04.18.08
Book-a-month challenge: March
The Fourth Treasure: a novel
by Todd Shimoda
with illustrations by L.J.C. Shimoda
So, for this month’s theme, craft, I went with a book straight off the list that I knew my library owned. Much more in line with the group, and unlike February’s disaster, I really enjoyed this one.
Tina Suzuki is a neuroscience grad student at Berkley who stumbles across the ideal research project: a local Japanese calligraphy master has suffered a stroke, leaving him with agraphia. As Japanese kanji stand for meanings (as opposed to our alphabet, made up of symbols for sounds), observing his recovery could lead to an enormous breakthrough in understanding how the brain tries to heal itself. As Tina begins her study, she finds her interactions with the elderly calligraphy master create ripples in her life outside a school, leading her down new paths and through unexpected changes.
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03.29.08
Hourglass
Please note: this is the first time I’ve actually sat down and ‘reviewed’ a CD. We’ll see how it goes, okay?
Hourglass is the second solo full-length album from Dave Gahan, the lead singer of Depeche Mode. My background with Depeche Mode is limited; I own two CDs and have heard a few other’s at friends’ houses. The biggest draw for me was the fact that their lyrics are written by keyboardist Martin Gore — meaning Gahan’s distinctive voice, which I’ve always associated with a certain lyric style, may be engaged in something entirely different when the words are from his own pen. Read the rest of this entry »
03.24.08
After Dark
Now that that’s over with, I can review the backlog of things I read in between chapters and while avoiding the BAM challenge review. We’ll start with After Dark, by Haruki Murakami.
This reading choice began as a New Year’s resolution – I would spend 2008 reading 50 fiction titles from the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2007” list. (Since that works out to about a book a week, I’m already ten behind, and it’s become increasinly clear that this is yet another resolution failure.) I’d already read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and enjoyed it, so it seemed like another of his books would be a good starting point on the list.
03.20.08
Book-a-month challenge: February
Yeah, yeah, I know: this BAM challenge review is heinously late. I put off choosing a book, because the “Heart” theme wasn’t doing it for me: I’m not a mush-and-smush reader; in fact, the whole month of February and its attendant holiday themes just make me cranky. (I think good relationships take more communication and self-perception, less ‘expensive gift in exchange for sex’ crap.) As nothing non-fiction related to the heart jumped out at me, I took the route of the Valentine’s Day equivalent of Scrooge – I finally threw “Heart” in title keyword and “horror — fiction” in subject, and went with the one and only result in the library catalog. The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison.
02.29.08
Metropolis
This review refers to both the silent film and the novel. If I get around to the anime film, you’ll be the first to know.
UPDATE! 9/27/08: Missing pieces of the film seem to have been recovered. With any luck they’ll be preserved at released on DVD.
I have this great set of DVDs at home – 50 Classic Horror movies, for which I paid like $20. By “classic” they mean “so old that the rights were hella cheap”, meaning there are some true classics, some bad-hysterical, and some bad-awful films packed onto these discs. They were initially purchased to aid in my quest to watch all of Wicked Magazine’s list of most influential horror films*, but I’ve found myself watching the other discs as well.
I decided on Metropolis one recent afternoon home alone on the basis of two facts: that I kept hearing it referenced by self important film snobs, who never seemed to actually know what it was about, and that it’s a silent film. I’d never really sat down and watched a silent movie before, and my curiosity for a new experience beat out my desire to laugh (or wince, depending on whose opinion you believe) at The Beast of Yucca Flats. Read the rest of this entry »
02.18.08
Welcome to Collingwood
I’m sure most library/bookstore/videostore/etc. employees have one of those items — every time you have to get it from or put it onto a shelf, you think “hmm, that looks interesting. I should try that one some time.” And you never get around to it? Well, I’m starting to think there’s a reason, beyond lack of time and forgetfulness, that this kind of item’s number never seems to come up.
