The View from the Cheap Seats (Neil Gaiman)

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Neil Gaiman
Harper Audio
Nonfiction, Essays/Media Reference/Memoirs
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: This collection of Neil Gaiman's writings covers a variety of topics, from the state of comic books and graphic novels as art and literary forms through reflections on his life and career to interviews, book forewords and afterwords, and more.

REVIEW: Though I find Gaiman's fiction a bit hit-and-miss, I can always appreciate what he's doing and how he's doing it, and one can't help but stand in awe of a career like his. Much like his fiction, these articles and essays and reflections can be a little hit-and-miss. Some loses context by being, well, out of context: material meant for inclusion in album liner notes can't help feeling a little lost without the album backing it up, and some of the minutiae of industry talk (especially the comic book industry) is lost on someone who only occasionally delves into graphic novels. (One of the coldest shoulders I ever got in a retail store was in a comic book shop, and so many of the popular titles seem to gatekeep themselves by being part of decades-long intertwined arcs and histories and traditions and so forth anyway in ways that can discourage newcomers from even trying to start - I'm lookin' at you, too, Sandman - so I never really felt welcome in that crowd. Yes, I'm officially too much of a social misfit to read comic books. But I digress...) Still, even when discussing stuff I wasn't familiar with, Gaiman manages to be interesting. Plus he's still one of the better audiobook narrators out there; I never have to crank my earbuds up to pain-inducing volumes just to understand what he's saying. The tone of the articles varies, some being lighter and some darker, some fairly focused and others ranging further afield, some short and some long, but few outstayed their welcome. All in all, it made for interesting listening.

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