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Micro Reviews, 2026

Created: 2026-03-27 (14:36:00)
Status: in progress

It’s taken me too long to realise I will never have enough time in this life to write, draw, make games, and on top of that also write lengthy essays about every single book I’ve ever read. I’m trying this year, as a compromise, to at least write something about them. So: micro-reviews!

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious—does every single term being deployed need a detailed explication of its etymological roots? But the terms are useful for all that.

I don’t know enough art theory to compare this book against other approaches, but I do appreciate the attempt to develop a vocabulary for art that does not specifically privilege the western tradition and its biases. I probably will not reread this book again in full for a long time. I will be reading in it pretty much constantly.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 1

This is such a good opening to the series. Frieren, a long-lived elven mage, undertakes a journey long after the big conflict has been won, in peacetime, as she starts to outlive her former travelling companions. I’m looking forward to seeing how the later volumes develop her as a character, and the autumnal tone with which this book starts.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 2

Where the first volume covers almost a century, this one slows right down to focus on a couple years’ journey north. I’m still curious to see how the series is going to handle the passage of time, and the likelihood that Frieren will continually outlive her travelling companions, which, obviously, does not really get raised here.

This volume also introduces demons, described as wild beasts that can only mimic human speech and society. This is sort of interesting, although far less interesting than other story threads the series has introduced. Early days. I hope the series develops them into something more complex than inherently evil antagonists.

Leena Krohn, Tainaron: Mail from Another City

A human moves to a city inhabited by talking insects, and writes letters her friend or former lover back across the ocean. I thought I would like this more, but for the most part the novel does not compellingly explore either the unfamiliarity of life in Tainaron, nor the narrator’s relationship with the silent recipient of her letters. It’s understated in a way that may benefit from a reread—I’m not sure, though, that I would get more out of it if I sat with it for longer.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary

This book is full of long, meandering descriptions of the minutiae of its characters’ daily lives—schoolwork, conversations among friends, family squabbles, arguments on bulletin-board systems—in which nothing much happens and which at the same time suggests that critical things are happening. Similarly for the literary allusions. I get the impression they are used less as clues and more to establish certain moods and resonances, so that when the novel does reach its conclusion it all makes an appalling sort of sense why its characters make the decisions they do.

Admittedly, this book doesn’t pull all its loose threads and resonances together half as well as Tam Lin. But it is fantastic, eerie and puzzling.

Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Near-perfect. It is miraculous the way this book can inflect its humour with sadness, and its melancholic moments with lightness. I love that characters in this book so frequently sing, or recite verse. I love that the book feels no obligation to give its characters an unambiguously happy ending. I love that the book is about being loved for who you are and not what you do, that it pushes back against the notion of being a hero even as it acknowledges how critical it is for there to be stories with heroes in them.

Taiyo Matsumoto, Ping Pong Volume One

This left me a little cold. The setting is more grounded than Tekkonkinkreet’s Treasure Town, although the same frenetic energy of that book still comes through in the actual ping-pong sequences themselves.

I think part of the problem is that the book very quickly establishes what drives and gnaws at its characters, and how they relate to one another, but then does not develop them much further for several hundred pages, so that at times parts of this book feel oddly listless. I’m interested to see where volume two goes from here.

As an aside, I do appreciate the way the visual humour so openly displayed in Tekkonkinkreet does emerge in subtler, weirder ways here—like the way everyone on the Neptune Academy team is bald and looks to be middle-aged.

Ursula Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

More than Earthsea, more than the planets of the Ekumen, Orsinia may be my favourite of Ursula Le Guin’s imaginary worlds. In every story, characters attempt some form of escape, and in nearly every story whatever escape they achieve is at best provisional. I think the lovely, glimmering thread throughout this book is that even in a country as bleak as Orsinia, and against the near-certainty that things will not work out, Le Guin’s characters still have the guts to make the attempt all the same.

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