Books Completed December 2024

Kind of a short stack this month. I put a lot of effort into Christmas this year, and then fell down the Hades 2 hole. But I received over 30 books as gifts, so expect to have larger stacks in the coming months.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut - I found a collection of Vonnegut books in a little free library, and asked my dad if he had any interest in them. He's not much of a fiction reader, but is sometimes interested in books from years ago he hasn't read in a long time, or such things by similar authors, and he took up my offer. He started with Cat's Cradle, so I grabbed my copy for the novelty of reading a book at the same time as him. Once he got past the invented words he really enjoyed it. I still do too, for the most part - I think I read it for the first time in high school in the 90s, and I was surprised to notice how many little individual bits were still rattling around in my brain.

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett - I read it every December. Total comfort read, which was nice, because there was some sickness in the house while I was reading it.

How to be a Praying Mom, by Jeannie St. John Taylor - Another little free library find. After finishing this, I remain a childless atheist, so instructions unclear. I did learn that some people apparently refer to God as "Abba Daddy" which... yikes.

Gunslinger, by Night Owl Workshop - A Kickstarter I forgot about and arrived as a present for me from me. Thanks, me! Our current D&D game is using a lot of Western tropes, and I followed the main author/designer's blog, and decided to back this project once he mentioned he was doing illustrations for every entry in the bestiary, and I love a bestiary. The game itself is a serviceable OSR hack. The tables look pilferable. I would have liked to see some of the weirdness fleshed out a little more, and I think it could have used a sensitivity read for something set in largely historical Texas. Overall it's a nice addition to my growing Weird West RPG collection.

Books Completed November 2024

 

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair - I found this in a little free library late in the month, and thought I knew the gist of it despite never having read it. It seemed topical (UNFORTUNATELY) so I decided to give it a go. This is an "enhanced" edition, apparently intended for schools or reading groups - I appreciated the extra context the prefixes and suffixes supplied. The book itself is wrenching, and I can understand the impact and outrage it created when it was published. Knowing it was a protest novel, I should have been more prepared for the long speeches at the end, but it did feel like a kludge still. On the whole, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but I think it was important to finally do so, and I'll be thinking about it for a while (UNFORTUNATELY).

Oglaf: Book Four, by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne - They keep churning out hilarious filth, what else can I say. I loved the introduction of Wobbly John, God of Lies.

H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, by Gou Tanabe - My wife picked this up for me for Halloween, but it arrived a few days late. No matter, November was still plenty spooky. This is a manga adaptation - I've read a few other of Tanabe's works in the same vein. This one again shows his skill at capturing a sense of huge scale in small, black-and-white pages. It varies the original less than some of his other works.

Dominic, by William Steig - I've had this for years and pulled it off the shelf on a whim. It's a book for older children, so not a challenging read, but share that same deeply weird, almost stream-of-consciousness feeling of Steig's other stories, amplified greatly by his sketchy illustrations. More children's books should use words like "seneschal", especially when describing a peacock. 

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick - My mother in law brought this over, thinking I would like it. I realized that somehow I'd never actually ready any PKD, so this was my first experience with an original instead of a movie adaptation. Shame I've been missing out all these years! I can see how this has influenced so many of the authors and stories I have read, and I'm going to be seeking out more, both for the stories' own sakes and to fill in some cultural gaps. I do have to say the last chapter felt a little schlocky or cheap, though.

Ozma of Oz, by L. Frank Baum - A well-weathered little free library find. This and The Marvelous Land of Oz were broken apart and remixed into everyone's favorite fever-dream childhood film Return to Oz, so you know there's some extremely bizarre notions and characters zipping around in here. Ozma hasn't reached the godlike levels of power she has in the later books, so there's some actual conflict here resolved through some classic fairy-tale logic.

The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss - My nephew came to visit, so I had the box of kid's books out. After he left, I pulled out this classic and read it for the first time in a while. Still clever! I tried to give and adult eye to the structure of the rhyme and the illustration technique - he was definitely crafting something here instead of churning out whatever the publishing industry of the time wanted. It worked out well for him, I think we can safely say.

Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero - An early Christmas gift from my sister. I very much enjoyed this "What Ever Happened To...?" approach to the slew of 70's teen sleuth stories. Clever writing and dialogue, good amount of pathos without being sappy, a few genuinely scary scenes, all bound together by a mystery that skips back and forth between the decades - it was a romp. I'm passing it on to my brother as an on-time Christmas gift.

The Monsters Know What They're Doing, by Keith Ammann - Another early Christmas gift from my sister in the same visit. It was a little odd reading this right as 5th edition is shifting minor versions and the monsters haven't been published yet, particularly with the changes in attitude towards innate alignments for humanoids that's happened in the past decade. But it was really great bathroom reading, and I'll take a few ideas away for my table.

Books Completed October 2024

 Horror movies took up a lot of time this month, so the stack's a bit small.

The Inhuman Condition, by Clive Barker - I pulled this off the shelf for Halloween times, having not read it for, oh a decade or so. I remembered the first two stories pretty well, though the latter ones did not feel familiar at all. This is pretty early, raw Barker, first published in 1985, but his style and talents are already definitely there. It felt like a good one to have kicked off the spooky season with.

