Super Novel

I wrote this #Pynchon review while eating #Pringles. #bloggersblasr

Oedipus Maas is an American housewife who becomes the executor of a millionaire’s will, only to be distracted by a postal conspiracy that dates back to the middle ages. Once again, the thing that impresses me most about Pynchon is that he is one of the few authors whose characters can sing without it being awful. Unlike J. K. Rowling. I’d classify this novel as a conspiracy comedy. Before I wrote…

I enjoyed and was confused by this book. #bloggersblast

It feels like a month since I read this book, and I don’t fully understand its background. The DC comics franchise consists of a multiverse that flourishes or wilts on the whim of its editors, occasionally into one sole universe. Having one continuity makes things accessible for new readers, but the old fans really love the crazy and occasionally convoluted things that go on in that crazy…

Let’s talk about Phoenix Wright

  So I won this game some time in the last month. I’ve given up writing reviews of video games, because there’s no way I could ever do it better than the Eurogamer people. I’ll say this though: if you’re a book nerd desperate to get into gaming, the Phoenix Wright games are the best possible place to start. They’re visual novels, which means gameplay consists largely of watching animation and…

The Book of Lost Tales 1 – J. R. R. Tolkien

I’m not the biggest fan of Tolkien. To me, his legendarium is so self-indulgently comprehensive that the needs of the reader are completely ignored. So why did I buy the first half of his Book of Lost Tales? Curiosity, and the low, low price of two dollars. In all fairness, this book consists of several unpublished drafts cobbled together by his son. Tolkien was clearly writing this material as a…

The Slave is good, but possibly racist against Poles. #Bloggesblast

Based on The Magician of Lublin and this book, Isaac Bashevi Singer has got to be one of the best authors I’ve discovered this year. The canon of classic literature tends to be a crapshoot for a sci-fi fan like me, with offerings ranging from genuinely creative work to tedious investigations of boring middle-class individuals that are presumably intended to remind the audience of themselves, but…

This didn't work for me. #bloggersblast

Thinking about DC universes honestly hurts my head a little. My understanding is that all their big superheroes started out in the forties and were rebooted in the seventies. Both continuities were published simultaneously. A Flash story happened where we learned that the original superheroes lived on Earth 2, and the newish ones were on Earth 1. Both worlds fused during Crisis on Infinite…

Look at this book's title and tell me the cover. #bloggersblast

Now that I’ve taken a really good hard look of this cover, it’s hard to say what words form the title. The ‘of’ and the ‘presents’ confuses me. Still the words Secret Origins are the biggest here, so I’ll go with those. This anthology collects a lot of classic DC material, from the forties to the sixties. There’s a few predictably zany Superman/Batman startups, and Green Lantern fails to impress…

Don't bother with this book.

This wasn’t a very good book. The art swung between generic and awkward, and too often the characters would speak in expository lectures. Which was a pity because towards the middle there was a really interesting scenario where Apokolips and New Genesis allied against a common threat, complete with Orion being made the leader of Apokolips and his father rendered blind. This was a scenario that…

What is a fotonovel? #bloggersblast #wtf

A fotonovel is a book that adapts a film by arranging stills in a sequential order, overlaid with dialogue from the script – essentially a glossy comic book with pictures. The term comes from Italy, I think. Heaven Can Wait is a seventies movie about an American athlete who swaps bodies with a millionaire after a near death experience. I paid twenty cents for this. I read Heaven Can Wait a while…

Don't mess with the trolley witch. #HarryPotter #Bloggersblast

  If you’re reading this review it’s likely that you’ve already finished this book, or that you intend to read it in the near future. For those of you in the second category, the only question that remains is whether you should buy or borrow Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I bet you know that Cursed Child is a play script. Because the thing was originally intended to be a play performed in…

When #Pynchon's characters sing, it is not horrible. #bloggersblast

Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V is a brilliantly eccentric mindscrew. Benny Profane is a former navy sailor searching for work and meaning in New York, while his eccentric acquaintance Herbert Stencil obsessively hunts for anything he can find on V, an enigmatic woman mentioned only once in his father’s journal. The stories these characters are implicated in stretch from the high seas to South…

What is the deal with Igor? #persona #bloggersblast

Recently I won Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, a gaming feat that took around fifty hours of my life, but instead of boring you with another unnecessary review I’ll tell you about my new theory concerning the whole Persona franchise. At heart this series is about groups of young people fighting demons with supernatural alter-egos summoned from within their own souls, called Personas. The fate…

Darkseid, the guy in the picture, freaks me out a bit. #bloggersblast

Of all the self-proclaimed villains in fiction, Darkseid is the one that scares me the most. Take a look at the above picture, I bet he’s creeping you out right now. This stony-faced monster is the megalomaniac ruler of Apokalips, a planet famous mainly for being an awful armpit of a place to live and its war against the nearby paradise New Genesis. The story is that after the old gods died…