To those who are new around here (I see somebody, hello there!!!) once a month… about… I’m not very timely… Anyway, about once a month I post short reviews about the books I’ve read…
It’s also about time I pick up with my resolution of reading one classic a month, I want to do this because it’s healthy, because I want to educate myself, because I want to understand on my own why it became “a classic”, and most of all to learn – from a creative writing perspective – what makes a book “big”…

Aaanyway, this summer I read few books… but a lot of comicbooks and finally my friend Lanterna got her Hellboy collection back (I swear I tried to treat it super respectfully). And withouth any further ado, here are the titles:

“The Second Coming” John Niven – I’m at a point where I just trust them… if Grazia tells Chiara and Chiara tells me to read something, I already know I’m going to like that book. The nice thing about this is that I never know *how much* I’m going to enjoy it! This one is simply brilliant: God comes back from a week off and sees what a mess the 21st century is, so he decides to send his son back on Hearth (“Don’t you remember the last time?”); said son decides he wants to be a musician and to try and be famous to spread The Word. Couldn’t this be awesomely awesome?
The thing I loved most, though (more than the idea itself, more than the jokes, more than how everything reads so easily) is that Jesus works, he’s perfect for the 21st century, also and most of all because he’s good to everyone, and he’s fun! Pay attention: he’s good, not condescending, and this is soooo hard to put to words, in my humble opinion, so yeah, I really liked this bit!

Hellboy by Mike Mignola – Ready for all the titles? Strange Places (n. 6), The Troll Witch and Others (n. 7), Darkness Calls (n. 8), The Wild Hunt (n. 9), The Crooked Man and Others (n. 10), The Bride of Hell and Others (n. 11), The Storm and the Fury (n. 12).
Here, all in neat order. What to say… just like the first five issues I keep liking the drawings a lot, all the Artist who collaborated ar great! I still like the humour and most of all the sketchbook bits at the end of every issue; differently from the first five issues what could I say… my all time favourites are the last four or five numbers… when finally all the “others” stories come together, they stop feeling like a disconnected bunch (that made me feel a little lost, I couldn’t keep track of what happened before or after this and that), it finally feels like you know Hellboy’s biography… and also because in the last numbers it looks like Mignola is heading in a precise direction, but then again he offers you a lot of other short stories, radicated in local folklore, and those Artist who cooperated, they deserve the capitol A… basically, I like Hellboy more and more!

Sud e magia (on the magic of southern Italian societies) by Ernesto De Martino – I read this jumping pages here and there, yes, my bad… But some of the more verbose parts or those where he tried a pseudo-scientific tone were very heavy reading… Still it’s a nice document, an essay from the fifties on what was left, in south Italy, of those sincretic practices between magic and catholicism. I’d love to read something similar about northern Italy as well, maybe I’d feel closer to some aspects… On another note, since my Hellboy binge, this book was like fuel on a tiny spark of creativity… so many ideas!!!

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