As a person of mixed race (White mother, Black father) who loves the blues, I thought that a book like Half-Blood Blues (featuring several mixed race characters and blues) would be right up my alley. It was not. In fact, it took me nearly a week to read the first 50 pages and I was bored to death almost the whole time. On page 54 things finally (finally!) got interesting from a story standpoint, but I still had to contend with the writing, which never […]
Both Sides…or at least his side
Not Dead Yet is a memoir of my favorite musical artist. I will be honest that I am not much of a memoir/biography guy and have avoided reading them unless cornered into doing so. However, Not Dead Yet is actually a pretty entertaining read. Phil Collin’s delivery of his memories can be a little jarring at first. I would liken it to talking with an older relative who is both verbose and perhaps boiling over with memories to share. Often during the course of the memoir […]
Semisonic’s drummer on life in the ’90s music biz
Semisonic’s Feeling Strangely Fine came out in 1998. I was a slouchy eighth-grader who was battling severe nodular acne, braces, and a wildly inappropriate volume of palm sweat. Lucky for me, I also played guitar. Conversations with anyone were hard, but rocking out was natural. Music is where I felt comfortable and found myself. It’s how I made friends and a life. In So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, Semisonic drummer Jake Slichter tells a similar story. He wasn’t a particularly cool teenager, but he […]
An absolutely perfect little book.
I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me. Until Rainbow […]
A mostly good story with a lovely soundtrack
(For maximum review enjoyment, please listen to the video!) One of the benefits of listening to the audiobook for this was the presence of the music. Incendio is the waltz that is central to the book, and in the audiobook you can hear it throughout the narration. It was not until I was finished with the book that I saw that the author had composed Incendio! (So to all the people who claimed that the music “detracted” from the story, you suck. Because here, […]
Welcome to the 80s
If I was writing this review back when I’d read this book the first time, I would have given it a firm 5 stars and been proselytizing it all over the place. It was the first urban fantasy I’d ever encountered, and the story really got me as a college aged writing major. With that being said, I did a close-read on it for my MFA, and d*mn those close readings for ruining a book I have such fond memories of! This is not to […]