Category: REVIEWS

Love is the Law by Nick Mamatas

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This entry is part 27 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

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, …

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Terrace House?

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I’m not the last person in the world to stumble upon the Terrace House franchise, but I do kind of feel like it. I’m not much for reality TV, and mostly avoided it until Netflix sucked me in a few years ago with a few reality TV series that I hate-watched. (Love in Blind, which I see not as an exploration of the moronic question of whether love really is blind and more about how easy it is for smarmy, manipulative jerks to  to do twisted psychological experiments on lonely, unhappy, and emotionally unstable people living through a massive social …

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Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

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This entry is part 25 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  I’m pretty sure I first saw a volume of Saga during a visit to Singapore in 2012, or maybe in 2014, when the series was relatively new. I didn’t pick it up then, but it did stick in my mind, especially as I’d recently read all of Y: The Last Man and, despite its flaws, enjoyed it. When I saw the entire series (I think?) available in a Humble Bundle earlier this year, I went ahead and bought the bundle: I have an iPad now, …

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Scourge of the Scornlords: Meatlandia Book III by Ahimsa Kerp and Wind Lothamer

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This entry is part 26 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Before I begin, some disclosures: Ahimsa Kerp is a longtime friend, and I’ve gamed with both him and Wind Lothamer in the past. I was one of the playtesters for this book. I’m currently working on a project with them.  So, with that out of the way: Scourge of the Scornlords is a supplement for old-school RPGs from the Meatlandia series by Knight Owl Publishing. It’s been out for …

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Fish F*ckers by Kelvin Green

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This entry is part 24 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  This is a module containing a seaside town called Innsmouth, where a cultist has set up a lucrative situation: Deep Ones are fornicating with villagers, bringing gold and offerings of fish. The villagers are conflicted about this setup, but they’re actually the abusers, while the Deep Ones are forced magically to do this, and dislike it. (The poor monsters want this magical binding to be ended so that don’t …

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My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

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This entry is part 23 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book back in April, wrote up this post, and then… never go around to editing it. So it’s going up now.  This book was given to me by by friend M.R. (@ageekinkorea) Thanks! My Friend Dahmer is a weird and uncomfortable read, for a few reasons. It’s sympathetic (to a point) with the twisted figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as a serial-killer-to-be, unflinching in its depiction of the strange and bizarre cruelty of high …

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Thieves’ World edited by Robert Lynn Asprin

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This entry is part 22 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book back in April. Shared world fiction wasn’t exactly new to the world in the 70s and 80s, but it became a really big thing at the time. In the 80s, shared-world story collections constantly seemed to be visible. Several big series appeared in bookstores and library paperback racks through most of my youth: Merovingian Nights, Liavek, Heroes in Hell, Man-Kzin War… and of course, the most omnipresent of them all was Thieves’ …

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Mouse Guard: The Owlhen Caregiver and Other Tales by David Petersen

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This entry is part 21 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book sometime in April, so… quite a while ago!  The Owlhen Caregiver and Other Tales is a single-issue comic from last summer that collects Petersen’s last few Free Comic Book Day stories from the Mouse Guard series, along with the title story, which is new. All three are in the same vein as the tales collected in Baldwin the Brave and Other Stories: two of the three offer glimpses of various stories that …

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Mouse Guard: Baldwin the Brave And Other Tales by David Petersen… and a song!

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This entry is part 20 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book back in April, though! I’ve just been busy! I’ve recently mentioned how I introduced my son to the Mouse Guard comics via the short tales in the Legends of the Guard series. After we finished those, I noted that there were two other Mouse Guard volumes available that we didn’t already have, as well as a single issue comic from this year titled The Owlhen Caregiver and Other Tales and the Mouse …

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Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time by James Gurney

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This entry is part 19 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Back when I made a trip to the United States in 2019, I asked at several bookstores about James Gurney’s Dinotopia books, and the response was always the same: the shop owners knew exactly what I was talking about, but told me that they hadn’t seen a copy in quite some time. The only way to get copies was online, as it turned out, but knowing my son’s obsession …

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