book ends

So, the last time I checked in on about books, I was re-reading Dumas. Yeah, that's not happening anymore. In my re-reading of The Three Musketeers, I now remember that I love Dumas because of The Count of Monte Cristo, and that love was reaffirmed by Georges. Musketeers was fun, but over the holidays I've added more books to my already towering pile of pending books. I had to move on quickly.

And I moved on to Alan Moore's Voice Of The Fire, which starts off with a story of a prehistoric man. It's the prehistoric man's narration so it's written with a limited vocabulary and syntax. It's a bit daunting but it's genius when you realize that the evolution of language affects the evolution of a consciousness that affects the evolution of language that affects... Anyway, this chapter is hard to read, and it's a hard way to start the book (whose chapters you can read out of sequence, I think), but I'll make my way.

But that's become increasingly difficult to because a friend came home from the US and got me this:

With a mouthful of a title, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac is a Freedarko.com-produced book. Borne out of a blog, you'd think that it's just an example of new media trying to sell more via old media. But maybe the blog was already brilliant to begin with because it's actually a funny, articulate, well-designed book on the significance of particular NBA players in... everything. I think. I'm still trying to figure out if it's about the myth of players, their impact on culture, and others things, significant or otherwise. But if for nothing else, it really looks great. Check out some of the pages I ripped from Amazon:

The book I really asked for, and got (score!), was Annie Leibovitz at Work. I'll be honest, based on that cover, I was hoping for lighting diagrams and some technical how-tos. How amateur fanboy of me, I know. But it's all behind-the-scenes narratives, and anecdotes about some of her famous pictures. A lot of which I already know about from her older monographs. But it's a nice, gorgeous book to add to the collection. I haven't gone in beyond the first chapter so I'll have to wait to see if I there are newer stuff in it.

One of my favorite books from last year was Michael Chabon's Gentlemen Of The Road. Not only because it's written in serial format ala Dumas, or that Chabon lists Dumas as a major influence, but because it's a fun, swashbuckling adventure with a lot of heart (ala Dumas). Anyway, I liked it so much that I got a copy for my eldest godson. He's turning 9, and let's see how his mother explains war, swindling, gender-bending, and the other exploits of a giant African Jew and his bosom buddy, a Frankish Jew, in the Middle-Ages.

The Frankish Jew, I hear, is an homage to a character named Elric of Melnibone, created by Michael Moorcock (to whom Gentlemen is dedicated). I obsessed about Elric and was about to give up finding the books here. I even downloaded the ebooks already. But I dropped by National to spend the GCs I got for Christmas and look what I found:

They had two covers available. One was a minimalist white cover with a nice Tolkien-esque illustration. And there was this gaudy one. I picked the gaudy one because the Foreword was written by no other than Alan Moore.