Poetry is something that a lot of us probably want to like, but we just can’t quite get there. Poets either write too much about flowers, or the writing is so opaque and pretentious that it’s pointless to try and decipher. It’s like reading a technical manual on how to fix an industrial HVAC unit – it’s another language entirely. Poetry should be the best of our language. It should sing and kick. It should change the way we view the world around us, even if it’s […]
Jonah Hex Visits Gotham!
I like comic books, and I like westerns, but I haven’t read many comic book westerns. I was recently browsing my local library and stumbled upon DC’s All Star Western series, so of course I had to give it a go. This trade paperback provides a lot of bang for the buck. You get an entire Jonah Hex in Gotham story, as well as stories featuring The Barbary Ghost and El Diablo. Finally, the back pages feature sketches of all of the main characters. I didn’t […]
They Can’t All Be Howl, I Guess
This is my first Ginsberg collection, and I’m not sure how many more I’m going to try. While the percussion and the music of some of the poems were fun and exhilarating, I found most of the book to be boring and tedious. Not all of it is Ginsberg’s fault. The book only covers the mid-1970s, and I wasn’t yet born, let alone sophisticated enough to understand world events via poems. I’m sure they would’ve hit me harder as a contemporary. What I did appreciate in […]
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
In the documentary The September Issue, the generally intimidating and inscrutable Anna Wintour is shown interacting with her high school- or college-aged daughter. The scene is only a few seconds long, but it shows a very human Wintour, just being a mom trying to be cool in front of her daughter. Sometimes we forget that icons are people. I kept thinking about that scene when reading Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Prior to reading this book, Joan Didion was more of a literary giant or […]
Too Many Space Quips. Someone be serious!
I five-starred Scalzi’s Old Man’s War earlier this year, calling it my dream blend of science fiction. In that book, Scalzi effortlessly worked in a new world, tech, humor, drama, action, and characters the readers cared about. It was so well done. So, when Audible had The Collapsing Empire audiobook on sale for $2.99, I snatched it up. As a bonus, it was read by Wil Wheaton. This book has already been reviewed myriad times on this site, so I won’t go too much into the […]
I’m Already Dead
Like all professional, well-adjusted thirtysomethings, I spend much of my free time watching the CW television network. Gossip Girl, Arrow, Flash, Reign, Jane the Virgin. What more could a guy need? While I was an early(ish) adopter of Veronica Mars and have read more than one Rob Thomas (the Veronica Mars creator, not the matchbox 20 singer) book, for some reason I was late to the game to his show iZombie. Why? I don’t know. Fortunately, my wife was not. She was all over iZombie […]
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