Book Reviews, In Clumps

The New York Times takes a look at four new horror collections: 20th Century Ghosts, The Imago Sequence, Mr. B. Gone and Living Shadows. They like all of 'em but Clive Barker's Mr. B., which they hated so much that they pulled out a thesaurus in order to find a word as harsh as "execrable." Now that's some brutal prose.

USA Today is a bunch of panty-waist pu**ies, so it should come as no surprise that they chose to review a slew of sissified memoirs: Trail of Crumbs, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Her Last Death and Someday My Prince Will Come: True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess. I'm sorry to stereotype (no, I'm not), but if you're the type of Hilton whose chihuahua ears prick up for a title like Someday My Prince Will Come..., then something as icky and unrefined as newspaper reviews probably won't sway you either way. Instead, you ought to pay a visit to the author, Ms. Fine's, MySpace page. If the two of you agree on background layouts, fave flicks and tiara styles, THEN THIS BOOK IZ 4 U!!!

My "fave" set of themed reviews this weekend belongs to The Washington Post, care of Michael Sims. Sims raises his over-sized magnifying glass to The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life In Letters. While Sims doesn't claim that either book is perfect (he says that the first suffers from "tiring" and "graceless prose," and that the second is mostly letters to and from A.C.D.'s mom, fer chrissakes.), he does make the good parts (exhaustive research, recently resurfaced letters, juicy revelations) sound good enough to make both books worth -- wait for it -- further investigation.