Books I've Been Reading Lately

I didn’t write a Saturday Note last week because I went out of town, and I figured there wasn’t much point as I didn’t even know if I’d have time to post one if I wrote it. But don’t worry, this week, we’re going to briefly talk about some books I’ve been reading!

And if I haven’t done it already, someone remind me to post an article on ImpishIdea.

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What the Hell Did I Just Read? by David Wong

I ended up liking John Dies at the End much more than I expected, so I picked up the sequel This Book is Full of Spiders shortly afterward. Thing is that I didn’t like that one as much. So it was a while before I picked up the third one, encouragingly titled What the Hell Did I Just Read?. And I liked it, although the ending was a bit more Andromeda Strain-y than I would have preferred.

The thing that makes these books stand out to me is that they’re plainly horror, but they’re also plainly comedy. The events that go on in the books are horrific, and thinking too much about them makes one want to hide under the blankets and never come out; this book, for instance, starts the Plot with children being taken from their parents by a sort of being that appears differently depending on who is looking at it.

But all of this is filtered through our narrator, Dave, who is so tired of life and all of this supernatural crap in this small town that his cynical view makes a lot of it sound ridiculous. And then there’s his best friend John, who cannot take anything seriously. John is the buffoon who makes light of every situation, but he’s not useless, as he often comes up with a lot of the solutions to their problems and is such a fun guy that he’s likable throughout.

This installment in the series contains large portions from the points of view of John and Dave’s girlfriend Amy, and the series benefits from that, especially because this one takes a closer look at Dave’s own issues and how harmful his outlook can be on life. It gives the series a lot more self-awareness.

Also there’s this creature called BATMANTIS??? and that’s pretty cool.

Greek Mythology Comics by George O’Connor

I remember when theses first came out and I didn’t really get into them, because I didn’t really dig the art style at that time. But they’ve grown on me since then, and so I’m starting a sincere effort to read more of them, in no small part because I’ve also been on a slight Greek mythology kick in the past few months (this might be due to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey or by my re-read of Percy Jackson and the Olympians).

The comics, each one focusing on a different Olympian, retells Greek myths in interesting and creative ways. The book on Apollo, for instance, is a series of shorter stories told by the nine Muses. The Hades story is actually mostly about Persephone, but through that story you learn more about Hades and what he’s like. I don’t think any of them push things too much out of the box for what you’ll expect in these stories; there aren’t any huge creative differences like in 100 Days of Night. But they’re different enough to stand out.

What I also love about these comics is that at the end of each on there’s a list of annotations on the comic, talking about the influences and ideas he was working with and some of the mythological in-jokes he included. There’s also a list of citations for his sources from Greek myth, so that you can look into his research.

Age of Unreason by Gregory Keyes

I have been let down by a couple of the Enlightenment Era fiction books I’ve picked up, but this series is a complete joy and I’m rather frustrated the library system doesn’t have the third book in the sequence.

The story is a bit like this: Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific advancements shake Europe and lead to a boom in technology. The twist, of course, is that in this timeline, Newton’s discoveries are not what we think of as science, but as alchemy, and so their science looks more like what we’d think of as a fusion between science and magic. And then one of Newton’s apprentices defects and offers to make King Louis XIV (who has had an extended lifespan in this universe because of alchemical shenanigans) a weapon with which to destroy London.

Our story, set in the early 1700’s, then gives us two major protagonists: Adrienne, a lady in the French court who is highly educated in the alchemy of the day, but pretends to be a ditz because that’s what’s expected of her; and a young Benjamin Franklin, whose own curiosity in the sciences gets him accidentally wrapped up in the Plot of the novel.

What makes this series work, I think, is that it’s runs on Rule of Cool. The climax of the second book involves Peter the Great of Russia leading an armada of airships to go conquer Venice. There are so many completely ludicrous scenarios, like young Franklin meeting Blackbeard, that work because the setting is such that it feels almost natural. It’s got a lot of historical in-jokes, like Ex-Libris and Quicksilver, but this is actually fun rather than beating you over the head with minutiae.

