roadrunnertwice: Scott fends off Matthew Patel's attack. (Reversal! (Scott Pilgrim))

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.

roadrunnertwice: Sigourney Weaver with a trucker 'stache. (Sigourney Weaver with a trucker 'stache)

Happy new year, by the way!

Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy

Oct 11

A solid ending for this story!

One thing I don't think I've mentioned here is how I really appreciate GrayCris's approach to villainy — to wit, never use less than overkill. They really don't fuck around! I feel like I don't see that kind of absolute disregard for boundaries or norms nearly often enough in a villain, and it makes their eventual defeat very satisfying.

I know I said before that I was going to try and spot the "episode breaks" in this volume, but... I forgot to. Sorry!

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy (re-reads)

Oct 2, Oct 4, Oct 6

Still so good!!! Ruth re-read these recently and it got me fired up to read them again. And we had a plane ride and a vacation, so I pretty much just blazed right through 'em.

Do I have anything to add this time around? Mostly I’m just even more impressed at how the whole thing fits together. In particular, Breq has a lot of hidden and unconscious motivations that she never really acknowledges to herself or to others, and you don’t really have to pick up on those to enjoy the hell out of the books, but it all slots perfectly into the structure in a really satisfying way. (Like, after the end of book one when she has to decide what she’s doing for the rest of her life, she kind of starts modeling herself directly after Lieutenant Awn. And over the course of books two and three, she acts a lot like she’s running an annexation inside the Radch, but it’s an annexation run on Awn's terms.)

Bonus Level: Oneshot

Dec 22

A short and satisfying little walk-and-talk/puzzle game (no combat), about a young cat-boy carrying a lightbulb across a ruined world where the sun has gone out.

This had some clever and creepy uses of the UI and runtime in service of the story. Some of the earlier ones are atmospheric but not particularly groundbreaking in a post-Undertale context, but I DID totally lose it over the bit about "expose this film to the void" and the bit about activating the tower. And the weird overlay app you have to use once things go all the way off the rails was REALLY impressive.

The story is one I've seen plenty of before (the "my virtual world is crumbling" plot), but I think it's a well-executed and affecting version of it.

Helen Macdonald — H is for Hawk

Sep 1

This was a little outside my normal hunting grounds, but Chris Baldwin quoted a tiny passage in one of his journal comics and I was instantly hypnotized by the language of it.

This is one of those memoirs where ostensibly it’s about something quite focused (the year the author spent training a goshawk after her father’s sudden death) but really it’s about everything (the history and meaning of human contact with nonhuman animals, the shape and nature of grief, and also a really unexpected amount about T.H. White). It was quite gripping, even when dealing with subjects I didn’t really have an independent interest in (honestly I could not care less about falconry), and the prose remained a delight.

Jen Wang — The Prince and the Dressmaker (comics)

Oct 12

I liked this a lot. It’s a well-told story about characters that I cared about, and I think the character design and cartooning and staging and timing are just a delight. It reminded me a lot of a Ghibli film, actually — it’s really that polished.

This seems to be getting a lot of buzz (both when it came out and on the year-end lists), and I’m glad, IMO it deserves it.

roadrunnertwice: Yehuda biking in the rain. (Bike - Rain (Yehuda Moon))

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.

roadrunnertwice: The Protagonist communes with a crow. (Corvid liasons (Buttercup Festival))

Molly Ostertag — How the Best Hunter in the Village Met Her Death (comics)

July 31

gumroad link

So, I absorbed this as an allegorical but seriously raw meditation on what confronting your identity while wrestling internalized homophobia or transphobia feels like.

But maybe I'm over-reading.

It's also a tense and very well-executed adventure story. Recommended.

Isaac Robin — Baby Universe (comics)

July 31

gumroad link

A basically plotless short, in which a hot twink waiter gets fed up with his boss and stows away with a gruffly handsome bounty hunter. Later, they go shopping. The end!

I grabbed this wholly for the art, which combines a deliciously loose and disheveled approach to sci-fi scenery/architecture/setting-layering with a very cute and expressive girly-boy situation. I'd be real interested in seeing this cartoonist do something longer and meatier, but I also feel like I got what I paid for.

