Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Lost at Sea": a snowflake on my consciousness that has since passed

Back when I was in grad school, if you were trying to write a paper and just spitballing ideas, a professor would ask you ”So what?”  Basically, they wanted you to justify what you were trying to create.  I hate to be overly critical, but I don’t think O’Malley really answers that with this finding-yourself road trip meditation.  It was passable, but ethereal, a snowflake on my consciousness that has since passed.  There is a passage near the end, the character is narrating the rest of the trip, and she says “Generally the rest of the story was probably more interesting if you were there and the jokes seemed funnier at the time.” I think this is true of the whole endeavor.

Gaiman and McKean's Violent Cases:

Basically, all I have to say is this.  You have an exceptional storyteller meeting up with an awesome artist creating a work of art for your enjoyment.  You would be remiss if you did not go out and buy this or steal this or rent it.  For a final bonus, the title is a clever pun that made me laugh.

Dennis Johnson's Nobody Move:

If you’re like me, you didn’t know Dennis Johnson had written anything since Tree of Smoke.  If you’re still like me, you didn’t realize that that book was released in 2007, and you worry about the increasing speed of the passage of time.  

But I was wrong.  Since then he has released this neat little noir book.  There’s a fun mix-up with money and dames and guns.  My initial impression, when I was just a few pages in, was in how tight it was written – no superfluous words or description – like Hemingway meet Spillane.  It allows Johnson to tell his story in less than two hundred pages and still pack in a lot of action.

It is not needlessly edited though, you can tell a lot of work went into this spare novel.  My favorite is the detail he uses.  The best example is narrating from one person’s perspective; he notes that there is a car part on top of the jukebox.  A second person, in a later scene, notices the car part, but he knows just what that part is meant for.  That is a master class in characterization and plotting that can feel like a throw-away detail, but it shows what a craftsman Johnson is.