- Lizard in a Zoot Suit by Marco Finnegan
- Samurai Cat in the Real World by Mark E. Rogers
- Jack Vance’s The Face (Demon Princes, Book 4)
- Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams (Demon Princes, Book 5)
- Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Vol. 1, by Various Artists
- Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Vol. 2, by Various Artists
- Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses and The Anti-Racist Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez
- Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Vol. 3, by Various Artists
- Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon
- Elements of Fiction, by Walter Mosley
- Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason
- The Wages of Whiteness (Revised Edition) by David R. Roediger
- The Katurran Odyssey by David Michael Wieger, illustrated by Terryl Whitlatch
- Dragons (Time Life Enchanted World)
- May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life by Graham Greene
- Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada by Anna Brownell Jameson
- The Cursed Chateau by James Maliszewski, illustrated by Jez Gordon
- Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari
- Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time by James Gurney
- Mouse Guard: Baldwin the Brave And Other Tales by David Petersen… and a song!
- Mouse Guard: The Owlhen Caregiver and Other Tales by David Petersen
- Thieves’ World edited by Robert Lynn Asprin
- My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf
- Fish F*ckers by Kelvin Green
- Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
- Scourge of the Scornlords: Meatlandia Book III by Ahimsa Kerp and Wind Lothamer
- Love is the Law by Nick Mamatas
I read this back in June, between the end of spring semester and the start of summer semester. I’ve been slow posting these—I’m about twenty books behind, so I’ll probably pick up the pace now.
Love is the Law has been on my Kindle for quite a while now, but I finally got around to it early this summer. It’s a spiky novel bristling with bitterness and snark, which makes sense given the fusion of punk, underground Communism, and Crowleian occultism embraced by its protagonist, who is investigating the murder of her occult mentor, or… well, the relationship is complicated, but that’s close enough.
The engine of the story is a murder mystery, but really it feels a bit more like a kind of brutal underworld odyssey, a narrative baseball bat with nails through the end, bashing its way through one after another encounter with the dregs of humanity in all its various forms. It’s a mosh pit of a book, experienced through the point of view of woman who finds herself tossed into the middle of an awful mess, only to discover this that she’s caught in a trap much darker and more dangerous than she’d imagined. The darkness here involves the intertwined awfulness of a deranged family, the insanity of the 80s in both the cultural and the political senses.
It’s a fairly quick read (or it was, once I managed to carve some time out for it) and some of the minor—and not-so-minor—characters amused me, as did some of the “prescient” political commentary Mamatas includes toward the end. (Which is a good thing, because without the occasional laugh, the grimness of some of the book’s events and the spikiness of its protagonist might have proved too much for me.) Even so, the novel didn’t overtake I Am Providence and Bullettime as my favorites by Mamatas.