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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
This is a book you have to savour slowly. You have to read and taste and enjoy and stop and come back. It's not a book to rush because each page is a masterpiece.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and this immersion in his world has been a pleasure from day 1 to finish. And even though I've marked it as read, I know I will come back to it, once and twice and a lot more times.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and this immersion in his world has been a pleasure from day 1 to finish. And even though I've marked it as read, I know I will come back to it, once and twice and a lot more times.
Ok, so I didn't READ read it. I was expecting a mostly visual art book rather than a biography, and with so many books on my plate right now I only really looked at the pictures.
So sue me.
So sue me.
This book is for hardcore fans of Neil Gaiman.
I am a very, very, very big Neil Gaiman fan. My love for his words and his big squishy brain and his characters is so intense it flows from my skin and leaves marks.
In one instance, it left marks on my sheets.
But even being a hardcore Gaiman fan, I did not like this book.
A quarter of it is the book itself. The binding on this is so badly done. I'm the kind of person who reads while doing something else. But because the wording goes so far into the binding, it really wasn't an option, unless I had something heavy enough to shove the book down enough to break the spine. And I don't break book spines.
This would be why it took me almost a full month to read a book featuring mostly material I'm already familiar with.
As for the material I'm not familiar with, this book is...I don't want to use the word dry, because so much of it is told by Neil, which is fun and lovely. But otherwise? Yes, it's dry. It's not interest holding in the least for the first half of the book. That was the reading struggle.
And all of the "fun bits", the stuff she found in his attic, the hand written pages? Well, they're unreadable. This is not a fault I'm placing on Neil, because people with bad handwriting can generally read their own handwriting, and he's writing those notes for himself, not for public consumption. But if they're illegible, there are two options. 1) Don't include them. 2) Transcribe them. We're not dealing with a long dead author here. You're sitting next to/e-mailing/smoke signaling with this man on this book, is it really that difficult to say, "Neil, what the hell is this word?"
Once we got to the parts where we talk about the origins of his books, my attention snapped back to. I didn't learn about any new works, but I learned so much about the process of the works I love, and that made everything the lovelier.
I'm giving the book 3 stars, which really sucks. Because Neil Gaiman is a treasure, and I genuinely appreciate his existence.
I am a very, very, very big Neil Gaiman fan. My love for his words and his big squishy brain and his characters is so intense it flows from my skin and leaves marks.
In one instance, it left marks on my sheets.
But even being a hardcore Gaiman fan, I did not like this book.
A quarter of it is the book itself. The binding on this is so badly done. I'm the kind of person who reads while doing something else. But because the wording goes so far into the binding, it really wasn't an option, unless I had something heavy enough to shove the book down enough to break the spine. And I don't break book spines.
This would be why it took me almost a full month to read a book featuring mostly material I'm already familiar with.
As for the material I'm not familiar with, this book is...I don't want to use the word dry, because so much of it is told by Neil, which is fun and lovely. But otherwise? Yes, it's dry. It's not interest holding in the least for the first half of the book. That was the reading struggle.
And all of the "fun bits", the stuff she found in his attic, the hand written pages? Well, they're unreadable. This is not a fault I'm placing on Neil, because people with bad handwriting can generally read their own handwriting, and he's writing those notes for himself, not for public consumption. But if they're illegible, there are two options. 1) Don't include them. 2) Transcribe them. We're not dealing with a long dead author here. You're sitting next to/e-mailing/smoke signaling with this man on this book, is it really that difficult to say, "Neil, what the hell is this word?"
Once we got to the parts where we talk about the origins of his books, my attention snapped back to. I didn't learn about any new works, but I learned so much about the process of the works I love, and that made everything the lovelier.
I'm giving the book 3 stars, which really sucks. Because Neil Gaiman is a treasure, and I genuinely appreciate his existence.
I feel like I've been in a Neil Gaiman bubble. in addition to reading this I'm listening to View from the Cheap Seats and reading stuff from the Humble Bundle of his rare works. A Neil Gaiman bubble is a lovely albeit strange place to be.
