pivic Stockholm, Sweden

Not as good as the first volume in the series about Huerta, i.e. Hopey, Maggie and their friends and enemies. This tome is centered around Maggie, Hopey and Ray (as the title implies) who are getting older, jobs and somehow finding out that they don't change as persons despite getting older.

While there are some changes in plot that slow down the tempo in here, I found some of the dada-drawn passages quite irritating, but still it's a sign of Hernandez' ability to incorporate the serious with the laughable and mash it together.

The characters evolve, and even though not at the same pace as before that would have been strange. This is a quite nice assortment of little stories, and despite my missing the tempo of yore, it's nice to see the happy days and demons up close and in detail, quite poetic through the motions. Especially the dogs.

All in all: not at all as good as "Locas I" (which I give 5/5 without hesitation, but still interesting, vibrant and at times beautifully written. I'll buy the third volume as soon as it hits the streets.

This book was quite dense in the way that it felt to me as if Joe Pernice really tried to squeeze every last odd word from the dictionary and make every character very eccentric. E.g. "Paul's cough sounded much more productive and serious than my own because it was."

A good thing about the book is that he didn't use The Smiths/Morrissey too much; of course he referred to lyrics but not that often. Nor did he over-use references to the album, which was nice.

All in all, a nice, romantic read about a troubled boy in American suburbia growing up. The best parts were his inner thoughts spilled out onto the page, and what he decided to keep to himself rather than telling people.

This was a quite good read, a psychology book designed for the layman, filled with interesting matter regarding borderline personality disorder (BPD). A lot of it is quite culled from "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me" by Kreisman/Straus, but still makes for an interesting read, mostly due to the varied - but similar - stories drawn from interviews with people diagnosed with BPD. Recommendable to all Swedes.

This is quite an epic. Spanning more than a hundred years, from Greece to the USA, this is Calliope's story of her grandparents, her parents and her self, plus the small matter of the entire world around them.

I'm not going to put down work enough to review this book the way it should be reviewed, rather than I know that Jeffrey Eugenides reportedly spent 10 years researching and writing this novel, and I feel as though it's been written in an eloquent breath. It feels effortlessly written, as as such, I believe it to be a resounding success, given its many complexities, all masterfully written. I feel like the author went through many hours of brain-work trying to think of ways to explain this massive story to the reader in an intelligent, funny and often witty way.

While the reader is at all times chaperoned throughout Calliope's history by herself, it is nothing short of a God's-eye-view, where you feel history's breath in your neck all the while. As events a century old are told, they tie in with fresh ones. History repeating, countries and psyches developing.

And bodies developing. We see Calliope describe her becoming of age, to match her mind. The obscure becomes clear and then obscured again, as through all levels of life.

The language is clear, varied and simple. The stories are many, ranging from slapstick to Bergman-ish tragedy.

I'll happily recommend this to anybody.

This is quite what the title implies: an encyclopaedia on Morrissey and his world, by journalist Simon Goddard. While the his subjective takes on what the songs are about are mostly worthless, as are his way of trying to be funny and witty - just read the end of his bit about Johnny Rogan's "The Severed Alliance" and you'll see what I mean - the real goodness in owning this book is that it serves as a collection of interesting trivia.

I'm your average trainspotter when it comes to music: things like label changes, singles, b-sides, shows, changes in lyrics are cool to me; vague, bizarre stuff about music sticks in my mind. And as Morrissey is my favourite living artist and seems to be extremely nerdy when it comes to music, he's left a legacy of borrowing elements from all types of media for his lyrics and music - for instance many a lyric he's culled off Shelagh Delaney's plays, or the music from The Cookies' "Only To Other People" for his "Girl Least Likely To" - not to mention obscure stuff like excommunicating people and leaving messages in the run-out grooves of vinyl records, his unique style and varying likes and dislikes are very much enhanced through this knowledge. If you're a music-sicko like me, that is.

I read this book from page one and forth, and as such it was beautiful to take an inner journey through Morrissey's work. For instance, reading of the workings surrounding the album "Vauxhall & I" really added depth for me, in relation to even the lyrics for the songs, those on the album, those reserved for b-sides and those discarded completely.

