Roadrunner Twice

And there we go!

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner

Aug 31

Hey hey, it’s another Commonweal book! This is so deep into the previous events in the setting that I don’t see much point reviewing it as an independent object, so instead I’ll just say that it’s a solid Commonweal book ~if you’re into that sort of thing~ (AND I AM). A new main character dealing with different kinds of problems, and a move back into a more March North-style military milieu after the last two books’ wizard homeschool setup.

In terms of series-scope movement, this advances the slow-motion freakout about the Second Commonweal’s fairly dire situation vis-à-vis getting enough resources on-line to deal with a very likely existential threat (whose outline you still can’t quite make out over the horizon but whose kicked-up dust is starting to make a little bit of distant haze).

Anyway, I dig these, see prior reviews for more, and I’ll reiterate that these books are not at all cliffhangery and are a safe exception to your policy against starting a new unfinished open-ended fat fantasy series.

Graydon Saunders — The Human Dress

Sep 27

I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I don’t think I can give it a general recommendation! (Good thing everyone knows not to come here for general recommendations, lol.)

Anyway, this is a standalone, it is LONG, it is weird, it is frequently digressive, it has Norsemen and dinosaurs, and it is occasionally deliberately obnoxious for comedic purposes. It is intensely satisfying if you enjoy following down the implications of strange aspects of the way a fictional world works. The character writing is an odd mix of high melodrama and chilly stiff-upper-lip-ism. It's straight and horny in a way that was honestly kind of surprising given the at least moderately-queer sensibility of the Commonweal novels.

In short, there are plenty of reasons not to read this book, but it also gets a fair amount right that's not really possible to find anywhere else. I had plenty of fun with it, but (and I can't believe I'm saying this) I think I'd be more likely to recommend the Commonweal series to most of y'all.

I might have mentioned this before, but Saunders' writing style fits my particular brain really well — it has something to do with the amount of connections he leaves un-drawn, where a lot of the later action in a book depends on understanding something he never actually explicitly covered in the prior text. I realize that probably sounds like an obtuse pain in the ass to a lot of people, but it fulfills some innate need for interactivity that I seem to have, and I tend to read his books at binge speed. I feel like I had this with The Wire too, where it was like thank god, someone finally figured out how to distract me enough that I don't get bored during a TV show.

Evan Dahm — Vattu vol. 1: The Name and the Mark (comics)

Dec 7

An intense and vivid drama about a nomad child and an empire. I'm not wholly sure where this is going, yet.

This is part of the same universe as Rice Boy (I think it's called "Overside?"), but it isn't dreamlike or surreal in the way Rice Boy was; much more linear and mimetic. (Well, the interludes into the War Man's memories are fairly dreamlike, but it's clear that his experience of time and events is very different from Vattu's and the imperials'.)

Kohei Horikoshi — My Hero Academia vols. 1-3, 4-5, 6-7 (comics)

Dec 23, Dec 27, Jan 1

I was feeling that urge to read some fight comics, and this is the one everyone's been gaga about for the last couple years, so I decided to hit the library and see if it's good. It is!

It's really no surprise that this is popular, because the premise is straight-up "Harry Potter except superheroes instead of wizards." Right down to the outrageous character names! (Although that part's all Japanese, so it's not necessarily obvious in the translation.) And the execution is really solid; excellent art and cartooning, interesting subtle depths to a lot of the characters, unexpected interactions of powers, solid fight choreography/plotting, etc.

I feel like there are a lot of manga that are roughly this good, but what's got me hooked is basically All Might. What a weird and fascinating character.

Bonus Level: Fortune 499

Dec 31

This is a game about investing too much of your identity in a day job that you never actually decided to care about, but which somehow has taken over your life anyway because you accidentally went on autopilot three or four years ago and are just now waking up at the wheel. A topic near and dear to my heart! And I quite liked the graphics and music.