If you are a Neil Gaiman fan you will love this book. It's slightly insane how much he has accomplished and his career is nowhere near done. I've been trying to compile all his works and it's turning into a towering pile of comics and films and picture books and live performances and random bits and stuff by people he collaborates with. This book is written by the daughter of one of the artists he's worked with and who has know. him pretty much her whole life and it is overflowing with notes and scraps from projects and quotes. It doesn't spoil any of his works, which was nice because I was a bit worried about that since I haven't read everything he's done yet.
Quite a lot of the book is about his creative process and making good art and persevering and I think it would be a good book to inspire people wanting to create. It has made me want to start writing again although we'll see if that sticks as I'd usually rather be reading.
The Hollywood section was sad as it made me want to see all the films that haven't been made, especially the one he cowrote with Penn Gillette and would have starred Bill Nighy. Someone make that happen please.
This is definitely a must read if you're a Gaiman fan.
If you are a Neil Gaiman fan you will love this book. It's slightly insane how much he has accomplished and his career is nowhere near done. I've been trying to compile all his works and it's turning into a towering pile of comics and films and picture books and live performances and random bits and stuff by people he collaborates with. This book is written by the daughter of one of the artists he's worked with and who has know. him pretty much her whole life and it is overflowing with notes and scraps from projects and quotes. It doesn't spoil any of his works, which was nice because I was a bit worried about that since I haven't read everything he's done yet.
Quite a lot of the book is about his creative process and making good art and persevering and I think it would be a good book to inspire people wanting to create. It has made me want to start writing again although we'll see if that sticks as I'd usually rather be reading.
The Hollywood section was sad as it made me want to see all the films that haven't been made, especially the one he cowrote with Penn Gillette and would have starred Bill Nighy. Someone make that happen please.
This is definitely a must read if you're a Gaiman fan.
A deep look at Gaiman through art and writing. I skimmed much of it, but really loved some of the original art and draft writing notes, and his story of following a vision and hustling to get published.
I'll say right up front that I am a Neil Gaiman fanboy. A Gaimaniac, if you will. So this book hit my squee buttons before I even opened it up. But, oh, what a beauty it is.
Much of the fact-based stuff here I already knew, from following Gaiman throughout his career, but the thing that sets this volume apart is the incredible access that Hayley Campbell had to both his papers and miscellaneous notes, and to the man himself. The fact that she has known him as a family friend (or honorary eccentric uncle) for much of her life lends the book an authoritative air that could not have been accomplished in any other way except if Gaiman had written it himself.
Campbell's choice to organize the book thematically by medium rather than chronologically occasionally irked me, as I would have been much more interested to see how one piece of writing influenced or was influenced by another by dint of temporal proximity, but the whole thing holds together so well that I got over my gripes fairly quickly. Her insertion of anecdotes within each section helped to accentuate the feeling that we're really getting a behind the scenes look into Gaiman's work (with some peeks into his private life as well).
This is a book that I will very likely come back to again and again for inspiration, in terms of both creativity and work ethic. It's a must-have for Gaiman fans anywhere.
Much of the fact-based stuff here I already knew, from following Gaiman throughout his career, but the thing that sets this volume apart is the incredible access that Hayley Campbell had to both his papers and miscellaneous notes, and to the man himself. The fact that she has known him as a family friend (or honorary eccentric uncle) for much of her life lends the book an authoritative air that could not have been accomplished in any other way except if Gaiman had written it himself.
Campbell's choice to organize the book thematically by medium rather than chronologically occasionally irked me, as I would have been much more interested to see how one piece of writing influenced or was influenced by another by dint of temporal proximity, but the whole thing holds together so well that I got over my gripes fairly quickly. Her insertion of anecdotes within each section helped to accentuate the feeling that we're really getting a behind the scenes look into Gaiman's work (with some peeks into his private life as well).
This is a book that I will very likely come back to again and again for inspiration, in terms of both creativity and work ethic. It's a must-have for Gaiman fans anywhere.
This is a weird conundrum of a book.
