I just finished this one myself, also a library checkout. I didn’t love it for the first half or so, but it grew on me by the end.
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Yeah, it was a little slow to start, but it was really good by the end. This is one that I can see myself going back to at some point.
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I’m currently working through “A Wilderness Station” by great Canadian Alice Munro. Not only do I love that she sets most of her stories in my native South-West Ontario, but she mixes the pastoral, quaint, country town story with morbid, devastating twists and turns. One needs a strong stomach and a soft heart to really enjoy these stories, but her illustrative writing will cast you into an entirely different universe than the one you’re sitting in.
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My partner lent me ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’ as a holiday read last year and I really enjoyed it. This post has put AM back at the top of the brainpan - must seek more out.
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She’s easy to love, even Margaret Atwood agreed Munro was right to win the Nobel before Maggie could! She’s a beloved treasure in the Ontario bookworm community. It might be my local bias, but I think the dark elements in her writing make the harshness of warped reality a little bit easier to take.
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Born to be posthumous, a biography of Edward Gorey. If you don’t know Gorey, here’s an example.
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This talk of Alice Munro, who I’ve never read, put me in mind to try the 3 stories that made up Almodovar’s Julieta… “Chance”, “Soon” and “Silence”.
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Ed Gorey is one of my favourites, and one of my inspirations. 
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Perfect title!
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Yes, I know the tune from memory and can play it on keys. Could just plink around on guitar and sound it out, but I’m curious how an actual guitarist would choose which strings and all that, so it’s an idle curiosity.
Besides, it’s not actual chords, so I could probably play it in relatively short order. Jazz chords! Delta House! Arrgh!
From this book: kind of a useless expenditure, but I’m taking every shortcut and bit of spoonfeeding I can get with my new toy hobby.
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Read the graphic novel Batman '89, which is a 6-issue miniseries meant to continue on the Burton Batman universe after Batman Returns.
An intriguing concept (they got the guy who wrote the story on both Burton films) and the artist has some exceptional talent, but the story does not feel like the kind of story that would have been a film in the Summer of 1995 (kind of like how PIXAR claims Lightyear is the film Andy would have seen in the 90’s that made me want a Buzz Lightyear figure…it just doesn’t hold water!).
Okay story, but feels like someone trying to recapture their glory days.
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Follow Me Down, 5th in the Reckless series from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, dark and hauntingly sad.
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Also, those stories are awful. The Joker kills the Waynes? OK, I guess, although that kind of undermines the “random crime” angle (which has been worked over a dozen times in the comix so…whatever) but in order for the Batman to know this, they give Joker a catch phrase which he says precisely twice, in order for the movie to happen.
That’s up there (down there) with Gremlins. “Here are three rules you must never break…”
I don’t know if the sequel is the writer’s fault but if you wanted a movie that clearly demonstrates a group of people’s failure to understand heroism, it would be that one.
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Heroism wasn’t fully on the mind of producer Jon Peters.
That guy felt that Batman fighting the guy twirling knives in the ‘89 film was what helped bring the kids in.
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An account of the making of A Star is Born from someone in a position to have heard a lot about it. Briefer accounts of the versions before and after the 1954 one are also included. I’m about halfway through it, but lots of interesting stories so far.
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Nice!
I’ve read up through Destroy All Monsters, and I’m loving the series so far.
(I’d tried Brubaker/Harris’s Fatale a while back and didn’t click with it. But Reckless hits all my favorite neo-noir beats. )
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I…was that in the movie? I think I remember that. So Jon “Giant Spider” Peters thought that’s why it was a hit?
I will say that the fighting in that movie is a marvel of editing since it’s painfully apparent that that suit can’t bend or move at all.
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Follow-up on this - it is a very good, thorough and detailed look at Gorey’s life and published works. There may be more concise books about him, but this is most definitely recommended.
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Here and Now! The Autobiography of Pat Martino
My mother finished it, as it was sent to her house as a gift, but passed it on to me. She sung high praises about the lengthy extracts from whatever other musicians had to say about Pat Martino and his extraordinary recovery from a ruptured brain aneurysm in 1980.
She doesn’t know anything about jazz, really, but she enjoyed it a lot.
While I’ve read excerpts online, I’m enthused. Of course, I’ll give it back so she can put it among her biographies/autobiographies at her beachhouse, but in the meantime I think this is a boon.
No, I didn’t buy her the book for the sole express of me reading it, but that’s a happy accident. I’m way into quite a few other books at the moment, but I don’t mind dipping into the mind of another for a while.
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