Category: Read Report

The Read Report — February 2024

March has begun with an unseasonably warm weekend. Here in Minnesota, where we’re used to rough winters, it barely feels like we had any winter at all. Let’s jump back to February for my monthly report on what I’ve been reading.

To stay on theme, I’m trying to read more short stories this year. I end up reading quite a few while researching markets, but I’ve also got a stack of anthologies on my bookshelf that I’ll be reading as the year goes on.

I’m getting close to wrapping up the read-through of Harry Potter with my kids, and I finally returned to The Witcher series after an unplanned hiatus.

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop.org affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these book pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of gig economy worker abuse.

Time Shift: Tales of Time

Edited by Eric Fomley

(Unfortunately, may only be available on Kindle Unlimited now)

For my February short stories, I picked Time Shift, an anthology of time travel flash fiction I picked up as a backer reward from The Martian Magazine.

Anthologies like this are awesome when you only have five or ten minutes to read. This one is even nicely pocket-sized. However, I’m reminded why I don’t like narrow themes like this. While any of these stories, individually, is good, thirty-eight stories about time travel, all in a row, started to feel repetitive.

If you like time travel and flash fiction, this is certainly the anthology for you. But if you’re like me, you might want to only consume them a few at a time.

The Witcher: The Time of Contempt

By Andrzej Sapkowski

I never intended to take a break from The Witcher series, but I got distracted by this and that, and suddenly a few months had gone by. The Witcher books consist of a five-book series, along with three anthologies of short stories that interconnect with the larger story. Time of Contempt is the fourth Witcher book, and the second book in the main series.

The setting for the story is the Northern Kingdoms, about a dozen countries of various sizes in a vaguely Nordic, medieval, semi-feudal fantasy world. A few years have passed since the attempted invasion of the huge southern Nilfgaardian Empire was barely stopped by an alliance of kingdoms and sorcerers in a decisive battle.

The Witcher, Geralt, had had his run-ins with royals in the past, but he’s made a point of staying out of politics. Now, however, he finds himself entangled by his ties to his adopted daughter, Cintran princess Ciri, and his sorceress partner Yennifer. War is brewing again between the Northern Kingdoms and Nilfgaard, but back-stabbing politics between kingdoms and factions of sorcerers make it look increasingly unlikely that the North will be able to unify again against their stronger adversary.

Ciri, despite her kingdom lying in ruins, is sought by royals and spies on both sides for her ability to legitimize claims over disputed lands near the center of the conflict. Some would kill her, while others would use her as a figurehead for political marriage. Even worse, she is believed by sorcerers and others to be the prophesied Child of Elder Blood, who may be destined to set off and/or finish a conflict of apocalyptic proportions.

Sapkowski does a great job combining the often humble difficulties of these powerful—but ultimately fallible and mortal—main characters, with the politics and machinations of classic high fantasy. All of the big movements of the world are revealed through small interactions. The widespread preparations for war are shown by following a royal messenger as he delivers secret messages, or the changes in market prices noted by a banker who sees the rich hedging their bets and fleeing in droves.

Geralt is the reluctant hero who could theoretically just walk away from all of this, but the people he loves cannot, so he gets drawn in through his efforts to protect them. He’s a likable character because he’s smart and moral, but he’s perpetually fighting a defensive fight to shield his family from forces he doesn’t entirely understand. The surface-level causes and effects of the war make sense, but it’s clear that there are deeper drivers of world events that haven’t yet been revealed: the Emperor of Nilfgaard and the Sorcerer Vigelfortz are both after Ciri because of something to do with the prophecy, but we don’t know why.

The languages and cultures of the world are, for my money, on par with the greats of the fantasy genre. The world is more gritty and grounded than the squeaky-clean high fantasy of Lord of the Rings, and the Polish influences make it feel distinct from the glut of generic Western European D&D knock-offs. The Elder Speech used by non-humans and sorcerers feels like a real language, and though few words are directly translated, it is consistent enough that phrases and patterns become familiar and recognizable.

Having recently read Palaniuk’s book on writing, I noticed some similarities in Sapkowski’s style. Palaniuk advocates writing each chapter of a book as a short story that can effectively stand alone. The early Witcher books are short stories that contribute to a larger narrative. The series books are more focused, but most sections are still nicely self-contained, and there are many smaller pieces within the narrative that could stand alone, without the context of the series.

The Time of Contempt ends with the three main characters separated, each of them in a bad place. However, they are survivors, and the question is how they will be able to get back together and solve the problems that plague them.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m delighted to be back in this series. It’s a joy to read, and I plan to plow through the rest of the books in the near future.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

By J. K. Rowling

Half-Blood Prince might be the most interesting Harry Potter book. In a series that relies on patterns that repeat in each book, this is the book where most of the patterns get broken.

The Harry Potter books usually slavishly follow Harry’s perspective. Half-Blood Prince, however, opens with two chapters where the namesake character is conspicuously absent. The first is a meeting between the newly elected wizard Minister of Magic and the “muggle” Prime Minister, showing just how much the war between wizards is bleeding out from their usually secret world. The second is a meeting between the bad guys where a promise is made that will be fulfilled at the end of the book.

This collapse of familiar structures mirrors the plot: the order of the wizard world, and the world as Harry Potter understands it, is falling apart. Despite this, it might be the most well-plotted book in the series.

The language in this book is also different. This is partly a continuation of the trend away from the childishness of the first few books, as the language grew alongside the audience. It’s also clear that some of this came with Rowling gaining experience. I’m sure she had a stellar editing team at this point as well. However, I suspect that the language is more cinematic, more vividly descriptive, partly because Rowling had the opportunity to see the first couple books adapted as movies by the time the series was wrapping up.

The ending of this book is, of course, the big twist that has become something of a meme by now. But that’s because it’s a pretty good twist. It’s hard to imagine a bigger, more unexpected plot point for the series, short of one of the three main characters dying. This ending really is the ultimate way to signal that the story is now off the map. The final book will do without the patterns and conventions of the previous six, and will tread into the darkest territory of the series.

Die

By Kieron Gillen, Illustrated by Stephanie Hans

I fell backward into this series, reading the TTRPG rulebook based on the comic before I got the book itself. My understanding is that they were created in tandem though, so it seems appropriate.

The book itself is a beautiful, monstrously thick hardback with an understated black cover. The slightly oversized comics form factor feels oddly tall and skinny for a book with this much heft. The art is full color, and the style is dreamlike. Almost every panel is either crowded with shadows or blown-out with background light.

The first two chapters describe the backstory: a group of misfit teens play a magical RPG that sucks them into the fantasy world of the game. They don’t return until two years later, missing one person and one arm, and considerably worse for wear. They never tell anyone what happened to them.

Twenty years pass, and they meet up again, brought together by the mysterious return of the magical dice that transported them, and memories of the player they left behind. Most of their lives aren’t going well. They still carry the traumas of their past. Once again, they’re sucked into the fantasy world of Die.

Like so many of the stories I’m drawn to, Die is a metafiction, obsessed with the structures and dynamics of stories. Where Sandman is a contemplation of dreams and myths, and The Unwritten is a study in fantasy tropes, Die is an analysis of story and conflict in tabletop RPGs, and the interplay between players, player-characters, and the game. In fact, the back of the book is taken up with a number of essays on TTRPGs written concurrently with the story itself.

Unfortunately, I feel like Die is a little too eager to define itself in shorthand references to greater works. It bludgeons the reader with big nods to Tolkein, Wells and Lovecraft, but they are shallow references, and not enough new and interesting is built on top of them. Die is constantly saying things like

The Fair are…”What if William Gibson designed elves.”

…or…

Glass Town is Rivendell meets Casablanca, Oz in No Man’s Land.

Eventually, I found myself desperate for something in the world that wasn’t described in terms of something else. Unfortunately, the gods of Die and the Fallen half-zombies are the most unique aspects of the setting, but they’re only rarely touched upon. I couldn’t help feeling that Die is a little too clever, and a little too eager to show you how clever it is. There is a certain cynicism to a story that hides behind its influences. By not exposing its heart, the story and the author don’t leave themselves open to praise or criticism in their own right.

Die is driven by a simple idea: the characters are trapped in this fictional world, and the only way they can go home is if they all agree to it. The challenge is that they do not get along, so getting everyone to agree is no simple task. It can’t be done through force, only through negotiation.

While that’s a fun concept, I felt like the motivations of the characters were too mercurial. Their disagreements and fights felt too arbitrary, too inorganic. It’s the soap opera problem, where the characters whims shift in service to every twist and turn in the plot.

In retrospect, I see that a lot of my review here is negative, and that is probably unfair. Die ultimately didn’t quite land for me, but it does do a lot of things well. The art is beautiful, and it presents a huge number of interesting ideas. And while many of them work on a granular level, they don’t quite mesh into a satisfying whole.

