The 2014 Nightly Reading Revelry

[Cashmere]

Yay! I am so excited that you are reading the Dresden Files! I really love them. I'm totally jealous that you're getting Butcher's autograph too.

[Darth Krawlie]

30. The Candle in the Wind, by TH White

31. The Iron King, by Maurice Druon

32. Saga volume 1, by Brian K Vaughn

33. Siege, by Brian Michael Bendis

[Darth Krawlie]

34. Saga volume 2, by Brian K Vaughn

35. Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes, by Ed Brubaker

36. Moon Knight volume 1, by Brian Michael Bendis

37. Promethea volume 1, by Alan Moore

39. Saga volume 3, by Brian K Vaughn

 

Out if everything I've read this year, promethea is probably the only one I wouldn't recommend. Even Alan Moore misses sometimes, apparebtly.

[NumberSix]

I love JH Williams III's Promethea art and all his other art anywhere ever, but I'll admit I have yet to get past volume 1 myself. Just kinda fell flat for me, for whatever reason.

[Darth Krawlie]

Even the first issue barely held my interest.

[Cerina]

Oh you people and your "spare time" and "no kids" or however you manage to do this...

 

My reading list this year has been something like the following. We're working our way through the Mensa for Kids Excellence in Reading Award Program. Noah wants the t-shirt.

 

How the Leopard Got His Claws

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Peppe the Lamplighter

Madeline

Stone Soup

Goodnight, Moon

The Quiltmaker's Gift

The Story of Babar

Mike Milligan and His Steam Shovel

Stellaluna

Strega Nona

Corduroy

Millions of Cats

The Three Little Pigs

The Reluctant Dragon

Little Toot

Bedtime for Frances

The Snowy Day

I Want My Hat Back (I highly recommend this one because it just reminds me of Jacob for some reason)

Leo the Late Bloomer

The Carrot Seed

The Story of Ferdinand

Frog and Toad are Friends

Paul Revere's Ride

Put Me in the Zoo

George and Martha

Blueberries for Sal

Make Way for Ducklings

Anansi the Spider

If I Never Forever Endeavor

Tikki Tikki Tembo

Amelia Bedelia

The Little Engine That Could

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Curious George

The Dot

Where the Wild Things Are

The Cat in the Hat

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

The Garden of Abdul Gasazi

The Polar Express

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Harry the Dirty Dog

Sam the Minuteman

[Cashmere]

You have some great ones on that list!

[Iceman]

Pretty sad, but I haven't read much this year. Just recently finished Captain America: Man Out of Time by Mark Waid and I'm currently reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. My goal is to next read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective.

 

I've also been meaning to read The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. I bought all five books last year and never got around to reading them yet.

[Darth Krawlie]

40. Moon Knight volume 2, by Brian Michael Bendis

41. The Strangled Queen, by Maurice Druon

42. Avengers vs X-Men, by every Marvel writer ever

[Cashmere]

I need to update my list here stat! It's so hard to do on my phone. I'll be back from a computer soon.

[Cashmere]

Time for some updates!

33. Skin Game by Jim Butcher

This one was back to being the type of Dresden book that I know and love. I immediately listened to it again after I finished reading the paper version.

34. Hidden by Catherine McKenzie -K-

I got this one free through Amazon Prime, and it was a decent read. Not sure I would have wanted to pay money for it, though. It's about a man's mistress and wife both coping with his death.

35. The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina -A- (7/8)

This is a crime book, but it's not a thriller in the sense that you're waiting to find out who the killer is. It's more that you're waiting for the police force to conclude their investigation to see if they get the bad guy. I liked the varied characters, and I enjoyed the book even though I didn't read the previous book in the series.

36. The Prodigal Son by Colleen McCollough -A- (8/4)

This was a classic whodunit crime drama. I won't say that the characters are particularly believable, but I still was wrapped up enough with the story that I was excited to find out who the bad guy was.

37. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (8/18)

My brother lent this one to me and begged me to read it. It's the story of a young wizard and his coming of age, but it's told by the grown up somewhat retired wizard. My only complain was that we didn't get far enough into his life with installment 1. Even though it's a hefty book, I wanted more. Luckily book 2 is already out, and I've started reading it. Here's hoping he hurries with the third one in the trilogy.

