Sunday, November 29, 2009
I know, the Beatles are so famous that there’s no such thing as an underrated song of theirs. But I actually wasn’t familiar with a lot of their early oeuvre until recently, and even on their well-known albums there are a few sleepers that don’t get the props they deserve. Here’s my list of underrated […]
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Sunday, November 29, 2009
This is book three of the Long Price fantasy tetralogy (I reviewed the first two here), and as much as I liked the first two, this is the best one yet. The stakes have risen even higher (as you might guess from the title) but the real interest lies not in the titular war but […]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Revolution in the Head is one of the most highly regarded critical books about the Beatles, and the Beatles have been in my mind a lot recently, having just written a game about them. My main interest regarding the Beatles is in their music itself, and in that respect the finest books that I have […]
Saturday, November 21, 2009
This got great reviews when it came out in 2005 and won the Hugo Award that year, but I didn’t get around to reading it until now. It’s a science fiction novel with the premise (slight spoiler, but you find this out really early on) that the Earth has suddenly been encased in some sort […]
Bone is a 55-issue long comic book recently collected into a single omnibus volume. It’s a weird hybrid between funny-animal cartoon (there’s lots of slapstick, and one of the protagonists bears a marked resemblance to Goofy) and epic fantasy (saving the world from the forces of Evil). The comic is pretty widely revered, and one […]
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
I’m going to list a lot of quibbles soon, so let me start by saying that this book was awesome. It looks at evolution by starting with humans and working backward in time to the beginning of life, paying special attention to the points at which other branches join the tree (moving backwards in time, […]
This is an interesting transitional period. The last incarnation of the Mothers of Invention (profiled in my last post) had faded away, and Zappa had just fired his manager and entered a long legal battle with him, moving to Warner Brothers in the process. Zoot Allures (1976) was made largely solo, and is very straightforward […]
Saturday, October 24, 2009
This is one of those books I appreciated a little more after finishing it and reading other people’s takes on it. Last year I read Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, which I thought was generally awesome; it aimed to turn the conventions of epic fantasy on their head, and actually did. I know some people who […]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
I discovered Edward Whittemore when his Jerusalem Quartet was republished a few years back and Jeff VanderMeer (author of the awesome City of Saints and Madmen) gushed over it. I got around three-quarters of the way through that series, and found it simultaneously really interesting and hard to read through. Quin’s Shanghai Circus, which was […]
This was a weird one. Chip Kidd is a superb book designer; he might be a little overexposed by now, but there was a time when whenever I picked up a book and thought the design was awesome, half the time it was by him. So this is his first novel, and it is, unsurprisingly, […]
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