My Year of Books 2020

I’ve continued to log, rate, and review my reading over on Goodreads, and as always I encourage you to follow me over there if you wanna see more of my writing on books (by the way, Goodreads is somehow is still the best site for such a thing that I know of, despite the fact that the site is really ugly and clunky… I can’t believe there hasn’t been an upstart with a sleek, Letterboxd-style alternative).

This year found me reading the entire Once and Future King saga by T.H. White, and I really, really dug it. As I discussed over on the Book Marks site, I came to White late:

“I’m very surprised I never got turned on to it when I was younger, since I loved myths, legends, and fantasy. I suppose I thought it would be a straight-forward telling of the King Arthur myths, something dense and old-fashioned that I really ought to read but wasn’t very excited about diving into. I had seen the Disney film The Sword in the Stone and I liked it, but it didn’t really click with me that I needed to seek out the source material. It was only in reading Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk a few years back that I got an inkling of what a strange, moving, and hilarious series of tales The Once and Future King really is. The writing is smooth, the humor layered, the central morality of the story is deeply touching.”

It was a big year for reading (or re-reading) comics and graphic novels, including finally making it through the first compendium of Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples (fun and imaginative but ultimately left me flat), revisiting Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (really impressive how well everything clicks into place and as an artist Rodriguez develops from being “pretty good” in Welcome to Lovecraft to “flat out amazing” in Small World), a bunch of Mignola-adjacent work including The Visitor How and Why He Stayed with art by my old fave Paul Grist and the cheeky Mr. Higgins Comes Home and Our Encounters With Evil by Warwick Johnson Cadwell (I found the latter particularly delightful), finishing up the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen saga with The Tempest (I think Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill manage to tie everything up with a nice little bow), and rereading stuff from my formative years like Paul Chadwick’s Concrete: Think Like a Mountain (beautiful and sorrowful) and The Extremist by Peter Milligan and Ted McKeever (ugly and brutal). I also made a point of reading some new graphic novels by friends and fellow-travelers and wasn’t disappointed in the least: Odessa by Jonathan Hill, A Map to the Sun by Sloane Leong, Junior Citizens by Ian Herring and Daniel MacIntyre, and The Cursed Hermit by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes were all really enjoyable. A bande dessinée series was one of the most impressive things I read this year: The Ogre-Gods books by Bertrand Gatignol and the late, great Hubert were an eye-popping take on an epic fantasy tale, I am looking forward to reading the newly-released fourth tome, Première-née, and very sad that Hubert died this year—far, far too young. I haven’t had the time to fully process these books so far, I think I’ll try to write a longer review of the entire series next year.

Back on the “real books” side, my reading leaned pretty heavily towards various flavors of science fiction: Golden State by Ben H. Winters, Red Mars and The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, Replay by Ken Grimwood (so fun and also quite philosophical), and some shorter works like The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal, The Daughter of Odren by Ursula K. LeGuin, and Lyra’s Oxford by Phillip Pullman.

For whatever reason I started but still haven’t finished a bunch of non-“genre” (tho’ I believe “literary fiction” or “memoir” are very much genres of their own) books; my currently reading pile includes The Overstory by Richard Powers, Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, and many more titles that will have to wait until 2021. I think I’ll be focusing on a bit less sci-fi and fantasy in the coming year.

Overall by book count I read a bit more than last year, but again a lot of them were graphic novels, so that is a bit more forgiving. I’ll see if I can improve that a bit next year as well.

Here is my list, including “blurbs” from the linked reviews, and links to my Bookshop in case you want to pick any of them up (I get a refferal fee):

The Daughter of Odren by Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“A simple stand-alone tale of trauma, revenge, and healing…”

Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman, illustrations by John Lawrence ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“A fast-paced adventure that ends almost as soon as it gets going, which is certain to frustrate many readers, but works nicely if you just enjoy it for what it is.”

The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Re-reading it I was really impressed by how clearly thought out the forward trajectory (and even more importantly, the convoluted backstory) of the series is right from the start.”
Locke & Key: Grindhouse ⭐️⭐️
Locke & Key: Small World ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Quick little jaunt into the backstory of Key House, this one-and-done tale has some fun characterization of some old figures in the Locke family and a nice and simple adventure narrative, but it is mostly and excuse to do some playful visual action.”

Millennium Fever by Nick Abadzis and Duncan Fegredo ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Fun, propulsive read, dealing with issues of racial and gender identity in a way that’s fairly ahead of its time…”

Mother Earth Father Sky by Sue Harrison ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“I picked this book up from a free library while traveling in South Africa, and had never heard of it and would likely never have picked it up in the shop. There is a bit of fun in reading something that is very much out of your wheelhouse, chosen for you by happenstance.”

The Extremist by Peter Milligan and Ted McKeever ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“…McKeever’s drawings are purposefully unpleasant, rough graphic slashes and drybrush, the characters all angles and sneering lips. Almost all the superficial sexiness is (appropriately) drained out of the story to reveal something deeper, darker, and crueler.”

Hellboy Omnibus Volume 2: Strange Places by Mike Mignola, Richard Corben, and Gary Gianni ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Overall this is probably the weakest of the Hellboy Omnibus editions, sort of stuck between the straightforward adventure vibes of the early arcs and the more epic tales to come.”

The Visitor How and Why He Stayed by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson, and Paul Grist ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“A rather sweet and introspective tale with a few bits of action thrown in. At the heart of the story is a romance that is quite touching despite being very loosely sketched in, more suggested than described.”

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“The plot progresses in an entirely believable and thoughtful manner, with characters’ actions and conflicts making perfect sense in the context of their development (mistakes, suffice it to say, are made).”

