Tag: The Witcher

The Read Report — Sept and October 2024

We’re doubling up two months again! Why? Because I didn’t read much in September, and by golly, I’m all about providing maximum quality to my readership.

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of private islands for billionaires.

Dune, the Graphic Novel — Vol. 1, 2, 3

Adapted by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Illustrated by Raul Allen and Patricia Martin

Dune is one of those perpetually evergreen sci-fi books that has somehow managed to maintain relevancy for more than half a century. This graphic novel adaptation of the book comes on the heels of the big budget Denis Villeneuve movies (despite the fact that those movies also have graphic novel adaptations).

I’ll admit that I had uncertain expectations for these books. Dune is fairly dense, as evidenced by its longevity and the very different adaptations that have been made over the years. These three volumes cover the plot of the original book, but there was no way to make it work in comic form without significant trimming. Even beyond that, Dune is a book that is often dialogue-sparse and heavy on characters’ internal thoughts, and this is a challenge that any visual adaptation needs to overcome.

The framing in the first book mostly stays out of the way. It’s nice and clear, but avoids any interesting or dangerous choices. There are a few multi-panel zooms and pans; a variety of big and small, wide and narrow panels; but almost no verticality in a medium where pages are taller than they are wide, and not a single curved line. It’s all rectangles, all the time.

However, the second and third books expand into a much wider variety of framing techniques. There are several pages with interesting nested circular frames, and a little bit of blending with nebulous or absent frames. It’s not quite the insane level of frame shenanigans you’ll see in something like Sandman: Overture, but it’s still praise-worthy.

The art is a little inconsistent, but never bad. There are a few faces and figures that come across as stilted or flat. It improves steadily in the second and third volumes. If I was disappointed, it was only because the whole package didn’t quite live up to the potential shown in some of the best, gorgeous full-page spreads. Hoo-boy, that full page sandworm reveal shot is fantastic. Color is used to great effect, with the characters and elements of House Atreides shaded blue, in contrast to the reds and pinks of House Harkonnen and the planet of Arrakis.

It tells the story competently, but I would have really loved to see more of that classic sci-fi strangeness. For all of the aspects of Dune that feel tropey in modern sci-fi (cough-cough-desert-planet-cough), it is a book where the people, places and cultures feel genuinely foreign and weird. The best aspect of the much-lampooned 1984 David Lynch movie adaptation was that it leaned into that weirdness. Even the Hollywood-friendly Villeneuve movies capture some of that magic with the Sardaukar throat-singing, insectoid spaceships, and psychopathic man-baby Harkonnen aesthetic. Here, the clothes, the technology, the landscapes all look a little too normal.

The story did, as I expected, suffer in some ways due to the inherent trimming that had to happen to fit into the graphic novel form factor. There is no room for expanded dialogue or exposition. The writers do take advantage of the ability to make characters thoughts visible to the reader. Ultimately, this is a slightly abridged version of the story, but there are only a couple of places where the development feels rushed as a result. The story isn’t broken, but it’s occasionally bent and loses some nuance.

My daughter (who didn’t really pay attention when I was reading the original book with my son) decided to read these books as soon as I was done with them. While I thought they might serve as a lighter, easier introduction to Dune, especially for a younger reader, her opinion was that it was still pretty confusing.

The Subtle Knife

By Philip Pullman

This is the second book in the Dark Materials trilogy, which I’m working through for bedtime reading with my children.

The Subtle Knife is a very different book from The Golden Compass. The first book takes place entirely in a secondary world, and feels like a traditional fantasy novel. It follows Lyra Belacqua, who is the classic precocious child/chosen one archetype. This second book takes Lyra into our world and another fantasy world, and introduces a second viewpoint character named Will Parry.

Will’s story is darker and hits a little closer to home, since he hails from the “real” world, and his problems, while extreme, are more relatable. I was curious to see how his story connects to Lyra’s. It’s clear that there are parallels between the two worlds, so I assumed the two characters are entangled in ways they don’t understand.

