Made of Library

I’m really enjoying expanding my reading sphere into comics and graphic novels. I still think I don’t have a proper appreciation for the artwork side of it, but I really like how quickly the story moves and different way you become involved with the characters through their dialogue and actions. After I started reading The Strain I realised that I’d seen the first season of TV show adaptation of this story. I enjoyed the show though, so I didn’t mind following along again. This story is another modern take on vampires and it pretty much ticks all the boxes. The end of the world, ancient creatures, rich old dudes trying to take advantage, stubborn authorities who don’t believe what’s really happening. It’s all there and mixed up together in the perfect amounts. I still feel as though I’m not doing justice to the artwork side of things. I really don’t have the knowledge to appreciate it properly. But if it does the job required and I can see what’s happening and I don’t get...

This book had been on my TBR list for quite a few years, so when I found out they were making a TV series adaptation I was actually kind of annoyed. I always want to read the book before I watch an adaptation, so I knew I was either going to have to bump this one up the list or watch the show without having read the book (inconceivable!), or spend an undetermined amount of time avoiding spoilers until I eventually got around to reading it. Despite it being the riskiest option I took the third path and tried to avoid spoilers. I’m pleased to say I mostly did. It’s harder to write a review of a book you really enjoyed, because all you want to say is “it was great, if you haven’t read it, you should”. I don’t like to discuss details of the plot for fear of spoilers, regardless of how long ago a book was published. Atwood has managed to build a dystopian world without bogging the story down with the politics. We’re told enough to know what the situation is and why, but there a...

I’d seen Emily merchandise on clothes, pencil cases and bags long before I ever knew she was a character from a book. I thought she was just this cute, kind of goth looking cartoon character. I’m still not really sure which came first, but expect this book came later. The book is in diary format, and when it starts we discover that writer of the diary has lost their memory. What we learn about her she is also learning for the first time. She likes to write lists, 13 items long and tries to have that quick-wit snark, but, to me, it just falls flat. Emily didn’t feel like a genuine character, she felt contrived, like a middle-aged man writing as hard as he could what he thought young teenage girls would like from an edgy, outcast character. The plot was bizarre, but not in a good way that gave you an other-worldly feeling or left you kind of unsettled. This was more just random weird things being slapped together. I don’t know enough about the background of the Emily franch...

I was hesitant when I discovered this was a continuation of the American Gods story. I always am when I have enjoyed a stand-alone book and then find out that there was more written later and it’s not a proper sequel. If it’s part of the story then why wasn’t it included in the book in the first place? It feels like an attempt to cash in on the success of the original, rather than for any artistic reason or for the sake of the story. I’ve been burned before, but I should have more faith in Gaiman by now.   It took me a little while to buy in. It didn’t immediately feel right to me that this is what Shadow is doing now. It didn’t seem to fit at first, but after thinking about possible alternatives it started to make more sense. I think Shadow is going to spend the rest of his days as a wanderer, never finding a place to call home, while gods old and new constantly try to use him for their own means. Poor Shadow. This novella was full of the things that made American God...

It took me a while to settle into the style and feel, but ultimately reading One Hundred Years of Solitude was a surreal experience. The town of Macondo and its inhabitants are hidden away from time. Everything that happened here could have happened in a year or a hundred years or a thousand years. The only way to you have of telling is the changing generations, the births, deaths and marriages, and even that isn’t always a reliable indicator. This feeling of time being suspended was enjoyable once you accepted it, and it felt like the book could go on forever because of it. When I realised that the names were going to be repeated I thought I was going to have a problem keeping straight who was who. It was written in such a way that whenever you started to wonder if you had confused one Aureliano with another there would be a reminder, by referring back to some previous event that happened to remind you which branch of the family tree was under discussion. The was no real over...

Georges St-Pierre has always been one of my favourite fighters, ever since I first started following MMA. As long as he doesn’t decide to come out of retirement he will always remain one of the greatest fighters in the sport. I’m not entirely sure what I expected from this book. I didn’t know if it was going to be an autobiography or a training manual. It was really either. There was autobiographical stuff in there, but it wasn’t a story of his life. It wasn’t a training manual either. St-Pierre talked a lot about his training practices and his philosophy on how he trains, but there wasn’t any practical training material in there. I think I expected the book to be inspiring and motivational. Instead, it was just vaguely interesting. Georges St-Pierre is always very self-effacing and humble and his book was like that as well. Yes, he had to go through some hardships to get where he is, but he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. For him, it’s just what you have to do to be a wo...

