Series: 2022 Reads

Lizard in a Zoot Suit by Marco Finnegan

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This entry is part 1 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

So, last year I tweeted about what I’d read, in part because some friends were doing it, but also because it helped me to resettle my reading habits, which had been somewhat upset since the start of the pandemic. (What can I say, a crazy workload and a kid at home full time for a year kind of… makes other things hard.) But I have this blog here, and I’m not using it so much, so I figure I may as well post my readings here. It’ll give me a little more than 280 characters per post. I’m going to …

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Samurai Cat in the Real World by Mark E. Rogers

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This entry is part 2 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

The third of the Samurai Cat books—and the the last to have full color art—features adventures through gangland Chicago, pulp Nazi Germany (with, yes, Nazi dinosaurs), and b-movie Communist Russia in the time of Stalin. That sounds worse than it is: the Nazis here are strictly for punching (or, you know, stabbing or blowing up: they’re pulp movie Nazis), and the Russian Commies are kind of the same. In other words, this is Samurai Cat’s adventures in three violent, awful moments in history, but the whole thing is a big weird snarking mockery of mobsters and the Nazis and the …

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Jack Vance’s The Face (Demon Princes, Book 4)

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This entry is part 3 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As you may have noticed, I’m mostly blogging to log my reading for the year, at least right now. Most of these posts come at least a few weeks after finishing a given book, to give me time to think about, process, and settle in my feelings and thoughts before discussing them.  So, I continued on in the new year with the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, of which this is the fourth. (I’d read the third back in December, so it wasn’t long ago.)

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Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams (Demon Princes, Book 5)

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This entry is part 4 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

Well, this is the saddest of the Demon Princes novels, because its villain, Howard Allen Treesong, was the most sympathetic of the series: a lunatic, to be sure, but he lost his mind through abuse and bullying and a horrible childhood. The eponymous The Book of Dreams feels like some kind of metonym for a lot of SF as a literary form: a kooky, self-aggrandizing remix of obscure adventure stories, folklore, and religious tracts. The “high school reunion revenge” scene is the stuff of a Netflix miniseries season climax, I tell you. Also, the parallels between Gerson and Treesong are… …

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Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Vol. 1, by Various Artists

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This entry is part 5 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

My son took an interest in this boxed set, which I got for my wife a couple of years ago. So… I sat down and read Volume 1 to him in a single sitting. He adored it, and was crestfallen that we couldn’t read Vol. 2 immediately. (But by that point—after about an hour and forty minutes straight of doing voices—my throat was getting a bit hoarse and it was his bedtime.) This series consistes of short Mouse Guard-related tales by other authors. They’re lore set in the world, but aren’t canonical events so much as folktales, legends, and fairy …

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