We have a bit of history with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick here at Monkey See. It was the second selection in our I Will If You Will Book Club after Twilight (true story!), and we read the entire thing together in the spring of 2010. Book club vice-president Marc Hirsh and I finished the book in June of that year and declared it a great lesson in "how to pursue a pointless battle to its bitter, violent, inevitable end." By which we meant, in part, reading the book.

Despite the fact that some of the whale anatomy chapters sapped my will to live, I've not been sorry I read it. Whatever else can be said about it, the book is a basic point of cultural reference and a source of jokes and allusions you otherwise won't get. The very ideas of the white whale, the crazed captain, the voyage that really is a trip to crazy ... these things have passed into myth, and it's good to know your own myths. But that's not the only reason to read it, and if you want to hear more reasons to read it, check out today's interview on All Things Considered with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the new book Why Read Moby-Dick?

WHY INDEED? No, see, that's what Philbrick knows many people are thinking, but to him, this isn't a chore. It's his "favorite book." He refers back to it almost daily. He finds it "full of great wisdom" — and yes, that includes the whale anatomy parts, which Philbrick says are part of a system of what might seem to be meanderings, but are in fact "wormholes of metaphysical poetry that are truly revelatory."

But that's really thinking too small to fully understand why Philbrick thinks you should read Moby-Dick. As he tells Robert Siegel, he thinks you should read it not only because "the level of the language is like no other," but because "it's as close to being our American Bible as we have."

What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn't a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a "great disaster"), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand that it contained "the genetic code" for much of what happens in the country where it was written. And he predicts it will cycle back to relevance in difficult times, "whenever we will run into an imminent cataclysm."

It's not that Philbrick doesn't understand that it's a difficult book to read — in fact, he thinks it makes sense to come to it after you've had some life experience and not, one presumes, in the high school and college settings where it's often been required reading. He notes that Melville himself was influenced by midlife encounters with both Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of Shakespeare. He even acknowledges that the much-discussed clam chowder and whale anatomy sequences require that the reader "have some patience."

But its sweeping story and a level of writing he calls "truly poetic" are, for Philbrick, a combination "built for the ages."

The occasional Monkey See I Will If You Will Book Club has reconvened to read Neil Gaiman'sThe Sandman: Dream Country. This week, we read "Facade," the fourth and final story in the book.

As we get to the end of the book (and as I, on my own time, circle back to the beginning of the series and start reading more of it), our comics blogger Glen Weldon and I exchanged a few thoughts about this story, the portrayal of Death, the iterative nature of superhero stories, and a whole lot more. Fairly clearly, we could have gone on about this all day, as you will see, but we stopped in order to avoid creating a 10,000-word blog post. Now, it's your turn. Hit the comments.

To: Glen

From: Linda

So...I'm not sure I understood it.

At the end, she dissolved. Or something. She ceased to be. It seemed like maybe she HAD died after all, but then Death had said she WASN'T dying, and also said "Better luck next time." So she...shuffled off this mortal coil in a non-dying way? She managed not to die but just to...become dust by looking into the sun?

I really tried, I did. But I am a trifle confused. And by "a trifle," I kind of mean "really really."

With that said, the face falling into the spaghetti was impressively, vividly off-putting. I felt like I was missing something with the friend's story about being pregnant (is that anything except the basic "life goes on while I remain trapped in my blah bling blah" story' (Not that it wasn't sad.)

This one seemed to me to have a little less...grace, I guess, than the others. It seemed more blunt or something, and she's a flatter character to me, kind of uniformly self-pitying, than some of the others.

To: Linda

From: Glen

Boy, death, hunh?

Some people get beaned on the head by a fly ball and slump into their basket of pretzel nuggets. Some pop a blood vessel while tending their Swiss chard. Some quietly succumb to a long and debilitating illness, surrounded by loved ones.

And some get turned to dust by the merciful ancient Egyptian sun god who, years before, bestowed upon them the ability to transform into any element on the periodic table.

Comics!

I wasn't left with any doubt that Element Girl — or as she was known back in the swingin' 60s, "Element Girl, The Chemical Doll!" — is dead.

And, sister, if you think she's a flat character in THIS story, you'd have been SERIOUSLY unimpressed with the emotional and psychological nuance she evinced back when she was introduced in 1965. She crashed soldier-of-fortune Rex Mason's wedding, announced to the assembled that she was "Urania Blackwell, secret agent!" (um....) and revealed that, in her zeal to defeat the evil criminal organization CYCLOPS, she had exposed herself to the same mysterious Egyptian orb that had granted Rex his weird powers. So. But that was 1965, when evil international criminal organizations like SMERSH, THRUSH and KAOS were thick on the ground, and superheroing was altogether a more whiz-bang- whimsical proposition than it is today.

