Bookish Thoughts

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.

This story was fine. It was quick and entertaining, and it's definitely an interesting concept. I know Sanderson struggled for years to figure out how to tell this story, and I'm honestly not sure he really figured it out. It almost feels like he just wanted to publish this to publish it, and it didn't get the care some of his other work does. It feels incomplete or flat compared to what I expect from him. The part that really confused me was whether this was part of the Cosmere or not. I've seen conflicting information, and I honestly hope it's not part of the Cosmere. The main fantasy planet in this story, Mirandus, is directly connected to Earth. And I just don't want Earth to have anything to do with the Cosmere. It's hard to explain, but I want the Cosmere to be pure second-world fantasy, with no connection to our world at all. This is only the first book in what I believe is a planned trilogy. And there's every possibility that the story will becom...

Instead of reading The Goldfinch in December like I was supposed to, I found myself revisiting Saga. I read the first nine volumes more or less as they came out over the years, which really spread the story out. While I enjoyed the later volumes, I was occasionally confused by who a character was or why they were doing something. Then the ending of the ninth volume left me hurt and angry and then the whole story went on hiatus for what was supposed to be a year, but which the pandemic dragged out to closer to three years. In those three years, a lot happened. And I came to appreciate the ending. I found myself growing more and more curious about where the story would go next. I wanted to know what would happen to Hazel in the wake of her most recent losses. So I went back and re-read the whole story over the course of about two weeks. The compressed schedule worked really well for this story. Everything flowed much better than the first time through. I was able to hold all the charact...

This was a very cute story about growing up and being brave and not missing your chance. Deja and Josiah are best friends who've been working at the local pumpkin patch for the last three years. But now they're seniors and it's the last night, and Josiah still hasn't even spoken to the girl he's been crushing on for the last three years. Deja is determined to make him take his chance, and they set off on a fun night of adventure, finding new things and revisiting old favorites. It's all the fluff I expect from Rainbow Rowell with very little of the angst.

I've been following Stevenson's career since she was an art student with a tumblr making fun of Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games. I loved watching her get her big break and launch into the stratosphere. I watched her start to make the sort of stories she wished she'd read as a child. She accomplished a lot at a ridiculously young age. She's also had some struggles,and I've always been impressed by the way she's open about them while maintaining her privacy. Because I've been reading her blog for so long, I'd already read most of the comics in this book over the years. But it was nice to see it all pulled together in a single place. Stevenson has a long career ahead of her, and I'm excited to see what she does next.

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.

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...

I think some of the shine is wearing off this series. It might just be that it's so spread out. I go so long between volumes that I can barely remember who some of the characters are. That doesn't make it particularly easy to sympathize with them. But also, all this tragedy is getting a bit boring. Sure, they do a decent job of balancing it with hope and alternating happy endings with sad ones. And sure, the series is ultimately about war. But three characters died in this installment, and I barely felt anything. Maybe it would help if I actually went back and read the whole thing from the beginning, like I've been meaning to for a while now. I'm sure some of these hits would land harder if I could remember why I should care. Then again, the comic is now taking an extended hiatus, so who knows when the next volume will be released. By then I'll probably have forgotten it all again. At this point I think I'll wait until the series ends before investing any mo...

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...

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...

The second volume of March  closed on John Lewis' speech at the March of Washington, and then included the original text of the speech, which was edited moments before he gave it. In that speech he points out that the Civil Rights Act, while a step forward, did not do enough. Specifically, it did not guarantee African-Americans the right to vote, thus allowing individual states to continue to deny them full citizenship. The third volume focuses on the fight to get the Voting Rights Act passed, ultimately ending back where the first book started, with the inauguration of President Obama. Once again, this book doesn't shy away from the hatred and violence that John Lewis and his cohorts faced in trying to secure their rights. The endless protests trying to get people registered, inevitably followed by beatings and arrests. And more than a few deaths. This book maybe be John Lewis' memoir, and it's certainly skewed towards his perspective, but it functions more as a hi...

The second volume of John Lewis' graphic memoir spends most of it's focus on the Freedom Riders. During this time, John Lewis rises through the ranks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually becoming chairman. He also becomes a bigger presence in the Civil Rights movement in general, and the book ends with the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech and John Lewis' own speech at the same event. This book really drives home how much work and organization went into the Civil Rights movement. And how much hate and resistance they faced. Learning about these things in school or online, it's easy to distance yourself a bit and focus on the results rather than the process. We always hear about Rosa Parks and her famous refusal to give up her seat. We don't hear about everything else that went into to both creating that moment and leveraging it. By telling his story with pictures, Lewis a...

