I’ve had this book for a while but only started (and finished!) reading it this year. I was looking for a quick read, and there this was. Interworld didn’t disappoint, because I finished it in a day. On top of being a quick read, it was engaging and interesting enough.
For a story that deals with multiple dimensions (among other things), though, I found it quite short. Maybe it’s the nerd in me, but I wanted to know a lot about the mechanics of the “interworld” and Gaiman’s and Reaves’ own interpretation of the multiverse.
It was a great read, though. I was hooked on it, but it definitely opened doors for interest in and questions about the characteristics and motivations of the two camps that were after “Walkers,” individuals who harness the power to walk through dimensions, which our hero—Joey Harker—apparently is. It definitely has the potential to be something that has a rich lore and history, and I think that’s the only main disappointment I have with this book; that there wasn’t a deep discussion of the ins and outs of this world they’ve created.
On the whole, it was a great (if tiny) adventure, and I enjoyed being a part of it.
I first learned of this novel through a tweet by John Green, celebrating the fifth year since its publication. I have a soft spot for YA and I decided to Google Sara Zarr’s “Story of a Girl,” because one of my favorite authors praised it to high heavens and even knew its birthday. When I read the synopsis, I knew I had to check it out. I found it right away and read it quickly. At 192 pages, with a riveting story and an endearing, honest character, it wasn’t really hard to do.
Deanna Lambert wants to skip town and live away from her family. Seems like a typical coming-of-age angst, but the hurt runs much deeper than the average story. See, Deanna Lambert is a sixteen-year-old girl, given a title of “school slut” for having been caught by her father having sex in the backseat of a Buick when she was thirteen. For the next three years, she has been trying (and failing) to come to terms with what she’d done, and to make other people forget about the girl they all thought she was.
We meet Deanna in the summer, where she tries to get a job so she can save up enough money to get out of a damaging home life. She also deals with her self-worth, and thinks of whether or not she deserves better than what she’s getting. “Story of a Girl” tells of how someone so broken and hopeless tries to make sense of things and then tries to move on, even when it seems that no one will let her.
Because of her “past” (if you can call being thirteen that, at sixteen), Deanna has harbored a deep-seated fear that no one will love her the way that she wanted to be loved. There is this fear of nobody choosing her for her, of never seeing her behind the taint of a label that had very flimsy truth to it. Often she talks about declarations, and how nobody ever “declares” her to be theirs:
“What did it feel like, I wondered, to be kissed like that right out in public? Not like some passionate tongue-wrestling thing, just a kiss to declare: We are each other’s. I’ve never been kissed like that, not by Tommy or anyone else. No one had declared me his, not for the world to see, anyway.
And it might sound a little trite, but it’s the little things like this that almost forbids Deanna from moving on: “I should have gotten up, slid into the booth next to her and put my arms around her, hugging her the way she hugged me every time she saw me. [...] I couldn’t be that person, somehow, no matter how much I wanted to. She was inside me; I could see her and picture her, hear her. But who was I to be her? I was Deanna Lambert, eighth-grade slut forever; Tommy’s funny story; my dad’s biggest embarrassment.”
Speaking of being an embarrassment to her father—the narration of the crumbling relationship with her father was one of the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read. I can understand his situation; imagine catching your thirteen-year-old daughter having sex with your son’s seventeen-year-old’s best friend in the backseat of the car! I understand the pain and the hurt, yes, but I don’t understand his response to Deanna. The withdrawal and anger that he kept on drawing out, and the resentment that he allowed to consume him. Somewhere in the middle of the story, where her father draws near to her, she felt a pang of pain and missing.
“I got this strong feeling of missing him, like he was someone who I loved who had died and gone away, someone who was mostly a memory. I wanted to grab him and say okay, I was sorry about Tommy, it was a stupid mistake and I knew I’d hurt him and I wish I hadn’t. Because I did love him. I did. [...] That’s what I figured out that day while he yelled at me. That as much as I’d let him down, he’d let me down, too… He was the dad, he was my dad. That’s when I had to make myself stop loving him. I had to stop remembering the way he used to be, the way we used to be, because if I kept thinking about the old dad every time I looked at him, it would never stop hurting.
