The Tropic of Serpents

Marie Brennan, 2014

(June 2015)

  

A much needed change of pace, this: an engaging protagonist, a decent plot, and some but not too much in the way of tension and peril. It also benefited from being started during an entire afternoon free from parental, academic, or any other kind of responsibilities. I can't remember the last time I just sat down and read a book for three hours straight. Lovely.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Jack Womack, 1993

(June 2015)

  

Holy fuck. I mean seriously: holy fuck. You know the cliché about stuff ‘making the hair on the back of your neck stand up’? Actually happened. Genuine shivers down the spine. Two-hundred-and-twenty pages of agonizingly honed build-up driven into the base of your skull through the knife-point of the final three paragraphs, with all the brutal precision of a neurosurgeon wielding a prison shank.

Vermilion

The Adventures of Lou Merriweather, Psychopomp

Molly Tanzer, 2015

(May 2015)

  

High in the Rocky Mountains of late nineteenth-century Colorado there is a sanatorium. It is run by one Dr. Panacea. That's Dr. Panacea. You can now be confident to the ninety-fifth percentile as to whether this book is something you’ll enjoy as rambunctious fun, or if it will only serve to annoy the everloving shit out of you.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz, 2007

(May 2015)

I want to write more about this book. This book deserves to have more written about it. Unfortunately though I’ve had a ton of deadlines recently, so while I only read this a couple of weeks ago my mind’s been so cramped since then I’m not sure I’ve got much in the way of intelligent – or at the very least interesting – comment left to pass. No change there then, eh? (Etc, etc, and so forth.)

Rat Queens

Vol. 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N’Rygoth

Kurtis J. Wiebe, Roc Upchurch, Stjepan Sejic, 2015

(May 2015)

Less of the sass this time around, which is no bad thing. Rat Queens continues to be best described as bloody good fun.

Archangel

Marguerite Reed, 2015
(March 2015)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons.

Honest Abe

Abe Shinzo gave a speech to congress a couple of days ago, and now I am conflicted.

The Devil Made Me Do It

Lucifer vols 1-10, Mike Carey et al, 2000-2006

Ghost Rider vols 1-4,  Daniel Way et al, 2007-2008
Ghost Rider: Road to Damnation, Garth Ennis et al, 2007

(Spring 2015)

My headlong plunge into Mr. Salaryman’s MASSIVE BOX OF COMICS continues apace. You’ll forgive me for being a little vague with the details, I’m sure, but when I said there were a couple of hundredweight of them I really wasn’t exaggerating. Anyway, at this point I’d like to do a little pondering about the nature of the Devil. The old ones are always the best, eh?

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi, 2014

(April 2015)

This is a beautiful book, both in terms of the cover (it’s even better in reality than on the screen) and the contents. Based on this it’s very easy to see why Oyeyemi has been lauded as one of the best British writers of her generation. It’s not quite a masterpiece though. The first 90% is outstanding, but I’m still not quite sure what happened at the very end, or how I should deal with it. That shouldn’t detract from the rest of the book but somehow, y’know…

Lust, Caution

Eileen Chang, 1979 [Julia Lovell et al, 2007]

(April 2015)

  

I need to read more of this kind of stuff: mid-twentieth century writing by vaguely dissolute women. Of course, all that most female writers from that era needed to do to gain a ‘vaguely dissolute’ reputation was to speak their minds and openly enjoy something other than childcare or macramé, but on the occasions I do read them they seem infinitely more contemporary to the present day than male writers of the same period. I’d be the first to admit that my sample sizes for both populations are pitifully small, but there’s something to be said for the theory that in order to compete with the men women had* to be better than them. Clearly this was grotesquely unfair, but as a reader it does mean that you get access to books that are, well, better.