[R.CAllen]

52. Right Side Up : the Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism by Paul Wells. An earlier look at the man who might be best characterized as a (very Canadian and somehow nonfictional) bloodless sexless Francis Urquhart.

 

53. Starboard Wine by Samuel R. Delany. Is it odd to prefer an author’s literary criticism to their artistic work? I’ve never been able to give his fiction much of a chance but I always return to these collections.

 

54. Spark from the Deep : How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery by William J. Turkel. Just about a hundred percent more ass stuff in this book then I was expecting. Alexander von Humboldt (father of modern, uh, EVERYTHING!!!) connecting his mouth to his anus with a bimetallic arc so he could see bright and colourful lights, the touching of electrodes to the rectums of deceased criminals, really should go back and reread this if only to see how much more ass is in this and maybe take notes too.

 

55. The Shocks of Adversity by William Leisner. A ST TOS tie-in book where the crew meets up with what looks like a ship from an alien miniature version of Starfleet/theFederation. It’s well done, really, with our guys momentarily feeling flustered by their own apparent lack of diversity (the Enterprise only has Spock and a few other aliens whereas the other ship’s crew are all a whole bunch of specieses) and seeming lack of professionalism when compared to the aliens who only talk in command codes on the bridge (no ‘it was inwented in Russia’ banter from Chekov allowed) and don’t bother with the luxuries our guys are so used to. But then the inevitable topsy turvy bit comes up and it seems these guys aren’t so nice but are instead the representative of a racist, imperialist, fascist warmongering system. Oops. Things work out for the best though and it all ends with more than a glimmer of hope that these new guys can help start their civilization onto a better path. There should be a sequel during TNG times so we can find out how that goes, I think.

 

56. No Time Like The Past by Greg Cox. Seven of Nine falls back through time to hang out with Kirk’s crew and go on a sightseeing tour of the planets from Greg Cox’s favouritest episodes. But I don’t much like “The Apple” or “All Our Yesterdays” though seeing the fall of the civilization from the one where the Riddler is made-up to look like a cookie was fun.

 

57. The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein. Boy loses pet and tries to get it back but there are some surprises in store for the boy and complex astro-political consequences for the pet. I’ve always liked this one.

 

58. Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein. Telepathy is seen as the key for interstellar communication and so a relativity gedankenexperiment (one brother goes to space and goes fast zoom on rocket and so he stays the same age while the brother on Earth gets older) gets a try-out. Has a nice “your family is an important thing but not THE most important thing” message for the kids but ruins it by having the guy marry his own great-grand-niece. Otherwise there’s plenty of Standard Heinlein Shtick #1 where a character goes onto spaceship, gets spaceship and spaceships ‘physics’ and spaceship way of life explained to him/her smugly by smug engineer, and then the character gets to be smug in turn to others about the same topics.

 

59. Assignment In Eternity by Robert A. Heinlein. Two novellas about how a small self-selected group of ubermenschen for sure should run society everything would turn out great if they did that you bet sandwiched around a fun wish fulfillment multiversal teleporting story with equally distressing implications if you think about it for more than two seconds. Oh, and “Jerry Was A Man” which sure feels racist but Heinlein apologists can sure come up with all sorts of super good and totally not-fake reasons why it’s not and actually shows how Heinlein was not a racist sure one hundred percent. But the miniature elephant was the one thing I really wanted when I read this as a kid and I still like how Heinlein’s Martians are more or less the same throughout his work.

 

60. The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein. G-man fights alien blobs and/or society itself. The snippets of television from the parts of the country the alien blobs have total control over is still super disturbing to me but a lot of the rest of it no longer works the way it used to. And the introductions and afterwords for these Baen reprints are kind of laughable.

 

61. Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein Shtick #2 (aka Let’s Play Army) from back when he didn’t know better maybe? I kind of think Herman Scheer is meant to be a Jew and a rebel yell which shows up in one of the fight scenes casts a pall over what would otherwise be a totally wholesome scene of good ol’ fashioned gook-killing. The makebelieve science basically assures victory for these guys no matter what crazy scheme they cook up to use them with (and the crazy scheme they do choose can no longer be read by aware readers without a sidelong glance to the real world crazy schemes of one of Heinlein and Campbell’s contemporaries) and the whole thing ends with large amounts of everyday Americans in possession of a raygun weapon that kills only certain ethnicities and with the only partially heroic death of the one, ahem, PanAsian character (who, at one point, is asked for his input on what those guys would do even though he’s like third generation American and is only slightly miffed that he’d be expected to know how those caricatures think) and the avoidance of an imposed dictatorship by a crazy scientist who wants things to be run scientifically from here on out which is the sort of idea Heinlein would dismiss as ludicrous in one decade and sometimes super totally awesomely obviously the right way to go in another. I don’t know. I shouldn’t be so hard on him. Of the big three he’s probably the one with the least skeevy personal life, the best prose style, and hey sometimes his characters are actual characters albeit ones who talk like the world’s cheesiest master of ceremonies.

