Maggie's Media Munchies 8/6/07

I know, I know. I'm off schedule again. Media Munchies are supposed to happen on the weekends. Well, don't you think Maggie's Monday Media Munchies is so much catchier? Okay, okay. I'll try harder next week. But today was a very exciting day! Without further ado, my media selections for the week. First up:

The Devil You Know, by Mike Carey. Warning to those faint of heart: I grew up reading Dean Koontz books. Giant invisible animals that chew on townspeople at night make horrible neighbors but great fiction. This witty gem of a novel is in that same vein. Fix Castor, a blunt and amusing narrator, is a professional exorcist in a world where ghosts have become commonplace. He takes on one too many jobs and suddenly he's battling succubi and were-animals of all sorts.

The plot was well put together, the mystery tied up properly at the end, and the narrative was so wonderfully funny that I wanted to give this five cookie dough scoops out of five. But I couldn't. I just couldn't. There was a chunk towards the end that dragged when it needed to fly, and some plot holes were filled in by one character's lengthy exposition. So alas, that one cookie dough scoop that would've made a perfect score slimed slowly off the spoon and onto the floor.

Verdict: Not the world's greatest novel but a very, very, very enjoyable way to lose a weekend. Recommended.

4 out of 5 cookie dough scoops.




Next up, another book - nonfiction this time. This one you might notice in my sidebar as one of the books I highly recommend for artists. I usually don't go in for artist career books because frankly, they all seem to say the same thing. They describe the traditional gallery route, gloss over the good details, and say precious little about the mentality associated with successful artists.

Cay Lang's Taking the Leap stands out from the crowd. I bought it about seven months ago, thinking all the time that I should've just borrowed it from the library, and now I'm glad I didn't. It's not a book that you can just read and return. It's like a cookbook. Some of the recipes you can use that night. Some of them you won't use for a year. Some of them look like something you'd never try, but you go back and take a look later and give it a whirl and wow -- you like what you get.

Most of all, this is a thought-mover. One of those books that gets your brain chugging into gear. "Maybe this won't work for me - but something like this might . . . " Really recommended on every artist's shelf.

5 out of 5 cookie dough scoops.