Voyage of the Basilisk & In the Labyrinth of Drakes

Marie Brennan, 2015 & 2016

(August 2016)

I’ll refer you back to my previous comments about needing a bit of a breather after reading The Vegetarian, and what better way than with Marie Brennan’s Darwin genderswap mind candy? I mean, it’s a superior sort of mind candy, certainly, but it’s exactly the sort of world you can sink into without having to challenge yourself to analyse every detail, should you so wish. And I so wished.

The Vegetarian

Han Kang, 2007 [Deborah Smith, 2015]

(August, 2016)

  

Neither a pleasant nor an easy read. Extraordinarily well written, but in many ways that just makes it worse.

The Devourers

Indra Das, 2015

(July 2016)

Early (well, more like halfway through) contender for book of the year. There is so much going on here, so once I’ve given due prominence to the utterly raw and visceral nature of book as a whole, I’m going to retreat into a bit of philosophising while I try to get the rest of my thoughts in order.

Saga & Sex Criminals

Saga, Vol. 6

Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, 2016

Sex Criminals, Vol. 3: The Hard Way

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

(July 2016)

I continue to love Saga. It is, as befits its name, now a sprawling soap opera of a thing with supremely engaging characters and at least two or three genuinely laugh out loud moments in each volume. Ghüs remains a joy every time he appears on the page, and god help me but Prince Robot is somehow hilarious, despite having proven to be an utter bastard.

  

Ambient

Jack Womack, 1987

(July 2016)

  

The first of Womack’s Dryco series, or at least the first one he wrote. Ambient is the book to which Random Acts of Senseless Violence serves as a prequel, and while that story described polite society’s shockingly rapid descent into dystopia, the one we’re talking about here gives us the shit show already in full effect.

  

Karen Memory

Elizabeth Bear, 2015

(July 2016)

  

A hugely enjoyable steampunk western, which inevitably leads me to draw comparisons with Molly Tanzer’s Vermilion, not least because that too was driven by a queer woman in her teens with a gloriously engaging narrative voice.

Spring 2016 Comics

(April/May 2016)

The Wicked + The Divine Vol. 3: Commercial Suicide

Kieron Gillen et al, 2016

Rat Queens Vol. 3: Demons

Kurtis Wiebe et al, 2016

Imaginary Cities

Darran Anderson, 2015

(July 2016)

Magisterial, I believe is the word.

City of the Iron Fish

Simon Ings, 1994

(June 2016)

Gothic New Weird with a healthy dollop of bildungsroman and one of the most gratingly pretentious protagonists I’ve encountered since Catcher in the Rye. In fact, I’m not even sure it is a bildungsroman, but there’s such a strong connection in my mind between the annoyance I feel for both Holden Caulfield and Thomas Kemp, the narrator of this book, that maybe I’m just collapsing them both in to each other.

The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan, 1405 [Rosalind Brown-Grant, 1999]

(May 2016)

  

There is a woman who occasionally crops up on my twitter feed who spends a large part of her time responding to men with anime avatars asking “BUT WHAT HAVE THE WOMENZ EVER DONE FOR US?” by sending them explicit lists of accomplished women in science, politics, the arts, and such like. A service that is both valuable and depressing in its necessity. This book is basically the mediaeval version of that, made even more depressing because apparently we’re still having these arguments more than half a millennium later. Plus ça change.