Books Completed November 2023

The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe - I pulled this from the shelf from a collection my wife has had for ages and ages after finishing the manga of At The Mountains of Madness last month, which was so heavily inspired by this. A few years ago, I was writing a pirate TTRPG that I put aside after learning too much about actual piracy - if I'd read this back then, it might have pushed me onward. There's some absolutely weird tonal thumps in here that don't connect with the modern reader, and I mean thumps like shoes in a drier. The framing is bizarre, and there's the requisite early 1800's racist subplot, but on the whole I'm glad to have read this, especially knowing all the other works it's inspired over the centuries. Love how you could just... stop writing a serialized story back then and be like "figure it out, weirdos".

Cookbook of the Seven Seas, by Dagmar Freuchen - Part of a trove of 1960's cookbooks I found in a little free library. It's not explicitly framed as such, but this is an homage by the author to her husband, who died unexpected on an exploration trip. His memory touches every chapter, which are based around how the couple interpreted the seven seas of the world. The only recipe I bookmarked was about making rice pudding with Coca Cola and a single almond merely to make my own spouse shudder. It's a sweet and sad cookbook illustrated by the author, her own vanished world wrapped in other layers of disappearance here for me decades later.

Taste of Eritrea, by Olivia Warren - Same cache of books, but from the 90s. I can't find out anything else about the author, but the subtitle for this one is "Recipes from one of East Africa's most interesting little countries". Hrm. Well, it's autobiographical of her several-month stay, and she seems to have had a lovely time. The recipes themselves are two thirds "yes, cook food with spices" and one third "oh no that would take three days". Her hopes for the country itself have not turned out quite the way she hoped, sadly.

Saga Vol. 11, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan - Forgot I ordered this, and got a nice little mailbox surprise. It's more Saga, it's more "war is awful" drum beat, but a few surprising character moments. The dream sequence/flashback is getting a little tired as a storytelling device, no matter how much of an excuse it gives to draw dead characters. Still, looking forward to the next one.

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, edited by Kevin Jon Davies - I Kickstartered this and a 42nd birthday present to myself, thinking the timing was just too good. The pandemic slammed research and production though, and I just got it this year, having almost forgotten about it. The drafts and scraps of unproduced works I found the most fascinating, these stories that'll never be fully told. The letters that his friends were invited to write were a touching addition I don't recall seeing in other anthologies. I think I'm going to have to pull some of his books off the shelves soon after reading this, I haven't touched them in too long.

Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, by Adam Rowe - I got this new, but I can't remember where I heard of it. I was at first surprised at quantity of the writing, expecting more of an art book, but then pleased by its quality and the context it set. The production quality is quite nice, which is fitting of the gorgeous subject matter. I want to take another couple lazy passes at this one, just soaking in the imagination oozing out of these pages.

Books Completed October 2023

 Good ol' spooky season.

 

 

 

Night Terror, by John Kenn Mortensen - I got Mortensen's Post-It Monsters years ago, and was thrilled and surprised to see, via another blog's monthly media post, he had some new work out. This is a big-format art book full of his creepy and evocative line drawings that was great to have for Halloween time. It's definitely going on the bestiary shelf.

Just a few sample images.

 

Sean Äaberg's Halloween Book - I backed this on Kickstarter back in 2021, and forgot about it until it happily showed up at the start of October. I was expecting more of an art book, but it also contains several essays by the author on his own vision of what Halloween should be about. I'll admit it wasn't clicking right for me until I started thinking about it as a hardbound zine, and then it all worked. I only found out after the fact that he was really involved with zines of various sorts for years, so there you go. The Halloween menus lists actually really inspired me and I ended up making a lot of corn bread and chili and pumpkin curry over the month, so that was fun.

 

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury - Normally in October I read The October Country, but I just wasn't feeling it this year for whatever reason. I remembered a discussion with a friend at work about this one though, and her being surprised I had never read it, so I picked it up. Turns out I have read this before, but not for something like 20 years, and I somehow forgot about it, which doesn't seem like it should be possible. I don't know if this is Bradbury's masterpiece, but it's certainly one of his strongest works, very much in his primary-colored idiom, while breaking from it in startling ways that are still his own. Fantastic.

The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury - This one I do read every year, not a tall order for a young adult book. This year the theme of smiles really jumped out at me for some reason. Everything is smiling or is a smile (particularly scythes). Some day I will have to vet the history he describes against the real world. I'm sure it was at least good-faith accurate when he wrote it, but he also has his own mid-century, middle America biases I don't feel like he ever really addressed.

H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, by Gou Tanabe - A quite faithful manga retelling of Lovecraft's longest work that my wife gave me for Christmas several years ago and I decided to pull off the shelf for October. I love Tanabe's intricate line work and ability to convey a sense of vast, horrifying scale from a 7 x 5 paperback 2-page spread. Having the Elder Things convey emotion somehow is also impressive.

