Monster
Trial novel meets
screenplay. Young black man, called a
monster by the law.
reviewdate:
Feb 2 2009
isn:
978-0-06-440731-1
Tagged with highly recommended
Syndicate Product #14: Syndicate Consumption 2008
This is A.j. Michel's log of her year's reading (books, comics, and zines), listening, and television and movie watching. I've thought of trying to chronicle more than just my reading, but have been too daunted. A.j., who I believe is a card-carrying but non-practicing librarian, is geekarifically organized and precise, and she provides a fair use statement to justify her inclusion of the occasional zine excerpt.
I recommend this zine to anyone looking for things to read, listen to, and watch, but it's especially appropriate if you have a serious comics jones and like your science fiction okay. Since I'm seriously challenged when it comes to music, I can't be trusted to characterize her taste, but I think indie would cover it, though perhaps too broadly.
Quotations:
Much like WALL*E debating where to place the spork he collected (With forks? With spoons?*), deciding how to arrange this consumption log was fraught with struggle. Should it be arranged by type of media consumed or by date it was consumed? If by type, where do graphic novels go - books or comics? What about graphic novels that are collections of previously published comic issues? Is watching a movie on DVD the same as watching it in a movie theater? What about movies on broadcast television or cable? Are television episodes on DVD still television? --inside cover
*After some deliberation, WALL*E placed the spork between the individual containers holding the fork and spoon collections.
(You can tell it's not "chick lit" because the cover does not feature a disembodied female body part, and isn't a pink hue.) p.16-17
reviewdate:
Jan 27 2009
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Parfait, 2 and 3
If you love books and/or zines and/or fashion analysis and/or fancy binding and/or letter press and/or library search results and/or math theory and/or French films and literature and/or Red Pandas and/or original illustrations and/or cookie recipes and/or whatever other crazy things are competing to get out of book artist Emily K. Larned's head and fingers, then you will find something to go gaga over in her zine series Parfait.
I must warn you that the following review is as gushy a thing as I have ever written. If the idea of my blasé self losing control like that makes you uncomfortable, do not read on!
Quotations:
When we're not ambivalent, how staggeringly particular we can be. #2, 2005, p. 76.
At the very same booksale you also bought Madame Bovary. You love this book. It is due for a reread. But then upon close inspection later, you find that this edition was "edited" by the translator! Jesus. There's five critical essays tacked onto the end in addition to the lengthy introduction and yet the translator actually took AWAY from the original text? Oh, I'm sorry, did YOU Mr. Translator labour seven hours a day on one paragraph like our pal Gustave? You didn't? Then don't fucking EDIT his work.
You become really rather irrationally upset about this. Like it was morally wrong of these books to be donated to the library booksale so some poor soul such as yourself would buy these lousy editions, ignorant of their inauthenticity. Like, no doubt the person who originally owned these books was duped by them too, and so got rid of them by donation. When in fact you kind of feel like they should have been THROWN OUT. They're broken. They're malfunctioning books. So you're going to throw them out, right? If that is what you think their deserved fate to be? Trash? Book in trash? Um, gosh. Of course not. You'll just donate them... to the Salvation Army. What sort of horrible person would throw out a book? #3, 2007, p. 67
reviewdate:
Jan 16 2009
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recommendation:
Given Day, the
This book was recommended to me by a friend who got so absorbed in reading it, that she called in sick to work to finish it. Since it's 702 pages long, I might have appreciated some more concentrated reading time, as well. I liked the book, where the central plot element is the labor dispute between the Boston Police Department and the city in 1919, pretty well, but was not quite as in love with it as my friend.
Quotations:
Danny didn't know a soul who had taken the Prohibition bills seriously, even when they'd made it to the floor of the House. It seemed impossible, with all the other shifts going on in the country's fabric, that these prim, self-righteous "don't dos" had a chance. But one morning the whole country woke up to realize that not only did the idiots have a chance, they had a foothold. Gained while everyone else paid attention to what had seemed more important. p.72
"Have you ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?" p.75
"The preliminary suspicions that the molasses tank explosion was a terrorist act have been a boon for us. Simply put, this country is sick of terror."
"But the explosion wasn't a terrorist act."
"The rage remains." Finch chuckled. "No one is more surprised than us. We thought the rush to judgment over the molasses flood had killed us. Quite the opposite. People don't want truth, they want certainty." He shrugged. "Or the illusion of it." p.491
reviewdate:
Jan 24 2009
isn:
978-0-688-16318-1
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Sister Safety Pin
The book starts out with Melany, a seventeen-year-old punk sleeping with a woman for the first time. You travel with her as she overcomes her shyness about her sexuality, her trying to reconcile punk with the hippie and new age lesbian scene, getting dumped, sleeping with her roommate, doing civil disobedience in an ACT UP era protest, and finally falling in love with the right person.
Quotations:
...I asked the woman who worked there about the music she was playing. She said it was "women's music"--music by, for, and about lesbians--and played me a couple of songs from the most popular records. I didn't like anything. I kept waiting for it to start. It wasn't punk, and I was depressed about my chances of ever achieving real lesbian consciousness. Finally, I bought a Holly Near record just to stop feeling stupid.
There were T-shirts on the wall behind the desk, like a Dykes on Bikes shirt which, I swear, almost weep right there in the store. At the last minute, I asked the woman to throw in a purple Fesbian-Leminist T-shirt. I clutched the paper bag between my knees on the motorcycle seat in front of me.
I put on my T-shirt when I got home and wandered around the apartment listening to Holly Near. Todd wasn't there, and I turned it way up, hoping to make it sound better. I played it at 78rpm and tried to pogo to it. It just didn't work. p. 33-34
reviewdate:
Jan 17 2009
isn:
1-56341-050-8