I have modified my book-a-day challenge to a book or old NYer challenge. Also, my paper notebook is used up so that's why "you" are seeing it here (as if there is a you).
The dates roughly correspond to the listed number.
- Rhialto the Magnificent by Jack Vance. I rather wish I hadn't stuck with this series, even though it has some pleasures.
- Sex and Rockets (John Parsons biography). Weird guy who was a self-taught rocket scientist and occultist (and apparently something of a libertarian icon), but not an especially well-done job.
- The Laughing Policeman. Back to the Martin Beck books. They've all been good, and sort of the same, but I like the title scene(s) of this one in particular.
- Daredevil by Chip Zdarsky volume 2. Kingpin, Elektra, Bullseye, Typhoid Mary, and Catholic guilt are all trotted out as usual. Done well enough, especially the two issues drawn by... I forget who.
- June 19th New Yorker
- June 26th New Yorker
- JLI volume 3. This one is funny, and also obnoxious funny. It concludes the space capitalist storyline, ending with the human trafficking of Mr. Miracle to Apokolips.
- June 12th NYer
- Spider-Man: Life Story
- Dalkey Days by Steven Moore.
- May 16th NYer
- 12-26-22 NYer
- JLI volume 4. I really noticed the pacing and the use of the page as a unit. Seldom does a segment last more than 4 pages, the lengths vary, and only when two storylines come together are they shared on a page.
- 8-1-22 NYer
- 1/2-9/23 NYer.
- 7/3/23 NYer.
- 52 Volume 1 (again)
- Love Everlasting- Expected to end, don't know why. I am into it, trying to figure it out alongside Joan. A little nervous about nature of mother and threat of father beyond.
- New Teen Titans v. 2. The sumptuously rendered "Clash of the Titans" plus the quest for the Doom Patrol (replete with indelible jungle scenes). Some of Perez's best art.
- Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight. Alex DiCampi and others. One is a graphic rapey fairly tale (the sexual violence grindy, but not the fairy tale) and a summer camp monster movie.
- The Guermantes Way. Marcel finds his way into the Faubourg St. Germain, who strike me as the ultra-rich superconservatives among us today. Dreyfus all over the place. The Duke Guermantes sends out to find out if his ailing cousin has died yet, so that he can go to a party. He refuses to hear the news he doesn't want to hear.
- The Violent Bear It Away. The nephew writes about him in a schoolteacher magazine! The boy fails at everything--baptism, drowning, burying, and burning.
- Invincible vol. 7: Three's Company. Nice triangle stuff--cover of Mark, Amber, and Eve out of costume with Eve looking jealous, then next ish Eve and Mark in costume flying off with Amber looking on. Also, older other-dimensional Eve to Mark: "Tell her anything!"
- Daredevil by Zdarsky v. 3. I'm done. Not terrible, but the premise of the super-hero as legal person is so stupid. Less stupid than the Venom invasion of the prison though.
- Gone to the Wolves by John Wray. A bad book with three incompatible metal scenes as successive back drops.
- JLI volume 5. Shifts focus to Justice League Europe including a legitimately funny issue with team taking French lessons with a stern teacher, alongside the incognito Injustice League and, we learn at the end, a handful of intelligent agents from various countries.
- High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 1970s. Erik Davis dives deeply into work and experiences of Dennis and Terence McKenna, RAW, and Philip K. Dick using theory of Sloterdijk, Latour, Agamben, and a passel of others.
- JLI volume 6. Still executing the formula, but even if this wasn't the last one available, I'd probably be done.
- Fast by Jorie Graham. New use of spacing (single vs double, blocks of texts vs. typical long lines0 dashes, arrows (vectors), bursts of internal rhyme. About life and death, of the parents, herself, the planet: "Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plancts to give me my small identity. No, the planets."
- Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight vol 2
- NYer 8/22/22
- The Firetruck that Disappeared (Martin Beck). Mentions recent events (from Laughing Policeman) but characters remain generic.