Joe Sparrow — Homunculus (comics)

Aug 14

Another book I bought loose from the Shortbox store. I was familiar with the author on this one because I've been following his tumblr for updates on the super rad tarot deck he's been making just finished. Seriously, look at these:

Where was I. Oh, anyway, this comic is very good! The whole thing is drawn in the first-person viewpoint of an immobile entity with an odd approach to the passage of time, and the combined effect guides your attention to changes in the environment in a really engaging way. A simple story executed really well.

Bonus Level: Final Fantasy IX

Sep. 9

I was a major JRPG fiend all through the lifespan of the original PlayStation, but I somehow never managed to finish FFIX, and at some point around probably 2002 we loaned our copy to someone and never got the fourth disc back. So when they put out a remastered version on the PS4 last year, I went ahead and grabbed it in a weak moment of nostalgia and completionism.

And I actually finished it! \o/ After putting it down for months at a time more than once. (I think I started it before P5.)

Anyway, no regrets about finally carving that notch on my stick, but I don't think I can actually recommend playing this. The whole PSX era was a serious awkward stage for the FF franchise, really; unless you're a fairly special breed of retrogamer, you really had to have been there to appreciate what these games were trying to accomplish. And even if you recognize the reach, it's still kinda hard to give them credit for the fraction they were able to grasp.

The story of FFIX mostly fails to cohere. They're trying for this pivot from an early-game goofy fantasy setting (rich with callbacks to 16- and 8-bit entries in the FF series) to an eerie and bittersweet "revenant universe" plot with the superimposed worlds of Terra and Gaia. Now, I love a good revenant universe plot (IMO Martha Wells' mid-career output remains the state of the art, between Fall of Ile Rien, City of Bones, and Wheel of the Infinite), but FFIX makes the classic mistake of not integrating the parasite world far enough back into the story, and the result is that Terra and Garland are undeveloped and just completely boring. And the final boss is a meaningless cipher who is literally never mentioned before the start of the battle. (And Kuja kind of sucks for his own independent reasons; you can see exactly how they were trying and failing to re-bottle that Sephiroth lightning.)

Also, they tried to make the summon spells a big and exciting part of the story, and it just didn't work at all. (They tried that in FFVIII as well, and after two incoherent whiffs they finally got it right in FFX.)

Anyway, the death of Queen Brahne was pretty much the last interesting thing to happen in the game, and then you get to slog through another ten-plus hours of nonsense.

Here's what's still good about FFIX: Vivi, Steiner, the black mages, and the Tantalus theater/robbery troupe. I think if they had taken these same characters and tried to tell a smaller and less cosmic story, about greed and war and rebuilding and the struggle to find meaning in life when you were born for conflict and robbed of choices, this game might have had the makings of a classic. But that potential is never quite realized.

Well. If you DO want to play FFIX, the current remaster is really pretty decent! The upgraded character models look very good, although they make the low-rez prerendered backgrounds look like ass by comparison (did they lose the original source files? At least they dug up some higher-rez FMVs). The high-rez menu/text interface is also nice, and they added some quality-of-life hacks to compensate for the late '90s being a fairly dark time for the art of "being fun" in JRPGs. There's a fast-forward switch to apologize for the frankly concussed pace of the battle animations, a random-encounters-off switch (especially nice given how confusing and awkward the environments and controls are), and several different ways to get out of grinding, depending on how you want to balance the imperatives of "grinding is bullshit" and "the 5-10% of battles they put some thought into should be challenging and fun." (And the fact that you have to do that balancing yourself is kind of the ultimate indictment of this era of game design, but bless the remaster team for recognizing that and giving you the tools.)

Oh wait, I almost ended this review without even mentioning Tetra Master! Ok, here's the important thing to know: FUCK Tetra Master. Well, bye.

roadrunnertwice: Ryoga from Ranma 1/2. Image text: "*Now* where the hell am I?" (Lost (Ryoga))

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.

roadrunnertwice: Vesta Tilley, Victorian drag king (Drag)

Ayelet Waldman — A Really Good Day

May 28

A journal of the author's month-long experiment with LSD microdosing (in an effort to alleviate some heinous mood problems), interspersed with some informed digressions on drug policy. (She used to be a public defender, among other things.)

