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Seaguy by Grant Morrison My rating: 3 of 5 stars Thanks to all my regular readers who come here in search of slightly more traditional essays on the "classics," however defined, for holding on tight through my now year-long re-reading of comic-book writer Grant Morrison. My own perhaps too hasty disparagement of Morrison in my… Continue reading Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart, Seaguy
Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus by Alan Moore My rating: 4 of 5 stars In the 1980s, Alan Moore, the most celebrated writer in the history of mainstream Anglophone comics, made his name by telling the same story four times. In Miracleman, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen, a commanding male figure, superior of intellect… Continue reading Alan Moore, Miracleman
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood My rating: 3 of 5 stars Some books are so famous, so ubiquitous in the culture, that you feel you have read them well before you ever read them. You feel, in fact, that you don't need to read them. This is what kept me from reading The Handmaid's… Continue reading Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Ice by Anna Kavan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Jonathan Lethem begins his introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of this 1967 novel, "Anna Kavan's Ice is a book like the moon is the moon. There is only one." Luckily, as he goes on he outgrows this meaningless blurb-babble (blurble?) and suggests Kavan's… Continue reading Anna Kavan, Ice
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro My rating: 5 of 5 stars Never Let Me Go is a contemporary realist novel about a friendship and eventual love triangle among three former students of an exclusive boarding school; the novel traces the effects of their childhood and adolescence on their adult experiences as they re-enter… Continue reading Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
A good, thought-provoking short essay by Christian Lorentzen. I disagree with his interpretation of Blade Runner 2049, though, which he sees as schmaltzy and simplistic. I certainly had problems with it—too slow; too lugubrious; too much spectacle and not enough story; at times while watching it I worried that "2049" might designate not the year… Continue reading A Note on Blade Runner 2049
The Road by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Road, like many other novels in the broad speculative tradition from ancient utopias to modern science fiction, designs a whole fictional world around the expression of a single thesis. Cormac McCarthy hints at this thesis when his nameless protagonist, sick with fever during… Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, The Road