(This edition is from 1987 and has a pull quote from Stephen King on the cover, which will become relevant later.)

Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1983 - A little free library find. Not technically a book I guess but whatever, this is my blog. I thought all of the stories were basically fine, no surprise hidden gems here, just an enjoyable pulp magazine. The essay by Asimov about some of the history of the discovery of photosynthesis was fun in that acerbic way he had. The book review section by Algis Budrys, covering some post-apocalyptic works, had a bit that felt topical in 2024 unfortunately:

You know what the straights are going to do? They're going to crack this planet because they can't afford the clothes and the car that would allow them to date Loni Anderson or Tom Selleck. Of course, each of us knows in our heart of hearts that we'll emerge from the rubble and make sense of it after they've screwed it all up, right?

The back cover's book club promo is a great microcosm of that year in fantasy and sci-fi, too:

Frontier Scum, by Karl Druid - An "Acid Western" TTRPG with the tagline "A game about outlaws and their acts of wanton survival on a lost frontier". I read a review of this and decided to give it a try since my game group's current setting is also some kind of weird West. It's based on Mörk Borg, so is rules-light and design-heavy. I've never seen a book bound this way, with an exposed spine that lies flat and perfect-trim pages. There's a lot of clever little things in here, like d4-d4 for abilities, how drunkenness is handled, and losing your hat to soak a hit. 

Sometimes I felt like the design was getting in the way of the rules' clarity, but perhaps at the table the visuals would become anchors. Not sure, don't expect to ever get a chance to play it. My biggest complaint is that the sample adventure takes up a lot of the book and is literally a railroad, which does hardly anything to establish the party within the setting outlined at the beginning with a considerate level of detail. On the whole I'm glad to have this one on the shelf to flip through for inspiration, though.

Behind Her Eyes, by Sarah Pinborough - I mentioned to my sister that I didn't feel like I had much on the shelves for Halloween season that I hadn't already read several times, and she was kind enough to send me a few from her house, of which this was one. I don't normally read thrillers but went ahead with this one, and I'm glad I did, it was a wild ride with some genuinely creepy moments and a lot of twists. The final twist is incredible, one of those ones that changes your perception of the whole story retroactively.

(Now, this was published in 2017, and like the book from 1987 above, it also has a pull quote from Stephen King on the cover. That's just some impressive presence!)

Men and Cartoons, by Jonathan Lethem - Found in a little free library, and pulled entirely on the strength of the jacket's graphic design, which mimics those ads from the backs of comic books where you could send away for shock rings and fright wigs and 7-foot skeletons and hot pepper gum. The stories were taut but enjoyable, with some outlandish settings that are just to be taken for granted, and a sprinkling of super hero tropes and references. I liked it well enough that I plan to pass it on to my brother.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson and John Kascht - This one also came from my sister. An eerie little fable told largely through intricate illustrations. I'm not going to spoil it but it's not one of those fables with a particularly uplifting moral.

Books Completed September 2024

  

Cunning Folk, by Tabitha Stanmore - I think I picked this up based on a book discussion thread on Bluesky because I often like popular histories that focus on how a single facet of life was experience by everyday people throughout time. This delivers for how people in medieval Europe integrated their beliefs in magic with their day-to-day lives as well as their religion. I learned a few things and liked it well enough to pass it on to a neighbor who is into similar things.

The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal - This was part of the Christmas stack of books from my wife. I'm not normally a big mystery fan - I never know if I'm supposed to be playing the game along with the author, trying to guess the reveal before the investigator does. I didn't try too hard in this one, which is good, because I don't think it would have been possible to guess. The ending pulled in a couple tropes to heavy handed effect and fell flat for me, but again I'm not very familiar with the genre. The setting and spaceship were carefully and interestingly constructed and explained naturally without lingering on them, though, and the treatment of trauma throughout was thoughtful.

The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw - This was in my bookshop.org shopping cart - I don't remember putting it there but I bought it anyway. What a strange and gory little tale. I wish I had known to save it for October. The handling of setting or world-building here was one of those "it's the notes you don't play" situations and nicely handled at that.

Dreadful, by Caitlin Rozakis - This one definitely came from a recent Bluesky thread. A fun fantasy romp that uses a normally tired amnesia premise to great effect, asking some questions about what it means to be good along the way. It also plays with fantasy archetype characters, having most of them revealed to not be what they seemed when introduced. I'm looking forward to passing this one along.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren - A little free library find. I remember seeing the movie a few times as a kid, but I couldn't say how faithful it was to the original. This was a hoot though. I'd just as easily believe Pippi to be some kind of fey trickster as a little girl. Actually that might be the best explanation for what's going on here! I'm going to get copies for the niblings and cause some trouble indirectly in the family I think.