The Handyman Method, by Nick Cutter & Andrew F. Sullivan - The same blog post above says "this book opens the door to the dank basement of Gothic masculinity, forcing us to examine the dark shape of manhood in the current moment". Sounded enticing, so I picked it up new to get some contemporary writing into my October reading. I think I'm just straight up bad at reading for themes though, because this landed as a pretty standard modern terror tale for me. It had its moments, and I'm stealing the dungeon idea for an adventure at some point.

Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein - Not Halloween really at all, but I found this on a shelf and had no idea where it came from. Since it was short and I didn't recall ever reading it, thought I'd just tear through. It's a Heinlein novel, yep, but the Lazarus Long character always feels like he wandered in from a pulp comic from two decades earlier. The structure is quite odd, feeling like three and a half smaller books kind of strung together with self-insert political rants and Math. Fun in its own way?

Cat and Girl Vol. 5, by  Dorothy Gambrell - The last volume of the set I picked up in a flash sale. More wit, cynicism, cloudcuckoolanders, and simmering despair. A few more color page experiments than the last volumes. All told, glad to have this set in my comics bookcase finally.

Peter Hunt's Cape Cod Cookbook - I found a trove of a half-dozen cookbooks from the 60s in a little free library, and this was the first one I went through -- what a trip. I was not familiar with Peter Hunt, but he was apparently a famous folk artist living in Cape Cod in his later years. The recipes are fine and interesting (but with an approach to the availability of seafood we'd find hard to fathom these days), but taken as a snapshot of a certain lifestyle in the early 60s on the Cape, it's fascinating. Most recipes are described as coming from a certain neighbor, and the notion of just dropping in at someone's studio until a party forms spontaneously and someone decides to start making paella, or having the restaurant across the street from your house decide to send a violinist over to your patio party on a whim are... another world.

Books Completed September 2023

 

 

Analog: The Best of Science Fiction, by Analog Magazine - I think I've had this anthology from 1982 since high school, almost certainly from a library sale. Some of the stories were distantly familiar, so I must have picked through it at some point or another, but I pulled it off the shelf a while ago to use as bedtime reading and finally finished it up. There are 32 stories which vary quite a bit in quality and length, and several more right-wingish ones than I'm used to running across. I particularly liked the stories by Arthur C. Clark and Lester del Ray, not so much the longest one by Randall Garrett (mysteries that rely on magic are really dodgy to me), and was reminded I don't much care for Asimov's preachy self-insert characters.

The Snail Factory, by Ari Bach - Originally a webcomic about the factory that makes the world's snails by the guy who runs https://facts-i-just-made-up.tumblr.com which I read via RSS when it was being posted, I decided to pick up this print-on-demand version when he announced it to support him a bit for years of entertainment. Surreal illustrations, some shaggy dog storytelling, and still some legitimately funny and unsettling moments.

Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse - The second installment of the Between Earth and Sky series "inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas" that I picked up new after getting the first one as a gift a while back. I had been wondering if the series was going to turn out to be one of those where you think it's a fantasy but it's really a distant future where people are using misunderstood ancient technology, but I'm pretty sure given the stuff that happened in this volume that is off the table and we're off to full-blown magic land. I enjoy this series quite a bit despite it having so many characters and relationships the book comes with a "players" section at the start, which is a challenge for me, but I'm sticking with it. I think the third one comes out soon.

Cat and Girl Vol. 3 & 4, by Dorothy Gambrell - Yep, plinked through a couple more of these that I picked up last month during a flash sale. Still satisfying, clever, and poignant, and there are a few experiments with color in these volumes. They also have indexes which should seize anyone's attention with the breadth of topics included.

A Natural History of Nonsense, by Bergen Evans - I don't know for sure where this book came from, but I think it was part of a Christmas gift years ago of a stack of natural history books and bestiaries. This is not a natural history at all though, rather a collection of short essays printed in 1947 where the author, who was apparently a prominent skeptic at the time, discusses a variety of topics of common knowledge addressing the misconceptions and logical fallacies that underpin them. He would have done numbers on YouTube. It was striking to me how relevant many of these writings still felt - we're still batting around the same assumptions over 70 years later. The language in the later chapters on race and gender relations have not aged super well, but I think he was coming from the right place.

Bunnicula, by James and Deborah Howe - Saw this in a little free library and it flew into my pocket somehow. This was the first "chapter book" I remember reading cover-to-cover back in elementary school. One thing I appreciated as an adult that I certainly didn't as a kid was how the illustrations by Alan Daniel have an etching quality that plays with what classical illustrations for Dracula. Still a funny and charming  book, and another one I will have to send along to the niblings.

Some Magical Items

Potion of Shirt-On-Backwards

The imbiber of this cursed potion cannot put their shirt on the right way. Normally this is just embarrassing and can be hidden under a cloak or shawl. Unfortunately the effect extends to armor, and affected's armor class is always treated as a class lower. Also may mess with some high-necked sorcerer robes.

Teleportato

Eat this whole tuber raw and you'll be warped back to where it was grown. The crops are a little weaker and meandering each year. Cooked into a meal it invokes strong yearning for that place instead and grants everyone who partakes advantage on checks to navigate there for a month.