But that's the thing about superhero comics: New characters are always popping up, but precious few manage to stick around for long. Creative teams change and popular sensibilities evolve; a character that's perfectly suited to the era in which she was created might begin to seem outmoded, even silly.

Now as we have discussed many times, to comics fans like me, "silly" isn't a dirty word - it's a reminder that comics are supposed to be ... you know, fun. But there are other comics fans for whom a character's "badassery" is his or her most salient feature; these people will never know the joy that characters like Paste-Pot Pete, Matter-Eater Lad, Batroc the Leaper or the Red Bee — who fought crime with the help of his trained pet bee! Who lived in his belt buckle! And was named Michael! - bring to the rest of us.

During his run on the 1980s series Animal Man, writer Grant Morrison posited a limbo where old comics characters go once writers stop using them. It's easy to imagine Element Girl hanging out in that vast, empty expanse, waiting for a creator to come along and summon her back to the comics page.

Which is what Gaiman did in this story, only to grant her oblivion. Since this comic first appeared, the trope Gaiman employs — the What if Superheroes Existed in the Real World, With Real Hangups? approach — has become much more common. In some ways, as writers became increasingly interested in making their heroes relatable or (shudder) "relevant," it's become the current superhero landscape.

But back then, it was still unusual, and intriguing, for Gaiman to show a superhero having to navigate the mundane world of human interaction, much less suffer from loneliness and depression.

We're squarely back in the dark emotional place of the collection's first story, "Calliope." Urania isn't just contemplating suicide, she's literally begging for it, having made several frustrated attempts. That, I think it's safe to say, was not standard operating procedure, superhero comics-wise, and it's still registers as discomfiting to me.

Hot, sexy Death and lots more, after the jump.

We're just about done with the current I Will if You Will book club selection, The Sandman: Dream Country. Just one story left, "Facade," which deals with the little-seen underside of super-herodom.

Linda's slammed this week, so if it's okay with y'all, let's hold off on that last discussion until next Monday.

I'll just note here, again, how much I appreciate that our discussions have been so fun, wide-ranging and substantive (the author of the book we're reading thinks so, too). Y'all rock.

So let's take stock for a second. Those of you who've never read a comic before: What do you think? Will you be glad when we're done with this IWIYW selection? Or are you a bit curious about some other comics out there?

If you're not: No harm, no foul. Thanks for playing. Other sports phrases.

If you are: Know that you have made this nerd right here very, very happy. And I've got some ideas for you.

After the jump, a brief set of "if/then" comics recommendations geared to your personal tastes.

The occasional Monkey See I Will If You Will Book Club has reconvened to read Neil Gaiman'sThe Sandman: Dream Country. This week, we read "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the third of the four stories in the book. (And no, it's not a rendering of the Shakespeare play, exactly. Just read it. You'll see.)

Once again, I invited our comics blogger, Glen Weldon, to trade a few thoughts with me to kick things off. After that, you take over in the comments. Tell us what you think about faerie business, layers of reality, and why Glen is so mean about a perfectly nice movie about overwrought high school students. (Just kidding.) (OR AM I?)

To: Glen

From: Linda

So this is the story where we are getting most heavily into the idea of stories and dreams, to me. (I mean so far, in this book.) I have to admit that at first, I thought there was a little bit of a possible too-cute-for-its-own-good problem, in that it's already a play within a play, and now it's a play within a play within a larger story? It's a little Russian-nesting-dolls for me in principle, but I found that I adjusted.

And one of the reasons I adjusted was that I had no trouble at all distinguishing between the levels of reality because of the way the art is done — both because of the use of blue to signify the ... dream world, or whatever, the world of the spookypants business going on with the actual real faerie types, and because of the way the art depicting the play is ... hmm. I'd say the art is more ... straightforward? Less whimsical? When they're performing the play and you're basically just seeing a depiction of the Shakespeare, I'd call the art more narrative and less atmospheric, if that makes sense.

So I expected to be confused, but I mostly wasn't. I really enjoyed it, even though I wasn't sure I picked up every nuance, since I haven't studied much Shakespeare since high school. (Sad, but true.) This is also where I admit that whenever I read the closing Puck speech, I always think about Dead Poets Society, where that's the last thing Robert Sean Leonard does before he goes home and ... well, you know.

