Bookish Thoughts

This is one of those stories that imprinted on me. I was slowly becoming obsessed with Neil Gaiman when I first read it, and I hadn't quite realized that you could do stuff like this, yet. Remix fairy tales, mix and match genres, change the perspective and the story so completely and yet leave it wholly recognizable. It helps that I've always loved vampires. But really, Snow White as a vampire just makes so much sense. When I first read this story, I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it first. And I loved and hated Neil Gaiman a bit in equal measure giving me this beautiful, horrifying tale. This is about the recent graphic novel version of this story, though. It's gorgeous. The art is amazing and the perfect complement to this lovely story about a demon and the woman who tried and failed to save her kingdom. It's always haunted me, and now it can haunt me in technicolor.

Every time I try to analyze this collection of Sandman  shorts, I want it to be more coherent than it is. There's no underlying theme or message or motif in these stories. They were initially spread across the run much more than they appear to be in this collection. So some but not all of them are named for months, and some but not all concern themselves with names. Dream himself doesn't even appear in all of the stories (though the one he's absent from takes place most wholly in his kingdom). Given that, it only makes sense to tackle each story individually. Fear of Falling : This is an incredibly short story that is nonetheless one of the most remembered and quoted from the entire run. A director is scared of his new play failing and is planning to abandon it before that happens. His anxiety manifests as a dream in which he falls off the top of the cliff and sees only two options: die or wake up. But Dream appears to him and presents a third option in what is probably t...

The fifth installment in the Sandman series is all about identity. The way we perceive ourselves. The way other people perceive us. The things we hold back and the reasons we choose to do that. The ways we declare ourselves to the world or hide ourselves from it. The things we have control over and the things we don't and how those interact to create a picture we call "me". The story focuses on Barbie, who is trying to redefine herself in the aftermath of The Doll's House . After Dream destroyed the vortex that was Rose Walker, Barbie's life more or less fell apart. The two biggest indicators of this are that she stopped dreaming (and lost a big part of her internal world) and she divorced her husband (and stopped being seen as one half of the perfect couple). She's living in a crappy apartment in NYC, trying to figure out who she wants to be. And that's when her dreams come back to find her. Barbie's dreamworld, populated by her childhood toys and...

Season of Mists  is the fourth volume of ten in the Sandman  series. We're nearly halfway through. And yet, this almost feels like the beginning. Maybe it's because of how much the world deepens here. We finally meet the rest of Dream's family (minus Destruction), and the mythology expands considerably. Maybe it's the huge jump in quality. The previous issues weren't bad, but this one pushes the series from good to great. Or maybe it's just my own nostalgia. This was my favorite story arc for a very long time. Whatever it is, it was a joy to get to this point and fall in love with the series all over again. The first time I read this, the story blew my mind. Lucifer quits! He locks up Hell and leaves! He forfeits his never-ending war with God in favor of sitting on a beach and watching the sunset. It was the first time I encountered God and Lucifer as characters in a story, rather than all-powerful deities. In my mind, it removed a lot of their power. Lucife...

The third volume of the Sandman  series isn't an overarching arc at all. Rather it collects four individual stories into a single collection. Given that, I'm going to take each story separately. Calliope:  Initially, this was one of my favorite stories in Sandman . When I was first collecting the series (a process that took me years), I revisited this story again and again. In later years it lost it's shine somewhat, and I became hugely critical of it. Now I think I've landed somewhere in the middle. This is a story of exploitation. Calliope is a muse who has been captured. She's held hostage by an author who literally rapes her as a way of getting new ideas. When he sells her to another author rather than setting her free, as he'd promised, she loses her last shred of hope and asks Dream to help her. My issue with this story basically comes down to Calliope and her treatment, both by the fictional authors who hold her hostage (Erasmus Fry and Richard Mado...

The Doll's House  is my least favorite arc in the entire Sandman  series. For me, the horror in this installment crosses the line and makes me truly uncomfortable. John Dee slowly torturing and killing everyone in the diner in 24 Hours  is disturbing. But there's an element of fantasy, of metaphor, that makes it a bit more palatable. This arc has some pretty horrific child abuse coupled with a serial killer convention. And while Morpheus metes out justice to everyone involved, I find myself squirming through a lot of this. Then again, The Doll's House  introduces Rose Walker and Hob Gadling, two of the best characters in the entire series. Men of Good Fortune , Gadling's introduction, is one of my favorite single issues. Gadling declares that he's not going to die, and Morpheus sets up a recurring meeting with him - once every hundred years - to see how his life is going. The story leans into the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same, ...