Though she had a friend in Jason (one she’s had since she was a kid), she knew she never really belonged to him either, because of Lee, a relatively newcomer in their joint lives who also happens to be Jason’s girlfriend. Lee is a good person, which annoys Deanna because she can’t find a fault in her, something to hate her for. Next to Lee, Deanna feels like a mess, a failure, and ultimately, a bad person.
Zarr crafts a story that is admirable, in that there is no “victim”-blaming (she asked for it—not allowed in this story!), and also no excusing the actions of someone younger just because the older person “should have known better.” It is deeply realistic, always with an outpouring of emotions that are all too real—magnified versions of the self-deprecation and worthlessness that we sometimes fall into. Zarr creates a safe environment in Deanna for people who feel this way to be truly honest with themselves, and to confront these feelings and be told that it’s okay to feel that way, but that it will also get better.
“It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I’m sorry, to say it’s okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then… and then. Who knew?”
There are a number of books I wish I had read earlier in life and “The Hobbit” is one such book. Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Tolkien’s world by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and have since tried to read the books that started it all. So far, I have finished “The Fellowship of the Ring,” about a third of “The Two Towers,” and fifty pages of “The Silmarillion.” And though I respect Tolkien for the excellent display of creativity and imagination, as well as his word-wieldy ways, in these books, it is in “The Hobbit” that I saw the care he gave his characters and how dear stories and adventures are to his heart.
¹ An introduction to hobbits can be found in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, which endeared me to them quite unexpectedly.
“The Hobbit” follows one Bilbo Baggins, a respectable hobbit who lives in a nice little hobbit-hole under-hill in the West. As everyone knows, hobbits, including Bilbo, are a peaceful folk¹, who like being left alone with their ale, food, and pipe-weed. One afternoon, Bilbo’s peace and quiet were disturbed by the wise wizard, Gandalf, and a gang of dwarves recruiting him for a treasure hunt.
With the job description of a “burglar,” Bilbo encounters mountain trolls, goblins, a slimy creature called Gollum, a terrifying but extraordinary creature named Beorn, a perfectly forest, as well as a lot of other wonders and misfortunes.
“The Hobbit” is arguably a children’s book, and the writing style is frankly more accessible and easy to read than my other ventures into Tolkien. I think it was written with that intention—to craft an exciting tale instead of just an account of events—and this makes me love it all the more. A friend and Tolkien-fan, Ching, said that this was the Tolkien work that had the most heart, and although quite new to everything, I would have to agree.
² A chapter I particularly enjoyed was the fifth called, “Riddles in the Dark,” which was full of suspense and was evidence of Tolkien’s excellence as a wordsmith.
It was an absolute page-turner² and a dream to read. Bilbo and his band of dwarves (Thorin Oakenshield, Balin, Dwalin, Bofur, Gloin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Bifur, and Bombur) went out one mishap into another and each time they emerged to be a little wiser and stronger and braver. It was clearly Bilbo’s story though, and it was such a joy to see him change and evolve into someone not quite so “hobbit-y”—for hobbits are generally predictable—but someone a million times better.
The thing of it is, is that “The Hobbit” is a tale for bravery, even in the face of dark times, even if you are so very small that people forget to respect you. Throughout this adventure, Bilbo is constantly underestimated, because of his size, until, of course he learned how to prove everybody—including himself—wrong.
“‘Well done! Mr. Baggins!’ he said, clapping Bilbo on the back. ‘There is always more about you than anyone expects!’ It was Gandalf.”
“The Elvenking looked at Bilbo with a new wonder. ‘Bilbo Baggins!’ he said. ‘You are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it.’”
And I felt my heart swell every time the big folk look at the hobbit with a twinkle in their eyes and a surprise coating their tongue, because they see Bilbo for what he truly is: a brave soul that endured so much, despite his lack of inclination for adventurous things, and despite being so small. A favorite passage: “Gandalf looked at him. ‘My dear Bilbo!’ he said. ‘Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’”
And when it all wound down to an ending, I found myself crying because the adventure had to end, and I had to leave Bilbo and all the others. It was a weird experience for me, as I had not felt so moved by a book, at least close to tears, in such a long time.
It was certainly a long and tiring journey, but one that I would take again, if I had somebody like Bilbo Baggins to take it with.