It's also got some surprisingly fun and challenging turn-based combat — the basic mechanic is a randomized rock/paper/scissors game, but you can manipulate fate to improve your chances (and even literally cheat, though that'll eventually get expensive), and there are a lot of weird variations on the rules that you end up having to deal with. In general the dungeons are more like puzzles than like the turn-based crawls I grew up with — there's no random encounters, and you often need a specific plan for each fight, based on clues in the dialogue and an assessment of, like, the office equipment on each floor.

I was about to say "this is a short game about etc. etc.," but then I realized my standards for game length are actually completely incoherent at this point and even I have no idea what I would mean by "a short game." Anyway it's a streamlined indie RPG with a beginning, middle, and end, it took me about six hours, and it costs like five bucks.

Niv Sekar — Your Mother's Fox (comics)

Aug 16

A short and melancholy story, about that point in early adulthood where you start to measure yourself against your parents and aren't really sure you like your score.

Martha Wells — Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries

Aug 25

Continuing to enjoy Murderbot. Also, I'm really glad this series has been getting a lot of love from elsewhere! People IRL have been bringing it up spontaneously! (Including my sister, who I don't think reads this journal.)

Sidenote, I'm starting to think I misjudged the title choices on these. I figured the episode titles were from someone in the editorial or marketing chain grasping for plausible nonsense that sounded badass and vaguely technological, but now I think they're tongue-in-cheek. After all, our protagonist's "rogue protocol" consists of making shit up as they go along and trying not to have a panic attack. And then if I look at it from another angle, there's this element of kind of sweet encouragement to it, too, right? Murderbot might see these misadventures as a frustrating and disappointing anxietyfest, but from the outside, it's all very much as exciting and badass as their beloved TV serials, and you could read the titles as telling them "buck up buddy, this is very hard and you're doing a good job."

Anyway, the end of this one was quite sad, and while slipping out the back door might not have been the coolest move, I'm not sure what else Murderbot should have done in that situation. Staying probably wouldn't have helped.

Oh, lemme throw YET ANOTHER tangent about novellas in here. If a short story ought to be about a movie's worth of story, and a novel is at least a season of TV's worth, how much story can a good novella fit? Three episodes of hour-long TV? More, less? This metric didn't even occur to me until I was already finished with this one, but I'll try to watch for the "episode breaks" next time.

Adolfo Bioy Casares — The Invention of Morel (re-read)

Sep. 1

This existential comedy/horror story remains a fuckin' delight.

Eleanor Davis — Tommorow, ch. 2 (comics)

Sep 26

(gumroad link)

This comic makes me feel very comfortable and very uncomfortable at the same time.

Ryan Estrada and Diana Nock — Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here (comics)

June 22

An educational comic about how to travel the world on the cheap (-er / -ish).

Cool material, and Estrada definitely has the requisite bona-fides. (Wasn't he running a shoestring cartoonist commune in Mexico for a year or two? I feel like I remember that from ages ago.)

Eleanor Davis — Tomorrow (part 1) (comics)

June somethingth

The first part of a graphic novel, which Davis is serializing as PDFs on Gumroad. This chapter is all set-up for... I'm not sure what. But it's good. Economical and self-assured storytelling, sketching out who these people are and what they want. Humane and deftly observed.

Ben Fleuter — The Sword Interval vol. 1 (comics)

June 27

The more I think about this setting, the less sense it makes — it's sort of like shared-world superhero comics, where there's just no WAY the world would look anything like this one after decades of constant super-battles. But it's a fun monster-slaying romp anyway! Well-staged and well-cartooned fights, good monster and character design. (Fleuter's other comic, Derelict, takes place in a much more cohesive world, but it's also on indefinite hiatus, alas. And it's much more of a persistent downer.)

Anyway, looks like this one is still running online, so I added it to my reader.

Chad Orzel — How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

July 14

I read Orzel's book about relativity a while back, and after I finished Hawking's Brief History of Time I remembered I'd always meant to go back and read the one about quantum mechanics.

This was pretty great. Again, it's way less ambitious than what Hawking was doing, but I think it does a better job of hammering home a real understanding of some really unintuitive and bizarre material. Quantum mechanics and relativity are concepts that make my brain feel like its fingers are greased, and I don't think I'm alone in this, but after reading these, I feel like I understand the cores of them, at least.

