In 1998, Pete McCarthy embarked on a project to explore Ireland. Over the next six months he traveled from Cork in the south south up the west coast to Donegal in the north, always observing the Eighth Rule of Travel: “Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name on It”. The result is McCarthy’s Bar. Publishers Weekly and Library Journal both compare McCarthy’s writing to that of Bill Bryson as he narrates the stories of his travels through the particular magic of Ireland.

I often find myself reaching for Irish tales in the late weeks of February and early March. Either that or baseball. I stumbled across this choice while browsing the local bookstore last week. Pete McCarthy was born in England to and Irish mother and an English father. He is at once an insider and an outsider to Ireland and it is that particular perspective that colors his tales, be they with the curious, the belligerent, or the infamous.

Along the way, McCarthy shows us that “In Ireland, the unexpected happens more than you expect.”

Douglas Coupland has written an epistolary novel. The Gum Thief is described as Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And quite candidly, that makes three things that I really like all wrapped up in one book. Roger and Bethany are the two main characters in the The Gum Thief, and Glove Pond is the novel within the novel– written by Roger. Roger is a middle-aged alcoholic contending with the fallout from an ugly divorce and loss of access to his child. Bethany is a younger goth girl without much direction other than black lipstick. They both work at Staples. Glove Pond is a corruption of Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At one point Roger writes that Glove Pond was supposed to contain characters like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — drunk movie stars who engage in witty repartee. Roger’s novel goes horribly wrong somewhere around the second paragraph.

Crush Inc. out of Toronto produced some fascinating video clips to advertise the The Gum Thief.

I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland novels since college when I discovered and fell in love with his first one, Generation X. Coupland has always been uncomfortable with the title of spokesman for this non-Generation. In a 1995 interview he went so far to state that the idea was dead following Kurt Cobain‘s suicide. And he moved on, writing about the emerging digital age. What attracts me about Coupland is his skill at finding nascent cultural events and chronicling them inside the structure of a story with authenticity. Like no other author, he can make me think that I am in the story– or at least in the area of the story looking on. There is a level of unabashed reality mixed with privacy in his writing.

I have been disappointed in the Sookie Stackhouse novels. I attribute the Golden Globe award more to the cleverness of Alan Ball than the skill of Charlaine Harris or Anna Paquin. On the other hand, I have heard good things about this debut novel by the Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. So I have picked up Let the Right One In (the original Swedish title is Låt den rätte komma in). Like many horror novels, this book focuses on the darker side of humanity. Let The Right One In uses the genre to contend with drugs, theft, pedophilia and prostitution. With the exception of the Harris novels, I haven’t read much contemporary horror in a while. I’m hopeful that this novel will be more satisfying.

Booklist provides this short summary:

Swedish TV and stage writer Lindqvist’s first novel is set in a commonplace suburb of Stockholm, where 12-year-old Oskar lives with his mother, is bullied at school, shoplifts, and keeps a scrapbook of notes and clippings about gruesome murders. Eli, apparently about his age, moves in next door but doesn’t go to school, leaving the flat only at night. Shortly after, the killings start. At first more fascinated than sorry, since one victim had bullied him, Oskar eventually discovers that Eli is a vampire, stuck permanently in childhood. What should Oskar do, especially when Eli is his friend as much as anyone is? Lindqvist develops the plot in rich detail. The characters, adult and child, are quite convincingly the sort that one would probably cross the street to avoid in any city. Lindqvist also realistically depicts the aftermath of brutal homicide on the nearby: shock and horror, some sleepless nights and bad dreams, despite which you must go to work and get the groceries.

The HBO series “True Blood” concluded its first season a couple weeks ago. The television storylines followed most of the first book, Dead Until Dark, fairly closely. But with about four episodes left in the season the television series veered off into territories not covered by the first volume of the book series. Now that Season One of “True Blood” is concluded, I’m interested to see where Alan Ball drew his inspiration. Living Dead in Dallas is the second novel in the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery series by Charlaine Harris. In this novel we return to Bon Temps and the now somewhat familiar supernatural world of telepaths, vampires and various other things that go bump in the night before heading off to Texas for further nocturnal adventures. These are quick, easy reads of not terribly weighty substance. I enjoyed Harris’ first book and Ball’s first season. So I’m coming back for more.

