Rated Doctor Who: Excelis Rising 7/10
<div>Very much the middle bit of the Excelis story, but still a good installment. I definitely want to keep going with it, and the Sixth Doctor is always a fun listen.</div>
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Rated The Gospel of Anarchy 8/10
To expect Taylor to devise an entire philosophy out of nothing along with the novel itself would be naïve. Expecting fiction to arrive completely out of the imagination misunderstands the act of writing. Even the most speculative or avant garde fiction hopes to connect with its readers, and readers connect when they can identify. The best fiction contains so much truth and honesty, but affords itself the benefit of creating its own facts. Taylor took an existing philosophy and manufactured a world to surround it. He lived in Gainesville between 2000 and 2004, and the description of the university town drips with humidity and rising mercury. The pressure builds in each character in a way that mimics the Florida summer. Borrowing from an existing group of people is no less valid than borrowing from an existing city.<br><br>(full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2011/07/gospel-of-anarchy-by-justin-taylor.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>)
Wants to read Kiss and Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22
Rated M Train 10/10
Loved this. Time and mourning and love and art and objects.
Rated Doctor Who: The Zygon Who Fell to Earth 8/10
The Zygons aren't necessarily my favorite (I get stressed out by the dramatic irony of their body-snatching, but that's me), but this was a good story. The Eighth Doctor is a romantic in many cases, but there are bits (like at the end of this story) that reveal some of his icier, "I know best" traits.
Rated Bog Queen 7/10
<div>The title, BOG QUEEN, is 100% what caught my attention at first (especially having read and loved The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister), and then I realized it was the next book from Anna North. I'd read and mostly enjoyed Outlawed, and I liked Bog Queen a whole lot more.<br><br>Couple of things bugged me though: Do we ever learn Bog Queen's name? Why do all the other people in the past get a name, but she doesn't? (Or if she does, why is it mentioned infrequently enough that I cannot recall?)<br><br>Also, occasionally, the chapters set in Bog Queen's time (50-ish BCE) have some dialogue anachronisms that snagged (calling someone a "weak, pathetic loser" may be accurate in feeling, but it would be phrased differently, yes?), but maybe I'm still too much in the world of Nicola Griffith's Menewood. That book is not set at the same time (600-ish CE), but there are some similarities. Both involve young women on the island eventually known as Great Britain, thrust into leadership positions and consulting with kings and trying to avoid war.<br><br>In the 2018 storyline, Agnes is an American woman who was all too ready to let the men in her life make her decisions for her, and her taking this job in England is the first time she's broken free of that. Does she come to any realizations about this? <spoiler>Not really. Instead she thinks about how it's because it's comforting to do the "easy" thing. Girl, your dad and boyfriend were plotting when you would have children! And you've never called them on it! You just went to England, found a body in a bog, and decided to get frisky with an environmental activist who seems just as "What I decide matters" as your ex! Some perspective, please!</spoiler><br><br>Still, I was invested enough in the story, even if I wanted more of the actual title character.</div>
Rated Excavation 10/10
What Wendy Ortiz’s writing does is startle me. It makes me want to at once confess and hide. Like fellow Future Tense author Chloe Caldwell, her writing makes me feel vulnerable within its truth. It’s difficult to say that I <i>loved</i> this memoir, for it’s like loving the most difficult parts of oneself. Yet, <i>Excavation</i> is indeed one of the best memoirs I’ve seen. I read along knowing that her relationship with Jeff was wrong, but I squirmed over knowing how similarly I would’ve acted in her situation. Everything I’ve read from Ortiz makes me want more, to keep poking at those wounds, to see how we both keep on living. If one must use that desire as a measure of a book’s success, then let it be so.<br><br>(My full review can be found at <a href="http://persephonemagazine.com/2014/07/book-review-excavation-by-wendy-c-ortiz/">Persephone Magazine</a>.)
