A year ago here at borg we reviewed the intriguing Star Wars tie-in book The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. For fans who have been lucky enough to experience firsthand Disney’s Black Spire Outpost, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: Treasures from Batuu will take readers back to Oga’s Cantina and Savi’s Workshop, and take home some souvenirs, too. The new “vault” type book is coming in July from Titan Books in the UK and Insight Editions in the U.S. and available for pre-order now here at Amazon.
You haven’t yet seen the best of the concept artwork behind the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Fans of the series saw the first swath of those images in the eye candy-filled first season look at the artwork behind the series in The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian–Season One, which we reviewed here at borg. Coming next month you’ll get to see the inspiration behind the return of Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker in the series, and the first live-action appearances of Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan, all found in the pages of Abrams Books’ The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian–Season Two. It’s now available for pre-order here at Amazon.
The library of books, which feature the most thorough of the franchise’s chronicles of the films (in The Art of The Force Awakens, The Art of Rogue One, The Art of The Last Jedi, The Art of Solo, The Art of The Rise of Skywalker, in The Art of The Mandalorian: Season One and even a look at the Earthbound destination in The Art of Galaxy’s Edge), repeatedly makes our end of year “Best of” lists. Take a look inside the latest book in the series below.
Review by C.J. Bunce
Two big storybooks for kids from Abrams fuse classic Christmas tales with traditional music boxes built into the books’ bindings. Previously released is a retelling of The Nutcracker in rhyming verse illustrated by Bodil Jane, and new for this holiday season is Clement C. Moore’s ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas {originally published as A Visit from St. Nicholas), illustrated by Raquel Martin. Each includes a classic music box mechanism readers can crank to listen to music cheer for all to hear while reading. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker plays on the first book and Deck the Halls plays with Moore’s poem.
Take a look inside each book below.
Our borg Best of 2021 list continues today with the Best Books of 2021. If you missed them, check out our reviews of the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2021 here, the Best Movies of 2021 here, and the Best in TV 2021 here. And we wrap-up the year with our additions to the borg Hall of Fame tomorrow. We reviewed more than 100 books that we recommended to our readers this year, and some even made it onto our favorites shelf. We don’t publish reviews of books that we read and don’t recommend, so this shortlist reflects only this year’s cream of the crop. So let’s get going!
Best Sci-Fi, Best Tie-In Novel – Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward (Gallery Books). An engaging read and fun-filled start to a new trilogy, full of great throwbacks to all the Star Trek series, with several surprise characters and incorporated events, and a great update to Wesley Crusher. Runner-up: Star Trek: Picard–Rogue Elements (Gallery Books), by John Jackson Miller, provided a great story for a newer character, pulling into the mix the future of some familiar characters including the classic villain Kivas Fajo.
Review by C.J. Bunce
Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need is Kill is an example of a spectacular Japanese novel that translated perfectly to the English language and Western audiences in the movie adaptation, Edge of Tomorrow, later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. Kotaro Isaka’s Bullet Train, initially re-titled from its original name Maria Beetle, is the next Japanese novel on its way to the big screen, not starring Tom Cruise but Brad Pitt, expected to arrive in theaters next year. It’s not what you’d expect, which is good or bad, depending on your tastes. Despite that evocative title, it’s surprisingly not an action thriller. It’s billed as social satire, like the French graphic novel turned Chris Evans movie and TV series, Snowpiercer, and that’s pretty much what readers should expect from Bullet Train, the novel, arriving in its first English edition in U.S. book stores next week. If Snowpiercer was your thing, you may want to pre-order Bullet Train now here at Amazon.
The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Unstoppable, Murder on the Orient Express, Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes, Von Ryan’s Express, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Silver Streak, Source Code, and yes, Snowpiercer, are the top 10 movies you probably think of featuring train action (oh, and don’t forget the original action movie, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, discussed here and remade several times, plus props are due for train flicks The Commuter and Trading Places). In each of these, a train goes out of control, or it gets highjacked, or hit by an avalanche, someone is kidnapped or killed, or the train is the target of a terrorist attack–all the kinds of dangers that couple well with a fictional speeding train.
