Animals!
That's right, today's book review theme is animals.
I Am Pusheen the Cat, by Claire Belton
This is more or less the softer version of How to Tell If Your Cat Is Trying to Kill You. Maybe a little more like Simon's Cat? Small, sweet, adorable comics about a cat's life with its fellow cats and its favorite humans. Belton's artwork is really adorable and her observations cute. I think my big complaint is that it's very short and there's a lot of white space on the page. Still, it's cute. Maybe worth a read.
The Dogist, by Elias Weiss Friedman
DOGS.
Ahem.
The Dogist is essentially a book of dog photos. There's a few other things in there, and a few not-dog photos (fun game to play on some pages: one of these things is not like the others), but really, it's all about the dog photos. If you like dog photos, this book is for you! If you don't, it is not for you. Five stars for doing exactly what it says it will do and doing it very well.
Unnatural Creatures, edited by Neil Gaiman
Yes, okay, this is pushing it on the theme, but whatever, it's my review blog, I will push the theme if I want, and anyway it's kind of appropriate.
Unnatural Creatures is basically a short collection of Neil Gaiman's favorite stories. I'm a fan of Gaiman's, so I decided to pick this up to see if it explained his brain in any conceivable way. It did not, but I did get to read some pretty cool stories along the way, so win/win, I suppose. Anyway, there are fantastical creatures in pretty much all the stories, but the only real theme is Neil Gaiman liked it, so if you like your anthologies focused, this is not one for you.
The overall quality is actually pretty good. The genres range from pseudo-horror (The Stain, actually pretty fun) to weird political satire (The Cartographer Wasps and The Anarchist Bees, which I loved) to whatever the hell one classifies Saki as (Gabriel - Ernest). Gaiman's own story, The Sunbird, is one I'm particularly fond of, but he picked one of Diana Wynne Jones's stories that I actually don't like that much (The Sage of Theare). He redeemed himself, though, by choosing the spectacular The Smile on the Face, by Nalo Hopkinson, and Come Lady Death. Generally a very good anthology, well worth picking up.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/416056.html. Please comment over there if possible.
I Am Pusheen the Cat, by Claire Belton
This is more or less the softer version of How to Tell If Your Cat Is Trying to Kill You. Maybe a little more like Simon's Cat? Small, sweet, adorable comics about a cat's life with its fellow cats and its favorite humans. Belton's artwork is really adorable and her observations cute. I think my big complaint is that it's very short and there's a lot of white space on the page. Still, it's cute. Maybe worth a read.
The Dogist, by Elias Weiss Friedman
DOGS.
Ahem.
The Dogist is essentially a book of dog photos. There's a few other things in there, and a few not-dog photos (fun game to play on some pages: one of these things is not like the others), but really, it's all about the dog photos. If you like dog photos, this book is for you! If you don't, it is not for you. Five stars for doing exactly what it says it will do and doing it very well.
Unnatural Creatures, edited by Neil Gaiman
Yes, okay, this is pushing it on the theme, but whatever, it's my review blog, I will push the theme if I want, and anyway it's kind of appropriate.
Unnatural Creatures is basically a short collection of Neil Gaiman's favorite stories. I'm a fan of Gaiman's, so I decided to pick this up to see if it explained his brain in any conceivable way. It did not, but I did get to read some pretty cool stories along the way, so win/win, I suppose. Anyway, there are fantastical creatures in pretty much all the stories, but the only real theme is Neil Gaiman liked it, so if you like your anthologies focused, this is not one for you.
The overall quality is actually pretty good. The genres range from pseudo-horror (The Stain, actually pretty fun) to weird political satire (The Cartographer Wasps and The Anarchist Bees, which I loved) to whatever the hell one classifies Saki as (Gabriel - Ernest). Gaiman's own story, The Sunbird, is one I'm particularly fond of, but he picked one of Diana Wynne Jones's stories that I actually don't like that much (The Sage of Theare). He redeemed himself, though, by choosing the spectacular The Smile on the Face, by Nalo Hopkinson, and Come Lady Death. Generally a very good anthology, well worth picking up.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/416056.html. Please comment over there if possible.