Reviews and Comments

this was a book club selection a decade ago… how did i miss it

I walked into a sapphic schoolgirl princess romance — the cover is very accurate — but partway through, a mystery broke out.

The story is that a middle-class American gets into a fancy boarding school on a music scholarship and then falls into the arms of a princess, who as heir to the throne, is very much not out as lesbian. She already had a sullied name because of a party gone very wrong the year before. The last thing she or the royal family needs is another scandal. So of course they get one.

The stakes were high enough to drive the plot, but never so high that I pushed the book aside, as I'm prone to doing. While I admit to being overly fond of sapphic schoolgirl princess romances, I promise you this is very well done.

If you're a fan of public art, or mosaics, or New York City, or transit, this could be your book. Contemporary Art Underground is a beautiful, weighty coffee-table book with photos from across the MTA universe, encompassing all boroughs (yes, and Staten Island too) and all of MTA's transit systems. The subway is front and center, but LIRR, Metro-North, and the buses are represented.

William Wegman's dogs lord over the 23 St F/M station; Yayoi Kusama has an impossibly long mosaic work running the length of the new LIRR station at Grand Central; Nick Cave's Soundsuits lines a new, narrow connector that links Times Square station to 42 St-Bryant Park.

Definitely worth a look, the book and the stations both.

typically in a book like this you get to a point where you know how it will end, but are there for the obstacle course.

with this one, i know one thing that should be true at the end, but i actually have no idea how the big picture will look. 'one last stop' is the last book that gave me this feeling.

This anthology mixes prose and poetry, in a wide variety of compelling styles and voices. Nobody will be in the mood to read all of them at the same moment, but they form a surprisingly cohesive whole for anyone who thinks they might be even slightly interested. It's a book I'll likely pick up several times, taking a different path through each time.

This book will be by my side for a long time, a coffee-table book that actually sits on the nightstand, comforting you after a long day.

By turns monograph, memoir and how-to, it takes you through the artist's life, from her start as a tiny fan of Sailor Moon to the accomplished artist she is today. She has made renderings of the locales that inspired her and the rooms she lived in through adolescence.

Whatever your day or week has saddled you with, there's an image in this book to take you away and calm you, whether that's the wilds of nature, a cityscape in Tokyo, or a girl lying on her floor with her feet up, scribbling in her journal.

(2022 review reposted from dead bookwyrm instance)

Even though the subtitle promised me 30 unforgettable journeys, I was still unprepared for how many overnight trains the authors had unearthed, nor for how far they went (think Arctic Circle).

A bit breathlessly cheerleader, this book is still one I'll keep for the next time I need a novel trip idea.

(2022 review reposted from dead bookwyrm instance)

The house from the Thriller video. Abandoned missile control sites. The graves of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable… and their lovers. The steps down which Laurel and Hardy dropped a piano.

This is not your Fodor's L.A. With lots of offbeat sites - A street steeper than Lombard! Dine with cops! A fiberglass chicken! - there's something in here to interest any L.A. unbeliever.

Worth the trip? Don't know. But the book got me thinking seriously about whether L.A. could be fun, and that's a 5-star lift.

(2021 review resposted from dead bookwyrm instance)

Tyson is the most objectionable writer I've encountered all year. I'd like to fill in my science knowledge gaps, in an entertaining way, but he's picking fights with the New York Times (over Pluto as planet) and J.R.R. Tolkien (over the plural form of "dwarf"). It's tiring and self-centered. It's a very bad year when I give out two one-star reviews, but this is a very bad year.

I normally take weeks to get through a book. I devoured this one in days. It pushed a Kleenex box in front of me just often enough that I couldn't set it down. These are two profoundly flawed women, yet also practically perfect in every way. Through it all I just wanted to wrap them in blankets, bring them tea and cookies, smooth their hair by the fire.

The jacket blurb already gives away more than I would prefer. And you know how it ends. But the journey is an E-ticket ride and worth every penny. You might not want to read it at the coffeeshop though.

don't mind me, just perusing wikipedia's reminder of what critics said about wicked, and seething again. gonna read this book again. the critics continue to slight the material, while being careful to praise the performances of (this time round) ariana grande and cynthia erivo

don't freaking listen to old critics. which is all of them.

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(musical_album)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(musical_album) href="https://sfba.club/hashtag/328" data-mention="hashtag">#Reception

'AllMusic rated the score three out of five stars, deeming it "tuneful and the lyrics often witty"… concluded that the music was "craftsmanlike and certainly efficient for this somewhat questionable project."'

'Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Lawrence Frascella gave the album a negative rating of C+, expressing that it was "fresh evidence that Broadway needs a new, galvanizing musical direction." Frascella lambasted the songs as "a dreary melange of Disney and Sondheim", though he praised the "lushly produced CD" and the performances of Chenoweth and Menzel.'