I’m not the most die-hard fan of TTRPGs, but I’ve played a decent amount. Over the years, I’ve come to realize and accept that the story in a TTRPG campaign will never conform to the shape of a well-crafted novel or movie. As a GM, trying to make that kind of story is a mistake. It can’t work when there are four or more people all driving it together. There will be tangents. It will meander. And that’s okay. It’s a different sort of experience than a novel or movie. Despite the incredible popularity of TTRPG “actual play” podcasts and videos in recent years, I firmly believe these stories are more enjoyable as a contributor than they are as an external viewer.

Strangely, I feel the same way about Die. I can feel a great story in there for someone, I just wasn’t able to experience it myself.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1

By Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was originally published in 1999. Ironically perhaps, for a series that cribs from the earliest science fiction, it feels older than that. I suspect that feeling is due to the outsized influence that League has had on indie comics. We see echoes of it in many things that came after, so when we return to the original, it seems a little less unique and strange than it did at first. But it still holds up pretty well.

If Die is a story that rubs me the wrong way with its blatant references to other stories, League is the polar opposite. Practically every single page is jammed to the gills with references to turn of the 20th century proto-science-fiction. However, there are no winks and no nods. The story doesn’t feel the need to draw attention to the references.

In the first few pages, our scarf-clad main character, Mina Harker (né Murray) meets with her employer, Campion Bond, who works for a mysterious M. Then she’s off to retrieve a second main character, the opium-addled Alan Quatermain, taking the taciturn Mr. Nemo’s submersible. The League is rounded out with the help of Mssr. Dupin in acquiring the two-faced Dr. Jekyl, and they locate a certain invisible man at the estate of Rosa Cootes.

The story is so stuffed with familiar names that it’s easy to latch on to Jekyl or Nemo or the invisible man and not worry about the rest. But an avid reader can search out every name and turn up another interesting lost corner of old pulp literature. League draws upon an absurd number of stories and mashes them together with reckless abandon. The result is something pulpy and silly and occasionally self-serious in much the same ways as the stories that it cribs from.

The story fully embraces the casual racism, sexism, self-righteous colonialism, and all the other -isms endemic to the British Empire as it approached the 20th century. This could easily come across as crass, but it manages to feel accurate to that world and time period. And as the main characters tend to be on the receiving end more often than not, it doesn’t feel as though these ideas or behaviors are condoned.

That’s not to say that the protagonists are good people all of the time. Or even most of the time. They don’t get along with each other, let alone the rest of the world around them.

The art is a style that I’m not sure I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s detailed and scribbly in equal measure, with impossible, caricature proportions that combine realistic and cartoon aesthetics.

At the end of the six issue series is a lightly-illustrated bonus story called “Allan and the Sundered Devil.” This adds a little more color to Quatermain’s character and acts as a mini-prequel to the main story. It leans into the pulp fiction premise of League even more than the comic, and the prose is so purple that I found it a little much to read.

This is the only volume that I’ve read previously, but the pile of comics I received at Christmas included three more volumes of League. I’ll be reading those in the coming months and seeing how they hold up compared to the first. This one, at least, I would consider a must-read for any fan of non-superhero comics.

What I’m Reading In March

The final book of Harry Potter, the continuation of The Witcher and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. For short stories, I’ve got some light reading lined up in The Complete Works of Ernest Hemingway.

The Read Report — January 2024

It’s a new year. I’m working on the pile of books and comics I got for Christmas, and mostly ignoring the books I had planned to read. Someday I’ll get back to The Witcher. Someday.

If any of these sound interesting, please use my bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of phallic rockets for billionaires.

Signal to Noise

By Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

I thought I had read nearly all of the Gaiman/McKean comics collaborations, but this one somehow slipped under my radar. Published in 1989, Signal to Noise is almost a prototype of their future work. It’s a little less subtle with its themes than later works, but it still shows that expertise at crafting a story that can be observed from a dozen different angles to reveal some new through-line or idea.

The “noise” cutting through the signal of the story is nonsensical text, hinting at meaning without ever finding it. At the end of the book, it’s explained that this text was produced by a text sampler program, a 1989 prototype of the LLMs that have recently become so prevalent.

McKean’s illustrations are a fever-dream. The filmmaker inhabits a foggy ghost world. The movie in his head is unfocused and clogged with snow. Pops of color cut through: the yellow of a wheel clamp on an illegally-parked car, a red traffic light, a rare splash of green from a potted plant. The story is drowning in monochrome blue-white-gray, and the splashes of color are quick breaths before going under again. The panels shift between purposely similar 4×4 squares (evoking strips of film) and luscious full-page spreads, especially potent in this oversized form-factor.

The main character is a filmmaker, who is dying. He’s composing a movie in his head: people in the year 999, waiting for the new year, when they expect the world to end. A dying man composing a story of the apocalypse. But the apocalypse never came for those people.

For me, the resonating theme of the book is creator’s remorse. The work, when done, is never as good as it was in your head. But there is always hope that the next piece will be the one that works. Still, there is joy in it. A finished piece of art evokes “the feeling that one has clawed back something from eternity, that one has put something over on a nodding god, that one has beaten the system.”

Death: The High Cost of Living

By Neil Gaiman and Chris Bachalo

Continuing the theme of old Gaiman comics, we have short spin-off in the Sandman universe, starring the effervescent goth girl Death, possibly the most popular of the Endless, apart from Dream.

Once each century, Death must spend a day as a mortal, and this just happens to be that day. She meets a boy named Sexton, who happens to have written a suicide note he has yet to act on. He is utterly disillusioned with the world, as only an inexperienced teenager can be.

Death, going by Didi today, explains who she is and invites Sexton to spend the day with her. He does , complaining all the way, and only slowly coming to believe Didi really is the personification of Death.

The magic of the Sandman version of Death is that she knows everyone, and she loves everyone, regardless of how the average human might judge them. She embodies the Christian ideal of kindness that many people aspire to, and none really achieve. So, of course, she goes on a little adventure with Sexton, and it changes him. He gains a new outlook on life. I won’t spoil who ends up dying at the end.

If you like the Sandman universe, this is a fun little jaunt along the edges of it, with a few familiar faces, and a good story in its own right.

Persepolis

By Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is autobiographical history in the comic tradition of Maus. The author grew up in Iran, living in a well-off family of intellectuals.

The first part of the book is largely about Satrapi’s childhood, and the many revolutionary elements that led to the overthrow of the Shah, followed by the disappointment of groups like the communist revolutionaries when the movement was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists.

In the second half, Satrapi moves overseas, attends college in Germany. She gets into drugs, spends time homeless, and manages to rebuild her life. After her time abroad, she returns to Iran and finds herself chafing against the rules of the regime.

She finds a boyfriend and marries, but they are almost immediately unhappy. The end of the book is abrupt. She gets a divorce and moves overseas again, this time to France.

Although it’s sometimes disjointed, the book is a great ground-level introduction to the recent history of Iran and a culture that I certainly didn’t learn much about, growing up in America.

There seems to be an inherent dissonance in Iranian culture between public and private life. Despite Islamic theocracy, many Iranians hold on to Persian culture, seeing themselves as independent from the rest of the Middle East. The fundamentalist regime makes the consumption of alcohol and mixed-gender parties illegal, but they still secretly happen with regularity. Head coverings are mandatory and makeup is frowned-upon, but many women flout these rules, even in public when they think they can get away with it. Punishments for breaking these cultural rules can be avoided by paying a fine, which results in the wealthy having much more leeway than the poor.

While it might be cliche, the obvious takeaway is that Western countries have more in common with Iran than the uneducated (like me) might think. There is a thread of fierce personal independence and self-determination in these stories that will feel familiar to anyone who has grown up in America, as will the rifts between social classes and the mismatch between public perception and private reality.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

By J.K. Rowling

The Potter read-through with my kids continues. It’s the fifth book in the seven-book Potter series, and everything’s falling apart. Wizard Hitler is back in town, consolidating power in secret. Meanwhile, the government refuses to believe the only evidence: the eyewitness testimony of our 15-year-old protagonist.

As a series of kids’ books, I’m willing to overlook some of the simplicity of world-building that a lot of folks like to harp on, but this book really makes it clear how dysfunctional the “wizarding world” is. There are a great many institutions that are unique in the wizarding world, and that makes it awfully easy to gain and abuse power.

There’s effectively only one wizard newspaper. The government apparently exerts tremendous control over it, and can just squash articles they don’t like. Harry only gets his story published in a homemade conspiracy zine.

There’s a very simple wizard government, with a single head of state that seems to have total control over the unicameral legislature. In fact, it’s not even clear if anyone except the wizard president even needs to sign off on new laws.

