My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a...
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It's really hard to find interesting books that both my son & I can enjoy together. Granted, I'm a permenent grade schooler who loves all thing science, while my son is actually a grade schooler, who also loves science but finds reading challenging.
Now that he's fallen in love with graphic novels, we killed two birds with one stone while reading this: reading and science together! In a form that both of us truly appreciated. If you're gonna read comics, why not gain some scientific knowledge along the way, eh?
The artwork is nothing short of fantastic, making science into almost fantasy, at least artisitcally. But this just adds to the prose, which actually more than held my attention. I wanted to keep reading more and more, long after bedtime.
This is a book for adults, I know, but it totally brought out the child in me and made me yearn for more.
Wow! Remember when you'd hold your favorite picture book as a child and stare for long, lingering moments at the artwork. You'd be transported into that realm magically, lifted up and away from your room, away to the world of the artist and his imagination. Michael Keller's book does the same thing to me now that Where The Wild Things Are did to me 30 years ago. The illustrations are lavish, and gorgeous, voluptous and imaginitive, especially given the subject matter: science, nay not only just science, but evolution!
The prose is worthy in and of itself, too. It takes the writings of Charles Darwin, arguably not the world's finest of writers, and literally translates his theories into modern language so that the scientifically lame amoung us can really grasp what Darwin's theory is about. Keller must have done this as a labour of love, because I remember reading Darwin as an undergraduate, and fell asleep many times! with picture, too! It's Divine.
For poetry in prose, this is the finest example. Her words shimmer with captavating wonder. Each sentence offers such jewels, and yet she wastes no words. It's like Mozart said in the film Amadeus: "I write only as many notes as there need to be; no more, no less!" Just so with Roy's words in this novel: each word is precisely where it needs to be, what it should be and she uses only as many as needed to tell this entertaining and moving story; no more, no less.
Also, her characters are at the same time interesting, entertaining, believable, and marvelous. Some are outrageous, some more one dimensional than others; but all contribute faceted elements to the story. Her main characters are well done, even though their actions, in the end, are still hard to justify. The reader expects one thing to happen, and yet another does, which leaves us to wonder long after the last chapter has been read and reread again.
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(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
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nikki monacelli has commented on (3) products.
The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA by Mark Schultz
nikki monacelli, November 13, 2009
It's really hard to find interesting books that both my son & I can enjoy together. Granted, I'm a permenent grade schooler who loves all thing science, while my son is actually a grade schooler, who also loves science but finds reading challenging.Now that he's fallen in love with graphic novels, we killed two birds with one stone while reading this: reading and science together! In a form that both of us truly appreciated. If you're gonna read comics, why not gain some scientific knowledge along the way, eh?
The artwork is nothing short of fantastic, making science into almost fantasy, at least artisitcally. But this just adds to the prose, which actually more than held my attention. I wanted to keep reading more and more, long after bedtime.
This is a book for adults, I know, but it totally brought out the child in me and made me yearn for more.
Charles Darwin's on the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation by Michael Keller
nikki monacelli, November 13, 2009
Wow! Remember when you'd hold your favorite picture book as a child and stare for long, lingering moments at the artwork. You'd be transported into that realm magically, lifted up and away from your room, away to the world of the artist and his imagination. Michael Keller's book does the same thing to me now that Where The Wild Things Are did to me 30 years ago. The illustrations are lavish, and gorgeous, voluptous and imaginitive, especially given the subject matter: science, nay not only just science, but evolution!The prose is worthy in and of itself, too. It takes the writings of Charles Darwin, arguably not the world's finest of writers, and literally translates his theories into modern language so that the scientifically lame amoung us can really grasp what Darwin's theory is about. Keller must have done this as a labour of love, because I remember reading Darwin as an undergraduate, and fell asleep many times! with picture, too! It's Divine.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
nikki monacelli, February 10, 2009
For poetry in prose, this is the finest example. Her words shimmer with captavating wonder. Each sentence offers such jewels, and yet she wastes no words. It's like Mozart said in the film Amadeus: "I write only as many notes as there need to be; no more, no less!" Just so with Roy's words in this novel: each word is precisely where it needs to be, what it should be and she uses only as many as needed to tell this entertaining and moving story; no more, no less.Also, her characters are at the same time interesting, entertaining, believable, and marvelous. Some are outrageous, some more one dimensional than others; but all contribute faceted elements to the story. Her main characters are well done, even though their actions, in the end, are still hard to justify. The reader expects one thing to happen, and yet another does, which leaves us to wonder long after the last chapter has been read and reread again.
(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)