http://www.themillions.com Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:36:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en With the holidays now arrived, so ends our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as all the helpful folks who assisted us in putting together such a great group of participants.Though we are undoubtedly ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/wrapping-up-a-year-in-reading-2009.html Here's a list of my favorite covers of 2009. The best way for me to pick some favorites was to break them up into categories. I feel that when a designer has the task of designing, say, a nonfiction book, the parameters are very different than when designing a ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-book-cover-design-michael-fusco.html As usual, my reading life in 2009 was split into comics, which I read voraciously and with a eye toward timeliness, and everything else, which I read haphazardly and with an eye toward pleasure. Start with the everything else. Plans to review the Broadway production of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-dan-kois.html As a half-Japanese kid growing up in the Northeast, I masqueraded quite successfully as another disenfranchised suburban Caucasian dude, angry more at being nowhere special than for any definable reason. But two historical phrases instilled unease: “Pearl Harbor” and “The Bataan Death March.” The former’s nasty ethnic stereotypes of ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-roland-kelts.html This year, the book that left an impression on me was Yurie Nagashima's Memory of a Back. The author is a female photographer, who also studied in a Master's program at the California Institute of the Arts. In the book, Nagashima, who is now a mother, looks back on her own ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-masatsugu-ono.html Samuel Ligon - Drift and Swerve. In this collection of sharp, unforgettable stories, Ligon's wayward American men and women slog through cities like Providence and Orlando and are always looking for something else, something not quite attainable. Ligon's work is sometimes called bleak, but there is great humor and hope ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-robert-lopez.html The book that impressed me most this year was Naoyuki Ii’s novel Poketto no Naka no Rewaniwa (Rewaniwa in Your Pocket). It deals with such socially relevant subjects as the working poor, hikikomori and the condition of immigrants in Japan; yet somehow manages to blend into this realistic background the ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-motoyuki-shibata.html For me, 2009 was the year of Europe Central - not so much because I would wind up reading, in late November, William T. Vollmann's large novel of that name, but because a couple of chance encounters back in January (Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England and Jonathan ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-garth-risk-hallberg.html Of the many books I enjoyed this year, the ones that stuck with me the most were all nonfiction, not my usual arena for reading. Of those, the one book I read in 2009 that I haven’t stopped thinking about and that awed me in a way that made ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-cristina-henriquez.html If you're interested in the history of the music industry, or have wondered idly how the song that's stuck in your head got to be there, you should read David Suisman's detailed and entertaining Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard). Every page held a new discovery for ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/a-year-in-reading-ed-park.html