Who Would Make a Book Entirely of Introductions to other Books?
The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman is a strange book. It is primarily a collection of introductions to other books and speeches. Being written by Neil Gaiman it is naturally both interesting and well written, but alone it is unsatisfying. It’s like watching a collection of the best movie trailers of the last thirty years. It may remind you of things you like and encourage you to try something new.
As I said, Neil Gaiman is an excellent writer. He also has, from what I can tell, excellent taste in fiction. More than that, he isn’t a snob. He writes deep powerful comic books and speaks proudly of his daughter discovering Betty and Veronica. He talks fondly of books that many people look down on and he reminds everyone that something that is old and cliche to you is new to a child, so let them read it.
Being an anthology, it is impossible to review it as a whole beyond what I have said. So I will focus on a few of the bits that stuck out. One is the transcript he gave at gathering of comic book owners during the middle of the last of the comic books collector booms in which he gave excellent advice to them on how to survive over the long term and how to build people who love to read comics rather than selling books to people who won’t read them. It was, according to him, not received well and while it might have been put in this as an ”I told you so”, it is still full of excellent advice.
Another of the interesting sections was his discussion of the Sundance film festival. He creates an interesting picture of the event he was at because he had written the movie Mirror Mask and it was being shown. He talks about the news looking for movies that had buzz and of the parties and how he didn’t think much of the festival. But he also points out there is more than one Sundance. The one he is writing about is for the media. People who don’t really care about the films, but care about the story. And then he talks about showing Mirror Mask. It was too late to get the aforementioned buzz. And he talks about the familiar fear of sharing something with people and the elation when someone enjoys something you do. He does this without resorting to the directness of what I just wrote. He even mentions a chance to watch The Dresden Dolls, which is a fun Easter egg for those of us who know a bit about him (Go and read The Art of Asking ). But mostly he just gave you a feeling of what it was like and made me want to watch Mirror Mask.
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend “The View from the Cheap Seats,” by Neil Gaiman because I think the audience for it is too narrow for that wide of a recommendation. But I can emphatically recommended it to Neil Gaiman superfans and more than that I can recommend it to anyone who needs to refill their to be read list of books and authors because while it isn’t explicit what this book did best, at least for me was the same thing that watching a bunch of movie trailers would do. It made me want to experience the things he was talking about.
