Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

Well, the most interesting book world story right now is surely the whole hardball face-off between Amazon and Macmillan. I expect the most interesting discussion at Making Light. It’s been a pretty depressing week in the book world: too many stories of authors dying. I guess there will only be more and more stories about [...]

Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead. I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway. I’ve seen some stories about tough [...]

I noticed on Walter Jon Williams’ blog that there seems to be a meme going around about quickly listing 15 books that you think will always be with you. Williams suggests actually modifying the meme by taking some time to think, which is an idea that appeals to me. In some senses it’s ludicrous–I just [...]

Did you get a chance to experience the cognitive dissonance that comes from VanderMeerian words read in a high-toned children’s literature type voice? Speaking of VanderMeerian weirdness, there was a nice little slice of it over at Tor.com. Sometime soon (yes, Real Soon Now) I will write another golden book post, and this one will [...]

That’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by Édouard Manet. I spent a bit of time thinking about it recently because of a cut-and-paste error. It started when the guys over at SFFAudio pointed out that the podcasts of UCSD lectures are available for a limited time. Their intention was to direct us to quickly grab [...]

I’ve made no secret of the fact that Eddie Campbell is one of my favourite comic creators—not to mention one of the top five living people I’d want to spend a night drinking and talking BS with—and that I think Alan Moore is probably the best comic writer to have yet lived. So it’s probably [...]

I was delighted to find out this week that Emma Bull is writing a sequel to Territory (you might recall I was pretty excited about that one), tentatively titled Claim. Of course, in the interim, I can always get a hit of Shadow Unit. (I think I might have mentioned that once or twice, possibly.) [...]

I was recently in a discussion of books as art object. Usually when I’m in a conversation like that it’s about fine limited editions, but this time it was about books that are works of art in a more conventional sense. I cited the Codex Seraphinianus, and the person I was talking to cited A [...]

Please allow me to present several things that I am quite looking forward to. First up is the new album from Danny Michel. This should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog at all regularly–I hardly hide the fact that I’m pretty much a fanboy for Danny’s stuff. However, reading some of [...]

If you have any doubt why people speak Berni Wrightson‘s name in tones of awe, check out these images from the Frankenstein portfolio he did back in the 70s: That’s just a detail from one image. You can see the rest over at Golden Age Comic Book Stories in these posts: one, two, three, and [...]

I must share with you this anecdote that I ran across today at The Fate Of The Artist, blog of genius artist Eddie Campbell. (NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Campbell let me just say that his book The Fate Of The Artist, in my not-so-humble opinion the finest comic/graphic novel/whatever to be [...]

Let’s go out for 2006 on some quotables–things that either amused, or enlightened me in the waning hours of 2006. “Anyone who gets married is a fool. I can understand why a man would get married. Everybody can use a wife. it’s just that nobody needs a husband. If women are fool enough to get [...]

So, remember almost a year ago when I started the “Hanging Around The House” series? The idea was to take some quick digital snapshots to show things I have on the walls around the house, and give me an excuse to talk about them. I did a post on the things hanging in my office, [...]

Look, Alan Moore is a genius. Hands down, he is the best writer who has ever worked for comics. Just From Hell, or V for Vendetta (my personal favourite), alone would make that first statement true, without looking at anything else. It’s not just comics though. His novel Voice Of The Fire is challenging, and [...]