This was an entertaining read, because Waldman's just a really good writer. (I picked up a collection of her murder mysteries at the Wave based on the strength of this book.) But also, the material was seriously fascinating and I'm VERY curious about microdosing now. This article is a good run-down of the theory (such as it is) and history of it, but Waldman's direct experience was what was really compelling. Like, basically it did exactly what she wanted: gave her a fighting chance at being a better version of herself every day, with basically no side effects to speak of. Who the fuck doesn't want THAT. Sign my ass up.

Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez — The Pervert (comics)

June 5

This was intense.

It's a story about a trans girl in Seattle, doing sex work (first as a guy, later, reluctantly, as a girl) to make ends meet. It kind of meanders around; it has the feel of someone trying to explain to themselves why they made some major decision, chewing back over events that seem like they might be related but might also just be dead ends. But paradoxically, it also feels like it moves at a breakneck pace, which I think is because of how precarious everything in her life feels. Any mundane moment could be the moment everything goes wrong, you know?

I liked this a lot.

Boydell draws most of the characters as anthropomorphic animals. And there's a lot of sexually explicit stuff in here. So a side question I've been pondering: are parts of this book furry porn? I mean it's way too much of a downer to be "porn" in a practical sense, but is it drawing from a furry porn artistic language and tradition? I think mostly it isn't, because part of the point of furry media is a fascination with the animal aspect; exploring what it'd be like to exist in a humanoid-animal body. And there's none of that here: from the way the characters interact, they're all normal human bodies that are just being depicted as animal-alikes. Right? It spends most of its time somewhere in the other various traditions of anthropomorphic comics art, even if there might be some furry influence in spots.

WELL, I ain't no scholar of the topic or anything. This is just something I was mulling over. Also, the book itself draws your attention to the tension in its depictions during that scene where the protagonist gets kind of cornered into a threesome, because when her client's husband appears from around the corner he's drawn as goddamn Jon Arbuckle and I just about hyperventilated when that happened.

Ted Chiang — Stories of Your Life and Others

June 15

A solid collection of odd SF stories. (Of which I'd previously read more than I remembered!)

  • "Tower of Babylon:" Almost Borgesian, and one of my favorites in the set. What a cool setting, up in the reaches of this tower.
  • "Understand:" This is the only one that really pissed me off. It's not just a bad story and insufferably smug, but it also perpetuates some of the dumbest and worst ideas our society has about what constitutes "intelligence." Skip this story.
  • "Division by Zero:" Cold and elegant.
  • "Story of Your Life:" This is the one Arrival was based on. I'd read it before, and it's very good. I spent a long time thinking it over back when I first read it.
  • "Seventy-Two Letters:" This is the most bizarre setting/conceit in the collection, and untangling it was very entertaining. But I'm a little uneasy about how half of the setup is based on Jewish esoterica, and yet Jewish people are almost entirely absent (there's one; he's crucial to the plot but has very little agency and also dies). Like, does a mainstream industrialized Kabbalah that excludes Jews make any sense?? Well, maybe it does; not the first thing industrial capitalism would have expropriated and monetized, is it. Still, I read that as a major hole in this world, and also just generally iffy. 😬
  • "Hell is the Absence of God:" Read it before; I kind of grew out of this type of gonzo engagement with atheism, but I have to admit the underlying Job joke is darkly hilarious.
  • "Liking What You See: A Documentary:" Read it before. This one has problems (among others, there was an aside about autism that made me go 😒), but it's mostly thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Joey Comeau and Emily Horne — The Anatomy of Leftovers (comics)

June 22

This was the bonus A Softer World PDF for Kickstarter backers, collecting strips that one author wanted for the best-of collection but the other one vetoed.

I already mentioned last time that A Softer World is great, right? Ok, end of review, good job team.

roadrunnertwice: Me, with the spoon and cherry sculpture from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the bg. (Me - w/ cherry)

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.

roadrunnertwice: Joe and bike, at top speed. (Bike - Liftoff (Yehuda Moon))

Geez, these are starting to pile up. I've been reading a bunch of comics lately.