Pullman doesn’t lock us into a strict POV—the book jumps between Will and Lyra—but it does feel like Will is heavily favored, and certainly seems to make more meaningful choices. Lyra often seems to be pulled along as a sidekick, and this is a significant demotion of her character after the first book. I wonder if this pairing would have felt more natural if Pullman had included parts of Will’s story in the first book, even if Will and Lyra didn’t cross paths until the second.

The book ends with a strange series of events. An important character dies for a reason that was only lightly hinted at once. Another major character dies because he forgot that he had a “get out of jail free” card until it was too late. The villains, after being completely stymied for the entire book, are suddenly pretty effective. And it looks like book three is going to be even moreso Will’s story, at least to begin with.

The feeling I had when reading The Golden Compass was that this is a serious kids’ fantasy series that doesn’t quite succeed at achieving the plot, deep characterization, and world-building that other YA fantasy has achieved in the last couple decades. That feeling is not going away here.

I do still believe that Pullman has some genuine weirdness in his setting and plot that deviates unusually far from the classic Tolkien fantasy formulas, and I really hope that it will blow up in book three.

The New Age of Apocalypse

By Larry Hama, Akira Yoshida, Tony Bedard

As I mentioned in my August recap, I discovered a lost box of superhero comics when I moved to my new house. This month, I re-read the “new” Age of Apocalypse.

The original Age of Apocalypse was a big cross-book event that ran for four or five months across all of the X-Men books in the mid ’90s. It’s my favorite thing in superhero comics, although that is probably a function of my age when it hit, the state of Marvel at that time, and a good dose of classic nostalgia. I also don’t really read superhero comics anymore, so there’s really no opportunity for anything to usurp it.

The New Age of Apocalypse is the trade paperback collection of a limited-run series that released for the 10-year anniversary of the original event and picks up the story in the same alternate universe where the originals left off.

The book is drawn in the same heavy-lined, anime-inspired style of the Ultimate X-Men books I reviewed in the August read report. This style is clean and easy to read, and the artists are certainly skilled and make it work, but something about it just rubs me the wrong way. It’s a little too cartoony.

The story follow’s Magnetos X-Men as they try to pick up the pieces in the wake of Apocalypse’s collapsed North American empire. There is a mystery element, with Mr. Sinister playing the villain, but the resolution of that mystery ends up being…kind of dumb. There is a soap opera quality of over-the-top character motivations and emotions, and some of the characters change their minds seemingly at the drop of a hat. If I’m being charitable, I’d say that the writers tried to cram too much plot into relatively few issues, and this explains the abruptness of the action and mood swings of the characters.

Much like Ultimate X-Men, the New AoA feels like a classic comic book story with classic comic book failings. It’s a little more disappointing to me, but that’s only because I have such a fondness for the original AoA.

On that note, my box of old comics does include almost the entire run of the original Age of Apocalypse. I’m a little afraid to read those issues again, lest I discover that it’s not quite as good as my faded and nostalgic memory would claim. But I might do it anyway.

The Witcher: The Tower of Swallows

By Andrzej Sapkowski

Dear God, I did it! After several months of promising that I would get back to it, I finally finished this book.

The Tower of Swallows is the penultimate volume in the main five-book Witcher series, and it suffers a bit of the classic long fantasy series syndrome. All of the characters are wandering across the land, spending a long time trying to get somewhere for something to happen.

Our three main characters, Ciri, Geralt, and Yennefer, are all split up for this entire book, and I suspect this is a lot of what slows it down. They each have their own cast of secondary characters in orbit, and while a lot is happening, it still ends up feeling like all the pieces are being lined up just right for everything exciting to happen in the final volume.

That said, it’s still a good book in a great series. The setting, heavily inspired by Polish mythology, continues to shine. The world feels alive with complexity and depth, and even the characters with supernatural powers are often at the mercy of bigger cultural and political forces.

I’m beginning to feel that Sapkowski’s literary calling card is his ability to build a narrative through a dozen little frame stories. The book is a mix of flashbacks and retellings of events from different perspectives: a bard’s memoirs, a late night story next to the hearth, or the testimony of a soldier on trial for treason. It’s to the author’s credit that all of these blend together into a cohesive quilt of smaller stories.