(In a way, I think Hawking was at a disadvantage just because of how brilliant he was; I suspect this stuff is harder for Orzel, so he has better judgment about how to get it across to people who find it really difficult.)

Bonus Level: Sundered

July somethingth

This was billed as a metroidvania with roguelike elements, and I was drawn to it by the cool art style.

Initially, the PS4 release was so foully bugged that I regretted paying money for it at all. I almost can't believe anyone would willingly release a game in that condition. But they eventually put out a patch that fixed the awful crashes and slowdown and cleaned up the worst of the load times, so now I can actually consider it on its merits.

And those merits are pretty mixed. Basically, this game is grindy as fuck, and the combat feels sloppy and un-technical (the enemy attacks are so cheap that they're basically noninteractive; it's just a question of whether your damage/armor/recovery/dodge numbers will let you prevail or not, or alternately whether you'll fuck up a heal trigger), and those things combine to waste a whole lot of your time. It was satisfying at times despite that — the environment and character design was cool, the voice work was good, the bosses were impressive and challenging (that Dominion fight, fuck) — but I don't really feel the urge to replay it for the other upgrade/story path.

I ended up siding with the cultists and elder gods, because A: within the text, the military dudes seemed like a bunch of colonialist fuckwads, and B: outside the text, Lovecraft can fuck right off. I guess that was sort of the "bad" ending, but IMO the surface world had it coming.

Dead Cells is coming out soon, and it looks like maybe a more technical/less random take on some of these same design ideas, so I'm excited to try that.

Jeff Smith — RASL vols. 1-4 (comics)

June 6

Finally found the final volume at the Wave, so I read the whole thing through.

This comic is basically a film noir with a bunch of UFO, parallel universe, and military conspiracy frosting on top. (The chemically flavor of that frosting was weirdly familiar: I'm pretty sure I remember that phased-out navy ship story from early-'90s daytime TV at one of my brother's friends' house.)

It also isn't all that good! And I think it hasn't aged very gracefully over the mere decade since it started. Among other things, it's part of that really weird moment of Nikola Tesla worship in the late 00s/early 10s (see also Atomic Robo, and a truly incalculable volume of memes and amateur edu-tainment), with the usual problems endemic to that Whole Thing. (Glossing over Tesla's advocacy of eugenics, for example.) Plus the plot and dialogue are pretty goofy in general, and the whole thing is sexist as fuck in that film noir kind of way.

The cartooning is quite good (and has plenty of room to breathe at the original books' tremendous trim size), but it's not good enough to transcend the work's general faults.

But, there is one thing about this book that I love wholeheartedly, and that is lizard-man antagonist Sal's fucked-up and revolting face. It's so foul and amazing. Bless that disgusting shitbird.

Joey Comeau and Emily Horne — The Anatomy of Melancholy: The Best of A Softer World (comics)

June 7

The long-running webcomic A Softer World wrapped in 2015, and it was great.

This compilation is basically what it says on the tin. It's not at all comprehensive (those two posted A LOT of comic strips), but all the strips in it are really good ones.

Also, somehow Helen DeWitt did the foreword.

Books I Stopped Reading: Charles Mann — The Wizard and the Prophet

June 3

Something about this was just annoying me, so I skimmed the first half and then let the library loan expire.

Emily Carroll — Beneath the Dead Oak Tree (comics)

June 12

This was excellent. It's a pretty classic Emily Carroll horror short that would fit right in with the stories from Through the Woods, but it features the type of glamorous beast-people she's been focusing on in her illustration work lately. (In this case they're foxes.) It's creepy and satisfying, and the art is, AS EVER, fucking outrageously great. Emily Carroll, my dudes. (And the printing is very much up to the content. This is a well-made pamphlet, with a solid feel and excellent colors.)

Rosemary V-O — What is Left (comics)

June 12

This was also excellent and beautiful, and it came completely out of left field because I had no idea who Rosemary Valero-O'connell was. (Sifting through her site, I'm now recognizing a few illos that must have rolled through on Twitter or Tumblr ages ago. Also, here's another excellent comic, much shorter.)

