copy cat blog...

so rather than doing one end of the year book review i've decided to copy my boyfriend and review books as i complete them. i hope this will allow me to give more honest immediate impressions and also i suppose make my blog more palatable so that not everything has to be downloaded at once. i can be quite wordy if you haven't noticed. i will probably do a summary at the end of the year, but i'm going to try to do them as i go, so here goes...

i'll use the same star rating system that netflix uses as mentioned before, with 5 stars possible.

1. Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu. short fiction collection. 3 stars.

i really really really wanted to love this book. so perhaps having my expectations too high led ultimately to both our downfalls here. i found myself, after the first story, wishing for men & cartoons. the first story titled Third Class Superhero was wonderful. really lovely and thoughful and quite brilliant i thought. it also set the bar rather high for the rest of the collection and for me, it did not quite deliver. i give it three stars however instead of 2 or 2.5 because i have to admit that it is pretty groundbreaking in a way. most of the stories are very experimental and while for the most part i had trouble connecting with them emotionally and found them to be clinical i've made a mental (and now physical) note to go back and re-read this collection in a year or so and see how i feel about it on a second reading. i'll let you know if i have a change of heart. so that, the experimental groundbreaking nature and my LOVE of the first story brings the rating up quite a bit. check it out certainly if you are into experimental short fiction, he does some very intersting things. also, this is a first novel/collection i believe, so i think we'll see some great things forthcoming from Mr. Yu in the future i'll definitely be checking out the next one.

2. Zoetrope - All Story Winter 2006 issue. Editor - Michael Ray, presented by Francis Ford Coppola. short fiction collection. 4 stars.

even though this is technically not a book i include it both because of it's length (90+pages of writing and images) and because of it's impressive weight in the short story field - much like Tin House and McSweeney's, Zoetrope features really great writers quite often. this was a really solid collection from start to finish. Miranda July is quickly becoming one of my favorite short fiction authors. she really has a great voice and a wonderful perspective. her stories often leave me with an aching feeling. in a good way i suppose. Alice Munroe is also featured here with a story that i gather she wrote and published quite some time ago, it is reprinted here with a preface by Sarah Polley (writer, actress, director) who is releasing a film based on the story in May 2007. i am truly glad i got a chance to read this story it is quite beautiful. also it goes a long way towards redeeming Ms. Munroe in my eyes. i spend a good chunk of time reading a VERY long piece of hers in the New Yorker some years ago that i really did not like. i kept pushing through it figuring it would pay off for me and it just never did. i was incredibly disappointed and though i have read other works of hers that i enjoyed since then this one sealed the forgiveness deal for me.

3. The Best American Comics 2006. Harvey Pekar Guest Editor and Anne Elizabeth Moore, Editor. 3.5 stars.

First let me say, congratulations to The Best American series for recognizing comics as the powerful and important media it is, and should be. I hope they keep this up for a long time in coming, i will be buying the issue every year both excited to see what they have picked up and also strictly to support something i believe in. If you believe in comics and furthering the art as a "legitimate" medium, you should pick it up too. it is yet another way to support the arts - what other wasteful thing are you going to do with your $22 bucks. buy it now. okay, onto the review. a really solid collection. are these the things i would have picked? some of them, definitely some of them not, but that happens in any "best of" collection. you've got people who have different tastes and even different reasons for the pieces they pick, but overall it's a nice cross section i think of what is going on in comics today. harvey pekar really hates superheros judging from his introduction, and as many of you know, i love me some superheros. but i love a different kind of superhero i think than the masses and i like to think that if harvey and i sat down to talk about superheros we wouldn't be that far away from each other really. you won't find any superheros here (actually that's not true, because Onion Jack is a great superhero story i think, and Rabbithead seems like she's gotta be a superhero to me, and then there's a Wonder Warthog story as well) but that's definitely not the focus of the collection. some standouts for me are: Joel Priddy's The Amazing Life of Onion Jack; Anders Nilsen's The Gift; Chris Ware's Comics: A History (obviously); Jonathan Bennett's Dance With The Ventures; Alex Robinson's Thirty Three; Rebecca Dart's Rabbithead; Jamie Hernandez's Day By Day with Hopey: Tuesday is Whose Day?; Kurt Wolfgang's Passing Before Life's Very Eyes; and Robert Crumb's Walkin' The Streets. You may have read some of these stories elsewhere, i know i have, but again, still worth it to see them and have them all collected beautifully here.

as a sidenote i must also congratulate Pekar and Moore on their introductions as i felt quite inspired to go back to comics immediately after reading their words. maybe i'll pull dusty Shiksa back out. who knows.