If I’d just seen Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, I never would have read it. First of all, the cover of the Finnish edition is hokey as hell. Bad publisher. Go to your room and think of what you’ve done. Second of all, what would you think, if you saw a book that’s just 300 odd pages about Scandinavia and Scandinavian people? Boring, right? Booth mentions very early on that many people to whom he talked about his book project […]
It’s Drafty in the Trenches, Oh
Jacques Tardi’s World War I opus, Goddamn This War!, is a hard beast to categorize, at least when using English terminology. It’s not a comic book, and for a graphic novel it’s not very novelistic. But call it what you will, it’s hard to deny its power. This is a harrowing masterpiece of one unnamed soldier’s experiences in the Great War that so wholly failed to be the war to end all wars. Things the reader won’t find in Goddamn This War! include plot and dialogue. Does […]
Just Stay Home
There are no doubt piles upon piles of books that make you want to travel, and there’s probably no shortage of books that make you want to visit Venice in particular. Then there’s Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, the book that makes you dread just the thought of Venice. Or really any travelling. After finishing this book, you will want to stay home forever, and lock all the doors to keep the outside world and its evils at bay. Mary and Colin encounter those […]
How to Survive the Unsurvivable
Reading The Shock of the Fall took me back to my early teens a little bit. Because back then, before wizard, vampires, and dystopian societies had exploded the YA market, the age-appropriate books found in my local library fell mostly into two categories: the ones with horses and the ones with problems. Sometimes the categories overlapped of course, so you’d get books with horses and problems. For a few years, after picture books and Nancy Drew, but before my brief Serious Adult Classics Only phase […]