Fats: A Global History, by Michelle Phillipov - My wife and I were talking about popular histories after I showed her Cunning Folk, and we got to wondering if there was one about fat, since that's an everyday thing that's been handled so differently in different cultures. Found this one after a little searching and gave it a whirl. Turns out it's part of a larger series called "Edible" that gives a similar short treatment to one food item per book. This one had more than its fair share of copy editing mistakes, which are always distracting, and I thought it focused overlong on America's interests with processed fats through the 1900s. It also barely avoids falling into being a list of facts - there's some structure within the chapters that stop it from being just trivia, but then the chapters don't mesh cleanly. I guess I learned some things.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter - I am pretty sure a friend recommended this to me months ago. It was another mystery entry in my shopping cart and I went for it. I don't know - I liked it but I am having a hard time saying why, because this is a hard work to explain. Almost a prose poem as a novella? A contemplative exploration of grief through a series of unreliable narrators, which grief makes of us all.

The Yellow Wall-Paper (and other stories), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Part of a collection of classics my sister gave me years ago, and I happened to notice this one towards the end of the month as I was starting to think about spooky season reads. I didn't know anything about this other than remembering it mentioned in several lists of classic weird tales over the years. And rightly so! Downright eerie. I went and read some analysis essays of it afterward and can see how this slotted into early feminist studies. I might pop one of the film adaptations on in October. For the creeping.

Books Completed August 2024

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This was part of last year's Christmas stack from my wife. It took me a long time to get rolling on this one. Everything about it should have worked for me - the brooding atmosphere, the hybrids, the tense secrets - but it couldn't hook for whatever reason. About halfway through it finally did and I finished it in a couple of days, carrying it room to room. There small central cast and half a dozen evocatively described locations they move between, and once I imagined it as a staged play in those constraints the flow worked better for me.

The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany - I've read this many times, and once, long ago, tweeted the entirely of its text. Recently I pulled it off the shelf after talking with my UU minister neighbor, wondering if there was something in there she might make a sermon of, and ended up reading the whole again. Holds up. This is an awful public domain, POD edition though so I'm not going to share it with her. Looking for a better one with the original Sime illustrations.

The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea, by Graham Phillips - My mom sent me this for my birthday with a note like "I don't know, seemed interesting". I went into it with what I felt was the appropriate amount of skepticism for any non-fiction book that mentions Atlantis in its title, but it was surprisingly reserved. No mention of ancient hovercrafts at all, but rather a fairly measured discussion of the rise and fall of sea levels over the past several thousand years and how that has displaced cities and societies. I liked the speculation around the discovery of ruins that might have been an ancient spa.

Every Heart A Doorway, be Seannan McGuire - Another part of the Christmas pile from my wife. I've read a few other of McGuire's books over the years and generally enjoy them, and the pattern holds here. It's a compact little "kill your darlings" queer magical mystery that I think I finished in a day.

H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by Gou Tannabe - This manga adaptation of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories was a birthday gift from my wife. She has previously given me Tannabe's adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, which I also really enjoyed. This one takes more liberties with the source material, mixing in some aspects of (spoilers) Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, but make it work extremely well. Where Madness showed Tannabe's skill at illustrating huge vistas, this work focuses on claustrophobia and decay with equal skill.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 14, by Ryoko Kui - The last one! I'm finally free of spoilers. Could not have predicted how this was going to end but by gum it stuck the landing. What a great series, and I'm excited to see the second season of the anime next year.

A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein - A little free library find. Of course I've read this many times over the years, and it wasn't a huge investment to sit down for an hour on an afternoon with it and read it again. It does contain one of my favorites, and one I've taken to heart at work over the years:

If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful, boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor—
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore.

Alien Nation comics, by Adventure Comics - I finished up my rewatch of the original series and all the made-for-TV movies earlier this year. While looking up trivia about them, I discovered there had been a whole (short lived, again) line of comics published shortly after the TV series ended! eBay provided a pretty complete collection in one order, but I have a few others to pick up to finish the whole run. One thing I noticed was they didn't have a consistent approach to handling the Newcomer's language - I guess continuity editors are a newer invention.

• A Breed Apart - The first one I cracked, and it made me trepidatious of the rest. The art was... "gifted high school student" level and the story ended on multiple cliffhangers with a plea in the afterward for readers to write in and beg for its continuation. This was the only one in the stack I have to use the medium of comics to introduce visuals that couldn't have been done in the TV show, though.
  
• The Firstcomers - Better, but with a really frustrating narrative structure bordering on "it was all a dream". Since this is an officially licensed work, I guess it means The Greys exist in the Alien Nation universe. Good to know. The male lead in this one is an irredeemable prick with a rat-tail haircut.
  
• The Spartans - Good one, pulls in some characters from the show. Plays with the Overseer concept in a way the show never did. Sets itself up for a sequel without begging for one.
  
• The Skin Trade - Best of the lot, really enjoyed it. If there had been a second season of the show, I would have liked to have seen it based off this. The main character, Mason Jar, adapts a hard-boiled detective persona based off movies he watched in internment and leans into it. Great character names and tweaks on lore established in the show. Also characters from the other comic runs show up and are referenced, showing Action was trying to set up a whole parallel roster. A shame nothing else came of it.

