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Right, it's only been over a month since my last reading meme post. I keep missing wednesdays and then deciding to just wait a week. Maybe I should change the week day?
Anyway, life goes on. The union negotiations are over and we're just waiting for the voting to start, Eurovision is rolling, summer has arrived, I have a stupid cold.
What I've recently finished reading
Sara Kenney: Surgeon X
In a near future, where antibiotics and other medicines are no longer working, a group of siblings are - each in their own way - trying to fight back. It's fun and I want more.
Tom King: The Sheriff of Babylon: Bang, Bang, Bang
Set in Baghdad 2003, the technical main character is an utterly clueless military contractor, hired to train the new police officers. The actually interesting characters are the two "supporting" characters, Sofia the Iraqi-American fixer and Nassir, the Iraqi ex-cop. (Though what a woman like Sofia ever saw in the main character is so far beyond me...)
Greg Rucka: Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia
I think this is one of my favourite WW comics so far. Drawing on old myths, exactly as inevitably tragic as something involving the kindly ones should be, and the story is good. My only real complaint is that I can't believe Batman would be so - unnuanced. Bruce is a good detective, by the time he comes for Diana's new ward, he'd have known the entire story, and I can't believe he'd have acted quite like that.
G. Willow Wilson: Ms. Marvel: Damage Per Second
Felt a little preachy
Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka: Gotham Central: Jokers and Madmen
Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka: Gotham Central: On the Freak Beat
Still good. Though how Gotham police didn't run out of officers years ago is beyond me...
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Kingdoms of Elfin
A collection of short stories featuring a fairly old-school approach to the elves and fairies of old. Mostly, they feel like they wouldn't be out of place in a Regency historical novel - despite the occasional pack of werewolves or bit of magic - though there is someting low-key fascinating about Warner's Elfin. Half the time they seem almost human (wings aside), the other half you see them as the utterly moral-free (but not free of manners, oh no) creatures of mischief that they are.
My favourite stories in this collection were: "The One and the Other", following a stolen child and the changeling left in his place, who manages to grow up and become a mad scientist, "Visitors to a Castle", where the modern world comes alarmingly close to the Elfins in the shape of a District Nurse on a bicycle, "The Late Sir Glamie", about a fairy gentleman who had the terrible bad manners of leaving a ghost behind when he died (something which ought to be impossible, as the Elfin are commonly convinced that they have no souls and that death is very final), and "Foxcastle", which felt more creepy than the rest, as this story follows the misadventures of a scholar who is abducted by fairies and sees their society from the outside, unlike how it's mostly shown in the rest of the stories.
Mike Mignola: BPRD: Being Human
Michelle Sagara: Cast in deception
Anne-Marie Vedsø Olesen: Lucie
This reminded me that I'm actually quite fond of AMVO's writing and need to get caught up. Anyway, the main character is a man-eating monster (the book uses cannibal a few times, but she isn't actually human, so...) who teams up with a guy who is developing prophetic visions and a man who can understand birds to undertake a pilgrimage holiday to Trondheim, where she hopes to find the answers to her existence, which has been a mystery since she rose, naked and hungry for human flesh, from a Norwegian fjord a thousand years ago. It's a universe that tangles Norse and Christian myth, and it's quite good.
Mike Mignola: BPRD: 1948
Mike Mignola: BPRD: Vampire
Jason Aaron: Doctor Strange: The Last Days of Magic
Mike Mignola: Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Sam J. Lundwall: 2018 eller King Kong blues
In some ways, this has turned out to be a fairly accurate guess at some trends, and for a book written in the 70s, it predicts reality tv, computer games, AIs, etc. On the other hand, it feels like far too typical cyberpunk, despite being a bit early for that sub-genre, and the characters feel pretty flat.
Danmark: en kolonimagt
Tamora Pierce: Tempest and Slaughter
Not the best TP book I've ever read. Maybe it's just that I've read too many books set in magic schools, so the tale of Numair's early years of studying wizardry doesn't really have that much new to offer.
Brandon Montclare & Amy Reeder: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: BFF
Jill Thompson: Wonder Woman: The True Amazon
This, on the other hand, falls into the pile of WW comics I could have lived without. Why are there so many stories about how Diana was a brat or did something bad on Themiscyra? Why is there this need to take this character and turn her into an Atoner type hero?
Jeff Lemire: Hawkeye: All-new Hawkeye
Brian Wood: Briggs Land: State of Grace
Genevieve Cogman: The Lost Plot
Mike Mignola & Gary Gianni: Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea
I will say that plotwise, this story is short and not particularly original. It more than makes up for it in the mood of the comic, though, a nice, dark ghost story on the seven seas with just a drizzle of the Lovecraftian.