Rated Magical Thinking: True Stories 8/10
Rated The Enigma of Dorian Gray 8/10
I don't play close attention to the Dorian Gray series that Big Finish does, but I always enjoy the bits and pieces I acquire during sales. This is quite good.
Rated NANO Fiction Volume 5, Number 2 8/10
Rated Duende 10/10
Tracy K. Smith is always great. I'm always glad to read her books.
Rated Doctor Who: The Wrath of the Iceni 8/10
I don't know the history enough to know how well this script's position about what happened rates, but this is a good story.
Rated Doctor Who: The Chimes of Midnight 10/10
What an audio classic. I really had to listen to so much more of the Eighth Doctor and realize the connections and references to other things to really appreciate it. A proper British Spooky Christmas Mystery that also manages to be quite funny. The story also goes back to that recurring theme in Doctor Who of, "I've never met anybody who wasn't important."
Rated Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Sun 6/10
Rated Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood 10/10
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, Martin Lemelman watched his Polish-Jewish family struggle with their new American lives running a candy shop in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Though the shop was legendary for its ice cream, egg creams and toys, the neighborhood itself was beginning its steep decline. Young Martin (or “Mattaleh,” as his parents called him) discovered his interest in art — particularly drawing — during this time, and has since made himself a career illustrating books. <i>Two Cents Plain</i> is his second graphic memoir, after <i>Mendel’s Daughter</i>, which gives a more detailed description of his parents’ childhood and escape from Nazi Poland.<br><br>Recounting his childhood and the events leading to it, Lemelman offers his own memories, the points-of-view from his family, and historical documents. His black-and-white drawings are richly detailed — almost as real as the photographs included on some pages. I really enjoyed the use of different mediums to tell the story, and I would recommend looking at the preview offered on <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781608190041">the book’s Powell’s page</a> to get a taste of the visuals.<br><br><blockquote>The moment I pressed brush to paper... Time slowed down. Minutes turned into hours. As if by magic — a face appeared on my paper, a tree, a house, a bird, a Pepsi bottle, hands... The cracked walls, dusty floors, screaming parents, worries, faded away. All I saw and felt were the marks I made on the paper.<br></blockquote><br><br>Naturally, as non-artist parents of artists are apt to do, his parents wish he’d chosen something more lucrative. “I will be happy to pay for you to go to pharmacy school,” his father says.<br><br>The tales aren’t all poverty and struggle — There are quite a few funny moments, including stories about their cat named Cat, who would attack any dog that was brought into the shop. “She always seemed to know when one was around,” he says.<br><br>There are little character sketches along the way of the other neighborhood workers — the fish man, the fruit man, etc. — and he writes his parents’ dialect well. The narrative itself isn’t perfect, but neither is memory. Lemelman gathers what he remembers most about growing up and assembles it thusly. To assemble more facts into the story when he did not personally feel any connection to them would feel inauthentic.<br><br>The only complaint I’d give is that the ending is a bit ... well, anti-climatic doesn’t feel like the right word. I suppose since the reader knows what is coming, it’s not as affecting as it could have been. I’m not exactly sure how it should be different; it’s hard to say. However, I enjoyed this book immensely, and I am now wanting to read <i>Mendel’s Daughter</i>. The artwork alone is worth the time.<br><br>(Full disclosure: I won this book through a Bloomsbury Press GoodReads giveaway. This review originally appeared on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-cents-plain-my-brooklyn-boyhood-by.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.)
Rated Doctor Who: Neverland 8/10
Good stuff. Includes Lalla Ward as Romana, ends on a cliffhanger as a lead in to the next story, Zagreus. Definitely liked this one.
Rated Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites 10/10
(A review will be forthcoming, but can I say that I am fully confident in giving this 5 stars, even though I had to give it back to the library with the last 40 pages unread? Not to worry, I will rectify that absence as soon as I get the chance.)
Rated Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere 4/10
This started out better than it ended. The title is very misleading, and I'm also not very interested in faking my way through my reading life or pretending like I've read things I haven't.