Book Review: Lips Touch, Three Times by Laini Taylor and Jim Di Bartolo

The kisses in Lips Touch, Three Times are not the absent-minded pecks on the cheek, expressions of friendship kinds of kisses. The kisses in these stories are sometimes shy, but also passionate, desperate, and full of longing and expectation. They celebrate life, and they herald death. They are not for the weak of spirit.

Lips Touch, Three Times is written and illustrated by the husband and wife team, Laini Taylor and Jim Di Bartolo. Each of the three stories creates a rich fantasy world that pulls you in so completely you may have difficulty re-entering reality when you put it down.

The stories build in length and complexity. The first, “Goblin Fruit,” is a short piece about Kizzy, a girl who so longs to be kissed, she becomes prey for the goblins. Can the spirit of her grandmother and stories of girls lost before her save Kizzy from the goblin’s kiss?

“Spicy Little Curses Such as These” takes the reader to India, where Estella, an Englishwoman, enters the realm of the dead every day to bargain with a demon for the souls of dead children. The deals she strikes promises an exchange of one soul of a corrupted adult for each child’s soul returned to the land of the living. When an earthquake claims the lives of many children, Estella is able to strike a deal that brings them all back. The price she must pay is to put a curse on a newborn baby girl named Anamique, a curse that will keep her silent or condemn those around her to death. When Anamique grows up, the love of a soldier tests her ability to maintain her silence and protect the life of her love as well as that of her family.

“Hatchling” is the most elaborate and inventive tale of all, creating a world of immortals, the Druj, who long for something they can almost remember having in their now forgotten past. To while away their time they keep girls as pets, casting them off when they grow to be women. Esme and her mother Mab have escaped from Mab’s cage and lived in hiding for fourteen years when Esme’s brown eye turns blue and their entire world turns upside down. With the help of Mihai, a Druj outcast, they hope to rid themselves of the Druj queen forever.

In each story, Di Bartolo’s color illustrations beautifully enhance Taylor’s evocative words to help the tales come alive. Even non-fantasy lovers should find the stories compelling. Topics to discuss include the nature of longing, maintaining self-respect while falling in love, and having the courage to create the life you want to live. Lips Touch is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. I highly recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls in high school and all readers over 14.

[Via http://motherdaughterbookclub.wordpress.com]

Book Review - Spiritual Warfare And Missions by Jerry Rankin and Ed Stetzer

Spiritual Warfare And Missions

First off, let me just state that this isn’t really a book review. Spiritual Warfare And Missions isn’t even published yet, and has an estimated release date of May 2010.

I was able to read and review a pre-release copy of Spiritual Warfare And Missions, watching for content and clarity.

Suffice it to say that this is an incredible book about missions that has opened my eyes to new thoughts and ideas concerning the strategies of our enemy, as he strives to keep us from sharing the Gospel with the Nations.

Without going into detail here, since the book hasn’t even been published yet, I would recommend that anyone grab this and read it as soon as it comes out. You will not be disappointed!

After the official release of Spiritual Warfare And Missions, I plan to post a review detailing my thoughts and ideas. Stay tuned…

[Via http://jeffrandleman.net]

David Carol - All My Lies Are True

Copyright David Carol 2009, courtesy of David Carol

Inside the window is a beautiful wedding dress, but this simple window is framed by a neutral toned cinderblock and wood wall with an exposed adjacent electrical box. The surrounding ground is a patchwork of grass and dirt, with a barren tree lurking on the edges of the fame. This bleak looking scene is not enhanced by the mirrored reflection of an oil well rig ringed by an overcast sky. The wedding dressed manikin is facing inward, with the reflected oil rig positioned such that it is just above the back shoulder out of the field of vision. This is a dark story about love and romance with a fairy tale wedding story, but looming in the background is the reality of a rough and tumble working life working out in the plains. This same mixture of humor and pathos seems to run though David Carol’s photobook All My Lies Are True.

The book’s title takes umbrage with the supposedly documentary aspect of photography that although a photograph appears to be factual and true, that the underlying essence of any photograph is that it exits as a unique fabrication by the photographer. All photographs are lies. Carol is stating that this is not the case with his photographs, he has in fact documented truth, or at least he would like us to believe as much. It is that contradictory thread running through this body of work which makes Carol’s humor and pathos that much more complex.

The coarse and grainy contrast of his black and white photographs provides a gritty undertone to these images and heightens for me a feeling of pathos. All of the photographs have a horizontal framing, outlined with a distinct black border to ensure separation from the nice white margins. This layout design seems to work well to maximize the size of the images within this horizontal book. Ironically, the black border was an early photographic technique to ensure that a photograph would be seen as a two-dimensional image and not be confused with reality.