Anyway, What is Left is a weird meditative thing, about a survivor of a deep space shipwreck thrown into a sort of cognitive netherworld; she's alive, but she finds herself haunting the memories of another (probably dead) crewmember, watching scrambled moments from her life and unable to interact with them. It reminds me a little bit of The Invention of Morel, but with a much gentler emotional vibe.

This book, the Carroll one, and the Schwartz one below were all published by Shortbox, which I'd noticed before (I remember some major buzz from comics people when it launched) but hadn't ordered anything from until now. And, uh, maybe I should start buying the actual boxes on spec, because this order was three for three.

Viv Schwartz — Cat and Bag (comics)

June 13

A collection of strips about living with an anxiety disorder. Solid. You can read Cat and Bag online, too.

Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya — Cuttings (comics/artbook)

May 29

(Since this book is from 2014, it lists Ananth Hirsh under his former name.)

Like with Offhand, I can't really recommend seeking this out unless you're already quite invested in the authors' work; read Our Cats are More Famous Than Us, Lucky Penny, or their ongoing comic Barbarous instead. Also much like Offhand, I like this and am glad to have a copy.

So I guess that's all the review this really needs, isn't it? But at any rate, it's a collection of fragments from dead, fallow, or still pending comics ideas these two have worked on. I'm still crossing my fingers that we'll see something cohesive in that weird beast-gods world Ota's been kicking around for a decade-plus, even though it does kind of have the aura of one of those intricate and expansive inner worlds that many writers nurture for eons and then ultimately put aside because they can't manage to melt it down into a mere story. (Sometimes because the world is too fundamentally incoherent and it simply can't be done, and sometimes because doing so would demand the destruction of the perfect inner vision, and they don't have the stomach for it. But then again, every once in a while someone pulls it off.)

One random bit that I cherish: the book includes this strip, which Ota drew in response to one of yrs truly's twitter goofs.

Bonus Level: Tacoma

May 31

The anticapitalism was coming from inside the house.

This was good, and it also had some interesting setting-specific solutions to some of the persistent problems of the depopulated site trash-pickup simulator genre.

If you remember my review of Gone Home, I had... ok, actually I'm not gonna bother to go back and read it 😅 but I THINK my biggest issues with the game were:

• The temporal dissonance of having Sam's audio records scattered throughout the house knocks you out of Katie's shoes. Her experience of the search is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the player's experience of the search, because she only finds Sam's diary at the very end. (I could go on about this at length but I feel like if you give a damn about this genre you probably know what I'm talking about.)
• The arbitrary gating of the house regions was busted. It didn't make sense for that to even be possible in a real residence, and the extra mansion size necessary to make the paths work out made the house feel totally clownshoes instead of plain-old "too big," AND the fact that the trash and audio logs were spread across the gates in roughly chronological order made it look like the family was a nomadic encampment that repeatedly moved from room to room over the months, which is an unintentionally hilarious mental image.

Guess what, Tacoma does a way better job with this! At the time I played Gone Home, I thought the answer was going to be to curve harder toward a trash-focused story design. But instead they doubled down on the recorded drama, and focused on working up a setting where the recorded drama and railroading actually made diegetic sense. (But don't get me wrong, the trash here is pretty excellent.) The audio-and-wireframe-gesture logs are an artifact of the station's AR panopticon (complete with storage glitches and people wandering out of frame mid-conversation, which gives a really effective sense of not having been recorded for your benefit), the gating is corporate busybodies micromanaging your contract, and the awkwardness of the living spaces makes perfect sense in a rotating tin can parked out at one of the Earth/Moon Lagrange points.

TBH, I think this found-recordings style of storytelling is just fundamentally better-suited for highly technological settings. Creating a coherent recording at, e.g., a 1990s tech level just requires so much intention that it's always going to come out stilted. Remember those tape recorders in the hospital at the end of The Last of Us? Why the fuck was the doctor carrying around twelve fucking flash recorders and discarding one whenever she sat down? What possible universe does that make sense in??? IDK, I think about these things. Unfortunately.

