"The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

NOTE: Today’s book is also available as a free audiobook download that’s read by the author himself. It’s really funny. Get it here.

Daniel Manus Pinkwater (a.k.a. D.M. Pinkwater or Daniel Pinkwater — he likes to change it up to confuse librarians) is a fantastic writer. He’s also a fantastic storyteller. But where I mean the first use of “fantastic” as an adjective describing the QUALITY of his work, I mean the second use as an adjective describing the STYLE of his work. More than anyone I’ve ever read, Pinkwater is able to take fairly normal people and propel them into the purest realms of fantasy. He’s not writing about knights and wizards and dragons, though he could be if he wanted to. But his works take the reader into places unknown, places that have a certain magical quality about them, and which seem to be built partially on memory and partially on dreams.

And maybe “dreamlike” is the best way to describe The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, because it begins as a simple story about a boy named Walter Galt who is bored with his high school. Walter is a misfit, an intelligent person among a bunch of dullards. His only friend is a similar misfit named Winston Bongo, the inventor of “snarking out” — sneaking out in the middle of the night, riding a bus into Baconburg and watching movies at an old theater called The Snark. Snarking out helps Walter manage the tedium of high school and the insanity of his family — his mother is a terrible cook who believes communists are lurking around every corner, and his father is obsessed with avocados.

Winston and Walter eventually befriend a girl they call “Rat,” and they discover that snarking out is something that many people do, including Rat’s uncle, Flipping Hades Terwilliger, who never misses a show. But when Uncle Flipping goes missing (something he’s prone to do), the boys put their snarkout plans to the side and go on a quest to travel through the underworld of Baconburg (not necessarily a seedy place, but rather, a literal street underneath a street) searching for Uncle Flipping… and find themselves tangled up in an international criminal caper that revolves around a specially-bred avocado that can think like a computer.

OK, so the book’s a little bit weird. But it’s a good kind of weird, and well-written. It’s an adventure into places that no other writer will ever take you, with characters who could only exist in a Pinkwater book. There’s a sense of nostalgia to the book, a longing for old things and simple pleasures. The sequel, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, is also quite good, and though it’s a little more aware of how weird it is, it’s also worth a read. (As a child, I read the sequel first, and thus preferred it, but many people feel that the original is the better of the two books.)

Though this is a book you’d find the Young Adult section, it’s a great light read, for three reasons:

1) It’s unique. I don’t use that word often, but it applies here. I’ve never read a book like it.
2) It’s never boring. Even though the book starts to get a little farcical towards the end, it still moves along at a brisk clip, and the ebb and flow of characters makes for interesting reading.
3) It doesn’t talk down to its audience. Part of the reason I can read this book as an adult and enjoy it so much is because it’s written for an intelligent audience. Pinkwater never talks down to kids, even in his picture books. That’s one of the reasons I liked them so much as a kid; they didn’t demean me.

If I have one complaint about this book, it’s that the story turns into a mystery two thirds of the way in that is not developed or compelling. The Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson-esque characters, while amusing, wear on you after awhile because they have everything figured out already and take dozens of pages to fill in all the backstory. You also feel no real satisfaction at seeing the master criminal, Wallace Nussbaum, brought to justice at the end because he never threatens the characters in any way.

This is a great collection, and well worth owning.

But don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It’s fantastic, and you can buy it in a collection with four other great books:

• Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars
• Slaves of Spiegel
• The Last Guru
• Young Adult Novel

Give it a try. If you like the weird, you won’t be disappointed.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

"The Neddiad" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

I don’t know too many kids who grew up reading the way I did. Most of the kids I knew struggled to read, and most of what they read was pretty trashy stuff. Thriller books, ghost stories, books about high school kids having sex and getting killed by serial killers, and so forth.

But not me. Nope. I was reading the works of Daniel Manus Pinkwater, an author whose surreal, fantastic novels were the closest thing to a drug trip my mind could endure without actually abusing some kind of chemical.

Pinkwater wrote a lot of strange children’s novels in the ’70s and ’80s. I’ll touch on some of them in other reviews. But for now, I want to discuss a recent title of his, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization.

It’s hard to describe a Pinkwater book without first explaining that the plot itself is inconsequential. That might sound like a slam, but it’s really not. Pinkwater seems to start his books with some vague idea of where they’re going, and he occasionally remembers to use techniques like foreshadowing and plot structure to pull you along. But sometimes, he just gets lost in his own wackiness and lets things go crazy. This was definitely true in some of my favorite novels of his, like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and Borgel.

