Fall 2022 Books
Oct. 25th, 2022 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI hadn’t actually managed to finish any books for a couple of months. Blame all the comic books.
Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams - Another from the Boss Fight Books collection of video game histories, and another that melds the author’s personal history with the game and the game’s history. It’s decent; it’s a love song not just to the game but to growing up exposed to the game in a certain way that I happen to share. This includes short interviews with Ted Woolsey and Tom Slattery, who did the SNES and DS translations of the game; and I wish it had included longer interviews, because those were some of the most interesting parts. Also, the author spent some time after college teaching in Japan, and I wonder if it was in the JET program or something similar.
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach – Only nominally “what happens when animals break the law,” this is really an exploration of how we handle wild animals intersecting with human society. The first chapter is magnificent and the rest are kind of a let-down, though still interesting. If you were ever curious about various tactics for scaring off birds, controlling rats, or dealing with drunk, amorous elephants, this book might be for you. (I also ended up reading a section on bears while in line for my monkeypox vaccine, and boy, was that on the nose.)
Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire - Each book in the Wayward Children series has an actual plot (in this case, the mermaid girl is tortured by nightmares from the events of a previous book, and goes to the competing school for children like her that promises to make them forget their experiences in other worlds) and it has an actual subject that McGuire wanted to write about. In this case, it’s about being bullied as a fat girl, and about how institutional learning and “re-education” programs for children are just torture that our society tacitly accepts. (I’ve met McGuire in person, and it's clear in both her writing and when you talk to her that she has Opinions.) The books in this series are a mix of stand-alone and continuity, and this both continues the ongoing plot and wraps one of the stand-alones into it. I continue to enjoy the books, but seriously, if you’re going to get into the series you need to start at the beginning.
All About Me! By Mel Brooks – An extremely stream-of-consciousness recollection of Brooks’ life; this feels like a series of interviews that were recorded, transcribed and loosely stapled together. Which is not to say they aren’t an entertaining series of stories, but they’re not particularly organized and only continuous in the way stand-up comedy is. Like Carey Elwes, Brooks doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone he’s worked with; and the actual bad things in his life get smoothed over (as opposed to the ones that make for good stories—his first marriage gets less than a paragraph, but the disaster that was Solarbabies gets half a chapter). It starts a little rough because it runs chronologically (and if you’re just there for the movies, you have to wade through his childhood and time in the army first), and the later chapters get a little repetitive. But you have to give him credit, the man has lived a remarkable life and done a lot of show business.
Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams - Another from the Boss Fight Books collection of video game histories, and another that melds the author’s personal history with the game and the game’s history. It’s decent; it’s a love song not just to the game but to growing up exposed to the game in a certain way that I happen to share. This includes short interviews with Ted Woolsey and Tom Slattery, who did the SNES and DS translations of the game; and I wish it had included longer interviews, because those were some of the most interesting parts. Also, the author spent some time after college teaching in Japan, and I wonder if it was in the JET program or something similar.
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach – Only nominally “what happens when animals break the law,” this is really an exploration of how we handle wild animals intersecting with human society. The first chapter is magnificent and the rest are kind of a let-down, though still interesting. If you were ever curious about various tactics for scaring off birds, controlling rats, or dealing with drunk, amorous elephants, this book might be for you. (I also ended up reading a section on bears while in line for my monkeypox vaccine, and boy, was that on the nose.)
Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire - Each book in the Wayward Children series has an actual plot (in this case, the mermaid girl is tortured by nightmares from the events of a previous book, and goes to the competing school for children like her that promises to make them forget their experiences in other worlds) and it has an actual subject that McGuire wanted to write about. In this case, it’s about being bullied as a fat girl, and about how institutional learning and “re-education” programs for children are just torture that our society tacitly accepts. (I’ve met McGuire in person, and it's clear in both her writing and when you talk to her that she has Opinions.) The books in this series are a mix of stand-alone and continuity, and this both continues the ongoing plot and wraps one of the stand-alones into it. I continue to enjoy the books, but seriously, if you’re going to get into the series you need to start at the beginning.
All About Me! By Mel Brooks – An extremely stream-of-consciousness recollection of Brooks’ life; this feels like a series of interviews that were recorded, transcribed and loosely stapled together. Which is not to say they aren’t an entertaining series of stories, but they’re not particularly organized and only continuous in the way stand-up comedy is. Like Carey Elwes, Brooks doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone he’s worked with; and the actual bad things in his life get smoothed over (as opposed to the ones that make for good stories—his first marriage gets less than a paragraph, but the disaster that was Solarbabies gets half a chapter). It starts a little rough because it runs chronologically (and if you’re just there for the movies, you have to wade through his childhood and time in the army first), and the later chapters get a little repetitive. But you have to give him credit, the man has lived a remarkable life and done a lot of show business.