 

62. Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein. A girl’s diary (with occasional unseen (by her but not by us) invisible-inked interjections from her brother) of her spacetrip. I like how his Martians are often the same even when the story/novel isn’t explicitly linked to his Future History or anything like that but it kind of bugs me that his Venus is rarely (never?) consistent. I’m not sure if I read this one as a kid (I’ve been going back to Heinlein because I find that usually once I pick up his books I can’t seem to put them down until they’re finished) or if I’m getting it confused with something else.

 

63. Waldo & Magic, Inc. by Robert A. Heinlein. A supervillain works through the logical consequences of a Feyerabendian cosmos and, in the second novella, Heinlein invents the urban fantasy genre.

 

64. Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein. Shtick #1 with a little bit of Shtick #2 at the end. I’ve always liked the dragon.

 

65. The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein. Family vacation in space. Boring.

 

66. S.H.I.E.L.D. by Steranko : The Complete Collection by Jim Steranko with an assist by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas and Jack Kirby for a bit of it but it’s mostly just him. Such good comics. Whatever happened to Nick Fury, anyway? He was great in these as a roughhousing goodhearted superspy who saved the world from Claws (both Yellow and Satan) and flew into secret island bases in a Dyna-Soar and would trick evil henchmen into killing their own boss with the aid of an epiderm-mask machine and then go back to his groovy apartment and make love to a beautiful woman before getting a hot tip from the psychedelic ESP division in their Incredible ESP Chamber to head off on another adventure with his old buddies from the war or the turned-good daughter of an evil nemesis or a bunch of new recruits straight out of the Underground Network Intelligence Training Academy. He was such a great character. It’s a shame Marvel forgot about him and for sure didn’t decide to turn him into some sort of crazy lunatic who brainwashes his best friends or uses child soldiers or commits intergalactic genocide or massacres innocent underground animals or assassinates living planets or who just goes and lives on the Moon by himself all sad forever. That would be horrible.

 

67. Iron Man : Fatal Frontier by Kieron Gillen and Al Ewing and Carmine Di Giandomenico, Neil Edwards, Lan Medina, Geoffo and Mast, Alvaro Martinez, Marcos Marz, and Agustin Padilla. Collects an online collaboration between two good Brit authors along with a supplemental printed annual where the story finishes. Reading it feels like deciding not to skip the cutscenes in a videogame but there’s no videogame there’s just cutscene after cutscene and everyone just says the same thing over and over and over again. Oh well. There’s a good bit where Dr. Doom From The Future shows up and Gillen bumps his pet neurotic robot semi-sympathetic villain count from 2 to 3.

 

68. Middlemarch by George Eliot. It is tough to get what you want in England surprise. I stopped and started on this maybe thirteen or fourteen times minimum. You can just feel the author padding it out. Maybe I’ll come back to it after Daniel Deronda.

 

69. The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi. I got this and read it really soon after it came out and that was a while ago so it’s a blur. I guess I’ll have to go back to the first two in order to form a proper impression of this capper to the trilogy. I don’t remember anything really new here, just plot elaboration and ending of established elements.

 

70. Echopraxia by Peter Watts. A sidequel to 2006’s Blindsight which examines science, faith, and whether or not a distinction remains if you use a good enough magnifying glass. A whole new unobtrusive footnoting style for this one.

 

71. A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes. Or, to give it its full title, A Mirror For Witches in which is reflected the Life, Machinations, and Death of Famous DOLL BILBY, who, with more than feminine perversity, pre-ferred a Demon to a Mortal Lover. Here is also told how and why a Righteous and Most Awfull JUDGEMENT befell her, destroying both Corporeal Body and Immortal Soul. Written in 1928, actually, but beautifully told in the form of a late 17^th century exposé of these pseudo-factual truths. By which I mean that nothing here happened, naturally, but everything that happens feels exactly as it would be described if it had. I don’t know. I just really like books that pretend to be real, I guess. Very good non-Fantasy fantasy.