The Neddiad starts off with a young boy writing about moving to LA in the 1950s, and quickly gets derailed into the realm of the weird when young Neddie is accidentally left behind at a train station. He befriends the son of a famous actor, meets a phantom bellboy, and has a bizarre encounter with a shaman named Melvin who gives him a little stone turtle to take care of. Neddie’s adventures veer off into tangents, and there’s not much of a sense of purpose behind the plot until the last third of the book, when the villain is finally introduced and things rapidly move towards a climax. In the meantime, the reader is treated to some really wonderful scenes and characters that seem like they were thrown in simply because they were interesting to Pinkwater at the time. One such character, Yggdrasil (also known as Iggy), serves very little purpose in the story aside from being the smart female companion to Neddie and his friend Seaumus in the second half of the book. (She’s the main character in the sequel, so I’m assuming her limited role was included for introductions’ sake. But it’s hard to tell with Pinkwater.)

Though this is a children’s book geared at the advanced chapter book kids, I found it readable and rewarding as an adult as well. I’ve never had a problem picking up a book marked “Young Adult” and reading it for pleasure. Sometimes, those books are the most imaginative, and it’s refreshing to read a book where hammy love stories aren’t being forced in and awkward sex scenes don’t have to be skipped over. Plus, Pinkwater’s books tend to feature overweight characters who are interested in mundane things and who don’t mind getting themselves into odd adventures. I love that.

One scene with this book will stick with me for awhile. Neddie and Seamus make friends with a boy whose father owns a circus, and the children watch as an old horse is taken out to pasture and shot dead by circus handlers. The boys are surprised, but the son of the circus owner explains, “Well, the lions have to eat something…”. It’s a chilling scene, and one of those moments where the book leaves the safe confines of fantasy and edges into reality. Most writers couldn’t pull it off, but Pinkwater’s good enough that the darkness is contained by some truly wacky moments elsewhere in the novel.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who needs a light, humorous read with a hint of fantasy to it. Fans of Norse mythology will also get a kick out of some of the allusions in this title, though they’re not too pronounced.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

Tonight, I found myself absolutely stunned by the conclusion to season 5 of LOST. I’ve made no secret about the fact that I enjoy this show, and I’m still reeling from what was revealed. Be warned — spoilers follow the jump.

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I’ve had several people approach me over the last few months and ask me that most fateful of questions:

“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to get into the comic book industry. So, how can I do it?”

It’s a big question. And unfortunately, I don’t have a straightforward answer to it for most people, because it really depends on what you’re trying to do. But what I can offer are some general guidelines that should help those who have this question burning in their brains to start finding some answers.

Let’s start out with the obvious point: there is no one “way” into the comic book industry. Everyone’s path is different. Most ways in require a large amount of patience and persistence, but some people do get lucky.

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It’s hard to believe, but eBay has been around for almost 15 years now. Granted, most people didn’t know about eBay until it went public in 1998, and it didn’t really become a household name until a few years ago. There’s no denying that eBay has been popular successful; it’s been called the savior of direct sales, the first major consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace, and even the future of business as we know it.

But if eBay’s so great, why is it struggling to convince everyone it’s still relevant?

I ran across an article in Business Week last month that’s got me thinking that eBay is not only starting to become irrelevant, but that it’s a sign of the changes in the way people are using the Internet. It’s bad news for eBay, honestly, because if I’m correct, there’s really no way out for them. They’re going to have to let their core business shrink and focus on other business units if they want to survive. According to the article, eBay has already realized that its side businesses, like Skype and Paypal, have the potential to be profitable on their own.

But chances are good those businesses are going to go down with the lumbering dinosaur that has become eBay unless changes happen, and fast.

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I’m a devoted fan of LOST, and have been since the first season. A lot of my friends think I’m nuts to have stuck with the show so long, and one of them even asked me the other day, “what’s it going to take for those people to just get rescued?”

I was taken aback by the question — do I really want to explain that the latest season is about those who were rescued trying to get back to the island? — but it led me to think about why this show continues to be so compelling to so many people despite the many twists and turns it’s taken into the realm of science fiction. And then suddenly, the answer hit me.

LOST is religion.

Don’t misunderstand me here — I’m not saying the show is a religion. I’m saying that it’s a metaphor, a thorough look at the ideas of mysticism and the supernatural, but through a lens that doesn’t require a Bible, a priest, or even a church.

