reading notes

by Chris Hedges
ISBN: 1400034639
What do you suppose war correspondents see and think that never make it into mainstream newspapers?
The answer is the kind of thing Hedges talks about in this book — not so much the relentless gore (though he doesn’t ignore it) but the relentless spin, the crushing of every day lives by lies [...]

by Cynthia Kaplan
ISBN: 0688178502
This book, which is I suppose technically a memoir, reads more like a book of short stories. Or possibly a somewhat rambling and informal collection of personal essays. Subtitled “true stories,” it contains twenty of them, all around ten pages long.
For the most part her stories are funny and ring true emotionally [...]

by James Kochalka
ISBN: damn good question
Kochalka really hits his stride with this second volume of daily sketches. This book probably gives the reader more bang for the buck per square inch of comics than anything else: there is a title page printed on both sides, and everything else, even the inside covers, is diary sketches, [...]

by Davy Rothbart
ISBN: 0971359792
I picked up this little book of short stories at my favorite comics store, but it is about 120 pages worth of short stories, not comics. Paul Hornschemeier (Forlorn Funnies) did do the text and cover design, so that could be part of the reason why. What I really hope is that [...]

by Lyall Watson
ISBN: 0393324591
This book is probably as much memoir as it is nonfiction title about elephants. Often while I was reading it, I pictured a sixty-something man in a khaki shirt, settled down behind a large oak desk covered with papers and interesting-looking objects, sipping a cup of tea. He was leaning forward slightly, [...]

by J.K. Rowling
ISBN: 043935806X
It took awhile to get through this book — not because it wasn’t good or because it was over 800 pages — but because L read the whole thing to me, out loud. We both wanted to read it at the same time (we bought it the day it came out) [...]

by Scott Morse
ISBN: 1929998341
I had high hopes for this book. The premise appealed to me: woman wonders into a church just looking for some quiet, and the priest bets her he can get her to admit that God exists by reading her three stories out of the day’s newspaper.
The art is interesting: printed in brown [...]

by Joel Priddy
ISBN: 0972179402
This graphic novel has an unusual format; it is a small rectangle, about the size (but not the thickness) of a mass-market paperback. The oddness runs from the front cover through to the end of the book.
I mean oddness in a good way. The story has three main characters, who just [...]