Ryan
I've started to look at retellings of superhero origins as something akin to Shakespearean productions - not that they're similar in style, but in the sense that you know the basic story you're going to get, so you have to learn to look for the nuances and individual differences of each version.
From that perspective, this was a lot of fun to read. Diggle and Jock make a great team, and there are enough callouts to moments from Ollie's history throughout that it's clear that they're fans of the character.
I had already read the first third of this collection as a stand-alone novel, so this entry represents the second and third parts of the series.
Temeraire is the story of a dragon from which the series takes its name, and his captain, one Will Laurence. Will and his dragon serve the British crown during the Napoleonic wars, fighting first at Dover and then travelling to China, Turkey, and Prussia in an attempt to prevent Napoleon and his dragons from conquering the world.
This was a lot of fun! Very reminiscent of Patrick O'Brien's work, but with less focus on the mechanics of naval travel, and more focus on giant dragons. I also really enjoyed the relationship between Will and Temeraire; in the face of the journies and challenges they faced, it helped to keep the plot grounded and focused.
The one real downside to the series, IMO, is that in Europe, at least, the presence of dragons seems to have had little to no influence on society (or, from what I can tell, the progress of the war). That seems odd to me, and I think it would have been really interesting to see how the evolution of society would have changed if dragons were historical creatures.
Lex Luthor is a humanitarian. He gives to charities, helps his employees with family problems, and does his best to make his city a better and more prosperous place.
Lex Luthor is an engineer, a spiritual descendent of Archimedes. He knows that, with a fulcrum and lever big enough, we could move the world. Move it out poverty, out of war, out of ignorance.
There's only one problem with Lex's vision: Superman. Superman, that pompous, arrogant alien who has come to his city and amazed the population. With Superman around, Lex sees, people don't want to lift themselves out of poverty. They're too busy watching the skies.
Lex Luthor understands sacrifice. He knows that you don't make omelettes without breaking eggs. He knows that, to stop Superman from blocking the potential of the human race, sacrifices will have to be made. He's willing to make those.
This isn't an entirely new way of looking at Lex (people call him “Mr. Luthor”, but really, he insists, call him Lex), but it's the most convincing look that I've ever seen at what motivates him as an antagonist, and why he's willing to go to such monstrous and villainous lengths to destroy Superman.
There were some interesting ideas here, and I like the premise of a fantasy novel that looks at people just using magic to do their everyday jobs, rather than epic, world-ending sort of concerns (even if it gets away from that in the third act). But the story wasn't able to engage me at all, and I didn't find myself caring about any of the characters.
Material so classic that Marvel's still mining it 35 years later :o)
Some filler, but it also includes the introduction of the Squadron Supreme and the Kree-Skrull war. Add in a team small enough to allow for proper character development and interaction, and some great art by Buscema and Adams and you've got a great Avengers book.
Ridiculous sexploitation story about a young woman with Disassociative Identity Disorder, and all three of her alt personalities are world-class fighters. I'm not saying it wasn't fun, overall, but it was so full of crazy fight sequences and T&A (and P, I suppose) that I was shaking my head a few times as I read it.
Miles visits the planet of Kibou-daini, on assignment from Gregor. In doing so, he gets involved in shady businesses using murder and cryogenic freezing for their own profit and political gain.
This was a very fun read, and very much in the same vein as the other post-Memory novels (with the notable exception of A Civil Campaign).
This was ...okay, I guess? Enjoyable, but definitely the weakest point of the series.
The first book, Falling Free, had some interesting ideas, but suffered from a very sudden ending and a cartoonishly evil villain.
The other half, Diplomatic Immunity, was nice because it gave us a chance to revisit with Bel Thorne, who I'd always been fond of. I found the “mystery” rather telegraphed, though, and had hoped Ekaterin would have been in it more (I love her and Miles' banter).
Drop City tells the story of a group of hippies who, in 1970, leave their California commune to attempt to start a new one in Alaska.
Author TC Boyle seems to have a gift for language - the book's written well - but the story is a bit of a meandering mess and lacks the charm of other anti-nostalgic looks at the era (Mad Men, for example).
None of the Drop City characters are in the least bit sympathetic. They're a bunch of spoiled, irresponsible children who are so reflexively antagonistic to “The Man” that they overlook things like child endangerment and rape, and who survive only through the privilege of their landscape and the charity of the US government. Boyle contrasts their fantasy of being “off the grid” with the reality of the Alaskan community, which could be interesting, but because we're not given any reason to care about the DCers, or see them as three-dimensional characters, none of the contrast is really able to raise any real interest.
A fun reimagining of a Doyle classic in a steampunk milieu. In this version, Mycroft Holmes is a femme fatale, Watson a cyborg, and the Bruce-Partington Plans instead the plans for Nemo's Nautilus. These changes made for a fun trip, and I enjoyed the changes made to the source material for the most part (especially as I am a firm believer that the world needs more Mycroft Holmes). It falls off the rails a bit in the last act, when it becomes something of a summer action film rather than a Victoriana story, but this intersection is definitely worth a read if you regularly travel through the avenues of its ingredients.
When I think back to the “grim and gritty” comics of my youth, I can't help but think that Astro City is what they grew up to become. There is a certain degree of cynicism to them, but they are still courageously hopeful stories that focus on the better angels of our being, and how truly awe-inspiring the vastness of the universe can be.
