Word: simonal
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...tendencies. The first song he ever wrote, at age 11, was called Mushroom Cloud, and much of his Radiohead songbook chronicles the destruction of abstractly good things by abstractly bad things. Still, like all other cynics, he'd like to think he's a romantic. Radiohead has covered Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better and Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy in concert, and Yorke insists that the homage is sincere. "Even in the midst of the darkness of Kid A, I still thought we were doing big, romantic pop songs. I mean, it's all I want, really...
Joshua Ramo was a hobbyist pilot who found himself mysteriously drawn to aerobatics, which he compares to aerial figure skating, with the following caveat: "When was the last time Kristy Yamaguchi burst into flames in the middle of a Salchow?" In No Visible Horizon (Simon & Schuster; 273 pages), Ramo, a former TIME editor, tells the story of his love affair with a sport that in a bad year, by his estimate, can kill 1 in 30 of its practitioners. Ramo buys a plane and learns to spin, loop, roll and do all three simultaneously at hundreds of miles per hour...
...Grace kids, Mallory, Jared and Simon, are the latest tyro trio to find themselves entangled in creepy adventures. Especially after a busted marriage forces them to move from the city into a ramshackle Victorian manse. Mallory's hair gets mysteriously knotted to the headboard of her bed. Simon's tadpoles are frozen into an ice-cube tray. Blame seems to rest on Jared, until he uncovers a strange book, a field guide to faeries that identifies the culprits. Turns out faeries are not all Tinkerbell types; the genus encompasses goblins, hobgoblins, brownies, trolls, ogres, dwarfs and sprites, some of them...
Quaintly illustrated, but with plenty of modern childhood trauma, The Spiderwick Chronicles (Simon & Schuster) are aimed at kids too young for Lemony. Authors Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi even make like Snicket creator Daniel Handler on book tours, playing coy about authorship. Sales magic seems to be afoot, at least; The Field Guide and The Seeing Stone, the first two volumes of the Chronicles, hit the New York Times children's best-seller list the week of their release...
...trails like a dog attacking a steak. This attention to detail, plus a vast canvas of characters, makes for a dense boulder of a story that moves creakily for the first couple of hours. But once it gets rolling, it's irresistible because of the humanity creator-writer David Simon finds in his characters, from cops who risk their careers if they seek out tough cases (because those cases raise the unsolved-murder rate) to down-and-out union workers taking payoffs to let contraband (or worse) slip by customs...