If the reader is a Morrissey neophyte, watch out: he has often given pretty varying accounts of events, times and likes/dislikes in the past, consciously or/and unconsciously. Hence, this feels a bit like treading water in wait for Morrissey's autobiography to drop, whenever and if-ever it will.

So, all in all, is this book worth a read? Fairly. If you're as much into minutiae regarding Morrissey and The Smiths as I am and you have a fair amount of common sense in order to try and separate gossip from fact, I'd say go for it. If you've heard "Girlfriend In A Coma" and say "Who?" when you hear the name Timi Yuro or see a picture of The Salford Lads Club, you'd probably fare better with another book.

This is the second volume of what happens to the main character, Buddy Bradley, after he during the mid 1990s leaves American Seattle for New Jersey together with his girlfriend, Lisa, to go live in his parents' house. His decrepit old dad is mean and his younger brother, dishonourably discharged from the navy, stays at home and gets up to no good, which drives Buddy to try and start a new business with a friend. Things get more complicated as his relationship with Lisa moves in different directions and his "friends" edge him towards all kind of edges.

Of course, Buddy's master of his own destiny, and as such perhaps isn't the best captain of his own ship...

This is a very human, heart-felt second omnibus of comics from the depths of low society-life where Buddy confesses to living as a snarling, optimistic yet dirty scoundrel. Funny, original and I really liked the characters; I will most definitely get the third volume.

Excellent tome on The Final Solution, focusing (of course) on Auschwitz, the foremost concentration camp in The Third Reich, if one counts by the number of dead. Rees has researched the subject for many years, and even facts from the 21st century are included here. Apart from the sheer chronological dealings, Rees exemplifies, factualises and explains everything in lay-person terms, going to great extent to bring out the humanity of it all, i.e. how humans are at their worst and best in a variety of ways, before, during and after WWII. A must-read, as a brilliant accommodation to the likewise brilliant BBC TV series.

This was a complete let-down. Apart from Wennstam's glaring talent - her ability to push prejudice into the lime-light - this is a collection of platitudes where people are portrayed. The book focuses on two different stories: one where a former, female journalist tries to find out what really happened to the previous owner of the house she's just moved into, and another where a suicide seems to conceal more. I tormented myself through this book, and read it aloud to my girlfriend. I'd rather sink a knife into myself than repeat the task. There were even more parallel stories but they weren't very interesting. A few lines of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes - nowadays public domain - give me far more. On the other hand, my girlfriend said a clever thing: for most who don't know a lot about how common domestic abuse is, how anti-feminism rears itself and how honor killings are viewed in Swedish society, this can probably be enlightening.

Colbert, previously of The Daily Show, today resides over The Colbert Report, a near-daily TV extravaganza in which he plays an American right-wing TV pundit, thrashing everything liberal in his path. While the show deals with reality, its contents are rarely as such. For a lot of outsiders - i.e. non-Americans* - the contents of his show often seem exotic, making the humor quite evident. To a lot of Americans, I know this is not the case. As the syndicated right-wing rhetoric is often reminiscent of Hitler's charms, Colbert evolves his humor on that and hence, his show is ripe with comments like:

"Once upon a time, racism was a terrible problem in this country."

"If there's a bigger contributor to left-wing elitist brainwashing than colleges and universities, I'd like to see it. There's an old saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Which means a _lot_ of knowledge must be a _really_ dangerous thing. And it is. Look no further than the example of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. He skipped sixth grade, got a Bachelor's from Harvard followed by a Master's and a Ph.D., and then embarked on a distinguished academic career of blowing people up. Most Ph.D. biographies have similar endings."

So, the book is much of the same, also with annotated margin comments! Chapter names vary from The Family, Religion, Sex & Dating, Homosexuals to Class War, The Media, Immigrants and Science, which are just as confrontational, prejudiced, narcissistic and funny as you'd expect.

Reading this book is quite like watching his show. Or watching Bill Hicks do his routine about how the American government fabricated the story on Oswald killing JFK. It's reality gift-wrapped, although Hicks wasn't right-winged, erhm.

All in all, a very funny read that aggravated me on more than one occasion, enlightened me on several and made me think of another Colbert quote:

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

* This isn't applicable to countries where one person owns all media. Yes, you, Italy, and...Rupert Murdoch!