Passages I would like to remember:
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
“Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to take more than hobbit’s care to make no sound, he crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago.”
“It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.”
“‘Never laught at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!’” he said to himself, and it became a favorite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. “You aren’t nearly through this adventure yet.”
I read this book on my new Kindle, which I will review one of these days. Some of the passages, I have saved on it and decided against posting. I love it, too, because it can display images such as these runes, and this rather beautiful illustration of Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls.
I loved Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and I was so sad when the final book “The Last Olympian” was released. Did that mean that it was goodbye to Percy Jackson and the demigod world forever? But what exactly can you do when you’ve exhausted this half-blood’s story line after five books?
The logical answer is to look for other cultures with a rich mythological background to build on. I stayed away from his other series that dealt with Egyptian mythology since it was so far from the series that I have come to love. (A friend said it was not very good.) I also did not read this new venture, Heroes of Olympus, until after I caught wind of “Percy Jackson” uttered from my friends’ Twitter feeds shortly after “The Son of Neptune” came out. I had borrowed “The Lost Hero” from my girlfriend’s brother and sped-read it so I could get finally get to meet Percy Jackson again.
¹ An overhaul in the sense that it adds another layer of complexity to the already rich story, not in the sense that it negates everything that happened before.
This is one series that did not disappoint. As much as I loved Camp Half-Blood, it wore on me. What has resulted is an amalgamation of two related mythoi—the Greek and the Roman—and such a large sideways-overhaul¹ of everything that have transpired in the last five books. In the first book of the series, “The Lost Hero,” we meet Jason, who is surrounded by a girlfriend named Piper and someone who claims to be his best friend, Leo. The thing is, he has no recollection or memory of ever meeting them. He doesn’t even know who he is. Their main mission is to free a goddess, and while their motivations might be different (Jason just wants his memories back), everyone sees it through.
There is trouble stirring between the world of gods and the world of men, and somehow it is up to Jason and his friends to help stop this tragedy, without his memories. As with stories that deal with memory loss and forgetting, it is a very thrilling adventure, when you start uncovering little parts of the story as you read along. Sometimes, you even get to guess the outcome and turn of events. The purpose of this memory loss gets pretty thinly veiled as you read, but it makes everything else no less exciting.
The next book, “The Son of Neptune,” is equally exciting because the amnesiac in question is the one and only Percy Jackson. Here, we are introduced to two new main characters, Frank and Hazel, who are both on the same quest as Percy. They are on a mission to retrieve and free something up to the most Northern part of the world—a place where gods are supposedly powerless.
Essentially, The Heroes of Olympus is a story that explores a prophecy about seven demigods destined to defeat a terrible force. I like it because Riordan found a way to freshen up the world of Percy Jackson just by adding what was already there, adding the complexity and depth of our existing mythological history—at least, in the Greek and Roman arenas. He injects a lot of historical aspects in the story, which really drew me in.
Also, Camp Jupiter is really something else. I really can’t wait for the next installment, which involves Annabeth. It’s called “The Mark of Athena,” however we will be in for a long wait as it comes out Fall 2012.
Alexandra Trese is a detective with supernatural powers and inclinations, and the police chief runs to her when he needs help solving strange cases. (Kind of like Batman and Commissioner Gordon, I guess?) Volume 1 includes four stories: “At the Intersection of Balete and 13th Street,” “Rules of the Race,” “The Tragic Case of Dr. Burgos,” and “Our Secret Constellation.”
My favorite ones are “At the Intersection…” and “The Tragic Case.” I admire the inclusion of traditional Filipino folklore in these mysteries, as I am, truthfully, sick and tired of hearing about vampires. The
The art was made by Kajo Baldisimo, and it is at times inspired and dynamic. I would love to see this in full color, although I know that would be a long shot.
¹ One reason why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite series is narrative complexity, and multi-arc seasons. While Buffy deals with a different problem each episode, there is always something bigger that is revealed at the end of the season.
One of my main nitpicks with Trese is that it’s a story that’s divided by case, meaning, there isn’t really an overarching narrative.¹ It’s a Monster of the Week, Encyclopedia Brown kind of deal. However, it’s an intentional, conscious decision on the part of Budjette Tan (as he states in the afterword), to make it easier for new readers to jump in at any time. The reason why I like narrative complexity is because it adds a certain depth, texture, and richness to a story, because of all the layers that are added on top of each other. I think that would have allowed me to empathize more with Trese’s character.