At any rate, Tacoma is an impressive advancement for depopulated site trash-pickup simulators; I really like what they did here, and I connected with the story and characters a lot more than I did in Firewatch (the other recent walking simulator that pushed the genre forward a bit).

I also really like some of the setting-building stuff they did for the AIs. Remember how I got mad when Slow Way to a Long Angry Planet (sorry, my brain's been bunging up that title ever since I started reading it) under-thought its AIs and it made that whole plotline boring as fuck? This game is a good example of how thinking it through just an extra half-step or two can really improve everything. Stuff like the methods for training and evaluating AIs, and how old the highest-capability ones are, and that book about meditation you can find that was written by an AI, and the nature of the AI cores; it all builds a certain depth and interest in what it's like to be one of these AIs, and the whole climax and denouement wouldn't work at all without that textual depth. I mean, it's no Ancillary Justice, but it's solid. It works.

The pacing of revelations was pretty decent too; I figured out who my character was and who her friends were pretty early (lmao @ that plywood enclosure in her ship, so good), but the way some of the other technologies in the game intersected with each other (like the vat meat and the OTHER vat meat) only occurred to me pretty much just in time.

The setting is a fairly dire capitalist hell, complete with company scrip, and I keep thinking about parts of it. Like: if this much of the space infrastructure is devoted purely to conspicuous consumption, that means we've kept on AND ACCELERATED the shitty way we've been going... so, how bad is it by this point, down on Earth? And also like: so many of our futures still seem to be always Urras, never Annares.

I finally have some more books reviewed! So here's a small batch.

Yuko Ota — Offhand (comics and artbook)

May 11

I saw parts of this injury and re-injury saga in real-time via Hirsh and Ota's Johnny Wander posts, but I think this is the first time she's laid out the whole ordeal.

Anyway, this book is a liminal critter. It's mostly just an artbook, but there's the edges of a memoir poking out at the sides, and you also get the sense that the book-as-physical-object might be part of some complicated personal catharsis that the reader is only incidental to.

I enjoyed it and I like having a copy, but I don't know that I'd recommend going out of your way to find it unless you're already an avid follower of Ota's work, in which case you probably backed the Kickstarter anyway and got your book the same time I did.

Or unless you're a work-through-the-pain type in need of a scared-straight cautionary tale! Bc damn. (Artists and craftspeople and deskjobbers, please take care of yourselves and watch out for your fellows.)

Tillie Walden — Spinning (comics)

May 18

This is a comics memoir about the author's teen and pre-teen years as a competitive figure skater.

So... what'cha all think about people writing memoirs (distinct from other, less perspective-intensive forms of autobio comics) at like age 22? I'm ambivalent about it, and I think this book might suffer some for the want of a little more distance and perspective. Spinning does an impressive job at wrapping you up in how it felt to be a depressed kid who does all this stuff, but it has nothing at all to say about being a person who used to do all this stuff, because Walden is still just barely starting life as an ex-skater? And like, her teenage fixation on her old coach, Barbara, seems like the sort of thing that would leave marks on every exposed surface on your life, in the kind of way that might take until you're into your 30s to start picking apart fruitfully, right?

Well, anyway, it's a book with some flaws. It is still a fairly amazing book, though. The cartooning is gorgeous, and so stunningly fluent at bottling intense (sometimes smothering) emotional spaces into a panel. And the choice of that goldenrod as a rare spot color was inspired. And admit it: you, too, are curious about what the hell the life of a teen competitive figure skater was like.

Ellen Forney — Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me (comics)

May 19

A comics memoir about how Bipolar I fucking sucks!

I remember briefly opening this before and deciding I wasn't in the mood for it, because it starts during one of Forney's manic periods and that part was full of cracked-out Betty Boop eyes that I just couldn't fucking handle at the time! The art style and cartooning style of this book are all over the place, because she's using stylistic variance to deal with some wild experiential variance. Not just manic vs. depressive, but also serious vs. comedic, and subjective/emotional vs. clinical/informational/analytical.