Xavier Dorison: Long John Silver: Neptune
Tim Seeley & Tom King: Grayson: Agents of Spyral
I'm mostly in this for Midnighter and for Dick Grayson getting chased by some very intrepid boarding school for girls students.
Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks
I feel that it is very important to say that this book contains an exploding, self-roasting duck.
Apart from that: the story of Merrick Tremayne, gardener and former opium smuggler working for the East India Company, his expedition into a mysterious corner of Peru hunting for quinine, his gradually figuring out his own family secrets from the same area - it's a nice, slow, evocative story. I quite enjoyed it.
Francis Spufford: Golden Hill
I suppose Wentworth Miller is just a tad too old to star in a mini-series as Mr. Smith, isn't he?
Joe Hill: Locke and Key: Heaven and Hell
Joe Hill: Locke and Key: Small World
The stories are good. Set in an earlier generation of the family at Keyhouse, we see a few magic keys made. Grindhouse was fun in a very EC comics sort of way, for instance. But - they were very short stories, and really - all of these stories should have been collected and published with a few more to make even one volume.
Spider-man/Deadpool: Don't call it a team-up
Somehow, Spider-Man/Deadpool team-ups don't quite seem to work for me.
Leigh Bardugo: The Language of Thorns
Hmm. So, a small collection of subverted and dark fairytales. Pretty standard at this point, sad to say - the twist is that they're all set in her fantasy universe, so now I want Kaz Brekker and his crew to meet some merfolk...
Joe Kelly: Spider-Man/Deadpool: Isn't it bromantic?
Holly Black: Lucifer: Father Lucifer
HB gets points for how close to Mike Carey's series it sticks. Alas, maybe that's also the bad thing about it. It never quite seems to become its own thing.
Efter fødslen
A collection of mostly good sf short stories. I'm a little impressed that this anthology series is still going strong and the books keep getting fatter, and with what feels like fewer and fewer dud stories. There's still a lot of the stories that rely on dystopic tropes, and a several rounds of it's-the-end-of-the-world, which frankly, I have grown very weary of.
My favourites this time around? I particularly enjoyed Anne-Marie Træholt's "Grens hedonometer", set on a space station floating over a dead Earth that might not be as dead as the regime wants people to think; Flemming Johansen's "Et nyt liv", a rather dystopic look at how it might go the people getting cryonically preserved; Caner Doga Cansi's "Ekspropriation", about a law exam in the near future; and Gudrun Østergaard's "Når krager i hobetal søger ly", which combines what seems to be a climate disaster world with a culture obsession with traditional weather lore.
I've really only got two unfavourites - Johannes Lundstrøm's "Urinstinkter", about a generation spaceship that has been gradually taken over by a conspiracy of women clones oppressing all knowledge of the vanished men with extreme prejudice (I really could have lived without the misogyny of that entire concept); and Flemming R.P. Rasch's "Den store dronedag", which - I checked the publisher's website and the deadline for these stories was literally months before Peter Madsen murdered Kim Wall, the author couldn't have known, but his as-it-turns-out psychopathic loner inventor in the boilersuit? It gave me associations that frankly left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
André Gorz: Letter to D.
Birgitte Jørkov: Vor Frues sorte søndag
Medieval murder mystery, except the murder kinda happens somewhere else and never gets that much attention. Not half as much attention as the pregnant servant girl that disappears. Really, it's mostly a story about a middle-aged, widowed merchant woman minding her business and interacting with her fellows in the small medieval town (at this point) of Elsinore and getting involved with a monk/builder from the new monastery in town. (Also, I had to stop reading and dig out a local history wiki to figure out where these places were to get a mental map going properly. The dangers of reading about the town you grew up in.)
Emmanuel Roudier: Neandertal
I quite enjoyed this - it's a fairly straight-forward adventure story set in the stone age, and I might be in the mood for more of that.
Warren Ellis: Injection vol. 3.
Anna Arvidsson: Ordbrodøsen
I quite liked this. I don't see nearly enough writing magic in the first place, and the book builds a fine world of a woman lineage of word embroiderers, the lengths someone might be willing to go to secure that that power remains available to the clan in the next generation, and a single girl coming to terms with her sheltered upbringing and coming into her own. It ends far too abruptly, but I do hope there will be a sequel.
What I've recently watched
14. Pojkarna
I liked the idea of the movie - three teenage girls who acquire a magic flower, which turns them into boys. I just - didn't really feel overwhelmed by it, and I could have lived without the massive bullying issues of it.