KC Green — VG Cheats & Beatums (comics)

June 1

Heck of.

A collection of one-off comics about video games, usually inappropriate and surreal. If you liked Green's long-running comic Gunshow, this has a real similar sensibility, but it's less general-interest; much funnier if you're at least familiar with the games Green is riffing on.

These are still readable online at US Gamer, but I re-read the paperback, which has these extra facing pages done up as inappropriate and surreal re-interpretations of '90s and '00s video game magazine design. (And given how surreal the originals were, they kind of make my head hurt. He got the tone spot-on.)

Josh Tierney, Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei, Emily Carroll, Oliver Pichard, et al. — Spera (comics)

June 4

A comic about two princesses and a fire spirit who run away from a war (started by one of the princesses's mother*).

And then they... don't really do anything in particular, or run into much in the way of daunting resistance. There's really not very much story here, and what little there is is somewhat janky.

What is there aside from story? Some solid character design, and some EXCELLENT art and cartooning. And a few scenes with a certain wonderful quietly tense elegance to them. I get the impression that maybe Tierney just wanted to do a comic about these two girls and a dog setting up camp for the night. And that's kind of all it ends up being.

After the main comic, there are a bunch of shorts by various artists about the girls' later careers as treasure hunters. These are mostly kind of slight, and they don't give a very good sense of what it's like to inhabit this world as a treasure-hunting ex-princess. But I quite liked Luke Pearson's short.

—————

* Is that even how that plural possessive and count agreement is supposed to work, or did I totally whiff it??? NEVER MIND, MOVING ON.

Stephen Hawking — A Brief History of Time

June 2

I got a bit lost around 60% in when he started talking about the imaginary time dimension, and never wholly managed to pick the trail back up, but even when I was struggling a bit there was still some interesting stuff in the back half.

This is a classic for a reason, and the writing is excellent, but I feel like How to Explain Relativity to Your Dog did a better job of really drilling into me how relativity works. I'm thinking particularly of the diagrams of light clocks, and the emphasis that time deforms along with space because space is the only implement we can use to measure time. Hawking kind of glosses over some of that, which I think is why it's easy to lose the path as a layperson. Still, it's an impressive effort, and it's also WAY more ambitious than Relativity because it goes equally deeply into quantum mechanics and the history and current state of attempts to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.

I liked Hawking's digressions about his hobby of gambling with other physicists about whether various theories would pan out. Something about that really got across how much he loved his work.

Eleanor Davis — You & a Bike & a Road (comics)

May 31

Diary comics (not memoir, per recent digressions about kinds of autobiography) about Davis' attempt to bike from Arizona to Georgia.

"What made you decide to do this trip?"

people ask. I say,

"My husband & I want a baby, so I figure I either do this now or wait 20 years"

or

"My dad built me this bike and I hate boxing & shipping bikes so I decided to just ride it home!"

I don't say:

"I was having trouble with wanting to not be alive. But I feel good when I'm bicycling"

But that is also true.

She runs into some knee trouble. She's also biking along the US border, which by her account is pretty dystopian. There's dodgy campsites. There's also actually kind of a lot of moments of grace and beauty, and a lot of interesting people and places. It's kind of a lot of Mixed Stuff.

turn your head

horizon

horizon

your sovereign body

God's thrilling indifference.

As ever, Davis' art is alone in its class, totally unlike anything else I've read. These are diary comics drawn in situ, and her line is often stripped down to the bare minimum of what can survive on page. She draws herself as this sort of big bluff rectangular giant, and I can't even handle it, it's great.

roadrunnertwice: Rebecca on treadmill. (Text: "She's a ROCKET SCIENTIST from the SOUTH POLE with FIFTY EXES?") (Rocket scientist (Bitter Girl))

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.

roadrunnertwice: A mermaid singing an unenchanting song. (Doop doop (Kate Beaton))

Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota — Lucky Penny (comics, re-read)

April 8

Originally read this when it was being serialized; this time I read the paperback.

The back 1/3 of the plot still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but the panel-to-panel character moments are good enough that I don't really mind that much. And as ever, I love Ota's art.

