Category: Books
“This creature who is part genius, part fool.”
'The human being is a truly remarkable creature,' he tells us. 'He has discovered fire, built cities, writen magnificent poems, interpreted the world, invented mythologies, etc. But at the same time he has never ceased waging war on his fellow humans, being totally wrong, destroying his environment, etc. This mixture of great intellectual powers and…
Booktrails… the story of 22 used books
Over the last few months, I've been progressively upgrading the print editions of my books to digital editions; selling the print copies on Amazon to finance their electronic offspring. Uhuh, replacing atoms with bits. With almost daily trips to the post office to despatch these used books, I began to wonder about the journey each…
Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you. And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves. My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves… — Moving pictures took…
Y, El Último Hombre
This week's episode of Lost – '316' – features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn… Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume,…
Islanded In A Stream of Stars
From Night on the Great Beach, in Henry Beston's The Outermost House… "For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."
Y: The Last Man
Like many late 80s geek teenagers I was consumed by adult comics and graphic novels such as The Dark Knight Returns, V for Vendetta and Watchmen; many of which have been recently re-released as gorgeous hardcover ‘Absolute’ editions by DC’s Vertigo label. I missed out on many of the long running series at Vertigo, with…
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis is one of my favorite books and probably the one I’ve most often given as a gift to others. Until today’s post at AICN, I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in production. The short trailer seems to capture the energy, spirit and humour of the book… I can’t…