Asterios Polyp

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Really pushes the boundaries of the graphic novel by expressing memory and emotion through color and form. While the plot/story line isn't enthralling, the characters are people you'd like to know, if only to avoid them, and the drama is enough to make you cringe.

4.5/5

Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled Frank Miller and Geof Darrow
Um. Action-packed robot violence without much explanation. Basically the world is set up, you get tossed around in it for a while, then it's over. I understand it's meant to be a series but as a stand-alone book it doesn't do much other than shock. I'll give it a high score because the art is superb.

4/5

30 hrs later - Hard Boiled is still with me. It's haunting the edges of my conversations. It has entered my dreams.

Ida by Gertrude Stein

Ida by Gertrude Stein is difficult to tackle with words. While much of it captured the human condition/being a woman, much of it missed. Stein is so hard to like or dislike. So many of the sentences miss while the ones that strike, strike hard. It is tiring to read once you stop but enthralling while you're in it. Maybe I'm on too much cough medicine. Maybe Stein is elusive. Probably both.

4.5/5

My Favorite Books Ever

Top Five
- Lolita Nabokov
- Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera
- Catcher in the Rye Salinger
- Slaughterhouse 5 Vonnegut
- Wuthering Heights Bronte

Honorable Mentions
- Grendel Gardner
- American Gods Gaiman
- Lève Ta Jambe Mon, Poisson Est Mort! Doucet
- Woman in White Collins

Flight Vol. 2

Flight Volume 2 was just sitting on the graphic novel shelf at work waiting to be read. And read it I did. While not every short-story comic compilation can appeal to everyone, this book was full of adorable, heart wrenchingly wonderful stories. There aren't too many words in most of them making it a quick read. I recommend it to anyone who likes anything.

5/5

Good Omens by Gaimen and Pratchett

The first 90 pages I was confused. In many parts after I was confused. Perhaps it is because I am an American. Perhaps it is because it didn't make any sense. I don't know. The funny parts were funny and the story overall was interesting to read. I wouldn't take back the fact that I've read the book but I probably wouldn't read it again. Maybe I've just come to expect too much from Neil.
3/5

Grendel by John Gardner

December, approaching the year's darkest night, and the only way of the dream is down and through it.
The trees are dead.
The days are an arrow in a dead man's chest. Snowlight blinds me, heartless fire; pale apocalyptic. The creeks are frozen; the deer show their ribs.
I find dead wolves- a paw, a scraggly tail sticking up through snow.
The trees are dead, and only the deepest religion can break through time and believe they'll revive.

And so it goes, on and on poetically heartbreaking, gut wrenching, philosophy questioning prose. John Gardener's Grendel is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. He takes the oldest, most monsterous monster of history (Beowulf's Grendel) and narrates his psychological transfiguration through time, his observances of man's futility, and contemplations of his own strange existence. He never apologizes for what he is though he is tormented by his separation from the on-goings in the meadhalls. It becomes easy to despise the efforts of mankind, especially through the dragons viewpoint.

The dragon has a Tralfamadorian sense of time and knows all that is to come as well as all that has happened. The dragon knows of his own death and tells Grendel of the men he scares, "You improve them! You stimulate them! You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last.... you are mankind, or man's condition." It goes without saying that I freaking love the dragon. I cannot wait to read more of Gardner's work.

6/5