Knobgoblin

A leering, verdigrised codpiece that bestows all the advantages of a ring of protection if worn proudly and obviously. Its facial expression shifts slightly to match the wearer's subconscious when not observed. Once per week it can be used to cast magic missile with a suitably obscene set of somatic gestures.

Pom de Terror

Planted in a garden, this root will flourish with almost no care. In fact, it will grow luxuriously when other plants near it flounder, and produce far too many offshoots. Within a year, it becomes the basis of farming within the hex it was planted in. And then it withdraws its nourishment -- the roots become bitter and underwhelming, providing just enough to keep people and livestock moving but not nourished. Soon they advance to their neighbor's farms, sickles sharpened, hungry grins waiting. The Pom de Terror is upon them.

Glaive of Mutilation

On a critical hit, this outlandish polearm deals an outlandish amount of extra damage (6d, maximum x 3, +3, whatever comes up to the borders of the system without being vorpal).

You Tuber

A wriggling 5-pronged root. Cut yourself, dribble some blood on it while you whisper, and plant it somewhere dank. Come back in a year, and unearth a simulacrum fascinated with your whispers and gaining approval, though not necessarily yours. It's a crappy copy of you with expertise in one of your skills, no loyalty, and an intense desire for fame. Good luck.

The Book of Making Ready the Way

This spellbook would look at home on any academic's shelf. A leather-bound, tastefully-gilt vellum volume. The internals are fairly common observations on the night sky and weather patterns, with a lot of internal references. Like, a lot. Holding certain pages that reference each other forces one's fingers into the correct patterns, and there lie the book's spells of abjuration and, with practice, hidden names.

If the Book of Making Ready the Way is used as a material component in any ritual that requires tracing a geometry, that ritual is a level more effective due to the precise placement of angles and points the book engenders.

Bolus Bolas

Rank and stinking bolas with a wet mass bound on each end. They deal escalating acid damage to a creature bound up in them for a few rounds until they burn themselves out.

Given a pair of rations, they can recover or even reproduce themselves.

Trickledown

This magical saber is forged of pure reaganite. On a hit, compare the wielder's lifestyle to the target's (luxury > wealthy > modest > poor > squalid): Trickledown deals additional damage for each step the wielder is above the target (a d6, or a +1, or bump the weapon die, depending on the system).

Additionally, the wielder has advantage on any Deception-style checks to convince someone a plan is in their best interest, or to stoke fears of a nebulous "they", so long as the notion is mostly lacking in details.

Trickledown is a mildly intelligent weapon with a weak and mumbly ego wrapped around a blistering Neutral Evil core dedicated to the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. It will nudge its bearer to acquire wealth at any cost, but preferably at someone else's cost.

The saber's goat-skin scabbard, Throat, is also mildly enchanted. Once per month, it can be used to cast commune, but it can just say no. It's said that on lonely nights, some adventurers have put the scabbard to unusual uses with remarkable success, but this is likely merely a rumor.

Books Completed August 2023

I'm reading a lot of books right now, but I didn't finish many in August.

 

 

The Monster Overhaul, by Skerples - A birthday gift from my brother, and right up my alley. It's a Kickstartered tabletop RPG book billed as "a practical bestiary" with a focus of usability at the table and a minimum of cruft. The monsters are grouped by theme, which is generally quite nice and useful, except for the kind of abstract groups by season, but the indexes are so complete it still works okay. Art is lovely throughout, with lots of well-known contemporary artists who were paid out of the crowdfunding campaign, no filler or public domain art. I didn't read every line of every table (and there are hundreds of tables) but I can see how this would replace my other monster manuals in my bag if I ever were to play in person again.

 

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir - The last of the pile of Christmas gifts from my wife. I was surprised how much I liked this - I think it came right up to the edge of how hard I can take my sci-fi. Even then it had two different flavors of unobtainium to make things work, but still a compelling story told through a narrative flashback framework that's real easy to do wrong. Maybe I will have to check out The Martian after all.

 

Cat and Girl Vol I & II, by Dorothy Gambrell - I saw a comment on this long-running comic's RSS feed that the author was clearing out a storage unit or something, so picked up five volumes. I've been reading this online forever it seems like, but actually it started in 1999. The author also added some sketches and dedicated the volumes, which was a cool surprise. The comics themselves mostly hold up well! I remember some of them, but some come hit me broadside with absurdity and insight and despair and she knows the medium so well.

 

 

The Emerald City of Oz, by L. Frank Baum -  Found this in a little free library and realized I hadn't read it. Apparently this was supposed to be the last Oz book, and it certainly ends on that note, but "financial troubles" saw Baum writing like seven more. Whoops. The story is kind of all over the place. Baum makes up horrible monster and tosses cruelty around casually in a way children of all ages are sure to love despite what grown-ups might think ("Please take General Crinkle to the torture chamber. There you will kindly slice him into thin slices. Afterward you may feed him to the seven-headed dogs."). Dorothy and friends Gulliver's Travel around Oz visiting various planet-of-hats style towns. Ozma and Glinda omnipotent away all threats, and then the series ostensibly ends. But it doesn't. Weird one.

