Books: Constance Verity, Takeshi Kovacs, Zanja na'Tarwein, Yuugo Hachiken, and Freddy Riley

[roadrunnertwice]

Well: here's a bookpost. There's still some stuff from 2019 in the queue, because what even IS time, anyway.

Laurie J. Marks — The Elemental Logic series — Fire Logic (re-read), Earth Logic (re-read), Water Logic (re-read), Air Logic

July 4, July 7, July 26, Aug 1, 2019

It's about time to give up on writing the review these books deserve and just post a short one: This is one of my favorite fantasy series of all time, right up there with the Broken Earth trilogy. It is unique and powerful and delightful, and does things that only fantasy could do but which no other series I know of has dared to. Fire Logic is a peerless opening statement, and Air Logic does the impossible and sticks the landing.

A fragment from the review I ultimately didn't manage to write:

The elemental magics of this setting aren't what you'd expect from prior genre experience, and fire magic is a power of intuitions and connections. In the opening sections of Fire Logic, the nature of fire logic is obscure, verging on plausibly deniable. But by the halfway point, it comes into blazing focus: fire mages can short-circuit cause and effect, break free of history, erase the entire plot of the story to come, leaving the future a blank slate where anything could happen.

You should probably read these.

Richard Morgan — Altered Carbon

Sept. 4, 2019

Trivia: I think Ben Heifitz recommended this to me like almost 20 years ago. What is time. More recently I guess there was a TV show, which B (among others) has spoken highly of; anyway, I grabbed it for vacation reading when I was off in Vermont with my fam.

This was a solid-ass O.G. hardboiled!? I was not expecting that's what it would be, but I DID happen to be in the exact right mood for that, so fuck yeah. I gladly accept this delayed serendipity.

I'll totally read some more books in this series the next time that urge grabs me.

A. Lee Martinez — The Last Adventure of Constance Verity

Nov. 26, 2019

For the first like 3/4 of this book, I couldn't decide whether I thought it was good or bad!

Well: it's decent enough; I didn't love it, but I liked it. What I do maybe love is the amount of stylistic risk-taking going on here. I think the first several acts of this book function as a parody of a bad parody of a thing, which is kind of a dangerous level of meta to attempt and which I didn't initially trust Martinez to pull off. (Only other time I ever saw that in play at novel-scale was In the Night Room, which IMO fell flat on its face.) But I think it ultimately worked!

(Am I overthinking this? Was this actually just supposed to be a fun silly romp? Dude, absolutely.)

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon, vols. 5 through 12

Jan 2 through Feb 8, 2020

I think the final volumes of this are probably out now, but I can't get them from the library yet because things are still kinda shut down for covid.

Anyway, I still like this comic a lot. In the later volumes it's kind of accelerating, skiping large chunks of time and lowering the resolution of detail; for example, I really like the new underclassman on the equestrian club, but I can't remember if they ever actually mention her name.

Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell — Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (comics)

June 16, 2020

This was so fucking solid. What a good-ass comic. Rosemary Valero-O'Connell is such an outrageously good cartoonist (UGH, these characters, these environments, these pages), and she syncs up so well with Tamaki's pacing.

This is the second Mariko Tamaki thing I've read, and both of them (this, and This One Summer) have kinda low-key been about the temptation to start becoming an awful person, about social situations that reward you for not being there for your people. Or at least that's been one of the major strands in the braid. This one leaned super-hard into that; intense enough that I ended up setting it aside for quite a while because I wasn't ready to deal with the mortification I knew was standing between my bookmark and the resolution. Yes, I know, it's Yrs Truly getting too stressed out by the gay romance comic for young teens, but I contend that this is some legitimately dark shit to contemplate at any length, and is tbh probably darker if you ARE in your 30s-plus and have had more time to re-evaluate and come to some tentative conclusions about whatever went down in your own teens and 20s.