Self-Promotion I-Am-No-Longer-Keeping-Count

You may recall that Mark Budz's novel Till Human Voices Wake Us came second in my ranking of the year's worst reading experiences.  If you'd like to find out why, head on over to Strange Horizons and read my review.  

To subscribe to posts on Asking the Wrong Questions, use the RSS feed, or sign up for email notifications at follow.it

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Tolkien Reread: A Long-Expected Party

Image
"Eleventy-First Birthday" by Nicole Gustafsson He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back speechless. Old Odo Proudfoot removed his feet from the table and stamped. Then there was a dead silence, until suddenly, after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once. We begin the tale of The Lord of the Rings with a chapter that quite deliberately recalls and reverses the opening events of The Hobbit . Instead of an unexpected party, there is a long-expected one. Instead of Bilbo rushing out of his home towards adventure without even a single handkerchief, there is a minutely-planned and carefully-orchestrated plan of disappearance and departure. And instead of the incursion of weirdn...
Read more

The Great Tolkien Reread: Introduction

Image
"The Doors of Durin" by J.R.R. Tolkien This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. It's Hannukah, and for me this has always been a time to revisit The Lord of the Rings . I don't reread it every year, but always when the candles are lit and the days grow darker, I find myself feeling the urge to return to this story....
Read more

X-Men: First Class

The first installment of the modern film incarnation of the X-Men franchise came out in 2000, and is generally held to have been the harbinger of the following decade's deluge of superhero and comic book films.  I remember going to see the film several weeks after its US release had been greeted by effusive reviews, which praised it for taking the comic book adaptation an enormous step forward, and wondering what all the fuss was about.  Even knowing next to nothing about the comics, it was clear to me that here was a complex setting that had been shoehorned into the standard Hollywood template of a single hero backed by a team.  The creakiness of that process's result was only exacerbated by a dull story, thin characterization, and lackluster action sequences.  I liked X-Men 2 a little better, but the third film was terrible, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was even worse.  The franchise, which never seemed to have much life in it to start with, was clearly on i...
Read more