Tag: #booksread2022

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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Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

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This entry is part 18 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!  Stolen Focus is a book about something a lot of us have been struggling with for years, but which a lot of people I know have found surging to the fore during the pandemic: a growing sense of difficulty paying attention, reading, and disengaging from the digital world. We all seem to be well aware of this problem—google the word “doomscroll” for one indicator of how powerless and trapped …

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The Cursed Chateau by James Maliszewski, illustrated by Jez Gordon

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This entry is part 17 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. The Cursed Chateau is an adventure set in a castle in the south of France, haunted by the ghost of a sadistic maniac and many of his victims. This is an adventure that James Maliszewski had published previously: there’s a Rogue Games edition listed online from 1999, and the author mentions having run the game many times over the years and noted player responses and feedback. The edition I’m looking at is the 2016 edition.

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Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada by Anna Brownell Jameson

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This entry is part 16 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 book I’ve had for ages, but from which I only read a little bit. I figured I’d resolve that, and… quickly remembered why I had never read much of it. Anna Brownell Jameson was long-winded in the way of many people from her era—she was born late in the late 1700s, and this book is an account of her travel to Canada in the 1830s.  Notably, …

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May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life by Graham Greene

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This entry is part 15 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!  May We Borrow Your Husband?  is a 1967 collection of short fictions—in some cases, they’re in fact extended vignettes, and Greene himself called them “entertainments”—by Graham Greene. The subtitle—”And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life”—isn’t printed on the cover of the Penguin edition I have, but it pretty much sums up the book. It reminds me a bit of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City except it’s much grittier …

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