Eugene Fischer

Tag: Thomas Disch

Reading 2015: Final Roundup

MyRealChildren_Jo-WaltonI never did a Reading2015 post for December, but I only read one book during the month, My Real Children by Jo Walton, which I consumed on Christmas day. I adored it. It’s the story of a woman who, in her old age, can remember living two distinctly different lives, stemming from a single choice in her youth. It’s an alternate history of alternate histories, with chapters alternating between two very different life courses that, in the end, ask you to make an impossible ethical and aesthetic judgement, what Ursula Le Guin on the back cover calls “a sort of super Sophie’s Choice.” I’m always a sucker for branching narrative, the way the space between the threads opens room for new resonances and emotions, just as a paper towel doubled over can absorb more than the same sheet applied flat. This book might just be my new go-to example of the form.

So here’s where that leaves my stats for 2015:

  • 67 total books
  • 35 prose books
  • 32 graphic novels
  • 26 women authors (writer or artist)
  • 44 books authored or co-authored by women
  • 33 male authors (writer or artist)
  • 28 books authored or co-authored by men.
  • Best month: September (12 books – all GNs)
  • Worst month: December (1 book – prose)

As with last year, here the the books (not counting re-reads) that stand out in most my memory (which isn’t exactly the same thing exactly as how much I liked them):

  1. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
  2. My Real Children by Jo Walton
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch
  5. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  6. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
  7. Tenth of December by George Saunders
  8. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
  9. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
  10. Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman
  11. Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
  12. The Wilds by Julia Elliott
  13. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Some interesting things include the presence of only one graphic novel, despite the form making up nearly half of my reading. That’s largely due to my having re-read all of Dykes to Watch Out For, all of which were ineligible for this list.  Another is which Mary Gaitskill book made the list. I think that in many ways the collection Because They Wanted To is the stronger of the two Gaitskill volumes I read this past year, but it’s her first novel my mind alights on more easily. And I can’t do anything about the wiring of memory, and what it may have to do with two books I read in just the last two month making my top 5.

It was my resolution for 2015 to read 100 books, and I fell short not just of that mark, but of my 2014 mark of 73 books read. I attribute this primarily to having started doing some work for television, which prompted me to massively increase my television watching. I would say the TV I’ve consumed, added to the hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I played in November, is easily equal to 33 books. But since I don’t have any better ideas, I’m going to go ahead an roll over my 2015 resolution to 2016, and aim for 100 books read in the year to come.

Reading 2015: January

January books
Rather than record the books I read in groups of 20 as I did last year, I think this time I’m going to track my reading month by month.

