Lower East Side Librarian

Issue #16 of her Syndicate Product series is A.j.'s spectacular 24-hour zine about her not particularly rational, but surprisingly powerful desire to live in California. LA, even. I can't believe how moved and awed I was at this work, created in 19.5 hours. A.j., an obvious perfectionist, regrets sleeping from 1-5:30 a.m., but I can't imagine the zine being any better with another 4.5 hours' worth of work.

I'd read DTWOF here and there, mostly on the interweb, like especially when the main character, Mo, decided to go to library school in 2001, and the link to that strip got forwarded around the bibliosphere like crazy. But without regular exposure, I had not realized just how brilliant the biweekly comic strip is. I can't believe (okay, I can believe but don't want to) that it isn't syndicated in every newspaper that carries Doonesbury, or at least Boondocks. I'm guessing it's the title? Which is unfortunate also because this comic is relevant to all people with radical left politics. Maybe even liberals!

The story of a more or less orphaned half Danish, half African-American adolescent getting used to life in the 'hood, sometimes challenged by and sometimes rewarded for her blue eyes and good hair, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky unfortunately isn't quite as good as scintillating as I wanted it to be. It's particularly sad because the first chapter really got me.

I don't get it. Oftentimes when a book is a huge success there's an easily discernible reason. I'll admit The DaVinci Code was a real page turner, and Oprah nailed most of her book club selections back in the day. But The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just isn't all that. It's compelling, sure, but standard thriller fare. Possibly a little more interesting for its Swedishness, but really it's just another guy written guy book where a smart middle aged guy ends up a hero with the money and the girl half his age. He throws in some statistics about violence against women and some strong female characters, yet one of the rape scenes was just a little too rapey for my feminist taste.

I remember being kind of cool to this Judy Blume book as a kid, but I might have been too old for it the first time I read it. Reading it now I have a greater appreciation for its portrait of a 10-year-old Jewish girl from New Jersey in post-World War II America. Sally is kind of dumb or naive, which is probably another reason I wasn't crazy about her as a kid, but as an adult I'm not quite as bothered. What really appeals to me is how Blume portrays the future writer, not by having her write a bunch in her diary, but by sharing her imaginative inner life. Blume identifies this as her most autobiographical work, which makes total sense to me.