cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (Default)
Novels/prose books:

Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Second: The Reptile Room.

Stephenson, Neal: The Big U
(the wheels fell off somewhere in this book. It's still an enjoyable read, but I can see why he was reluctant to let it be brought back into print; god forbid someone should read this and imagine that this level of writing is what made Stephenson famous. Obviously, this is not as ambitious as one of the monster tomes, like Cryptonomicon, or the Baroque Cycle, but as a shorter work, it doesn't live up to the tighter, more focused plotting of Zodiac. Maybe I should excuse the lack of grounding as probably being intentional--it's very much about the university as a place that's insane and closed-off from the real world, higher education as a mental institution--but it was hard to connect to the book because of that).


Graphic novels:

Lemire, Jeff: Essex County vol. 3: The Country Nurse
(Top Shelf).

Campbell, Ross: Water Baby
(Minx. Wow, creepy. Campbell, doing that thing he does, so weirdly compelling and so well-illustrated).

Abel, Jessica, and Warren Pleece, artists (?), Gabe Soria, writer (?), Hialry Sycamore, colorist: Life Sucks
(First Second. Cute, but not exactly a work for the ages. I vastly prefer Abel's other work--La Perdida, Artbabe--which are better written, and frankly, much better illustrated as well. Abel's linework suffers from the coloring here).
cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (Default)
This everything I can remember reading since...oh, March or maybe a little before? Probably no earlier than February. I jogged my memory by looking at my bookshelves; if it was from a library, or elsewhere borrowed, I may have forgotten about it. I borrow more novels/prose/nonfiction than I buy, so this list is a little slanted towards comics and graphic novels, which I buy more often, because less of what I want to read is available from the library in a regular and timely fashion.

It's also slanted towards comics and graphic novels because I read a lot more of them.

School-related/academic reading: uncounted multitudes.
Poetry: like you care.

Novels/prose books:

Kipling, Rudyard: Kim (reread), The Jungle Book.

Eddings, David & Leigh: The Belgariad, The Mallorean (rereads).

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age, Zodiac.

Can't remember the author: Keturah and Lord Death.

Alexander, Llyod: The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.



Comic strip collections/comic book collections/graphic novels:

Various: The Big Book of Hoaxes.

Eisner, Will: The Spirit Archives vol 1, The Building.

Ishida Tatsuya: Sinfest, Sinfest: Life is My Bitch (all the Sinfest is technically a reread, since I read the strip online).

Warren, Adam: Empowered vol. 3 (damn! just...damn. Adam Warren's obscenely talented. I am interested in his ideas, and would like to subscribe to his newsletter).

Buja's Diary.

Geary, Rick: I cannot remember their damn names, but the Jack the Ripper book, and the Lizzie Borden book. Which reminds me,

Graphic Classics: the O Henry, the Lovecraft, and the Stoker.

Moore, Alan and Rick Veitch, Swamp Thing (whatever that first Moore volume is titled).



Manga. This is where it gets long. )


And yes, this is typical.
cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (Default)
Cryptonomicon was kind of a letdown after The Baroque Cycle, not least because of the frankly distasteful sexual politics--there is, at best, one vaguely sympathetic and remotely interesting female character in the entire book, and even she is totally subsumed by the book's portrayal of women as receptacles for ejaculate, in an irritatingly vivid and memorable passage near the end, which pretty much became the dominant image of the book for me--but I remain in awe of Stephenson.
cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (Default)
I finally finished The Baroque Cycle. After about three months, with two short intervals to knock off a dozen or so fluffy Georgette Heyer Regency romances and half a dozen odd murder mysteries by Josephine Tey (just to clear my palate), I have finished reading ALL TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND FORTY-SEVEN PAGES OF IT thank you herongale.

It's one of the best books I've ever read, period, hands down, no qualifications and no genre classifications. I recommend it to anyone who likes to read. Don't be scared by the page count; it's got a slow start, but within a few chapters, you'll be too caught up in the joy of Stephenson's prose* to even notice.

And now I go to read the earlier, yet chronologically later Cryptonomicon, which is a wussy thousand something pages, and I can probably knock off in under two weeks. HAH.

*He uses the word palimpsest. Repeatedly. People have been justly canonized for lesser accomplishments.

September 2012

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