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.