What I also liked was that the main character and ultimate icon of badassery is a woman. The character of Trese was originally planned to be a man, but it was later changed to Alexandra, our heroine. I don’t know a lot about her, aside from she’s really good at what she does, and she commands respect from both man and monster. I would love to see a bit more than a peek into her character.
Ultimately, Trese was a great idea and a great premise, but it just didn’t stand out as much as I thought it would, for me. I’m hoping that the later installments will do the trick. I read this on high recommendations from just about everybody, and although it wasn’t at all terrible, there seemed to be something missing from it that made me want to care about Alexandra’s life.
Trese is available at National Book Store and Fully Booked branches.
Format: Black & White, 104 pages
Cover price: Php 140.00
I don’t know if it’s laziness or just me being busy and productive (I’m hoping it’s the latter), but I haven’t really read much this year. For October, I seemingly gravitated to thick, illustrated volumes, namely Sanjay Patel’s “Ramayana: Divine Loophole” and Craig Thompson’s new release, “Habibi.”
I liked Sanjay Patel’s rendition of “Ramayana.” After reading the notes, it was astonishing to me that the entire endeavor took about five or so years! The Ramayana translation he got ahold of was over 3,000 pages long and took about a year to read. On top of condensing the text, he also laid out his book, as well as the illustrations. Then, he’s off to do line work and sketches on paper, and then rendering on the computer.
I’d like to think that I’m a voracious reader, but the truth is that I don’t really read half as often as I’d like. Over the last couple of months, I stopped writing about the little that I did get to read. It’s not that I’m pressured by the Internet to read and to write, but every time I survey my room and my eyes fall on unread books, I keep awakening a desire to read all of them, at the same time.
If only there were enough time.
I guess this is an attempt to reawaken that active reader who is immersed and involved in, and ultimately, excited about books. About time, too, because I missed her.
2010 was such a great year for me, books-wise. I’d been setting a goal for 50 books every year since 2008 (which was when I went to the States for summer, and was mostly alone in my thoughts and unbotherable because of a book), and I’ve only done it successfully then and in 2010. In 2009, I read nearly 40 books, which isn’t a bad number, but I wanted to challenge myself more.
This year, I read a total of 54 books (including five re-reads), and read and abandoned/didn’t finish at least 13 books. I count this as an accomplishment, because most of the time, I really didn’t feel like reading. I was finishing up with school and I was busy with the nuances of the life of employment as well, so I fell into a sort of slump from time to time… Keeping a book blog really motivated me to read faster and to look at the text more closely. I really spent time piecing my thoughts together and figuring out why I liked or disliked a book, instead of just going by feelings.
I wanted to chart and graph books comparatively (how many YA books I read vs. poetry etc, written by women/males, etc.) and present them visually, but I got a bit lazy.
To signal the coming of 2011, I’ve decided to start with Nicole Krauss’ “Great House,” which was given to me by my best friend, Isa, for Christmas, along with Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” So far, so good.
(Since I wrote this draft, I’ve already actually finished reading “Nine Stories” by J.D. Salinger, which was given to me by Raymond, and also Adam David’s “The El Bimbo Variations,” which is amazing and can be downloaded over here in PDF form.)
Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project” has been sitting by my bedside table for a couple of weeks (months?) before I had the time to pick it up. I was so very glad that I did. Friends had been recommending this book, and it interested me, because of the premise and the story it promised. The story circulates around one Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian immigrant who was killed in Chicago in 1908, under mysterious circumstances. We follow Vladimir Brik, a newspaper columnist, as he attempts to uncover the truth behind Lazarus’ death, intending to write a book about his findings. He travels back to his homeland, retracing Lazarus’ steps, hoping to dig up things he might have missed, fleshing out the story that he had been contemplating in his head.
