Category: BOOKS & AUTHORS

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje

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This entry is part 42 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

Long ago, a friend in Montreal with whom I’ve lost touch gave me a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a favorite author. I read it and enjoyed it, though it didn’t turn me into a fan. Still, I kept it since it was a gift from a friend. I no longer have the book—it was donated to a symphony booksale fundraiser in my hometown, when my mother moved house recently—but I have a different copy here, collected in a sort of not-quite omnibus of Ondaatje’s earlier work. The omnibus, from 1997, contains The Collected Works of Billy …

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Embassytown by China Miéville

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This entry is part 48 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts get published with some lag. I’m trying to be more punctual, though, and this one’s very recent. I’ve had the audiobook for Embassytown in my Audible account for quite a long time now, but I’ve been off audiobooks for quite a long time. These days, I’ve driving more than I used to, so I’ve had the chance to listen to a few. I’m not sure this is the best medium for the novel—it has a lot of neologisms, and I didn’t catch the implied meaning of a few of them—but …

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The Planetbreaker’s Son by Nick Mamatas

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This entry is part 41 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with earlier posts in this series, I’m publishing this some time after reading the book.  The Planetbreaker’s Son is another of the PM Press Outspoken Authors series. As I’ve said before, that series hasn’t let me down before.  Mamatas’ contribution to the series contains the usual mix of fiction and nonfiction plus an interview by Terry Bisson.  “The Planetbreaker’s Son” is a wild story of life, well, “life,” in a post-Singularity spaceship with a bunch of digital personalities: some uploaded, some rebuilt simulacra based on the memories of the uploaded, and some generated onboard. Except it’s really about family …

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The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ron Pattison

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This entry is part 40 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Supposedly, I read this book a few years ago… but I don’t really remember doing so. Perhaps that’s the result of sleep-deprivation, since the time when I (supposedly) read it, my son was very young. In any case, I thought I’d get a refresher on English beers, and this fall I might brew up a few of them.  I’m without the two brewing books I used to find most useful and/or inspiring while planning out my brewing, what that was a more frequent pursuit: Ray Daniels’ Designing Great …

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Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason

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This entry is part 39 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Mammoths of the Great Plains is a volume from PM Press’s wonderful Outspoken Authors series, of which I’ve read a few others—and have at least one or two more waiting to be read. Everything else I’ve read from the series has been excellent, and I really enjoyed Arnason’s Hidden Folk, plus my friend Justin praised it a few years back, so I was eager to give it a try.  The book contains three pieces, and only one of them (the title story) is fiction. That story is one …

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Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig

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This entry is part 38 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this quite a while after finishing the book. Despite having gotten a decent foundation in classical music theory, and some jazz theory of the sort a young improvisor learns, I never managed to find a good source for horn arrangements. A while back, I was inputting an arrangement I did for jazz quintet and orchestra (meaning classical orchestra), when I realized that I didn’t know much about how one goes about actually doing proper jazz arrangements, especially the kind of classic block chords used in sax soli, horn section arrangements, and stuff like that. Not that …

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Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavić, translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić

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This entry is part 37 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway. (I read this in August.) The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is a very strange book. I guess I’d sum it up as dueling untrustworthy historical accounts by three sources, one from each of the religions of the book, about the Khazar people. The idea is that the accounts were compiled hundreds of years after whatever actually happened with the Khazars, and those compiled accounts have been translated and edited by a modern scholar. So you have a bunch of points of view, …

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Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure& Folk Magic From Appalachia by Jake Richards

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This entry is part 36 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Backwoods Witchcraft is kind of a memoir of Appalachian folk magic. This is the second book by Richards I’ve given a look. The first—Doctoring the Devil—was more recent, but also not particularly interesting to me: it’s more of a highly organized magical cookbook than a cultural history, and not the sort of thing I was really after.   Unfortunately, Backwoods Witchcraft ends up feeling a bit like a less-well-organized stream-of-consciousness magical …

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Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan

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This entry is part 35 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle.  This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to.  The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …

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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

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This entry is part 34 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this at some point weeks after reading the book. This one, I was happy to run across by chance in as an available ebook on the National Library website.  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a multigenerational memoir of her family’s experiences—of the history of Vietnam (both during the colonial era and the Vietnam War)—and of their emigration to America, and how the past reverberates through the present, how the further past reverberates through the more recent past.  It’s pretty inspiring that she decided to learn how to draw comics in order to write …

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