The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
If I had to write the logline of this book, I would say it’s like Robert Coover writing Blade Runner. Our narrator is a body scout, whose job is to look for potential talent for a cyborg baseball league. It’s cyborg in the sense of of body modification run amok. He can’t play himself because of certain bans, but he’s still in the biz. He’s on a call when he finds out that one of the stars of the league has been found dead, seemingly […]
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
This is the premier collection of Borges fiction and nonfiction that was published early in the US. You’re obviously served better by his collection fiction and his collected nonfiction, but as an entry point this one is great. His nonfiction offers up a lot that his fiction doesn’t, namely who and what to read. His fiction obviously opens up a world of strange and curious stories, that are ofte not even narratives. Some various reactions: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – a long and meandering story […]
Fearless: A Graphic Novel by Kenny Porter
I like the illustrations of Fearless: A Graphic Novel by Kenny Porter. However, the story? Not so much. The fact best friends are growing apart is fine. I can get behind that. It is the theme of many going into middle school story. But it was what one of those best friends did afterwards that was unbelievable: On the first day of school, she runs away, tries to bike two towns over (where her friend moved to over the summer) to find her best friends’ […]
Hilo Volume Five: Then Everything Went Wrong by Judd Winick
Do You Remember the Summer Before? (Black Sand Beach, #2) by Richard Fairgray
Sequels are interesting. Sometimes they are better than the first book, and sometimes not even close. And when you get to book five in a series, sometimes you are more excited than you could imagine and other times you are thinking it is time to stop helping my uncle the logger keep his job and save a tree or two. Hilo Volume Five: Then Everything Went Wrong by Judd Winick is a mix of the above. This volume is a “middle of the story” story. […]
Metropolis Grove by Drew Brockington
I think ages strong 6-7 to aged 10 will get a kick out of this book, Metropolis Grove. The story is simple: a new kid on the block meets the only other kids on the block on her first day in the neighborhood. Theirs is a friendship that is quickly made, along with a tree house (a little less quickly made) and one of the three does not really believe Superman is real and other knows he is as she saw him from her window […]
Hotel California by Don Bruns, Heather Graham, Andrew Child, John Gilstrap, Reed Farrel Coleman, Amanda Flower, Jennifer Dornbush, Rick Bleiweiss
In this anthology of eight crime stories, the reader is introduced to a quite wide cast that includes multiple hitmen and detectives, a senator, an influencer – and a whole bunch of victims. I don’t read many anthologies, but I do make an exception for ones consisting of crime stories. I think the mystery genre is one of the most diverse when it comes to the way authors explore its common tropes. Hotel California‘s central theme is that each story is inspired by a song […]