Also the series takes some twists that I absolutely did not expect in the slightest, and I have to give it credit for that. 

One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus

I’d been reading more teen books recently and I thought I’d give this a shot. It’s The Breakfast Club, but with MURDER. Five kids who are different high school stereotypes (the Jock, the Ditz, the Smart Girl, the Bad Boy, the Nerd) all end up in detention for something they didn’t do, but then whoops! The nerd dies. It’s a murder, and now it looks like one of the other four did it! 

[Honestly, it felt a bit like how I imagine Pretty Little Liars goes, only having seen the ads for Pretty Little Liars.]

This book is very good at delivering twists, but there comes a point at which it just felt tedious, especially because almost all of those twists are chapter or section-ending reveals. The next part would then pick up some time later, so that we don’t see the immediate fallout of the plot twist. So like, one chapter towards the end where the main four compare notes about everything that’s happened, and it ends with implicating a side character in the murder, but then we skip to the next day and we’re told how the others react to this news rather than the conversation immediately afterward. It felt like the author wanted to do a lot of drama, but didn’t quite know how to follow through on all those twists.

There are also plenty of plot and character beats that you’ve probably come to expect and won’t surprise you at all. Some of the twists, yeah, but other things like, “Hey, the Jock has a bit of a rough home life because his father’s expectations of sports stardom are always hanging over his head” is something that wasn’t new when High School Musical came out, and of course the Bookish Good Girl ends up falling in love with the Bad Boy. 

If you like teen drama or CW shows, then maybe you’ll like this. I thought it was okay, but it didn’t blow my mind or make me want to rush out and buy the sequel (which is about a different set of kids anyway).

Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo by Ben Costa and James Parks

I know I said I wasn’t doing the music thing anymore, but this came with its own songs.

I sort of expected this to be a little funny comic about a skeleton and his goop friend. Instead it’s this amusing but also weirdly touching and remarkably sad story about finding out where you come from. The book’s like this: Rickety is a skeleton working in an evil organization that’s structured remarkably like a soul-crushing corporation. He’s not good at his job because he likes singing more than actually doing anything evil, or even cleaning up the torture dungeons. So he’s fired, along with his best friend Goo, a blob of… goo, that only Rickety understands. He becomes a wandering stitch, or a minstrel.

He decides that he’s going to find out where he came from, because he can’t remember. And he’s the only skeleton anyone’s ever heard of that can speak and isn’t a mindless slave to a necromancer. All he knows is that when he sleeps there’s this song that plays in his head, “The Road to Epoli,” and he feels like he needs to find this place that may or may not even exist anymore.

The stories are fun, but they’re also somber in tone; Rickety’s dreams are always paired with verses from the song, and they’re in black and white. Yeah, the characters mostly act silly, and the character design evokes the idea this is a bit of goofy fantasy parody. But lurking under it all there’s something almost sinister. The villain corporations all over the world of Eem are a satire of evil organizations in fantasy, but the fact is… they’re still a bunch of villain corporations that run the world.

And in the middle of all this chaos, there’s this single skeleton and his goop friend, wandering around to the tune of a half-forgotten song, trying to figure out what happened that left the world in the state it is.

It’s very good, and it’s almost a crime that it’s not more well-known.

Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland

You ever hear how the Warriors cat series was really intense? Well this is like that, but with dragons. Set in the continent of Pyrrhia, a land in which there are several tribes of dragons, a war has broken out between dragons over the succession of the Sandwing throne: three sisters who each think she should be queen after the death of their mother. Different tribes side with different potential queens. And then the mysterious isolationist Nightwings issue a prophecy: that there will be five dragonets born that will end the war, choose the rightful queen, and bring peace to the world.

So a group called the Talons of Peace hopes to raise the Dragonets of Prophecy in order to stop the war. Thing is, some dragons don’t want the war stopped. And also, the Talons of Peace suck at their job. The prophecy seemingly goes wrong at every turn, and the dragonets decide to break free from living in a cave their entire lives. And then they get captured. Like, a lot.

