As part of First/Second's delightful Vampire Month extravaganza, I give you a most urbane vampire of alternate history, Don Sebastian de Ulloa, the central character in Elizabeth Bear's most excellent New Amsterdam. From the publisher's site:

Abigail Irene Garrett drinks too much. She makes scandalous liaisons with inappropriate men, and if in her youth she was a famous beauty, now she is both formidable--and notorious. She is a forensic sorceress, and a dedicated officer of a Crown that does not deserve her loyalty.

In a world where the sun never set on the British Empire, where Holland finally ceded New Amsterdam to the English only during the Napoleonic wars, and where the expansion of the American colonies was halted by the war magic of the Iroquois, they are exiles in the new world--and its only hope for justice.

In this collection of mysteries, readers learn slowly about Sebastian and Abigail and how their relationship will become great enough to threaten the actions of the British Empire. The larger arc that reaches from the book's beginning to end is political but each self contained mystery covers all sorts of circumstance from greed to revenge. The mysteries are artfully written and reason enough to enjoy the book but the inclusion of true political figures (and Tesla even!) gives the book even more depth. What's really cool about it though is that while Sebastian is a vampire the point is not that he's a vampire - the point is that he is a detective; the issue he has with needing blood every now and again is what makes his life hard but is not who he is - and it's not why this title was written.

In other words, for all the fun Laurell K. Hamilton is, you won't find her issues here. New Amsterdam does have its share of horror and supernatural crimes, but this is a very urbane and sophisticated vampire and those are the type of stories that Bear has written. It's very cool, very different, and very smart. I've included the book in my June column at Bookslut along with some other awesome alt history titles (including Jenny Davidson's wonderful The Explosionist); I think New Amsterdam will be a winner for teen mystery fans who like a bit of horror with their stories.

For other fabulous vamp tales, check out First Second Books for more links. For me, Buffy will always hold a special place in my heart, as well Robin McKinley's Sunshine and yes, Anita Blake's complicated love life. As to the big screen, it is only and forever The Lost Boys - best vamp movie and one of the top ten soundtracks ever.

Multiple links (not necessarily of a bookish sort) to stories that I found interesting:

From BLDGBLOG, the lost rivers of Manhattan:

But how much would I love to find myself in New York City for a weekend, perhaps sent there by work to cover a story – when the phone rings in my hotel room. It's 11pm. I'm tired, but I answer. An old man is on the other end, and he clears his throat and he says: "I think this is something you'd like to see." I doubt, I delay, I debate with myself – but I soon take a cab, and, as the clock strikes 12am, I'm led down into the basement of a red brick tenement building on E. 13th Street.

I step into a large room, that smells vaguely of water – and six men are sitting around an opening in the floor, holding fishing poles in the darkness.

For those of you wondering how to save the world, consider urban gardening:

All this has not quenched Ms. Washington’s agricultural ambitions. In April she took a six-month leave from her job and headed to the Center for Agroecology with two other city growers. She said she hoped to take notes and start an urban farm school in New York.

“So that the next time we ask a kid where a tomato comes from,” she said, “he won’t have to say a supermarket. He can say, Here’s an urban farm, and here is where I’m growing that tomato that you’re talking about. How great is that?”

A lifetime (and three generations) spent studying Lake Baikal:

Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,” to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,” Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.”

When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.”

From the Natural History Museums Antarctica blog, "Near Enough is Not Good Enough":

Shackleton and his men didn’t cross the continent as planned. Before reaching land the Endurance became wedged in ice and had to be abandoned by the crew. [Frank] Hurley argued with Shackleton to go back to the sinking ship to rescue his precious glass plate negatives. Diving below the icy waters of the sunken ship he found these jewels that he’d soldered shut in a tin. The legendary story follows how he and Shackleton went through the hundreds of negatives, smashing those that could not be taken in their harrowing journey to be rescued. Imagine the images nobody has yet seen, in an icy grave at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

Finally, Jenny D. pines for the new bicycle novel (which she should write!) and links to Guy Dammann's article at The Guardian on the subject:

Obvious sources from the cycling's first golden age range from HG Wells's follow-up to the Time Machine, The Wheels of Chance to Flann O'Brien's anarchic surrealisation of the Irish countryside, The Third Policeman. Somerset Maugham's long short story, Cakes and Ale, indexes the cycling habits of Hugh Walpole and, more famously, Thomas Hardy, and Jerome K Jerome's sequel to Three Men on a Boat, sees the three companions regroup for some bicycle action in Three Men on a Bummel.

[Images from Lake Baikal including Mikhail M. Kozhov and his granddaughter Lyubov who along with Lyubov's mother conducted the ongoing Lake Baikal study.]

