Wants to read Please Don't Be Upset and Other Stories
book
Rated Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 10/10
Excellent. Would love to see the musical.
Rated Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional 10/10
<div>I have followed Isaac Fitzgerald's literary career ever since he was an editor at The Rumpus back in the late 2000s, and it's been great to see where he's gone since then. A couple of these essays, I read wherever they were originally published, though long enough ago that I don't know whether or not they changed in any significant way. This is a great memoir, full of honest, insightful memories, and it's also interesting to see what was happening "behind the curtain," so to speak, during some of the times I was paying attention to his professional work. He's the same age as I am, so some of his childhood attitudes and memories felt very familiar, even though I did not grow up in the same area (and my childhood was considerably more stable). Like, of course you just get up to shit in the woods and are glad for only loose supervision! Of course every teen boy was obsessed with Fight Club and the Pixies after the movie came out! I definitely knew guys like the friends he describes.<br><br>Also, Zeitgeist sounds like an amazing bar.</div>
Rated One Day 10/10
One Day is an excellent book — one filled with as many funny moments as there are heart-crushing. One of the best books I've read all year.<br><br>(Full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2010/08/one-day-by-david-nicholls.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>)
Rated Just Kids 10/10
One of the best, most affecting memoirs I have ever read. Just Kids is a love story — a love story between people, a love story about art — and a story of sacrifice for what one believes is their destiny. <br><br>My full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2011/01/just-kids-by-patti-smith.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.
Rated Doctor Who: The Forgotten Army 6/10
This is definitely a Doctor Who novel that is more suited for younger readers, since it's a bit more simplistic in both plot and writing style. Tell a kid, "The Doctor is investigating a prehistoric mammoth and tiny soldiers in New York," and I'm guessing they'd be on board immediately. As an adult, I still enjoyed it well-enough. However, Minchin tried a bit TOO hard to play up the contrary parts of Amy's character, along with some of the Doctor's more common turns of phrase, and they didn't quite ring true. So, not essential reading, but not wasted time either.
Rated Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection 10/10
<div>I'd already read some of these stories in their novella form, but it was great to finally get the full collection. The story centering on Amos' origins ("The Churn") and "Strange Dogs" were probably my favorite, but they're all good.</div>
Rated Gallifrey: The Inquiry 8/10
This is very good. Romana gets to flex some Presidential Power.
Rated Motherwell: A Girlhood 8/10
<div>Sometimes the freshness of the wounds Orr still felt over her childhood cloud her perspective, but also it's understandable how she wrote this to say, "Hey, I am my own person, and here's what I've learned after a life trying to please others who imposed their own narrative about me." It is definitely also worth reading if one is looking to read about a specific time and place, '70s semi-industrial Scotland.</div>
Rated Summerland 6/10
<div>I liked it well enough to keep reading all 500 pages, but how others may feel about it depends on one's feelings about baseball. If you know nothing about the literal rules of baseball, best of luck. If you love baseball, you will love or hate the magical elements here, depending on how much this story's rules grate against your own "magic of baseball" feelings. I am a person who will go to a minor league ball game every once in a while, and someone who badly played Little League, but I almost never watch it on TV, so I suppose it's not surprising that my feelings fall somewhere in the middle.<br><br>The attempts at having certain characters speak in dialect has... mixed results. The book is from 2002, so maybe different choices would be made today.</div>
Rated The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists 10/10
<i>The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists</i> is a love letter. Canadian artist and writer Seth creates a simple world where comics are revered and treasured, and it is as lovely as a traditional sonnet. He creates a fictional world so believable that I had to do a bit of Google research to see if I'd just been ignorant of Canadian comics history. The bits of reality mixed with Seth's creations <i>feel</i> authentic, and that's all we can really ask of a good book.<br><br>(My full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2011/11/great-northern-brotherhood-of-canadian.html">Glorified Love Letters.</a>)
Rated The Minister of Chance 8/10
I feel like I need to listen to this again to really grasp what's going on, as it's a bit of a different listening experience than, say, the Doctor Who audio adventures. Maybe that's because I wasn't previously familiar with the world in which the story exists. However, all the acting is top notch, they do a lot of interesting things with the sound mixing, and I want to support the cause so that the filmed version can continue to be made.