 

Books Completed July 2024

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett - After finishing Pratchett's biography a few months ago, I decided to round out my Discworld collection. This is one of the ones I hadn't read, and I picked it up one day when I was feeling kind of down and wanted some comfort food. It's supposed to be a book for children or young adults, but with Pratchett's approach to his readers, it's anything but simple or saccharin. It was a timely read, too, because we're dealing with a rat surge in the neighborhood this summer. Our methods have been less elegant than hiring a piper though, I'm afraid. Really enjoyed this one, and looking forward to when my niblings get a little older and I can share it with them.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs - Found this one in a little free library. It was printed in 1919 and in really good shape, with some great (unattributed) pen-and-ink illustrations, so that was an exciting discovery. I hadn't read any original Tarzan stories before somehow, despite reading a lot of John Carter over the years. I went in expecting some amount of racism, given it was written over 100 years ago by a white American about Africa, but I was not prepared. If we put that aside for a moment, the writing is really quite thrilling and you can see how Tarzan became the cultural icon he is. My favorite story in here was probably the last one, "Tarzan Rescues the Moon". But I've gone and done some research on Burroughs since, and learned he was an outspoken eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism, which the Tarzan stories were explicitly supposed to convey, so yeah. I can see why we generally encounter Bowdlerized versions now.

The Snouters, by "Harald Stümpke" - I do not remember how I got this little book. It might have spontaneously formed on a shelf, because it's so extremely weird that I can barely imagine someone sitting down to write it, yet here it is in my hands. Published in 1967, it's an absolutely straight-faced scientific recounting of a small island chain where a whole new order of mammals has evolved, the rhinogrades, who all have exceptionally developed noses that allow them to fill every matter of ecological niche. It should be a two page joke, but it keeps going, with an entire fake bibliography, invented scientific rivalries, and anthropological notes about the islands' original inhabitants (who were all wiped out by a common cold carried by the Swedish prisoner of war who escaped and swam to the shore). It's also fully illustrated with these outlandish beasts. In a terse epilogue, the whole island chain is destroyed by an errant test nuclear explosion. Simply one of the weirdest books I own.

Hey what the fuck.

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 1, by Kamome Shirahama - My wife got this for me for my birthday, because she is nice. I think it does a pretty good job of establishing the fantasy setting without info-dumping, though it skims dangerously close a couple of times. Having the main character be a student at a magic school is a classic storytelling device for a reason, I guess. The art somehow reminded me of early 1900s American comics, particularly Little Nemo, though Shriahama draws jaws particularly expressively. I will probably pick up a couple more volumes since I've gotten past the "here's how magic works in this world" portion of the story.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage - A little free library find, though one that had been soaked in something weirdly fragrant at some point, so I could only read a few warped pages at a time before I got kind of woozy. It's a global history of humanity that uses six different drinks as a lens: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. Sometimes it could lose its thesis in the author's excitement to share some bit of trivia he'd learned along the way, but it's not the worst example of that I've ever read. The shape of the history is pretty American middle school, just a general kind of "march of progress", with a treatment of the European Dark Ages that has the Levant serving as some kind of battery of knowledge waiting to be rediscovered. Also there's a random picture of George Washington in the spirits chapters, like we don't know what George Washington looks like. Anyway, I learned a few things and it was enjoyable enough, but it's heading back to the little free library for someone else to smell.

Deserter, by Junji Ito - Another birthday gift from my wife. Somehow I haven't read very much Ito, so having a collection of some of his early stories is a probably a good start to reading more. What can you say, it's Ito. Take a simple concept, play it straight and horrifying, lean on it, iterate, end abruptly on a shocker page. "Unendurable Labyrinth" was my favorite overall, but "Bullied" had the best last page. I'm going to seek out some more, I think.

Army Food and Messing, by Military Service Publishing Company - Another little free library find. This one took a couple months to get through, and was almost certainly never intended to be read cover-to-cover, but that's what I did. This is a practical guide to all aspects of food and mess management in the Army of 1942, with only a few dozen pages actually devoted to recipes, all for 100 men. There's menu planning, mess management, how to build a field stove, pages and pages of supply inspection guidelines, how to store supplies, how to bake at scale... just weirdly fascinating stuff. The inspection guidelines in particular had a weird poetry to them, trying to describe how good apples or bread or coffee should taste. The recipes looked generally fine, and economical, but I did notice there's beef broth in everything.

Books Completed May & June 2024

 

 

Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett - I had lent this to a neighbor years ago, and when she returned it, there it was at the top of the pile right after I'd finished Pratchett's biography last month. This is one of the later Discworld books, and the longest. I wish it was a little tighter because there's themes in it I think other friends would enjoy, but it's a little too long to recommend to most people (my neighbor, however, seems to read like she breathes). I had forgotten about the character of Pepe, and rediscovering them was great. This one also contains one of my favorite extended Pratchett quotes (it's the one about otters).