To: Linda

From: Glen

Well, technically the term is "spookybreeches" or "spookytights". But, yes.

Yeah, the art's much different — gone are Kelley Jones' heavy shadows and murk, replaced by Vess's lighter lines, airiness and twinkly bits of Faerie whatsit. And yes, Gaiman asked Vess to pull off a very difficult job — keeping the reader oriented through layers of narrative that make Inception look like Hop on Pop — and I'm glad you didn't get lost. I've met several folks over the years who had trouble following the action, but in most cases that was a result of what we've discussed before: the impulse of prose-oriented folks to simply hurl themselves from word-balloon to word-balloon without looking down, like they're running the Wipeout! gauntlet.

Of course, lots and lots of non-comics-readers have been handed this particular story by their comics-reading significant others, over the years. Coupla reasons for that: It was the first (and to date, only) comic to win a World Fantasy Award, which made quite a splash back in 1991. Also it's about Shakespeare.

And here's where I confess my ambivalence, not to the story itself, which is aces, but to a certain latent snootiness you can still hear among self-styled 'literary' types who'll give a comic a chance, but only grudgingly, and only if it's about something they deem worthy. "THIS comic is DIFFERENT. It's LITERATURE. It's about SHAKESPEARE." (See also: "The only time I regret not owning a television is when I hear IFC's showing a 12-hour documentary about the history of snoods.") But that's a me thing. I'll get over it.

The "stories don't have to be real to be true" thing is another major theme, of course, and I like how the denizens of Faerie are all about gloss and glamour — making something real look different/more enticing is their standard operating procedure, after all — yet they can't get their heads around the human act of making up stories. And I like the fact that Shakespeare's deal with Dream is measurably less twisted and abusive than Madoc's deal with Calliope.

Also: Dead Poets Society is a treacly sap-fest of insufferable preciousness which attempts to push emotional buttons with its giant ham-fists.

The occasional Monkey See I Will If You Will Book Club has reconvened to read Neil Gaiman'sThe Sandman: Dream Country. This week, we read "A Dream Of A Thousand Cats," the second of the four stories in the book.

Once again, I invited our comics blogger, Glen Weldon, to trade a few thoughts with me to kick things off. After that, you take over in the comments. Tell us what you think about story, art, and whether cats can be trusted.

To: Glen

From: Linda

So Glen, my immediate reaction to "A Dream Of A Thousand Cats" is essentially this: Is it okay that I find parts of it funny even while finding other parts of it profoundly sad? Obviously, the death of the kittens is devastating, but the part where the giant cats were walking around with the puny humans as their pets? That art was a tiny bit funny to me, and there's a panel of the little naked people grooming the cat that I did snicker at slightly. There's also one where the cat is sitting on top of the angel statue staring down at the other cats, and while I didn't find it funny, exactly, I found it sort of ... witty?

I guess I had a little trouble getting a handle on the tone of this one, which isn't to say I didn't like it, because I did. But it kept me uncomfortable, because I felt like it was really sad, but I couldn't help being slightly amused by incredibly severe pronouncements delivered by kitties.

To: Linda

From: Glen

If your question is: "Is it okay to snicker at the image of a handful of nude beardy-hipster li'l cavedudes scratching at a cat-tummy the size of a Quonset hut?" Why then my answer is yes.

It's an unabashedly silly image — and one, I'll just note here, that'd look even sillier were it transferred to live-action film or TV. Sillier, and fakier, because the comics page admits the fantastic more freely than the screen. It's not just that comics provide creators with an unlimited special effects budget, it's that the eye is more forgiving, more willing to accept what it sees, even when the it in question is a 50-foot-high Mr. Fuzzy Shnookums.

Glen asks a question about hunted humans, after the jump.

The occasional Monkey See I Will If You Will Book Club has reconvened to read Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country. This week, we read "Calliope," the first of the four stories in the book.

Our main discussion will take place in the comments to this post, but I decided to start by exchanging a few thoughts with our comics blogger, Glen Weldon, who is massively more experienced in this medium than I am. Head to the comments to share your thoughts about "Calliope."

To: Glen

From: Linda

So...that is a disturbing story. Before we get to the mechanics of the form, which we can do next, I kind of have to get this part off my chest.

