Series: 2022 Reads

Roman Britain by David Shotter

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This entry is part 31 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  I picked up this book at a university booksale in Jakarta many years ago; I apparently read it in 2016, though I didn’t realize it until near the end, when I reached the most memorable portion of the book—that which discusses the role of religion in Roman Britain.  (I’m sure some of the viewers of Raised by Wolves would be interested in that chapter, since it has a discussion of the rivalry between the Mithraic cult and the Christians in that context. Nodens also comes …

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Saga, Volume 2 by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

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This entry is part 32 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  As I recently mentioned, I’ve got the entire Saga series (so far) on my iPad. I read the second volume recently, and enjoyed it. What really grabbed me was the voice: our narrator for a lot of the volume is the future voice of the infant in the present time of the story. The other thing I enjoyed about it is the fact its handling of in-laws: they can, after all, be a real trial for any couple, but when you’re star-crossed lovers from cultures …

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Menace Under Marswood by Sterling Lanier

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This entry is part 33 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  The back cover copy of this paperback seemed to promise a kind of planetary romance voyage tale, like a more modern (circa 1980s) take on Burroughs’ Mars adventures: a trip into the Martian “outback” to investigate a new threat among the people living in the Martian wilderness. It starts out very slow. The setup preceding the adventure proper—which I’d expect a writer today to cover in 5–10 (or maybe 15) pages—takes about a third of the book, with base politics, an encounter with a shaman and …

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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

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This entry is part 34 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this at some point weeks after reading the book. This one, I was happy to run across by chance in as an available ebook on the National Library website.  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a multigenerational memoir of her family’s experiences—of the history of Vietnam (both during the colonial era and the Vietnam War)—and of their emigration to America, and how the past reverberates through the present, how the further past reverberates through the more recent past.  It’s pretty inspiring that she decided to learn how to draw comics in order to write …

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Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan

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This entry is part 35 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. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle.  This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to.  The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …

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