I gave this book five stars (out of five!) on my GoodReads account, because I believed it to be gorgeous. However, I feel a sort of emptiness, due perhaps to the bubble of questions that Hemon’s story generated but didn’t quite answer. Much like Vladimir Brik, I am brimming with questions about the story, which answers I didn’t even get. And how to explain the five stars? I suppose that I’m just the kind of reader who can overlook the lack of a plot if the book is rife with good thought, articulation, an excellent depiction of situations and feelings and ideas—which is what Hemon seems to be really good at. A Bosnian US immigrant like Brik, Hemon has written several books in English (his second language), all of which had been praised and celebrated. This is the first one I’ve read, but it only makes me want to read the rest.
I admire his construction of his characters. The main ones on display are rich and original, and those we catch mere glimpses of seem to be complete, despite the sparse descriptions and the lone sentences dedicated to them. Hemon seems to pick the perfect ways by which to bring them to life. Brik, for one, shines in his endearing tiredness, where he seems at home with failure. Acutely self-aware, not overly sad, he seems to be the right amount of being ill-at-ease. He knows what to do, he just lacks the courage, the motivation and at times, the funds to do so. Rora, a photographer friend from Sarajevo that he takes along on his pilgrimage, is wild and brash, but lovable in being so.
There is an ease and an effortless quality to Hemon’s prose—one that I felt myself slide into almost immediately. He is at once humorous and painful, with a brutal honesty that seems neither staged nor forced. He knows how to uncover each layer of a story, and in the process, fleshes everything out. What I lacked was, perhaps, the understanding of what these layers had to do with anything. The story is told in alternating perspectives—sometimes bleeding into each other—and I am at a loss as to what they have to do with each other, and why the story means so much to Brik. (I hated the way the story is told—back-and-forth from the two narratives—but only because each was equally interesting and compelling, and I felt utterly sorry having to leave one story, especially when it was starting to get good.)
I appreciated the themes that he dwells on: thoughts of home, one’s roots, the leaving and arriving. A line is repeated, over and over, almost like a mantra: “Home is where somebody notices your absence.” During the course of the novel, Hemon confronts Brik with the glaring disparity of the difficulty of his life as a Chicagoan, married to an Irish neurosurgeon named Mary, and his past in Sarajevo, where everything seems to fit him properly. I don’t really have a particular affinity with my roots as a Filipino, so reading about Brik’s homecoming—the naturalness of it—was interesting to me. I wonder if it’s because I rarely ever leave this place, or if it’s because when I do, I never think that I am not coming back.
Hemon talks a lot about a person’s center (Brik’s was located somewhere about a foot above his asshole, relegated to his shirt pocket where his American passport and money was; Brik claimed that this one girl’s center was situated in her sea-foam green eyes) and I begin to think a lot about the broadness of the word “home” and how it can mean many things. Home is where somebody notices your absence. There are a lot of people and things, both physical and intangible, that are homes in which I have nested, that even though I have no affinity to geographical roots, I understand it completely when Hemon talks about “homes” and the feeling of displacement, and even moreso, the surge of peace upon arriving at your home’s doorstep.
There are so many parallels and references brought up by Hemon—a lot of which I couldn’t possibly talk about at length without maybe eliciting boredom or resentment. I especially loved it when he wrote about Brik’s marital problems with Mary, and his problems as a partly Americanized version of himself.
There are many moments, many jokes, many particularities that make this book, despite its lack of a clear plot and resolution (to my mind, at least), rich, stunning and certainly worth the read. Hemon is an excellent wordsmith, most of the time pitch-perfect, often honest and true.
Lazarus Averbuch is an actual person, and I think that the usage of historical images, as well as those that are personal to Hemon (I think he traveled to Sarajevo with a photographer friend, much like Rora, unless I am mistaken) lends to the honesty that I found so present in his writing.
If you are new here, you probably haven’t been acquainted with my incredibly biased love for Jonathan Safran Foer. Sure, he is an assface in interviews, and sure, most of his writing is geared towards making you feel like loneliest you’ve ever been, but I like it. I love it. Despite his “gimmickry” and his seemingly constant pursuit of strangers’ eyerolls, I dig all of it.
