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.

CCC Charms 1

Some simple, one-use magic items for an upcoming weird west, 5e-ish campaign.

A wizard can study these charms as if they were scrolls for purposes of expanding their spellbook and add a normal version of the spell to it, but doing so consumes their magic as if they had been cast.

---

This pig-leather poke of 99 clinking discs of fool's gold can be used to cast friends once. The target of the spell will believe the discs to be gold coins for the duration, as well.

A pair of knucklebone dice, each wrapped in the end of a rawhide tether. If hung from the handle or wrapped around the body of a walking stick or staff, they can be used to cast shillelagh on it. When you do, the dice clatter against each other - roll 2d6. On anything less than a 7, they crumble.

An iron rail spike that looks like it just came out of the foundry, glowing with a soft red light, but strangely casting no warmth. Striking it with a hammer loudly ignites it to the brightness of a candle for a minute. Striking it again while it glows this way causes it to flare up to red-tinged light spell for an hour, after which it becomes an ordinary rail spike.

This snuff pouch is made of waxy reeds woven tightly together. Filled with herbs, it can be used to cast druidcraft once, but the effect always manifests accompanied by a sneeze.

In full, bright sunlight, this burnished tin hand mirror can be used to cast fire bolt with a 300' range, and then melt.

A handful of jagged, magnetized scrap-iron needles. Toss them into the air to cast wrathful smite, and they will hover around you. When you hit and trigger the spell, the needles fly out and pierce the target, giving them disadvantage on any save to end the frightened condition imposed by the spell.

A bent and reforged cavalry saber handle forms the grip of this oak walking stick. It can be used once to invoke the soldier's memories that infuse it, casting longstrider on the bearer and allowing them to use the stick as a saber for the duration.

This delicate yew dowsing wand trembles in the presence of blood, granting advantage on checks to follow a trail to the wounded, but casts healing word on its quarry and becomes nonmagical as soon as it comes within 60 feet.

Anyone proficient with a playing card set can use this deck of gold-gilt playing cards as if the spell was on their class list. These decks are becoming more common, everyone involved in a game where one is introduced can make an Arcana check to recognize it. As part of play, the owner of the deck can command one other player to lose the game (giving disadvantage on any checks for the game), or, sometimes more sinisterly, to win the game (giving advantage). At the end of the game, the gilt has worn off on the players' fingers, and the deck becomes a regular, non-magical deck of cards.

Several tiny glass vials of patent veterinary medicine. The labels make it unclear which are appropriate for which animals, but the smells are unmistakably alluring. When used to cast animal friendship, also roll a d6: On a 1, the target animal attacks immediately; On a 6, the effect is permanent.

A mycelium-riddled railway map points the way towards routes not yet established, and ones long since rotted. It can be used to cast pass without trace once, and fungus and slimes will eat the footsteps of those who follow its dampened paths. If cast in the desert it simply desicates.

Deep in this cheaply printed religious pamphlet for One Eyed Jack, a misalignment (?) of characters is actually a prayer of spider climb.

A finger ring of white salt, that doesn't melt despite humidity or sweat. You can eat it as a ration, or eat it to cast mirror image. If you're somewhere salty, attacks against the images have disadvantage.

This wallet of reeking cigars can be use to cast locate animals or plants - the smoke that drifts from them indicates the direction. Adding a bit of the quarry to the cigar will double the range.

Poems of loss and fidelity grace this embroidered linen hanky. It can be used to cast wind wall if fluttered as if in farewell, at which point the embroidery unravels and falls out.

A clockwork toy donkey that can happily stomp around and bray when wound up. Wound in a certain unintuitive combination, though, it brays... backwards? somehow? in a dissonance that replicates dispel magic. After this it continues its playful aspects, somehow looking more pleased with itself.

This pair of wooden hare statuettes is carefully (and demurely) interlocked. When teased apart, they crumble, and a stinking cloud effect of boisterous charging bunnies, dust, musk, and... scents erupts.

An old leather dog collar scratched with the name "Bo". It can be used to cast polymorph once, changing the subject into an shambly hound dog for the duration. Since only one form is available by using the item, the target has disadvantage on their saving throw.

A finely printed religious pamphlet for Factumus that can be used to cast staggering smite. If all the dice come up the same, the book is not expended in the casting.

An old, dry cardboard box tied with a faded black ribbon. Inside is a dried grave wreath. It can be used to cast seeming, but only to create the appearance of a funerary party with out-of-date fashions, with a duration of 24 hours, at which point a ghost appears and reacts as if it had observed its own funeral again.

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.