Reviews

Fun Home is an engaging, somewhat surprising graphic memoir about a girl and her obsessive/small town/intellectual/in-the-closet/ domineering/mortician/gardner/interior designer/passionate/frustrated father. It's about her mom and wanting to be a boy and her brothers and being a lesbian and literary classics, too. But mostly her dad.

2008's Best Music Writing contains an essay from one of my favorite writers, Mr. Craven Rock. While not a household name like Chuck Klosterman or Nick Hornby, for years now Rock has done Eaves of Ass, one of the finest and most underrated zines around. When he released the music issue earlier this year (issue 6, which we at Orca also carry for the lowlow price of three dollars), I knew he was bound for glory. His music writing is not some dry analysis of music or bands or albums, it's about the great many ways our lives connect to music and how the stories of our lives can connect back to a song, a band, a concert; how a piece of music can define a period of your life. So, now you have an excuse to pick up 2008's Best Music Writing, which was probably already tempting.

If you feel lost in the sea of opinions/information/misinformation about immigration and the issues surrounding it, The Politics of Immigration is a good place to get set straight. Set up in a Q+A format, pretty much every question you would think to ask is asked and well responded to. While openly biased towards a pro-open border stance, their research, fact-checking, and statistics keep it from being a preaching-to-the-choir/one person's opinions-type book.