 

72. What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha. His first novel. I really liked his second, and the guy from the second one makes a cameo appearance in this one BTW, but I’m unsure about this. It’s good and it takes things like love, faith, and suffering seriously. Maybe it should be returned to in the future for a second look.

 

73. The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron by Janet Lewis. The last and longest of her novels. The wife of a bookbinder encourages her husband to hire an apprentice. One would have thought this was exhausted territory for Lewis, seeing as she covered adultery in such a great fashion in the perfect The Wife of Martin Guerre, but then one would be proved wrong because she is an author who always manages to say old things in ways that feel both new and yet entirely suited to their purpose. Just really good sentences. The best sentences ever? Maybe. Janet Lewis is really good at putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages and pages into books. She is really good at doing what writers do.

 

74. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. The life of a child prodigy’s mother and, soon enough, the child prodigy’s search for an equally prodigal father. Uniquely told, a book that teaches you how to read it as you read it rather than one which comes before you in familiar shape. The “a boy choose his father” story is one that really works for me but even if that’s not your cup of tea it’s still worth a try.

 

75. The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman. The last of an uneven trilogy. Like the previous two, peppered with flaws and smirking asides but there is fine writing here and there (a first-person confession from a now-grown Pevensie child is really the highlight but even that is marred by a moment which seems designed to elicit giggles from the reader more than anything else) so if you’re really desperate to find out who Quentin Coldwater is gonna sleep with this time around (spoiler alert : a little like the 800 pound gorilla joke, it’s anyone he wants to) and what the real deal is with Narnia maybe wait for the paperback?

 

I started but was unable to finish or continue with the following : Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, A Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man by Joseph Heller, The Mighty And Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Studies In Iconology by Erwin Panofsky, The Sundial by Shirley Jackson, Harriet Hume by Rebecca West, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (the title story is great but none of the rest seem to sustain interest), Master Of The Day Of Judgment by Leo Perutz, and Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth.

[Cashmere]

That is quite an update! I love to read your reviews because you read so many books I have never heard of.

[R.CAllen]

Thanks!

[Darth Krawlie]

43. Uncanny Avengers Volume 1: The Red Shadow, by Rick Remender

44. Age of Ultron, by Brian Michael Bendis

45. Uncanny Avengers Volume 2: The Apocalypse Twins, by Rick Remender

46. The Poisoned Crown, by Maurice Druon

 

Add Age of Ultron to the list of not recommended comics. I thought it was going to be a story about Ultron, not Wolverine. Silly me.

[Guest]

I don't understand.

 

A comic that isn't about Wolverine or Batman?

[Destiny Skywalker]

Oh you people and your "spare time" and "no kids" or however you manage to do this...

 

My reading list this year has been something like the following. We're working our way through the Mensa for Kids Excellence in Reading Award Program. Noah wants the t-shirt.

 

How the Leopard Got His Claws

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Peppe the Lamplighter

Madeline

Stone Soup

Goodnight, Moon

The Quiltmaker's Gift

The Story of Babar

Mike Milligan and His Steam Shovel

Stellaluna

Strega Nona

Corduroy

Millions of Cats

The Three Little Pigs

The Reluctant Dragon

Little Toot

Bedtime for Frances

The Snowy Day

I Want My Hat Back (I highly recommend this one because it just reminds me of Jacob for some reason)

Leo the Late Bloomer

The Carrot Seed

The Story of Ferdinand

Frog and Toad are Friends

Paul Revere's Ride

Put Me in the Zoo

George and Martha

Blueberries for Sal

Make Way for Ducklings

Anansi the Spider

If I Never Forever Endeavor

Tikki Tikki Tembo

Amelia Bedelia

The Little Engine That Could

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Curious George

The Dot

Where the Wild Things Are

The Cat in the Hat

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

The Garden of Abdul Gasazi

The Polar Express

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Harry the Dirty Dog

Sam the Minuteman

Look at how lovely and diverse your reading list is. This is mine for the year:

 

1. Wish for a Fish x 100

2. Press Here x 50

3. The Berenstain Bears and the Honey Hunt x 25

[Cashmere]

Can you do them by memory by this point, Destiny?