It’s a children’s series, I guess, but it’s awfully dark considering that fact. And by ‘dark’ I mean there are bits of horrific violence. Right in the prologue we have one of the Talons of Peace getting gored through the face and thrown off a mountain. The first book also has a dragon that gets its face melted off. And the war that’s been raging means that all the dragon tribes are essentially living in a dystopia, a war-torn land where their monarchs care more about gaining power and land for themselves than helping their subjects.

Still, it’s a series that’s about dragons, and just about dragons. There are humans in the series, but they carry such a minor role. It’s relieving to read a dragon fantasy series that is only about dragons, not dragons as they relate to humans or elves or anything. It’s just dragons! And they FIGHT! And isn’t that what we want in fantasy?

Newbury and Hobbes by George Mann

I’d seen these books in the library for a while, so I started reading them. It’s a steampunk science-fiction series, set in an alternate Victorian London. Newbury is an agent of Queen Victoria tasked with handling special cases and requests; his newly-appointed assistant, Veronica Hobbes, helps him solve those cases. They’re mostly fun little steampunk stories, though I don’t think any of the stuff in the books is really that out there from any other steampunk setting you’ll see.

The main problem I had with the series was that it tries to tease the idea of the two leads being in a relationship, and I just don’t see it? I don’t see much chemistry between them, and I can’t really see what they like about each other, especially since it’s established pretty early on that Newbury is obsessed with the occult (for Reasons) and that he’s an opium addict. Neither of these are things that Hobbes is okay with, but she finds herself falling in love with him because… I dunno, Plot.

If you’re into steampunk, take a look, but otherwise it’s fine to skip these.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Fantastic, glorious, beautiful, wonderful, radiant. I loved this book. Go read this book.

Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the three sections of the novel center around a monastery that has dedicated itself to preserving lost knowledge about science and technology until the world is ready to fully understand what these things were. The history of the world is cyclical; it’s not until the second Renaissance that the people of the world are really able to begin to understand this technology, and even then, they mostly want to use it to justify their own grabs for power.

There is a lot in this book about technology and science, and how that relates to religion. What is knowledge for? Who is it for? How do we misuse knowledge? How do we know when we’re ready for knowledge? And this was a book that actually did something interesting with religion in a post-apocalyptic setting other than “Here’s an evil cult!” that you see pop up so often in the same genre (and every other genre…).

There’s also something very cool about the idea of history being a cycle. When the world has already ended, history starts again much like it did after the fall of the Roman Empire, with several different factions duking it out and the only commonality between different countries being the Church. And as the end of the last world isn’t fully understood, the people in the post-apocalyptic landscape start unintentionally talking about the truth of what happened into a type of mythology, one that fits rather well with the stories of ancient Biblical civilizations quite well.

And through it all there’s this mysterious figure who may or may not be Saint Leibowitz, observing all that happens around the monastery of his own order.

It’s thoughtful, it’s strange, and it’s a really cool science-fiction novel that’s not quite like any other I’ve read.

Delilah Dirk by Tony Cliff

She’s a sword-fighting English adventuress! He’s a failed Janissary officer! Together, they FIGHT CR--well no, they don’t fight crime, but they do go on adventures throughout Europe and Asia Minor.

The story goeth like this: Selim is a Janissary who interrogates Delilah Dirk, an adventurer who has tried to sneak into the Sultan’s palace. Through some unfortunate circumstances, the Sultan thinks they’re working together, so when she escapes he has to go with her to avoid execution. Unfortunately, he’s not much of a fighter (but he makes great tea!), so he’s not the usual sort of backup that she would like on her excursions. The two end up being a rather complimentary pair, as she’s able to help him get out of his comfort zone, while he helps rein in her more… aggressive habits and impulses.

They’re historical fiction, though they do tend to lean towards the fantastical (Dirk travels around in a flying boat, for starters). There’s a lot of adventuring around; one story involves travelling around Turkey, while another is about searching for the ruins of a long lost civilization that’s long been considered a myth. 

These are fun, and they’re not too serious. If you want a really cool action comic that’s a joy to read, these might be your jam. Also the two leads are definitely more shippable than the ones in Newbury and Hobbes.