Still slowly working toward being catching up.

( The wrong The Middle Passage & Dread Island under the cut. )

Wow. Did I fall behind, or something? Quite a bit! I was planning on rethinking how I was going to post these, so I put off posting them until the rethinking was done. And you can see how well that has worked. So I'll pretty much be doing the same thing this year as last. Talking about some things that I've read but aren't necessarily ( Read more... )

I have been reading books this year. I haven't posted on any of them, because I was planning on re-jiggering my little template. But seeing as a quarter of the year has passed, and I haven't actually done so, perhaps I'll just go with it as it is now.

The only trend that I can identify so far? A lot of Joe R. Lansdale.

Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo: The official history and commemoration of Pogo's first decade... all wrapped up with a running commentary by Walt Kelly (288 pp).

Walt Kelly is one of the great prose stylists of American English. I would put him up against anybody else. The book in question is a survey of Pogo (mostly strips, but some ( Read more... )

Last one for 2010 under the cut.

( Here be the cut. Arrr. )

Eighty-first book started & finished in 2010: The Manual of Detection: a Novel by Jedediah Berry (278 pp).

Was it interesting? It started slow, but I really got into it once the protagonist's routine got disrupted, and when he accepted that it would stay that way.

Well-written? Yes. It's written to parallel the fictional Manual of Detection, ( Read more... )

Eightieth book started & finished in 2010: How I Filmed the War: A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. by Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins (199 pp at Project Gutenberg, not counting index ( Read more... )

Seventy-ninth book started & finished in 2010: if i knew, don't you think i'd tell you? selected journals of jann arden by jann arden (199 pp).

Was it interesting/well-written? I enjoyed it, but not as much as I thought I would. I loved the anecdotal asides to the audience during the Live With Vancouver Symphony album -- this was more slice-of- ( Read more... )

Seventy-eighth book started & finished in 2010: Time Bandits: The Movie Script by (as the cover says) Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin of Monty Python (228 pp, I think -- the book was unpaginated, so I counted the pages manually, but only once ( Read more... )

Seventy-seventh book started & finished in 2010: Vanished! explorers forever lost by Evan Balkan (138 pp ( Read more... )