Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

Lost Girls
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

Short Review

Read If: you love gorgeous erotic artwork, you like to read thought-provoking subject matter, you enjoy retelling of classic stories with lots of sex added

Don't Read If: you hate the mere idea of pornography, you refuse to read anything that broaches seriously taboo issues, you just want really classy-looking masturbation material


Long Review

This is a tough review, because Lost Girls is often a difficult book to read. Melinda Gebbie has referred to it as a "beautiful book of sex," and the graphic novel is certainly that at face value. The plot of the book revolves around adult versions of Peter Pan's Wendy, Alice from the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland books, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz meeting up by chance in an Austrian hotel at the brink of World War I. Together, the women share their past sexual adventures (erotic retellings of the classic stories), while embarking on the expenditure of their current sexual horizons. The book is unabashedly pornography, with many varied sexual situations gracing nearly every page. The squeamish need not apply; especially since the book explores many taboo sexual situations, up to and including pedophilia, bestiality, and incest. The book waves aside any moral implications involving these kind of sexual relationships, as after all, it is just fiction. However, I at least could not help but become somewhat disgusted with some of the more graphically upsetting scenes, even if I could accept it as an artistic exercise and plot device. If you could not stand reading Lolita, you should stay far away from Lost Girls. However, both books have merits far beyond any depiction of socially reprehensible actions.

The art in Lost Girls is simply gorgeous; lush, vibrant, and expressive. There is tons of erotic detail packed into every page, and the book greatly succeeds as a visual expression of humanity's sexuality. Moore's writing in the book is generally minimal and tends towards straight eroticism, with many clever allusions and metaphors. However, beyond mere pornography, Lost Girls has an agenda. It is a direct response to the glorification of violence seen in media, and the looming approach of World War I is felt throughout, adding a dark tint to any sexual ecstasy. The book mourns the vilification of human sexual acts, and raises questions regarding the modern world's Puritanical beliefs regarding pornography. A celebration of sex in all forms, Lost Girls is beautiful, thought-provoking, and sometimes extremely sad. Reading it was a singular experience, and I think anyone who takes the time and effort to read through the volumes will gain something from it. All in all, Lost Girls is a successful if extreme venture into the world of artsy porn, and stands as a thoughtful and moving expression of that famous and all too topical phrase, "Make love, not war."

Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
by Ruth Reichl

Short Review

Read If: you love reading about food and eating, you enjoy hearing stories of others' interesting lives, you like hearing about food magazine editors having sex

Don't Read If: you could care less about the gritty insides of the food business, you dislike voyeurism, you want this book to be about only food and not life's trials


Long Review

Yet another sequel on my blog, shame on me! Comfort Me with Apples is the direct follow-up of Ruth Reichl's first memoir, Tender at the Bone. A bit more disjointed and wandering than Riechl's first memoir, Apples still provides a vibrant and honest telling of one woman's search about finding her place in life. This memoir covers Reichl's life through her 30s, following the point in her life when she became seriously employed in the restaurant critic scene. The reader gets to follow Reichl as she visits far-off countries and meets famous chefs and celebrities, learning much about the up-scale restaurant business on the way. However, the book is not solely concerned with food; much of the book chronicles Reichl's personal journeys at the time, from affairs and divorce, to new love and trying to start a family.

Reichl writes beautifully about food, and plainly and honestly about love, sex, and life's hardships. The author has a strong personality and great sense of humor, which definitely come through in the writing. She does have some issues with time management in this book, as sometimes months pass by without any indication (without even paragraph breaks!), and at worst the book becomes overly self-absorbed (although to be fair it is a memoir), but I will admit to being unable to put it down. It feels a privilege to be invited so intimately into this woman's life. Reichl takes her readers through a roller-coaster ride of wild successes and failures, and deep love and heart-rending pain. I am not usually a memoir fan, but I greatly enjoy reading Reichl's life story. If you enjoy modern memoirs and especially food, this is a great pick.

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

The Last Wish
by Andrzej Sapkowski

Short Review

Read If: you enjoy retellings of fairy tales, you want to read fantasy without definite "good" and "evil" sides, you are tired of 5,000 page dry fantasy epics

Don't Read If: you are looking for a substantive discourse on morality, you can't take boob jokes, a collection of fun but not fantastic Polish fantasy stories sounds uninteresting


Long Review

Published in the U.S. shortly after the release of well-received PC RPG The Witcher, The Last Wish is a fantasy short story collection by famous Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. I am a big fan of The Witcher video game, so I will admit some bias in my enjoyment of this book. This book centers around Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher living in a typical European fantasy setting - with a twist. One of the big draws of the game and the book is the premise that nothing in this world is black and white; morality is a hazy gray, and Geralt is often forced to make decisions where there is no "right" answer. Geralt's job, as a Witcher, is to kill monsters; however, the monsters in his world are often no more monstrous than the people who hire Geralt in the first place.