There’s a single, hellish maximum-security wizard prison, which seems to be the default punishment for any non-trivial offense. There’s a single wizard bank, just in case the all-powerful government wants to exert economic controls as well. Finally, there’s only one wizard school in the country, so it’s nice and easy to lock down that educational system.

The wizarding world is a model autocracy. No wonder a new wizard Hitler crops up every couple decades.

Anyway, this book marks Harry at his most persecuted. The all-powerful government hates him because he keeps saying that Voldemort is back, and exerts all its power to convince everyone he’s a crazy person. His friends are mostly children, so they can do very little about this. The few adults on his side have created a secret society to try to fight back, because they’d be targets for the all-powerful government if they were open about it.

The theme of being unable to depend on adults really reaches its peak here. The school is taken over by a sadistic pawn of the government, the adults who Harry trusts are picked off one-by-one, and even Dumbledore, who has always been a bit like Old Testament God (distant, but loving authority figure), purposely abandons Harry.

As usual, Harry leads the kids by ignoring all adult advice and doing what he thinks is best. On the one hand, this is a pretty bad idea because he knows full well that all the adults have been hiding a lot of information from him. He doesn’t really know what’s going on. As usual, he’s ignored their warnings. On the other hand, this has worked out well for him in every single book up to this point. Maybe if the adults wanted him to behave, they should have tried a little harder to parent the headstrong super-wizard orphan boy.

Where previous books like Prisoner of Azkaban toyed with the idea that Harry’s poorly thought-out actions might cause real problems, everything always turned out prefectly when he followed his gut. Even the first death of the series in Goblet of Fire was not really his fault. He got played by an adult he trusted. But in Order of the Phoenix, Harry lets his intuition guide him, against the advice of literally everyone, and the result is terrible.

Sure, they get incontrovertible evidence that Voldemort’s back. So that’s nice. It just costs the life of the only person Harry considers family.

There is also a problem of Harry’s personality in this book. He’s constantly angry, and generally mean to all of his friends. In the end, it turns out that he’s being psychically manipulated, but there really aren’t enough hints about what’s going on, so he just comes across as an unpleasant character for most of the book.

Consider This

By Chuck Palahniuk

I won’t harp on this one, since I’ve already written a separate post about it. Suffice to say it’s the best book on writing that I’ve read in a few years.

What I’m Reading in February

Harry Potter continues. I’m halfway through a beautiful hardcover complete edition of the comic Die. I may dig into a stack of anthologies, to stay on-brand for my year of short stories. And there is always the eternal promise of jumping back into The Witcher. It could happen.

See you in February.

The Read Report — December 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. The end of the year really snuck up on me. I didn’t have a lot of time to read in November due to NaNoWriMo, and I was busy with holidays in December, so I decided to roll them together into a single blog post.

As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Monster (Vol. 1 – 18)

By Naoki Urasawa

My interest in this series stems from watching an episode or two of the anime based on these books several years ago. Conveniently, one of my co-workers is an avid collector, so I was able to borrow the whole series over my Christmas vacation.

What s stands out about Monster is the subject matter and setting. So much anime and manga follows familiar formulas, and this one is refreshingly different.

Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a Japanese immigrant in west Germany, shortly before reunification. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon with a promising future at a prestigious hospital. He’s a favorite of the hospital’s director, and engaged to the director’s daughter.

However, Tenma has a crisis of conscience after he’s ordered to save the life of a famous performer instead of the poor immigrant worker who arrived first. The next time he has to make a similar choice, he rejects hospital politics, saving the life of a boy shot in the head, while less skilled surgeons are unable to save an important donor who came in shortly after.

Overnight, Tenma’s life begins to collapse. The director refuses to talk to him, his engagement is broken off, and he’s overlooked for promotion. His fortunes turn yet again when the director and two of his allies are found poisoned, and the remaining hospital leadership puts him in charge.

A decade later, Tenma comes across the boy he saved, now an adult. To his horror, the boy seems to be tied up in a string of serial murders, and kills a man in front of the doctor. He reveals that he was the one who poisoned Tenma’s co-workers.

With Tenma once again close to a murder, a federal investigator takes an interest in him, trying to pin all the murders on the doctor. Tenma is wracked with guilt for saving the boy who has turned out to be a monster, but he has no evidence, and only he knows the truth. When the police attempt to arrest Tenma, he decides to flee and chase down the boy he saved, to kill him and stop him from harming anyone else.

The series follows Tenma as he evades the authorities and slowly uncovers the mysterious and disturbing origins of the monster, Johan, while helping people along the way. He uncovers the history of secret psychological experiments on children, and the legacy of the people who once ran those experiments, as well as the damaged children that came out of them.

Set in 1990s Germany and Czechoslovakia, the setting is phenomenally well-executed. The characters are excellent, and the mystery is compelling. Unfortunately, I felt like the story was treading water in some of the later volumes, and the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as the opening.  Regardless, this is still a fantastic manga, and a great story for anyone who is turned off by the usual anime/manga tropes and settings.

The Department of Truth (Vol. 1)

By James Tynion IV and Martin Symmonds

Every conspiracy theory is true. Sort of.

The Department of Truth is a comic built on the well-worn fantasy premise that peoples’ collective belief can physically change the world. It feels especially relevant in our current moment, when it sometimes feels like our different political and cultural factions are living in entirely different universes.

Cole Turner is a teacher at Quantico specializing in home-grown American extremism. In the course of his research, he attends a flat-earther convention, where he attends a showing of Stanley Kubric’s fake moon landing tapes before being whisked off with a select group on a private jet to see something even more impossible: the literal edge of the world. The trip is cut short when the group is unceremoniously gunned-down, and Cole is taken in for questioning by a group calling themselves The Department of Truth.

The Department of Truth is the secret government agency responsible for monitoring the effects that collective beliefs have on the fabric of reality, and keeping them in check. What exactly does that entail? Well, that’s the complicated part. They cut down conspiracy theories, killing and ruining lives when they deem it necessary for the greater good. It’s a messy job. The agency’s leader, none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, recruits Cole as a new member.

This first volume does a good job laying the groundwork of setting and characters, and brewing up a big fight. There’s an enemy organization called Black Hat working against the Department of Truth. They are trying to change the narrative, to put real evidence of the conspiracy theories out into the world. They want to reveal and destroy the Department of Truth, and it turns out they’ve been watching Cole for a long time.

Unlike similar stories, this doesn’t shy away from real, modern conspiracies. In this first volume it touches on classics like the Kennedy assassination and the satanic panic, but it also hits Obama’s birth certificate, “pizzagate,” Epstein’s suicide, flat earth, school shooting “crisis actors,” 9/11 as an inside job, and the whole QAnon/deep-state mish-mash. There’s effectively infinite material for them to riff on, since conspiracy theories are practically mainstream these days.

The book also features a gay main character, without making a big fuss about it. Unfortunately, Cole’s personal life with his husband is hardly touched on. Between the conference and his recruitment, he goes missing for a couple of days, and it results in a mildly heated argument. The relationship boils down to one face-to-face scene and a phone call in this first volume. I would have liked to have gotten more, and it would help to flesh out Cole as a character. However, there’s a lot of hinting that his background will tie into the story more and more as we go deeper, so I’m hopeful that there will be more in future volumes.

The art style is grimy, dark, and impressionistic. It’s more about conveying mood than the literal scenery, and the moods are not generally happy ones. Characters’ inner thoughts are expressed as shadowy images lurking behind them. Almost every image is filtered through TV scan lines, ink splatters, deep chiaroscuro shadows, and scribbled linework. This intense abstraction is appropriate for a story where there’s a blurring between truth and fiction, and dark things really are lurking in the shadows.

Unfortunately, the darkness and the abstraction sometimes make it hard to tell what is actually happening. On more than one occasion, I found myself having to re-read a two-page spread because the panel order wasn’t clear from the layout. I don’t mind unusual layouts (Sandman Overture is still my favorite art in any comic, and it almost never uses “normal” layouts), but there’s a real difficulty in not confusing the reader. The Department of Truth doesn’t always quite hit that mark.

Overall, I really enjoyed the Department of Truth, Vol. 1, and I’ll definitely be picking up more of the series.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By J.K. Rowling

The Potter read-through with kids continues. This is the middle book of the series, and it feels like a middle book. There are still a few of the kid-centric tropes and patterns that have repeated through the earlier volumes, like a red-herring bad guy and a mystery to be solved. It’s also doing a lot of work to set up everything that’s going to happen in the next three books.

This book clearly signals darker stuff to come, with the main villain finally arriving, and a death near the end of the book. Still, I couldn’t help feel that the dead character wasn’t actually all that important in the grand scheme of the story. There is a broad cast of side characters that have been built up across the first few books, and any one of them dying would have had more impact.

