January 2011
10 posts
4 tags
For fun: comics
Just the best hardcover and trade collections. Read way too many this year to actually form a complete list.
All-Star Superman Vol. 1 (Grant Morrison) All-Star Superman Vol. 2 (Grant Morrison) Batman R.I.P (Grant Morrison) Batman: Battle for the Cowl (Tony S. Daniel) Final Crisis (Grant Morrison)
Luthor (Brian Azzarello)
A look through the eyes of Superman’s nemesis. It stands out as one...
6 tags
Done. And not a moment too soon...
86. Dragon’s Eye (Anne McCaffery)
87. The Masterharper of Pern (Anne McCaffery)
88. Dragonsblood (Todd McCaffery)
I think Todd McCaffery might be a stronger writer than his mother. He gets less caught up in gender essentialism, in any case.
89. Graceling (Kristin Cashore)
Great young adult fantasy. Thanks for recommending it, Meghan. I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the...
December 2010
39 posts
giving it up
So…I haven’t picked up a book in a week. It’s Christmas. It’s my birthday. It’s NYE and I am, since the university locked me out of my office, on holidays. Eff it. Count me in for next year. the two or three titles I could add at this point won’t get me over the hump and I don’t even remember what they are.
January first I start fresh - congrats to JB...
4 tags
81. - 85. More Dragonriders of Pern (Anne...
81. Nerilka’s Story (Anne McCaffery) 82. Dragonsdawn (Anne McCaffery) 83. The Renegades of Pern (Anne McCaffery) 84. All the Weyrs of Pern (Anne McCaffery) 85. The Dolphins of Pern (Anne McCaffery)
Not much to say about these books. Good mindless sci-fi/fantasy reads. I think the one about Dolphins was my favourite, perhaps because it was the most unlike the others.
~Claire
Wuckin puh nub
70. The Location of Culture - Homi Bhabha
Picks up the threads left by Anderson and Fanon to build a model for resituating culture as both arbitrary and politically motivated, regardless of which side of the colonial debate you start from. Think of the stereotype in colonial discourse as “fetishistic, scopic, imaginary” (79) and you’re in for a ride.
71. Mrs. Dalloway -...
4 tags
80. Welling (Margaret Christakos)
Welling is the most lyric of Christakos’ poetry books, and it moves away from the exuberance of What Stirs. The poem “The Problem of Confessionality” is posted over at Lemon Hound. This is self-aware poetry, poetry that turns around to question itself. Welling is meticulous. As always, the language is bounty. The book is situated in Sudbury, exploring the variety of nostalgia and...
5 tags
79. Poets and Killers: A Life In Advertising...
Helen Hajnoczky has written a book of poetry that transforms advertisements into a poetic biography. The book succeeds most in the long poems, in my opinion, because it is in those longer poems where the craft of teasing a narrative out of the pre-existing texts tends to go in less obvious directions than the shorter poems, where both the ad and the story are clear. I was pleased that there were...
9 tags
96 through 103. (Caple through Eichhorn)
Here’s my next batch, leaving me seven books away from my personal goal of 110. I’m not going to talk about all of these, but they’re all worth checking out.
96. The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg) - Natalee Caple
Rich and interesting, but I wish I knew more about August Strindberg since Natalee is clearly drawing deeply from his biography for her gender-bending...
More Fall Reading
63. Green Grass, Running Water - Thomas King
Coyote and friends and friends. King’s a great writer and this book is one I’ll probably come back to - I need to learn more about the role of water in this book - how it undermines authority (and cars) while perhaps moving ideas across translated space. Hrm. Maybe I am in the right line of work.
64. Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
...
Fall Reading
So I’m switching now into stuff I read in the fall and later…note, I have to make a correction here. I realized that I counted Rita Wong’s Forage twice in the spring (numbers 17 and 23), probably because I read it twice and don’t pay close attention to what I’m doing when busy. To rectify that, I’ve switched down a number to start this post and compensate for...
2 tags
66. Scott Pilgrim (Bryan Lee O'Malley) →
I recommend Scott Pilgrim over at the Advent Book Blog (link’s in the title). Best book I read in 2010 (unless I read something better in the next 10 days).
-ryan
Reading List Continued
53. How to Write - Derek Beaulieu
A series of pieces entirely cribbed and plagiarised from other works. The pieces range from the surprisingly narrative “The Editor” in which Beaulieu uses sentences from another book that include the words “the editor” to a cheeky series that offers a bunch of interrogative questions on Tristram Shandy that could be applied to pretty much...
Summer Reading, Continued
So, I’m up to about August now and I finally started in on some of the reading for my field exams…
48. Ion - Plato
It’s been a while since I touched anything by Plato and was surprised to find that a) I hadn’t actually read this before and b) I really enjoyed it. Basically, Socrates runs in to a cool hep cat who works as a Rhapsode, performing Homeric classics....