The design detracts so much from the reading experience. It's big, it's heavy, and the words are so close to the margin near the binding that you really have to wrench the book open at all times to read the bloody thing. It's unwieldy, with the same size, heft and glossy colored pages of a text book. Forget about trying to read this on the bus, or in bed lying down. [These are the #1 and #2 ways I read.]
On page 18 the author admits it's a coffee table book, which forgives this awkward format, but coffee table books are mostly for looking at photos, paintings, or large illustrations. They are poorly suited to reading narrative text that continues on every page. That's why coffee table books often contain an essay at the beginning, followed by full pages of illustrations. You read the text once, you come back to view the images over and over.
What's the problem then? This book is The Art of Neil Gaiman. A coffee table book is for showing art.
That's the whole problem. Neil Gaiman is an author, not a visual artist. Sure, he writes comics, and this book has a lot of (other people's) drawings, comic book covers and panels reproduced on the pages. It also has a lot of copied ephemera: photographs, illegibly scribbled notes, type written letters, computer printouts of scripts. It even contains doodles that Neil Gaiman drew. All of this is interesting for Gaiman fans but not all that essential to reproduce at this size. Only die hard fans will spend any time trying to decipher the scribble. And I will not display this book on my coffee table and come back to look at scribble or single pages of comics over and over. If I want to enjoy the art, I'll collect the full comics.
On most pages, half of the space is dedicated to narrative text - a history of Gaiman's life and quotations about the conception, production and publication of his written work. And Neil Gaiman's biography is fascinating. I had no idea he was in a punk band, got his start as a journalist for lad magazines, and wrote a biography of Duran Duran. I want to read more. But a great biography is easy to read, usually with ephemera and photos contained to a handful of pages in the center of the book, or even spread throughout the book, but at a portable size and weight so you can read it from start to finish. Again, the size, the heft, and the actual arrangement of text vs ephemera in the book makes it so that you cannot easily sit down and read this. If Neil Gaiman's art is his words, why make it so difficult to read?
The design detracts so much from the reading experience. It's big, it's heavy, and the words are so close to the margin near the binding that you really have to wrench the book open at all times to read the bloody thing. It's unwieldy, with the same size, heft and glossy colored pages of a text book. Forget about trying to read this on the bus, or in bed lying down. [These are the #1 and #2 ways I read.]
On page 18 the author admits it's a coffee table book, which forgives this awkward format, but coffee table books are mostly for looking at photos, paintings, or large illustrations. They are poorly suited to reading narrative text that continues on every page. That's why coffee table books often contain an essay at the beginning, followed by full pages of illustrations. You read the text once, you come back to view the images over and over.
What's the problem then? This book is The Art of Neil Gaiman. A coffee table book is for showing art.
That's the whole problem. Neil Gaiman is an author, not a visual artist. Sure, he writes comics, and this book has a lot of (other people's) drawings, comic book covers and panels reproduced on the pages. It also has a lot of copied ephemera: photographs, illegibly scribbled notes, type written letters, computer printouts of scripts. It even contains doodles that Neil Gaiman drew. All of this is interesting for Gaiman fans but not all that essential to reproduce at this size. Only die hard fans will spend any time trying to decipher the scribble. And I will not display this book on my coffee table and come back to look at scribble or single pages of comics over and over. If I want to enjoy the art, I'll collect the full comics.
On most pages, half of the space is dedicated to narrative text - a history of Gaiman's life and quotations about the conception, production and publication of his written work. And Neil Gaiman's biography is fascinating. I had no idea he was in a punk band, got his start as a journalist for lad magazines, and wrote a biography of Duran Duran. I want to read more. But a great biography is easy to read, usually with ephemera and photos contained to a handful of pages in the center of the book, or even spread throughout the book, but at a portable size and weight so you can read it from start to finish. Again, the size, the heft, and the actual arrangement of text vs ephemera in the book makes it so that you cannot easily sit down and read this. If Neil Gaiman's art is his words, why make it so difficult to read?
This book took about a month to read. I had to read little chunks at a time. It was really in depth about his early career and mid-career, more current stuff like Ocean at the End of the Lane got two-three pages. There wasn't a whole lot on his childhood or personal life. The book was informative, lengthy, and in depth.