Once again, the biggest lesson this series teaches is that adults are all useless. They’re either outright evil, incompetent, or just don’t trust the kids enough to inform or direct them in any useful way. Of course, this is a theme that’s pretty common in kids’ books. It wouldn’t be fun if the adults took care of everything.

What I’m Reading in January

Harry Potter continues, I dig into more of the comics I got for Christmas, and I’ll definitely (probably) finally return to the Witcher series. See you then.

The Read Report — October 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Sandman: Dream Hunters

By Neil Gaiman

Having finished rereading all the books in the main Sandman series, I figured I would top it all off with the two stand-alone Sandman volumes. The first of these is Dream Hunters, which was published three years after the 1996 wrap of the main series.

Dream Hunters comes in the form factor of a graphic novel, but it is actually an illustrated short story in five parts. There are a variety of different layouts, including many full page illustrations and some two-page paintings and both horizontal and vertical splits. There is even a double-fold-out illustration, four pages wide. Amano’s inks, pencils and watercolors mingle to create a variety of effects, sometimes clear, other times murky or abstract.

The story is a retelling of a Japanese folk tale, “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming.” A magical fox falls in love with a lonely monk who maintains a small and forgotten shrine. When a powerful sorcerer tries to kill the monk in his dreams, the fox intercepts those dreams to protect him.

This is one of those classic Sandman side-stories where Dream is involved, but only as a side character. It’s a good story with great art, but not really necessary to pick up unless you’re already in love with the series.

Sandman: Endless Nights

By Neil Gaiman

Unlike Dream Hunters, Endless Nights is a proper comic. This is an anthology of stories, each with a different illustrator, and each one focused on one of the seven Endless: Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Destiny. Again, these could be considered side-stories to the main series, but they feel closer to the main series in tone and style, and they do offer a few interesting tidbits for die-hard fans.

Some light is shed on Dream and his interactions with Desire, when they attend a gathering of sentient stars some few billion years ago. We see what might be the first of Dream’s many ill-fated romances, and the source of animosity between Dream and Desire. We also get to see what Destruction is up to in his exile, and hints that he may yet reach a kind of friendly ambivalence with his family, even if they never quite see eye-to-eye.

I really like Endless Nights. If The Wake was the epilogue to the main story, then this feels like a reunion.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

By J.K. Rowling

I continue to work through the series with my kids. This third book feels like the inflection point to me, still largely plotted in a way to appeal to relatively young kids, but beginning to ramp up the darker themes.

At this point, it’s clear there is something of a formula that the books follow. Again, it leans on couple of mysteries to keep the plot moving. Again, there is a red herring that is pushed hard. Where this book differs is in the long third act, which wraps everything up with a fun time-travel sequence that has to interweave with a series of events that we already read from a different point of view.

While it’s popular to knock the Harry Potter books these days, especially for their plot holes, the time travel opens up a pretty egregious one. Sure, as in Back to the Future, a big deal is made over the “dangers” of seeing yourself while time traveling. But then main characters do it anyway, and it turns out perfectly fine. Unlike Back to the Future, the Harry Potter books barely mention time travel again, which is a little hard to swallow.

House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I didn’t intend to read House of Leaves again. I was talking with my son about the Backrooms, and how it seemed like it was inspired by House of Leaves. I went to grab my slightly beat-up paperback copy and discovered that it wasn’t on the shelf. Then I remembered I had loaned it to a friend, years ago. So I ordered myself a new copy.

When the book arrived, I popped it open, just to enjoy the sections where the text went all wonky. I went back to the beginning, to see how it started. Before I knew it, I was fully absorbed. It’s probably been over ten years since I last read it, and there was a lot I had forgotten.

House of Leaves is a strange book. At its heart is a horror premise: a house that somehow contains an infinite, shifting, maze-like series of rooms and corridors, where one might become lost forever. Wrapped around that core are multiple layers of frame stories and linguistic complexity.

I could go on about this book, but it’ll have to wait for another post. Suffice to say that it’s just as enjoyable as I remembered, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading something genuinely weird.

What I’m Reading in November

With NaNoWriMo looming, I probably won’t be reading much. If I do get ahead and end up with some free time, I expect I’ll finally get back to The Witcher or delve into a new comics series.

See you next time!

The Read Report — September 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Sandman: Worlds’ End (Vol. 8)

By Neil Gaiman

This volume is a collection of stories within a Canterbury Tales-esque frame. A group of strangers from across the Sandman universe get caught in a storm and find shelter at The Worlds’ End, an inn that exists beyond ordinary space and time, and a play on words in a few different ways.

This is, in many respects, the beginning of the end: the final arc of The Sandman series. While this volume is similar to several others, with seemingly disconnected stories set in the same expansive world, it’s laying groundwork for the two volumes to follow.

The end of the book makes this apparent, as the storm quiets, and all the strange guests at the Worlds’ End see a huge procession in the sky. This is a funeral on a cosmic scale, and the dead man is Dream of the Endless.

Sandman: The Kindly Ones (vol. 9)

By Neil Gaiman

Finally paying off the foreshadowing in Volume 7 and 8, The Kindly Ones is the largest volume in the series, and the climax of Dream’s story. The dangling plot threads come together, and it’s incredibly appropriate as Dream’s antagonists in this volume are none other than the Fates, who measure and cut the thread of each person’s life.

In the Sandman mythos, the Fates have many aspects, each represented by three women: young, middle-aged, and ancient. They are also called the Furies, embodiment of revenge against those who dare to spill the blood of family.

The Furies are called to action against Dream by Hypolyta Hall, the former super-hero from earlier volumes, who conceived her son within dreams and holds a grudge against Morpheus for “killing” her husband. She’s convinced that Dream has stolen her child. However, the real kidnappers are mere mythological tricksters. It’s Dream’s murder of his own son, Orpheus, that allows the Furies to work against him.

The surface conflict between Dream and the Furies becomes progressively more violent, and we see a number of fan-favorite characters caught in the cross-fire. The bigger question, however, is why this is allowed to happen. Within their specific sphere of influence, the furies have power to equal the Endless, but it seems that Dream is holding back.

Gaiman has shown that he knows how to wrap up a story, so I can only assume that this final ambiguity is on purpose. It’s up to the reader to decide why Dream doesn’t have his heart in the fight. Is he overwhelmed with the shame and guilt of what he did to his son? Is he an exhausted immortal who knows that there will always be another fight, another petty enemy knocking at his doorstep? Does he know himself too well; his obsession with responsibility forcing him into the fight when he could just as easily run away like his brother, Destruction?

In the end, Dream dies. This isn’t a spoiler so much as an inevitability. However, he doesn’t lose. He is prepared for even this eventuality, and a new aspect of Dream appears to take his place.

For my money, this is still probably the single finest volume in comics. Not only does it provide a satisfying conclusion to a great series, but it represents an inflection point in comics that opened the doors to so many great stories in subsequent years.

Sandman: The Wake (Vol. 10)

By Neil Gaiman

The Wake is a classic epilogue. The story of Dream (at least the Dream that we’ve followed for 9 volumes) is ended. This last volume sweeps the floors, pus the chairs on the tables, and turns off the lights.

It starts with the funeral that was hinted at in Worlds’ End, a once-in-a-billion-years send-off for one of the Endless. As is appropriate, this somber affair happens in dreams, and many of the side characters from throughout the series are in attendance, even if they don’t all entirely understand what’s happening.

The final few issues are a melancholy mix. We spend a day with Hob, the immortal (but otherwise ordinary) man who met with Dream once each century. His life goes on.

We meet a man exiled from ancient China, who finds himself in one of the “soft places” between waking and dream. He meets the old Dream and the aspect who replaced him. The man doesn’t run from his fate: he meets his exile with dignity.

Finally, we see Shakespeare, near the end of his life. He finishes the second and final play commissioned by the Lord of Dreams. This was the price he paid for the chance to tell stories that would live beyond his own lifetime.

The play is The Tempest, and Dream commissioned it because it is a play about endings. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, we see the possibility that the Lord of Stories wanted just one story about himself. He wanted an ending.

We’re left with the words of a Roman soldier, lost in the place between dreams and waking:

Omnia mutantur nihil interit.

Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.

500 Ways to Write Harder

By Chuck Wendig

I snagged this book after reading Wendig’s Damn Fine Story. This is an older book, and only barely available as an e-book from one or two retailers.

There was probably a reason for that. On the upside, it only cost a couple bucks.

The book consists of a series of listicles, each on a particular writing topic: antagonists, novel prep, self-publishing, etc. Each has 25 items. It’s apparent that these lists were originally Twitter or blog fodder and were compiled unaltered—a few of them say as much.

