Tag: #booksread2022

Vermilion by Molly Tanzer

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This entry is part 46 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. Though I’ve never been much for Westerns, Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp was a fun ride. I mean that quite literally: the audiobook entertained me while cycling around Sejong City in the dark of night.  The story  is entertainingly creepy and weird, and I was surprised how recognizable Tanzer’s voice is here, given how different the book is from the other novel of hers that I’ve read. Some of that is …

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Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

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This entry is part 45 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 don’t note every book I’ve read to my son here, but this one sort of stands out. Aside from occasionally seeing it in the newspaper, I’d never actually read Calvin & Hobbes before my son stumbled onto this volume. It was one of many I’d ended up with thanks to a nearby bookstore’s regular bulk sales of kids’ books ($30 for a box of books, I think I got him five or …

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The Sword of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers

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This entry is part 44 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 finished this particular book quite recently, though!  Unlike the previous three books in the series , The Sword of the Samurai Cat was released not as a coffee table book with copious, large, full-color illustrations, but instead as a smallish trade paperback with far fewer illustrations, all of them black-and-white. That means that where the previous books were really heavily illustrated and contained three or four novelettes, this volume (and, I assume, the later ones) are …

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Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

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This entry is part 43 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

Mira Jacob is new to me, but when I searched on Libby for graphic novels at my local library, Good Talk came up and I figured I’d give it a shot.  The book is a graphic novel, but the focus isn’t really the art. That’s not to disparage it: it’s just that this is a cut-and-paste comic, with specific drawings of the characters repeated many times throughout, something familiar from early webcomics. This is fine, though there were a few places where apparent bystanders got recycled into scenes later on, and I found myself wondering, “Wait, is that the same …

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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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