Sfé R. Monster, ed. — Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology (comics)

Apr 11

Anthologies are fundamentally odd, I think, or at least the experience of reading one through is bizarre. Like... themes are weird, and un-themed anthologies are also weird. But they're a good way to support artists you like who're between Things at the moment, and a good way to maybe find out about some new folks (although they make following up way more awkward than when you just see a lone short make the rounds on Twitter or Tumblr), so I end up with a bunch of them. And I'm a bit behind on them at the moment!

Anyway, this one has an impressive density of good work in it. TBH I was concerned it would be a bit basic, since the whole theme was just "queer SFF" and with a dictate that loose I was kind of braced for like twenty repetitive gentle coming-out stories. But luckily, no! So my compliments to the editor.

A few of my favorite standouts:

  • Jon Cairns' "O-Type Hypergiant"
  • Sfé R. Monster's "The Dragon Slayer's Son"
  • Kristina Stipetic's "They Simply Pass"
  • Anissa Espinosa & Alison Wilgus' "Barricade"

Boulet - "Kingdoms Lost" (comics short)

Apr 12

Posted online here.

I've seen this story before, more or less, but the devil is in the details, and this particular nerd-vs-jock plot has space for a lot of nasty devils. Who, in this case, mostly stay away!

For me, what makes this one work is simply that the protagonist doesn't get the girl (who has her own thing going on) and in fact wasn't even fixated on the girl in the first place. Once they get to the real world, his attitude is like "Hey, high school was bullshit but now it's long gone and I'm just out here working on myself." He teaches chemistry at a primary school, he has a cozy little 1br apartment and enjoys cooking, and he's like "this was a stunning and total victory, go me." IDK, that feels true and I appreciate it.

Books I Didn't Finish: Frances Hardinge — Verdigris Deep

noped out May 29

(UK version; also published in US as Well Witched.)

This was a solid book, and Hardinge did a real impressive job at crafting something I genuinely Do Not Want. I was curious enough about what was going on to skim the rest of the book, but I didn't care to fully experience it.

I'll try and describe what's going on here: this is a middle-grade novel (written to a younger level than Fly by Night, the other Hardinge book I've read) which tells a Ringu-esque horror story, and the trick is in what that horror is constructed from. There's a very small amount of body-horror, but for the most part her instruments are embarrassment, humiliation, peer cruelty, and social anxiety (have I mentioned yet that she's British). In other words, she's constructed a sophisticated horror story where the fundamental unit of action is getting in trouble. And even if you know that being in trouble is a fake idea, I bet your body still knows how to do it.

Anyway, if that's what you're into, I guess have fun!!

roadrunnertwice: Wrecked bicyclist. Dialogue: "I am fucking broken." (Bike - Fucking broken (Never as Bad))

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.

roadrunnertwice: Me, with the spoon and cherry sculpture from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the bg. (Me - w/ cherry)

Kimmy Walters — Killer (poetry)

Feb 7.

Man I like Kimmy Walters' poems. You should get this book, forget you have it, and find it again when you're in a Mood that you don't have a name for.

Completely unrelated to the content, which is excellent: Hey, what's up with these Bottlecap Press books? Like, why are they so physically bad. The print looks like gritty-pixeled inkjet, and they're bound cockeyed so the line of print is tilted out-of-square with the page. If there's a chance you'll fuck up that hard, you usually play defense with a typewritten zine aesthetic so it looks plausibly DGAF intentional, but this is in like the uncanny valley of unprofessional book-objects — perfect-bound, trimmed pages, book-like page and cover stock, interior jank.

I happened to flip through a Two Ravens Press book (David Troupes's The Simple Men) as I was re-shelving Killer, and the difference was brutal. They're both in the $10/£10 zone, and since they're both slim books of weird poetry you have to figure they aren't making up the difference on volume.

Well, maybe Two Ravens has an endowment or has those crucial three or four bestsellers or is a rich kid's hobby or something else that makes the comparison unfair, I don't know. I just get curious about how these things happen!

Jo Walton — My Real Children

Jan 25

Wow, this was a fuckin' wild ride. I loved it, even though the first half of Tricia's timeline was seriously hard to read.