I don’t begrudge Wendig for turning these posts into a saleable product, especially since this was published a decade ago, when Wendig was early in his career as a professional writer. The origins of the material show in the lack of cohesive through-line, something that made Damn Fine Story much more satisfying.

Considering the low price, this book isn’t a bad one to pick up, but I wouldn’t suggest reading it cover to cover. Instead, skim through the list of topics and use it as reference. If you’re revising a book (as I am), you might find the section on revision useful. Consult the topics when they’re relevant to you.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

By J.K. Rowling

I’m still reading Harry Potter with my kids.

This second book establishes a lot of the elements that will repeat through most of the series. Harry spends his summer with his caricature-villain evil aunt, uncle and cousin, before being whisked back to wizard school where he can live happily (apart from wizard Hitler occasionally trying to kill him).

I realized as I was reading this installment that these early Harry Potter books follow a very straightforward formula. A mystery is established early on, and Harry and his friends latch on to a red herring. Clues appear at intervals, and they all seem to support the red herring thesis. In the finale, the truth is revealed, including an explanation for each clue and how it actually pointed toward the real answer.

The first book is all about the kids’ distrust of Snape and the mystery of the package hidden in the guarded corridor. But Snape turns out to merely be a jerk and not the jerk. The second book is all about finding the person opening the chamber of secrets, and the children are fooled into thinking it’s the only adult they actually like and trust. Nope, it’s the ghost of Wizard Hitler!

The moral of the books so far seems to be that adults are untrustworthy. Some are bumbling, some are outright malicious, and a few are well-meaning, but ineffective. Even Dumbledore, often invoked as the most powerful wizard in the world, doesn’t really…do anything useful, at least so far.

As an adult myself, this lesson is a little concerning, but I also know first-hand that adults really are often bumbling, malicious and ineffective. As a starting point for a middle-grade series, it makes a lot of sense. Kids aren’t going to get into interesting adventures if they go whining to the grown-ups whenever they have a life-threatening problem.

What I’m Reading in October

I finished The Sandman series…or did I? There are two more more spin-off volumes: Endless Nights and Dream Hunters. As long as I’m rereading, I might as well include those, right?

I’m also overdue on getting back to The Witcher, and I aim to remedy that with at least one book in October. I’ll be continuing through Harry Potter with my kids, so I expect to get through one or two more of those.

Finally, I’ve started ordering some of the trade paperbacks for comics on my huge list of “acclaimed non-superhero comics of the past 30 years I haven’t read yet.” I’ve been enjoying comics a lot lately, partly because a typical trade paperback is novella-length, and I can feel like I’m reading a lot more books.

See you next time!

The Read Report — August 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Transmetropolitan (Vol. 1)

Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson

Transmetropolitan has been on my radar for some time, even though I knew almost nothing about it. It was lodged in my brain alongside a bunch of other 90s-2000s non-superhero comics. I’ve recently discovered just how cheaply you can snag slightly beat-up trade paperbacks of old series at places like ThriftBooks, so I went ahead and purchased the first two volumes of the series just to see if I had any interest.

My feeling coming away from the first volume is that Transmetropolitan is weird for the sake of weird, and that particular brand of “edgy” that was popular in this era, but a little silly in retrospect. It is a depiction of the kind of cultural and technological singularity where almost everything is possible and is probably happening just down the street, but the absolutely schizophrenic nature of that kind of chaos doesn’t really jive with telling a deep or particularly coherent story.

The book begins with former journalist Spider Jerusalem living like a wild-man in a mountain-top cabin surrounded by booby-traps. He is naked, heavily tattooed, and clearly hasn’t gotten a shave or a haircut in a few years. We learn that he was the most famous journalist in a nearby city (simply known as The City), and he gave it all up to move out here. Unfortunately, he signed a contract for a book deal, overdue by five years, and now his publisher is threatening to take the money back. So off he goes, back to The City.

Spider breaks into the offices of his old newsfeed, secures a job and an apartment, removes all his hair with a chemical shower, and gets his trademark glasses out of the totally-not-a-Star-Trek-replicator in his kitchen. Then he turns on the news. There are cryogenic defrostees, people uploaded into nanite clouds, and humans surgically turning themselves into aliens and trying to succeed from The City and create their own colony. As it turns out, these will all be plots for subsequent issues.

The first volume didn’t wow me as an introduction. The chaos of The City struck me as an excuse to just throw any sort of futuristic spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. The characters all range from unpleasant to outright awful, and I have a hard time taking it seriously when the city is called The City and the protagonist has a name like Spider Jerusalem. But hey, it’s the first volume, and a lot of series don’t find their feet right away, so I started in on the next one…

Transmetropolitan (vol. 2)

Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson

I realized partway through this volume that the post-facts world of Transmetropolitan probably seemed more science-fictiony around the year 2000. Nowadays, it’s hardly any different than world outside my window. This certainly isn’t the first piece of sci-fi to satirize politics and religion, only to find that the future went and outdid them. Being subversive and edgy is not a good way to last—yesterday’s shocks are boring to tomorrow’s audience.

I also came to the conclusion that a lot of what rubs me the wrong way about the series is that it’s packed with big, obnoxious allegory. It’s constantly winking and nudging you.

Transmetropolitan doesn’t have an ongoing arc in these first couple volumes. It’s just a series of unrelated stories. This time, we get one about Spider’s assistant’s boyfriend, who decides to download himself into a cloud of nanites. After that, it’s a cryogenically frozen woman who wakes up and discovers that the future is impossible to acclimate to, and that nobody much cares to try and help her. Then there’s Spider’s tour of the “reservations,” hermetically sealed places throughout The City that are built to preserve different cultures and ways of life. Each of these works pretty well as a stand-alone short story, but it didn’t feel like it was building to anything bigger.

Ultimately, I found that Spider Jerusalem was one of the least interesting characters in his own book. It’s possible that some of these disparate threads will eventually weave back together into a larger story, but I wasn’t feeling it after two volumes. I don’t think I’ll be continuing this series.

The Witcher: Sword of Destiny

By Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the second Witcher book that’s billed as a short story collection. And it is, but they end up feeling like more than the sum of their parts. There are bigger arcs happening across these stories, continuing the events from the first book.

In addition to the titular Witcher, Dandelion the bard and the sorceress Yennifer are the other main characters. If there is an overall theme across the book, it’s the angst between Geralt and Yennefer, who are both outcasts and troublemakers in their own ways. They each think they can’t make the other person happy, while also being unable to permanently break things off.

There is also a great deal more world-building happening here, including the first mentions of the Wild Hunt, a mysterious recurring event where ghostly warriors cross the sky and portend disaster and war. These stories are still “low to the ground,” but they incorporate a bit more about the nations and politics of the northern kingdoms.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the Witcher without stories about the interactions between humans and magical creatures, whether that be a shapeshifter stealing friends’ identities or a pompous town mayor in love with a mermaid. It also sets up the series of books to follow, as Geralt meets Ciri, the kid princess whose destiny he inadvertently entwined with his own.

The Sandman: Fables and Reflections (Vol. 6)

Written By Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by P. Craig Russell

Much like Volume 3, Dream Country, this is a set of mostly stand-alone tales where Dream takes on a minor role. There’s a story about Emperor Norton, the real person who declared himself Emperor of the United States of America, a fable about a clan of eastern European werewolves, a tale of young Marco Polo getting lost (and eventually found) in the desert, and story of a spectacular Baghdad, greater than we ever knew it because it was traded into dreams so it might stay perfect forever.

Unlike Dream Country, there are a few things of note that tie back into the broader ongoing plot. For the first time in the series, we actually see “the prodigal,” Destruction, the one member of the Endless who has abdicated his position. We witness a retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy of Orpheus, who is an oracle, and Dream’s son. We see why Orpheus lives eternally as a severed head, and the cause of the rift between him and his father.

These events lead directly into Volume 7, and it really feels like the meandering main story is picking up steam.

The Sandman: Brief Lives (Vol. 7)

Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Jill Thompson

The issues of this arc are labeled as “chapters,” and this is probably the most linear and focused volume since the first. The beginning pulls together several threads from earlier stories, and the end implies a whole lot of bad things are in store for Dream.

Each chapter begins with a sequence of cryptic phrases, like this for chapter one:

Blossom for a lady

Want/not want

The view from the backs of mirrors

Not her sister

Rain in the doorway

The number you have dialed…

They turn out to be little landmarks in the story, a game where the reader can try to guess what might happen from these tidbits, and then check items off the list as they come to pass. It got me thinking how excellent the whole series is at these little things. From the surreal Dave McKean covers and interstitial art to the introductory quotes to the entertainingly themed credits, the Sandman books feel like absolutely every single element was labored over more than was really reasonable. All the little things add up.