15. Get Out
I liked it. It's fun and suspenseful. Didn't quite live up to the hype, but considering the amount of hype, that doesn't really surprise me.
16. Liberty (mini-series)
Okay, so the main character is an entitled asshole. I liked the setting and the idea, but it all devolved into personal drama of the most bland sort and people running around covering up and/or resorting to crime, and at the end? No.
17. Baby Driver
Kinda dull, actually
18. Stoker
I really liked the way this movie was shot, the hyperfocusing to go with the main character's sensory issues. And the plot is creepy.
19. Legends of Tomorrow season 3.
I liked season 3 more than season 2 - admittedly, it had to go through a couple of episodes before getting there, but after that. I still miss Len, but now we've met his superhero-doppleganger Leo, and we get John Constantine on occasion, and the new lady villains were fun. The season arc is ridiculous and I could bitch about things in the viking episode, but overall? It's been fun.
20. Anvengers: Infinity War
So - when's the sequel?
21. Marvel's Runaways season 1.
While I like that they've tried to make the parents more sympathetic, I must admit I really miss the "various types of supervillains banded together" of the comics. In this they've all been recruited by an über-bad guy, and half of them aren't really that bad, and while I like that the parents aren't immediately willing to kill their kids, I'm just - I could have lived without that. Points to James Masters for playing his most evil character ever, except I really don't want to see any more of that character - ever.
22. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
This works so much better after en introduction by Jakob Stegelmann, focusing on the old serial movies and how things worked in them.
23. The Rain season 1.
I was pretty disappointed by this show. Netflix finally makes a Danish show, and it's SF! And it's so bloody cliché that you can predict the entire plot after the first episode. Not a single subversion. And no real making use of the Danish setting aside from a few touristy images of post-apocalypse central Copenhagen.
What I'm reading now
Arséne Lupin by Maurice Leblanc and They both die in the end by Adam Silvera.
What I'm reading next
We'll see.
Total number of books and comics read this year: 95
Anyway, life goes on. The union negotiations are over and we're just waiting for the voting to start, Eurovision is rolling, summer has arrived, I have a stupid cold.
What I've recently finished reading
Sara Kenney: Surgeon X
In a near future, where antibiotics and other medicines are no longer working, a group of siblings are - each in their own way - trying to fight back. It's fun and I want more.
Tom King: The Sheriff of Babylon: Bang, Bang, Bang
Set in Baghdad 2003, the technical main character is an utterly clueless military contractor, hired to train the new police officers. The actually interesting characters are the two "supporting" characters, Sofia the Iraqi-American fixer and Nassir, the Iraqi ex-cop. (Though what a woman like Sofia ever saw in the main character is so far beyond me...)
Greg Rucka: Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia
I think this is one of my favourite WW comics so far. Drawing on old myths, exactly as inevitably tragic as something involving the kindly ones should be, and the story is good. My only real complaint is that I can't believe Batman would be so - unnuanced. Bruce is a good detective, by the time he comes for Diana's new ward, he'd have known the entire story, and I can't believe he'd have acted quite like that.
G. Willow Wilson: Ms. Marvel: Damage Per Second
Felt a little preachy
Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka: Gotham Central: Jokers and Madmen
Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka: Gotham Central: On the Freak Beat
Still good. Though how Gotham police didn't run out of officers years ago is beyond me...
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Kingdoms of Elfin
A collection of short stories featuring a fairly old-school approach to the elves and fairies of old. Mostly, they feel like they wouldn't be out of place in a Regency historical novel - despite the occasional pack of werewolves or bit of magic - though there is someting low-key fascinating about Warner's Elfin. Half the time they seem almost human (wings aside), the other half you see them as the utterly moral-free (but not free of manners, oh no) creatures of mischief that they are.
My favourite stories in this collection were: "The One and the Other", following a stolen child and the changeling left in his place, who manages to grow up and become a mad scientist, "Visitors to a Castle", where the modern world comes alarmingly close to the Elfins in the shape of a District Nurse on a bicycle, "The Late Sir Glamie", about a fairy gentleman who had the terrible bad manners of leaving a ghost behind when he died (something which ought to be impossible, as the Elfin are commonly convinced that they have no souls and that death is very final), and "Foxcastle", which felt more creepy than the rest, as this story follows the misadventures of a scholar who is abducted by fairies and sees their society from the outside, unlike how it's mostly shown in the rest of the stories.
