I recently listened to the audio version of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. The book was on my radar for a long time: some of my own readers saw parallels between Niffenegger’s handling of a relationship interrupted by time travel and my own Take Back Tomorrow, so I kept hearing about the book, but…
Read more
Some critics and some unhappy fans have said that Neil Gaiman’s latest book is too short and too unremarkable, not worthy of rubbing covers with Neverwhere or American Gods; many latch onto the fact that this book started as a short story, and they shout “Aha! Gotcha, Gaiman! You should have kept it short. Clearly…
Read more
This is an analysis of one of my favorite SF novels. I originally presented this at a Popular Culture conference a few years back. A friend suggested I publish at the time, but the hoops associated with academic publishing were not the ones I wanted to jump through back then. Now I make my own…
Read more
I first came across a reference to Don Ryan when I was reading Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series, a remarkable history of California. Starr identified Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight as one of the first novels about Los Angeles and Hollywood, and since that was the focus of my dissertation, I sought out…
Read more
So the editor of the Times Literary Supplement feels that book bloggers are doing a disservice to literary criticism, watering it down. Anyone with enough know-how to set up a blog and read a book can become a literary critic. On the one hand, there’s a legitimate concern there. The proliferation of voices on the…
Read more
I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the preferred text read by the author. It’s been said that writers are often the worst readers of their own work, which may be true in some cases, but not this one. Gaiman’s rendering of the different characters’ voices is brilliant, vivid, and…
Read more
