PJH Studios

Category: Books

All things books, fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi, thriller, horror, comics, literary

  • The Passage

    Essentially, The Passage is a worthy literary attempt at a post-apocalyptic vampire zombie novel.  The premise is solid–mysterious virus developed by the military is tested on random subjects, and then something goes wrong, and the the vampire zombies lay waste to anything with warm blood.  Told over the span of a 100 years, Justin Cronin introduces a sprawling cast of characters, some superfluous and forgettable and others quirky and memorable, and heftily takes his literary license on a gleeful Mad Max joy ride through a barren Western United states. There are numerous subplots that divert the story without fulfilling ends or turn into tangents for Cronin to verbosely develop a character to advance a theme he’d like to fit in.  Themes of love, hope, redemption, social class, consumerism, military industrial complex, faith vs. science and even a dark twist alluding to Jesus and the 12 disciples, blend together like a bloated science fiction western.   At times you’re left wondering what the point is, and others are engaging scenes of suspense.

    This is the beginning of a trilogy and it’s hard to envision the other two books requiring wordy flair.  Hopefully, Cronin gets an editor to continue his zombie vampire saga.

  • Dennis Hopper – Bucharest Nights

    Eccentric and edgy Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper avidly collected art, and photography was a lifelong active hobby. In 2005, he published Bucharest Nights, a collection of “digital paintings” at night with a digital camera. The majority of the images are ghostly and ethereal. Stark figures in golden tones against a black backdrop, light trails down a street, neon glows from a casino. A few are stunning but for the most part the book contains good pictures that work better on a whole as a body of work. The random photos of naked women taken with film, jarringly contrasts the preceding 30 or so pictures as if you were listening to soft trance music and someone turned on a buzz saw.

  • Finite and Infinite Games

    James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility philosophically explores the premise of life as a series of games and infinite games.  Finite games have an end and rules may not change, whereas infinite games are never ending and the rules must change. Directly, think of Super Mario versus World of Warcraft.  With the Mario games, there’s a set of rules (stomp the mushrooms, fireball the goombas, save the princess, don’t die), but with Warcraft, there’s an entire world with a constantly changing set of rules and dynamics of play.

    Understanding that, there are several other tenets:

    • Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries
    • Finite players are serious, infinite players are playful
    • A finite player seeks to be powerful, an infinite player plays with strength
    • A finite player consumes time, an infinite player generates time
    • A finite player aims for eternal life, an infinite player aims for eternal birth

    Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).

    Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical.  Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.

  • Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now

    Charlie Styr published Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now using pictures from the Flickr Teenage Photography group. It’s aimed at the beginner or wanna-be-a-little-bit-cooler-by-by-taking-cool-pictures photographers. It’s balanced covering all the essential photography topics-exposure, aperture, shutter speed, light, composition, etc. It goes a little further with the example photos and includes camera settings. This comes in handy when wanting to figure out techniques specific to certain situations, such as macro, low-light, creating light trails or portraits.

  • 1000 Fences and Gates

    1000 Fences And Gates by Jo Cryder should contain the subtitle Wrought Iron of the American Southeast.  The majority of the pictures are snapshots and hardly vary.  I’m not sure if it meant to be a coffee table book or a sampling for Southern belles to fence in their magnolia trees.

  • Art Space Tokyo, a Kickstarter postmortem

    After a project, it’s a good thing to capture your thoughts on how you did.  This includes everything from the initial idea, the the steps you took to get everything together and complete it, for better or worse.  Craig Mod did a writeup about the whole process of creating Art Space Tokyo using Kickstarter as a means to raise funds for his project.

    Kickstarter.com is a fund raising website. You create an account, describe your project and set a money goal to be obtained within a specific time period. Anyone in the world with an Amazon account can pledge money to help fund your project. Pledges are tiered, with each tier offering different incentives. If your project doesn’t reach your pre-set (unchangeable) monetary goal in the (unchangeable) time limit, nobody pays. If you reach your goal before the time limit, you continue to raise money until the time limit is up. This system has several interesting implications.

    Backers simply can’t lose — if you can’t complete the project, they don’t pay. And if you can, they get both their tier award and the satisfaction of knowing they were instrumental in seeing your project through to completion.

    I really wish I had heard about this as money was being raised. The book looks amazing.