Notes from a bibliophile

Back in the day, I worked at a little mom-and-pop video store. It was pretty cool. We rented VHS and Beta. They had a pretty awesome backlist of titles, too many to work through. Also a lot of soft porn. The best was working on Saturday mornings. The boss didn’t come in til late in the day, and no one came in the story, or if they did, it was just to drop off and run back out. So you had all morning and an extensive library at your fingertips. I saw Eraserhead on one of those Saturdays, and after I transferred to closing their other branch, I was able to watch pretty much watch the entire run of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Not to mention the screeners we’d get in advance of the tapes hitting the shelves. Those were good times. A friend and I had a pool going every year about which of us could predict the most Oscar wins. I invariably lost every year, because I tend to vote with my heart and not like an Oscar voter (and who knows what they vote with). Granted, I haven’t seen a lot of...

I was raised Baptist. My grandmother on my dad’s side was very much into church life. She was there every Sunday and Wednesday; she helped serve the Wednesday dinner at the church; she played piano for a long time, then retired so to speak to the pews where she was almost a hall monitor over the kids, who kept moving further and further to the front to escape her. The quote from Shakespeare could have been written for her, “And though she be little, she is fierce.” My dad said I’m a lot like her; I kind of wish that was more true than it is. My family was not into church life so much. We recently watched the film Almost Christmas with Danny Glover, and there’s one part where they’re all in church and the pastor refers to them as CME Christians - they’re only in church on Christmas, Mothers Day, and Easter. That was us. Dad claimed it was because of the hypocrisy he saw in the church, and I totally understood that. I went to a private school tha...

We live in an age where people are shouting about freedoms everywhere. And it's great to be able to live in a country where we are so free, but one thing we often forget is that other people are also free to disagree with us. Just as we are free to shout our beliefs and opinions from the rooftops, we have to allow others to do the same, no matter how wrong we feel they are. Freedom is hard won and difficult to foster. But it's beautiful just the same. One of the most discussed freedoms (especially now) is freedom of speech and press. I've only recently gotten interested in comics/graphic novels, so the history of the genre is lost on me. I'm not surprised though to learn that comics have suffered the same strong-arm tactics that face controversial novels. It just seems sillier. To arrest people for selling comics that have boobies drawn in it seems truly a waste of law enforcement's time. That's one of the scenarios addressed in this collection of comics, w...

The thoughts start to weigh her down again. They come from nowhere sometimes. A song on the radio, an offhand remark, something she read on Twitter. Suddenly sadness overwhelms her, but on the outside you'd never know. At least she hopes you'll never know. She's always felt alone in the world. Like it twirls around her, mocking her, in some sort of dance, while she stands there wishing she could belong. But she gets passed over too much to feel like she can belong. It was always like this. Her father drove into her that children should be seen and not heard. Now she feels she's neither. Can a person actually be invisible? There have been times she's wondered if she was. She knows there have been times her voice has been drowned out by the crowd. By the time she has found a place to say what she wanted to say, the conversation has changed. So what's the point in trying to talk? She's even afraid to say things on Twitter. People say the craziest things on...

I finally finished a book with no pictures. Holy cow, I sure didn't think I'd do that this year, the way I've been going. But I'm not surprised it's Hornby that's broken my funk; I'm surprised it's a book about music. Anybody with a passing familiarity with Nick Hornby knows he is a music fan. Perhaps that's putting it lightly really. Hornby seems to be a music fan the way people are fans of oxygen. He knows his shit and it works its way into a lot of his novels. I am not a music fan to this level. That's not to say I don't like music; I love it. But I don't breathe it the way Hornby does. I'm not even sure I would be classified as an enthusiast. I'm like the John Cleese character from a Monty Python sketch that says, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." This book is a series of short essays about just that, songs that Hornby likes. Songs that meant something to him at some point in his life. It...