Reviews and Comments

Struggled to finish this one. I read that it was made into a couple of movies, which makes sense, because it's as much a police procedural as anything I've seen on the screen. Ups and downs with that, I think — the titular murder mystery is a vehicle for cultural and bureaucratic encounters, but it's a slow-moving beast. Back cover blurbs make it out to be a page-turner, but I struggled.

Lots to recommend here if you're interested Japanese (or maybe Tokyo-specific?) family and institutional hierarchies, less so if you're looking for a crime story that hooks with plot.

A portrait of doomed lovers. I read this a while back, and my memories of it are ink-washed rather than photorealistic. Romance, tragedy, magic, and an alien world that first looks like sword-and-sorcery dustbowl but which upon deep reading opens into something much weirder. All written in a singular voice that flows between archaic and musical, as if the rap styling of 20th/21st C Earth were a foundational rhetoric for language in the far future.

An unparalleled history of roleplaying, from war simulations through modern ttrpgs. Plenty of digressions into topics like measuring fictional distances, the origin(s) and meaning(s) of the term 'orc,' hobby zine production and distribution, etc — overstuffed, if anything, but a delight for those who would enjoy opening every drawer in a cabinet of wonders.

Utopia Avenue is disappointing. Not just because it's another lackluster outcome from an incredibly talented author, but because I want to agree with Mitchell's central thesis: that styles and genres (naturalism! fantasy! character sketch! superheroes!) can coexist harmoniously, or even benefit from jostling up against one another.

As I write this, something occurs to me: it's not that Mitchell has a hard time welding the natural and real onto the pulp fantasy, but that his fantastical world-building isn't up to the task. He's writes remarkable and sensitive inner lives, but his dueling groups of magical immortals in whose hands lie the fate of the world are a snooze.

As the title suggests, 'Detail in typography' is primarily concerned with what's seen on close inspection. But this focus on the macro (and specifically on the empty spaces within individual strokes, characters, words, and lines) is a better introduction to the fundamentals of typography and typesetting than anything else I've come across.

Probably the best modern book about letters and writing. Noordzij's basic premise is that the letterform is not the shape's outline but the stroke itself — that letters are fundamentally written. In my reading, this liberates typography from being merely seen, and returns it to something that is experienced. Maybe that's grandiose? It's currently out of print, and though PDFs can be easily found the book itself is a delight to read and hold, and worth tracking down.

The same banal story — a person gets on a bus, witnesses a fight, sees one of the participants later that day — repeatedly told using different stylistic forms. Past tense, future tense, haiku, free verse, rhyming slang, "permutations by Groups of 2, 3, 4, and 5 letters," etc. It's fun! And an excellent gift for any young writer, designer, game maker, etc.

This is listed with a recent pub date, but the original text is from 1947, with the English edition translated by Barbara Wright in 1958. New exercises, most by the original author, were added in 2013.

Book's okay, with a plot that chugs along and some fun character design and costuming, but it's just so in love with its own voice. Narrator and descriptive text are both arch, clever, "cussy!", and devoid of anything human. As review title suggests, we have yet to escape Buffy.

Very specific in tone. Unforgettable narrator. Extremely well-written, almost to an unnecessary degree (the prosaic is often described in the poetic, which can grate). But it's an achievement, with a plot full of sucker punches.