La Tinaja

Links

• Website, Profiled: Why Are the Most Important People in Media Reading The Awl?—The Verge: This was a great profile at The Verge by Josh Dzieza, and I’m happy to see The Awl recognized in more mainstream media for the work that’s being done there. From a narrative standpoint, not much was new to me, but it’s still nice to have it all packaged in the same place. From my perspective in trying to get another publishing project started, there were some numbers here that I hadn’t seen other places and that was very informative. As an aside, Choire’s episode of the Longform podcast was great.
• After Moore’s Law: How Phones Are Becoming Open-Source—WIRED: I’ve always been interested in the work Bunnie Huang was doing, and this piece that takes an electronics components shopping trip in Shenzen as an occasion to explore the leveling possibilities of the commoditization of processing power. I read WIRED less and less these days, but there was something about this piece that made me feel like I could was reading old WIRED if I squinted a bit. Perhaps it was just my sympathy for the author and the subject, but either way there is some interesting, hopeful prognosticating here.

Books

• Håkan Nesser. Mind’s Eye. Inspector Van Veeteren #1. Translated by Laurie Thompson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008 (1993).

  One of the things that I enjoy most about crime fiction is its careful verisimilitude and the ability to speak to contemporary politics that results. Henning Mankell exemplifies this tendency among the Scandanavian detective fiction with which I’m familiar, and Richard Price is an obvious example of this tendency among American crime writers. Nesser sets his Inspector Van Veeteren series in a fictional Northern European no-place that removes this angle, but the detective story elements and an ambitious narrative structure more than make up for it. It’s been a long time since I’ve read detective fiction with as much interest in the unfolding of the mystery.

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• Håkan Nesser. Borkmann’s Point. Inspector Van Veeteren #2. Translated by Laurie Thompson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006 (1994).

  I quickly moved on to the second book in the Inspector Van Veeteren series after reading the first this week. More tight detective fiction, and impressively, another ambitious structural conceit that is a total change in direction from the previous entry.

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• Dan Slott and Michael Allred. Silver Surfer. Vol 1: New Dawn. New York: Marvel, 2014.

  I bought the first two issues of this new Silver Surfer book in hard-copy when it came out because Silver Surfer has always been one of my favorite characters and Dan Slott and Michael Allred are among my favorites in each of their respective crafts. I’ve only now been able to catch up and finish this arc by reading the first trade and it’s one of my favorites. The climax of the arc comes in 3 or 4 consecutive two page spreads that give Allred an opportunity for a real work out, and Slott throughout hits a great balance between hokey, knowing, and fun.

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