In combination with the accompanying captions, it is obvious to me that Carol is a punster, humorous and witty, perhaps like Elliott Erwitt, seeing the absurd in the everyday, who mined the urban landscape with his series of flicks, snaps and photofictions. Perhaps not as dire as the work by Barbara Kruger, who Carol Squiers states, “Although Kruger’s work is always levered by and sometimes dependent on humor for its punch, it is usually humor of the blackly corrosive variety”.

I have found myself challenged by Carol’s photographs, attempting to find the comedy, satire, irony or humor before I advance the page, although not always successfully. I remember a quote about a comedian, regretfully whose name I do not recall, who stated that “humor is really hard work”.  Sometimes humor is witty and ironic, leaving you smiling, enjoying the delightful pun that has been discovered, but sometimes it leaves the comedian sweating. It seems that a small number of Carol’ photographs are highly dependent on the accompanying caption for their success.

Humor also depends on your cultural background, life-stories and past memories, thus some will have an easier time with some of Carol’s photographs than others. I recall when my wife and I were rolling with laughter at a Robyn Williams comedy in a Munich theater, unlike everyone else (later my wife said that those around me were only laughing after I began laughing). We understood the subtly of the puns and jokes because we grew up in the United States. The movie had a subtext and external context that was not easily understood without that cultural grounding.

Carol placed the sign of the sailing shipping floating on a far wall, made all that more humorous if noted that this was photographed in Mystic, Maine. A wiry spelled out HAPPY sign is in fact falling over and neither appears very uplifting or in a very happy state. A Welcome sign obliterated by the growing shrub, implies that in fact you are not really welcome at all. A dour looking white-face clown stands facing the photographer with the ironic text We Ha Fun Yet written on his shirt. At an apparent sales lot, multiple OK signs are festooned on the abandoned and rundown property. A pair of doors on the side of a building, with a number 3 on both doors and a giant spray-painted 3 and arrow pointing to the same doors, belabors the obvious.

There is a Walker Evans element to a photograph of billboard poster that has been composed to extract the paired text of Alive with Pleasure in juxtaposition with Cancer, Heart Disease & Emphysema, then within the in the lower corner of the frame,  a smiling face is reflected on the windshield of the car. A heart shaped clock is also adorned with the text Free Tibet. Three plumb paper covered figurines are hanging in the foreground, then subtly in the background on the edge is a cartoon of a laughing chef who appears to be very amused by this sight.

Carol finds humorous and absurd situations of the everyday, utilizing an amusing vernacular to highlight poignant ironies. At times overstating the obvious, other times with an undercurrent of satire and black humor, he captures mankind’s follies in comedic relief.  Regretfully, Comedies rarely get an Academy Award, but that does not make them any less popular, entertaining and enjoyable.

By Douglas Stockdale

[Via http://thephotobook.wordpress.com]

Book Review: Insights on Romans by Charles Swindoll

Insights on Romans by Charles R. Swindoll

Charles “Chuck” Swindoll has indeed done an amazing job on Insights On Romans.
Listening to Swindoll on the radio is good. Reading his books is good. I never dreamed, however, that his commentary would be so good.
Swindoll combines an amazing amount of background information: society, geography, religious beliefs, politics, etc. He then shows how these things are relevant to the text.
Not only does he do this, but Swindoll takes the text and faithfully expounds upon it.
Then there are charts, maps, illustrations, etc. to help the reader.
Scholar, layman, and pastor will find this a good reference.
I honestly was very pleased with this book and look forward to using it more in the future.
Zondervan has done a great service to the people of Christ by publishing this work by Swindoll.
Thanks to our friends at Zondervan for supplying a copy for review.

View all my reviews >>

[Via http://pastoralmusings.com]

Book Review: Crafting a Business: Make Money Doing What You Love

For my birthday earlier this month, my sister-in-law graciously sent me a copy of Country Living’s Crafting a Business: Make Money Doing What You Love by Kathie Fitzgerald. I just finished reading it, so I wanted give it a little review for those of you out there who might be curious if this book is for you.

This book was published in 2008, so it isn’t new to the market, but it was new to me because I had not seen it before. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from a book put out by Country Living because I am not really a country livin’ kind of gal. That being said, I would not let the fact that it is by Country Living put you off in anyway. The one thing that makes it obviously Country Living is that all of the featured artists and crafters belong in the pages of a Country Living magazine. It might seem kind of hard for you to imagine finding any inspiration from most of the women in this book who are your mom’s age making things like American flag rugs (which is how the book appears at a cursory glance), but there were a few crafters in here I had heard about before, such as Amy Butler and the ladies of The Junk Gypsy Company.

