steveatwaywords's reviews
1212 reviews

This review is for both Volume 1 and Volume 2, Preacher Compleat, as is were.

Much as already been said of the series' audacity in events, language, violence, and the like. It's a hard R-rated work or worse. If that's not for you, move on, and quickly. Don't look back. 

But the most important part of Preacher is its ambition. It assembles some of the most wild assortment of characters, builds thick backstories both grubby and/or divine, and works to make them gel in a great arching 66-issue series of adventures (75 when you add in the "extras"). Few take on so much or do it with such obvious glee and abandon.

That said, abandon is often also reckless, and there are plenty of moments where the story falls to weaker tropes and turns: super-governmental conspiracies, hyperbolic and offensive characterizations, and too-simply motivated divinities all live here, all too predictable, even lazy in their conception. When combined, the primary storyline strikes us as too basic, without nuance of even much complexity, and a first-year divinity or civics student might imagine something more. By around the 1400th page of reading, I was nodding wearily at yet another round of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show with the Grail, placing bets on which body part Herr Starr would lose this time.

So it doesn't always work as story. What multi-year graphic series does? Where Preacher is at its best is with the troubled collisions between its three protagonists. Each has the spotlight at length and even then we don't know if we've understood them completely (in fact, they realistically surprise themselves even to the end), and I found myself desiring even more of them (despite a possession, a betrayal, a few addictions, or the odd resurrection here and there). 

Preacher probably solidified Ennis's career going forward, and with good reason. It's a bit of a niche sell for its controversial art and writing, but it's that same quality that makes it stand apart (only works like Saga might compare IMO). Wisely, too, though, Ennis resolves the lengthy work

on its strongest characters and sets even its divine scale aside for them.

. I left, unexpectedly, satisfied.

If you loved the novel, this revisit to the Downs will be a mostly gentle and kindly return!

A lengthy collection of fables and tales from the bunny mythology of Lord Frith, El-ahrairah, and others as well as a closing section which offers several chapters of adventures following the events of the book, each is brief enough that it would make for a wonderful bedtime story (though read ahead--some are a bit frightening). None individually nor the book as a whole is any match for the novel, of course, nor can this book stand alone. Adams offers no explanations or other assistance to readers who are expected to have read the original work.

Instead, think of this at best as a nostalgic read of coming once again to the glades and re-discovering the characters with some new stories which open up other ways of understanding the myths and the apparent psychic ways of Fiver and others. Asking any more of it is against its welcoming spirit of tale-telling for the sake of story. 

Others have written of Booth's excellent prose and attention to detail. The people he meets, their conversations, the endless roads and paths his blistered feet take him, are all genuine and revealing. For travelogue, this is nearly ideal.

Too, Booth's premises for each of his trips are fascinating choices: following a summer path of author Osamu Dazai, tracing the retreat of the last Samurai, etc. This is not tourist writing, and the gaijin Booth--fluent in language and custom or not--is not always warmly welcomed in space unused to foreign drop-ins. Frequently I wondered at his choices and mistakes along the way (for instance, trusting the directions of disagreeing school children), but I can honestly say I have made equally inconceivable errors in my own travels. He's honest as we might expect about events.

Still, the read felt a bit long to me, and this is perhaps because I found not every detail or moment compelling or noteworthy (perhaps some editing) and perhaps because I am unused to travelogue as a genre. I do not seek the escapist substitute for travel that many readers want. Far better for me to know how Booth thinks/reflects on what he encounters than on how many ryokans he must visit before finding a room for the night. Booth leans on this latter type of detail and leaves us to make sense of much of the rest. 

In the end, though, I got what I came for and more: some real experiences in rural Japan (what I missed in my own trip there) and some discoveries of its history that we seldom find elsewhere.

Cooper's historical storytelling into the mainland onslaught of an ancient Sri Lanka is so well-researched and his detailing and mood-setting so engaging, that I was ready for the story premise from its outset. And, largely, this does not disappoint.

In brief, our poet protagonist is engaged by a conquering tyrant to translate an epic work for the defeated people. He does so (what choice does he have?) but (partially) unwittingly begins to make changes. Certainly translation is difficult, poetry more so, and Cooper gives us just enough of the struggle for us to understand the absurdity of preserving both accuracy and beauty. Along the way, however, we have a tyrant to manage, an illicit love affair to balance, and all the politics in between. Our protagonist is far too fragile to accomplish this--too fragile altogether, in my opinion--and so the results are not entirely in line with his growth (or lack thereof). 

Even so, Cooper is merciless when it comes to his historical realities. When we might expect some narrative justice, some tropish resolution, the book goes elsewhere--both frustrating and refreshing. Still, it makes some elements of the novel's resolution entirely too neat.

Not everything lines up, not all story elements (poem, fictional to quasi-fictional persons, military events, etc.) sync as we might like. But that is the "history" part of historical fiction, and Cooper (creator of the podcast Fall of Civilizations) understands this. The result is a novel fairly unique in its approachability, its characters' anxieties, and its very topic. Worth the read!

Arrington's story of a 1960s circus sideshow act in the American South finds its way to pose questions of faith with characters of unlikely beginnings, middles, and endings. No wonder that the stumbling town sheriff can make so little headway with his investigation, let alone pause overlong to reflect on any of it.

