Reviewer Spotlight

Branch: University City Regional

Reader's Club honors Mark, a librarian at University City Regional Library. He enjoys reading graphic novels and Mark has reviewed several for Reader's Club. Here are Mark's thoughts on reading and writing book reviews:

I was a voracious reader as a child; I remember going through my local public library branch’s entire collection of Hardy Boys, Tom Swift Jr., Sherlock Holmes, and H.G. Wells. When my older brother started high school (four years before me), I read all of his reading assignments right after him.

Later I developed an interest in 20th Century fiction (Nabokov, Barth, Pynchon, Tom Wolfe) and fantasy and science fiction (Tolkien, Niven, Varley, more recently Harry Potter). I’m a musician, so I used to review sound recordings forOption magazine, and music books for Library Journal. When I was a business librarian, I reviewed nonfiction business books for Salem Press.

Recently I rediscovered comic books and graphic novels, which I also loved as a kid. After a period catching up on some of my favorite superheroes, I got interested in “mature readers” titles, which are the main thing I’ve written about for Reader’s Club. They’re like small independent films, representing the creator’s vision in a pure form rare in other media. At their best they are both entertaining and thought-provoking. The variety of themes and art styles used are interesting to write about, and I hope my reviews will help stimulate more interest in this material, which tends to have a narrower audience than Japanese manga or American superhero comics. Some of my favorites include Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta, along with current series like Fables, Y: The Last Man, 100 Bullets, and DMZ.