In which I chat about reading Dr. Brinkley's Tower in a single day. (You can't build a tower that quickly, but you can read about it.) Admittedly, I shuffled this volume amongst my stack of current reads for weeks before I started reading. (There is always a book in there that
Jeff Lemire's style is immediately recognizable. The colours are sombre, earthy. Faces are often smudged with shadow. Sometimes entire pages appear to be shadowed. The lines are raw, sometimes inexact. Details in the background are sometimes perfectly drawn, like expertly squared tiles, and other times they are hasty cross-hatchings, a
No need to wonder whether you fit in this novel: Harriet Baxter is speaking directly to you, Reader. Even before the novel has properly begun, she is saying "Reader, if you wonder -- as I suspect you may..." Even though you weren't wondering yet. And, on the next page, she
We want that "paradoxical search for familiarity combined with strangeness; want more of the same – but with a difference," says Victor Watson in Reading Series Fiction. Watson's book considers series written for children, but it still applies, doesn't it? There's nothing like reading a series. Robert Kirkman's The Walking
The stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are so consistently good that I almost didn't want to read them. Beginning Megan Mayhew Bergman's collection, I had no expectations. She's been much-anthologized, and has a nice list of publishing credits, but that doesn't guarantee a good match between
