Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

Remembering Satan
By Lawrence Wright
Vintage, Paperback, 9780679755821, 224pp.

Publication Date: April 25, 1995

Truman Capote signing copies of his book In Cold Blood, with Harper Lee. Photo: Steve Schapiro

I suppose that kids in the days that these comics were created had a better chance of getting “spanked” for bad behavior than they are in less medieval times.  And I suppose some parents could find rueful humor in the beatings that follow a little girls’ innocently destructive behavior. You can really only buy that rationale for so long before you start to think, man, some of these artists must have had some serious issues.

Because there are hundreds — nay, thousands — of examples of children in the funny papers getting spanked beaten. They are not limited to girls, but overwhelmingly are  (I am not a comics connoisseur so I am not standing by statistics).Perennial favorites such as Nancy, Little Audrey, Little Dot and Lil Jinx, all get the business side of their mother and father’s hands, shoes, hairbrushes among other more original household objects. The beating-worthy transgression is usually some sort of naughty antic or chicanery as opposed to anything willfully evil.

Lil Jinx was constantly getting the stuffing kicked out of her by her scary, rageholic  father. With his large ham hands, with books…

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Vacant Possession
By Hilary Mantel
Picador USA, Paperback, 9780312668044, 242pp.

Publication Date: August 31, 2010

Plotted: A Literary Atlas 

by Andrew DeGraff

Product details: Hardcover: 128 pages

Publisher: Pulp; Original edition (October, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-936976-86-7

The 1963 Madeleine L’Engle classic, A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books from childhood. Alongside the Narnia Chronicles. it was as close to sci-fi as I was going to get.

This was what my copy looked like:

Disclosure: I am a vicious judger of books by their coverer and always was. Needless to say, this was not appealing to an 8-year-old me. A trio of pale-green concentric circles that looked like goddamn radio waves, against a dark, storm blue background. The three silhouettes not saying ANYTHING about the characters that I may or may not be reading about in the book.

What the hell was this? Too sic-fi, too weird, too psychedelic.

Turns out, it is the story about a 12-year-old girl, Meg and her little brother Charles who live in the requisite big, drafty New England house on a wooded hill, with parents who are brilliant scientists, the mom a beautiful one. Meg is messy, not pretty, temperamental, and surly. She fights with the school bully to protect her little brother. The time-traveling part comes in when the children need to search for their father, who has disappeared –  “through a wrinkle in time, to the deadly unknown terrors beyond the tesseract!”

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The Good Neighbor By William Kowalski
Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780060936259, 406pp.

Publication Date: October 28, 2015

First they made Nick Fury black, then Green Lantern black, then gay, then Spiderman Hispanic, then Thor a woman, then they made Ms. Marvel Muslim, then Hermione Granger black, then some guy in the new Star Wars black, and the other Star Wars guy a woman, then ginger Ron Weasley is a blond, then Captain America is black, now also black is Nancy Drew. Titian-haired, lily-white Nancy Drew. It’s almost like they are fictional characters that can be changed willy-nilly at the complete whims of their intellectual property owners!

Yes, some wingnuts are pretty chafed over the fact that there might be a new Nancy Drew teevee program (yahoo!),  wherein the titular character will not, tragically, be white (BOO!), as God intended when He wrote those books. She might be black, she might be  Latino, she might be Asian, but she will NOT BE WHITE. According to the head of the Mystery of  Nancy Drew and the Missing Master Race club Dave Blount:

A civilization is a chain. Each generation is a link. Sever the connection of one link from the preceding link and you have destroyed the entire chain. […]

Sounds like they are preserving a piece of American culture. But the reverse is true.

That’s one argeldybargeldy, wordsalady way of calling New Nancy Drew the  “N WORD”. And the new icky non-white fictional girl detective is being used to “alienate the core population [read: white people] from their own culture.” Ayup. Sorry about your hundreds of years of supremacy, American white people, Nancy Drew is here to kill your asses off.

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reposted with love and dignity from  Adequateman by Samer Kalaf

American actor Joan Crawford (1904 – 1977) sits on a sofa, reading a book with her pet poodle, 1940s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

What was the last actual, physical book you read? If you’re struggling for an answer, please keep reading. (Note: This does not count as a book.)

Screens can be irritating. I stare at one—sometimes even two—all day for work, and my eyes burn by the end of the day if I don’t take breaks. The fact that I occasionally hurt my eyes due to prolonged focus on words and GIFs makes me feel terrible about myself, and I feel even more guilty when I go straight home and watch TV. That just means I’ve spent a whole day staring at different bright squares. To balance this out, I’ve decided to make an effort to read books after work instead. My informal goal is to finish 12 books this year. If that number seems laughable to you, maybe you should read this book next, genius.

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