Math Girls novel is "Glee for math nerds"

By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Thursday, Oct 6

Math Girls is Hiroshi Yuki's immensely popular series of fiction and manga about math geeks ("Like Glee for math nerds"), and the stories themselves are a potted education in all sorts of mathematics. The first volume of Math Girls is to be published in English shortly by Bento Books, and they've posted a brief excerpt in PDF form. The site is short on actual details (publication date, ISBN, etc), but I'm looking forward to the book becoming reality nevertheless.

(Thanks, Sohagan!)

Math Girls [bentobooks.com] Tags: Book, happy mutants, Japan, Kids, math, novel

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Math Girls novel is "Glee for math nerds"

By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Thursday, Oct 6

Math Girls is Hiroshi Yuki's immensely popular series of fiction and manga about math geeks ("Like Glee for math nerds"), and the stories themselves are a potted education in all sorts of mathematics. The first volume of Math Girls is to be published in English shortly by Bento Books, and they've posted a brief excerpt in PDF form. The site is short on actual details (publication date, ISBN, etc), but I'm looking forward to the book becoming reality nevertheless.

(Thanks, Sohagan!)

Math Girls [bentobooks.com] Tags: Book, happy mutants, Japan, Kids, math, novel

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.

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New Daniel Pinkwater novel being serialized online in weekly chapters

Zack sez, "The author of such surreal delights as LIZARD MUSIC and THE HOBOKEN CHICKEN EMERGENCY has gone to the web to premiere his latest work before it heads to hard-copy. Daniel Pinkwater's BUSHMAN LIVES will update with a new chapter every Monday, with the first already online. So far, it involves a giant gorilla and a sacred order of hall monitors. Pure Pinkwater."

Just in case it's escaped your notice, I happen to think that Pinkwater is one of the greatest novelists alive, and I credit him with a large part of my sanity and outlook.

I must have been asleep for an hour or two. I woke up sensing there was someone in my room.

“Geets?”

“Ook Ook, Bushman lives,” Geets Hildebrand said.

“Ook,” I said. I switched the light on.

Geets was sitting cross-legged next to my bed. He had done this before. Sometimes I would wake in the morning and there he would be, sleeping on the rug. I could never get him to tell me how he got in–how he got into a building with a doorman, into a locked elevator area, into our locked apartment, and into my locked bedroom. Had he slipped past the doorman, and picked three locks? Had my father, who disliked and mistrusted all my friends, let him in and for some reason agreed not to say anything about it? It was a mystery.

“Drink to Bushman,” Geets said. He pulled four bottles of Guinness out of his jacket, and two bananas. This was our ritual. We would drink to Bushman the Gorilla at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and eat bananas, which actually went quite well with the thick, bitter Guinness.

Bushman Lives | A novel by Daniel Pinkwater (Thanks, Zack!)

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Habibi: graphic novel is blends Islamic legend, science fiction dystopia, love and loss

Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi is an enormous and genre-busting graphic novel that blends Islamic mysticism, slave/liberation narratives and post-apocalyptic science fiction, creating a story that is erotic, grotesque, and profoundly moving.

Habibi is set in an atemporal Middle Eastern country that seems at times to be caught in classical times, but whose landscape is dotted with derelict jeeps, poisoned water awash in rotting consumer goods and other elements from out of time. Dodola, a child bride, is captured by slavers who murder her older husband, a scribe who had reared her on the stories, sutras and legends he was paid to calligraph. On the run, she rescues a younger slave boy, Zam, and the two become refugees together. They find a new home in the desert, a strangely out of place wrecked ship amid the sands, which they make into a snug home. Dodola raises Zam as her son, and to feed them both, she must prostitute herself to the caravans that pass by their hiding place.

When violence comes again -- when Dodala is enslaved to a capricious sultan's harem -- Zam is on his own, and is also soon in trouble. The story veers into Scheherazade territory as Dodola tries to charm the sultan into releasing her, but with the dark threat that usually lurks in the background in Scheherazade brought to the foreground. Zam is battered by life and circumstance, mutilated and enslaved, and still the two pine for each other.

Habibi is told in a dreamlike, non-linear, dense style, with asides for swirling Islamic legends, the theory and practice of magic squares, the hidden meanings in Arabic calligraphy, jumping from time to time and place to place, giving the book a deep, mythic resonance. The tale is epic and often horrific, but so well told that it grips you right through it's 670-odd pages.

I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.

Habibi

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Zahra’s Paradise: graphic novel about Iranian uprising is a story and a history

Zahra's Paradise, a new book from FirstSecond, collects in one volume the serialized (and brilliant) webcomic, written by two pseudonymous Iranian dissidents. It's the gripping story of a Medhi, a young man kidnapped by Iran's secret police during the election-season demonstrations of 2009, and it is a heart-rending tale of loss, hope, technology, revolution, politics, bravery and resilience. Told form the point of view of Medhi's blogger brother (who has previously been arrested for publishing political material), it features an in-the-round look at the power and limits of technology to effect revolution. Its cast includes bloggers, secret policemen, brave copy-shop/Internet cafe owners, influence peddlers, disgraced bourgeois, broken prisoners and a family devastated by loss.