  1. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon – I read Last and First Men several years ago, and quite liked it. Star Maker is a companion work, and references Last and First Men (which I think I enjoyed a bit more) several times. They aren’t novels in the traditional sense; these are philosophical fabulations of different ways human life, nonhuman life, and the universe itself could exist, stitched together with thin threads of narrative. One particularly interesting thing about Star Maker is how much time Stapledon devotes to explaining in detail concepts that have become very familiar in the last 100 years. For example, he devotes many pages of imagistic text to the changing appearance of stars as one travels closer and closer to the speed of light. The writing clearly expects a readership that’s never seen such things visually depicted. It’s rare to read cosmologically rigorous science fiction from before the space age, when these things began to be tropified, then commonly visualized. (While I own the physical copy of this book pictured above, I actually read this on my phone as an ebook, using the excellent app Marvin.)
  2. Off Course by Michelle Huneven – I read this on the strength of her previous novel Blame, which was among my favorites I read last year. Off Course is a novel of much narrower scope, following a woman with mildly fraught family relationships and an incomplete dissertation who lets a few years of her life disappear into a rural affair with a married man. An enjoyable read, but it didn’t blow me away like Blame did.
  3. Saga vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I could easily just repeat what I said for volume 3. I don’t follow comics the way I used to, but Saga awakens my old fervor. Like science fiction or fantasy or gorgeous artwork? Read it.
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch – The third novel by Disch I’ve read, and longer than the other two combined. This is a 1979 Bildungsroman set in a fairly recognizable satire of the future United States dominated by ecological disaster, urban economic collapse, and rural religious fundamentalism. Also, in this world, some people who sing while hooked up to a particular device can leave their bodies and psychically fly around. I find Disch’s writing fascinating, though I haven’t  been able yet to exactly articulate why. Part of it just the manifest confidence and intelligence shining through the pages; Disch doesn’t apologize, doesn’t waste any time on bashfulness, and even his expository devices operate at a sprint. He was clearly among the most technically and verbally gifted writers of his era of science fiction, and yet his fall from the modern conversation is starting to make a kind of sense to me. Not because he isn’t worth being talked about, but because so far each of his novels have come to rest in my mind as somehow amorphous. Most books I’ve read sit in my memory as a sort of solid aesthetic crystal whose facets encompass the shape of my reading experience even as the textual details fade. Disch’s books, though, have blurry borders. The moments that sparkle in the mist are dazzling, but the formlessness is somehow mildly, naggingly dissatisfying. As is this description, even to me, because I nonetheless find his books fully compelling and intend to read more.
  5. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce – Merritt left Iowa just before I arrived, and while we have many friends in common and were once both in the same reading, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met. But I thought the piece she read at our joint event was memorably great, and only ever heard good things said of her and her work during my years in Iowa City, so was excited to read her first novel. I consumed it in one go, mostly while sitting at a bar, which ended up feeling appropriate as this is a novel of sex and search for self definition set against a constant backdrop of the food service industry. This is a book that resists tidiness, moralizing, or resolution, and if you enter it expecting the glimmer of redemption to ever arc toward the horizon you will be disappointed. What’s on offer here instead is a sort of fierce snowfall, a four year blizzard of cutting fragments, each slice an attempt to figure out how to manage existing in the world.
  6. The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter – In my last year at Trinity University my attention began to swing away from physics and back toward fiction, and so I signed up for the undergraduate fiction writing workshop. My professor was Andrew Porter, a soft spoken and knowledgeable Iowa alumn who explained on the first day that he discouraged writing genre fiction in his classes, as genre fiction lacked the attention to character which he wished to cultivate. When I inevitably chose to try to prove him wrong, writing what would eventually turn into “Husbandry,” his enthusiastic reception of what I’d done completely won me over. Years later, when I wrote to let him know that one of his students had been accepted to Iowa, he could not have been more excited for me. Which is all to say: Andrew played a big role in shaping the path of my life, and I have been meaning to read this book for years. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get to it until now, though. These are quiet, unadorned stories of ordinary and largely suburban life, the conflicts mostly struggles of self definition. It is exactly the sort of writing I would have been least able to appreciate back in 2006, when I was indignantly launching zombies across the workshop table. Now though, post-MFA, I have a much greater understanding of space this kind of fiction occupies.
  7. Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill – About halfway through reading this book I realized that I had unconsciously decided, without ever previously articulating it to myself, that I would read everything Mary Gaitskill has ever published. To borrow a phrase, her writing is like an exposed nerve. Her stories are twitching and lucid and sharply felt, unsanitized and unsentimental, full of analytical language and twisting images that knot around emotions I find achingly familiar but wouldn’t have known how to begin capturing with words. This collection is an unflinching look at how impossibly, fractally complex sex and relationships are, even in circumstances where we tell ourselves they are straightforward. I think my favorites from this volume were the four part novella “The Wrong Thing” and the short story “Blanket,” which seems to me almost like an opposite direction companion piece to “A Romantic Weekend,” my favorite story from her first collection.
  8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – I was feelingly weirdly intimidated by long novels, as though, having decided I wanted to try to read 100 books this year, I feared I would only manage it by sticking to shorter works. That seemed like the kind of avoidant psychology which can spill from its container and paralyze you, so I decided the thing to do was commit to a giant brick of a novel. Wolf Hall turned out to be the perfect choice. It’s a historical novel focusing on Thomas Cromwell, a man who became a chief aide of King Henry VIII, but in my mind it’s Game of Thrones except all the people are real and instead of blood magic there’s clever banter. It’s easy to see why this won the Man Booker prize. I couldn’t put it down, and read it nearly straight through, stopping only to sleep, and that less than I should have. I was so absorbed, when I finished it I went immediately out and bought…
  9. Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel – The sequel to Wolf Hall, which also won the Man Booker award. This book picks up right where the previous one ends, and I continued my three day Mantel binge straight through to the end. Her writing is poised, layered, funny. I feel gluttonous reading these books, and moved to stay up until sunrise finishing them, which I discover my body doesn’t handle nearly as well at 31 as it used to. So thanks for making me feel old and busted, Hilary Mantel. Jerk.