Anyway, this was a good book. Honest and tough and funny and interesting. And I really appreciated that bit in the next-to-last chapter where she kind of paused the whole subjective merry-go-round and faced head-on into one of her core anxious questions about her disorder (the possible link between mental illness and creativity) in a really measured and straightforward way. IDK, I feel like that was a mode of denouement I've almost never seen.

I knew about Forney from her "I was 7 in '75" comics (which I remember being hilarious and bizarre), and from some incidental work she did for The Stranger back in the day. This isn't much like those (of course??), but it was funny how familiar the voice was.

Hope y'all had a good New Year! I spent mine installing a staircase, about which probably more anon. But in the meantime, here's a brief bookpost.

Max Gladstone — Three Parts Dead

Sep 6

OK, I like this series a lot. This was the first one, going by publishing order, but it's real strong right out the gate.

Alison Bechdel — Are You My Mother? (comics, re-read)

Nov. 11

I might just let my prior review stand for this one. Or better yet, don't even read my prior review; this is one of those books where it's probably best if you don't have any idea what you're getting into.

Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond — The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way

Dec 11

A long time ago, I heard a rumor that this manual existed, that Chumbawumba had obtained a rare copy and followed it to the letter, and that the result had been that fucking "Tubthumping" song.

Years later, I read a story about the KLF dumping a sheep carcass outside a record industry awards afterparty and then setting a literal £1,000,000 on literal fire, and it included a link to an old OCRed scan of this book, which I read half of immediately and eventually got around to finishing after a Goodreads update from Suzie reminded me of it.

I can't speak to the efficacy or feasibility of the method described here, but it was definitely an entertaining ride and a real intriguing time capsule of the British record biz in 1988. Short, fast, and weird.

Carolyn Nowak — Diana's Electric Tongue (comics)

Aug 26

This is a really good comic about being heartbroken, right up there at the top of its genre (along with the Octopus Pie arc "The Witch Lives"). It's also basically everything I want from a character-driven "mundane SF" story. I recommend this to anyone.

Aside from the pure and wonderful writing, this has some amazing character and environment art. Good lord, the wedding venue? Sabine? Owen? So good. And I love that Diana's prosthetic tongue is offensively lime green, that little tidbit does so much hidden heavy lifting to establish her character and the world she inhabits.

This is longer than a normal floppy, but smaller than what most people would call a graphic novel; I guess you could call it a "graphic novella" if you didn't mind being a 🔪TERMINOLOGY CRIMINAL🔪 (and lol, I don't). As far as I know the only place to get it is at the author's Etsy, although I wouldn't be shocked if Floating World or BWP had a copy or two hanging around. For all that it seems to be at a zine-ish level of commerciality (blank spine, no ISBN), the physical and print quality is superb. (That critical "I feel fine about spending $10 on this" quality level.)

Here's a shorter online comic by Nowak, which I also loved tremendously. This is a cartoonist to keep a very close eye on.

N.K. Jemisin — The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky

Aug 7, Aug 7, Aug 20

I recommend this whole trilogy with no reservations. It deserved both of the Hugos it's gotten so far, and I wouldn't be shocked to see it collect a third.

This is basically the book/series I was waiting for Jemisin to write. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms were good, but to be honest they weren't quite for me — 100k had the cosmic mythos of an epic fantasy, but at its core it was actually a Gothic (no, seriously), which is a genre I respect but can't really jam on. And Broken Kingdoms was super interesting and weird, but I couldn't quite get wholly into it. And I still plan to read the Dreamblood at some point, but the first few chapters didn't quite grab me. This one grabbed me, and I blew through it at one or two days per book. Like, I could replace this paragraph with that panel from Enigma of Amigara Fault where they're like "this is my hole!!! It was made for me!!!"

So, uh... that's my review, bye!!! I guess I'll just go into some tangents for a while.