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders - My neighbor lent me this when returning some other books I'd lent here, including the above. I'd never heard of it and probably not the kind of book I would have picked up on my own, but I ended up enjoying it well enough. Slight spoiler: They never tell you what "The Bardo" is, you're apparently supposed to just know this (insert Chris Flemming meme). It's a deft weaving of fiction and fact, told trough primary source quotes of the Lincoln era and a truly odd narrative structure. Takes a while to figure out what's going on, but that's intentional and a confusion shared by most of the characters. I particularly enjoyed when conflicting source quotes were presented in rapid succession as a way to recreate the hazy and unreliable nature of memory.

Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher - I got this for Christmas and pulled it out of that stack at random. It ended up being my favorite fantasy novel of the year so far. I immediately gave away my copy in excitement, forgetting I needed a picture for this post, which is largely what ended up delaying it a month. Not much I can say without spoiling anything, other than what the jacket blurb already does: "This isn't the kind of fairy tale where the princess marries a prince. It's the one where she kills him." The world-building is sharp and diegetic, and there's a satisfying number of twists based on clues laid out in bare sight of the reader earlier. I'm giving this copy away immediately, too. 

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway - This came up in conversation after a D&D game, and I mentioned that I didn't think I'd ever read it. My friend latched on that and promptly ordered me a copy, because they're good that way. This is one of those books that reminds me how media illiterate I am despite reading all the time. It's smashing me over the head with allegories, and I just get the vaguest sense of "ah, the fish represents... something". Same with the sharks, and the basically everything. As a narrative there's something to be said for the dry, staccato prose, but in the end I felt like a high school sophomore who got a C- on their quarterly. I should read about reading more.

The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett - After finishing Pratchett's biography, I decided to go through my collection of Discworld novels and make sure I had them all. This is one I was surprised to be missing, and when it arrived in the order to fill in the gaps, I decided to give it a go, since it had been a while. It has a pretty bad reputation, and the common wisdom is "don't start Discworld with the first book", but honestly it was better than I was expecting. The world-building is probably what gets people thinking that, because it's much more heavy-handed than his later work, but there's plenty to enjoy here, and you can see how the seeds of weirdness and humor and humanity planted here grew into the larger series over the years.

Hollow Kingdom, by Kina Jane Buxton - Another gift by the same friend as Old Man Hemingway up above, in a decidedly different vein. A foul-mouthed, foul-named crow and his doofus hound dog companion set out to save the world, or at least the humans they care about, from a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes it seemed like it was trying to be an allegory for transness, but then would put that to the side entirely for chapters, so that just might be my reading comprehension failing again. The language could get a little thesaurus-poisoned, but I think that was the narrator crow putting on airs rather than the author grasping for ten-cent words. On the whole, it was a romp, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Gackling Moon, by Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp - Don't you love it when a forgotten Kickstarter project shows up on your doorstep? A nice hardbound copy of what started as a series of blog posts describing a distant fantastical land teetering on nonexistence, rife for adventure. It's accompanied by a set of inspired illustrations that depict cultural artifacts from the land, making it a kind of museum of an imagined place. I do wish they'd given it another run through an editor's hands - there's just a few too many typographic errors and "see page XX" left in an otherwise well-produced book. My favorite bits were the goblin empire and the antigoblin empire, but I also really enjoyed the lunatic phases of the titular moon.

The Pretty Good Jim's Journal Treasury, by Scott Dikkers - I don't know why I pulled this off the shelf. I've had it since I bought it off the bottom shelf of a used book and game store in college on a whim, and have read it who knows how many times since. The nigh-complete absence of humor is like slowly rolling down a set of winding stairs, and you occasionally hit a landing/joke, and are redirected down another flight. Nothing happens, and we're all the worse for it. A paragon of anti-humor.

The Marvelous Land of Oz, by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young (and L. Frank Baum) - A gift from the city's numerous little free libraries. I've read the novel a few times over the years, but did not know this comic adaptation existed. It punches up the puns and the absurdity of the source material a bit. The art is lush but, and this might be unkind, a little too Hot Topic. Also they copy and paste panels within a page rather frequently - maybe it wouldn't stand out if it was being read month-to-month, but in a collected volume it really does, even if it's done for laughs. A nice enough modern take, but I am sending it back to whence it came.

 

Books Completed March & April 2024

April kind of got away from me.

The Gormenghast Novels, by Mervyn Peake - I picked this absolute tome up a few years ago after reading about it in another blog post I can't find. I read the first of the trilogy, then put it aside for a year or two before picking it up again sometime earlier this year and finally pushing through. It's a work whose language makes it both enjoyable and difficult at times. Sometimes at the same time. I was not expecting the drastic tonal shift of the third book in the least, but it works for the fever dream it seems to be. Having read it, I'm now seeing references to it in other works frequently. It feels like one of these forgotten, load-bearing works of the fantasy genre.

It's hard for me to not read fantasy with an eye to gaming, and Gormenghast is indeed included in Appendix N. Sometimes it felt like you could hear the dice clattering. Everyone has 1d6 HP and every attack deals 1d6 damage. The characters have a defining physical trait and a personality trait that are easy to remember, but then polished and worried to a luster.

It's going to be a long time before I reread this series, especially having read some of the critical and historical essays in the back of this edition, but it's going to be rattling around in my head for a long time, too.