Reading 2014: Final Roundup

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My New Year’s resolution for 2014 was to read at least one book per week. I counted as a “book” any bound volume of a complete work, or digital version of the same. So books included things like novels, omnibuses of several novels, novellas published as slim volumes, graphic novels, anthologies, ebooks, or audiobooks. Things that didn’t count were single comic book issues, or individual short stories or articles. My in-progress roundups are here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

For much of the year I was on pace to double my resolved amount, but then I moved from Iowa City to Austin, and my reading rate never really recovered. Looking through my journal I see averaged over 9 books per months before my move, and only a little over 4 per month after. Moving, unpacking, buying furniture, dating, breaking up, traveling; these all replaced the predictability of my Iowa routine after I reached Texas. Here are the stats:

  • 73 total books read
  • 50 prose books
  • 22 graphic novels
  • 1 audiobook
  • 60 male authors (writers & artists)
  • 22 female authors (writers & artists)
  • Best month: March (14 books – 6 GNs, 8 prose)
  • Worst month: October (1 book – prose)

Looking back over my list, there are 12 books (not counting rereads) that stand out as my favorites. Here they are, ranked in order of how much they’ve stayed with me over the last 12 months. That isn’t quite the same thing as how much I liked them, but it’s close.

  1. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  2. Blame by Michelle Huneven
  3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  4. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
  5. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
  6. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
  7. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke1
  8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  9. The Genocides by Thomas Disch
  10. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  11. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  12. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Some things I notice about this is that, while my list for the year doesn’t have gender parity, my list of favorites does: five men (one twice), six women. Also notable is that the top five most-thought-about books are all works of realist fiction, almost certainly the first year of my life when that has been true. I don’t think this is indicative of a shift in my taste so much as an expansion of it. While at Iowa, reading and critiquing the work of my peers, I developed an appreciation for realism that I didn’t have before. My enjoyment of speculative fiction hasn’t lessened, but the appeal of realism is something new and exciting. I think that’s why the top five novels have been so much in my thoughts; I have thorough understanding of how SF works, but I’m still learning the nuances of mimetic realism.

For next year I hope to improve on my 2014 performance. I’d like to hit 100 books read in 2015, and to have at least 50% of them authored by women. I’d also like to read more classic or public domain fiction. At the time of this writing, I’m on my 6th book of the year, and have maintained gender parity thus far.

  1. Technically a reread, but since the first time was when I was under ten years old, I’m counting it. ↩

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

2014Books21to40jpg
When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

  1. Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
  2. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
  3. Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
  4. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
  5. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
  6. Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
  7. The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
  8. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
  10. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
  12. Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
  13. Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
  14. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
  15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
  16. Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
  17. The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
  18. Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
  19. The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
  20. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.

Thomas Disch Taught Me a Bunch of New Words

Disch_CampConc_Bantam

I recently finished reading Thomas M. Disch’s novel Camp Concentration, which had more words in it that I didn’t know than any book I’ve read in years. Here are the new additions to my vocabulary.

  • Orthoepy. n. The correct or accepted pronunciation of words.
  • Lutulent. adj. The state or condition of being muddy or turbid.
  • Resile. v. Abandon a position or course of action.
  • Orgulous. adj. Haughty.
  • Chrism. n. A mixture of oil and balsam, consecrated and used for anointing at baptism and in other rights of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.
  • Hierodule. n. A slave or prostitute in service to a temple.
  • Hypogeum. n. An underground chamber.
  • Chiliad. n. 1. A group that contains 1,000 elements. 2. A millennium.
  • Opsimath. n. A person who begins to learn or study only late in life.
  • Jactitation. n. The restless tossing of the body in illness.
  • Squitters. n. Diarrhea.
  • Commination. n. The act of threatening divine vengeance.
  • Electuary. n. A medical substance mixed with honey or another sweet substance.
  • Meretricious. adj. Apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.
  • Rodomantade. n. Boastful speech or behavior.
  • Concinnate. adj. Of speech or writing: put together with elegant style or propriety.
  • Philoprogenitive. adj. Having many offspring.
  • Emissile. adj. Capable of being protruded.
  • Epalpibrate. adj. Lacking eyebrows.
  • Viscid. adj. Glutinous, sticky.
  • Atomy. n. A tiny fairy or sprite.
  • Virescence. n. The state or condition of becoming green.
  • Chyme. n. The pulpy acidic fluid that passes from the stomach to small intestine, consisting of gastric juices and partially digested food.

 

The First Twenty Books of 2014

First20Books2014
As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

  1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
  2. Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
  3. Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
  4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
  5. Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
  6. The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
  7. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
  8. Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
  9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
  10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
  11. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
  12. The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
  13. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
  14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
  15. Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
  16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
  17. Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
  18. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
  19. Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
  20. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.