( Read more... )

V.E. Schwab — A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows, and A Conjuring of Light

March 6, March ??, and July 10

I plan to head directly into the weeds on this review, but I'll make a brief pit-stop at concision before I hit the road: I definitely recommend the first book of this series. It's fast, bold, and slick — just weird enough to grab your attention (a stacked-worlds cosmology where the only constant is London? What??), and more than competent enough to hold on to it. I'm more ambivalent about the other two books, but A Darker Shade of Magic actually stands alone pretty well anyhow.

Speaking of which, HEY, let's talk about trilogies! There are several different ways to put three book-sized objects in a row, and this series uses what I think might be the worst. I don't have a proper name for it (duologies behaving badly? party in the front, sweatshop in the back?), but it's that same thing Garth Nix did with Sabriel and Lirael/Abhorsen:

• Start with one standalone, book-shaped book, with tight plotting and characterization and some deep-but-restrained worldbuilding.
• Follow it with a much larger and more sprawling sequel, arbitrarily split into two volumes. (Book 2 usually ends on a cliffhanger of some kind.)

Recognize it? Contrast with the "three book-shaped books" trilogy or the "one continuous scroll" trilogy, both of which work better.

Part of the problem is just setting up an expectation of book-shaped books and then flubbing it. But I'm also starting to think that two books out of a trilogy is a uniquely awkward and unbalanced story unit, and should be avoided categorically. In all the examples I can think of, the sprawly second story has major plot and pacing issues that didn't afflict the first book and could only be addressed with major story surgery.

In this case, most of book 2 is dedicated to a shōnen manga tournament plot. This is a time-tested device that works really well in a long-running combat-focused comic, because it provides a lower-stakes pause in the main action (during which you can cut to machinations in the background as needed), it's guaranteed to take up a good long chunk of serialized time, and it's a good way to demonstrate how various characters have progressed or not progressed, especially because it lets you pit allies against each other without having to completely deform the story.

But tournaments usually work so well because they take up like an eighth or a tenth of a tremendously long comic. This one is like a quarter of the damn trilogy, and while yes, it's cool to see how badass Lila is now, it basically shoots the pacing all to hell.

Also affecting the pacing: The villain of the second story seems to spend an inordinate amount of time just twiddling his thumbs out in the distance. And he's just a lot less interesting than the confluence of villainies in the first book! He kind of sucks, tbh. (Note that I had this same beef with Lirael/Abhorsen. Is this a weird secondary effect of the structure?)

I had some other plot beefs. There's a death in book 3 that just kind of comes from someone acting out of character for no good reason, plus a few other things... not gonna go super deep into this, it just felt like things generally got a little sloppy.

Finally, there's a central character unironically named "Alucard," even though the only proper use of that name is to tell the reader with a big fat wink that this is Dracula's depressed son. (This story has nothing to do with Draculas, and IDEK how Schwab managed to not realize what she was doing there. Are there truly people who Don't Castlevania?? [yes])

IDK. I did enjoy the second book quite a bit, but it's not a complete unit, and I got bored partway through book three and just put it down for several months to read other things. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but it's flawed and uneven compared to book 1's mirror-bright polish.

Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red

May 7

Yay, new Martha Wells! Spoiler, I liked it.

This had a more-than-passing resemblance to her short-lived Emilie series — it's more stripped-down than a lot of her other books, with more straightforward plotting and a more parsimonious approach to characterization for the supporting cast (not flat, but with most of the depth gestured rather than rendered, if that makes sense). It's an old-fashioned sort of feel, and one that suits both series' niches (Emilie was a deliberately retro pre-"YA" subgenre of youth lit, and Murderbot is a novella, which is sort of a coelacanth format just now coming out of a long hibernation).

Anyway, this is short and enjoyable and cheap (in its native ebook form, at least; the "tor.com" imprint has been publishing pretty nice tpbs of their novellas, but they're so overpriced that I get the impression we're not actually meant to buy them), and you should check it out.

Re: recent comments about how to structure a series: this is definitely the start of a larger story (note the beautiful last-minute left turn to avoid "happy ending"), but it's nicely contained, setting the stage for a next bit without any cliff-dangling. Which, again, I always greatly appreciate.