In-person cancellations have not kept every event this summer from canceling entirely. One of those is typically one of the summer’s biggest events, San Diego Comic-Con. As with last year’s Comic-Con At Home, events for SDCC 2021 are proceeding this week, once again providing a rare opportunity for fans of all things pop culture a chance to sit through the kinds of panels you might see were you to attend in person in any regular year–without standing overnight in lines. You can even grab a lanyard off the rack, print your own badge (for you and your pets), cosplay with your family, and load the panels up on as big of a screen as you have. Check out some suggestions for building your own fun convention week experience with SDCC 2021 below.
We’re continuing our ten-year celebration of borg today with our favorite genre books. If you missed them, check out our Top 40 movies here and our Top 40 TV series here.
We reviewed thousands of books and comics that we recommended to our readers since June 2011, and some even made it onto our favorites shelf. We don’t publish reviews of books that we read and don’t recommend, so this shortlist reflects only 23 of the Best of the Best books and book series reviewed from June 2011 to June 2021.
So let’s get going!
Review by C.J. Bunce
Stanley Kubrick’s The Lord of the Rings starring The Beatles. Peter Jackson’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. George Miller’s Justice League. Robert Rodriguez’s Barbarella. Shane Black’s The Monster Squad. Two John Carpenter movies you’ve never seen. If you’re wondering what the best movie was in any given year, you have plenty of options. You can look for the movie that had the biggest take at the box office. You can look to critic reviews. You can scroll through the Internet Movie Database. You can review awards lists or Alternate Oscars. Or you can just watch the movies and choose for yourself. Underexposed! The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, a new book arriving this month from Abrams, could have been called False Starts–it’s a book about movies that almost made it to the big screen.
Peppered with movie poster mock-ups from art group PosterSpy, filmmaker and film enthusiast Joshua Hull tracked down interesting histories of some of the best and most quirky movies that almost got made, but were either abandoned, had legal rights issues, lack of funding, lack of interest, or simply were not made to save audiences from a bad idea. They aren’t from obscure creators, either. The list includes projects from Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg–and some are ideas that sound like they could have been pretty great. What were they thinking? Find out in this book.
Review by C.J. Bunce
It’s more likely than not you haven’t heard of Galaxy’s Edge, or Black Spire Outpost, or the remote Outer Rim planet called Batuu. But you have heard of Star Wars. Billions have seen that fictional space fantasy galaxy via movies, books, and a TV series. But far fewer have made their way to Walt Disney World in Florida or Disneyworld in California, and that means a tie-in, real world location event experience is out there that most Star Wars fans haven’t tapped into yet. That’s where Abrams Books’ seventh book in their concept art library documenting the Star Wars universe comes into play. The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will take readers where they’ve never been, a world inspired by the artwork of Ralph McQuarrie just as the movies were so inspired, further springing from 11 movies, three series, and dozens of books. The result is a destination different and new that fans have never seen before.
Continue reading
Review by C.J. Bunce
If the CW’s 2019 take on DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline was your thing, you may enjoy the Barryverse version of events in a sequence of six novels featuring The Flash. The television tie-in wove several CW Arrowverse series of DC Comics adaptations into a single story for a few weeks, in what was probably the closest we’ll see to Marvel Comics’ Avengers: Endgame for the live-action superheroes of DC Entertainment. The Flash Crossover Crisis: The Legends of Forever debuts next week here at Amazon and at booksellers everywhere. The sixth of Lyga’s time traveling, there-and-back-again speedster tales, and the third in his Crossover Crisis trilogy, reaches its finale as The Legends of Tomorrow take over from Green Arrow and Supergirl as guests of The Flash aka Barry Allen and supporting characters of The Flash–the series–as they prepare to go to the End of Time… to save all the worlds of the Multiverse.