It’s kind of hard to write about anything Foer releases, because I know that at least a small part of me will love it, regardless, and I know that people know this and they might judge me. But, whatever. I have my reasons. I was really nervous about his latest “experiment,” just because I knew that people are going to write it off as another gimmick without even reading it. “Tree of Codes” is London-based publisher, Visual Editions’s first major title. According to an interview, they wrote him and said, “We can’t pay you, but you can make anything.” And Foer, always up to taking on challenges, didn’t hold back. What “Tree of Codes” is is a sculptural work, where Foer “erases” parts from Bruno Schulz’ “The Street of Crocodiles,” a collection of interconnected short stories.
Each page is then a reconstruction of what has already been built. Foer is quick to stress that the work belongs to him, because of accusations of potential plagiarism. I like how he puts it:
“It’s not really sampling, because that implies taking something out of its context and inserting it into a new context. A better analogy might be carving a stone. Of course one can carve any number of things from a block of marble, but one is still dependent on the marble. And marble is not like granite, which is not like chalk. Has a sculpture taken away from the block of marble? Not really. Has it added? Not really. “Tree of Codes” took “The Street of Crocodiles” as its starting point and made something new.”
And all biases aside, I can see what he meant by that. I haven’t personally read Schulz’ work, but I would wager that it is very different piece, and also creates a very different experience. Reading the book takes you about half an hour, even with the various causes for stopping and pausing. It’s a little difficult, but it lets you spend time with what you just read.
Story-wise, the plot is simple enough (yes, there’s a plot!) but it’s the turns of phrases, the way he connects words he chooses to leave behind, threading them across gaps of literal and metaphorical space. I like remembering what I read, and usually, I will just go ahead and write on a book. Obviously, I couldn’t do it with this one. It is such a special book, in the way it was made and the way it affects those that come across it.
Resurfacing from the initial shock and wonder caused by its physicality, I can honestly say that it was a good book, touching on a haunting narrative of loss, sadness, and familial relationships. The narrative itself is poetic, slightly less lucid than most fiction, but it retains the tone of most of Foer’s works, and fits the story it is telling. There is a certain sense of darkness and mystery, a surreal sort of quality fitting to the world he has created.
It’s difficult to comprehend how a work as breathtaking as this exists, but I guess with enough time, and dedication, as well as the presence of people who believe and support what you do, it is possible. Part of what makes this venture such an amazing one is the process behind it. This book was turned down by countless printers before they came across one in Belgium who saw it as a possibility, instead of writing it off as something that cannot be done. Foer went through many manuscripts of an English translation of Schulz’ work before he was able to create something that he was proud of. The process took at least a year.
I’ve been thinking a lot about things that concern technology and how it somehow (almost) dehumanizes our experiences as people. I think this book is relevant right now, and speaks volumes about how we create our connections and relationships, with the technology and the means we have at hand. Because of that, I do believe that it is really something worth looking into. Aside from coming up with a stunning, both in its tactility and its narrative, book, Foer raises questions about how we relate to the things that we encounter, and how different, still, it is to interact with an actual, physical object than with something over a screen.
From the write-up by Olaffur Eliasson:
In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers it actually has a body.
It also affected me on the level of craft and creative endeavors. For as long as I can remember, I have always wrestled between Carina the writer and Carina the designer. Whenever people asked me what I wanted to be, what I was, I always draw a blank. Am I a designer, as my day job dictates? Am I a writer, as what I do on my freedom says? Am I an artist (maybe only in my dreams)? Why couldn’t I just be Carina, the person who likes to make things? I’ve appended most of my business cards with “I make pretty things,” because I couldn’t succinctly explain what it was that I did. And you know, reading this New York Times interview with Foer made me wholly okay with that description:
After all this, do you see yourself as an author or a designer? Aren’t they often one and the same?
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
And then I am suddenly so free, and suddenly so excited about everything I am about to do.
There are so many other things I can say about this book, but perhaps I’ll save that for another time. I hope that you get to experience this book, the way it was intended to be experienced, whether or not you get to buy the book. Please find someone you can borrow from, someone you can share with. It’s such a beautiful exercise and I am still reeling in awe.
(Vapid notes are vapid. I hope you are not able to read my messy handwriting.)
Book Report is a place to dump all my book-y thoughts. Aside from book reviews or flailing about little children, I'll be posting scans of pretty books, talk about my favorite authors and book series, write essays about the role of books and literature in my life, and maybe even talk about publishing and technology. I just really like books and reading.
It all depends on how long I can actually keep this up.
