Shelf Life: August 2013
Brief snippets of opinion and a too-long list. This month’s themes? Sex and writing, apparently.
literary criticism
Shelf Life: July 2013
It’s summer. Traditionally a time for beach reading, fluff reading, right? This is how I’m justifying all the comics and manga to myself, anyway. Judge ye not, etc. 87. Spike: Asylum, by Brian Lynch (IDW Publishing, 2007) Brian Lynch has a terrible habit of over-explaining things both within the comics themselves, and then going over …
Shelf Life: May 2013
TCAF was in May, and I came out of it with a few comics, and a desire to read lots more. 61. Spike: The Complete Series, by Brian Lynch (IDW Publishing, 2012) While Spike was my favourite character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series), he’s lost something in the comic. Lynch seems intent …
Shelf Life: March 2013
Lots of poetry, some lit crit, and a burnt lasange. 30. Rush, by bill bissett (BookThug, 2012) Reviewed for Broken Pencil. 31. Heroines, by Kate Zambreno (Semiotext(e), 2012) When I saw it in Book City, I couldn’t resist picking it up. Zambreno looks at the “mad” literary wives of famous authors as they’re popularly portrayed, …
Shelf Life: August 2012
Very brief comments on a lengthy list of books read in August. A banner month. 101. The History of Tattooing, by Wilfrid Dyson Hambly (Dover, reprinted 2009) I love tattoos. At the time I read this I had only two, but for months I had been looking for an artist to complete my third and fourth. …
Shelf Life: May 2012
A varied month. 50. Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen (Picador , 1988, 2001) To backtrack, I really liked The Corrections, and thought The Discomfort Zone was pretty good, but I felt like I kept waiting for Twenty-Seventh City to make sense. At its most bare, it’s the story of a conspiracy by a group of people …