Time and Again, by Jack Finney - This was a birthday gift from my mom years ago, in a pile of time travel books. I picked it off the shelf because it was close and I didn't want to get off the couch. An odd one from the 70s, both for its method of time travel (cosplay hard enough) and its choice of protagonist (New York's horniest illustrator). I appreciated the attention given to the food in the past, and would love to visit one of the all-you-can-eat lunch counters he describes. The approach to cops and the military is swingy to a modern reader - sometimes lauding, sometimes bastardizing. The finale did not go the way I expected. There are other books in this series, but I don't think they're going to float to the top of my read pile.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe, by John McPhee - A Christmas gift from my family in Georgia, I had no idea what to expect picking this up. It turns out to be a combination of travelogue, historical overview, and biography centered around one Henri Vaillancourt, a young man in 1975 Vermont obsessed with crafting birch bark canoes with traditional native American methods and tools. For the most part. Unless he doesn't want to. The portion of the book that covers a long and challenging canoe trip with him, the author, and a few others does not paint him in a flattering light, except when it comes to the care of their crafts. McPhee's writing is what I think of a mid-century masculine - staccato, steeped in Hemingway, but brisk and illustrative. I never would have picked this up on my own but I'm glad I read it.

Carsick, by John Waters - Another Christmas gift, this one from my sister. I really should ask her if she read it. John Waters takes three hitchhiking trips across America - an imagined delight, and imagined disaster, and an actual journey. This is really only my second exposure to his work, outside of his presence in the vague pop culture fog. (The first was as a freshman in college, renting Pink Flamingos from the city independent video store as part of an evening entertaining a visiting prospective student. It went well.)

So not knowing really what to expect, I was thrilled to see him invent something like a roadtrip of the valkyries for himself, writing the weird and sordid into existence, and conjuring old lost friends from the dead for another surprise visit. Then the awful trip I would... also find awful. The actual trip was made in 2014, a strange time for technology. He's interacting with Twitter, but has also been convinced to carry a separate satellite tracking device, which doesn't always work. He encounters an Outback Steakhouse for the first time. It's a ride.

Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon - In the same Christmas package as Carsick this comes from my sister. I have never heard of this author, but he is apparently well-established, at least enough to write a book about writing books. I skipped one of the essays, thinking it dissects a story I hope to read one day... but now I can't remember which one. The Golden Compass is now thoroughly spoiled, though. The personal essays got a little confusing in retrospect after a later one was revealed to be a speech that included several constructed stories. He seems incisive on his subjects, but I was not familiar with most of the comics or authors he was discussing, or his own work, so it was essays standing on their own for me, and they stood admirably. I can appreciate his love for maps of places that don't exist and their ability to excite the imagination. The physical book is lovely, with a three-part nested cover.

A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow - It's early in the year, so I'm working my way through the Christmas stack still, as you might have noticed. This one comes from my wife, and she got me the predecessor on a Christmas past. A fine novelette retelling of Snow White. Dimension hopping abounds, and the protagonist's many adventures between the two books are deftly touched on. Bittersweet as a late summer apple.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons - Noticed I didn't have it on the shelf, and figured I must have lent it to someone when I still saw people. Ordered up a new copy, and then it was just sitting there so, yep. Not much to say. A classic for all the reasons, and every page, heck every panel, invites further study. Feels too real right now.

The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune - Back to the Christmas stack. This romance was a gift from my wife. I do not usually read romances, not because I think love is icky, but knowing there must be a Happily Ever After at the end of the journey tends to muck with guide posts for me along the way. But here it was, so here I went. 

You ever hear someone with a persistent sniffle during a test in school? And once you hear it, you can't stop waiting for it, and throws you off the whole effort? The main character in this book sweats every three pages, I swear. I kept waiting for it, to the distraction of whatever else was going on with the love interest or the supernatural orphans in their care.

The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17, by Jeff Rovin - A friend back in high school found this at a thrift store and gave it to me. I read it then and it sat burbling away at the back of my mind since then, and I think this is the first time I read it as an adult. What an outsider art entry into speculative fiction. It's presented as an illustrated in-universe guide to the titular galaxy for Earth tourists to five planet/moon systems that seem to get weirder as you move out from the sun M-17. There's proto-civilizations, alien philosophies, mysterious lifeforms, magic and ghosts for some reason, scientific mysteries, and five, FIVE, alien language glossaries.

Absolute brain candy for teenage me.

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins - From the Christmas gifts from my wife stack. I do not read a lot of biographies, so don't have a reliable measuring stick, but this one seems excellently done. The focus is relentlessly on Pratchett, but the people and family he's known move in and through that focus deftly. I've been a Discworld fan since high school, so learning more about the author seemed long overdue. He seemed like, to put it mildly, a cool guy, and also, to put it mildly, rather a handful. The world didn't work the way he wanted it to but he gave his damndest to write the world he wanted into shape and you have to think he succeeded at least a little. He deserved better than what he was dealt, but did so much with that hand. Definitely putting some Discworld at the top of the pile after this one.