Read through a few chapters to see if I could use this with a student who's struggling with math. I can't, but not because of any shortcomings of the book; he's just far outside the target audience (45 year old construction worker, rather than high school girl).
If you are a high school girl, though, and are struggling with math, I could see it being a useful book. McKellar is great at describing concepts in a way that's simple, without being simplistic, is never pandering or patronizing, and has lots of metaphors that I think teenagers might find useful (describing variables in terms of a blind date, for example, and explaining order of operations with pandas).
This book is a fascinating look at how the concept of race has evolved over time. Dr. Painter starts back in ancient times, when the distinction was between Roman and Gaul/German (both terms roughly meaning “barbarian”), rather than based on skin colour. Then, centuries later, “white people” would get used to describe what people in my father's generation would call WASPs, before eventually expanding to cover different races such as Irish, German, Italian, and others at different periods in history.
Dr. Painter repeatedly illustrates the irony of how flexible and inconstant our conception of race is, and yet how firmly it has been planted in the collective psyche of human civilization. Across time and nations, people seem convinced that they know what race is, even if no one can arrive at a good definition of what that is. And it's a concept that still matters, even though, as Painter mentions in the last paragraph, the human genome project declared that there's actually no such biological construct as “race”.
Dr. Painter makes sure to present the material in a scholarly, exhaustively-researched manner, but also writes with a style that's engaging and keeps the reader hooked while reading.
Every once in a while I forget how much I dislike modern Marvel. This time, it took a cover filled with a bunch of characters from back when I was really into Avengers - the Shooter/Stern years, to be specific.
What follows is a book that's borderline incomprehensible unless you've read the larger Chaos War storyline AND which requires you to already have an emotional connection to the characters, because this book doesn't provide you with any. Recommendation to avoid unless you have 20+ years experience with Avengers - but of course, if you have that, you'll likely be underwhelmed by the plot.
This series just keeps getting more and more entertaining. This volume's a self-contained trilogy in which Miles encounters a problem none of his previous training prepares him for: he falls desperately, head-over-heels in love with a woman named Ekaterin Voisoisson, whom he meets while on a case.
Along with the tale of Miles' attempts to woo Ekaterin, we get a legal thriller, a romantic comedy with shades of slapstick, and a rather touching story involving one of Miles' armsmen.
Didn't read the whole thing - there's a lot here that's reference material for someone actually playing the RPG, and I wasn't interested in that. I just wanted to get an idea for the world of the Centurions before diving into the novels inspired by the game.
Seems like it would be a fun game to play sometime, though, for people with pulpy interests.
This felt a bit like eating at a pulp fiction buffet. You've got superheroes, time travel, psychic dinosaurs, two-fisted scientists, spunky mechanics, psychic dinosaurs, intelligent apes, ghost detectives, subterranean cavemen, and more. Thirteen-year-old me would have absolutely lost his shit at the prospect of all this, and to be honest thirty-three-year-old me was pretty damned excited about the idea as well.
At the same time, all of those things in the same book sounds like it could almost be a bit overwhelming, even if that book's the first part of a trilogy. Luckily, Evil Hat put that book in the hands of Chuck Wendig, and Chuck was able to weave them all together into an enjoyable yarn filled with both drama and comedy. And psychic dinosaurs. We can't forget those.
“How the Irish Saved Civilization” tells the story about how a group of Irish monks continued to make copies of Greek and Roman books while the Visigoths and other barbarian groups destroyed many of the existing versions of those same books in continental Europe.
There's some very interesting subject matter here, but Cahill tells it in a folksy, meandering sort of way that makes it hard to take the book seriously. The actual question of the title doesn't show up until over 100 pages in, with the main focus instead being a look at pre-Christian Ireland. Which is stuff I find interesting, but also isn't exactly what I was looking for in this book.
With a touch, Miriam Black knows how you're going to die. Usually Miriam's okay with this. She meets a lot of lowlifes, you see, so knowing when they're going to die makes it easy for her to be there when they do kick it, allowing her to pick up any valuables they're leaving behind. Louis is different, though. He's a good man, a kind soul. So when Miriam touches him, and realizes that she's going to be instrumental in his death, she takes it a little hard.
This was a really fun read. It's dark, and it's pretty gruesome at times, but no matter how dark it gets you're drawn in by the sense of urgency that Wendig writes with. He's got an acerbic comic tone to the darkness that he provides, as well, which helps preventing it from becoming too macabre.
Recommended for horror fans who like some sarcastic humour with their murders, and urban fantasy fans looking for something on the dark side.
There were some likable things here - it's nice to see a fantasy novel drawing on Chinese mythology/culture, rather than the standard Western European stuff. I felt the author was trying to hard to drop in Chinese/Japanese terms just to show off at times.
What turned me off from the book is how perfect the main character is. She's charming, and strong, and upstanding, and fierce, and we know this not so much because of anything that she does, but rather because other characters mention this to her. Every thirty pages or so.
The plot wasn't my cuppa, either: I went in expecting wuxia American Gods, but instead got wuxia Twilight.
They got superheroes in my Vertigo book!
Thematically, I can understand why the creative team would want to do an arc on superheroes; I can even grant that it's a metatextual statement about Vertigo's role in DC comics in 2012. The execution, though, fell extremely flat, especially the bit at the end, which was so anti-climactic that I wouldn't dare call it a climax.