Category: REVIEWS

The Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers

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I first read this book as a teenager: I think my mother found it among the remaindered books at a local bookstore and brought it home for me, as she had so many other books I fondly remember. It’s gonzo parody featuring a samurai cat named Miaowara Tomokato adventuring as he avenges the death of his master—accompanied, at times, by his homicidal little nephew Shiro.  The world of these books—it’s a series—is a patchwork jumble of pop/geek culture franchises and canonic works tossed it into a blender with Norse mythology and Japanese history, except with (a few) anthropomorphic cats. It …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXI

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This entry is part 56 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. Well, here we are, folks, at the final Adams Canto! It’s taken some time, but the coronavirus outbreak has …

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Recent Books (More Recenter Books Edition)

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So, here’s some stuff I’ve read lately… It’s a lot of what I’ve read so far in 2006, at least since my last book post. Since I typically are working my way slowly through any five books at once, these posts tend to come slowly, and to have a lot in them when they do come, so I’m including just fiction here. I’ll put up a second post, a bit later, with the  nonfiction stuff in it.  Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan I picked up this book in Los Angeles, and I’m very glad I did.  A creepy …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos LXIX and LXX

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This entry is part 55 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. This is my second post on the Cantos after returnint to them following an eight month break. I do …

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Recent Reads: Troubadour Verse Edition

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Though I was inspired to return to Provençal verse by a game—one run by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert—I’ve been interested in Occitan culture and literature for a long time. Honestly, it was kind of dumb luck, because reading Pound had reawakened in my a craving to return to old Occitanian song and verse, and when I realized I hadn’t read any a decade or so, I decided to get my hands on some. Fortunately for my bank account, a request for a branch loan at school worked out and I got both of the books I asked for: Meg Bogin’s …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXVIII

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This entry is part 54 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. This is my first post on the Cantos in eight months. I do hope to finish the Adams Cantos …

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Recent Books (Recenter Books Edition)

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Since the end of November last year, I’ve done three things relevant to my reading: … struggled to get over a bad cold. … cut back on using social network sites (and especially cut back on wading into arguments with idiots). … made an effort to spend more time reading books instead of internet glop. The first was both involuntary and unpleasant, but has definitely helped with the latter two endeavours, which in contrast were a concerted effort (and were, obviously, quite linked to one another). On the other hand, I also traveled, which usually takes a bite out of …

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Reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Moon Trilogy: The Moon Maid, The Moon Men, and The Red Hawk

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Well, the next in the set of Edgar Rice Burroughs books I’ve tackled are his Moon stories. The series consists of one novel (The Moon Maid) and two sequel novellas (“The Moon Men” and “The Red Hawk”), the latter of which Ace published together under the title The Moon Men. I read the former in late 2018, and the latter just today, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on the whole series: the lunar adventure and romance, the pulp war stories, and the inevitable weird racial fantasy of postapocalyptic cowboy-and-Indians-and-moon-men and all. Oh, and naked Japanese hill-pygmy warriors.  Yeah, …

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Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest

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See that image above? That’s a map of heavily populated places where, by 2050, it’s estimated mass flooding is very likely to occur on a yearly basis by 2050. (It’s taken from here.) The relevance to this book review will be clear, if you read on.  I will start by saying that I wrote this long reflection on what is ultimately an obscure novel about a refugee crisis in Britain back in November, when illness forced me to rest for a couple of days and I finally read it after having it around for literally decades and never having gotten …

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Reading The Gaean Reach RPG

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I’m somewhat familiar with the Gumshoe RPG system: I’ve played a short campaign of Trail of Cthulhu, and skimmed several core rulebooks using the system—Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Ashen Stars, and Cthulhu Confidential, all of which I own copies—but I haven’t had a chance to read any of those rulebooks in full or run a Gumshoe system game. In fact, until recently the only Gumshoe gamebook I’d actually read in full was Gareth Ryder Hanrahan’s Lorefinder book, which essentially is an extended Gumshoe hack designed to be bolted onto Pathfinder (and other D&D-styled traditional RPGs), in order to …

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