Saturday, May 9, 2020

Stay-at-home shelfie #43


The three volumes of These Are the Voyages, by Marc Cushman, are the most ridiculously detailed books ever about Star Trek: The Original Series. (And that's saying something, give the billions of words that have been written about Star Trek.) Writing for Gizmodo in 2014, Charlie Jane Anders noted: "These Are The Voyages goes through, episode by episode, and shows you the whole process from first draft to filming — and you get to see just how much this show was being made by the skin of everyone's teeth, and how incredible it is that the show actually survived out of its first year." These large volumes are also good books for tucking things away inside. I'm sure there are some Shatner tweets in there somewhere.

Playing at the World by Jon Peterson, a ridiculously detailed book about the history of the wargaming that eventually led to Dungeons & Dragons, was first mentioned on this blog in February 2013.

There are a handful of volumes from the BFI Film Classic series, including analyses of Night of the Living Dead and Nosferatu. And there's John Connolly's ridiculous attempt to write an entire book about the 1972 cult film Horror Express, which starred Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas. (Careful readers might remember that in Stay-at-home shelfie #17, I said we'd eventually get to this book.) In my three-star review on Goodreads, I noted that Connolly's book is "simultaneously the best and the most disappointing — the most complete and the most frustrating — book you will ever read that's devoted entirely to" this film. Others seemed to like the book more than I did, which makes sense, because why the heckfire would you read it if you weren't obsessed with the movie?

Speaking of movies, this might be the only bookshelf on Earth on which the script for Last Year at Marienbad is tucked between books about Horror Express and Manos: The Hands of Fate. Just imagine Torgo shambling through a sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel, where one endless corridor follows another, silent empty corridors...

As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman is a short graphic novel about friendship and acceptance.

The number of volumes of Roger Ebert's reviews that I've had at any given time has fluctuated over the years. This is the only one I have at the moment. I grew up devouring the reviews in the 1988 edition of his Movie Home Companion. I might track that one down some day for nostalgia's sake. And I'd like to have his four volumes on The Great Movies.

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