Smartest Tuck Megatransect
Jan. 17th, 2010 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouTuck, by Stephen R. Lawhead
I thought this book had gone off the rails but then I realized it was just that I like Lawhead (at least recent Lawhead) *much much better* when his characters are actually interacting and I'm not just reading pages and pages of GGK-style-plot-description-cum-faux-history. 'Cause he's not very good at that, at all. But the bits where people were actually doing stuff were entirely serviceable - though the bad French spoken by the purportedly Norman characters was kind of wince-worthy throughout. (I actually found myself trying to justify it in various ways as having to be a deliberate effect, but I couldn't come up with an explanation I could buy into.) Definitely not my favorite of his books. On the upside, I now have closure for the trilogy AND they excerpted the first book of an old series of his, The Paradise War, in the back. It seems like it might be my cup of tea, and I somehow never got around to reading it when I was on my Lawhead kick in high school. Yay!
(13/200)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
When I first started this book I was very enthused about the art, but I hated the story. Somewhere along the way the story won me over, but that meant I didn't pay as much attention to the art. Weird, huh? Anyway, it went from an awful book to a nifty book as I read it, so if you don't have patience for reading stuff you hate, you may want to avoid it. But if you like art and are willing to resent the writing to get the art, recommended. Or maybe I'm just a surly old curmudgeon who doesn't know what she's talking about.
(14/200)
Mike Fay's Megatransect Journals, by Mike Fay, photographs by Mike "Nick" Nichols
Very very interesting. It was a pain trying to puzzle out Fay's handwriting from the journal pages but I recommend doing so, as the excerpted caption-y quotes don't contain some of the stuff I was most intrigued by. I kind of wish there had been a "here are all the journals and we only took out the odd thing that was too personal" general transcription of everything, rather than a coffee-table book version that had more pictures than journal - but the pictures are excellent, and I suspect most people who were willing to shell out the hundred and fifty smackeroons for the set of this & the larger more photo-focused Nichols book would prefer this version to my imaginary version. C'est la vie. Anyway, it's lovely and fascinating and the picture of Mike Fay sitting and brooding in the rain is some kind of iconographic This Is A Field Scientist Here portrait for the ages, I tell you what.
(15/200)
I thought this book had gone off the rails but then I realized it was just that I like Lawhead (at least recent Lawhead) *much much better* when his characters are actually interacting and I'm not just reading pages and pages of GGK-style-plot-description-cum-faux-history. 'Cause he's not very good at that, at all. But the bits where people were actually doing stuff were entirely serviceable - though the bad French spoken by the purportedly Norman characters was kind of wince-worthy throughout. (I actually found myself trying to justify it in various ways as having to be a deliberate effect, but I couldn't come up with an explanation I could buy into.) Definitely not my favorite of his books. On the upside, I now have closure for the trilogy AND they excerpted the first book of an old series of his, The Paradise War, in the back. It seems like it might be my cup of tea, and I somehow never got around to reading it when I was on my Lawhead kick in high school. Yay!
(13/200)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
When I first started this book I was very enthused about the art, but I hated the story. Somewhere along the way the story won me over, but that meant I didn't pay as much attention to the art. Weird, huh? Anyway, it went from an awful book to a nifty book as I read it, so if you don't have patience for reading stuff you hate, you may want to avoid it. But if you like art and are willing to resent the writing to get the art, recommended. Or maybe I'm just a surly old curmudgeon who doesn't know what she's talking about.
(14/200)
Mike Fay's Megatransect Journals, by Mike Fay, photographs by Mike "Nick" Nichols
Very very interesting. It was a pain trying to puzzle out Fay's handwriting from the journal pages but I recommend doing so, as the excerpted caption-y quotes don't contain some of the stuff I was most intrigued by. I kind of wish there had been a "here are all the journals and we only took out the odd thing that was too personal" general transcription of everything, rather than a coffee-table book version that had more pictures than journal - but the pictures are excellent, and I suspect most people who were willing to shell out the hundred and fifty smackeroons for the set of this & the larger more photo-focused Nichols book would prefer this version to my imaginary version. C'est la vie. Anyway, it's lovely and fascinating and the picture of Mike Fay sitting and brooding in the rain is some kind of iconographic This Is A Field Scientist Here portrait for the ages, I tell you what.
(15/200)