For years I claimed to hate horror. I can see now how absurd that statement is. When I was growing up, my favorite television show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer . And while it's a bit trite to say that Sandman  changed my life, it certainly awakened any number of nascent interests in me, from mythology to non-linear story-structures. Two of the most formative works from my teenage years, and both are classic examples of horror. But for a long time I didn't know this. In my world, both of these series were classified as fantasy. Horror was Scream  and it's various sequels and spin-offs. Saw  and Halloween  and Final Destination . All those movies were characters died in ever more gruesome fashions. It's a subset of horror that's been popular for a while now. So popular that I thought it was the whole of the genre. It wasn't until I heard someone describe Sandman  as horror that I began to open my eyes and understand how much I actually loved this genre. I like...

Good Omens  was my favorite book for a very long time. I've re-read it more times than I can count. I once gave a copy to my mom for Christmas and then immediately stole it back. It's sitting on my book shelf right now. This book never failed to make me laugh or to make me think about what it means to be a good and moral person (or a god worth worshiping). I've read it so many times that I practically have it memorized. But I think I might be outgrowing it. Or maybe it's just that it isn't aging well. I still like a lot of what it says about humanity and morality and taking responsibility. But this time through I found myself cringing at as many of the jokes as I laughed at. Shadwell as a character no longer makes much sense to me. Or maybe it's the way people react to him. I can certainly imagine an angry, conservative, little man who hates everyone indiscriminately and insults anyone he interacts with. I can't imagine all these people finding it charmi...

I first discovered the Sandman comics during me senior year in high school. It took my a while to collect all ten, and in the meantime I re-read the ones I had. Then I hauled them all to college with me and read them again and again. Comics were about the only "for fun" reading I could eke out for a few years, and this series was my go-to. Suffice to say that, even though it's now been years since I revisited the series, I know it pretty well. It's one of those foundational works for me, the series that opened up all sorts of other possibilities for me and determined the sorts of stories I continue to gravitate towards. I actually remember when Overture  was first announced and then released years ago. But then I decided to wait for the trade to be released and then I more or less forgot about it. There were so many other books to read. Until I saw this by chance on a shelf of a brand new indie bookstore that was only 1/4 unpacked at the time. I snatched it up. It...

American Gods remains one of my favorite books. It's been a while since I last picked it up, but with the new upcoming television series I had to revisit it. This isn't a book I've ever been able to read quickly. The plot is slow and meandering, and I always take my time to meander through it. I just love spending time in this world where gods are real and dying. Where America is both a promise of a fresh start and a short attention span. I love the old, stubborn gods and the new, fragile, scared gods and all the little weird corners of this immense country I call home. I'm really excited to see how the television adaption plays out. They're only doing 1/3 of the book in the first season, which actually makes sense plot-wise. It's everything before Shadow gets to Laketown, which would mean that Laketown takes up the entirety of season 2 which would be great. But for now there's still a lot of exciting stuff. And I'm interested to see how the "C...

I'm about halfway through the final Wheel of Time book, but I found myself needing a break. That book is essentially an 1100 page battle, which can be wearing. I'm someone who tends to completely skip over battle scenes in books, so a book, so I've been having a hard-time focusing. I decided I needed a break, and Neil Gaiman's most recent short story collection was exactly the palate cleanser I wanted. I've been a fan of Gaiman since I got American Gods  for my 18th birthday, and a fan of his short stories since college, when I could never find the time to devote to anything longer. So I was excited when he released a new collection. Then I was surprised to discover how many of these stories I'd already read. Not because they're in previous collections (only one appeared in a collection I already owned), but because I follow Gaiman's online presence, and a lot of these have popped up on the web at one point or another. I heard Gaiman perform (is that...

I'll admit, I bought this $30, 800+ page tome in order to read one single short story. Because that short story was written by Patrick Rothfuss about Bast, and I am desperate for new material in that world. Of course, this collection also contains plenty of other stories by plenty of other authors I love, so it felt worth that price tag. Let's go through it story by story, shall we? The Lightning Tree  by Patrick Rothfuss - This story basically chronicles a day in the life of Bast an indeterminate amount of time before the first book starts, but after Kvothe has established himself as Kote, owner of the Waystone Inn. Bast trades secrets and favors with children, gets into some mischief, does some highly questionable and uncomfortable things, but also does some tough and honorable things. He's a tough guy to pin down, because his moral code is skewed by his Fae heritage. This story left me more confused about him than before, but it was a nice little slice of life, none...