Books Completed July 2023

 

 

 

Lackadaisy Essentials, by Tracy J. Butler - This was part of a Kickstarter campaign reward for backing the first animated short. I don't even remember how I heard about Lackadaisy but I feel like I've been following it forever. This is a fun book of extras that shows off Butler's expertise in conveying expression and emotion through illustration. A lot of it is reprints from web extras, but that's fine.

Baking Yesteryear, by B. Dylan Hollis - I was seized by a strange urge to get a new cookbook a few months ago. Not that I'm running out, mind you, I have a built-in bookcase of them. Well this was my runner-up, which I passed over for another, but then my mom happened to send it to me as a gift so that worked out well! I've only seen a couple of his videos that were the foundation for this book, and liked them well enough -- people who self-identify as "zany" usually aren't people I'd keep chatting with at a party. But these recipes are fun, even though I don't bake very much at all, and the little inclusion of select horrifying recipes from community cookbooks over the past century struck a special place in my own hording heart.

The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley - Now this is the cookbook I did choose. An educational (for me) exploration of foods and cooking methods native to North America. I don't know if I'll ever be able to actually cook any of these -- I get basically all my groceries delivered since the pandemic started, and most of the recipes call for things I've never seen available on stopandshop.com . I still really enjoyed reading it though, and it gave me a lot of ideas and things to keep an eye out for.

Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - Pulled off the shelf at random. I've read this many times over the years. I'm not a very big superhero comics fan, but the execution and scope of this one continues to impress. My favorite bit is still when the spread of mutants hits the "comfortable suburbs" by route of a throwback to a 50s horror comic that I actually remember happening to read as a teenager well before reading this.

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, by The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante - No idea where I got this book. It's barely recipes, more a collection of techniques by a French food collective with a health food bent. Not recalling anything earth-shattering in this one, but I've read a few books on this subject by now. It would be a useful introduction to the subject probably, given its breadth. They do frequently do the health-food thing where they laud the value of one of these recipes for having "no added sugar", but proceed to concentrate some fruit to basically pure sugar through simmering or drying... it's all about the concentration, guys.

Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch - This one has been on my radar for years and I finally picked up a copy. The timing could not have been weirder - this book only came out 4 years ago, and it simply could not have been written now since it relied so heavily on Twitter having an API, which was burning down as I was reading. Separately from that I much enjoyed the history of emojis, and the closing arguments about viewing language as a communal process rather than some set of formal, inviolate decrees.

Nation, by Terry Pratchett - A little free library find by one of my favorite authors. I was only barely aware of the existence of this one, but I'm quite glad to have picked it up. It's a young adult book, so was a pretty quick read, but it touches on topics of nation building, faith, language, ancestry, and colonialism all with Pratchett's trademark wit and charm. I'm probably going to get my niece a copy for her birthday next month and start her down the Pratchett trail early.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 6-10, by Ryoko Kui - A birthday gift from my wife -- she gave me the first five last year. I'm still impressed by Kui's ability to portray such varied subjects with impact, from delicious looking food made with impossible ingredients to genuinely unsettling faces of doubt and anguish. It's a ride. Plus the plans the adventurers come up with really do remind me of the bonkers kind of stuff you can come up with at the gaming table. I hear the series is publishing its final issue in Japan soon and looking forward to seeing how this wraps up.

Cod, by Mark Kurlansky - Here's one with a bit of personal history. My senior year of college I found a copy of this in the trash in my dorm and read it. I then gave it to my girlfriend at the time (now wife), who found it so striking she changed the topic of her senior thesis towards maritime research. Anyway, it came up in conversation with a neighbor a while back so I decided to revisit. Kurlansky is really talented at weaving all these disparate threads of history into a cohesive narrative, all without having the book collapse into a glut of factoids, like a lot of popular history books seem to. This was published in 1997: I should go look at the state of the ecology he described as precarious back then. It's probably not great, is it?

Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett - Two Pratchetts in one month. For some reason bits and bobs of this one, which I last read I don't know how many years ago, had been bubbling up to the top of mind over the past year and change, so I pulled it off the shelf. Still holds up, though this is one of the earlier Discworld stories, and some rough edges show, at least compared to the later stuff. Specifically, the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions feel like real hollow villains compared to the introduction of The Auditors.

Books Completed May & June 2023

What dreadful months, and how many worse to come. But here we are, dredging another month's distractions, and another...

 

The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta, edited by Dian Hanson - This colossal Christmas present from my wife finally arrived after all sorts of shipping troubles. I don't use the word "tome" lightly, but this is a tome. It feels like it should be floating next to a badass lich who's conjuring warriors and monsters from its images. I'm not going to try and describe the images, it's Frazetta, they're amazing, and they're out there in many formats if you go looking. I was surprised to learn about his years ghosting for Little Abner, and how many movie posters he did. It was disappointing to see that one of the essay authors is still getting work in their chosen field knowing even some of the shit they've done, though.

Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples, Vol. 4-9 - Not sure why I pulled these off the shelf, or where 1-3 went. Well, I almost certainly "lent" them to someone in a fit of enthusiasm pre-pandemic. Well, they hold up incredibly and are one of those series I know I'll be revisiting every few years for the rest of my life. I happened to check in on the state of the story as a result, since they'd been on hiatus for a while, and found...

Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples, Vol.10 - Given the way 9 ends, having to take a few years as creators to sit with it and reorient makes sense. Happening to read through the start and then come across this shortly after it came out was an interesting coincidence. I think they still got it, but might have needed this one to get their feet back under them - it doesn't quite hum like the previous several volumes did. Still gorgeous and layered and I'm looking forward to 11 this year.

A Master of Djinn, by  P. Djèlí Clark - Another Christmas present from my ever-loving wife. I have read a couple other novellas by Clark, but this was his first full novel. Now, I've played a lot of D&D in my life, so I often think of stories as being run by a given friend as the DM. And this one, to me, was a Robert adventure over and over and over. The nature of the characters and what was called out about them, the places, the history of the city and world, well, I wanted to lend this out immediately. As to the book itself, I often felt Clark's delight at writing seeping through the pages. He seemed to really love this setting and people and have such a clear vision that he was clamoring to express. That said I am not too familiar with the mystery genre and having one with magic involved was challenging for me.

Leech, by Hiron Ennes - I picked this one up based on a review on a blog I follow. I was not disappointed, and am waiting for just the right opportunity to share/inflict this book on someone. Really impressive storytelling from a non-human point of view, great worldbuilding, a manageable cast of truly awful people, and the way things all come together at the end... a sweet little sweat drop of a novel.

The Ghost Galleon, by De Ossoerio & Rowe - A comic adaptation of the 70s classic horror flick by my friend Vin. Because why not, that is the kind of thing he does and is so good at. Sporting goods magnate, my gosh. Obligatory Templar Dawn link.

The Nib, Vol. 15, Future - Apparently the last one! The Nib is shutting down after ten years. This final installment showcases their constant and well-founded lack of optimism. I have been a contributing member for years and will miss their presence greatly.

The Past Is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente - See above, but this book was DM'd by my friend Bud, who ran it in Apocalypse World. I liked this over and over again, it felt like something my game group was coming up with as we played, from the naming rituals to the sea friends of the main character Tetley. It had and odd sense of hope in it amongst the despair, and it's bleak, but she carries it. It was, though, yet another instance of the recent trend I keep seeing of normalizing the idea that some portion of humans can flee to Mars. You can't! Fixing what's here is 100x easier and better for everyone! Stop doing this!

Medieval People, by Eileen Power - You have to sit down with a 100-year-old history book by a British author with a certain guarded stance, but I like reading histories centered on "the common man" and this is a seminal work in that genre, so gave this a go. It was on the shelf from my wife's college days. I thought the Marco Polo chapter was a little long and out of sync with the others, but overall an interesting read. Powers did seem to make up situations and then have her subjects react to them like Barbie dolls--"Oh, here comes Charlemagne, how flushed will Bodo be, my goodness"--but it's humanizing and perhaps a stepping stone out of The Great Man approach to history.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers - The last in The Wanderers series, and I think the most ambitious, as it contains no human characters. It goes well, mostly, the setup of trapping the characters of different species in what is functionally an intergalactic truck stop giving ample opportunity for them to have to explain things about their physiology or culture to each other. They take a moment to dig on humans for liking cheese, which, fair. The last few chapters have some amazingly convenient biology but that gets us to a pretty satisfying and considerate closure, for the book and series. I'd easily recommend this run to basically anyone.

Illustro Obscurum Pandæmonium Compendium  I, by Michael Bukowski - A short folio of illustrations based on demons from the Ars Goetia, mostly. What can I say, I have been a fan of Bukowski's work for a long time and have multiple editions of his treatments of various horrid things.

Books Completed April 2023

 

Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley - I got this after reading Bea Wolf last month, based on the afterward. And then I had to skip the forward, because I realized I'd never actually read the whole story, and I was spoiling the oldest story in English for myself. Sort of astounding. Anyway, I really enjoyed this translation/treatment, and I hope anyone who harrumphed over it chokes on their pearls. I found myself slipping into kenning a bit after reading this: "Ten-years tenured" was probably the best that slipped out, sad as that is.

 

Bro!

Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard - A novelette that should have worked for me: There are five characters, real specific goals, starkly contrasted. Something kept tripping me up though and around two-thirds through I realized what it was. And this is petty, I admit this. The main character had something undefinable happen in her chest every few pages. "Something hitched in her chest", "Something thawed in her chest", "Something exploded in her chest", and so on. Those are not exact quotes, but that was the pattern that threw me out of the story. Cool fire elemental, though.

Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Well I'm editing this in after hitting publish, which is a shame because this was one of the best books I've read in a long time. I saw another blog post somewhere recommending a series by this author and I think I will check that out next, once I get through a backlog a little. Two main characters playing off each other over generations, lovely worldbuilding woven into the storytelling, and an approach to mental health I've never seen before.

American Vaudeville, by Geoffrey Hilsabeck - I wanted to learn more about vaudeville after a conversation with my wife meandered there one morning, so I picked this up off bookshop.org as the top result. Not at all what I was expecting but a compelling way to approach the subject. Rather than a formal history, this is a long narrative that borders on a prose poem. The chapters on the individual stars were compelling portraits. I was expecting a little more on how vaudeville affected the early movies that replaced it, and how it continues to echo through our culture, such as it is. The layout of this book was wild, with photographs of vaudeville ephemera split across several pages of chapter headers.

Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers - The human-focused installment of the Wayfarers series. It's been a long time since I read a whole sci-fi series, I think. No, wait, I read Book of the New Sun last year. Anyway. 

• The series continues an admirable expression of progressive values into the sci-fi arena. I haven't read any interviews with Chambers but I suspect she is trying to manifest something lovely into the world. It's not a perfect space, but it's grounded in ecological efforts, patience, cross-cultural understanding, sex positivity... all that good shit.
• There's a solid "kill your darlings" that lands and doesn't go to waste. I don't think that's a spoiler.
• Perhaps a spoiler, a bit: The human fleet is revealed to have been built on the bones of cities, ripped apart and restructured by people who knew they would never fly on the ships they were building. Again, I don't like that we're normalizing "well, Earth is fucked, better get to space" stories, but if we can't even all agree to wear masks in hospitals anymore, this is the hardest aspect of the story to believe.
• Not sure how to put this, but sometimes the story feels like writing. Nobody chuckles this much. Nobody serves this much tea, or sighs so often. 

I did still enjoy it and would recommend it. I've finished the last of the series since starting this post.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury, introduced by Christopher Buckley - I thought I had read a lot of Bradbury, but there were stories I'd never heard of in this collection of 100 short works. Now, I decided to skip the stories included in The October Country, because when I started this tome in November 2022, and had just completed that annual read. So, yeah, I have been plinking away at this for months at bedtime, maybe three stories a week.

Someone with more time and/or intellect than me has probably analyzed Bradbury's relationship with Mexico. It struck me as his Martians are written more human than his Mexicans. And you get to pick your favorite "awful husband journeying through Mexico with traumatized wife" story. I know there are others that aren't even included here.

Also I have no idea who Christopher Buckley is but his introduction made both him and Bradbury out to be joyless bastards so I'm not much interested in finding out.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton - Before trying to write this post, I talked with my wife about words other than "enjoy". It'd be wrong to say I enjoyed this book. I was impressed by it, and moved by it. Beaton is a storyteller of the first degree always, and here she is telling part of her own story.

Books Completed March 2023

 Comically late for some reason. Wait, the reason is I worked too much this month. Whoops!

 

 

A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne - Another little free library find. I think I was expecting more of a classic "young man's adventure story", but this was written while that pattern was still being figured out. Heck, this might have set the pattern: You had your genius, eccentric know-it-all; your taciturn, inexhaustible strong man; and your somewhat clueless youngster along as a cipher, off to some mysterious destination. I did not expect the first several chapters to be dedicated to solving some random cryptogram. Also, spoilers for a 100+ year old book, just because the journey is to doesn't mean they actually make it there, which... weird to a modern reader. I liked the mushroom forest and its inhabitants, and the sea monster fights, which for some reason played out in my mind like Harryhausen scenes.

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - This is the first book I think I've read with multiple Achewood references. I struggle with books with large casts or shifting narratives, which is basically the point of this series, but I keep coming back to it and just going limp for some parts. It's probably deserving of a more focused reading (or reader), but I'm having fun. Getting some gaps from the previous two books filled in by a long series of flashbacks was appreciated and well-told.

 

I don't like that it's continuing an apparent trend in modern sci-fi authors of "whoops, Earth got too bad, better build a lot of spaceships and move everyone to another planet". I hope we can start realizing that fixing what we've got is so much less complicated than this trope. I realize it's a story hook, but I worry it's being popularized this way.

Irish Fairy & Folk Tales by W. B. Yeats - Coincidentally finished this on St. Patrick's Day, which was neat. This collection from 1892 grabbed me for how grounded in places it was. A lot of fairy tale collections have been polished or aggregated to be "long ago and far away". These were "two hundred and eight years ago, there". Like, the history of specific rocks. Many of the tales were written in dialect and ostensibly collected directly from cunning folk who had direct contact with the faeries, or just one degree of separation. The quality of this actual edition was really bad unfortunately, with offset pages and tons of scanlation errors.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire - I wonder if knowing this was part six of a series before I read this Christmas present would have influenced my read at all. It's a standalone story, but maybe there were established patterns I could have grabbed on to. I felt adrift in this one. There were maybe five acts, and the connections between them felt weak, with characters just kind of drifting out of the story. It lost a point for "and then someone knocked her unconscious" at least once. I probably just wasn't the audience for this one. I did like the attention that was paid to how the main, human character having feet would interact with a world where all the inhabitants had hooves, at least.