I finally got my hands on the second and third volumes in John Lewis' graphic memoir, March , so I had to go back and re-read the first one. The memoir as a whole is about Lewis' experiences in the Civil Rights movement, and the first volume is specifically about how he came to be involved with it and his participation in the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. It goes in depth with the training Lewis and his fellow students received before the sit-ins, which was quite extensive. And it also shows a lot of the hatred and violence they faced, including attempts on their lives. The story as a whole is told through flashbacks, both John Lewis' memory and the stories he tells a couple of young constituents who come by his office in the Capital. In the present, this is all happening on the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. The frame provides a nice counter-balance to the story, showing how far we've come and how ...

The final volume of Y: The Last Man delivers a mostly satisfying, somewhat tragic ending that wraps up Yorick's epic quest to find his lost love. Everyone converges on Paris for final confrontations, epic reunions, and a few surprising revelations. And then life goes on, as it must. I'm going to have to re-read this whole series again at some point. It took me far too long to pick up on the slow burn romance between Yorick and 355, maybe because it was such an incredibly well done slow burn. But, like Yorick, I was blinded by the quest for Beth. I couldn't see what was right in front of me.  His resolution with Beth (and even Beth 2 and Beth Jr) was fantastic. It hit all the right beats of joy and awkwardness and betrayal and despair. Things were broken between them, and she was ultimately more of a fantasy than a real girl. I'm glad he was able to let her go in the end. I'm mad, though, about 355's death. It was shocking and jaw-dropping and ultimately fr...

I loved this volume of Y: The Last Man. We're heading into the endgame, so obviously it's time to back up and see how everyone got here. There are a handful of arcs that move the plot forward. But there are also a lot of one-off issues that give us flashbacks of all the main characters. I loved learning more about them and what their lives were like before the "gendercide". As for the main story - the main group is forced to split up. Everything moves forward. Doctor Mann tracks down her mom, walking right into the trap Toyota set for her. Yorick is finally reunited with Ampersand and learns that Beth is headed to Paris. Beth 2 has a baby (!) and she and Hero head back to the Hot Suite in Ohio. There are kids again, which is fantastic. Except that hope gets yanked away with the return f Tse'elon right at the end. But it's all the flashbacks that really sold this one for me. We get a look at 355's early childhood and her recruitment into the Culper Ring...

The third installment of Y: The Last Man  sees our trio on more adventures. They finally reach Dr. Mann's lab, only for Ampersand to be kidnapped, kicking off another journey. Yorick and Hero are finally reunited in a non-murdery way. And we meet some pirates! This was basically a series of exciting adventures. I enjoyed them, though not quite as much as the previous arcs. It was fun to meet another Beth, and to get confirmation that the original Beth is still alive. Ultimately I don't feel like I have a lot to say about this book, though. It was fun and entertaining. The main mysteries are still chugging along, though it doesn't feel like we're any closer to solving them. This is a middle book. No intriguing beginnings or astonishing endings. Just lots of treading water. Though there are those pirates I mentioned. Sigh, I should have written this review earlier. When this volume wasn't all mixed up with the next one in my head. That'll teach me to fall so...

The second Y: The Last Man  book chronicles a series of adventures Yorick, Ampersand, 355, and Dr. Mann have as they continue their journey to California. Some were a lot of fun. Others were weird and off-putting. But it was all entertaining, and I'm still very excited to see what comes next. The first arc deals with three astronauts on the ISS who are returning to Earth. The trio includes two men, and Yorick is excited by the prospect of not being the last man on Earth anymore. This arc helps tie off a few loose threads, particularly the Israelis and their weird conspiracy with Yorick's mom (not the president - I was mistaken). Once all that business is taken care of, we get to follow the main group for a while and the background characters are largely relegated to the back-burner. We see a traveling theater company trying to keep art alive in a small, conservative town. We meet one of 355's oldest friends. And then they encounter a scary militant group in Arizona...

I've been meaning to read Y: The Last Man for a while now. It's written by Brian K Vaughan, the same guy responsible for Saga . But unlike Saga , this story is actually complete. I finally managed to get my hands on the first (of five) deluxe books, which collects the first ten issues. And now I'm going to be spending my birthday money on the remaining books. Because I am hooked. The story mostly follows Yorick. He and his pet monkey, Ampersand, are the only males left in the world after some unknown cataclysmic event caused the immediate death of everyone with a Y chromosome. All Yorick wants to do is find his girlfriend, but everyone else has their own plans for him. Yorick's mom is a congresswoman, doing her best to help hold the government together in DC after most of the government officials have died. The Secretary of Agriculture has been rapidly promoted to president, reminding me of Battlestar Galactica . Though I think this women is less qualified, and som...

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...