With any luck, I’ll finish the final volume before the end of the year. I’ve really enjoyed my time with the Witcher and his cohorts, and I’m hopeful that Sapkowski will answer the remaining questions, finish off the biggest villains, and bring it all to a satisfying conclusion.

The Read Report — March 2024

Well, we’re halfway through April, but I’m just getting around to my monthly reading recap. This month was mostly continuing series: The Witcher, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and finally finishing Harry Potter with my kids.

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop 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 mega-yachts for billionaires.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

By Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is often cited as the pinnacle of American short fiction, and I haven’t read any of his work since college. Perfect for my year of short stories. However, this particular collection is 650 pages, and I only managed about half of that in March, so I’ll be continuing in April.

If you’ve heard anything about Hemingway, it was probably that he’s known for his short, terse sentences. While those sentences are certainly present, he actually mixes up his sentence styles quite a bit. I feel like this description of him has been cargo-culted through undergrad English programs for decades. Possibly unpopular opinion: many of his best sentences are quite long.

While the majority of Hemingway stories are quite short and straightforward, the language is sometimes a little bit of a slog. We’re far enough removed from the times and places in these stories that it’s like visiting another land. The style and word choice is old fashioned enough that it’s sometimes like translating a different dialect. It’s not like parsing Shakespeare or anything, but I’m probably getting less out of it than a contemporary reader would.

None of these stories are particularly plot-heavy, and many are vignettes with scarcely any plot at all. They capture a feeling and a place and time, but I find myself wishing that more would happen.

If you’re a modern reader who is acclimated to fast-paced, plot-heavy stories, and you’re not interested in the historical value or the literary prose, I can’t really recommend reading all of the Complete Hemingway. However, I think anyone with an interest in short fiction should read at least a few of his more famous stories.

The Witcher: Baptism of Fire

By Andrezej Sapkowski

War is raging between the kingdoms of the north and Nilfgard. The Witcher is recovering from a near-fatal beating at the hands of the traitorous sorcerer, Vigilfortz. Ciri has become a bandit in Nilfgard, (though Nilfgard claims she is safe under the protection of the Emperor). Yennefer is gone, missing after the battle at the sorcerer’s conclave.

We appear to have reached the section of the fantasy series where the main characters are all split up and must fend for themselves. For Ciri, this means having to survive for the first time without the protection of Geralt or Yennefer, and falling in with a very bad crowd.

For Geralt, the Witcher, this means coming to grips with the possibility that he is not strong enough to protect the people he loves without some help. Despite himself, he collects a motly crew that includes his longtime bard friend, Dandelion; Regis, the old alchemist with a dark secret; Milva, the human archer allied with the non-human scoi’atel rebellion; and a caravan of kind-hearted dwarves scavenging and collecting refugees in the wake of battle.

Yennefer’s absence remains a mystery for most of the book, but she comes back into the story with a meeting of a new alliance of sorceresses from the north and Nilfgard. As usual, the wizards are always plotting ways to control the events of the world. Unfortunately, those plans still involve Ciri.

The strength of the Witcher books thus far is the way the story integrates the large-scale political machinations and battles with the personal connections between characters.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2

Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal

We begin with John Carter and Gullivar Jones as leaders in a war of many races on mars. One alien race, holed up in a fortress, escapes in rockets headed for earth. Thus begins the Martian invasion of tripods, a la War of the Worlds.

The first volume of League was so short and introduced so many characters that there was limited opportunity to delve into each one. It worked, partly, because the source material was already familiar. In Volume 2, there is space for more characterization: romance, betrayal, and plenty of fractures and disagreements between the League’s members (as well as Bond, M, and the British government).

If Volume 1 was the origin story, Volume 2 feels like an abrupt finale. Two members of the League end up dead and the rest are estranged by the time the story is over.

The weakness of the series so far is that all these exciting characters have so little control of their own lives. The violent and self-centered Hyde and Griffin act on their own impulses, mostly to their  detriment. Mina and Quatermain, and to some extent Nemo, are the “good kids” of the group, who actually follow orders, and are once again used to carry out actions they don’t understand or necessarily agree with. While the League plays a major role in the fight against the martians, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were side characters in their own story.

