Site notes . . .

I’m in a reductionist mood and I’ve been trying to edit down the number of blogs I read because it kills me a little bit every time I go to Bloglines and find my feeds have over 500 posts to read. As such I’ve also been tweaking the links on this site. You might note that in my usual keenly detailed categorizing I now have a section for “blogs I read” and “writers I like” which are for the most part very self explanatory.

With few exceptions you have links to literally every blog I read regularly. Some of them are silly, some of them are friends, and some of them are trusted sources. Some are all three. If you’re a regular blog reader you might notice some of the “big” names missing from my links which is no reflection on any blog or a non-endorsement (new technical term). I just can’t sustain the amount of blog reading I’d been having and some sites are too chaotic for me to track or simply outside of my immediate interests.

The writers section I’ve cut down to some of my favorite writer’s blogs and also to ones that are updating regularly. I might add more, I might remove all of them, I haven’t decided.

I don’t think any of you, dear readers, really care one way or the other when I make tweaks like this but I thought in the spirit of full disclosure that I would . . . disclose them.

Seasons: A Picture Book Review

Seasons (2010) by Blexbolex

Find it on Bookshop.

This is one of those books where I’m not even how to start talking about it.

Blexbolex (or BLEXBOLEX?) is a French artist. Blexbolex makes prints and is almost impossible to find online. According to Ask.com/Wikipedia he was previously a French comics artist. One of his other books called L’Imagier des gens was awarded the prize for “Best Book Design of the World” in 2008 at the Book Fair in Leipzig.

Seasons (2010) is his latest book. It has been brought to the US and translated into English.

Essentially Seasons is a series of pictures cycling through different seasons. One or two words are written across the top of the page in large, bold, pink letters and a corresponding image (which I think are made with some form of printmaking) is displayed below the words. Some of the images and phrases are straightforward (swim, sunburn) and some are more whimsical (caterpillar crawl, siesta).

The book has an interesting idea and, frankly, this review might be the only one you’ll ever read that isn’t glowing. That said, the whole thing felt very disjointed. While eventually the cycle of images and seasons does eventually order itself into some kind of sense, a lot of the pairings on each two page spread felt, for lack of a better word, random (especially in the first pages).

Blexbolex’s prints are interesting and, given the medium, fairly intricate, but on a whole the work was grim with an image of a forest fire and a car accident including among images of summer fruits and winter snow. Seasons is a clever book even including a nod to Manet’s famous painting “Luncheon on the Grass” in one image but this is one book that ultimately felt a little too clever.

*This book was received for review from the publisher, Enchanted Lion Books.*