The story of this volume centers around the duo of Dream and his youngest sister, Delirium (who used to be Delight). Delirium’s personality is somewhere between a young child and a lunatic, and you get the feeling that the rest of the oh-so-serious Endless family is perpetually humoring her. She decides to go looking for Destruction, the brother that abandoned the rest of the Endless and made it clear that he doesn’t want to be found. Delirium asks her siblings to help her, but one by one they brush her off. When she comes to Dream, the most serious of them all, it’s a surprise that he agrees to go with her. So the pair set off to find Destruction.

Eventually, we learn that Dream had ulterior motives, and never really expected to find Destruction. But he takes his responsibilities seriously, and since he promised to help Delirium, he turns to the one person who has the power to find the Endless, even when they do not want to be found: his own son, Orpheus. For this favor, Orpheus (a severed head who cannot die) asks his father to end his suffering.

The book ends with foreboding. They find Destruction, only to have him leave again. Morpheus returns to his realm, everything neatly wrapped up, and then reveals his chalk-white hands stained with his son’s blood. It’s made clear that there are consequences for the Endless when they spill family blood. The only question is what those consequences will be…

Small Gods

By Terry Pratchett

Sometimes I look at the Hitchhikers’ Guide omnibus on my shelf and I think sadly about how I’ll never be able to read another Douglas Adams story for the first time. But if there’s anyone who can compare to Adams, it has to be Terry Pratchett. I’m grateful that unlike Adams, he wrote so prolifically.

There are 41 books in the Discworld series, and I’ve been slowly going through them, picking up new ones at Half Price Books whenever I see them. I’m savoring them, because I know eventually I’ll run out.

Small Gods is about an accidental prophet named Brutha, in the desert land of Omnia, where the people worship the god Om. Omnia is a strict theocracy where the church is the central pillar of life, and it’s not uncommon for supposed sinners to have the badness tortured out of them. Faith is of the utmost importance in Omnia, so it’s especially awkward when Brutha discovers that Om is trapped in the form of a turtle with hardly any godlike powers at all, and this is because nobody besides Brutha actually believes in him anymore.

Brutha goes on a hero’s journey, and despite his best efforts he manages to overthrow the Omnian order, restore (real) belief in Om, and generally start making the country a place where people can live their lives without worrying about being randomly tortured.

Small Gods isn’t my favorite Discworld book, but it’s a parody with plenty of laughs and a few sideways glances toward our world. As usual, an average book by Terry Pratchett is quite good by anyone else’s standards.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

By J. K. Rowling

One of the joys of being a parent is getting to share things you enjoy with your kids. One of the strange things about being a parent of several children (with a few years in-between) is that I’ve shared a bunch of those things with my eldest kids, and my youngest knows nothing about them. So, although I read the Harry Potter books to my eldest son—and my daughter was sometimes in the general vicinity of the reading—I was told that we should read them again. And now we are.

I’ll say here that I don’t agree with Rowling and the garbage she is now known for spewing on social media. I also think it’s fashionable to criticize books by authors who are deemed terrible people. Despite Rowling acting out, I think the Harry Potter books are perfectly enjoyable.

A lot of the complaints about this series are about all the unbelievable aspects of the world-building. There are a lot of problems with the Wizarding World and its interactions with the regular world that just aren’t addressed. And that’s completely true. But I also think it doesn’t really matter.

The odd thing about this series is that it grew up along with its readership. The first book is very much a children’s story, in its form and in the language it uses. It’s not worried about perfectly consistent world-building, any more than Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks is, because the shape of the story still works. Part of that is because it borrows from fairy tales, starting with the classic evil step parents (or in this case, aunt and uncle), and the orphan boy who is destined to save the world.

So shockingly, my takeaway is that a super-bestselling book that started a huge pop-culture craze and made more money than some small countries does, in fact, do a lot of things well.

What I’m Reading in September

I’ll continue working my way through the Sandman and Witcher series. I might go for a couple brand-new books about writing that I just got. I also recently compiled a list of highly-rated comics from the last 20 years, and I might start working through some of those.

See you at the end of September.

The Read Report — July 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Sandman: Season of Mists (Volume 4)

By Neil Gaiman

My re-read of the Sandman series continues.

I was surprised how quickly this volume rushed into the plot that would drive this entire arc. For the first time, we see Dream meet with all of the other Endless, except for the still-unrevealed “prodigal.” His elder brother, Destiny, calls them together for a meeting, because his book (which describes everything that will ever happen) tells him that’s what’s he’s going to do.

In previous volumes, it was revealed that Dream was once in love with a mortal, and when she rebuffed his advances, he got very grumpy about it, and threw her in hell, where she’s been for a few thousand years. For some reason, Dream’s siblings bring this up, and amazingly, for the first time, he realizes that this was a pretty shitty thing to do.

He embarks off to Hell, and Gaiman cleverly sets us up to think that Lucifer is going to fight Morpheus, but when Dream arrives, he finds the Lightbringer shutting everything down. He gets his revenge on Dream by giving him the keys to an emptied Hell.

The rest of the book follows Dream as various old gods come to his kingdom to ask for the keys to Hell, a piece of prime psychic real estate. We see him for the first time as a royal figure, with these mythological figures seeking his favor. He turns out to be adept at navigating the politics of the situation, and he manages to get rid of the key and free his former girlfriend in the process.

I think this might be the first volume that is completely free of any superhero references, which is no big deal in modern comics, but was probably a rarity when it first released.

Sandman: A Game of You (Volume 5)

By Neil Gaiman

Volume 5 revisits Barbie (no, not that one), who was first introduced in Volume 2, The Doll’s House. She’s split with Ken (no, that that one either) and now lives in New York, in an apartment building with a whole new set of interesting neighbors. In Volume 2, we saw bits and pieces of Barbies dreams, which were an ongoing fantasy tale where she was the protagonist. Here, we find out that she hasn’t been dreaming for months, and when her dreams return, they bring some very real nightmares with them.

I’m hardly an arbiter of wokeness, but I will say that this story was written in 1991, involves a lesbian couple, a trans woman, and a homeless person with implied mental illness, and feels surprisingly modern and respectful in the way it treats all of these characters. The world around them doesn’t always treat them kindly, but the narrative explores them honestly as people with good aspects and interesting flaws, rather than caricatures.

This volume also barely involves Morpheus. The apartment building crew venture into Barbie’s strange dreams and confront an invading creature. Only at the very end does Dream show up, giving us a few tidbits of info about his past.

I have to say at this point that I had forgotten how meandering the series is. There are certainly bits and pieces of connective tissue: characters that keep coming up, and the ongoing theme of Dream learning how to be more “human” and a bit less of a stodgy, immortal curmudgeon. And hints of a feud with Desire. I’m now halfway through the original run, and there’s no clear overarching conflict apparent. Yet. Luckily, the world, the characters, and the writing are so good that I don’t much mind.

Borne: A Novel

By Jeff Vandermeer

The city of Ambergris left a strong impression on me, and I decided about a year ago that I needed to explore more of Jeff Vandermeer’s work. So I picked up Dead Astronauts, only to find it almost inscrutable. Then I discovered it was actually the second book in a series. I finally got back around to picking up the first book, and that is Borne.

Vandermeer has once again created an amazing setting in the confines of a city. We learn that the Earth has been ravaged by environmental catastrophe and bioengineering run amok, but apart from this, very little is revealed beyond the City. The City has no name, and it is a ruin surrounded by harsh desert. It is inhabited by scavengers, and by Mord, the kaiju-esque 3-story-tall bear. Mord and many other creatures were engineered by the also-unnamed Company, which exists as a huge, white building at the edge of the city, abutted by the holding ponds where the bio-waste and failed experiments are dumped, to eat each other and be eaten, and sometimes to escape into the City.

Borne is about a scavenger, Rachel, and her partner and lover, Wick, a sort of freelance bioengineer who once worked for the Company. They protect and defend their base of operations, a half-ruined apartment building, from scavengers, from another Company alumn called The Magician, and from Mord and his monstrous bear minions. Rachel discovers a piece of biotech, which she calls Borne, who turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter and becomes a sort of surrogate child to her.

I find Vandermeer fascinating because he is frequently riding the very edge of the Principle of Least Necessary Information. This book and the Ambergris stories are all a kind of puzzle that manages to propel you forward through the story while scrounging for hints and clues about what exactly is going on. I devoured this book in a day, because I couldn’t stop reading.

The Strange Bird

By Jeff Vandermeer

The Strange Bird is a hundred-page story set in the same world as Borne. It starts with some tantalizing bits outside the City, as the titular Strange Bird escapes from a bio-engineering lab and sets off in search of…something…it’s not sure what, but it knows it’s got to find it.

After a series of adventures that leave it considerably worse for wear, the bird arrives in the City and is captured by The Magician. This middle part of the story covers some of the same events from Borne from a different viewpoint, providing  more context around the events toward the end of that book.

