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I tried doing 52 books last year, but I only did any substantial reading in the Summer, so I gave up. Ended up doing 35, which surprised me! That's a pretty good number for someone who didn't read for months on end. So I guess I'll try 52 this year? I just bought a Kindle! So I think I can do it! My goodreads. I only add real-life people, but feel free to laugh at my bad reviews full of bad opinions.
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Jan 2, 2014 08:44
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:39 |
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So I managed to read 4 books this week, which I think is a pretty good start! Hoping to surpass my goal of 52 this year. I mean, I say  "books", but they're mostly comics. Still, this challenge is basically an exercise for me to whittle down my massive to-read shelf, which does contain quite a few comics!    1. Aldebaran by Leo - The worst BD translation in history. Bad story and bad characters. Creepily full of sex and discussions of rape. 2 stars. 2. Betelgeuse by Leo - Oh god why did I read this. Sex Adventures On Alien Planets 2: This Time It’s Sexier. Bad bad bad. "I have to fight to stop my hands from stroking your breasts." Great, thanks Europe. 2 stars. 3. The Sea Rover's Practice by Benerson Little - One of the best books on piracy in the Caribbean, I love history books like this one that are crammed full of excerpts from first-hand sources. The prose is amateurish, though. 4 stars. 4. Mr. A by  . 1 star.
Qwo fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 8, 2014 06:10
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Mr. Squishy posted:Is that a Mr. A collection?
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Jan 8, 2014 18:09
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Okay, so I think that's it for January. I'm already 35% of the way towards my goal, geez.               5. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons - I read the first book in December. This series was my first foray into space opera. I found the ‘literary’ qualities of the series really stupid—the intertextuality, etc.—and Dan Simmons has a dull style of writing, but I ended up liking this book quite a bit, probably more than the first one. It’s just more exciting, despite being overly long. I liked Gladstone’s arc most of all. Simmons still takes himself way too seriously, though. I’m glad the later books are terrible; I was jumping for any excuse to stop reading the series. 4 stars. 6. The Thieves of Ostia by Caroline Lawrence - A pleasant surprise! It was a fun little kids book (not quite YA lit) that drew me in largely because of its historical setting. I can see why some people would hate it. The protagonists are progressive, ‘middle-class’, anti-slavery Romans with all of the values of 21st century Americans. No big deal; I can accept that kind of hand-waving. Kids would probably find genuine Roman attitudes impenetrable. But it did threaten to go off the rails when the Roman protagonists gladly sat through a sermon on Christian forgiveness and prayer and letting the Lord into your heart. Whatever. I liked the rest of it well enough. 4 stars. 7. COPRA: Compendium One by Michael Fiffe - Simply one of the best comics I have ever read. Phenomenal world. Amazing art. Surprisingly good dialogue and plotting for a comic written by the artist. 10,000 stars. 8. COPRA: Compendium Two by Michael Fiffe - Same as above. Maybe a little less mind-blowing. There’s some awkward ‘story-so-far’ recapping near the end and it stumbles around a little bit in service of wrapping up the first plot arc. 5 stars. 9. Crecy by Warren Ellis - I don’t like Warren Ellis, he’s a tryhard and an eternal teenager, but this was pretty good. It makes a good effort at being educational although it’s not really historically accurate. Ellis seems to be tolerable to the adult mind when he’s not writing from a soapbox. 4 stars. 10. Sabertooth Swordsman and the Mayhem of the Malevolent Mastodon Mathematician by Damon Gentry and Aaron Conley - A fun little comic from the same zeitgeisty formula that produced Adventure Time et al. The art is the best and the worst part. The zany ‘hyper-bizzy’ style makes for some surreal designs, but there’s just too much poo poo everywhere, it’s too messy. The climactic fight scene was incomprehensible. Would make a better Klei brawler. 3 stars. 11. Yoko Tsuno: The Curious Trio by Roger Leloup - Cinebook is responsible for some of the worst translations in the history of the written word. I looked up the translators’ CVs and it looks like they mostly translate manuals and technical writing. Boy, it loving shows. The awkward, formal dialogue basically ruins the story, although I have the sneaking suspicion it’s not very good in the original French, either. Alas. 2 stars. 12. COPRA: Compendium Three by Michael Fiffe - The end of the series as written, illustrated, lettered, marketed, and published by Fiffe. What a man.  Anyway, these last few issues are the loving best of the lot. The characters really get the poo poo fleshed out of them. 5 stars.13. The Secrets of Vesuvius by Caroline Lawrence - The second book in the Roman Mysteries series after The Thieves of Ostia. This book loving sucks. I should have known it from the first book, but this series is Christian fiction. The first book featured a fun little mystery (that I was unable to solve before it was revealed, hooray), but the mystery in this book amounts to a single riddle, to which the answer is GOD. Well, GOD drat IT. Additionally, all of the female characters (from small children to teenagers) have vivid romantic interests. Bleughk. This series was promising, but I guess it’s just not for me. 2 stars. 14. Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz - Short, threadbare, and ultimately devoid of the Rashomon-style metafiction that is hinted at, this book was nonetheless pretty enjoyable. I think I’m more willing to forgive really short books. 4 stars. 15. Adventure Time Vol. 1 by Ryan North - A fun, if nonessential, diversion for fans of the show. It doesn’t feel quite ‘right’ but it’s still pretty fun. 4 stars. 16. Adventure Time Vol. 2 by Ryan North - Okay, this one nails the tone of the show pretty much perfectly. The dialogue is true-to-form and the storyline feels like an extended episode. After some teething issues, this comic is easily recommendable to fans of the show—although I can’t imagine what non-fans would get out of it. 17. The Magus by John Fowles - Read this book. This book really blew me away. I was struck as I was reading it that it’s one of the most special—and immediately one of my favorite—books that I’ve ever read. My goodreads revew sums up my thoughts better than I can paraphrase here. Basically, the ending left me feeling a little sour, but I think that’s the point, and I appreciate it for that. Fowles left me feeling like Nicholas Urfe in that regard, I think. He did a really good job of consummately bringing the reader (I should say, me) into every twist and turn of Urfe's character. ???? stars. 18. The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide - Spare, stiff, and short. The ending saves it. Nothing in particular happens in the ending, it just meanders into a sweet, comfortable place. There’s something awfully formal and awkward about every Japanese author I’ve ever read. If you gave me a Haruki Murakami, a Seicho Matsumoto, and a Takashi Hiraide book, and told me they were all written by the same person, I would believe you. Like Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, I forgave this book its faults because it was so short. 3 stars.
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Jan 31, 2014 08:11
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My reading challenge is largely an effort to diminish my goodreads to-read shelf, which has a substantial number of trade paperback comics on it. In your honor I'll be reading all comics for February.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:58
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:39 |
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gently caress off already.     19. Adventure Time Vol. 3 by Ryan North - I think at this point I'm done with this comic series. It's a good long-form approximation of the show and Ryan North is rockin' it—plus when I was a kid I read way too much Bongo comics and this tickles that bone—but ehhh. Adventure Time is nice and zany and fun but it's like a big huge sugar-blast to the face that sends me into diabetic shock if I have too much of it. I found myself skimming a lot of this volume. 3 stars. 20. Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938 by Hal Foster - This poo poo blew my mind with how good it is. I loved Dick Tracy and Tintin as a kid, I don't know I never got into Prince Valiant. Really, this comic series is phenomenal. I want to say it's the best newspaper comic ever made, but I gotta read me some A.D. Condo and Winsor McCay to see if that's actually the case. Valiant is a bad-rear end protagonist for being such a sissy-haired nancy squire kid. Dude slits throats all over the place and gets into so much poo poo. Fantagraphics's Valiant volumes are far and away the most loving reproductions of an old comic I have ever read. The pages are MASSIVE, the colors wonderful. God it is so gooood. 5 stars. 21. Usagi Yojimbo, Vol. 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai - After hearing about all the trouble Stan Sakai has been going through recently, I bit the bullet and got my hands on the entire run of Usagi Yojimbo. It's as great as I remember! This volume is a collection of the various pre-series short comics starring Usagi, and even before it begins the art is great, the world is vivid, and the characterizations strong. Sakai doesn't really succumb to any of the teething issues that other artists have when kicking something off (although his art certainly evolves, of course). Really harmless, happy, cozy fun. I wish I had a fireplace to read these books next to. 4 stars. 22. Usagi Yojimbo, Vol. 2: Samurai by Stan Sakai - More of the same goodness. It's just a really earnest and sweet series. The villains are always ridiculous strawmen caricatures of evil-ness, but I can deal with how cartoonish everything is amidst the somber Kurosawa framing. That's just Stan Sakai's thing. 4 smiley faces. 23. Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido - This is one of the best BDs of the 2000s, but it's definitely not perfect. The art is perfect, of course, it's so good as to be beyond compare. But the writing is a little sub-par. It's not bad, especially after I've had to suffer through a few Cinebook BD translations, but the prose never approximates the noir-ish flavor it seems to aspire for. And the plotting can be messy; each of the three stories ends with Blacksad soliloquying about how he solved the problems that seemed insurmountable one page before. Additionally, European treatments of racism and sex are always spotty, they're arguably not great here, but it didn't bother me. I can see how it would bother some folks, though. I had a lot of problems with this comic series but I still think it's great and would recommend it to anyone. 4 stars.
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Feb 9, 2014 07:39
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