Jason Turner — Fir Valley (comics)

July 13

I liked this! It used this really aggressive POV shifting to get kind of a cubist every-angle-at-once view of the town of Fir Valley. And the town felt pretty legit; idk, I was reading this at the same time as Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, and they both do interesting things with the, like, sensation of being in the Pacific Northwest.

Tonally, this was all over the place in a way I kind of loved. Gruesome murder, young people making music, ghostly conspirators with animal heads, drunken idiocy, all kinds of stuff in here, and all presented with this kind of goofy big-hearted cheer? Turner has cited Twin Peaks as an influence here, and I can definitely see it. He isn't following Lynch's aesthetic, but the method seems familiar.

Anna-Marie McLemore — When the Moon Was Ours

June 11

I liked this, but I don't really feel like talking about it. It was good.

Well gosh, it's been a while. Here's some book reviews!

Jess Fink — We Can Fix It (comics)

April 11

I kind of had the wrong expectations going into this. I was geared up for some kind of absurdist-but-vulnerable adventure story where Fink had to learn to collaborate with her distracted past selves to solve some kind of urgent problem, but it was more like an episodic memoir with a side of time travel comedy.

Larry Brooks — Story Engineering

Apr. 17

A writing advice book, focused on novels. Recommendation via yhlee Yoon Ha Lee's journal. (Hey locals: Multnomah County Library has this as an ebook.)

Brooks' writing voice is pretty corny, and he dedicates about 40% of this book to throat-clearing, repetition, and justification. It's also kind of disorganized. But all is forgiven, because this has some of the most astute and immediately useful analysis of story structure I've ever seen. I got grumpy waiting for him to get to the point sometimes, but it's solid material and I'm grateful for it.

In particular, Brooks’ framework for pacing and plot development is excellent. It's sparse enough that I'm not worried about painting-by-numbers, but it's explicit enough to actually help answer the question of what has to have happened by a given point in the novel. And it makes sense in the context of how I read novels, in a way that most renditions of 3-act structure have never managed to do.

He also has some useful thoughts about character writing and theme and initial concept; nothing as huge as that pacing framework, but at least a few cool tools I hadn't heard elsewhere.

Andrea K. Höst — Bones of the Fair

Feb 28???

I was having a hard time powering through Black Wave, so I took a break to read something fluffier.

This is a fairly straightforward secondary-world fantasy from the author of the Touchstone trilogy; a comfortable sort of adventure with good character writing and just enough interesting details to feel fresh. I liked it, and Höst is now firmly established as one of my go-to authors for relaxing junk food reading.

Hope Larson and Tintin Pantoja — Who is A.C.? (comics)

May somethingth

I was all ready to like this, and then I just couldn't manage to actually like it. The story just seemed busted somehow. Incomplete motivations, incomplete magical mechanics, unclear stakes, unclear causes and effects. It has the exterior gestures of a magical girl story, but lacks the working core.

Larson's other books are better.

Max Gladstone — Two Serpents Rise

May 7

This was solid. It's a mystery/urban fantasy story in a truly bonkers setting — the main character works for a corporation headed by an undying skeleton who fought and killed the gods, and the plot largely hinges on contract negotiations and urban water infrastructure.

The Mesoamerican megacity where this takes place was rad as hell, and I really liked the way magic works there. (It's a "dirty" magic system where everything has a fairly extreme and direct cost, with some clever approaches to weaving it more firmly into normal life in that world. Everything in the city runs on magic, and the currency system is based on small, fungible fractions of your soul. Like, your utility bill is the water tap claiming some of your life force when you turn it on.)

So yeah, the setting rules, but also the plot, prose, and characterization are all hella competent. This was a pleasure to read. I went ahead and bought the ebook omnibus of the whole series so far based on the strength of this one. (They're mostly written so you can read them in any order, which is a lost art I greatly appreciate.)

Oh, and ignore the random white kid on the jacket, because almost the entire cast are people of color 👍🏼. (Including the skeleton, although both "color" and "people" are a little conceptual in his case.)