If you aren't an avid reader of Country Living, Amy Butler may be the only person in "Crafting a Business" you've actually heard of.

I’m certainly not saying the other ladies in here aren’t inspirational, it’s just that, well, they are a lot older than me, and it makes it hard for me to relate to them or see any linear connections.  See, one thing about this book is that the first 140 pages is 2-3 page short bios about successful women. If you like reading about others successes, or sneaking a peek into the shops of successful women, then the first 140-ish pages are for you. One of the women who “spoke” to me the most was probably Julie Dobies who said:

“I enjoyed my job at Shabby Chic and had a great salary, but it wasn’t about having money anymore; it was about having a life. So, I decided to take a week off and paint every single day as if it were my job and see how it went. I produced so much work it was phenomenal.”

See, this is a desire I can relate to. So, yeah, I get some of these women, but just not all of them in Part 1 of this book.

Part 2 of this book is about 40 pages titled “Business-Crafting Workshop.” Here is where the reader starts to glean a bit of information about how they could  accomplish what the other ladies in the book have done.  There are 7 sections: The Business Plan, Financing, Product Development, Marketing and Sales, Financial Management, Staffing, and Growing Bigger. Each section is anywhere from 3-5 pages long and has very basic information about how to create a business plan or deal with staffing issues. In the “Financing” section, I was surprised at how much focus was spent on debt and equity financing. Personally, I don’t feel like most people starting out in a craft business like I am should be dependent on credit cards, taking out bank loans, or dipping into our home equity lines to finance our needs. It just seemed really intangible.

Now, the Product development section had good information on pricing your items and remembering to including such things as not undervaluing yourself or being afraid to raise prices as the market changes.  The Marketing and Sales section however, gives advice like “Get Your Products into the Hands of the Media,” but does not tell you how to go about doing this at all (Of course you could check out my post about Craft Business Press Kits for some ideas).

Overall, I found this book to be a bit out of touch with the typical type of crafter I am used to working next to at craft fairs. It’s focus is more on the successful women than telling the reader how to succeed, and one thing that it doesn’t spend nearly enough words on is how to use the internet to help your business.  My last words: If you are just starting to consider starting your own business, then this book is definitely for you. However, if you have been successfully running your business for a year or more, then you probably won’t benefit much from this book. If, though, you are looking for some simple inspiration, regardless of how long you have been in business, and you like peeking into the lives  and workshops of others, but are not hoping for all the answers to your craft biz questions, you’ll probably enjoy this book quite a bit.

So, please tell me, what are your favorite and most useful books to go to for inspiration? What book do you go to again and again for business help or advice?

[Via http://sundayafternoonhousewife.wordpress.com]

Canister X Book Review #1: Gross Movie Reviews Volume 1

Click Here to Order from Amazon.com

This book is hardcore. It’s 99.9% horror movies start to finish, with a few of those “other” movies (read: non-horror) peppered throughout.

Tim Gross is a guy who loves horror and his love for the genre oozes on every page with every review. And there’s loads of ‘em here. Tons. I mean, really, out of all of the movies he reviewed, I only maybe knew of, what, 40 of them? The rest were horror flicks ranging from the ’80s to the present, stuff made not just by the mainstream but all those cool underground movies as well. In other words, my DVD rent and shopping list just exploded.

This book is dense and totally horror info-loaded.

If you dig movies and want to hear somebody’s thoughts–and genuine fan’s thoughts and not just a mainstream reviewer’s whose job it is to “review stuff”–then Gross Movie Reviews Vol. 1 is a must-have hands done.

Grab a copy. You’ll have a blast.

[Via http://apfuchs.wordpress.com]

The Resurrection of Deacon Shader by Derek Prior

I reviewed the first edition of The Resurrection of Deacon Shader when it was first released on Lulu. At the time Derek Prior was virtually unknown outside of a select genre circle. At CFR we were fortunate to be sent a review copy and it instantly hit our top 10 independent fantasy books list. Since then, Shader has entered its third printing (via Create Space/Amazon). More significantly, late in 2009, it was released on the Kindle. This is where it once more came to our attention as – for a couple of days in January 2010 The Resurrection of Deacon Shader was a best seller in Kindle fantasy (sandwiched inbetween Piers Anthony and Neil Gaiman). As a subscriber to Kindleboards I keep tabs on all my favourite authors and sometimes stumble upon useful bits of information like this. I also learnt that Prior has now released Shader on Smashwords in all Ebook formats, has entered it into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and now lists it on Authonomy, where it is rapidly soaring up through the ratings. With all this activity (not to mention C.F. Levy’s recent interview, the transcript of which will appear on CFR shortly) I figured it was about time I took another look at the book with a view to cutting it down to size.