Books Completed February 2024

This is like the blurriest photo ever, you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King - I hadn't heard of this one until my mom mentioned it, and that she had an extra copy someone had given her, and she was planning to listen to it, and would I like to read it too and talk about it? I suppose it's out there on the Internet if you want it, but talking about a book with someone who has also read it has been an elusive goal for my weird old broken brain for a good many years now, so I said yes, and she mailed it to me. 

This is a Stephen King book. I think the newest one I've read before this was volume something-something of the Dark Tower. He's got exactly the weird place in my childhood of probably too early novels scavenged from yard sales and libraries that he'd be proud of, I hope. I won't say much about the story itself, other than I broadly enjoyed it, and there's probably some literary cleverness in all the allusions that I'm missing. What I was most glad about was getting to talk about a book with my mom though. Apparently my brother has also, independently, read this, so it might be a double dip!

Drifting Dragons, by Taku Kuwabara - My wife got this for me as a surprise. The dragons are very cool and imaginative while they're alive, but once the crew of the story's airship turns them into meat the cooking aspects of this manga fall flat for me. Maybe it's because it's the introductory volume but none of their motivations really grabbed me.

Hamburger and Hot Dog Book, by Good Housekeeping and the year 1958 - A slap in the face in every page. I'll spare the details, but "shredded hot dogs" should not have ever been an ingredient in anything, and yes they involve a gentle freeze and a box grater, holy crap. Okay, actually, the winner was the recipe that involved those, and canned pineapple, and egg yolks, and was then served on waffles and topped with slivered almonds.

Schott's Original Miscellany, by Ben Schott - We had this on the bathroom bookshelf back in our first apartment, and I pulled it for similar uses this month. Won't say I read line for line, but it's still worth a chuckle ("1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship", but in chart form).

The Singing Hills Cycle, by Nghi Vo - My wife got me the second two books of this for Christmas, so I reread The Empress of Salt and Fortune just to get back into it before picking up the other two. All are delightful stories-within-stories, and a series I have to brake on pushing into the hands of so many people. My wife also read TEoSaF and enjoyed it, and we got to have a little discussion about it, so that's two in one month.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 1-11, by Ryōko Kui - A re-read, except for volume 11, apparently because I'm watching the anime. It wasn't a conscious decision, just something I picked off the shelf. Still great. The odd thing here is for the first time while watching an anime, I've read the source material while my wife hasn't, and I keep watching her face at key moments. I have since read volume 12, have backordered 13, and am waiting on 14 to be released.

Books Completed January 2024

 

The Game Master's Book of Astonishing Random Tables, by Ben Eglof - A surprise gift from my friend Bud, who got a copy for themselves as well. This does what it says on the tin for the most part, and is pages and pages of tables for fantasy RPGs, with a strong focus on 5e D&D without saying that. The first section on world-building seemed like decent advice, but quite unlikely to fall into the hands of someone who would need it. The second section is the meat of the book, and I won't say I read every line, but there's inspiration here. The random encounter tables could have used more cross-referencing to other tables in the book and fewer "1d6 [level-appropriate monsters] leap from nowhere". The three one-shot adventures at the end were the weak part of the book, only ever utilizing the wealth of tables as a seeming afterthought, and broadly feeling like railroads in the worst 2e tradition, though the mystery had an approach to the solution that was useful for a one-shot.

Mourka, by Tanaquil Le Clercq (Author) and Martha Swope (Photographer) - Before there were cat blogs, there was Life magazine. I received this as an Xmas gift from my cousin Nate, and it expounds on a famous cat photo from the 1964, telling the fictitious exploits of a real rescue cat owned by a real ballet director. The photos are cut together with more than amateur but less than professional expertise, and that makes it fun. It's like a printed tweet thread.

boing

New England Cook Book of Fine Old Recipes, by Kay Morrow - A gift from my brother for Xmas. This is from 1936, and falling apart a bit, sadly. Another one of those old cookbooks that really hammers home how cheap and available seafood used to be, and how maaaybe that wasn't a great idea. Not too many show stopper recipes in here, though sour-cream and raisin pie stands out. Oh, and

a gentleman's dish

What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher - An Xmas present from my wife (there is a theme this month). A retelling and exploration of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, which I had just so happened to read in December. A delightful and spooky little tale that really leans into the italicized bits of its inspiration (it's the fungi). Describing the inhuman in a relatable way is always a challenge, and Kingfisher rises to it while riffing on the source material admirably but not obsessively.

The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi - Source: See above. I think I might have been banter-deprived, because this book delighted me, and it is a rich seam of banter My banterometer is full now.

Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree - Source: See above. A slow and (generally) kind fantasy romance that I really enjoyed. I showed my friend Bud the cover and they picked it up with no further information and are also enjoying it. I should seek out more books like this, it took my blood pressure down a few points without ever being saccharine.

Career Cat, by Eleanor Harris - In the same vein as Mourka, above, and from the same source (thank, Nate) this would have been a blog post or a tweet thread these days. It follows the life of a cat in the 50s in New York who becomes famous for numerous advertisements. The origin story seems a little too fabulous to believe, but not enough for me to dig in and try to confirm or refute it. Handsome cat, to be sure, I do wish this version had been in color.