I’m going to talk about things that may be spoilers if you haven’t been keeping up with the show, so if you want to continue to be surprised, don’t read the rest of this article until you’ve got yourself caught up. (But since you can watch the entire run for free on ABC.com, why not get started now?)

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I don’t often write about the things I’ve actually done — I tend to get bored talking about myself — but I wanted to write up a brief piece reflecting on the arcade auction I visited earlier in the month.

As a kid, I was always drawn to video arcades, and I have fond memories of standing in Aladdin’s Castle in the mall, armed with a plastic baggie full of tokens and trying out as many games as possible until my money ran out. Another place that got quite a bit of my money was the arcade just outside the B/X on the military base where we lived — a great place to hang out while my mom was shopping for boring stuff, like clothes and household supplies. These were the days when arcade machines were everywhere, when Chuck-E-Cheese and Showbiz Pizza ruled supreme, when game magazines actually covered arcade games in their regular coverage. After all, arcade machines were a much better value proposition than the home systems — they had better graphics, more satisfying games and custom-built controls. Most only cost a quarter or two to play, and they didn’t tie up your family’s lone television set. I suspect, in the long run, I spent about as much on arcade gaming as I would have spent on a Nintendo Entertainment System with a small library of games. But whereas my Nintendo would have grown outdated and would be worth very little to me today, the memories of hanging around arcades discovering new games with my friends and my brothers are still with me.

As it happens, I live about three blocks from a fairgrounds where one of the largest arcade auctions in the Midwest is held. It happens every quarter (whether or not that’s intentional, it’s hilarious), and it involves people carting in retired arcade machines, pinball machines, air hockey tables and other amusement machines and putting them up for auction.

My wife would murder me if I brought one of these things home, so I have to settle for the next-best thing: the precious hours when they turn on all the machines and let people play them.

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Yesterday, I mentioned that I’m taking a break from Internet “chatter” by avoiding commenting on large forums and ignoring my Facebook account entirely. But don’t think this is the first time I’ve waged a personal war against wasting time with Internet “chatter”. Last year, I decided to stop using Internet chat services like AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger because I realized I was wasting far too much time instant messaging people. And I’ve been avoiding Twitter like crazy, because, in my mind, it represents the absolute worst things that social networking has to offer.

Allow me to explain… though it will take me more than 140 characters, I’m afraid.

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Maybe I’m getting cranky in my old age, but I’ve been realizing lately that I waste a lot of time on the Internet engaging in “chatter”… like posting comments on peoples’ facebook updates, or writing responses to news posts on Fark.com, or commenting on message boards pertaining to skepticism.

Here’s the problem I’m having — it’s all a colossal waste of time, and it’s causing me to form a lot of shallow relationships that don’t matter instead of pursuing real ones that do. It’s also taking up a large amount of my free time that could be spent doing things I actually want to do, like contributing to my blog here, working on one of my many writing projects, or developing my relationships with others.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to take some time off from commenting on forums and playing around on social networks and attempt to gain some sense of perspective. Even though a lot of the stuff I publish on this blog is rather trivial and unimportant, I’ve decided it’s not chatter, because its my primary purpose in posting is to keep myself writing so my skills can stay sharp. I suppose writing in a private journal would have then same effect, but I benefit from believing that people might actually learn something from whatever I say.

I also will allow myself to comment on a forum if a) the content is original and b) I am interacting with the author in a manner that is exchanging ideas, not chatter.

While I realize that this might seem preachy, it’s not intended to be; putting this down in writing is meant to keep me accountable.

Now if I could only find a way to get so fired up about the massive amounts of time I waste on online video…

Want to see a great video game get ruined? Watch its transition from your game console to the silver screen. Whether you’re talking about something recently released (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), something released in the last few years (Doom, Resident Evil, anything by Uwe Boll) or something released back in the days when arcade fighters and Nintendo consoles reigned supreme (Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat), it’s clear that Hollywood still has yet to figure out how to make a video game movie work. And even Japan, with its video game-based anime films like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Tekken and Street Fighter II: The Movie, has not been able to create films that are as compelling as the source material.

I’ve seen a lot of articles that have talked about how badly video game movies have failed, but I haven’t seen any articles on why they’ve failed. Certainly, it seems to be common knowledge that these films are generally rushed through production with poor choices made when it comes to the screenwriters and directors, but there’s an even more basic reason that games don’t work as films. Simply put, it’s all about the experience… but my, how that experience plays a role in the shaping of the story.

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