needs more demons?

This was my first exposure to either Cohn or Levithan, aside from seeing the film version Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (without, I’m ashamed to say, even knowing it was based on a novel). But it’s their third collaboration, in which the authors write alternating chapters, “without planning anything out beforehand. That’s the way they [...]

[Read more →]

Future on Ice is a collection of short stories selected circa 1998 by Orson Scott Card representing his take on the best short science fiction of the eighties (it follows the earlier, similarly themed Future on Fire).
It was a strange exercise in cognitive dissonance for me. Many of Card’s selections are terrific — the list [...]

[Read more →]

I’m probably waaay over thinking my reaction to Gunn’s Golden Rules. I was entertained and amused, even a little bit edified. But it still strikes me as an odd, even inconsistent book.
Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some [...]

[Read more →]

I swore I was absolutely not going to read any more books about white, middle-aged, male academics in romantic entanglements with much younger women, and (despite having read several that I liked a lot), I’m currently kind of down on books about white, middle-aged males going somewhat or completely off-the-rails with the assistance of large [...]

[Read more →]

Mostly I thought City of Ashes was a vast improvement on City of Bones. It had a few nifty surprises. The plot continues to echo elements from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series, and Star Wars, among other sources, but generally doesn’t draw enough from any one of those wells to feel overly [...]

[Read more →]

I wanted to read The Book of Lost Things even though I disliked Connolly’s The Gates. I had an intuition that The Gates was a less well-developed book, maybe even rushed a bit to capitalize on the market created by The Book of Lost Things.
And I was right — The Book of Lost Things is [...]

[Read more →]

Warning: This review is more than a little mean.
I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations [...]

[Read more →]

Three quick endorsements of Our Noise:

I read every word within a 24-hour span
I’ve already purchased some Merge recordings I hadn’t previously heard
The palpable enthusiasm of Ryan Adam’s (slightly incoherent) intro almost makes me want to hear what he’s been up to lately

The structure of Our Noise is pretty genius: there’s a little bit of [...]

[Read more →]

City of Bones, the first volume of Clare’s young-adult supernatural series Mortal Instruments melds tropes and themes from sources such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars, Meyer’s Twilight books and Rowling’s Harry Potter in a way that sometimes felt a little calculated, but still kept me flipping pages.
Three little gripes:

The author’s name is Cassandra [...]

[Read more →]

I appreciated the craft that went into Johnny One-Eye, but I didn’t enjoy it very much. It’s not the sort of book I usually read, but I picked it up hoping it might be something of a cross between HBO’s John Adams and Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. It’s much more like the former than [...]

[Read more →]