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It borrows quite a bit in the beginning from the structural frame of Stephe King's "It". That can be a bit distracting if you're familiar with that story. But, by the end of the first volume Urasawa starts pulling. Besides as a device to advance the plot - Urasawa uses the time jumps to the decreasing conviviality of modern life. There are many examples but one that jumped out at me - child care is expensive so Kenji works at the convenience store with the baby - the franchise manager threatens to break the contract. What better sign that we are all trapped in a global capitalist doomsday cult.

I'm digging it, I hope it stays this hot!

Second book of The Once and Future King. It almost made me give up on the whole endeavor, glad I didn't since the third book is a home run. It's just tedious and not funny. The pacing is strange, the characterizations uncompelling, and the tone attempts to be varied but comes across as incoherent.

A lot of contemporary fantasy especially of the cinematic variety owes a huge debt to this one it seems to me. Maybe perhaps because it's White's first effort on the Arthurian thing, there's a simple delight to the beautiful language presented here. Clearly intended for younger audiences, but impossible for older readers to not enjoy with equal measure.

After reading Morrison's Playing in the Dark, I immediately started thinking about Moby Dick and how I had probably missed an entire United States worth of story. Somewhere along the way of confirming that, I chanced upon a description of this book - never heard of it before. Somehow missed that it's quoted in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

It's a short page turner, I finished it in a week and a half. Holy hell. Perhaps one of the most perfectly constructed bits of short fiction I've ever read. Melville's dramatization of real life events recalls a method of my favorite "modern" authors as well as oddly the filmmaker Herzog. All the contradictions of a country founded on freedom which simultaneously embraced slavery in the same moment crammed into a a couple hundred pages of finely crafted prose and sculpted symbolism.

I've really lucked out w/ some real bangers for the last few reads!