La Tinaja

Books

• Sean Howe. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

  I’ve always been interested in having a greater understanding of the long trajectory of both the history of the Marvel story universe and of Marvel as a business, having followed comic books for only about a year as a teenager but enjoyed being generally aware of the current set of ”important” books in recent years. This chronicle is incredibly detailed which made it a little slow going when I didn’t have any outside familiarity with the material, but it was well done and interesting. I’m glad to have read it and enjoyed it, even when I moved slowly through some eras.

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• Harri Angell. Pilates for Runners. London: Bloomsbury Sport, 2017.

  There’s just enough theory here to make the reading worthwhile, but the main focus of the book is clear descriptions of mat Pilates exercises and sample routines targeted at runners’ strength and flexibility needs.

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• Jayce Clayton. Uproot: Travels in Twenty-First-Century Music and Global Digital Culture. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2016.

  Uproot is an incredibly compelling blend of artist memoir, cultural criticism, and music and travel writing that does an amazing job of addressing the influence of digital media formats, recording and production tools, broadcasting and performance technologies, and more on listening, performance, and composition in music today. I share Clayton’s affinity for some of the regional styles he explores and am completely unaware of others, so I look forward to following through on those.

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• Andie Mitchell. Eating in the Middle: A Mostly Wholesome Cookbook. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2016.

  The organizing principle of this book is to find ways to adjust cooking techniques and substitute ingredients in comfort foods to make them a bit more healthful while still being satisfying. Many of the recipes themselves are good, but the biggest help for me was as an exercise in finding ways to make adjustments to lower calories in other recipes.

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• Daniel Suarez. Freedom. New York: Signet, 2010.

  I enjoy this series, but continue to wish there was more focus on world building and less on action. I was struck reading this by how it prefigures some of the ideas Cory Doctorow explored in Walkaway although without the same degree of rigorous analysis. It makes for more of a page-turner, but also it is fundamentally a less ambitious work.

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