Work (The Nib #13) - Another nice and pointed collection from The Nib. Always glad when one of these show up. The bumps about obsolete jobs of yore were great. I'd read the entry about the Pinkerton Agency online before, but it was good to get a refresher on these bastards. "Not Working" was a hopeful piece, and I'm wondering what I can do to help that along.

Bea Wolf by Zack Weinersmith, illustrated by Boulet - I preordered three copies of this and then forgot about them. Nothing like a present you get for yourself (and each of your siblings' kids). What a fun approach to this classic. I should go back and read some more bits aloud, the language really feels both ancient and modern at once. The illustrations are a pleasure as always, particularly the villains, and I liked their attention to having a diverse cast of kids. The afterward was interesting too, and has led me to order a copy of Headley's new translation that I'm looking forward to.

Books Completed February 2023

 

 

 

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow - A Christmas present from my wife. I read this novella in one evening. It's an adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale rooted in the present day, peppered with allusions to the many versions of the story through cultures and time, and flecked with adaptations of Arthur Rackham's classic illustrations of the same, so, yeah. A lovely little tongue-twister of a book whose Superman-tattoo-sporting supporting character's description made my wife go "oooh". I read another book by Harrow in my first book post, and this one touched on a lot of the same themes.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers - Another Christmas present! From my wife! It's been a few years since I read the first book of this series, but I got about a third of the way through before I started doubting my memory. After checking a summary online, I was back in, assured I wasn't spoiling anything and we were off on another branch of the story with some different characters. This is has some deep, relatable considerations of what non-human consciousnesses interacting with humans might experience. I have the next two on my shelf and am looking forward to them.

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki - Same origin story as the two above. The story here centers heavily on violinists and makers of violins, furiously passionate about their crafts each. I enjoyed reading it and Aoki makes it relatable, but it's a thing I've never been able to connect to that deeply. The idea of giving up your life for a single perfect performance. This all intertwines with an intergalactic war (again, possibly resolved through music?), the difficulties of owning a donut shop, and the challenges of transsexual existence in modern America. A ride and a parable I wish I was better equipped to comment on.

Token by Gabriel Robinson - Hey, another Christmas present, but from my brother this time. This is so cool because I was part of getting him into RPGs a few years ago and now he's recommending them back. This is a two-person, GM-less, one shot game about a human exile and a humanistic beast circling each other in a threatening wilderness. It's heavy on evocative tables and suggestive illustrations. I don't know if I could ever play this, but I love the craft of it and the potential of the tables and sample scenarios.

Soul Food Love by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams - This was my selection for Black History Month. It's a cookbook focused on a Black family's history through four generations of kitchens. Some of the recipes are really function as anchors for stories, like the tequila ice: Pour an ounce of tequila over a couple ice cubes isn't much of a recipe, but at the end of a tale of a mother did this to regain control over some threads of her life, it hits differently. The recipes I would most like to try are the sweet potato broth and the Chocolate Communion, which is a brilliant way to serve dessert for a crowd.

Odious Uplands by Jason Sholtis - The sequel to Operation Unfathomable, whose reading a few years back had me backing this Kickstarter. A strange and lethal RPG sandbox. For me the most believable aspect was also the part I couldn't imagine working at my table: The land is swarming with imperial agents thirsty for bribes and officially charged to confiscate any magical items or relics they encounter. I love an RPG book where the author is also the artist, it gives such a clarity of vision. Could have used another proofread, though.

Books Completed January 2023

Apparently I'm going to keep doing these posts in 2023.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan - Got this one for Christmas from my wife. This was pretty out of my regular fiction comfort zone. I tend to get lost in large casts, and this book had dozens of characters coming and going and running all over the map (there's a map in the front cover, it's that kind of book). There's a main character, but I'd be hard pressed to call her a hero, and all the antagonists are acting out of understandable motives. It ends being set up for a sequel, which would explain some inclusions along the way that didn't make a lot of sense to me while I was reading them, like the one-page scene where someone's trying to invent firearms that's never referenced again. I think this might have been a case of "that was beautiful, but I didn't like it".

The Book of Gaub by Lost Pages - I Kickstartered this back in 2021, but pulled it off the shelf at random as a quick read. It's a book of system-agnostic horror magic that I don't think I'd ever use at the table, which opens with a lengthy content warning and discussion of the X-Card and Lines & Veils. The physical book is really nice, heavy paper with a weird blue/purple iridescent cover featuring an embossed monstrous hand. Actually, I do think I could use this minor magic item at the table: "Grimy bucket. When lowered down into a well on a property, it will fish up a single bone of one of the deceased previous owners, regardless of where they are buried."

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor - A Christmas gift from my sister. This one was creepy! I used to listen to Night Vale a lot but kind of fell off and the catalog is so huge now trying to come back as a listener is kind of intimidating, so it was cool to be able to check in through another medium. My favorite terrible faceless old woman "prank" was leaving a Honey-Nut Cheerios box full of tarantulas in someone's pantry. Well done.

