read 52 books in 2010

Finished in Dec. 2010

finished in Dec. 2010

finished sometime in Nov or Dec 2010

I hated to start this book, knowing it’s supposedly the last in the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett. The series has been wonderful, filled with a great mixture of humor and satire.

This book leans more towards the satire side, with obvious lessons to be taken from events and people in the book. I would have liked more humor, but Pratchett’s lessons are good ones for young adults and adults alike to take heed of. The fact that they are happening between witches, ghosts, kings, and farmers make it easier to read; Pratchett doesn’t try to hit the reader over the head with preaching. Pratchett ends this series with a great set of sentiments society would do well to take note of. My only hope is that the characters end up in future Discworld books.

PS – I had one laugh out loud moment with this book. Pratchett can usually get more out of me, but the one I had was a good one.

I bought this small book of poetry for the cover. It’s a beautifully printed book. The poetry inside was not so beautiful. Nor was it thoughtful. It seems utterly “hipster”. Random collections of phrases are smashed together, interspersed with popular culture references, but in the end, not leading to any deep thoughts or observations. The poems seems completely inaccessible to any reader, no matter how well trained in reading poetry they might be. I’m not sure of the point of it, other than to be obscure and pretentious. There’s potential, for sure, but the poet needs to be a little less “cute” and actually weave her phrases into something people can connect with.

The first half of this book is a great read. We learn about Alix Dobkin and what is was growing up in a liberal communist family. We get an interesting perspective about the roles of women in the 1950s and 60s and the opportunities they had. This minority perspective about the United States during this time is refreshing to read about.
The second half of the book, once Alix graduates from college and starts to enter the folk music world, starts to become less about Alix and more about the scene she finds herself in. There’s a lot of descriptions about the clubs in New York City and all the folk musicians that pass through them. Politics are hardly mentioned and life is seemingly about describing other people and her married life.
Just as things turn interesting in the 1970s, when she starts to become active in the feminist movement, the book ends. It seems like this is meant to be a volume 1 of Alix Dobkin’s life. Overall, it’s a nice read, but a bit more introspection, especially in the second half of the book, would be nice.

As someone who studied Philosophy and Logic in college, I appreciated this graphic novel. Logicomix tries to explain a fairly complicated subject, Logic and Mathematics, and succeeds fairly well.

The art is excellent. The story is well written. I didn’t really like the back and forth between Bertrand Russell’s story and the narration by the authors, but it wasn’t overly interruptive and tolerable. The best parts of the story for me were the explorations into the links between madness and those who strive to make rational sense of the world. The book touches on this in several places, but I wouldn’t have minded an even deeper exploration into that theme. But as it is, a really enjoyable story that makes Russell’s life, Logic, and Math interesting.

When I read that this book was a satire on the slave trade, I was intrigued. I love satire and it seemed an interesting topic to tackle. However, I then wondered how switching around races would help tell the story of the slave trade any better than simply keeping them as they were in reality. Blonde Roots simply switches races to create her tale. White North Americans are captured and sold to the more developed Africans as slaves.

As it turns out, there really isn’t any point to switching around races, that I could find. I felt this actually worked to trivialize the real horrors of the slave trade and the lives it affected. Now, it’s interesting that Bernardine Evaristo has a Nigerian father and a British mother. However, reading this book, it didn’t really seem to bring any light as to why she chose to tell the story this way. She just seemed to want to be sensational.

It’s a well-written story that certainly helps people understand the wrongs of slavery, but it would have been just as good, and probably better, if she had just kept the reality truthful in regards to races. Having the white race play the role of victims just seems demeaning to the real victims. I don’t think the slave trade needs any additional sensationalism.

I try to like Daniel Clowes, but I have trouble not viewing his work at crude and vulgar. The artwork is nice and his plot certainly creative, but it doesn’t allow my mind to dwell upon higher thoughts and find tangents to meander with. David Boring is simply the story about a guy and his search for love. Twists and turns abound, but other than creating a unique story, they serve little purpose.

It’s obvious that Clowes has the ability to weave a great story, but in the end, he tends to keep the story simple and not flesh out the more intriguing plots, instead relying on sexual encounters to titillate the majority of his readers.

I picked up this book because it incorporated photographs with the standard graphic novel. The artwork and unique manner of incorporating drawings and photographs are top-notch.

However, the story of the author and her mother spending a month in Paris really doesn’t go anywhere. There’s lots of writing about the food and visiting various sites. However, the author getting depressed and stressed while on vacation was annoying. Let’s see, you have rich parents who can afford to take you to Paris for a month and you are going to lay around whining about your life. Smacks of pampered privilege to me, which I’m not interested in reading about.

Despite that, however, the art makes for a decent story about a month in Paris, although nothing is exactly ground-breaking.