Sf&f: The City and the City, Neverwhere, Neptune’s Brood
Comics: Fatale, George Perez’s Avengers Visionaries, Great Darkness Saga, 303, Lazarus, Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying, Little Hits (Fraction's Hawkeye), Batman: Illustrated by Neal Adams, Defenders: "Tournament of Heroes"
other: Oregon Hill, The Tipping Point, Veronica Mars, Brothers K, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, I Know What You Did Last Summer
Romantic Poetry: Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Landor, Lamb, Campbell, Hazlitt, Moore, Hunt, DeQuincey, Peacock, Haydon, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Beddoes (i.e., finished the anthology I was reading)
Notes on reading--of the novels, probably most admired The City and the City which read like a chapter of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller that just kept going. A few of this I took in by audiobook: Neverwhere and The Tipping Point read by the author, which is always my preference. I heard that the Veronica Mars audiobook is narrated by Kristen Bell, which sounds appealing, but the third person viewpoint would be weird. Of the comics, I was pleasantly surprised by Brubaker and Phillips's Cthulu-noir take on crime fiction. I was not surprised by the Hawkeye (the second volume even better than the first), the Legion of Super Heroes Great Darkness (I had 3 of the 5 issues when a kid, so the nostalgia carried me through), or Defenders (for some reason, I have loved every issue of that series I've ever come across). It's work noting that Lois Duncan "updated" I Know What You Did by throwing in words like "texting" and "webcast." The updates were merely annoying, but I would seek out originals in the future.
I finished my major reading project in the Romantics anthology-- I should jot down some notes before too long. I also plan on glancing at some more current anthologies to see how the landscape has changed. Expect to see some posts in next few weeks--thinking about a piece comparing the Reagan-era dystopias of Frank Miller and Margaret Atwood.