Spending a year living in a cabin on the edge of a lake in the woods sounds pretty much like a perfect year to me, an introverts dream come true. A year to sit around and read and write and enjoy nature. I don’t think I’d want to repeat Thoreau’s year in the woods though. A lot of the book was about the practicalities of Thoreau's life in the woods. Building his cabin and growing his food. I didn’t find this particularly interesting as he did it all with the safety net of civilisation right there. I don’t know that there was much to be gained from reading it from a survivalist perspective either. It all seemed a bit too easy. Another good portion of the book was just his opinion about how he thinks people rely too much on modern conveniences and if they would only do what he’s doing they could save themselves a lot of money and be much better off. I found his opinions to be forceful and brash. There was no possible way that he could be wrong and anyone who disagreed with ...

I remember when I was a kid looking at a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and being intimidated by how big it was. For that reason, I never got around to reading it. I think it must have been a compendium of multiple Narnia stories, because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t that long at all. I decided that I wanted to read the Narnia series for myself, because I had never actually read them, only seen film adaptations of them. Most of what I’d heard about them was that it was shoving thinly veiled Christianity down children's throats. I’d never picked up on that from the adaptations that I’d watched, so I wanted to see for myself. Deciding which order to read the books in was more difficult than I’d imagined. There’s the order in which they were originally published or the internal chronological order. I chose the original publication order. The writing is what I expected. The delivery is the somewhat stuffy style typical of the time and place in wh...

This read was a huge step outside of my usual reading habits. I don’t really read romance novels, so I’m not really up to speed with all the sub-genres and naming conventions, but I think this one falls into the erotica category. If there are books of this genre that have plots that are actually worthwhile please let me know. Every time I’ve tried, I just get frustrated at how the story is just a very loose vessel to pad out the page count between sex scenes. The plot is flimsy, there’s no character development because the characters are all just caricatures and the sex scenes themselves are just ridiculous. I don’t feel like it’s very fair of me to speak negatively of this book. It’s a very popular genre that a lot of people enjoy, it’s just not for me. So much of the actual content was sex scenes, which I don’t enjoy reading anyway, but almost all of these involved coercion of some kind, and that made me quite uncomfortable. I’m not averse to being uncomfortable when re...

As far as I can find there’s only one issue of this comic, which is disappointing because I would gladly have read more. There is also a short film and it’s been picked up by Netflix to make a TV series. I haven’t watched the short film yet as I wanted to review the comic on its own merits first. My comic reading history is webcomics and The Walking Dead, so I don’t ‘have a very broad basis for comparison, so I’m sure there’s a lot here that people more familiar with the genre could talk about that I’ve missed. The premise for this comic is a single mum and her superpowered kid, Dion. We only get about two pages of mum and kid action before we go to flashback and hear the story of how mum and dad met. It’s a shame because I liked the interaction between the mum and Dion. It was natural and fun and immediately showed us the dynamics of their relationship. The majority of the time is spent in flashback. We meet the dad, who is supposed to be charismatic and charming, but I ju...

Many years ago I used to read a lot of webcomics. It was part of my daily routine to check each one for updates and then read through the archive of any new ones I’d come across or old ones I just wanted to revisit. One of my regular comics was xkcd. I even read through the archive a couple of times after I realised I’d been missing out in the extra text you get when you hover the mouse over the image. Unfortunately, due to a number of technical issues, I lost all my comics bookmarks and links and was so disheartened about setting them all back up in the order I liked to bother doing it at all, and I stopped reading webcomics. This collection was published before I stopped reading xkcd so none of the comics were new to me, though there was some I’d forgotten. There was some added notes and marginalia that added extra interest beyond just the comics themselves. I think there is also some kind of secret code in there, which strikes me as something that would amuse Randall Munroe...

I like to come into a book not knowing too much about what it is. Let me know the genre and maybe and maybe an inkling of the subject matter, but mostly I prefer to start reading with as few preconceptions as possible. I avoid reviews, I avoid synopses, I try not to look at it’s Goodreads rating. I want to start with a clean slate. When I started reading Beloved I thought I was going to be reading a novel about a woman not long out of slavery and the struggles she faces. That is what Beloved is about, there’s no denying that. But it’s also about so much more than that. I thought I was going to be reading literary drama. It turned out to be more magical realism. Fortunately for me, magical realism is one of my favourite genres, so it was a win all around. I’d mentally prepared myself for reading about the brutality and horror of what was done to slaves in that time and place. It was there, but at no time was it gratuitous or intended for shock value. It was a necessary part...

This year I decided I needed to start reading more non-fiction. Where better to start than what is called the first true crime novel. In Cold Blood was written very soon after the events which the book covers. So soon after, that you have to wonder how much the rawness, the closeness of it, affected the writing of it. Researching and writing about a crime that was committed 20 years ago, is a much different thing to researching and writing about a crime that happened five years ago. The majority of our time in the book is spent with the murderers. And there’s never any question that they are the murderers, that’s not the approach taken here. We know that they killed this family, what unfolds is the how and, more chillingly, the why. We get quite a comprehensive history of both Dick and Perry, the two killers, but at no time does it feel like we’re being told this as an excuse for what they’ve done. It’s just laying out what is, it’s not trying to explain away their actio...