I don't have anything particularly smart to say about this book. It's great, check it out.

Margaret Killjoy — The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

Feb 12

This didn't quite do it for me.

There's this thing that I think might be a common failing of the novella format, where everything is just a little too baldly-stated and on-the-nose. Like, you're trying to have more shit happen than would fit in a short, but you don't have enough space for any of it to happen in a naturalistic or nuanced way. I was feeling that in a major way here. An excess of tidiness.

Carolyn Nowack — Diana's Electric Tongue (comics, re-read)

Jan 21

I finally got my books shelved!!! I can re-read comics on a whim now!

Nothing to add to my previous review. This story is great.

Meredith Gran — Octopus Pie, vol 5 (comics)

Jan 27

This final volume collects the best parts of one of my favorite comics. (Also, it's the run where Valerie Halla was doing the colors, which look SO GOOD.)

Even just considered as a series of setpieces, this is an excellent book. (That long tracking shot following Jane through the circles of chaos around her weird apartment is a particular standout.) But it also closes the story in a satisfying way, which is an impressive achievement for an open-ended soap opera.

If you're reading this for the first time, I feel like this volume in particular benefits from some room to breathe. Consider setting it down for a few days between stories instead of gunning through in one sitting.

HEY INCIDENTALLY, Gran is running a kickstarter for a new videogame right now. Maybe go check that out.

roadrunnertwice: Me looking up at the camera, wearing big headphones and a striped shirt. (Default)

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.

roadrunnertwice: DTWOF's Lois in drag. Dialogue: "Dude, just rub a little Castrol 30 weight into it. Works for me." (Castrol (Lois))

Alison Bechdel — Fun Home (comics, re-read, adaptation)

Oct 13

The Portland Armory was showing a production of Fun Home: The Musical, and Ruth's aunt was involved in some kind of related fundraising or profile-raising event for the Portland Lesbian Choir (they were originally going to sing before the show, but that ended up not happening), so... we went to see it!

It was good. Well, for me and for a musical, that still means it was more interesting than it was enjoyable, per se — musicals aren't exactly my favorite genre. (Like with VNs, I find them somehow inherently suspect, but keep prodding at them because I can still sense something interesting there, even if they're mostly talking past me.)

Anyway, I think it was a good adaptation. When they first announced it was happening, years ago, I was like "you read THAT comic and decided it would make a good WHAT?" But it was an adaptation of the events rather than of the comic, which I think showed some wisdom and restraint vis a vis the capabilities of media that are in many ways opposites.

Of course, being a reinterpretation of events means it wasn't the same story (story being the construction of meaning from mere dumb events), and medium is very relevant to that. In main, Fun Home is a comic about the uncertainty of memory and knowledge and emotion, and those are things that the Broadway musical as a format has no tools to represent. In fact, I'd say that certainty is the fundamental building block for anything else represented on Broadway. Fun Home is reticent and evasive, and you can't reticently belt out a showstopper, I mean Jesus, come on.

So taking that into account and being sensitive of medium (as best I can), here's the things that are still odd to me from (this production of) the musical. Read more... possibly too much more. )

OH RIGHT, hold up, this is the book review post, isn't it. Well, I re-read the comic too, and finished it shortly after we saw the show. It had been about ten years since I'd read it, and while I'd forgotten a lot of specifics (all the Proust and Fitzgerald parallels), the feel of it and the spiral-shaped narrative structure were exactly as I remembered them. Again thinking about form and adaptation: in the comic, you see Bruce's death (or moments adjacent to it) many times — approach the brink, pull back at the last second, circle around for another pass; that's basically the shape of the book. Fuckin' imagine doing THAT on Broadway, the audience would revolt. (That's what I was picturing when I first heard they were adapting it.)

Ruth's mom (not a comics reader) is interested in reading it now, and I'll be interested to hear what she thinks.

John Alison et al. — Giant Days, vols 2 & 3 (comics)

Sep 21

Y'know, I might not continue reading this series. I'm glad it seems to have gotten popular, though; Alison has always deserved a bigger readership, and his co-creators on this project (Sarin, Treiman, Cogar) are all great.

