Bookish Thoughts

The sixth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is another collection of short stories. This volume actually collects the issues slightly out of order, as some of them were originally released before the Game of You arc began. But the ordering in this volume works quite well. Actually, since this is the order I was introduced to the comics in, I can hardly imagine a different order. I'm just going to go through this story by story. Fear of Falling: The first issue is incredibly short. It functions as a prologue to the volume, appearing even before the table of contents. But it remains one of the more powerful messages in the whole series. This is one of the stories that sticks with me. Three Septembers and a January : This issue tells the story of the first and only emperor of the United States of America: Emperor Norton I. Remarkably, this is a mostly true story. There was a man living in San Francisco in the late 1800s who styled himself Emperor. The st...

A Hat Full of Sky  is the second book in the Tiffany Aching arc, and the 32nd book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld  series. It picks up two years after the events of The Wee Free Men  and follows Tiffany as she leaves home to become apprentice to a witch named Miss Level. In her impatience to learn "real' magic, Tiffany starts casting spells beyond her ability and leaves herself open to possession. It's up to the Nac Mac Feegle to rescue her (though she actually ends up rescuing herself quite handily with a bit of help from them). I really like this book, and Tiffany is really growing on me as a character. She's definitely being set up as a young Granny Weatherwax. Since Granny may be one of my favorite literary characters, seeing her at 11 years old is a real treat. All that power with very little experience is definitely going to result in some wisdom in a few decades. For now, it just means exciting adventures. Watching Tiffany get into messes and...

Having re-read The Handmaid's Tale somewhat recently, I really wanted to branch out into more of Margaret Atwood's work. Cat's Eye seemed like the obvious starting point. Mostly because it was the only other novel of hers that I'd actually heard of. Parts of this book were incredibly painful. It's about bullies, but the more insidious "mean girl" bullying that doesn't involve any physical violence. Just a prolonged attack on someone's self-esteem. Atwood's slightly detached voice adds a lot to this experience, I think. You can feel Elaine fading away at one point as her best friend Cordelia makes her feel like nothing. There's one scene that's particularly hard to read in which Elaine peels the skin off the soles of her feet. As soon as I read it, I remembered one of my friends from high school describing the scene to me. It was disturbing then without context, and it's even more disturbing in the book. Elaine herself...

I first read Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises my freshman year of college. It was part of a class on modernism and modernity, which also included novels like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway , and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot . I remember The Sun Also Rises being my favorite of the books I read for that class, but looking back I'm wondering if that's just because it was more straightforward than the others. Between taking 18 credits and adjusting to college, I didn't really have a lot of time for digesting books. And The Sun Also Rises can be enjoyed entirely for what's on the surface. This book doesn't make you work too hard. While you certainly can find lots of depth and symbolism, you can also just enjoy a story about a group of friends going on vacation. They fish, they watch the running of the bulls, they stay drunk for a week. And sure, there's some profound stuff about the Lost ...

I'm really surprised that I didn't read Carl Sagan's Contact before now. I mean, it's my life and I know that there was always something else I wanted to read. But looking back, I really wish I had read this book in high school. I think a lot of what Ellie experiences in the first few chapters would have prepared me better for the massive amount of sexism I suddenly encountered in college. I'm impressed with how well Sagan captured the experience of being a woman in science. Mostly I really liked this book. The science that went in to sending and then decoding the message was really interesting. And there were some great characters, including Palmer Joss and the man who funded the building of the machine. It got a bit slow at times, especially towards the end. But it mostly held my attention. Now I just need to track down and watch the movie again. I haven't seen it since high school, but I remember liking it. I'd like to see how it compare...

A Game of You is the fifth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. It's unique in that it doesn't really showcase Dream at all. Although half the story takes place in dreams, Morpheus himself only appears in the first and last issue. Instead, the story follows several women who live in the same apartment building and are all struggling with identity in their own way. Identity is the main them of this book. The identities we choose for ourselves and the ones society forces on us. It looks at how our perception of ourselves can change depending on where or when we are. This story explores how fragile identity can be and how important it is to have your own identity acknowledged by the people around you. Barbie is the main character in this story. She appeared briefly in the second volume, A Doll's House . When last we saw her, Barbie was married to a man named Ken and living the perfect suburban fantasy with him. But now she's divorced, broke and wi...

I picked up Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets because of a recommendation on the internet. And because I found the first three volumes incredibly cheaply at a used comic book store. I'm not sure what I was expecting beyond "sort of similar to Sin City " (based on my own inference, not the actual recommendation), but I was pleasantly surprised by what I read. The first issue is titled First Shot, Last Call , and that actually refers to two different stories contained in the volume. The first arc lasts for three issues and follows Isabelle "Dizzy" Cordova who has just been released from prison. While she was there her husband and son were shot in a drive-by. She'd assumed this was just a random shooting, one more shitty event in her shitty life. But the Agent Graves sits next to her on the bus home from prison. He presents her with proof that her family was targeted by a pair of crooked cops, a gun, and 100 bullets that he promises will get her ...