Rated Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You're Too Scared to Watch 8/10
What a delight this is! It's richer than I was expecting, with lovingly-detailed, compelling plot summaries and sharp analysis. I am absolutely the target market for this book.
Rated The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists 10/10
<i>The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists</i> is a love letter. Canadian artist and writer Seth creates a simple world where comics are revered and treasured, and it is as lovely as a traditional sonnet. He creates a fictional world so believable that I had to do a bit of Google research to see if I'd just been ignorant of Canadian comics history. The bits of reality mixed with Seth's creations <i>feel</i> authentic, and that's all we can really ask of a good book.<br><br>(My full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2011/11/great-northern-brotherhood-of-canadian.html">Glorified Love Letters.</a>)
Rated Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving 8/10
This is a good, entertaining book. I reread many chapters, and I find the included family photos interesting. Now, would his siblings have a different version of events or say he is glossing over some of his own issues? Maybe, but what he presented was compelling. Repeatedly I've said that I like knowing the life stories of people. I like knowing what shaped their character, and <i>Fante</i> is a 2-for-1 deal. Well played, Dan.<br><br>(My full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2012/04/fante-by-dan-fante.html">Glorified Love Letters.</a>)
Rated Doctor Who: The Light at the End 10/10
So much fun - the story, the music, all of it.
Rated Doctor Who: The Deviant Strain 8/10
This was an excellent story that would have been great on screen too (though with later series' budgets), but the sentence fragments during moments of action were frustratingly bad.
Rated The Worlds of Big Finish 9/10
<div>I do like a Big Finish crossover and this one is better than most.</div>
Rated The Payback 10/10
<div>Set in the near-future where people who are behind on student loans risk a beatdown from the Debt Police, <em>The Payback</em> begins with a lazy shift at an LA mall and increasingly amps up the pace. I loved reading from a retail store employee's perspective. An underutilized profession in novels! More "Mall Novels," please, even if only half of this book takes place in one.<br><br>And then it all turns into a heist? One of my favorite genres? Yes, of course I loved this book.</div>
Wants to read Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Rated The Twenty Days of Turin 6/10
I think I would have liked this more if I were more familiar with the time period/location (1970s Italy) to which this story alludes, and also if I'd read more of it while not drowsy. However! It's a good book with pleasantly unsettling elements, and plenty of other people should get more out of it than I did.
Rated Katabasis 5/10
<div>If this book is meant to replicate the futility of certain sections of hell by being a little bit of a slog to read, then mission accomplished.<br><br>Alice is just SO special, dontcha know, SO SPECIAL. She doesn't need pesky things like FEMINISM or FOOD or NORMAL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. She has THE WORK! And her coworker/fellow grad student is just TOO GOOD to be CHRONICALLY ILL! He must HIDE it! <br><br>I don't need my main characters to be likable, but I gotta have some reason to care how it all shakes out for them.<br><br>Look, I really loved Yellowface and Babel, so I was quite surprised that I didn't really like this much. I get that it's supposed to be a tale of not killing yourself for academia and/or terrible "mentors," but it doesn't seem like Alice learns a whole lot. I guess it was innovative in that it was a dude, for once, who got <spoiler>fridged, temporarily, in order to advance her plot, but I didn't care that much.</spoiler><br><br>The magic system and the intellectual rigor were not turn-offs. I get it; it's Cambridge. And the writing itself was 99% perfectly fine. (Writers, please never make me read "quirked a smile" again, though.) It's just that, if we're writing a story about fucked up priorities, I guess I just expected a little more revelation other than <spoiler>"Now I will have an undead boyfriend who is ashamed of his health."</spoiler><br><br>YMMV!</div>
Wants to read Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
Rated Doctor Who: The Guardian of the Solar System 10/10
As much as I love the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, this (along with its first 2 parts) is the best storyline I've heard from Big Finish... And not just because of my undying love for Jean Marsh. The writing is great, the sound, all of it. Beyond recommend all three for any Doctor Who fan.
Rated The Man Who Fell to Earth 9/10
<div>I was surprised by how much I loved this. I have a free month of Audible, so I listened to the audiobook that was available without having to use a credit mostly because I'd seen both the movie and the TV show, and I thought, "Well, why not complete it?" But this mostly holds up as both a product of its time and as a story that's still relevant today (alas), all while remaining innovative and interesting.</div>
Wants to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1
Rated Those Who Walk Away 8/10
<div>Ok, so it's a little light on plot — other than "these two guys hate each other" — but yeah of course I'm going to enjoy a Patricia Highsmith book where people make bad decisions in Venice.</div>
Rated Frankenstein: By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley : Illustrated & Unabridged 8/10
A fascinating book to read for the first time, because it has an enormous pop-cultural footprint that is in many ways independent of and different from the book itself. Basically all of horror and science fiction is downstream of <i>Frankenstein</i>; the book has an interesting structure with embedded narratives and flows quickly despite the elaborate, heightened language of its era. It's composed of a couple of different horror-movie nightmare scenarios. The first, affecting the doctor, is the classic "you've done something terribly wrong and it's putting you and people you love in danger"; the second, narrated by the erudite creature himself, is "you're thrust into a world where everyone seems to hate and fear you and you're not sure why." The first-person narrative style foregrounds the subjective emotional experience, the suspense and grief and self-loathing, rather than the plot, which is actually pretty simple. Although it's about big questions and themes, takes place over a big geographical scale, and is considered a monumental work, it's very intimate, with very few named characters. It's also much more horror-y and not very science-y; absent is the focus on the "how" you usually get in subsequent sci-fi (I was surprised, for instance, that there's no *process* described, and no lightning-and-dials-and-switches "it's alive!" scene). It remains a rewarding read two centuries after it was written.
Rated The Inferno of Dante Alighieri 10/10
Feels weird to give a classic of the Western canon a star rating, but it’s my first time with it and I think the translation and commentary Ciardi offers is very good.<br/><br/>An inspiration to petty people everywhere: you can create something enduring, resonant, widely beloved and taken seriously for centuries and still have it basically be a burn book to settle a bunch of esoteric political and personal scores. <br/><br/>It’s not going to be a surprise that so much of Western culture is downstream of this, from religious imagery to fantasy literature to heavy metal lyrics, but it’s interesting as always to be able to see the well-worn references and images in their original context. And if there’s anything I want to explore in more detail I certainly don’t need to wonder if there’s an explanatory essay I could read. There’s seven centuries’ worth! <br/><br/>Glad I read this, and it’s more engaging and less chore-y than I expected.
Wants to read The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus