Summer Book Report
The excitement and socialness of summer has cut back on my reading, but I've still managed to read a few things since last time.
First and foremost, I knocked off the five extant collections of Scott Pilgrim, soon to be a major motion picture. These came courtesy of zodarzone; I read the first two at Rock Band night and then borrowed the whole stack. The sixth and final book came out yesterday so I hope to have that in my hands soon. I did feel that there was a drop off in quality as the series went along; more and more balls were flung into the air, and Bryan Lee O'Malley isn't quite good enough to juggle them all simultaneously. In particular his flashbacks and montages start to bleed together to the point of being difficult to separate from the main story line, but this is really quibbling. It's excellent stuff, with the finest critique of the video game generation to date.
I read a trio of baseball books. First was one on Buck O'Neil and although it was a quick enjoyable read, it felt more like an extended Sports Illustrated article than a book. Will Leitch's book Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball chronicles a man's relationship with his father over 9 innings, and toward the end almost made me cry with a heartrendingly accurate chapter about a major difference between my generation and my father's generation. Lastly, I read another book in the long series of attempts to prove that my coreligionists are good at sports. This one was the Baseball Talmud, which had the distinction of listing every single Jewish big leaguer in history. When I was 12 I would have eaten it up; now it seems like more of a pointless exercise. We've got Sandy Koufax; that's enough for anyone.
The Shakespeare for the month was the always enjoyable The Comedy of Errors. I'd seen it before, and I think read it, but a re-read never hurts, especially when it's short and sweet like this.
The only 'great book' this time around was another one by my wife's least favorite author, Ernest Hemingway. The previous two books I read by him yielded a split decision: I loathed A Farewell to Arms and really liked The Old Man and the Sea. The rubber match was For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I loved it. It's one of the best things I've ever read, period. It's the very rare book that I read slowly because I didn't want it to end, and also because I was quite certain (correctly, as it turned out) that bad things were going to happen to characters I really liked. Robert Jordan is a fully realized character in a way that almost nobody else I've ever read about is. Brilliant, and highly recommended.
For genre fiction, I read the new Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead in the Family. Nothing to complain about, certainly. I also read the last Honorverse book that remained to me, Storm From the Shadows, which is the second book in the Saganami trunk. Unfortunately, it wasn't very good. There was a lot of recapping and talking, which might fill in the gaps but isn't terribly exciting to read. I expect the next book to be much better; fortunately, I don't have long to wait as the next episode in the main series, Mission of Honor, came out last month. And if you have a copy you'd like to lend me, please let me know.
Don't read Twinkie, Deconstructed. It takes a great concept (where do we get all the ingredients that go into a Twinkie?) and makes it dull, boring and hard to read. I finished the book on concept alone, but I would have been better off just putting it aside.
It's not too often that you read a book told from the point of view of a dog in a realistic manner. Dog On It is a mystery told from the point of view of the canine assistant to a private investigator. This is masterfully done; Chet doesn't know a lot about what's going on, but he knows what smells good and who he doesn't like, and somehow this is enough to get him through as he solves the case, with a little help from his person Bernie.
For a completely different view of dogs, read Dog Man, which chronicles the life of the man who more or less kept the Akita from dying out in its native Japan. It's also in many ways a paean to the simple life in the woods, a sort of Walden for 1950s Japan.
First and foremost, I knocked off the five extant collections of Scott Pilgrim, soon to be a major motion picture. These came courtesy of zodarzone; I read the first two at Rock Band night and then borrowed the whole stack. The sixth and final book came out yesterday so I hope to have that in my hands soon. I did feel that there was a drop off in quality as the series went along; more and more balls were flung into the air, and Bryan Lee O'Malley isn't quite good enough to juggle them all simultaneously. In particular his flashbacks and montages start to bleed together to the point of being difficult to separate from the main story line, but this is really quibbling. It's excellent stuff, with the finest critique of the video game generation to date.
I read a trio of baseball books. First was one on Buck O'Neil and although it was a quick enjoyable read, it felt more like an extended Sports Illustrated article than a book. Will Leitch's book Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball chronicles a man's relationship with his father over 9 innings, and toward the end almost made me cry with a heartrendingly accurate chapter about a major difference between my generation and my father's generation. Lastly, I read another book in the long series of attempts to prove that my coreligionists are good at sports. This one was the Baseball Talmud, which had the distinction of listing every single Jewish big leaguer in history. When I was 12 I would have eaten it up; now it seems like more of a pointless exercise. We've got Sandy Koufax; that's enough for anyone.
The Shakespeare for the month was the always enjoyable The Comedy of Errors. I'd seen it before, and I think read it, but a re-read never hurts, especially when it's short and sweet like this.
The only 'great book' this time around was another one by my wife's least favorite author, Ernest Hemingway. The previous two books I read by him yielded a split decision: I loathed A Farewell to Arms and really liked The Old Man and the Sea. The rubber match was For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I loved it. It's one of the best things I've ever read, period. It's the very rare book that I read slowly because I didn't want it to end, and also because I was quite certain (correctly, as it turned out) that bad things were going to happen to characters I really liked. Robert Jordan is a fully realized character in a way that almost nobody else I've ever read about is. Brilliant, and highly recommended.
For genre fiction, I read the new Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead in the Family. Nothing to complain about, certainly. I also read the last Honorverse book that remained to me, Storm From the Shadows, which is the second book in the Saganami trunk. Unfortunately, it wasn't very good. There was a lot of recapping and talking, which might fill in the gaps but isn't terribly exciting to read. I expect the next book to be much better; fortunately, I don't have long to wait as the next episode in the main series, Mission of Honor, came out last month. And if you have a copy you'd like to lend me, please let me know.
Don't read Twinkie, Deconstructed. It takes a great concept (where do we get all the ingredients that go into a Twinkie?) and makes it dull, boring and hard to read. I finished the book on concept alone, but I would have been better off just putting it aside.
It's not too often that you read a book told from the point of view of a dog in a realistic manner. Dog On It is a mystery told from the point of view of the canine assistant to a private investigator. This is masterfully done; Chet doesn't know a lot about what's going on, but he knows what smells good and who he doesn't like, and somehow this is enough to get him through as he solves the case, with a little help from his person Bernie.
For a completely different view of dogs, read Dog Man, which chronicles the life of the man who more or less kept the Akita from dying out in its native Japan. It's also in many ways a paean to the simple life in the woods, a sort of Walden for 1950s Japan.