Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry

Sometimes it feels like we’re continually being hit up for money via the girls’ kindergarten.  What I don’t like about it is the sense that the school or the PTA are using the kids for fund-raising — invoking the nag factor to get us to pony up.  If they wrote directly asking if we could [...]

Torture Porn Lit

Just read Heartsick by Chelsea Cain which I picked up looking for something else because, I think, Amazon named it the top thriller of 2007.
I didn’t altogether enjoy it — it seemed derivative (of Silence of the Lambs, although it does have the wit tacitly to acknowledge the debt when the psycho killer mockingly refers [...]

Pleasure reading

A loyal Moonraking reader (thanks Judith) asked why it had been so long since I updated.  Oddly, I checked my stats and visits have been high lately despite no new updates.  Is it all random Google visits?  Who is out there?  To be honest, I think I crave more interactivity and lately have been more [...]

Asterios Polyp

Strongly recommend this new graphic novel, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.  It’s being hailed as a landmark of the genre, and I agree — it strikes me as among the best graphic novels I’ve read, along with the likes of Maus, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Ghost World, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, and I’m not sure what else [...]

Uncreative Destruction of Harvard Square

Creative destruction = Joseph Schumpeter’s account of capitalism’s dynamism based on innovation and the destruction and abandonment of the old.
I’m just the 10,001st person to complain about it in print, but Harvard Square has become an outdoor mall.  What’s distressing is not just the loss of all the old book stores, record stores, cafes and [...]

Roberto Bolano’s 2666

We’ve been in Maine in the little cabin on Long Pond for 9 days or so.  No DSL.  My cellphone stopped working in Ellsworth.  Landline went out for three days.  I finally got it together to make dial-up work.
I associate time here in Maine with reading long novels.  Last summer I read The Magic Mountain.  [...]

Juliana Hatfield memoir

I got around to reading the Juliana Hatfield memoir When I Grow Up.  I read the Dean Wareham one recently (Black Postcards) too. The two books feel like they constitute a minor wave of memoirs of 1990s semi/almost rock stardom.  Wareham (of Galaxie 500 and Luna) and Hatfield both had comparable experiences as indie stars [...]

Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander

Watched the first (of three, I believe) installment of PBS Mystery’s versions of the Henning Mankell Kurt Wallander thrillers.  Last night was Sidetracked and I think in the next two Sundays they’re doing Firewall and One Step Behind.
It wasn’t bad at all, was a creditable version, but was still mildly disappointing.  I didn’t really buy [...]

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Why do I love Swedish police procedurals?
I’ve already written here about my addiction to Henning Mankell’s novels.  I’ve recently gone back a few decades to the series that I believe inspired him, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novels (they were a married couple) from the late 1960s and 70s, which have been reissued [...]

Letdown of Ozma of Oz

We recently got through Ozma of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s 1907 followup to The Wizard of Oz.  Actually there was another book in between, The Marvelous Land of Oz, which does not feature Dorothy, but I decided we’d just pick up Dorothy’s continuing adventures.
It was a bit of a let-down.  The art is fantastic: ravishing, [...]