Volume 2 concludes with a thirty-page illustrated travelogue that hints at several earlier iterations of the League, composed of literary characters from previous eras. It also hints at the future.

Like the Quatermain story at the end of the first volume, this was too tedious for me, and I ended up skimming by the end. There are tantalizing references to the previous Leagues and the adventures of Allan and Mina will have after the Martian invasion. But much like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, endless descriptions of fantastic places become dull when they have no characters or plot to anchor them.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal

Set in the same alternate universe as the first two volumes, we’ve jumped to 1958. The totalitarian post-war Big Brother government has just fallen in England, and Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain are back after years abroad.

Black Dossier expects the reader to have slogged through the travelogue at the end of Volume 2, which contains a lot of mostly elided story. It explains where the pair have been all these years, why they are young-bodied and effectively immortal, who the heck this Orlando character is, and what exactly is up with the Blazing World.

Black Dossier is a very strange comic, a time-jumping multimedia extravaganza. It begins as an ordinary comic, as Mina and Quatermain trick a rather nasty version of James Bond into gaining them access to military intelligence records. They proceed to find the black dossier of information about all the different incarnations of the League, and make their escape.

Safely back at their boarding house lodgings, they begin to read the dossier. Then the narrative  pauses to show the contents of the files.

The rest of the books shifts back and forth between Mina and Quatermain in ’58, fleeing military intelligence, and the dossier’s files, which range from lost Shakespearean folios to memoirs and maps, to borderline erotica/porn.

This book is incredibly horny. It makes some sense, with the pulp fiction roots that the series embraces wholeheartedly, but at a certain point it just comes across as a little juvenile, especially when some sections have no purpose in the story and exist just to be sexy.

The book ends with a 3D glasses chapter, and a play on the end of midsummer night’s dream — instead of comparing stories to dreams, it plays on the way science fiction has shaped the world over the years.

The League books have always been a mix of high-brow and pulpy. Unfortunately, the whole experience is pretty uneven. Some sections are dull and self-indulgent, feeling more like a collection of backstory notes than proper story, and it’s frustrating that you need to cross-reference everything to get a sense of exactly what’s going on.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

By J. K. Rowling

This final book of the series eschews the structures that have held fast through the previous books. Harry isn’t going to school. He’s on the run, searching for the immortal lich villain’s phylacteries horcruxes. The story alternates between a series of narrow escapes and heists.

The death of a secondary character at the end of the fourth book was fairly shocking compared to the surrounding material, but the tone is so much darker by this final book that major characters are dying every few chapters.

The biggest problem I have with this book is how much time the three protagonists spend wandering, with no idea what to do. They fight, separate, come back together. They argue and complain. The middle of the story gets bogged down and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s too bad, because the first third and last third of the book are packed with good action.

Right in the center of this soggy middle is a sequence where the main characters acquire an important macguffin without any effort on their part. This is all explained much later, but it still feels like a major success falling into their laps almost accidentally.

Finally, I have to complain at least a little bit about the amount of info-dumping that occurs in the last couple chapters of the book. The biggest info-dump comes through the pensieve, a magical device that allows Harry to view other people’s memories. This device is Rowling’s exposition machine in the latter half of the series, but it is exercised to such an extent in this book that we effectively get a whole chapter of wading through memories. I can’t help but feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, allowing Rowling an easy way to reveal all the important secrets of a major character right at the end, without any of the messy difficulties of figuring out how the characters could discover that information.

With all that said, and the occasional other complaints I’ve lodged in earlier Read Reports, the series holds up pretty well. It feels relatively unique in the way its voice changes so significantly from the beginning of the series to the end. It also creates a huge cast of interesting characters. So even if I may be irritated by the inconsistencies of the magic or the incredible dysfunctionality of wizard society and government, the story still gets me to care about what’s happening to Harry and his friends.

What I’m Reading in April

I’m going to be finishing off the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Volumes three and four. I’ll be reading the fourth novel in the Witcher Saga, Tower of Swallows. I’ll also be doing my best to finish The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.

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 — 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 — 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.