Eventually, the bird escapes once more, in an entirely new form, and continues its journey. When it finally arrives at its destination, it discovers that the thing it was looking for is long gone, but the ending is bittersweet and it still manages to find some peace at the end of the road.

Dead Astronauts

By Jeff Vandermeer

I was excited to return to Dead Astronauts, now that I had the first two stories in the series fresh in my mind. If Borne rides the edge of Least Necessary Information, Dead Astronauts jumps head-first off the edge. It is experimental in the extreme, living somewhere between poetry and novel. In my original reading, I was lost. With the added context of Borne and The Strange Bird, I was able to follow the story, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything.

Dead Astronauts has four parts. In the first part, we follow the three “astronauts.” They are Moss, an ever-changing plant creature in the form of a human, Grayson, an actual astronaut with a robotic eye, and Chen, a former Company bio-engineer who sees the world in equations. These three have made it their mission to destroy the Company, and to this end, Moss shunts them between parallel universes to try to find a version of the City and the Company where they can gain an advantage. The Company, however, also coordinates between parallel universes, and in the end, the Company seems to overcome them.

The second part shifts perspective (and uses the rare second-person!) We follow a character who remains unnamed for almost the entire section, living homeless in a city that may be a past version of the City, or may be another place entirely. Creatures from the Company begin to appear , followed by the Company’s agents, biological and robotic. There are pale men who may have some relation to Wick from Borne, and a duck with a broken wing, an innocuous creature that turns out to be a horrible monstrosity.

In the third part, we learn more about what goes on inside the Company. We learn about Charlie X, a character who has appeared in the first two stories in smaller roles, and how intertwined he is with everything that has happened. While we get more information, the origin and the nature of the Company are never entirely explained. Is it responsible for the ruination of earth? Or did it merely take advantage of it? And just how many of its tentacles did it send out across parallel universes? Vandermeer gives plenty of tantalizing clues, but no clear answers.

The final part of the story follows the blue fox, another bio-engineered creature that has appeared here and there in the other stories. The fox shares a connection with Moss, and it can also cross between parallel worlds. In this final part, the different storylines become intertwined across time and the different versions of the city. Causes and effects are all mixed up in twists and loops.

Reading these three books in order, I enjoyed them immensely. If you can accept that not everything will have a clear answer, and you’re interested in puzzling through some of the mysteries, I would highly recommend the series. This is pretty much the pinnacle of literary science-fiction.

Reamde

By Neal Stephenson

I already wrote another post about this book, so I won’t say any more here.

What I’m Reading in August

I’ll continue The Sandman series, and pick The Witcher series back up as well (in fact, I’m already halfway through the next book). I’m also eyeing some unread books on my bookshelf by Terry Pratchett and Andy Weir. See you in a month.

The Read Report — June 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. This month, I continued my reread of the Sandman series, and delved into the Witcher books. I also took a look at a new TTRPG.

As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House

Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Mike Dringenberg

The first Sandman trade paperback followed Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) through his embarrassing imprisonment by a petty modern sorcerer, his escape, and the subsequent retrieval of his magical tools. It also introduced some of his siblings, the immortal personifications known as the Endless.

However, things aren’t yet back to normal. In this second trade paperback, Dream must clean up his kingdom, which fell into disarray in his absence. Several of his minions are missing, including The Corinthian, a murderous nightmare with mouths for eyes. To make matters worse, a Vortex has appeared: a mortal with the ability to tear down the walls between dreams (which turns out to cause a lot of problems). Mixed up in all of it are Dream’s siblings, Desire and Despair, who plan a potentially deadly trap for their older brother.

Through flashbacks, we see stories from Dream’s past, interspersed with his present-day hunt for the escaped dreams and the Vortex. While he is obsessed with his responsibilities, there are some indications that his imprisonment has taught him to have more compassion in his dealings with mortals.

This volume confirms that the series is not afraid to wade into dark topics, with storylines involving an abused child and a convention of serial killers doing the sorts of things you’d expect them to do.

The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Kelley Jones

This volume contains four stand-alone stories set in the Sandman universe. Some involve Dream heavily, some barely, or not at all. They’re all enjoyable in their own way, but not strictly necessary to read if you’re only interested in the “main” storyline.

They include a story about a feline prophet from the perspective of cats, a captive muse used (and abused) by artists for fame and fortune, Shakespeare’s theatre company putting on a play for faeries, and the second story to feature Death, about an un-killable super-hero who wants to die after her powers alienate her from society.

The book ends with some notes, revealing the origins of these stories (namely that Gaiman was itching to do different things after struggling to complete the Doll’s House arc). It includes the original script for Episode 17: Calliope. If you’re interested in writing for comics, it’s a nice side-by-side comparison of script and finished product, from a widely acknowledged master of the craft.

Die: The RPG

By Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans

This was a Kickstarter that I backed somewhat on a whim.

It starts with a group of people attending a school reunion. They played table-top RPGs together when they were younger. Now they’re all grown up, and they’re getting together to do one final adventure. Only this game is different. It’s magical, and it transports them, literally, to another world.

It’s basically TTRPG Jumanji.

Die began its life as a comic series. You can read the first issue for free. Now, it’s also a real TTRPG by the same authors. It’s a nice, 400-page hard-bound all-in-one rulebook.

The main innovation the system offers is a doubly-layered story. Players first create a cast of “real life” characters, a group with history and emotional baggage. Then those characters become the paragons (the classes) in the fantasy world of Die.

Die eschews the usual fantasy archetypes. The default rules require each player to play a different class, and each is associated with one of the classic TTRPG dice. Characters can play as…

  • The Dictator (D4), with the power to alter others’ emotional states
  • The Fool (D6), who gains incredible luck so long as they’re being dangerously daring or cavalier
  • The Emotion Knight (D8), who harnesses a specific emotion for martial power and wields a sentient weapon
  • The Neo (D10), a cyberpunk thief whose powers are fueled by money
  • The Godbinder (D12), a spiritual mercenary who gains magical powers by going into debt with the divine
  • The Master (D20), is played by the GM, and can break the rules and cheat at the risk of destroying themselves.

The game is relatively rules-light. It’s a D6 dice-pool game, with the class dice adding a little variety for special skills. The book includes a single chapter bestiary, and very little incidental description of items.

It is also story-light. It doesn’t have a setting so much as a meta-setting, a world with 20 regions that can take the form of whatever settings you want to pull into your game. The Master plays the ultimate villain who forces the players into this alternate world, and all the players must collectively decide whether to stay in the fantasy or leave together. At least, all the players who are alive at the end…

There are some interesting rules for death, where players come back as zombie versions of themselves, capable of regaining life only by taking it from one of the other players. And there are The Fair, the hidden denizens of the world of Die, with their own secret agenda and godlike powers.

I don’t have an active RPG group at the moment, and I haven’t had the chance to play this yet, but it feels like a game designed for veteran players. The two-layered characterization requires players to deeply understand and heavily role-play their characters. It’s unlikely to make for a fun hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. The lack of detailed systems or predefined settings and adventures mean the GM is going to have to either prep a lot or do some excellent improv (and probably both).

Overall, an interesting game book to read, and one I’m happy to have on my shelf, but probably not one I’ll be playing any time soon. For experienced groups who are looking for a new game, it might be a system worth trying.

The Witcher: The Last Wish

By Adrzej Sapkowski

The Witcher series contains eight entries: a five novel series and three stand-alone books. This is the first: a short story collection. They were originally written in Polish by Andrzej Sapkowski and later translated into a variety of languages, several successful video games, and an ongoing Netflix series that just happens to have released a new season.

These sword-and-sorcery tales take place in an Eastern-European-feeling secondary world and follow the titular Witcher, Geralt, one of a dying group of magic-infused monster hunters. Geralt is often feared and treated poorly because of his mutant nature, and an ongoing theme of the books is that the humans are often more evil than the monsters.

In addition to monsters and humans, there are several non-human races like dwarves, elves, and gnomes. There are hints that these races once ruled the continent, but were long ago ousted by humans and their kingdoms in a series of brutal and attritive wars. Now, they are forced to choose between hopeless rebellions or integration into a society that treats them as dangerous and lesser beings.

Geralt, by virtue of being an outsider among humans, moves between all these different factions and groups, managing to make friends and enemies in equal measure just about everywhere. The stories often hinge on questions of ethics, with Geralt being thrust into situations with no good choices.

This is a great intro to the character and the world. Many of the elements are fantasy staples and little homages to fairy tales, but they’re infused with little twists that make them all feel fresh again.

The Witcher: Blood of Elves

By Andrzej Sapkowski

In the release chronology, this is technically the third book, however it is the first book of the five-part series of novels, and the place to start if you’re less interested in the short stories.