But then again, while Arrington is clearly onto something--teasing readers with references to foundational literary works which undermine tradition, a snake-eater who confesses only to a curious teen some over-arching spiritualism for her act, and a young man in not only an expected adolescent identity crisis but its accompanying one of faith--he holds his cards a bit too close. Not enough is offered for us to do much more than mouth the questions along with the characters. It's a difficult line to walk, the one between elusive ambiguity and outright preachiness; even so, the novel is short enough that Arrington could have offered a bit more elbow room for wondering.

Still, there is enough oddity of story here to interest, enough shifts in point of view to disorient, enough small-town nonsense to grasp the coming stench of soul-hollowing tourism. Is it any wonder that ennui misses those larger questions, too?

When I understood Chance to be a lifelong writer and teacher on Tolkien and one who based her studies on the works of Michel Foucault, I admit I slathered at the mouth a bit. But who knew how quickly that excitement might run dry?

"Dry" is the first word I might offer to describe Chance's approach. For the better part of this work (which feels much longer than it is), she ploddingly assembles her points around the role of "power" in Middle-Earth. She rightly places it mostly in the realms of language and difference, of epistemology and politics--and I would not therefore oppose her approach or even most conclusions--but the results of her inquiry largely fall into territories obvious to lay-readers without the Foucault background: Bombadil's joyous language to banish the lifeless barrow wights, the illusory power of "sight" with the One Ring, etc. Chance has the language, but too often her jargon only obscures what must be otherwise apparent.

For me, what truly bothered me about her scholarship was the limited reading of power as she approaches LotR: for Foucault there is an ever-dynamic flow of power which itself is not inherently destructive. We cannot/must not fool ourselves to naming a condition as static but recognize that it is the arresting or creative energy to power which alters conditions, which moves us to change inside its workings. For Chance, little is made of this and we are left to see particular characters and incidents as ever-wicked or heroic. What of Bilbo across the epic? What of the biography of Galadriel?  Yes, duplicity is a destructive strategy, but does Gandalf never use it?

Certainly much might have been made from Chance's approach; but she treated her analysis as yeoman's work rather than an opening for usefulness.

Probably the best of several books of LotR criticism I have read: Kocher is approachable, admiring of Tolkien, and expansively thoughtful about the larger-scale themes the master of linguistics and storytelling as undertaken.

Always cementing his observations with structure, example, and pattern directly from the texts, Kocher demonstrate and moral and cosmic order to Tolkien's universe, reflecting on the roles of its denizens through their own parturition, fates, and philosophies. Is the storyline pre-ordained? Is chance involved or does a "divine" hand guide? What roles for fealty and friendship? What for mercy and environment? How, exactly, do we understand evil in a universe without religion? 

These are just a few of the questions Kocher addresses as he examines each of the realms races, the complexity of Aragorn (a terrific chapter), and the value or lack thereof in presuming simple allegory from Tolkien's lifework. At the work's close, Kocher looks closely at seven other writings of Tolkien to reveal their connections to the central LotR, as well. 

There is a ton of Tolkien writing out there, but Kocher's, written way back in 1972, will stay on my shelf.

Set aside for a bit Yeats's personal challenges with aging, with finding love, with grasping the intangible. These themes pervade most of the works included here, none simply rendered or thoughtless doggerel. Instead, I am always stunned by a subtext which lives beneath most all of Yeats's work and stands openly before us in the title poem: the life magical and mythic. 

Nothing as flippantly callous as a "Christian faith" or "eternity" is offered: instead Yeats works upon the individual (or at least the poet) as furrowing a narrative soil ambiguous in symbol and portent, nonetheless ever-past and forward. From and within it lie the meaning we seek. It metabolizes into the outward and more visible forms of love and flesh. 

We may (and do) look to the autobiography and literariness in his lines; we marvel at tone simultaneously suffering and resolute, mourning and celebratory. But none of these descriptions alone satisfy what these poems are up to.  

Miracle lives and lies in the imaginative act, if only we'd reach. 

A short parable on our life time, what we value and do not, what we choose to be meaningful, and what counts in the end.

The premise is fantastic enough: caught in a strange planet's atmosphere, planetary colonists have regressively shifted to living their entire lifetimes in little more than five days. In that time they grow, love, work, war, and die. But a lone spaceship, impossibly far away, offers a chance to extend that life. 

With only a few days to live, what possible work might seem important enough to study and continue? What border or personal battles merit our passions? And what relationships might we ever hope to "sustain"? Indeed, Bradbury raises these and other questions, and along the way poses them to us, who live only a mere dozens of years. 

What is a life lived satisfied? What risks are worth taking? What role does regret have? 

The work is short, a mere novella, but the ever-lyrical Bradbury takes what might otherwise be a pulp fantasy and turns it to a challenge of philosophy.

Gimenez wrestles with the inter-sectional identities which themselves contend: they demand her internal attention, threaten to unbalance, all while simultaneously being subsumed under these same identities defining her from without. What results is a compelling, vulnerable, and finally insistent collection that cannot know what comes next: but what we can do/be is recorder, the resistance to forgetting, to oversight, to rationalization.

Gimenez is no lightweight in understanding the demand: our language, our politics, our ideologies, our own psychological subversions ever seek to rewrite the world back to "normalcy" of a status quo. Caught up in a tradition of gaming our "othering," a thoughtless strategizing "away," we dismiss the nuance and struggles of those we meet. 

And what do we miss? The joys and challenges of parenting, of adapting, of laughing, of wondering. 

Not many poems in this collection stand singly as superior to another; in fact, they might/should be read collectively across the book; the kind of embrace that no more witness could ever offer.