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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
tyler23 has commented on (3) products
Dark Star An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia
by
Robert Greenfield
tyler23
, June 17, 2008
This book is terrible and exploitative. It focuses on the depressing and uninteresting soap-opera aspects of Garcia's life and is neither insightful nor well written. However, it does have some photos in it that are hard to find in print elsewhere, so I'm going to pick up a used copy (avoiding giving the perpetrator, I mean author, any money), cut out a couple of the images for scanning and framing, and throw away the book. If you want to read a great deal of in-depth information about Garcia's addiction struggles towards the end of his life - most of which might well be completely bogus anyway - and sordid details about his women, well then this is the book for you! Otherwise, though, it is of no (or perhaps negative) value.
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Dark Star
by
Robert Greenfield
tyler23
, June 17, 2008
This book is terrible and exploitative. It focuses on the depressing and uninteresting soap-opera aspects of Garcia's life and is neither insightful nor well written. However, it does have some photos in it that are hard to find in print elsewhere, so I'm going to pick up a used copy (avoiding giving the perpetrator, I mean author, any money), cut out a couple of the images for scanning and framing, and throw away the book. If you want to read a great deal of in-depth information about Garcia's addiction struggles towards the end of his life - most of which might well be completely bogus anyway - and sordid details about his women, well then this is the book for you! Otherwise, though, it is of no (or perhaps negative) value.
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Star Maker
by
Olaf Stapledon
tyler23
, December 08, 2006
This book is not for everyone, but it my single favorite SF novel. This edition is vastly superior to any other I have seen on the market; I found the annotations very useful and interesting. If you know you like Stapledon or are pretty sure you'll like this book, buy this one. If you're not sure, try a cheap used version first. Here are reasons some other people don't like this book. None of these objections bother me, but I will mention them for fairness' sake. - Lack of a covnentional plot or normal character development. There isn't an antagonist. The protagonist just flies through space, meets aliens, and has his consciousness expanded one order of magnitude at a time. Some people say "nothing ever happened!" I don't agree, I like that aspect of it, but it's a valid subjective view. - the prose style. It's written in 1930's high-intellectual semi-Romantic academic style, a bit like Tolkien in the Silmarillion or something, though without the poetic flourishes. It drives some people crazy, and I can understand that. I wouldn't want to read prose in this style all the time. But for me, for this book, it works great and doesn't bother me. - the subject matter. It's mystical and somewhat psychedelic. Diehard cynics and postmoderists find the complete lack of ironic distance troubling and attack the book in their usual mocking style. If you find the idea of higher consciousness inherently laughable, read something else. Reasons I like it? Well, read the wikipedia article, with which I agree, though perhaps skip the spoiler-riffic synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Star_Maker (I had to add a space between '.org/' and 'wiki' to get around some weird powells.com word length rule) Conceptually it has never been equaled, I think. It broke so much new ground and created so many new concepts that more than a few successful SF authors have made entire careers out of mining small corners of this one book. I could rattle on and on about how deeply it's lodged itself in my psyche, but instead I'll just say that if the marks against it above don't scare you, and you like SF that is more about ideas than action or even character, you owe it to yoruself to give Star Maker a try.
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