 

Update time!

38. The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann

This book was terribly boring. Not all that much happened, but the characters kept having internal monologues on repeat about the same incident. After the fourth or fifth time that a couple pages were in the book verbatim, I almost gave up. I did skip a little bit in the middle, but that's because my iPod messed up and it wasn't worth trying to go back to find my spot.

39. Still Missing by Chevy Stevens

This was a great crime thriller. It was told entirely from the kidnapping victim's perspective, so the tension was wondering if/how she would be found. I really enjoyed it.

40. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

This is the second in a trilogy. I loved the first one, but this one was a bit slow in the middle. It also ended abruptly. I'll still read book 3.

41. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I did not think I would like this book after the first few chapters, but I ended up caring about the characters, so I did eventually get into it. It's about a bunch of artsy teenagers that meet at summer camp and then grow up and live their separate lives.

[NumberSix]

28. Danny Fingeroth, Mike Manley, et al., Darkhawk Classic vol 1. Fingeroth was a guest at Wizard World Chicago and I felt obliged to buy something from him because of his long Marvel career, but nine issues of a '90s teen antihero with a standard '90s compound name was not the best way to go.

 

29. Various, Playlist: a Comic Book Anthology. A Kickstarter'd collection of music-themed by assorted newcomers, one of whom was another WWC guest. Many of them are songfics based on songs and artists I don't recognize. A few of the artists were promising, but trying to read most of the stories proved fruitless.

 

30. Paul Sizer, BPM. Another WWC find. Rags-to-not-exactly-riches tale of a young DJ working her way up the local music scene's pecking order. The characters come most alive in between gigs, but the scenes set at nightclubs and raves only accentuate the challenges of making stories about music in a soundless medium. When an author tells you that the music in a particular scene is awesome, it means nothing if your words and/or pictures can't convey any sense of its actual awesomeness. It doesn't do much good to tell me, "Look, I know you can't hear it right now, but the music she's playing right now really rocks! We swear! Trust us!" The coloring does a better job of setting mood than either the pictures or words do, but it's still not a mood that conveys specific rhythm or melody. It's like watching a movie with the volume turned down to zero.

 

31. Jane Irwin with Jeff Berndt, Vögelein: Clockwork Faerie. Charming, episodic story of a tiny artificial fairy who wanders through the Big City after her creator dies and has to keep finding people who'll agree to wind her up or else she'll die. Of the five books I bought directly from creators at this year's WWC, this was my favorite. (The fifth one is still sitting on an end table, half-unread, and not in a complimentary way.)

 

32. Gilbert Hernandez, Sloth. Slice-of-life small-town magical-realism tale about a teenage guy who awakens after a yearlong coma to find he and the world around him aren't the same. There are spooky elements involved, and then halfway through, the whole thing does a David Lynch about-face and turns everything topsy-turvy. I completely lost the point after that, but Hernandez is always intriguing to watch at work regardless of confusion.

 

33. Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel, The Quitter. The late curmudgeon and creator of the autobiographical American Splendor goes back to pre-adulthood for the first time to tell the story of his upbringing in ethnic Cleveland neighborhoods, where he constantly started fights, threw away opportunities, and made a lot of poor choices that led to his lifetime spent as a struggling nervous wreck of a writer. If you like Pekar, it's mandatory reading as the most candid, self-flagellating book he ever wrote. Haspiel remains one of my favorite among Pekar's illustrators and he's in top form here -- well capturing the anguish, the anger, and the humility that didn't overwhelm Pekar until years after the sins of his youth had taken their toll.

 

34. Daniel T. Thomsen, Corinna Bechko, Michael William Kaluta, et al., Once Upon a Time: Shadow of the Queen. Ya like prequels? This one reveals the secret history of the love affair between Evil Queen Regina and the Huntsman, who would become Storybrooke's town sheriff in season 1 until his demise. And next year he'll be coming to theaters as the star of Fifty Shades of Grey. Each of the four chapters is drawn by different artists whose work ranges from just-okay to not-bad, but this book mostly reminded me that the Huntsman was a pretty dull character. And without Lana Parrilla's performance to bring her to life, Regina is much worse off.