It's not often that I rush out to buy a book the day it's released. For the most part I'm content to wait until the paperback to comes out. But I've been eagerly awaiting Neil Gaiman's new book since I heard him read the first chapter at the Fall for the Book Festival last year. So I ran out to pick it up on my lunch hour the day it came out, and read the entire thing that evening when I got home from work. My only real complaint about The Ocean at the End of the Lane  is that it wasn't long enough. Not that the story felt rushed or anything. The book was exactly the right length for the story within. But after waiting so long for a new novel from Gaiman, I was a little disappointed to have finished it in a single evening. That said, the book was fantastic. One of the scarier stories I can remember reading for a while. Unlike Coraline , which deals with the fear of your parents being replaced, this book's main character sees his parents betray ...

I love a good fairy tale. One of my favorites is Stardust , which I've read and seen several times. My favorite version is the illustrated novel, which includes 175 paintings done by Charles Vess. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous are really add to the fairy tale quality of the book. It's like being a little kid and reading a picture book again, except for the occasionally adult content. Stardust  follows young Tristran Thorn as he goes searching for his heart's desire. Unlike Dorothy, he discovers that it's a lot farther away than his own back yard. Tristran goes off in search of a fallen star, in the hopes that he can present it to young Victoria and secure her hand in marriage. Tristran isn't the only one searching for the star though. A witch is seeking her heart which will grant her additional youth. A trio of brothers are racing to find her; the first one who does will secure the Lordship of Stormwal. And poor Ditchwater Sal would be l...

The eighth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Worlds' End , is easily my favorite. It's another collection of short stories, but these are connected with a Chaucer-like framework. Several beings, finding themselves caught in various storms, make their way to the Worlds' End Inn. While the storm rages outside, the pass the time telling stories to each other. The stories are a lot of fun. One concerns the dreams of a city. Another is a fairly standard tale of a girl dressing as a boy so she can live as a sailor. My favorite takes place in an idealized America where a young president is able to unlock the potential of what our country can be. Between stories we return to the Inn, to see the conversations the characters are having there. And to finally discover the reason for the storm that has driven all of them there. In some ways, this volume represents the end of the series, with the next two volumes delving in to what happened and why and what w...

The seventh volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is most people's favorite. But it's my least favorite. It's not that I dislike Brief Lives . There are some cool themes and some really interesting characters. It's the first time we really get a story focused on the Endless as a family which is cool. But it does this by putting the youngest Endless, Delirium, front and center. This story is her's as much as it is Dream's. The problem is that I'm not overly fond of Delirium. She's annoying. She has trouble moving linearly, which means that the story also has trouble moving linearly. It wanders around and some plot threads are simply left hanging. The story, like Delirium, has a lot of trouble focusing. And I find that really frustrating. But that's okay, because the next volume is one of my favorites in the entire series.

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 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...

For a long time Season of Mists was my favorite volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. It's the volume that really made me fall in love with this series, and it stayed my favorite for a few years until I got around to reading the eighth volume, Worlds' End . (It took me a long time to collect the entire series). The premise of Season of Mists is pretty straight forward. Fed up with his duties and just plain bored, Lucifer quits. He kicks everyone out of hell, locks the door, and gives the key to Dream. This concept completely hooked me. I loved the way this played with Christian mythology. Maybe the Devil is sick and tired of the endless war with heaven. Maybe he'd rather just chill on a beach somewhere. For his part, Dream has to deal with a host of mythological being who all want Hell for their own. Odin, Thor, and Loki want to move in so they can avoid Ragnarok and the end of their world. Egyptian and Japanese gods want to expand their current la...

The third installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a collection of short stories, rather than a cohesive arc. However, a line from Death in the final issue helps tie all of the stories together thematically [M]ythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you. Each of the stories concerns an old mythology. Beliefs and figures that have passed into the realm of stories. Calliope : In the first tale, an author kidnaps the youngest muse and holds her hostage. He rapes her in an effort to get ideas and grows prosperous on his projects. She appeals to Morpheus to free her. He does this by flooding the author's mind with ideas, so many that he can't sort through them in any meaningful way. After Calliope is released, she elects to retire to the dream realm, to continue only in the minds of men. This may be my favorite story of the four collected in this volume. It's certainly the most ...