During the purge of VHS to make room for the ever-expanding DVD collection, I got to know our movie collection pretty darned well. You might remember where you were when JFK was shot; I recall just as vividly the day we finally replaced this Jazz with that Jazz, netting nearly one and a half shelf-feet in a single item. (The room was quickly taken up by catering to the public taste for agenda-driven mediocrity, but that’s a story for another day.) Read the rest of this entry »
01.19.08
Musical Mystery
Swing: a Mystery
by Rupert Holmes
My first contact with this book was in a moment of pity: the Mystery section’s stuffed to the gills – again – and we have to weed. I have to weed, really, and despite my tendency to treat every title like a cute little puppy at the pound, things are getting withdrawn. I’ve got our shelves down to single copies of the big-namers (because a little ol’ branch library just does not need three copies of “Plum Lucky”), individual Maigret titles we’ve had since the ’70s are being replaced with a space-saving omnibus… and then I get to that pile. No checkouts since ‘04, each one the only copy in the district, and they all look really interesting. I’ve only got the one pair of eyes, so of the 20-odd books, I check out 4, sparing them the axe until at least 2010.
So Swing comes with me on lunch break, and within the first dozen pages I’ve made an important discovery: this book deserves far better than pity.
The premise itself is nothing to write home (or a blog) about: it’s the summer of 1940, and our hero Ray Sherwood plays tenor sax in a swing band that’s touring middle America. They arrive in San Fransisco during the Golden Gate exposition, where Ray gets a proposition from a gorgeous young musician named Gail: he’ll orchestrate her piano composition Swing Around the Sun for a full brass band, in exchange for fifty bucks and her unending, beautiful gratitude. But before long, Ray finds himself tangled up in a serious mystery, and solving it may cost him much more than Gail’s affection.
01.14.08
Book-a-month challenge: January
The House on the Strand
Daphne DuMaurier
My first experience with DuMaurier came from a decidedly odd moment at the library – while weeding the fiction section, I found Don’t Look Back (a horror short story collection) with some very familiar handwriting in the margins, railing at the idiocy of the works therein. Well, any book my ex-boss could hate that vehemently merited at least a look.
I loved it. Though there were times the details were overly mired in their time and place, I was left with the overall impression of a talented author presenting well-crafted tales. So when I ran across The House on the Strand as an audiobook, I figured it would at least keep me occupied until my Rex Stout ILLs came in.
The story is that of one Dick Young, who until recently worked for a major London publishing house, currently figuring out what to do next with his life. It’s also the story of Roger Kylmerth, steward to a minor noblewoman, and keeper of secrets for another, in the 1330s. The connection between them? A curious drug that transports Dick back over six centuries, to observe lives in a world long since gone. As Dick’s fascination with this other world takes over his life, his relationship with his wife and two stepsons grows increasingly strained, and the side effects of the drug harder and harder to conceal.
01.04.08
Not Your Typical YA Series…
The Hungry City Chronicles (series) by Phillip Reeve
I should start out with a confession: I’m a sucker for all things Victorian. I love the era’s bizarre mix of the uselessly beautiful and offhandedly cruel, crammed into overdecorated parlors and buried in their countless repressions and taboos. Such a tiny sliver of the world’s population – the white, middle-class English-speakers – trying so hard to make every aspect of their world just so. I suppose that appeals to the control freak in me; I smile at the idea of the little household despot, with her breath-defying corsets and 42 gazillion-piece place settings, who will run her home just as Caroline Beecher’s book dictates or die trying. Less charming was the way that same tyranny was applied in a global setting: colonial powers subjugating people far too old to be sent back up to the nursery after tea.
Phillip Reeve takes one of the viler Victorian notions, Social Darwinism, and gives it a science fiction twist: welcome to Municipal Darwinism, where whole cities borne on treads and wheels hunt down smaller, less “fit” towns, tearing them apart for material resources and humans to enslave. The system was devised after the Ancients (back in the twenty-somethingth century) caused widespread destruction in the Sixty Minutes’ War, leaving North America an uninhabitable wasteland and Europe and Northern Africa as the great Hunting Ground.