I've finally figured out what this comic reminds me of. About fifteen years ago, in the webcomic Paleozoic, one of the most dominant subgenres (possibly even above bullshit gamer strips) was the college dorm-mates comedy/drama, with or without paranormal hijinks. (It made sense: in 2002, who had the most reliable access to expensively fast internet and the highest inclination to avoid their work and fuck around on the web? Undergrads at 4-year residential colleges. That's your early webcomics readership, and a significant chunk of the authorship too. And even ignoring that, a college dorm is just a very natural fit for a sitcom.)

Giant Days is like a much slicker and smarter throwback to those strips, very close to the perfect, Platonic form they were all chasing.

But I was part of that early webstrip audience — I ate that subgenre up, then kind of got it all out of my system and stopped craving that flavor. That's also why I haven't looked into Dumbing of Age, even though I've enjoyed Willis' stuff a lot over the years and by all accounts it's his best work.

Anyway, this is a very good comic, and I recommend it to anyone who isn't in perma-burnout on college roommate dramedy.

roadrunnertwice: Young Marcie Grosvenor from Finder, asleep in a ward drawn from Finder trails. (Wardings (Finder))

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... )

roadrunnertwice: Rebecca on treadmill. (Text: "She's a ROCKET SCIENTIST from the SOUTH POLE with FIFTY EXES?") (Rocket scientist (Bitter Girl))

Gigi D.G. — Lady of the Shard (comics)

Aug 9

Readable online.

The stark and glitchy aliased look on this comic scratches some very particular itch for me. Especially the intense use of red, once that shows up.

Anyway, this is a simple story executed well, and you can read the whole thing in an evening or two.

Kristen Gudsnuk — Henchgirl (comics)

Aug 10

This is notably better than the average cape spoof, but I'm hard pressed to explain exactly how. It's some combination of the delicious art and the out-of-control tonal shifts, neither of which would do the job independently.

It also hits some #relatable Millenial territory, where it's like... fuck you we're not just lazy shitheels, but ALSO, UNRELATEDLY, being a lazy shitheel sounds kind of great sometimes.

Tobias S. Buckell — Hurricane Fever

Aug 11?

I don't think I can really... recommend this silly and formulaic spy thriller — in fact, I think it's less interesting and rewarding than Arctic Rising, which I was already a li'l lukewarm on.

But you know, sometimes I need something silly and formulaic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

roadrunnertwice: Scott fends off Matthew Patel's attack. (Reversal! (Scott Pilgrim))

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.

roadrunnertwice: Yoshimori from Kekkaishi, with his beverage of choice. (Coffee milk (Kekkaishi))

Eleanor Davis — How to be Happy

April 10

This is a collection of Davis' short comics, which are all over the place in style, length, and media. Davis is a really good cartoonist, and her more out-there art styles (the spindle-legged huge-torso look) are legit unique — the sort of thing that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.

I liked these shorts; they felt like they were holding me at arm's length a lot of the time, but they did unexpected stuff and followed through on their swing. And Davis' cartooning is real engaging even when you're not really feeling a given story.

Books I stopped reading: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter — The Long Earth

April 2X

I stopped reading this about a third of the way through, because it lacked all of the things I'm looking for when I pick up a Terry Pratchett book.

John Darnielle — Universal Harvester

June 24

To be honest, I'm still trying to figure out what I think of this one. I was very much not satisfied at the end, and I'm trying to decide how much of that was the whole point, and how much of it was JD's reach exceeding his grasp this time. I might end up not deciding.

This had certain rewards anyway, despite the way it trailed off in the back third or so. There's this kind of roaring hollowness behind every paragraph that I feel really fuckin' nails why I find rural and small-town America scary, and not jump-scare scary but existential dread scary. JD was onto something here, and it's pretty compelling for a while. But it seems like an unfinished thought, and I put the book down with the sensation that someone had walked out of the room in the middle of a sentence and was not going to come back.

Again, it's possible that was the point.

Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities

May 9

Whoa, this was great! Not quite a novel, not quite short stories, more just an expanding fabric of disorienting oddness. A glitchville sort of vibe that reminded me of the last section of Kalpa Imperial, or maybe (faintly?) of Vellum? I feel like I can't quite dig up the thing it reminds me most of, which is very on-brand for this, now that I think of it.

Lars Brown — North World, vol. 1 (comics)

July 18

This had its charms, but maybe not enough of them. I don't feel the need to read more of it.

It feels like it belongs to a very very particular era — that bit in the late '00s, where mixing elements of classic video game settings with more prosaic character drama was having a moment? Scott Pilgrim kind of kicked it off and did it best, but there were a lot of others; some were blatantly following the trend, but I feel like a whole bunch of them were legit convergent evolution. Stories their authors wanted to do anyway, and which happened to be ready to go when the commercial moment arrived. Like, old games are responsible for a lot of the foundational metaphors by which my generation understands life, and of course we're going to work through that in our art.

Anyway, what I really liked about this comic were the settings — the city streets and markets and shops and houses and apartments. Brown's approach went something like: assume this big dumbass JRPG world, then focus on what people actually do from hour to hour and try to make everything feel really lived-in. It was great, a cool mix of... how to describe this. How about "conflicting familiarities." Which is kind of the whole raison d'être of this subgenre, right? The dissonance between our too-many methods of making sense of the world, which went from an idle preoccupation to an emergency when we realized the social and economic structures we were supposed to be "growing up" into had been devastated pretty much beyond repair well before we arrived? Yeah.

Oh right, back to the comic. Setting good, plot totally forgettable. Character writing ok, but nothing I was really connecting with. I kind of need at least two out of three to keep investing in something, so I'm out.

roadrunnertwice: Rodney the Second Grade T-Ball Jockey displays helpful infographics. (T-ball / Your Ass (Buttercup Festival))

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 [personal profile] 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.)

roadrunnertwice: Rebecca on treadmill. (Text: "She's a ROCKET SCIENTIST from the SOUTH POLE with FIFTY EXES?") (Rocket scientist (Bitter Girl))

Well, it's been a minute and I have a few in the queue, so:

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me

Jan 19

I’ve read a lot of Coates's magazine length work, so I thought this was a superb continuation/culmination of several multi-year projects I was already invested in, as well as a good introduction for people new to his intellectual zone.

It’s also an excellent brain corrective in the present atmosphere, or at least it was for me. Some people find Coates pessimistic, but I find him reassuring and grounding: his writing helps me feel like I haven't gone completely fucking crazy, and gives some serious historical perspective to events that can otherwise seem like an ambush. I kind of can't imagine trying to make sense of the past two or three years without TNC’s writing.

I haven't heard much from him lately. I hope he's doing ok and working on something fulfilling. One of the things I liked best about following his work before this book blew up was watching him slowly assemble some complex argument in public, and it sounds like that era might be over.

Maggie Nelson — The Argonauts

Jan 20

A delight. A wandering, looping, discursive memoir/essay about queerness and motherhood and time and basically everything.

This has some kind of family resemblance to Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother, but not a simple one. They share a certain theory-heaviness, a certain obsessive practice of quotation, and a certain conception of both those elements being somehow integral to assembling a resilient queer selfhood that can persist across Weird Time.

I cannot for the life of me explain what the hell was the point of this book. It was incredibly important, but I can't summarize how so. Anyway, you should totally read it!

Sarah Jeong — The Internet of Garbage

Feb 2

Huh, wow. I was kind of bracing for this to be some remedial Twitter Harassment 098 material, but it's definitely not that.

Jeong is reaching toward a grand unified theory of Unwanted Content, of which harassment is only one aspect. I don't think she's there yet. But she's the only person I've seen even start that project, so shout-out for that. Also, there was a lot of interesting history and case law in here that I wasn't aware of.

Ryan Estrada — The Kind (comics)

Apr 11

That male lead really should have got eaten. I feel bad for the werewolf, and that would have probably made her life and mental health a lot worse in a lot of ways, but that relationship is doomed anyhow and the protagonist is a self-mythologizing crap-bro who refuses to listen to her expertise or respect her boundaries. He earned his doom, or at least a real solid and decisive dumping.