book

Wants to read I Am Holding Your Hand

Wants to read Signal to Noise

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.

Wants to read Thousand Star Hotel

Rated Silver Nitrate 8/10

<div>This was really good. Spooky old cinema magic? Yes, please.</div>

Rated The Masque of the Red Death 10/10

Wants to read Arcadia

Wants to read Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Wants to read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Wants to read Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness

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 Interrobang

Rated They're Going to Love You 8/10

Rated Autobiography 6/10

My feelings about Morrissey are conflicted, for a lot of reasons, and I wasn't surprised to find this book kind of insufferable. Very little about the process of making music, tons and tons of petty passive-aggressive score-settling that I think is supposed to be "delicious" but is actually kind of sad. Also, there are no chapter breaks; it's like a seven-hour monologue. Still, somehow glad I read it.

Wants to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1

Wants to read Rough Music

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

Wants to read On Stranger Tides

Rated Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 8/10

Tolentino is a great writer - her project is taking the tools of literary criticism and applying it, deftly and clearly, to non-literary texts: broad cultural trends, institutions, her own life. These essays vary from bright and fun to heavy, but they all come from the same sharp critical eye.