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July 07
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Kerry
marked as to-read:
Best Of Write Now (Paperback)
by Danny Fingeroth, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Kerry
marked as to-read:
Disguised As Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, And the Creation of the Superhero (Hardcover)
by Danny Fingeroth
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Kerry
marked as to-read:
Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society (Paperback)
by Danny Fingeroth
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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June 11
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Kerry
took the never-ending book quiz.
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May 16
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Kerry
gave
to:
Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 25 No. 1 & 2 (Literary Journal)
by Various Authors
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
Kerry said:
"I have to admit my interest in this was mainly, "ALASKA has a literary journal?!," but once I got past my initial condescension this turned out to be a pretty decent selection of writing (though when you're publishing twice a year it may be...more
I have to admit my interest in this was mainly, "ALASKA has a literary journal?!," but once I got past my initial condescension this turned out to be a pretty decent selection of writing (though when you're publishing twice a year it may be time to stop referring to yourself as "quarterly"). Fully half the issue is poetry, which I traditionally have never liked and, with the exception of a few stand-outs, there wasn't much in this section, guest edited by Jane Hirshfield, to change my mind. As usual,
most of the poetry just
seemed like short stories that
were chopped up and made a bit
more obtuse
than they normally would
be
which has never particularly appealed to my own sensibilities. The fiction was uniformly pretty good, though I thought it was strange to have two stories (Celeste Ng's "B&B" and Michael Hawley's "Diptych") to have homosexuality as central themes; normally a repetition in motifs wouldn't be that noteworthy except, as another reviewer noted, we also get two separate pieces dealing with terminal illness, Deborah Lott's essay "Looking For an Angle" and Leigh Morgan Owen's "The Tricky Thing About Endings," which contains this particularly good passage:
That's the tricky thing about endings. Even if you know that all things end, it doesn't mean you know when something has. It's not until you stop thinking the echoes are the voices. Sometimes you just look back and think, "Oh. That ended."
The other stories and essays revolve around prison rodeos, Vermont inns, and parachuting schools, so it's a pretty eclectic selection of prose pieces.
Despite my disinterest in the poetry, this was a solid issue, and I'll probably pick up the next one should I see it at the bookstore....less
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May 04
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Kerry
is currently reading:
March (Paperback)
by Geraldine Brooks
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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May 29
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Kerry
marked as to-read:
Alice In Sunderland (Hardcover)
by Bryan Talbot
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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April 26
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Kerry
gave
to:
Batman: The Killing Joke (Hardcover)
by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in April, 2008
Kerry said:
"It's pointless to recapitulate the plot at this point--Batman vs. The Joker in a battle of wills and ideologies, with plenty of casualties besides--but this has always been my favorite Batman story, even over The Dark Knight Returns, since I f...more
It's pointless to recapitulate the plot at this point--Batman vs. The Joker in a battle of wills and ideologies, with plenty of casualties besides--but this has always been my favorite Batman story, even over The Dark Knight Returns, since I first read it as a teenager. The Joker never quite lived up to the sheer malice and lunacy that Alan Moore so perfectly captured here; I'd dare say that the scene at Comissioner Gordon's house is as dead solid perfect as the character's ever been. That genuinely ghoulish Joker, with the most definitive non-definitive character origin in comics history and a grim, relentless Batman make this story classic. When I think of comics working with both words and pictures, I think of The Killing Joke, where just as much is said with nine panels without dialogue as pages filled with chatter, and scene transitions are things of compositional and storytelling beauty.
Re-presented here in a hardcover format, DC tries to justify the upped price tag by having the artist, Brian Bolland, himself, re-color everything using modern coloring techniques not available in 1988 when the book was first published. It's a nice result, with lots of subtle changes and some fairly jarring ones (if you own a copy of the softcover, compare any random pages and you'll see the difference). Bolland's choices are aesthetically sound and make for a general improvement (I especially like the spot coloring in the flashbacks). The art was always beautiful, realistic but expressive in that distinctive Bolland way, but the updated colors really do suit the book. Alan Moore cut ranks with DC years ago, so he's nowhere to be found in the supplemental material. Instead, artist Tim Sale (himself associated with another highly regarded Batman story, The Long Halloween) provides a fairly useless introduction, while Bolland provides a bemused afterword. Bolland's own short Batman story, "An Innocent Guy," pads out the volume, presented for the first time in color. It's a decent little story (originally presented in Batman Black & White) but, at 8-pages, just a trifle. A brief selection of sketches with some commentary by Bolland close out the book....less
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