Bookpost: Reives, psychic detectives, some rad comics, and foots

I've still got a pretty big bookpost backlog from this year, so let's plink away at it a bit more.

B. Zedan — Before Dungeons, Dragons & Dives: Reives

May 17

$1+ ebook on Gumroad.

My bud’s been playing what sounds like an excellent cooking-themed D&D game, and wrote some cool shorts about their character’s backstory. (They are a kea-kenku rogue, which always reminds me of the fuck the police keas.)

I liked this.

J. Kathleen Cheney — Dreaming Death

May 14

This is shaped like a police procedural, but with psychic powers and ancient technology and soulbonds and stuff strewn around all over the place. Solid and competent and enjoyable; I had a good time with this.

It's also low-key extremely weird on a structural level, much of which has to do with the wild-ass setting. What it feels like is, maybe the author spent a shitload of time on a big technofantasy epic in this setting — fate-of-the-world and lost civilizations and all that — and then she decided that it was unfinishable or would never be as interesting as it was in her head, so she recouped some of her investment by writing a completely opposite type of story in that setting and reusing maybe one and a half characters. And not only that, but the characters themselves all have a solid scrapped novel worth of backstory behind them, and it’s distinct from the scrapped epic that spawned the setting.

I think this was a Martha Wells recommendation, which makes perfect sense.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug 7

I've been doing a lot of re-reading this year, and I highly recommend it. Nothing new to really say about this one.

Carolyn Nowak — Girl Town (comics, compilation)

Aug 19

This collects several of Nowak's existing short comics, and adds a few new ones. I previously reviewed Diana's Electric Tongue, and it's still probably my favorite in this collection, but all of these comics are excellent. I read them one-by-one in different sittings, and they all left me in a sort of contemplative, pleasantly off-balance mood.

Strong recommend, especially if you're down for a Kelly Link sort of vibe.

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

Sept. 3

God this book is still so good.

John Vonhof — Fixing Your Feet

Skimmed, somewhere in the second half of August

We went backpacking with our friend Melissa a few months ago, and she said this book was really useful in recovering from the foot injury that ejected her from the trail in California and in avoiding further hurts.

The library had it in their free online reader, so I gave it a skim. I don't think I'd recommend reading it all the way through, but I did glean some interesting info from it, especially the argument against letting calluses build up and the accumulated shear forces theory of blister prevention. A combination of filing off thick calluses and using vaseline to reduce friction in the sock has already improved my life on long runs, so skimming that PDF was definitely time well spent.

Sarah Webb — Kochab, ch. 0-3 (webcomic)

Sept. 30

Ongoing at http://kochab-comic.com/

This is excellent! Slow and gentle and atmospheric, with gorgeous lush art. (It's on hiatus while the author builds up a backlog, but it sounds like she basically has the final three chapters thumbnailed, so it's not like someone's unfinishable started-it-at-age-19 epic or anything.)

It's about a girl from a snowy village and a lonely ifrit she meets while trying to traverse a ruined palace/arcology that's blocking her route home. The ifrit might have some memory issues, and it's not clear why she's been asleep for (probably) centuries. There's some slow-burn romantic tension going on. I feel like a lot of you'd be into this.

I wish I could remember who recced this, but at any rate it was in my file of "cool-looking webcomics that I want to get to someday but probably won't." And then I built a thing that makes it easier to get around to reading all those, and this was one of the first payoffs.