I have to admit, the beginning of the book is a little hard to swallow. The famous troubadour Dandelion sings to a crowd, crooning a thinly veiled ballad about the Witcher, Geralt, and his young princess ward Ciri. For the remainder of the chapter, the crowd of listeners dump exposition about these characters, their past, the world, and the current political situation. Somehow, half a dozen of the people gathered have had run-ins with these people. After that, however, it livens up quickly.

The story mostly follows Geralt and Ciri, and the sorceresses Yennifer and Triss. Ciri is the princess of a kingdom annexed by invaders. While the invasion was halted by an alliance of other kingdoms, war seems to be looming on a variety of fronts, and at least a few dangerous people are looking for Ciri and her Witcher protector.

This book really expands the world with some tantalizing hints of a long and complex history. It’s revealed that monsters came into the world through an event known as the Conjunction of the Spheres, an overlaying of dimensions more than a thousand years previous where things could cross between worlds. Monsters are invasive species, and while many are dangerous, they are not necessarily well-adapted to this world and are generally in decline, leaving Witchers with less work. It is also implied that humans may have entered the world during the Conjunction, explaining how they suddenly started to take over ancient non-human lands.

Sapkowski introduces some interesting anachronisms to his largely medieval setting. Sorcerers and Witchers apparently understand quite a bit about biology, physiology, and the origins of disease, and use a mix of magic and modern(-ish) medicine.

This is a great first book for a series, introducing important characters, building the world, and hinting at bigger mysteries and a villain lurking in the shadows. While Geralt is at home among the common folk (rarely interacting with anyone more important than a mayor in The Last Wish), this book promises an epic fantasy series with plenty of royal politics, assassins, magic, and world-shattering consequences. The characters drive the action, and are largely pulled into these broader political situations against their wills. Geralt is the perfect gruff-but-lovable protagonist, and I look forward to learning more about the cosmology of Sapkowski’s world.

What I’m Reading in July

I’ll continue the Sandman and Witcher series, I’m going to get back to Discworld with my kids, and I’ve got a Neal Stephenson novel I’ve been slowly picking at in e-book that I’m determined to finish.

The Read Report — May 2023

Good God, I read a lot of books in May. You can find out more about why in another post.

I don’t have the desire or time to write full-on blog posts for every book I read, but I’ve come to appreciate how blogging gives me an opportunity to reflect a little bit more explicitly on what I got out of a book. So, I’m going to start writing these monthly posts to talk about what I’m reading.

If you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle

This triply-titled book is the kind of non-fiction that is perfect for fiction writers. It’s full of interesting ideas that could spark a story. Bridle is a little bit “out there,” but this exploration of intelligence comes at an old topic from an interesting perspective.

The book postulates that we should consider a lot more under the umbrella of intelligence than we typically do. The human definition of intelligence always seems to be “things that humans do,” and Bridle argues that this definition dramatically limits our understanding of the universe.

As you might guess from the title, Bridle argues that various animals, plants and machines all have their own varied forms of intelligence, often radically different from our own. He provides some interesting examples to back up his opinions, although some of the leaps of logic toward the end of the book didn’t quite land for me.

The Way of Zen

By Alan Watts

This is an introduction to the basics of Zen Buddhism, along with some history and context.

Alan Watts was an odd duck. A British-born writer and speaker who gained popularity after moving to California in the 1950s, he was a priest before becoming enamored with Asian religions and philosophy, and he found a receptive audience in the hippie movement.

I don’t really know if Watts is much appreciated in more mainstream or traditional Zen circles, but he has an entertaining style and a knack for explaining abstract concepts through metaphors and parables aimed at a western audience. His many recorded philosophical lectures have found new life on the internet in the YouTube era.

Becoming a Writer

By Dorothea Brande

I wrote a whole post about this one.

The Black Tides of Heaven / The Red Threads of Fortune

By Neon Yang

A fun pair of fantasy novellas set in an Asian-inspired secondary world. Despite a pair of royal twins and a magic system based around elements, these books feel original and fresh. Quick reads full of action and adventure.

What I really appreciated about these books was that all of the magical fantasy action was driven by relatable and varied interpersonal conflicts: disagreements between parents and children, irritation with in-laws, and the loss of loved-ones.

The first book also successfully tricked me into believing that it would end with a big fight, then switched it up at the last second and gave me a more cerebral conclusion.

Animal Farm

By George Orwell

Originally published in 1945, Animal Farm is a skinny little book that Orwell sometimes described as a fairy story. It’s a modern (for its day) fable about a group of animals that take over the farm, only to have their noble rebellion slowly subverted back into tyranny.

I’ll be the first to say that allegorical novels aren’t exactly the sort of thing I’m very excited to read, and I probably wouldn’t have read this if it wasn’t considered such a classic. However, it’s a very quick read, and entertaining enough that I didn’t regret it.

In many ways, this book feels like an early prototype of Orwell’s 1984, which was published only four years later. Many of the same ideas appear in that book, but in less simple, satirical forms.

The Wes Anderson Collection / The Grand Budapest Hotel

By Matt Zoller Seitz

These are big “coffee table” books with some great illustrations and images from the movies.

The original book spent a good amount of time on each of Anderson’s first seven movies. While I’m not much of a movie critic, I do have an appreciation for experts talking about the things they love. This was an interesting look into that world. While a lot of it is specific to filmmaking, there are some useful tidbits about building good stories in general.

The second book is a bit thinner, but focused entirely on a single film. For my money, Grand Budapest is Anderson’s best work, but this still felt like more of a deep dive than I needed on the one movie, especially when contrasting it with the first book.

While they may make more of these books as the director continues to make movies, I think these two were enough to satisfy me, and I’ll get off the ride at this stop.

Flash Futures

(Anthology, edited by Eric Fomley)

This was one of my backer rewards from a Kickstarter for The Martian magazine. It’s an anthology of sci-fi flash fiction, generally on the darker side. I have to admit, while there were some enjoyable stories here, I prefer the drabbles on the site.

I think flash fiction is one of the hardest formats to write. I enjoy drabbles and micro-fiction because it’s hard to even tell a coherent story at that length. Pulling it off is a bit of a magic trick. At the 500 or 1000 words of a flash piece, you still can’t tell very much story, but you also don’t have the incredible tightness of a drabble, where you’re fighting to fit every single word and forced to cut words in clever ways.

Hellblazer: Out of Season (Volume 17)

Written by Mike Carey

Art by Chris Brunner, Leonardo Manco, Marcelo Frusin, Steve Dillon

This was a random pick from the library.

I love Constantine as a character, and his whole milieu, but how many times can there be a worldwide supernatural apocalypse event? It seems like it happens every year or so in these books. I really prefer the smaller, more intimate story arcs that focus on just how miserable it is to be in Constantine’s social circle.

I will say, this is a pretty great connecting arc. The twist at the end is interesting, and it creates new characters and problems. It’s a great example of finishing a chunk of episodic story by building a lot of new scaffolding that future stories can be built upon. That’s not always an easy thing to achieve. Good lessons for anyone who wants to write a series.

The Sandman: Overture

Written by Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by J.H. Williams and Dave Stewart

Not my first time reading this, and it won’t be my last. If you love comics and you haven’t read this book, you are missing out.

It is, by far, the most beautiful Sandman book, and that is a high bar. There are no straight-edged standard panels here. It’s a master-class in all the different ways a comics page can be composed. While the original Sandman was often very dark and brooding, Overture contrasts its serious blacks with all sorts of psychedelic color.

I’ve read some complaints about the story not being as good as the originals. And that might be true, but I also don’t think it’s too far off the original series. Neil Gaiman does his usual Neil Gaiman things, crafting stories that feel simultaneously new and old, familiar and strange, playing around in one of the worlds where he is most comfortable.

Although this is a prequel, I think it definitely ought to be read after the original run. Narratively, the story comes before the other books, but the references and emotional beats are clearly designed as a follow-up.

Reading this again gave me the itch to read even more Sandman. So…

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (Volume 1)

Written by Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Kelley Jones

The big, bad original, from the early days of DC’s Vertigo imprint.

Despite Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) being almost infinitely old when we first meet him, this is a fantastic origin story. It’s a satisfying arc in its own right, as Morpheus is trapped, escapes, and then has to regain his tools and repair his kingdom. It also sets the tone for the entire series: a delightful mix of modern and ancient stories in a new mythological frame.

Almost all of the issues collected here are dedicated to the main plot, with the exception of the final one. “The Sound of Her Wings” remains one of the greatest single issues of a comic of all time, characterizing Death as a whimsical, kind, and profoundly compassionate older sister to Dream.

What I’m Reading in June

In June I’ll be continuing my re-read of the original Sandman series. I’m also delving into the Witcher series and a brand new TTRPG.