Caribbean Cookbook, by Rita G Springer - I found this in a little free library, along with a trove of other cookbooks from the 60s. It's fascinating in its completeness - it's not a cookbook of, say, Caribbean recipes, but a cookbook of how to cook in the Caribbean, down to how to make coffee, or what to serve for Christmas. There is a continual focus on nutrition and economy that aligns with the author's home economics credentials stated in the introduction. It's another seafood-heavy cookbook that feels like it's from another time.

The Mold Farmer, by Rick Claypool - I actually read this in December, but forgot to include it in that post, so rolling it over here. A gift from my friend Daniella, this novelette uses Lovecraftian tropes to tell a harrowing and odious story of oppression through the life of the titular mold farmer. I think I might need to read this one again and really sit with it. I bet if you had children it would hit a different chord. It's one of those ones I can't say I liked, but it was impactful. 

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson - A little free library find. Kind of hard to believe this was children's literature back in the days. Maybe kids are soft now, or maybe we didn't care about them at all back then. Hard to imagine a middle ground, and I'm in my mid-forties and grew up with unrestricted and voracious access to a library back then. Anyway, this was a ride, and I want to watch a couple of the many film adaptations. I simply did not have the religious background that was assumed the average (ten year old?) reader would have, but I loved the characters (when they weren't dying horribly).

The ABCs of Casseroles, by Ruth McCrea - An Xmas gift from my brother. This is a supermarket checkout book from 1954 that sticks to the gimmick of its title and arranges dozens of casserole recipes alphabetically. Some are pretty forced, like "Johnny's Favorite" or "XYZ Pudding", but they're all cookable at least. I wasn't left craving any. There's also a little rhyme and period illustration for each letter, which are cute.

Books Completed December 2023

  

A Christmas Bestiary, by John Kenn Mortensen and Benni Bødker -Think I saw this promoted when I was ordering Night Terrors, and it'd be one of the few times I can remember an internet ad actually working. This is an advent calendar of Christmas and Yuletide related beasts, spirits, and spooks mostly from Scandinavia, with pointers for the reader on their danger levels and survival tips. I picked up a copy for my brother as well with the intent we'd each read a page a day. Really a fun ride and glad to have it my stack of Christmas books now.

North American Lake Monsters, by Nathan Ballingrud - My friend Daniella kindly sent me a stack of books from Lovecraft Arts & Sciences, and this was among them. I thought it was a bestiary at first glance, but it turned out to be a collection of grim and haunting short stories, many centered around New Orleans, all centered around something sucking at the heart of whatever America is, with the supernatural aspects applied more for contrast of that in most cases than as the real horror themselves. Quick and gripping reads with some genuinely unsettling moments.

The Old Farmer's Almanac Colonial Cookbook, edited by Clarissa M. Silitch - Received this from my parents for Christmas. I'm pretty sure I have another version of this somewhere, or something quite, quite similar, but I can't find it. Does what it says on the tin - a collection of colonial-era recipes, adjusted for modern measurements in most cases, if not modern tastes. I do not particularly want to try the ham-stuffed calves' ears, for example, but most of these look fine, if demanding more time than I have these days. It definitely has some rose-colored glasses on in the historical anecdotes that accompany some recipes in how it discusses Native Americans and the "servants", ahem, at several plantations.

The Shortest History of India, by John Zubrzycki - Sometime last year I realized rather out of the blue I know very little about India despite working with many people who live there. So I looked around and ordered a few books, and this is the first one I finished. I now still know that I know very little about India, but I'm more aware of the depths of my ignorance, so, that's a start. Cramming 5,000 years of history into under 300 pages is obviously never going to be more than a survey, which is why I was surprised the author often chose to linger on some episodes that felt sensationalist, or graphically violent. But I had to start somewhere, and it was a good read overall. Also, apparently, there is a whole line of short histories by this publisher, so I may get more to fill in some other gaps in my education once I winnow down my TBR pile.

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett - I read this every year for Christmas. Still holds up, not much new to say. I lent an extra copy to a neighbor, but haven't had the chance to see what she thought of it. This year the character of Violet stuck out to me more than usual. I noticed she made some contradictory statements and got to wondering if that was on purpose to show her rather flighty personality, or an editing mistake. Maybe I'll remember to look around for others' thoughts some day. Probably not. In any case, a tradition I look forward too each year - there are not many books at all I read over and over.

The Notes and Commonplace Book of H. P. Lovecraft - Another entry from Daniella's gift stack. This is a reproduction of a facsimile of a notebook where HPL scribbled his half-formed ideas and bits of inspiration as they struck from whatever source, mostly as sentence fragments. I have several books that reference this, and knowing of it made me start one of my own years ago, but somehow I never actually read it until now, so that felt nice. You can see which of these ideas were developed into stories, and which never quite justified it (vampire seals, looking at you). The second half of the book is summaries of dozens of works he considered interesting or inspirational, but I only read the ones for stories I'd read, of which there were only seven or eight, for fear of spoilers. It is, however, a great-looking reading list once, again, I winnow down the current TBR pile from Christmas.

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.

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.