The reading experience starts with the cover, and in this case it’s a win-win situation. The cover art is so strong, so evocative that buyers are likley to splash out on the book purely for the artwork. If they like the story within as well then so much the better. The cover is a dark atmospheric piece that was produced by fantasy artist Mike Nash. The image captures the protagonist in exquisite detail battling the amorphous, shifting shape of the Dweller, a demon from the Abyss. The backdrop arch is suggestive of a church interior and the billowing smoke not only hints at incense but also contains a myriad demonic faces. The Dweller itself is sprouting human limbs as it moves to smother Shader. It is a compelling action piece, one to which I found myself frequently returning as the action unfolded. Prior’s writing is equally compelling. We are thrust straight into an action prologue full of mystery and then immediately into a scene set in the sweltering city of Sarum and a young woman tearing along corridors as she goes to collect a mysterious visitor. The action in Shader is cleverly tempered by passages of reflection, back stories and sublime poetic prose describing the harsh environment of Sahul (which approximates to Western Australia) and the dream world of Aethir. Perhaps the finest example of these moments of purple prose comes in the first chapter of part two when we are introduced to a relam that may or may not be Heaven. Prior is at his best in these moments. He is also a master of melee – my favourite example being the confrontation between the Sicarii assassins and the shamed youthful knight gaston Rayn. The scene was a masterwork of point-of-view with scintillating sword fighting that was reminiscent of David Gemmell. Prior is very assured during combat scenes and passages of reflection and description.

If he suffers from any weaknesses I would suggest it sometimes lies in the dialogue – there are a few needless speech tags and the odd irrelevant adverb. I noticed on my second reading that these disappear largely towards the latter part of the book – presumably as the writing becomes more assured. There is also a little bit of exposition – more than I would have expected. It appears that there was some attempt at keeping down the length of the book by occasionally telling rather than showing. I actually enjoyed some of these passages and felt they kepts the pace up. A couple of short chapters, however, gave me the impression that they were fillers, buffers between scenes designed to slow the pace and explain to the reader. They were barely noticeable and did actually serve their purpose, but I think the book would have been even better without them. Prior’s language is a great strength of the book – although I wonder how many readers will have to refer to their dictionaries now and again. He has a deftness for using archaisms intelligently in order to promote atmosphere and voice.

The action scenes are kept much simpler – as they should be – affording a nice contrast in pace.

Characterisation is one of the major keys to fanatsy novels. Often fanatsy characters are bland and indistinguishable, othertimes they are too broadly sketched, caricatures (I found this the case with Joe Abercrombie). The principle characters in Shader are strong and memorable. Many are iconic. The best ar ethose who admit us to their inner minds – Shader, Rhiannon, Maldark, and most especially the nefarious Dr Cadman. Perhaps my favourite example is when Cadman – afraid for his soul – resumes his illusory disguise of a fat librarian (he is a skeletal lych) in the manner of a comfort eater. I would have liked to have seen a few more idiosyncracies of voice (Brother Hugues is good here) but that’s a minor point.

Prior makes excellent use of foreshadowing throughout Shader, to the extent that it is very satisfying for the reader to start to piece things together. There is also a good deal of foreshadowing relating to the sequels. There are mysteries left unexplained too, and characters with unclear, or shifting motivations which adds to their depth and realism. Thematically the book is very strong, drawing upon mystical theology, Nietschean philosophy and the Faustian myth. There is a pleasing coherence to the plot elements – even the darkest hours of the principles. This is no simple fight between good and evil.

I still find this one of the most promising new fantasies out there – it is light years ahead of much of the slush currently published by the major houses. Judging by comments made to C.F. Levy in his recent interview, Prior has fine-tuned his skills further for the sequel “The Archon’s Assassin”, which is set to be pacier and much more character driven. The Resurrection of Deacon Shader is a must have for any Kindle fantasy library. The paperback is a hefty $11.99 but well worth it if this is your style. Check out the free samples on www.smashwords.com first and then you’ll know if it’s for you.

CFR rating: ****

(thanks to Nathan Sugbury for permission to post his review on CFR)

[Via http://conradlevy.wordpress.com]