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A review by roxanamalinachirila
The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-fiction by Neil Gaiman
4.0
I was expecting something more, I guess, or maybe just something different. Non-fiction pieces Neil Gaiman wrote on all sorts of occasions, little essays, what-have-yous, things I didn't know about, the sort of things I vaguely recall his blog containing - but then, it turns out that most of the things Neil Gaiman wrote were either stories, or introductions to other people's stories. Some were speeches, it's true, and some were little bits about his life or an industry or another, but most of it is him using the best of his craft to fanboy about things he loves. When you finish reading this book, you'll have many new things on your wishlist and you'll be searching for all sorts of things, just to experience them.
I thought about it for some time and decided this was fine, although "The View from the Cheap Seats" isn't the sort of book I'd recommend to others, unless they were fans of Neil Gaiman already. It's not that the introductions aren't nice, but that there are so many of them, and often very personal. There are beautiful words about other people here, and new things to discover, but it's a bit hard to go on reading them after a while, especially if you don't really know what or whom he's talking about, and then you put the book down and leave it there for a while, and come back to it when you want to discover someone new.
Conversely, I now wonder if someone who knows all the things and people Neil Gaiman talks about, without knowing Neil Gaiman himself, would find a strange kinship with him. I wonder if this would be a page-turner then, a mystery of sorts, as they try to find out who this he is, and how come he came to meet all these people and love all these things, and show his love in such splendid ways.
So it's a beautiful book, but a difficult one, too. Very dense, and it will have you writing things down for later, and then you'll read something else, and come back to it. It's all good.
(Well, most of it is good. My particular edition, the paperback Headline one, already has a peeling cover, which is not precisely what I was expecting.)
I thought about it for some time and decided this was fine, although "The View from the Cheap Seats" isn't the sort of book I'd recommend to others, unless they were fans of Neil Gaiman already. It's not that the introductions aren't nice, but that there are so many of them, and often very personal. There are beautiful words about other people here, and new things to discover, but it's a bit hard to go on reading them after a while, especially if you don't really know what or whom he's talking about, and then you put the book down and leave it there for a while, and come back to it when you want to discover someone new.
Conversely, I now wonder if someone who knows all the things and people Neil Gaiman talks about, without knowing Neil Gaiman himself, would find a strange kinship with him. I wonder if this would be a page-turner then, a mystery of sorts, as they try to find out who this he is, and how come he came to meet all these people and love all these things, and show his love in such splendid ways.
So it's a beautiful book, but a difficult one, too. Very dense, and it will have you writing things down for later, and then you'll read something else, and come back to it. It's all good.
(Well, most of it is good. My particular edition, the paperback Headline one, already has a peeling cover, which is not precisely what I was expecting.)