And while Zahra's Paradise is an informative (if fictionalized) account of the Iranian election uprising and a vivid condemnation of the stern, joyless Khomeniest version of Islam, it is also a fantastic story, a graphic novel that races to its conclusion. The webcomic was serialized in 12 languages (including Farsi and Arabic) and the print edition is available in a dozen countries from today.

Zahra's Paradise

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Willingham’s Down the Mysterly River, a kids’ novel that captures the glory of Fables

Up the Mysterly River was Bill Willingham's first kids' novel, published by a small press in the 1990s, long before his multi-award-winning (and most excellent) Fables graphic novel got underway. After languishing out of print for many years, Tor Books has finally brought it back to shelves. It's high time, as this is a ripping good read that explores many of the themes that make Fables such a tremendous read, but in a form that's accessible and appropriate for younger readers.

Mysterly River opens with Max the Wolf, a young cub scout, wandering in a mysterious forest with no memory of how he got there. We quickly learn that Max the Wolf is an accomplished boy detective of the sort that ripping kids' books are written about, and it seems reasonable to assume that this is going to be a book in that mold.

And then Max meets the talking badger, Banderbrock, who is a fearsome warrior himself, and who believes that he has come to the badger afterlife (he can remember dying). Just as Max and Banderbrock are getting their bearings, they encounter McTavish the Monster, a foul-tempered tomcat who is fleeing from a savage hunter and his baying hounds. The hunter turns on Max and Banderbrock, and they overcome the odds to best him, and they escape him with their lives, now a company of three.

So begins a fast-moving, utterly charming fairy tale about a mysterious land populated by speaking animals and the wicked cutters -- a brotherhood of vicious swordsmen who use their magical blue swords to cut away at their prey, turning them into inoffensive, narratively convenient literary constructs in keeping with whatever the current storytelling vogue demands. Soon, the small company of heroes meets a fourth, TK the bear, and they set off for a sanctuary in the keep of a wizard, where, they are told, they'll be safe from the Cutters, perhaps forever. From then on, it's a roaring adventure story, with twists and turns and mysterious saviors and double-crosses and tragedy and sacrifice and heroism.

And on the way, there's a great lot of stuff about the nature of stories and fables, the lives of characters and the intentions of their creators, and the mysterious workings of creativity.

Though this is very early Willingham, it still stands with his best work, and certainly prefigures the Fables series. If you enjoyed Peter and Max (his recent Fables prose-novel, which is also available as an audiobook masterfully read by Wil Wheaton) this will surely delight you -- and it's a perfect entree to the Fables world for younger readers for whom the more adult material and illustrations of Fables might not yet be appropriate.

Mark Buckingham, an artist on Fables, did a series of internal illustrations for the book. Tor was good enough to provide a complete set (PDF) for your enjoyment (some samples after the jump).

Down the Mysterly River

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Typo in romantic novel causes bowel movement during love scene

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Trailer for creepy thriller novel, Bedbugs

[Video Link] In Gweek 014 I discussed a psychological thriller novel I enjoyed by Ben H. Winters called Bedbugs. Here's the trailer for it.

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SmarterComics — graphic novel adaptations of business and self-help books

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Echoes – a creepy, Hitchcockian graphic novel

My 14-year-old daughter spotted the review copy of Echoes sitting on my desk. Intrigued by the creepy images on the front cover, which included small illustrations of what appeared to be voodoo dolls, ghostly hands, and scenes of haunted and frightened people, she grabbed the graphic novel, disappeared into her room for an hour and reemerged with a favorable verdict. "Read it," she said. "It's creepy and you'll like it."

I read it. She was right. It was creepy and I liked it. Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov and illustrated by Rahsan Ekedal, Echoes is about a man named Brian Cohn who has to take the antipsychotic medication Clozapine at scheduled times throughout the day. If he doesn't, he starts to hallucinate, especially when he is subjected to stressful events. And as you might expect, Brian gets blasted with plenty of stressful events, usually under circumstances that don't allow him to take his medicine -- like when he is searching the decrepit, abandoned house that his father told him to visit in order to find the bodies of dead children stored there.

The best word to describe Echoes is Hitchcockian, because Brian is a confused victim who doesn't know what's real and what is the product of his schizophrenic brain, and because there are good twists in the story.

One thing to be aware of is that this hardbound anthology does not have the complete story, because the comic book series is ongoing. You'll either have to pick up new issues of the comic book as they get published, or wait for the next Echoes anthology to find out what happens.

Read the first issue online for free here.

Buy Echoes on Amazon

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