 

35. Charles Soule and Renzo Podesta, 27: First Set. A young musician sells his soul to become a world-famous rock star, only to learn that the evil device making it possible will kill him after twenty-seven uses....and it never gives him the same kind of artistic talent twice. A sort-of horror book inspired loosely by all the famous musicians who died at age 27, this underrated Image project was Charles Soule's first foray into comics, and now he's writing a bunch of Marvel and DC series every month.

 

36. Charles Soule and Renzo Podesta, 27: Second Set. Knowing they couldn't and shouldn't recycle the same plot for the sequel, Soule and Podesta wisely tackled a different musical theme: one-hit wonders. The events of the First Set leave our changed hero taking a different path to make his way in the music world, until he's threatened by a formerly famous singer who lusts for a return to the limelight and is willing to go to dark extremes to acquire it. Podesta keeps getting better as he goes, and Soule weaves a tighter, more suspenseful narrative here. Between the two of them, the emotion of the music comes through without relying on quite so many music-critic adjectives.

 

37. Richard Price, Clockers. The widely acclaimed 1992 novel is basically an A+++++ prototype for The Wire, to which Price would later contribute and probably inspire. The alternating New Jersey street-level storylines of Strike the drug-corner manager and Rocco the murder po-lice are often as detailed, engrossing, and heartbreaking as The Wire could be, likewise bolstered with a large cast of characters and so many lamentably real-life scenes of squalor from a broken world no one wants to look at. This is the kind of masterpiece that makes me want to stop collecting comics and graphic novels forever so I can just read nothing but stellar stuff like this for the rest of my life. I should probably hunt for a copy of Spike Lee's film adaptation at some point, too, assuming it could possibly compare to the book at all.

[Rogue 3]

I bought a book earlier on called "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North. The title alone jumped out from the shelf, and reading the back cover it sounds very good.

Got to finish something else first, but looking forward to this one.

 

"Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. I nearly missed you, Doctor August, she says. I need to send a message. This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow."

[Cashmere]

Sounds like it's going to either be awesome or terrible! Good luck. Let us know what you think!

[Darth Krawlie]

47. The Royal Succession, by Maurice Druon

48. Immortal Iron Fist volume 2: The Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, by Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker

[NumberSix]

38. Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts 1991-1992. The latest, twenty-first volume in the 25-volume series. Schulz' twilight years continue, the punchlines are generally less biting and more heartwarming than they used to be, and for some reason Snoopy develops a cookie fixation, as if all comic-strip animals now required a specific people-food craving and Schulz was legally obligated to comply.

[Darth Krawlie]

49. Pickman's Model, by HP Lovecraft

50. Dagon, by HP Lovecraft

51. The Colour Out of Space, by HP Lovecraft

52. Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt, by JM DeMatteis

53. Imaginalis, by JM DeMatteis

54. Local, by Brian Wood

 

Done with Lovecraft, at least for a while. I like a lot of his ideas, but I can only read "it was so horrifying and terrible it can't be described" so many times before there's literally nothing imagine anymore.

 

Local, on the other hand, is highly recommended.

[NumberSix]

39. Rick Remender and Wes Craig, Deadly Class, vol. 1: Reagan Youth. In 1987 a homeless kid named Marcus who dreams someday of killing President Reagan is drawn into a special school for teen wannabe assassins. It's like X-Men meets Wanted (the movie version), or a Hogwarts where Slytherin is the only house and everyone has weapons specialties instead of magic. The characters hold your attention despite their slow descent into reprehensible evil, and there's a snotty teenage attitude to it all that I should hate, but there's something about the energy level, the stylized art, and the psych examinations of brats who think they're Bad but surprise themselves when they discover which lines they won't cross.

 

40. Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin, Princeless, vol. 1: Save Yourself. Adrienne is one of seven princesses whose parents have followed the fairy-tale rules of exiling them in separate towers guarded by dragons, because that's where they're supposed to be kept until they're rescued by their destined princes and turned into wives. Adrienne decides to buck the formula, escapes her tower with a small assist from a non-prince, tames her dragon guard, and decides to go rescue her sisters herself. Plucky heroism and occasional comedy ensues. If you like all-ages fantasy that mocks its clichés and gender roles, and stars a nonwhite heroine, and isn't half bad, this is the kind of book you should be supporting or else you're a grumpy hypocrite who's helping ruin Western literature for everyone.