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 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.

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!

This is a very well-written pop-psychological look on the borderline personality disorder. The book is quite dated: it’s built on the diagnosis criteria from DSM-III and as such omits mentalisation-based treatment as the method is just too new. But otherwise, to me (a complete layman), this is very well-written and contains many examples of how people with BPD can behave, and what most have in common. The book is written for the lay-person and is very easy to understand. I think all who read it will get the big picture and a firm grasp of the mechanics of the borderline – of course generally speaking. The many examples throughout the book are really great, and there’s a portion written for the persons who aren’t diagnosed with BPD but live/cope/work with somebody borderline.

If I overlook how abject Hitchens' arrogance at times threatens to overlook the importance of this book, it is very valid in this time. This book delves into how religion, indeed, poisons everything it touches, and responds to ideas such as "faith brings happiness" and "what would the world be like without faith?". It also displays how religions are man-made, anti-intellectual and basically corrupt. While it's OK for christians to stone people who make fun of bald men, for muslims to pay the local imam cash to let it be known that he/she is in straight descendant from Mohammed and for followers of the Dalai Lama to think the Heavens appointed him (and for Steven Segal to be made "highly enlightened" for the right amount of cash) and for rabbis to bite the foreskins off young boys, reason doesn't. The power of this book is in Hitchens' ability to display how ludicrous it would be to have faith of the wrong kind.

A documentary on Mary Bell, a girl who in 1968, aged 10, killed the first of two younger boys. Sereny has done startling work with hundreds of hours of interviews with Bell about her childhood, her extremely damaged mother, what happened to her during and after the trial, and what has become of her life up until the mid-1990s. This is a highly insightful look into the mind of a child whose existence was torn apart due to her mother's and her own actions, and also into what I think is the kill-the-monster attitude that modern society carries, e.g. in the James Bulger case. This puts Deborah Spungen's book on her daughter in the corner - and hopefully lets us forget it.

I love 33 1/3. My fave title is "Paul's Boutique", but this one is up there.

Vincentelli offers trivia (e.g. Lasse Hallström's apartment being the one used as Agnetha's in his video for "One Of Us") next to very interesting gems (e.g. starting "Dancing Queen" with the chorus because Björn & Benny couldn't find a proper way to start it) and intricate information on how ABBA fit/didn't fit culturally during the 70s and 80s, and how "ABBA Gold" changed the general perception of ABBA in the 90s.

This is, culturally speaking, an in-depth look of how one of the most popular bands of the 20th century (and beyond) crafted some of their very best songs, a bit of what their world looked like and why we're bonkers for these wonderful tracks. A work of love.

I’ve been listening to Neubauten for a long time, and this book is enlightening. It consists of 300 pages of interview material with all former members conducted during 43 interviews, yet that’s not the point. “Nur was nicht is, ist möglich.” – “Just what is not is possible”, as Blixa Bargeld sings in “Ende Neu”, defines the anarchic knife’s edge where this band, that has now existed for more than 28 years, is and always has been. The book takes the reader from their shaky, anarchic and drug-addled existence in 1980, West Berlin, to their present, third roster, explaining where their journey has taken them. From funny anecdotes to how the band squandered themselves through drugs (in ways both good and bad, as Neubauten logic has it), how the band nearly quit in the mid 90s and what instruments, structures, lyrics, sound, politics and language means to them. Highly interesting if you’re into the band, very well-written biography on a ground-breaking band if you’re not.

If one can say anything about this book without spoiling some of the elements, I'd say you cannot even move past the first page, so for those paranoid, read no further!

This is an absolutely marvellous book on a seemingly rampant blindness that leave its victims in a visual sea of milky white. Saramago delves into what this blindness means on many levels, foremost individually as well as for society in large, and shows humanity from within its core in a variety of ways.

To me, this book displays humankind and the surrounding world at the base level. When stripped of sight, our senses are shocked, and then, as through cooking, reduced to display our core values.

I haven't read Saramago prior to this novel, but I hear his way of writing is the same almost everywhere: long sentences, few punctuations and no quotation marks to show who's saying what in dialogue. It's very interesting, yet I think some may dislike it.

When "Microserfs" hit, I was enthralled. It said a lot about my life: popular culture as I was a sprawling 20-something working with computers? C'est moi; second helping, please. Today, "jPod". I'm still in the same line of work, still surrounded by wonderful autists and Coupland sniffs most of the air out off that atmosphere.

The twists and turns of the book are otherworldly, even Monty Pythonesque, and I shan't give any away. Wikipedia will give you the plot. I'll just say that I think Coupland's existential ponderings are interesting kicks and that I loved some of the characters; Ethan's mom scared me the most, by far.

Some things in the book are very Coupland, e.g. dressing a lot of illegal refugees in nerd, e.g. a Nine Inch Nails Fragility 2.0 tour t-shirt. Pop culture-references hail while the plot thickens, loosens up and gives way to a sort of Bill Hicks-ish atmosphere, circa "it's just a ride".

Factual, emotional, filled with humanity as well as the seemingly opposite, this is a view of what happened with the 589 persons who were on death row in America in 1972, when the death penalty was deemed unconstitutional. 322 of these people were released from prison since then, and Cheever looks into what happened to them since, indirectly in search of a factual answer to the question: is capital punishment worthless or good? Of course not. But this book raises many questions regarding the subject, and looks into many a crack in the American justice system; what happens to those who are innocent but sent to death row? What constitutes a technical parole violation and just how hard does it hit somebody who used to be on death row? Any word on racism? Should people on death row be denied education? Where is William Henry Furman? This is very well written, some times bordering on poetry, but always factual, by a lawyer. Highly recommendable.