I don't mean to be all "the patriarchy freaks me out," but I have to say, that is a REALLY unsettling thing to read, woman-wise. Not only because it's got rape and sex slavery, but because this woman lived — well, all the women live — in a universe where if they are captured according to an established set of rules, they have NO CHOICE but to submit to rape and sex slavery until the guy decides to let them go. In other words, it would be one thing if she were imprisoned by actual force, but it's another that she's imprisoned by her own recognition of social (socio...sociomythical?) authority saying, "He got you with the garlic flowers, so tough darts, sister."

I want to be perfectly clear: I'm not accusing Gaiman of being a sexist; I think this is all done consciously. If she were in chains, it would be just a horror story. But because she's in...you know, rules instead, it's even weirder. It's no accident that the baddie says, "I bound her with ... certain rituals." Bound by rituals — that's a new, and more than a little freaky, concept. It just...bothers me, in a way I'm sure it's meant to.

Of course, you have the writer's fascination with writing, which is where the tale has a bit of the Stephen King about it. There are moments when it jolted me out of the story a tad — the line about genre fiction winning the Booker Prize, while funny, may be a leeeeettle on the nose — but overall, I think he caught the desperation of the blank page pretty well.

I'm not sure who gets it worse in this story: women or writers. INTRIGUING.

To: Linda

From: Glen

Yep: Creepy, dark and rapey, right out of the gate. "Pow! Zap! Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!"

It's intentionally disturbing, of course: Gaiman establishes — with an admirable economy that all comics writers should aspire to — that the business with the capturing and the binding and the holy moly is something new, something Erasmus Fry threw into the equation, a corruption of The Way Things Are Meant To Be.

Because classically — er Classically — Muses are wooed; they are complicit in the creation of art, they choose the person they inspire and they move on of their own volition. (See: Calliope and Homer, Sharon Stone and Albert Brooks, Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino, Chris Evans' pectoral muscles and me.) (COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, LEFT PECTORAL MUSCLE, LEFT PECTORAL MUSCLE.)

In fantasy, there are Rules, and characters literally live or die by them. In this story, the ancient Rules get circumvented (creepy old dude BURNED GIRLFRIEND'S SCROLL), and, for a while at least, the Universe just ... looks on. Because it, and everyone in it, is bound by those same rules.

Rules, and the repercussions of futzing with them, is pretty much what Gaiman's exploring throughout the whole series (which: read it). In earlier chapters of the story, we see Morpheus himself get trapped in much the same way Calliope does, here; later in the story ... well. Rules get broken, at Great Cost.

As on-the-nose as some of the book party/promotion stuff is, I love that Gaiman writes somebody asking "Where do you get your ideas?" Because I've never been to a reading where that question doesn't get asked, and I love that Gaiman, with this story, wrote an answer.

More thoughts, after the jump.

Hello, book-club enthusiasts!

Presumably, in the last couple weeks, you've had a chance to get your hands on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country, which is our current selection in the I Will If You Will Book Club. For more about the book from our own Glen Weldon, you can click your little mouse right about here.

The first story in the book is "Calliope," and your task, should you choose to accept it (and really, you should) is to read it for a discussion next Thursday, April 21. We're still nailing down the specifics of what form that discussion is going to take, so watch this space.

But for now, get your book out, get reading, and remember Glen's advice to go slow and not read it the same way you would a print novel. Apparently, you need time to absorb and so forth. Not for speed-reading! Anyway, we'll see you Thursday.

So, it's done. The new book has been chosen, albeit only after a bout of shilly-shallying so epic it'd cause the Melancholy Dane to scowl impatiently at his Skagen wristwatch BUT NO MATTER.

The new book is The Sandman: Dream Country. It's a comic. If you're having trouble dealing with that fact, you can go ahead and call it a graphic novel, we won't mind.

Technically, however, it's not a novel, it's a collection of four short stories — four stand-alone issues from Neil Gaiman's groundbreaking, game-changing comic book series, The Sandman, which was published by DC/Vertigo from 1988 to 1996.

The series, which ran to 75 issues, has been collected in various trade editions over the years. By that reckoning, Sandman: Dream Country, which collects issues 17 through 20 of the series' run, is Volume 3.

Wha-huh?, you say. Volume 3? Of a long-running series? And we're just meant to ... read it? By itself?

Yep.

But how're we to know who's whom? And what's whatm? Don't we need to read the first two volumes in the series first?

Nope.

I mean, you could, and you'd likely come away with a slightly more nuanced understanding of what's going on. But only obliquely, and not necessarily.