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut - Another Christmas gift from my sister. I have read a fair amount of Vonnegut, but hardly anything in this short collection, so that was a nice surprise. An impactful selection of stories about war and its aftermaths, plus the text of the last speech he was to give but was never able to deliver. I like his approach to science fiction where the miraculous is there to allow him to explore how people would react to a strange situation, and not as the focus of the story itself.

Color (The Nib #14) - One of my favorite collections since I subscribed. The short history of orange, both as a color and a fruit, was extremely interesting, as was the longer piece about the history and science of gendered colors. Blurbs throughout about poisonous sources of pigments from around the world through history tied it all together.

Happy Cruelty Day! by Bob Powers - My laptop died in January, and in the process of setting up a new one I found myself going through reams of old bookmarks. One was for http://www.girlsarepretty.com/ which I used to follow via RSS before it stopped updating, and it turns out they put out a book. You're... probably not supposed to read these in a go like I did. Microfictions of despair and abuse and absurdity and horror and hope, with no fear of dropping you in the middle of thing and letting you figure out the vignette, or not, presented like something like the inverse of daily affirmations. Powerful stuff, I think That's The Black Sludge Part Of You Day! is one of my favorite examples.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers - The first book I read in 2023 was this short novel my wife gave me for Christmas. I really enjoyed this, it was hopeful without being maudlin, and I haven't read a decent "person versus nature and self" story in a while. If I was still seeing my game group on the regular I would have brought this along and made someone take it and pretend they were going to read it.

Books Completed December 2022

 Well, that's a whole year of doing this. It wasn't a New Year's resolution, just an impulse I had at the end of January after realizing I'd chonked through a lot of my Christmas stack. Still it feels cool to have stuck with it for a year. I'll probably keep doing it.

The Goon Library vol. 3 by Eric Powell - Halfway through the Library collection here. A lot of tension wound up in the first two volumes starts to release here, to the general misery of all involved. It's a story of greed and loss and pining, which isn't something I'm usually into, but it's so expertly constructed here that it's worth it.

I do have to call out that there's no favorable reading you can give to the encounter with the monstrous "tranny", though. Also when the characters are handed over to other artists/writers for filler content they're never nearly as strong - without the grounding of the City and Lonely Street, the "lol random baboons with razor boomerangs" just falls flat.

Powell can present some serious monsters though, both in behavior and appearance. Even with my huge Christmas stack of books, I'll probably read vol. 4 in January.

Bob the Angry Flower by Stephen Notley - I've been reading this strip online since college, and it recently celebrated its 30 anniversary, so I decided to pick up some print copies. Actually I decided to pick up one, but it's print on demand and flat shipping, so... I got four: "Pamplemousse", "X", "How to Operate a Chair", and "The Unthinkable".

Even the old ones still hold up. I have to admit I didn't read every annotation, but the ones I did were interesting additions and helped ground the comics in the time they were written. Which, we're revisiting the rogues' gallery of Bush II here a lot.

Two church community cookbooks - Specifically "St. Mary's Wrentham 75th Anniversary" and "Tasty Trinity Tidbits Wrentham, MA". I have stacks of these things, and two more got added at Christmas. I enjoy the similarities they all seem to share (you're always going to get at least one recipe for Impossible Cheeseburger Pie straight off the Bisquick box) while hunting for the one "wait, what" each one almost always has. In the former books' case, that was a curried banana desert, and in the latter, a reuben casserole which honestly sounds amazing.

Sometimes you get old-school diet recipes, too, which are always... intriguing. Finding penned-in stars or stained pages are hints the recipes there are worth trying. Always buy the most damaged second-hand cookbooks possible, I say. Throw in some outsider art and some folksy "recipe for a happy marriage" nonsense and what's a better way to blow 20 minutes and 25 cents.

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum - This is such a weird book. I've read it before but every time I'm struck by how bizarre it is, and that, given its age and the fame of its author, basically none of the entire Santa mythology it created has made it into the modern Christmas zeitgeist. I got enough of a bee in my bonnet about how weird it was that I had to write up a little RPG bestiary for the Awgwas, Knooks, Goozle-Goblins, and what-have-you.

I watched the 1985 Rankin & Bass animated special of this last year. Somehow that manages to be even weirder than the source material. There's apparently also an animated one from 2000 I haven't touched yet - maybe next year.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett - Not sure how many years I've read this for Christmas now, or how many copies I've given away. Ten maybe? This is such a fantastic book on so many levels, and something I look forward to as part of the holiday season now. Every year I think I find a new joke (this year it was "All cisterns go!"), but the old ones still slide in there skillfully. Mr. Teatime is one of the few fictional characters I'm genuinely afraid of. The way all the incredibly disparate threads are woven together by the end is a mastercraft of storytelling. We'll see how long I manage to hold onto this copy, which I finished on Christmas Day this year, in the twilight glow of the tree.