Reviews and Comments

I don't know what I expected, but this book doesn't hold up well.

And by "doesn't hold up well" I mean that it reads like a Twilight Zone episode, complete with punchline. It's a good idea, but Haber and Orr just don't resonate as real people. The plot forces the individuals to act as they do, and so it plays out in the concept of archetypes. The aliens are a nice touch, but I kept wondering what Philip K. Dick would have done with this.

Decent.

"The Truth doesn’t fuck around. It doesn’t care about your opinions. It doesn’t care if you don’t believe in it. It doesn’t give two shits what religion you are, what country you’re from, what color your skin is, how rich or poor you are. None of what concerns you concerns it in the least. It is not open to negotiation. You either go along with it, or it will sweep you aside."

"But most of us don’t believe in the reality we experience every moment of every day. That’s why we’re always trying to escape into religious beliefs, or into physical pleasures or into the kind of mindless zoned out state induced by video games and endless web surfing."

"We would say normal things to each other and to anyone we met and we’d behave in normal ways. This broke down in about half an hour."

Good, but short. I was also a bit concerned that the cartoons were very male centric.

Solid, and well put together.

There are a couple of annoying typos in the book though. It's not hard to see "Buttons 9don't", so I'm going to chalk this up to bad proofreading.

Can't read this book without cringing.

One of the densest, most thoughtful superhero books out there. It plays with the lines between cartoony superhero and all too real impact in beautiful fashion, thinking about how people who kill (ninjas) think about people who don't (superheros), how death isn't harmless and how carefully people have to manage attraction and attention between friends and lovers, and how even cosmic villains occasionally want to kick back, watch a cute girl, and pretend that they're not driven by a cosmic imperative to destroy the world and everything in it.

I wanted to wait two weeks until picking up this one. I made it two days.

AWESOMENESS

This is a collection of various interviews that Strauss did with rock stars and celebrities.

It's pretty clear that rock stars and celebrities are not always interesting people. Some of them have nothing to say, some of them really don't give a crap about saying anything, and worst of all are the ones with nothing to say, but intent on saying it.

P.J. Harvey is the most interesting one of the bunch, because she's genuinely not interested in anything but music, and suffers the interview like a commuter subjected to a drunk tourist's questions. Oh, and Trent Reznor has issues.

Other than that, you can skip it. It's not going to tell you anything deep about human nature, and it's not even going to tell anything new about these people.

Beautiful art, and a nice slice of life story about an architect who has never built a damn thing in his life.

I think I liked the story simply because it's told in a clever fashion, and merges the visual and literary themes nicely (when Asterios and his wife are arguing, they're drawn the way they see each other in the argument, in hard lines and soft pastel shadings).

That said, the decisions that Asterios made that actually impressed me were the ones that were utterly unlike him and came with no explanation. Left to himself, without the intervention of the author, he's an insufferable ass -- and there's no clear reason why he suddenly stopped being one.

Read it when I was 12. It's an unsettling bunch of stories; no-one is quite as good as they should be, or as bad as they'd like to allow themselves to be.