Understand that to those of us who were reading this series during its initial run, this four-issue interlude came out of nowhere. The book we'd been reading up to this point was in most respects a horror title that took place in a dimly lit corner of the DC Universe — the same reality inhabited by Superman, the Justice League, et al. Up to this point, Gaiman had told a couple long, multi-issue stories, and had begun to demonstrate that he had ambitious plans for his main character, and for the book.

But then came these four stories, filled with characters we hadn't met, set in times and places that had nothing to do with the main series we'd been reading.

To us Sandman fans, Dream Country represents the series' pivot-point, the first time Gaiman takes a breath, rubs his hands together and really shows us how wide and deep the world he's creating for this series truly is. The horror trappings start to fall away, along with the superhero stuff, and the title begins to concern itself with the myths and magic underneath it all.

So, no. You don't have to read the first two books beforehand, and I think it'll be an interesting experiment if you don't. But if you really really you want to, or your OCD demands it, you should of course feel free.

For the rest of you, here's all you need to know:

There's This Guy. Named Dream.

A.k.a Morpheus, the King of Dreams. He's an immortal, one of the most powerful beings in the universe, with many different names and guises.

But don't take that "King of Dreams" business too literally: Yes, his domain includes your nightly, ohmigod-I'm-naked-on-The-Price-is-Right-and-Drew-Carey's-my-old-algebra-teacher! reveries. But in a larger sense, his realm (called "The Dreaming") is where stories come from. All stories. Every story.

Every story ever told, and many that never were: the stories we tell one another to comfort, terrify and/or amuse, to try to make sense of the universe, and the stories we only tell to ourselves. Grad students would call his bailiwick "narrative," kindergarten teachers would call it "imagination."

Not What You'd Call a Joiner, This Guy.

To be fair, he's had a rough go of it, over the past 100 years. Lost his kingdom, his power, and had to gain it all back, piece by piece.

But that's not what's got him down. He's always been sort of aloof and mopey. You would be too, if you had his family.

Oy, the Family.

Immortal beings like him, in charge of various aspects of existence. At this point in the series, we've only glimpsed a few of them: his sisters Death (who's hotter and more chipper than you'd imagine) and Despair (who's ... yeah, about what you'd expect, really) and his sister/brother/whatever-you're-into, Desire (she/he/it is trouble, that one.)

Speaking of Desire...

It's not good for people like him to fall in love with people like us. Never ends well. As you'll see.

And that's ... pretty much it, really. I envy those of you getting to enter this universe for the first time, and look forward to talking it over with you.

Now, for the extra-credit grubbers among you, I'll note that it's possible the four individual stories in Dream Country contain references to things you might want to bone up on, but to say what they are could be considered mildly spoilery, so I'll bury them after the jump.

Click, if ye be insouciant about that kind of thing.

Why you might wanna brush up your Shakespeare, or at least dust it off, after the jump.

Forgive me.

When we went through our reader poll to choose our next book late last year, the plurality voted for a graphic novel, which I agreed to choose in consultation with Monkey See's own comic/graphic novel go-to guy, Glen Weldon.

Glen, unfortunately, is so considerate that he presented me with several options. This one was more fun, this one was more deep, this one was grittier, this one was lighter, this one is a little harder to get, this one is a little easier to get through. I, unfortunately, froze, feeling like any direction was going to make a lot of people unhappy, and what the book club is supposed to be about the most is enthusiasm and good cheer. (About whales and vampires.)

But now that I have let this go on for a couple of months, hoping that a resolution would suddenly come to me, it is time to just pick something already — and I am fairly sure that Glen himself is on board with this suggestion, based loosely on the number of times he has said to me, "Just pick something already."

So we're going with the highly regarded, reasonably accessible but still challenging, not too expensive, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country.

The good news is this: Glen is here to help lower the barrier to entry. I'm very confident that he will help us get to where we need to be in order to understand what's going on. You should be able to find the book relatively easily, particularly relative to other books, and we're going to give it plenty of time, so if you want to read along, get yourself a copy, and we'll get going in a week or so.

I bet you thought I forgot you! I didn't.

For those of you who don't know, the I Will If You Will Book Club began here at Monkey See as a way to read books we might otherwise not choose to tackle, whether because of their reputations or because they're a different style than we typically prefer, or whatever. We have gone both lowbrow (Twilight) and highbrow (Moby Dick). I have personally been really glad that I read both of those books, even though they were both difficult in their own unique, vampy, whale-anatomy-intensive ways.

This one shouldn't take as long as Moby-Dick, I can say that for sure. You can direct any questions, in the comments, to Glen, because I don't know much more than you do, but we'll all learn together.