Mike Mignola: BPRD: Being Human
Michelle Sagara: Cast in deception
Anne-Marie Vedsø Olesen: Lucie
This reminded me that I'm actually quite fond of AMVO's writing and need to get caught up. Anyway, the main character is a man-eating monster (the book uses cannibal a few times, but she isn't actually human, so...) who teams up with a guy who is developing prophetic visions and a man who can understand birds to undertake a pilgrimage holiday to Trondheim, where she hopes to find the answers to her existence, which has been a mystery since she rose, naked and hungry for human flesh, from a Norwegian fjord a thousand years ago. It's a universe that tangles Norse and Christian myth, and it's quite good.
Mike Mignola: BPRD: 1948
Mike Mignola: BPRD: Vampire
Jason Aaron: Doctor Strange: The Last Days of Magic
Mike Mignola: Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Sam J. Lundwall: 2018 eller King Kong blues
In some ways, this has turned out to be a fairly accurate guess at some trends, and for a book written in the 70s, it predicts reality tv, computer games, AIs, etc. On the other hand, it feels like far too typical cyberpunk, despite being a bit early for that sub-genre, and the characters feel pretty flat.
Danmark: en kolonimagt
Tamora Pierce: Tempest and Slaughter
Not the best TP book I've ever read. Maybe it's just that I've read too many books set in magic schools, so the tale of Numair's early years of studying wizardry doesn't really have that much new to offer.
Brandon Montclare & Amy Reeder: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: BFF
Jill Thompson: Wonder Woman: The True Amazon
This, on the other hand, falls into the pile of WW comics I could have lived without. Why are there so many stories about how Diana was a brat or did something bad on Themiscyra? Why is there this need to take this character and turn her into an Atoner type hero?
Jeff Lemire: Hawkeye: All-new Hawkeye
Brian Wood: Briggs Land: State of Grace
Genevieve Cogman: The Lost Plot
Mike Mignola & Gary Gianni: Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea
I will say that plotwise, this story is short and not particularly original. It more than makes up for it in the mood of the comic, though, a nice, dark ghost story on the seven seas with just a drizzle of the Lovecraftian.
Xavier Dorison: Long John Silver: Neptune
Tim Seeley & Tom King: Grayson: Agents of Spyral
I'm mostly in this for Midnighter and for Dick Grayson getting chased by some very intrepid boarding school for girls students.
Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks
I feel that it is very important to say that this book contains an exploding, self-roasting duck.
Apart from that: the story of Merrick Tremayne, gardener and former opium smuggler working for the East India Company, his expedition into a mysterious corner of Peru hunting for quinine, his gradually figuring out his own family secrets from the same area - it's a nice, slow, evocative story. I quite enjoyed it.
Francis Spufford: Golden Hill
I suppose Wentworth Miller is just a tad too old to star in a mini-series as Mr. Smith, isn't he?
Joe Hill: Locke and Key: Heaven and Hell
Joe Hill: Locke and Key: Small World
The stories are good. Set in an earlier generation of the family at Keyhouse, we see a few magic keys made. Grindhouse was fun in a very EC comics sort of way, for instance. But - they were very short stories, and really - all of these stories should have been collected and published with a few more to make even one volume.
Spider-man/Deadpool: Don't call it a team-up
Somehow, Spider-Man/Deadpool team-ups don't quite seem to work for me.
Leigh Bardugo: The Language of Thorns
Hmm. So, a small collection of subverted and dark fairytales. Pretty standard at this point, sad to say - the twist is that they're all set in her fantasy universe, so now I want Kaz Brekker and his crew to meet some merfolk...
Joe Kelly: Spider-Man/Deadpool: Isn't it bromantic?
Holly Black: Lucifer: Father Lucifer
HB gets points for how close to Mike Carey's series it sticks. Alas, maybe that's also the bad thing about it. It never quite seems to become its own thing.
Efter fødslen
A collection of mostly good sf short stories. I'm a little impressed that this anthology series is still going strong and the books keep getting fatter, and with what feels like fewer and fewer dud stories. There's still a lot of the stories that rely on dystopic tropes, and a several rounds of it's-the-end-of-the-world, which frankly, I have grown very weary of.
My favourites this time around? I particularly enjoyed Anne-Marie Træholt's "Grens hedonometer", set on a space station floating over a dead Earth that might not be as dead as the regime wants people to think; Flemming Johansen's "Et nyt liv", a rather dystopic look at how it might go the people getting cryonically preserved; Caner Doga Cansi's "Ekspropriation", about a law exam in the near future; and Gudrun Østergaard's "Når krager i hobetal søger ly", which combines what seems to be a climate disaster world with a culture obsession with traditional weather lore.
