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New information: if you’ve had a cold for a week and then your gums start hurting, when you go to the urgent care clinic and list your symptoms they will be unimpressed until you get to “gums hurting,” at which point you will be diagnosed with sinusitis and dosed with antibiotics. Talk about how I f’n love science.
Tim Seeley & Mike Norton, Revival vol. 1: You’re Among Friends: In a rural Wisconsin town, the dead have returned to life. Not as zombies, but as pretty much how they were before death. At least physically (the details of this are as yet unclear; they heal from new wounds, and one of them regrows the teeth she’d lost before death, but another still bears the scars of the attack that killed her). The whole area is quarantined until the government can figure out what happened and whether there’s any danger of it spreading. A young member of the sheriff’s department, whose murdered sister was one of the revivees, is put on the squad dealing with returnee-related crimes; so far it’s not going well. Intriguing setup, and I’m really glad they weren’t zombies.
Chip Kidd & Dave Taylor, Batman: Death by Design: Pros—some neat architectural stuff, including phallic paternocentrism and maxi-minimalism in contrast, which both look good in the comic book form (though only the former is truly Batman style). One of the adversaries, whose passion is architecture, specifically the doomed Wayne Central Terminal slated for replacement with a new structure based on the shape of a humpback whale, has some neat tricks up his sleeve, while the Joker just has tricks. Cons—standard woman in peril; also unions are the enemy of anything good. Where is the pro-union superhero? Obviously Batman doesn’t need a rep or dental insurance, but surely some of them do.
Cristin Terrill, All Our Yesterdays: Early review copy. Em’s in a secret prison, being interrogated. Then she finds a message … in her own handwriting. It tells her there’s only one choice: “You have to kill him.” Page-turning time travel story with requisite teen romance love triangle which, because of time travel, can actually have different resolutions at different times—that’s neat. The biggest flaw is that these people are too damn young for what they’re doing, though there is an attempt to lampshade that by making one a genius and the others have several rounds of time travel to give them experience—even though Em doesn’t consciously remember past loops. The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Terminator is not a bad description, though I did not like the former and I did like this because the characters often though not always rise above their teen angst bullshit and take action designed to improve the world in general.
E.C. Myers, Fair Coin: Ephraim finds a coin that seems to grant wishes when it’s flipped. But like the monkey’s paw, the wishes seem to come with a price: the world changes in other ways as well, sometimes objectively better and sometimes worse. Ephraim abuses the coin early on to make his crush Jena like him, and finds out that’s not all it’s cracked up to be (no sex ensues); meanwhile his best friend Nathan seems to be becoming more and more violent. As it turns out, the coin doesn’t exactly grant wishes, and it’s not a coin; the sf elements are used in the service of exploring the morality of being able to change the world without others knowing. Decent enough YA, though it didn’t rock my world.
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes: Yep, that about covers it. Lyrics from Saturday Night to Merrily We Roll Along, though really I’m only in it for Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the cast recording of Angela Lansbury & George Hearn so familiar to me that I can tell when that production diverged from the lyrics he puts down in the book. The man hates critics and grumps that musicals are the only art form reviewed by illiterates; at least, he says, visual art is usually reviewed by failed visual artists. For me, the interest was mostly in the musicals and not in his extensive commentary.
Tim Seeley & Mike Norton, Revival vol. 1: You’re Among Friends: In a rural Wisconsin town, the dead have returned to life. Not as zombies, but as pretty much how they were before death. At least physically (the details of this are as yet unclear; they heal from new wounds, and one of them regrows the teeth she’d lost before death, but another still bears the scars of the attack that killed her). The whole area is quarantined until the government can figure out what happened and whether there’s any danger of it spreading. A young member of the sheriff’s department, whose murdered sister was one of the revivees, is put on the squad dealing with returnee-related crimes; so far it’s not going well. Intriguing setup, and I’m really glad they weren’t zombies.
Chip Kidd & Dave Taylor, Batman: Death by Design: Pros—some neat architectural stuff, including phallic paternocentrism and maxi-minimalism in contrast, which both look good in the comic book form (though only the former is truly Batman style). One of the adversaries, whose passion is architecture, specifically the doomed Wayne Central Terminal slated for replacement with a new structure based on the shape of a humpback whale, has some neat tricks up his sleeve, while the Joker just has tricks. Cons—standard woman in peril; also unions are the enemy of anything good. Where is the pro-union superhero? Obviously Batman doesn’t need a rep or dental insurance, but surely some of them do.
Cristin Terrill, All Our Yesterdays: Early review copy. Em’s in a secret prison, being interrogated. Then she finds a message … in her own handwriting. It tells her there’s only one choice: “You have to kill him.” Page-turning time travel story with requisite teen romance love triangle which, because of time travel, can actually have different resolutions at different times—that’s neat. The biggest flaw is that these people are too damn young for what they’re doing, though there is an attempt to lampshade that by making one a genius and the others have several rounds of time travel to give them experience—even though Em doesn’t consciously remember past loops. The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Terminator is not a bad description, though I did not like the former and I did like this because the characters often though not always rise above their teen angst bullshit and take action designed to improve the world in general.
E.C. Myers, Fair Coin: Ephraim finds a coin that seems to grant wishes when it’s flipped. But like the monkey’s paw, the wishes seem to come with a price: the world changes in other ways as well, sometimes objectively better and sometimes worse. Ephraim abuses the coin early on to make his crush Jena like him, and finds out that’s not all it’s cracked up to be (no sex ensues); meanwhile his best friend Nathan seems to be becoming more and more violent. As it turns out, the coin doesn’t exactly grant wishes, and it’s not a coin; the sf elements are used in the service of exploring the morality of being able to change the world without others knowing. Decent enough YA, though it didn’t rock my world.
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes: Yep, that about covers it. Lyrics from Saturday Night to Merrily We Roll Along, though really I’m only in it for Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the cast recording of Angela Lansbury & George Hearn so familiar to me that I can tell when that production diverged from the lyrics he puts down in the book. The man hates critics and grumps that musicals are the only art form reviewed by illiterates; at least, he says, visual art is usually reviewed by failed visual artists. For me, the interest was mostly in the musicals and not in his extensive commentary.
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