Saga: Book One by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“The bad side of this ‘anything can happen’ approach is that literally ‘anything can happen.’ There is rarely a sense that this universe operates by any sense of rules, order, or logic.”

Uptight #5 by Jordan Crane ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Fantastic.”

Your Black Friend by Ben Passmore ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mr. Higgins Comes Home by Mike Mignola, Warwick Johnson Cadwell ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Our Encounters with Evil ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“The stories definitely have a touch of Mike Mignola throughout, but Cadwell really makes the tales his own here, and thankfully these adventures are not connected to the greater Mignolaverse, so no need to worry about prophecies of Anung Un Rama getting in the way of the fun. Highly recommended and can’t wait for more!”

Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley ⭐️⭐️

Concrete: Think Like A Mountain by Paul Chadwick ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Chadwick does such a good job taking his central sci-fi conceit (man is abducted by aliens and has his brain implanted in a super-strong, rocky alien body) as a starting point, and then using that platform to examine ideas and experiences that are obviously near and dear to to the author’s heart… In particular a multi-faceted engagement with environmentalism, on display most prominently in this volume but a major thread throughout the entire series. This look at the earth has been really moving to me… I know this work, which I first encountered in my teens/early twenties, has had a major influence on my own thinking about the natural world and the (human-created) problems facing it.”

Black Widow: The Complete Collection by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“All this is intriguing, but in point of fact little pays off… Without getting into spoiler territory I think it is safe to say that almost as soon as new characters and ideas are introduced they end up being variously sidelined, revealed to be unimportant (remember those top-secret files? Not such a big deal after all), or killed off rather prematurely (suffice it to say this book has a rather high body count).”

The Prince in Waiting by John Christopher ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons by Patrick Rothfuss, Jim Zub, and Troy Little ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“The creators brought their A-game and made something that’s very rich.”

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Absurd, virtuosic, and bombastic, The Tempest is also somehow rather touching in the end.”

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Other moments are bizarre and terrifying, with some really rough moments of violence and war, especially as the plot moves closer to our own time. One element that is really intriguing is that I think you’d be hard pressed to say which timeline was “better,” both our own world and this alternate history abound with a mix of the horrific and the sublime, progress and regression.”

Odessa by Jonathan Hill ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Despite their cartoonish feel, Hill’s characters retain a surprising sense of realism; the reader gets the sense that every line is important to the full expression of Hill’s protagonists, their allies, and their many enemies.”

The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
The Witch in the Wood ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Ill-Made Knight ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Candle in the Wind ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Book of Merlyn ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“The writing is smooth, the humor layered, the central morality of the story is deeply touching. The figure of Merlin, who T.H. White brilliantly envisions as a man moving backwards through time, is absolutely brilliant and delightful.”

Junior Citizens by Ian Herring and Daniel MacIntyre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Incompetent fools fail upwards into the highest echelons of the corporate hierarchy, while at the same time no good deed goes unpunished amongst those “juniors” who are trying their best to muddle their way through a world that views them as disposable cogs in a machine.”

The End of October by Lawrence Wright ⭐️⭐️ Review
“This book, originally written as a screenplay, is less Contagion (i.e. realistic, sober, concerned with everyday heroes) and far more Inferno, an over-the-top, borderline sci-fi potboiler complete with an infallible protagonist with an outlandish tragic backstory, a silver-haired ecoterrorist super villain in a modernist lair, rather dull action, and more.”

A Map to the Sun by Sloane Leong ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Gorgeously drawn with a loose line and a vibrant color palette, A Map to the Sun captures a dream-like Southern California vibe that stands in sharp contrast with the very real issues Leong’s “wrong-side-of-the-tracks” female teen protagonists face.”

Replay by Ken Grimwood ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Cursed Hermit by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Bertin and Forbes are definitely “playing for keeps” here… Characters are wounded, suffer, and die. Past actions, from a character’s life-altering injury in the previous book to the malevolent and often invisible forces of colonialism, racism, and sexism all rear their ugly heads here, and what starts off as a loving pastiche of light-hearted adventure fare is quickly transformed into a rather moving and disturbing look at pain and sorrow.”

Golden State by Ben H. Winters ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“A rumination on truth and the social compact that couldn’t be more relevant.”

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Really an impressive feat of imagination and detail, grounded in reality but encompassing remarkable ideas and concepts, occasionally I found it veered into boring, but there were always amazing twists and turns along the road that made it well-worth the effort.”

Destination inconnue by Agatha Christie ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Petit by Hubert and Bertrand Gatignol ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Half-Blood ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Great Man ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Julian in Purgatory by Jon Allen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Jon Allen’s cartoony drawing style (Julian and his friends and enemies are drawn as cats, dogs, bears and other anthropomorphic characters), snappy dialogue, and breezy pacing belie the depth of this graphic novel’s themes and narrative heft.”

Saturday and Sunday: Rock Heaven by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen de Bonneval ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“Light and breezy, with the episodic rhythms of a classic newspaper strip. This book… chronicles the adventures of a pair of anthropomorphic lizards, one grumpy and questioning (Saturday), the other laid-back and accepting (Sunday), who go on a quest to learn more about their place in the world. Do they find answers? Not really, but this is more of a ‘journey-is-the-destination’ type of tale.”

First Knife (AKA Protector) by Simon Roy, Daniel M. Benson, Artyom Trakhanov, and Jason Wordie ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review
“The artwork by Artyom Trakhanov is remarkably gorgeous and sits in a perfect sweet spot between art comix expression and genre action. Occasionally the narrative and pacing becomes very hard to follow, but the pleasures of the work transcend any failings.”