Eclectic Bookshelf: Moonlit Metaphors - Page 2

Some books never quite leave your mind, let alone your possession. These books, these gifts, have traveled with me. They have been my companions across 20-plus years and countless miles; once in a box, left unopened for years, but now on a shelf, piled high and free, where I can visit them from time to time and return for a moment to those distant days when I explored those improbable alien lands for the first time.

This is not always the way of it, of course. The dog-eared copy of Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, which I read some 15 or more times in high school, fell by the wayside somewhere in between there and here, between then and now. It is like that as well for the box of books now in the back of my car, waiting impatiently for their new home somewhere other than the cramped, overflowing confines of the bookcases I can't seem to keep tidy. Some purges, it seems, are inevitable. Yet one must assume there is still something of Thomas Covenant rattling about inside my head; perhaps there is also something of the countless other characters, from Jack Pumpkinhead and Princess Ozma to the Riddle-Master of Hed or Dickens' pernicious Pip, who have each occupied an occasional parcel of mental real estate.

Oh, I still have my personal preferences, as do we all. Some old, some new. When I first read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, I marveled at the wit and creativity of his tale; likewise, when I read Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's Nation of Rebels, I found their perceptions of popular culture quite striking. And yet with books I find I can indeed backtrack, revisiting old terrain with new eyes, be it Tolkien or Chandler or Hemingway: in each, there is that opportunity for a new revelation with each pass across the surface of the text. On the bookshelf, it seems, one can find both the newly discovered and the eternally relevant.

Here are this week's reviews from a wildly disorganized bookshelf:

Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams

Donald Bogle, the author of Dorothy Dandridge, is one of the nation's leading authorities on African Americans in film. His extensive knowledge and incisive writing is on display in Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood. This immensely readable (as well as intermittently shocking, sad, entertaining, and poignant) history tracks some 60 years in the history of "Black Hollywood." Bogle interviewed a host of historical figures and documents how they carved a place for themselves in an industry that initially was not interested in them.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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