* You are viewing the archive for January, 2009
Tales from Outer Suburbia is beautiful and amazing. Shaun Tan is awesome.As is John Berger. I loved The Shape of a Pocket even when I didn’t completely understand it. His passion and interest is continuously contagious and heartening. I underlined and left notes in the margins and smiled and patted the book when it was finished.
I love Yellowrocket. It’s fun, lively, touching, precise, lovely. Just read Ruin – irresistible.
Five Quarters of the Orange was good but not my favorite. Too much heady nostalgia and romantic turns of events. But the characters were vivid and the story well-written. I loved reading the descriptions of countryside and food. I think I would have liked either the child’s tale or the old woman’s tale alone – mixing them together somehow weakened them both for me. Or perhaps I loved Dream of Scipio so much, I wished all the way through that I was reading that again instead. My favorite character was Paul, of … Continue Reading
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana is uneven, provocative, and very much not a usual sort of mystery story. I liked it, though, especially when I was nearly half-way in. I looked up lots of words… and skipped more than I looked up… always fun. There were certainly sections that dragged – but I loved the dream sequence and the asides – the more bizarre the better. “And there were toes. Plip, Plop.”Kenny Shopsin’s Eat Me is lovely. Always nice to read about people who have done their own … Continue Reading