The book is comprised of several short stories, alternating with chapters that make up an over-arching narrative. This format is sometimes confusing, as the time lines jump wildly and the reader is sometimes left wondering where and when the current event is taking place. The Last Wish was originally written in Polish, and the translation seems to do a decent enough job as far as I can tell. There's not much poetry or intricacy in the prose here; it's generally a very straight-forward and quick read. Most of the short stories in the book are retellings of classic fairy tales, such as Beauty and the Beast and Snow White, but presented in a morally-ambiguous and dark fashion. The twists are somewhat similar to Neil Gaiman's classic Snow, Glass, Apples, with the main focus being that both the "good" guys and "bad" guys are flawed and interchangeable. Geralt often becomes trapped between two or more options that end in pointless violence and the death of innocents. One of the main pleasures of the book is watching how Geralt resolves these issues while adhering to his own gruff personal code. Despite all the depressing and violent themes present in the book, The Last Wish actually offers a good deal of laughs, as the stories are peppered with crude jokes, clever wit, and silly antics, especially involving Geralt's foil, the irrepressible womanizing bard Dandelion.

Overall, I found the book to be an enjoyable and easy read, with interesting takes on familiar stories and original narratives set in a gray and dying world. The Last Wish serves as an adequate introduction to Geralt's story, and is an excellent companion for The Witcher PC game. Sapkowski creates for us a convincing amoral fantasy realm where you are never sure who exactly the monsters are, and makes it a pleasure for us to follow Geralt in walking the line between monsters and man.

Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One

Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One
Played on PC

Short Review

Play If: you enjoy classic turn-based battles, you like off-kilter steam punk stories, you want to kill mimes and/or clowns

Don't Play If: you want a fast-paced twitch-based game, you hate reading text, graphic depiction of fruit-lovin' upsets you


Long Review

Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One is the first game in a series of episodic RPG/adventure games, brought to us by Hothead Games. The game is basically the bastard child of a three-way between a classic Final Fantasy game, a Monkey Island-esque adventure game, and Penny Arcade. Unfortunately, it is not quite the stunning specimen that description makes the game sound, as it inherits some unfortunate birth defects. First, some things I enjoyed about the game. My favorite aspect was probably the setting; the partly steam punk, partly Lovecraftian world of New Arcadia. Twisted machines, gritty locations, and malevolent dark gods work together to create a living and enjoyable alternate world. The musical score adds much to the atmosphere, as well, and overall it feels like a fully imagined world with a lot of storytelling potential. The bleakness of the atmosphere is of course tempered by Penny Arcade's usual wit, although the dialogue is often fairly straightforward and more serious that one might expect. I didn't mind the tone of the game, but I have read complaints that Rain-Slick just isn't funny enough - and, to be truthful, there are only so many penis jokes one can take before they get stale.

I did laugh out loud several times, generally when surprised by some enjoyable small detail in the game, such as the clowns bleeding rainbow, and the various descriptions for objects around the world. The game is played in the point-and-click fashion, very much reminiscent of old LucasArts adventure games. Many of the objects around the locations have witty descriptions or secret items attached to them. The graphics in the game are decent and serve their purpose; the art direction is great, but the bobbing 3-D characters sometimes feel a little out of place. The highlights of the game, for me at least, were the 2-D cut scenes, done to mimic a standard multi-panel comic page. Your avatar, customized by the player at the beginning, is inserted into these cut scenes as a 2-D character faithful to its 3-D model, which I found great. It was a lot of fun to see a character you created living out comic adventures with the guys from Penny Arcade.

Combat takes place in a turn-based environment, very much akin to the Active Time Battle System seen in the older Final Fantasy games. Characters have three options; use an item, regular attack, and special attack. Each of these options has a timer, and the respective action can only be performed when the gauge is filled. Special attacks are short mini-games, involving pressing the correct arrow keys, or hitting the space bar at correct times. You also have the option to block enemy attacks by hitting the space bar after the enemy's health bar has flashed. The combat starts out pretty slow, but as both your characters and the enemies get more powerful, you'll rarely not be clicking or pressing something at any time during battle. I found combat serviceable; nothing really special, but it gets the job done.