5 tags
78. The Humbug's Diet (Robert Majzels)
A retirement home murder mystery with a sense of the ridiculous. The language of this book is sharp and meticulous. Morbid without melodrama. And what characters! Have I met another Claire in literature that I’ve liked? (I might have, but it’s 2:30am, so I’ll go with no.)
This was a one-sitting read for me. The pacing was just right. In fact, if I were to describe The...
More Summer Reading
As mentioned, I spent a good part of my summer travelling through India and avoiding my minor field reading list - which I brought with me on an eReader that I had great trouble charging reliably. Here are a few more titles from the travels:
41: The Ramayana: R. Narayan
Originally written by the poet Valmiki, this Hindu epic was one of the books I felt I had to read while travelling....
122. Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges...
Though Borges strikes a compelling and articulate figure in these interviews, I found it difficult to get much out of them due to the emphasis on Argentine political and literary culture, both of which I know little about. At times the interviews read like a litany of Borges’s opinions on people I’ve never heard of before. At other moments they are a delight. Sorrentino is a clever,...
121. Sum (David Eagleman)
Subtitled “Forty Tales from the Afterlife,” Sum compiles 40 visions of the afterlife, making it structurally similar to Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and *ahem* my own Clockfire. The premise contains an inherent danger — that each “vision” of the afterlife will be more saccharin than the last — but...
120. Talking About Detective Fiction (P.D. James)
E.M. Forster once wrote:
“The king died and the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot… . “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. (Aspects of the Novel, qtd. in James...
119. Seven Nights (Jorge Luis Borges)
An excellent, slim volume collecting seven stunning lectures by Borges. Borges is an astute and complex reader, ranging widely within a single essay while staying on point. He defends Dante from Nietzsche’s remark that “Dante is a hyena making verses among the tombs” by comparing his plight with Job’s:
If Dante had always agreed with the God he imagines, it would have...
118. Neighbour Procedure (Rachel Zolf)
Although in some way I prefer Human Resources, Zolf’s newest book is a stunning examination of the language in and around the Israel/Palestine conflict. Notable not only for its depth and complexity, but also for its compositional process, as the book is crafted (I believe entirely) from found text. — Jonathan Ball
117. Unleashed (Sina Queyras)
I’m a fan of Sina and her poetry, but I’m not sold on Unleashed, which collects blog entries from a previous incarnation of her site Lemon Hound. I’m not convinced that blog entries ever need to be collected into a book — although I will admit that there is a certain way it’s interesting to read this “blog” in print, where the development and progression...
116. Catching the Big Fish (David Lynch)
A series of short meditations on film and artmaking and, unfortunately, meditation itself. Lynch might very well be the greatest living filmmaker, but he’s undoubtably lost his mind insofar as he’s joined the cult of transcendental meditationists, and his unfortunate zeal for transcendental meditation mars an otherwise fine book. Lynch is plainspoken and direct, not at all like his...
115. Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other...
Whatever cash there might be to grab in the field of Bolano ephemera, this book attempts to grab that cash. After a strong introduction by Marcela Valdes, focused on Bolano’s epic novel 2666, the disconnected interviews proceed to arouse mild interest. The hyped “last interview” (with Mexico’s Playboy) consists of a bunch of nonsense questions and playful answers. At one...
114. The Certainty Dream (Kate Hall)
Surrealistic and lyrical, Hall’s poems are dreamlike and startling at their best. Line after line, Hall crafts fresh, sparkling images. My predilection is for bird poems, and Hall doesn’t disappoint:
a crow-bird held another bird I dropped them both … between the release and the impact time sounds like a bird strung over an abyss I tucked my tongue into him he was flat, he was...
37-40
So, I’m waaay behind on my posts…time for some filling in. Here’s the start, dating back to summertime. Word is, I still think I’ll make it!
37. Hyperion – Dan Simmons
Holy crap. This is the best sci-fi I’ve read in years, probably since the Otherland stuff by Tad Williams. Basically, imagine the Canterbury Tales retold only with the questors in search of the devil, who...
113. Bigfoot (Pascal Girard)
A coming of age story about youthful love and relationships wound around the tale of a possible Sasquatch sighting, starring poor “Disco Jimmy” (reluctant/unfortunate YouTube star). Extremely well-developed characters, especially Uncle Pierre, who’s obsessed with spreading the word about his Bigfoot sighting. Girard has a strong, understated style, though I admit to growing weary...
112. Wilson (Daniel Clowes)
Clowes paints Wilson in broad strokes, through a series of distinct strips (each page is a self-contained comic, with culminating “gag”) that together tell a continuing story (Wilson’s attempt to reconnect with his old lover and abandoned daughter). He’s a despicable, pathetic character, but uncomfortably recognizeable. Clowes ironizes the complex ambiguity of his story...