I’m amused more than anything. I also agree with Ross Wolinsky that there are at least 8 Things Modern Vampires Could Learn From The Lost Boys. I’m just sayin’.

Impulse buys at the bookstore can be dangerous. I went into the bookstore yesterday without a particular idea of what I was looking for. I enjoy browsing bookstores for this very reason. Despite attempts to try and replicate the experience online with recommendations, reviews and customer profiling I cannot get over the idea that it just is not the same as moving from shelf to shelf through a well-stocked bookstore. So that’s what I do when I’m looking for something to read and don’t have a clear idea of what is is I’m looking to read. Yesterday I found Gods Behaving Badly, the first book by London anthropologist and BBC researcher Marie Phillips.

The novel’s structure is straightforward in this postmodern era. Take some bit of classical culture — in this case twelve Olympian Gods — and place them somewhere disconnected from their expected environment. Let’s say a flat in 21st Century London.

The twelve Greek gods of Olympus are alive and well in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in a London town house — and none too happy about it. For Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator), and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic), there’s no way out — until a meek housecleaner, Alice, and her would-be boyfriend, Neil, turn their world upside down.

When what begins as a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills, Alice and Neil must fear not only for their own lives but for the survival of humankind. Nothing less than a true act of heroism is needed — but can these two ordinary people replicate the feats of the mythical heroes and save the world?

Well, it sounded like a great premise to me.

I will attempt to make a case that Watchmen is not as a comic book but a novel through the clever use of argumentum ad verecundiam. Ready? Watch. In 1988, Watchmen received the Hugo Award. In 2005, the editors of Time Magazine placed Watchmen on the ALL-TIME 100 Novels list. The list of the best novels written between 1923 and the present. More recently, Entertainment Weekly placed Watchmen at number 13 on its list of the best 50 novels printed in the last 25 years. And just in case that hasn’t convinced you, a few more soundbites:

“A work of ruthless psychological realism, it’s a landmark in the graphic novel medium.” — Time Magazine

“Watchmen is peerless.” — Rolling Stone

“Remarkable … the would-be heroes of Watchmen have staggeringly complex psychological profiles.” — New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant piece of fiction.” — The Village Voice

So, all of these authorities say Watchmen is great literature. So it must be true! The point here is that none of this matters. Watchmen is a story — a dense, complex story with social, psychological and structural elements worthy of more traditional literary examples. Originally published by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987, Watchmen is a twelve-issue series created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I am reading it in a collected form: the so-called graphic novel. Alan Moore has stated that the initial premise for the series was to examine what superheroes would be like “in a credible, real world”. That premise shifted as the story developed and grew in complexity. Watchmen grew to encompass the idea of “power and about the idea of the superman manifest within society.”

Compelling storytelling takes myriad forms: song, theater, novel, poem. Why not this?

Halloween means monsters– ghosts, vampires, women wearing little more than fishnet stockings and a smile. So it is in the spirit of Haloween that I’ve started reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Eight novels comprise the Sookie Stackhouse series, so far– the first one being Dead Until Dark published in 2001. The series takes the vampire legend and turns it on its head. The premise is that the development of synthetic blood has allowed vampires to come “out of the coffin” for the first time in history. So much of vampire lore is wrapped up in the element of secrecy about them. Harris does away with all that in the second paragraph before moving on to her version of vampire stories.

I came across these books via the HBO series “True Blood”. Alan Ball created the television series, basing it upon the Sookie Stackhouse novels. You may know Alan Ball as the writer of American Beauty and the creator of another of my favorite HBO series, “Six Feet Under”. When I saw that he was creating another TV series, I decided to take a look. After two episodes I wanted to read at least the first book.

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn’t get out much. Not because she’s not pretty. She is. It’s just that, well, Sookie has this sort of “disability.” She can read minds. And that doesn’t make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He’s tall, dark, handsome– and Sookie can’t hear a word he’s thinking. He’s exactly the type of guy she’s been waiting for all her life …

But Bill has a disability of his own: He’s a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs witha seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of– big surprise– murder. And when one of Sookie’s coworkers is killed, she fears she’s next …