The new issue of Bookslut is up and those of you who remember my complaints about YA mysteries will enjoy my column this month which includes several recommendations on that front. Ben Towle's graphic novel Midnight Sun is my Cool Read this time - and for more on Ben and how he came to write this historical drama, be sure to check out my interview with him in two weeks for this year's Summer Blog Blast Tour. I also have interviews with Delia Sherman and Elisha Cooper and lots of other folks are getting their interviews ready as well. The tour is set for the week of May 19th and should be the same awesome round-up of cool literary voices that we enjoyed for last year's Summer & Winter tours.

I also have a review of the amazing nonfiction title Aaronsohn's Maps this month. I can't recommend this history title enough - it has WWI, Palestinians, Turks, Zionists, Lawrence of Arabia and the Jewish Joan of Arc plus Aaron Aaronsohn, the man who might have had the plan to a peaceful Middle East. If you have any interest at all in the history of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict then this look at the region just as that discord was in its infancy is a must read.

I have not read most of Bookslut yet this week but I do highly recommend Elizabeth Bachner's piece on Syliva Plath. I came to Plath very late - in my thirties - but adore her writing. This is a great look at the writer and what everyone thinks of her readers.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this review of Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe. I have the book here and will get to it by this fall when I'm sure I'll have much more to say than this reviewer did. (It seems like a poor match between reviewer and book but I might just be reading too much into a scanty critique.)

I've read Gods of Manhattan. I agree with Betsy. I am going to write a more thorough post soon on the matter though because I think there is something important at work here that we should (as readers/reviewers of MG/YA fiction) be addressing. Just for myself though - would everyone please stop writing fantasy where a kid wakes up one day and discovers he's the second coming of whatever? It worked for Buffy only because Joss Whedon created the mother of all back stories and it worked for Harry Potter because the bad guy was dead and he was just supposed to be one more of many many wizards (and he wasn't even the best). But how many books do we have to read where a kid just walks out the door one day and by the end he/she/they are everything and a bag of chips when it comes to saving the town/city/important book/holy grail/or Manhattan. For further evidence, see Triskellion, The Black Tattoo, Endymion Spring and The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. When it's done right it's very good; but when it's done over and over just to get the plot moving then really - it's very very bad.

I am putting together the collection of books I plan to read for August's look into political titles (Cory Doctorow's Two Brothers, Walter Dean Myers' Sunrise Over Fallujah, Nick Mamatas and Under My Roof, Paul Molyneau's Swimming in Circles, Bomb the Suburbs by William Upski Wimsatt, Betrayal of Africa by Gerald Caplan, etc. etc). Some of these I might not like enough to review so they'll be dropped but that is the basic plan (And of course a big shout out to David Levithan's Wide Awake.) I did just see this Powell's essay from author Kelly McMaster on her memoir Welcome to Shirley and I thought - man I've got to read that book! Here's the book's description:

Shirley seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Founded by a Vaudevillian huckster who touted it as a seaside haven despite the sand bar that blocks access to the shore, the town has been plagued by one disaster after another — a UFO, a childhood cancer cluster, and a mysterious federal nuclear laboratory in nearby Brookhaven that leaked toxic nuclear and chemical waste into the aquifer from which the residents unknowingly drew their well water.

This is Kelly McMasters' account of growing up in a cursed town and loving it anyway, and of a girl's awakening to tragedy and to a sense of mission. Told in a deliciously engaging voice, Welcome to Shirley balances the bitter with the sweet, the funny with the infuriating, in an unforgettable story of working class Long Island.

PW said it was a bit of a "a tedious memoir of childhood" but I think that makes it perfect for teens. It's a different look at the environmental issues we are facing so hopefully I'll be able to fit it in.

Oh - and Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton Bryant on life and death in the WY oil fields is on the way as well.

It looks like a lot of reading right now, but my June and July columns are done as well as half of August, so I'm way ahead of the reviewing curve. It's all going to be such interesting reading that I don't think I could have resisted it anyway. The feature just gives me a great excuse to get to all these subjects.

Guys Lit Wire is still set to debut on June 1st and is looking lovely. I'm quite excited and hope this site can be the kind of power for good in the world of teen reading that I envision it to be. You will not believe the stuff that the contributors are working on - it is so awesome and impressive and thoughtful. Nobody is coasting over there - it's all going to be great.

Now back to the The Map of My Dead Pilots. I finished writing a bit about Antoine de Saint Exupery's book on flying the mail last night (Night Flight - it's an amazing novella, one of my favorites books on flying). That one really affected me the first time I read it; it is so much like the Alaska I knew (even though the book was set in South America in the 1920s) that it really struck me. I have also written about hauling sled dogs (more on this later) and I'm struggling with a long chapter on a good friend who crashed because of a lot of little reasons that never should have added up to an accident but they did. This is not hard because of the crash itself (he's fine) but because I have to explain how a good pilot can crash. Not so easy to do. Fifty pages by the end of the month though; I never knew I could be so productive.