I've really only got two unfavourites - Johannes Lundstrøm's "Urinstinkter", about a generation spaceship that has been gradually taken over by a conspiracy of women clones oppressing all knowledge of the vanished men with extreme prejudice (I really could have lived without the misogyny of that entire concept); and Flemming R.P. Rasch's "Den store dronedag", which - I checked the publisher's website and the deadline for these stories was literally months before Peter Madsen murdered Kim Wall, the author couldn't have known, but his as-it-turns-out psychopathic loner inventor in the boilersuit? It gave me associations that frankly left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
André Gorz: Letter to D.
Birgitte Jørkov: Vor Frues sorte søndag
Medieval murder mystery, except the murder kinda happens somewhere else and never gets that much attention. Not half as much attention as the pregnant servant girl that disappears. Really, it's mostly a story about a middle-aged, widowed merchant woman minding her business and interacting with her fellows in the small medieval town (at this point) of Elsinore and getting involved with a monk/builder from the new monastery in town. (Also, I had to stop reading and dig out a local history wiki to figure out where these places were to get a mental map going properly. The dangers of reading about the town you grew up in.)
Emmanuel Roudier: Neandertal
I quite enjoyed this - it's a fairly straight-forward adventure story set in the stone age, and I might be in the mood for more of that.
Warren Ellis: Injection vol. 3.
Anna Arvidsson: Ordbrodøsen
I quite liked this. I don't see nearly enough writing magic in the first place, and the book builds a fine world of a woman lineage of word embroiderers, the lengths someone might be willing to go to secure that that power remains available to the clan in the next generation, and a single girl coming to terms with her sheltered upbringing and coming into her own. It ends far too abruptly, but I do hope there will be a sequel.
What I've recently watched
14. Pojkarna
I liked the idea of the movie - three teenage girls who acquire a magic flower, which turns them into boys. I just - didn't really feel overwhelmed by it, and I could have lived without the massive bullying issues of it.
15. Get Out
I liked it. It's fun and suspenseful. Didn't quite live up to the hype, but considering the amount of hype, that doesn't really surprise me.
16. Liberty (mini-series)
Okay, so the main character is an entitled asshole. I liked the setting and the idea, but it all devolved into personal drama of the most bland sort and people running around covering up and/or resorting to crime, and at the end? No.
17. Baby Driver
Kinda dull, actually
18. Stoker
I really liked the way this movie was shot, the hyperfocusing to go with the main character's sensory issues. And the plot is creepy.
19. Legends of Tomorrow season 3.
I liked season 3 more than season 2 - admittedly, it had to go through a couple of episodes before getting there, but after that. I still miss Len, but now we've met his superhero-doppleganger Leo, and we get John Constantine on occasion, and the new lady villains were fun. The season arc is ridiculous and I could bitch about things in the viking episode, but overall? It's been fun.
20. Anvengers: Infinity War
So - when's the sequel?
21. Marvel's Runaways season 1.
While I like that they've tried to make the parents more sympathetic, I must admit I really miss the "various types of supervillains banded together" of the comics. In this they've all been recruited by an über-bad guy, and half of them aren't really that bad, and while I like that the parents aren't immediately willing to kill their kids, I'm just - I could have lived without that. Points to James Masters for playing his most evil character ever, except I really don't want to see any more of that character - ever.
22. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
This works so much better after en introduction by Jakob Stegelmann, focusing on the old serial movies and how things worked in them.
23. The Rain season 1.
I was pretty disappointed by this show. Netflix finally makes a Danish show, and it's SF! And it's so bloody cliché that you can predict the entire plot after the first episode. Not a single subversion. And no real making use of the Danish setting aside from a few touristy images of post-apocalypse central Copenhagen.
What I'm reading now
Arséne Lupin by Maurice Leblanc and They both die in the end by Adam Silvera.
What I'm reading next
We'll see.
Total number of books and comics read this year: 95
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Why can't Aja draw ALL the hawkeye :( ? His art really makes Hawkeye for me, and all the other artists drag the stories down to unreadable levels :(
Isn't he just? Why should I care about this spoiled brat? (Assuming you consider the son the main character). I'm stalled somewhere in E3, I think, and I'm not sure I'm going to pick it up again. Let's be real, I'm not.
Exactly, and I didn't even like it! Can't wait to see it again, either :D
It absolutely wouldn't have worked for me without it, and I won't be watching it again - but it was fun with the talk :)
Imma give The Rain a miss, methinks.
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I do, and he doesn't get any less of a spoiled brat as the show moves along.
Can't wait to see it again
I was talking with S. today at work, and she can't wait to see it at all. How does wednesday look for you? (I was looking at times and if we want a large screen and a fairly early evening showing, it'll be Cinemaxx. The others are already moving it to the smaller cinemas.)