This combination allows him to have free reign with his opinions making for some very interesting writing. I enjoyed both the style and substance presented in this collection.

Michael Chabon is writing about the borders between serious literature and popular culture. For example, he describes how Cormac McCarthy's The Road remains literature despite being written as post apocalyptic science fiction in his essay, Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Similarly, the borders are touched on in On Fan Fiction: Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyles ambivalence about writing about the great detective is explored.

The origins of his bestselling, The Yiddish Policemen's Union comes from a traveller's phrasebook How To Say It In Yiddish. The essay Imaginary Homelands describes this process. He angered a number of people when he wrote about How To Say It In Yiddish in the periodical Civilization. This gave rise to thoughts on the urge to form a Jewish homeland and led him to write his story about a Yiddish homeland in Alaska.

Thoughts on the Death of Will Eisner, Kids' Stuff, The Killer Hook Howard Chaykin's American Flagg are all essays about graphic novels. Michael Chabon is talking about the maturation of the graphic novel as an art form. The Death of Will Eisner is a eulogy to both Will Eisner's art and his business acumen. Kids' Stuff describes how graphic novels have become an acceptable art form and at the same time have had an incredible drop in readership. The essay on American Flagg is about how Howard Chaykin turns graphic novels into works of pop art.

The writing in this collection is open and free flowing. It touches on a wide variety of subjects. All in a way are somewhat autobiographical. Michael Chabon became a writer partially because of his interests in old maps and legends. He criticisms numerous other writers in this collection including Philip Pullman, M.R. James, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Part of the essays are autobiographical. He talks about his origins as a writer in Diving Into The Wreck. His last essay is entitled Golem's I Have Known, or Why My Elder Son's Middle Name Is Napoleon A Trickster's memoir. This essay touches on the idea of the golem, both as a story and a spiritual metaphor for deeper understanding.

I have not listed and described all of the essays in this collection. They are all unique with varying perspectives on writing, genre fiction, graphic novels and literature. I think the writer was enjoying himself when he wrote this book. There are a few single page illustrations, a daily strip of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, and a single panel from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg. These essays are well worth reading especially if you like genre fiction and graphic novels.

A Few Thoughts

In the morning, on the train, I read The Twelve Kingdoms Sea of Shadow by Fuyumi Ono. The copy I read was an uncorrected proof. This was a wonderful story about a girl transported to a mythical chinese fairytale land consisting of twelve kingdoms. There she acquires the spirit of a warrior, fights demons, and goes through a variety of hardships; getting her money stolen, almost being sold to a brothel, almost being captured by the local magistrates, and wandering the roads near starving. The characterization is wonderful.

I rather like the character Rakashun who spends part of his time as a rat person, and part of his time as a human. There are wonderful fairytales elements like people being born from fruits, and each kingdom having a god king. I am not giving this book a full review because it is an uncorrected proof and I am not supposed to. I am however suggesting that the book be purchased for our young adult collection.

The cover on the finished book is slightly different than the cover on the uncorrected proof. I also think, some of the content will be different, so if I quote things in the book, I will make a mistake. There are two page spread manga style black and white illustrations throughout the book.

Over 15 million copies of this book have been sold worldwide. It is part of a 7 volume series. Tokypop, the publisher mainly sells manga. So, this is a slightly different thing for them to do.



When I got in to work, two books were waiting for me. Michael Chabon's Maps And Legends Reading and Writing Along the Borderland. The dust jacket is very nicely designed, it is three sections of layered images. I really like it a lot. However, it does not completely cover the whole book which some people may not like. The cover art is by Jordan Crane. Jordane Crane has some pretty interesting looking art. http://reddingk.com/

The other book that came in for me is The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. The Algebraist was nominated for the Hugo award. I am looking forward to reading both of these books.

I have been trying to figure out what the Second Life Library is all about. I took a look at the Info Island blog which explains events related to libraries in second life. http://infoisland.org/
I also looked at the various Youtube videos on second life libraries. There are a lot of them. Quite frankly, I have always found virtual worlds to be rather odd. Putting a library staffed by librarians in a virtual world is somewhat perplexing. I find the idea of stepping into second life, a virtual world, to visit a library quite frankly mildly scary. I wonder if it will be like World of Warcraft for librarians.

It seems that everything is changing really, really fast with library technology. We are getting the same treatment in libraries as the web is with web 2.0. Now there is the concept of library 2.0 which is a very vague technocentric ideal. I am a concrete person. I prefer to touch and feel what I am reading.

I have started reading The Haiku Handbook How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William J. Higginson with Penny Harter. This book appears to be an in depth overview of Haiku. I was hoping to pick up a book so I could learn the basic form of Haiku and write a few Haiku for the next poetry open microphone. The book has started with Japanese masters of Haiku. I am going to read it on the train home.