The plot of the game involves tracking down clues as to why a giant robot has decided to visit New Arcadia, crushing your character's house in the process. The story evolves to include angry hobos, evil mimes, and dark elder gods. As the first part of an episodic series, the game serves to lay the groundwork of further adventures for Gabe, Tycho, and your player. Thus, the game is fairly short, running about 5-6 hours to finish everything. It is also somewhat lacking in locations, and you'll be revisiting the same areas again and again during your quest. But despite the mediocre combat and other small stumbles this game makes, overall I found Rain-Slick to be extremely enjoyable. Shooting mimes, collecting urine, throwing pricks; the game is really just plain fun. If you enjoy Penny Arcade's type of humor and old-school adventure and console RPGs, you'll probably get a kick out of the game as well. But if you have any doubts, there's a demo available on the Greenhouse Interactive website via the link above. The demo gives you a good feel for the game and will definitely go a long way to convince you whether to purchase the game or not. The demo is also available on the Xbox 360 marketplace if you'd rather play it there, but I preferred the mouse and keyboard for both the movement and combat, so I opted for the PC version.

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength
(Book 3 of the Space Trilogy)
by C.S. Lewis

Short Review

Read If: you enjoy retellings of classic myth, you are looking for some science-fiction based philosophy (or vise versa), you enjoy bears (the animals)

Don't Read If: you abhor Christian allegory, you find descriptions of British academicia dull, you are Philip Pullman


Long Review

Possibly a bad idea to start a review blog with the third book in a trilogy, but here goes nothing! This book can technically be read on its own, but I would not recommend it, as it frequently makes references to the previous two books and would be a much more confusing read if you did not have the backstory. Anyway, on to the book itself. Possibly Lewis' most complex work, That Hideous Strength is the story of an immoral new corporation looking to destory the world as we know it, and the small group of rightous folk (backed up by pseudo-omnicient space entities) who band up against them. The book is deliciously well-written, with poetic descriptions and long, interesting points of philisophical discussion. I found the plot to be enjoyable, if not terribly deviant in its ultimate "Good conquers Evil" finale.

The central character in the story is Jane, a disaffected scholar and housewife (who also has visions). It was honestly refreshing, at first, to have Lewis focus on a realistic and progressive female character! However, the glimmering promise of a strong female character written by Lewis was not to last. By the end of the novel, Jane has learned that her enlightened individualistic days are morally bankrupt, and true happiness only comes from being an obedient Christian wife. Yes, you can gag. Lewis, a bachelor for most of his life, is very much a man's man in the sense that women are so foreign to him that he feels the need to either ignore their existance or place them in a context wherein they can complement his severely WASP viewpoints -i.e. supportive wives to his male characters. He is all but obsessed with the "masculine," even going so far as to state that God is such a pure form of masculinity that we are all feminine in comparison. This is certaintly no departure from Lewis' other works, but it was disheartening to have it beaten in so soundly.

Another aspect of this trilogy that I found disconcerting was the focus on the violence by which the good guys vanquished the evil-doers. For someone who claims to have a Christian viewpoint, the moral given by these books is that evil can only be defeated by submitting yourself wholey to God and beating the utter CRAP out of any bad person in the most violent and painful methods possible. Hmm, on second thought, looking at history I guess this is a fairly predominant Christian viewpoint. But I feel as if Lewis was capable of better. There is little to no hope of any redemption or actual conversion here; people seem to be naturally geared towards good or evil, and the good people always progress into better and better people, while evil people must die. Which feels out of place inside Lewis' extremely philosophical discourse; much of this book involves discussion of religion, faith, morality, and other high-minded and, franky, interesting ideas. However, the story itself seems to be pulled between being a highly original and thought-provoking exploration into modern society and religion told through a science-fiction story, or just being a stereotypical action-adventure tale. It accomplishes both variations well, but neither to true excellence.

Honestly, this book is a very good read if one can get past the heavy-handed Christian allegory and anti-feminist themes. It has many witty and fun moments, and an interesting plot involving zombie heads, psychic space-beings, Arthurian legend, and philosphical discourse. Overall, I believe this trilogy is worth taking a look at, especially if you enjoyed the Chronicles of Narnia and want a more adult and sci-fi based series by Lewis. The series also offers an interesting comparison to works by other authors, such as Tolkien and Pullman, who act as either companion pieces or rebuttal pieces to a lot of the ideas Lewis brings forth in That Hideous Strength. In fact, there's a lot more I could say about this series, which in itself makes it a worthy read to me. Anything that can keep me interested and make me think deserves a place on my bookshelf.