111. Masque (Rachel Zolf)
Although the least interesting of Zolf’s books, Masque remains an intriguing take on a tired genre — the “autobiographical novel” — as Zolf arranges fragmentary lines into a dramatic script for a family in crisis. Much of the text involves Zolf elliptically dramatizing her relationship with her father, famed journalist Larry Zolf, and examining the role of media in...
110. Indexical Elegies (Jon Paul Fiorentino)
Although I like JPF’s work, I’ve felt for a little while that he needs a change, needs to take more risks, needs to move away from his “loser” persona — and this is exactly the kind of book he’s needed to write, to add more dimension to his oeuvre. He takes the elegy and plays with its conventions without any superficial ironizing — these are affecting...
109. Mindscan (Robert J. Sawyer)
Mindscan is one of the best Sawyer books I’ve read — an intellectual courtroom drama that examines complex issues surrounding personhood, concerns which become material after Jacob Sullivan has his consciousness copied into a mechanical body (called a mindscan). Sawyer writes cleanly and explains difficult, heady concepts in a down-to-earth manner, like the best popular science writers...
10 tags
71 - 77 Dragonriders of Pern (Anne McCaffery)
71. Dragonflight (Anne McCaffery)
72. Dragonquest (Anne McCaffery)
73. Harper Hall Trilogy: Dragonsong (Anne McCaffery)
74. Harper Hall Trilogy: Dragonsinger (Anne McCaffery)
75. Harper Hall Trilogy: Dragondrums (Anne McCaffery)
76. The White Dragon (Anne McCaffery)
77. Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern (Anne McCaffery)
Anne McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern is a sci-fi series. The books take...
108. Torontology (Stephen Cain)
Compared to Cain’s other work, I found this book a tough slog. I much prefer the later American Standard/Canada Dry. The density of the lines here is forbidding, and the poems can be frustratingly humourless, but flashes of Cain’s brilliance and wit shine through on occasion: I especially loved the self-reflexivity of “Probability of reception minimal write anyway” (15)....
107. Fieldnotes, a forensic (Kate Eichhorn)
Eichhorn’s previous book, Fond, impressed me, but Fieldnotes moves far beyond it in both language and concept. Combining fragmentary, disjunctive phrases with a fractured narrative and parodies of television procedurals like Bones (that’s right!), this is a truly imaginative, engrossing book.
— Jonathan Ball
106. R's Boat (Lisa Robertson)
Robertson may be the greatest Canadian poet working today. The incantatory rhythm of her sentences here, their patterns and repetitions, is intoxictating and hypnotic. Her more concrete, visual lines impress much more than her more abstract, essayistic moments, but in general she marries these well: “The sun glitters on the top of the sycamore while the lower branches deepen to blue. / The...
105. Rag & Bone Shop (Earle Birney)
An uneven 1971 collection by Birney. Still, admirable in its range — Birney’s experiments with form and style intrigue, and on occasion inspire. I grow weary of collections like this, which seem dilettantish. But I can’t help but admire the drive and curiousity that compels Birney, even if the poems here lack a certain polish.
— Jonathan Ball
104. BRICKBRICKBRICK (Mark Laliberte)
[I’m actually up to book 124 right now — beating last year’s 119. So my reviews will be short, because I’m pressed for time these days, but want to catch up on my posting.] In BRICKBRICKBRICK, Mark Laliberte reproduces bricks drawn in panel backgrounds by various comic artists: Schulz, McKean, Mignola, Gorey, etc. Each set of bricks is contained within an identical square...
2 tags
Progress Report
95 books in a year? No problem, I thought. I probably read more than that every year. Now I’m sitting at # 77, and it’s looking grim. But I’m halfway through two books right now, and I just completed my last day of work for the semester, so I still feel I can reach 95 books before the New Year.
The other day I realized that if I had been counting graphic novels / trade...
2 tags
95 Books - Done
Hi all,
I’ve been negligent in my posting the back half of this year (thanks, school), but I haven’t been negligent in my reading. I just finished book #95 - the excellent For Space by geographer Doreen Massey. In lieu of a catch-up post from where I left off, I’ll post my entire list so far, broken up by month.
January
1. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious - Sigmund...
Catsup: Books 75 - 82
Will I finish? I’m not certain. Here’s some catch-up:
75. Unleashed by Sina Queyras
As you may know, I’ve been blogging for Sina Queyras’ Lemon Hound blog since January 2010 (see some links below) and I enjoyed reading through the development of the blog in book form through various stops and starts and rethinks. The importance for women to make their voices public was...