Reading diary

I never really got into superhero comics, and while Watchmen is quite a bit more sophisticated than most of the ones I've been exposed to, it indulges in enough of the genre's brash fantasy to keep me from being as excited about it as a lot of people are. That said, I did really enjoy it. Alan Moore's alternate 20th century is more interested in its (mostly) mortal heros' politics and relationships than their powers… See more →

Zadie Smith commissioned twenty-three reputable writers (including herself) to each "make someone up." Their stories were named after their characters and compiled into this book, published and sold for the benefit of 826NYC, a non-profit that gets kids into writing. It's a good enough idea, but unfortunately, most of these stories are instantly forgettable.

Some of the authors I've found to excel at short-form character studies before (like Dan Clowes and Miranda July) don't disappoint,… See more →

Preferable to the story's original form, this graphic adaptation is well-paced and beautifully illustrated (full disclosure: the illustrator is a good friend of mine), both preserving and enhancing Fitzgerald's winking, flowery prose. Kevin Cornell's loose lines and sepia watercolors strike a flexible tone that deftly manages the story's mood swings and evokes the era magnificently. The portraits marking Benjamin's progress in backward aging at the beginning of each chapter are an especially nice touch.

Part motivational pep talk, part memoir, and part chess instruction, How Life Imitates Chess shares insights accumulated through a lifetime on professional chess's world stage by the most accomplished player the game has ever known. Self-awareness is the main message, and Kasparov has a gift for making the steps to achieving it plain, if not easy. His points are well-illustrated by anecdotes from his chess and political careers as well as historic examples from the… See more →

This could be a great book if it bothered to go into any actual detail or offer any really compelling arguments for or against abiding by typographic principles. Instead, it offers two equally under-developed halves. The first half gives us the ten “commandments,” several of which are typographically context-specific, and each of which has barely a sentence of explanation or justification for why it should be followed. The second half of the book supposedly describes… See more →