Edited 48d ago
Rated Legs Get Led Astray 8/10
Chloe Caldwell's personal essays have a way of making me dissect my own life, whether I want to or not. I say 'me' instead of 'you' (though I bet it would be true for you too), and I am disregarding the editorial 'we.' Reading Legs Get Led Astray is not an abstraction — it is her voice and my brain having a conversation through the page. And though at times what I remembered through her past made me uncomfortable, it was only because I knew the feelings to be true. I enjoyed <i>Legs Get Led Astray</i> in the same way a song can hurt so good. Love, lust and loneliness — Over and over I say that is what I want to read and what I want to write, and this book makes me want to write.<br><br>Wrapped up in music and smells and drugs and strewn pieces of clothing, Caldwell writes from a place of longing for connection, while also yearning for distraction. Release. If you gathered all the songs she mentions throughout the book, you'd have a really good playlist. She is unafraid to admit when she's been fearful, when she's been the fuck-up, or when she judged too soon. But she also loves wholeheartedly, generously, and it's endearing. None of her stories come across like, "Hey, look at me shocking my audience!" No. She is writing to someone.<br><br>Is it you?<br><br>(My full review appears on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2012/04/legs-get-led-astray-essays-by-chloe.html">Glorified Love Letters.</a>)
Edited 48d ago
Rated The Boxcar Librarian 7/10
<div>Okay, the research seams REALLY show during the first half of the book, but the research is good, so the "Yes, girl, we can see you searched a bunch of different words for storyteller" are not too distracting. Once the story gets cooking, the "Look at me trying hard to get it right" falls away, and we're more invested in what is happening to these characters specifically. Brianna Labuskes does seem to get a lot right about Montana, despite not being from here, and it's nice to have a story that is about books and workers' rights and not forbidden romance at the ranch. For awhile, I was more invested in Alice and Collette working together, so once we switched back to Millie's point of view, had literally forgotten who she was and needed half a page or so to remember. That's kinda on me, but also, Millie's importance doesn't come to the forefront until the end.<br><br>Also, I expected there to be more queer people? Or maybe I read certain characters that way, like Sidney, and kept waiting for the reveal and... I mean, it's fine! I was just surprised.<br><br>Still, I was invested in how this all shook out. It was a little tidy for my taste, but ymmv.</div>
Rated Doctor Who and the Pirates 8/10
<div>This is a mostly very silly one that reminded me a little bit of that episode of The X-Files with the vampires (and Luke Wilson), though this involves pirates. Part 3 is a Gilbert & Sullivan-style musical, but there are touching moments throughout, including the ending. The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn remain a great pair.</div>
Rated Lawnboy 6/10
Is it fair to compare one writer to another? Is the comparison ever quite right? Blurbs for <i>Lawnboy</i> compared Paul Lisicky to [a:Michael Cunningham|1432|Michael Cunningham|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1198584594p2/1432.jpg] (<i>The Hours, A Home at The End of the World</i>, etc.), and the cover even boasted a blurb from Cunningham himself. While certainly flattering, how does Lawnboy compare?<br><br>Non-straight characters? Check.<br>Coming of age/awakening type plot? Check.<br>Complicated romance? Checkity-check-check.<br><br>But couldn’t one say this about plenty of other books? Francesca Lia Block also had these things, but <i>Wheetzie Bat</i> and <i>Lawnboy</i> and <i>The Hours</i> are three entirely different books. Then again, it’s been a little while since I’ve read Cunningham’s work. Still, there is one clear way that Lisicky and Cunningham reminded me of each other: It took me the first third of the book to really get into it. That’s not to say I spent the first third uninterested; I just questioned how much I would enjoy the whole thing. Lawnboy is divided into three parts, and by Part 2, I became much more engaged in how things turned out.<br><br>I enjoyed <i>Lawnboy</i> well enough that I will keep an eye out for Lisicky’s other work. The lingering, awestruck descriptions of physicality, and the unabashed searches for affection were enough to make me want more. It doesn’t matter whether Paul Lisicky writes anything like Michael Cunningham — Let the man stand on his own.<br><br>(Full review can be found at <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2010/07/lawnboy-by-paul-lisicky.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.)
Rated Night of the Living Rez 10/10
<div>I really loved this collection of stories that revolve around one family and their surrounding community. It's grim at times, but also funny and always interesting. It was an excellent book to read after having recently finished an Alice Munro story collection.</div>
Rated Doctor Who: Something Inside 8/10
Another "amnesia" story. Man, that whole "regenerating under anesthetic" thing is rough on a Time Lord! The brain worm seems like a precursor to the memory worm used on the show, and it's a little bit funny to hear things like, "It's the brain worm!" and take it seriously, but this is a pretty good story all the same.
Rated Doctor Who: The Deviant Strain 8/10
This was an excellent story that would have been great on screen too (though with later series' budgets), but the sentence fragments during moments of action were frustratingly bad.
Rated The Worlds of Big Finish 9/10
<div>I do like a Big Finish crossover and this one is better than most.</div>