laceblade

Journey Into Mystery Featuring Lady Sif #2: Seeds of Destruction - I really had nothing to say about this. It was /shrug/


X-Men: The Curse is Broken - I was grateful for the focus to return to Jubilee, and enjoyed this volume more than I have the last few.
I liked Pixie, too. I've seen her in a few comics, and am interested in learning more about her.

The art feels like a series of micro-aggressions to me - the center of a panel will be the back of a woman's spandexed ass, and you're looking at someone else *from between her legs*. Like, really? Obnoxious. Not to mention the breast-accentuation.


X-Men: Blank Generation - This arc was like a breath of fresh air after the previous few. Everyone has distinct personalities, the plot is actually interesting, etc.

I enjoyed seeing the team hanging out on their plane/ship, & actually talking strategy, as opposed to just showing up places & fighting.


The Secret Country - I loved this. As with The Dubious Hills, I love the way Dean includes details not often mentioned in fantasy novels - breezes, insects, too many stairs, etc.

The premise is that a group of cousins play-act a Shakespearean fantasy with magic & murder & etc. During the summer they're separated, their pretend world - "the game" - becomes real. (Maybe.)

I'm excited to read the rest of the trilogy, and also glad that this seems to be a series that will lend itself well to rereading. Not only are there many clues & nuances to the plot, but I really just enjoy Dean's prose.

Laura sure gives shoujo manga heroines a run for their money with her clumsiness, ;)

Heidi - As a child, I imprinted on the movie version of Heidi, which had Jason Robards & cast Jane Seymour as Fraulein Rottenmeier. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that I devoutly watched Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, every week (yeah, I know).
Heidi is a book about miserable people whose mental & physical woes are cured by the fresh air & impressive views of the Alps. Or possibly, faith in God.
There's a weird trick with this one. Despite the fact that I really don't believe in, "God has a plan, so everything will work out, you just need to trust him" & also tend to abhor the "person is paralyzed and then magically cured!!", it works for me in this book because the "cure" works first for people who are sad & visit the mountain. They eat good food, they get stronger by being outside. And after Heidi comes back from Frankfurt & becomes a little more "learned," people become less crabby/fearful both because they reconcile their relationships with God & also because they meet one another through Heidi, & are able to help solve one another's problems.
Peter's grandmother can never sleep at night because their house is rattling, & she's afraid it'll cave in. Heidi's irritable grandfather comes & patches it all up before the winter, & so Grandmother is able to sleep & grow a little stronger.
Also, Heidi's able to pull strings with her rich friends in Frankfurt to supply the Grandmother with soft bread she can eat (rather than the cheaper brown bread she can't really handle), & also transport the bed she herself slept on in Germany so that the Grandmother's head can be elevated at night.
It all works out, like some kind of feminist utopia. The book was written in 1880, so ymmv. I really liked it.

ATLA FCBD offering - I was so excited to read this because Faith Erin Hicks did the art!! GO FAITH!!! An excellent story for Free Comic Book Day, & we got to see Suki be a badass.

Journey Into Mystery featuring Lady Sif, volume 1: Stronger Than Monsters - borrowed from garrideb through our comics club. Sif is kind of like a lady-version of Thor. No prior knowledge of Asgard/Thor stuff is needed, which is good, because I've never seen his movies & am only aware of him as he appears in the Avengers movie. This was pretty decent! I put volume 2 on hold at the library, although I think the story was canceled after just two volumes.
It'll be interesting the next time I reread my beloved Runaways, as I've now read other stuff by most of the authors!

Sea Change - Continuing in my quest to read books from the 2013 Tiptree Award Shortlist. I'm going to be lazy & crib the Tiptree Award's description:

This debut novel tells a dark, fairy tale-like story of a young girl and her best friend, Octavius, who is an eloquent, intelligent kraken. When Octavius is captured, Lilly sets out to rescue him, bargaining with a greedy circus master, a witch, and a pair of gay bandits. She is transformed by her quest, giving up everything she has known, including her gender, to save her friend.

And it does pretty much that! An okay read, but this writing style didn't really grab me.

Angel & Faith, s10 #2 - Still okay-ish?! I'm feeling Faith's plot more than Angel's at the moment. I hope they team up again.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - This was a reread, although I didn't remember much of my first read except that I liked it, lol. AND I STILL LIKE IT. The gods, Yeine, political intrigue up the wazoo, this is just great. I know some people have griped about the writing, in how the narrator is flashing forward and back sometimes, but it really works for me as an honest first-person perspective, and that's how I feel when I'm reading it - not at all like I'm uncomfortable in the hands of an inexperienced writer.
I reread it so that I can read the rest of the trilogy. N.K. Jemisin is one of the Guests of Honor at this year's WisCon, which is why I'm try to hustle through some of her books before Memorial Day weekend. I'm really looking forward to the next one, especially because it gets away from the uber-privileged people of the first book. I'm eager to see what this world looks like from someone else's perspective.
I was stopped by two strangers - one on the bus & one on the street - who told me how much they love this book.

• What are you currently reading?
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
There was obviously lots of Kennedy reminisces last week with the 50-year anniversary of JFK's assassination.
I bought this for $2 at the Memorial Library sale a couple months ago, during the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I like it quite a bit, just finished the chapter about the investigation committee into unions/etc., focusing on Jimmy Hoffa.
Overall, it's very sanitized, pretty obvious Schlesinger was a close family friend, etc.
For example, the mention of Rosemary going to live with nuns in Wisconsin is just a simple, "She got worse," with no mention of the attempted-and-botched lobotomy.
I empathize for RFK, who most people seemed to take as crabby & irritable if they didn't know him very well.

Very! Very! Sweet, volume 4. Only a chapter in, but I finally have this volume, which means I'll get from here to volume 8/the end in short order.

Hild by Nicola Griffith - It took about 70 pages for me to fall into this book. So far, I don't love it quite so much as some of her other stuff, but I'm sure she'll set me straight before the end.
Griffith is one of my favorite authors, & she and her wife are doing in a reading in my city next Tuesday at my favorite bookstore, so I'm pretty excited.


• What did you recently finish reading?
X-Men: Curse of the Mutants - This is essentially X-Men versus vampires. Jubilee becoming a vampire was interesting, but overall I disliked this.

X-Men: With Great Power - Following the previous volume, this was also written by Victor Gischler. I'm glad to get a little familiar with him, as he's going to be taking over the writing for Angel & Faith when Buffy season 10 starts up.
This included some more recognizable characters (Spider-Man), and the team is dealing with PI. I liked the art much more in this volume than Curse of the Mutants, in part because it was much less objectifying of women. While I found Xavier's manpain flashback sentiment in the last issue annoying, I appreciated him communicating to Jubilee that she'll be able to find a way to live with her new condition.
My goal in reading these was to get the backlog for the current series headed by Brian Wood. Given the revelation a couple weeks ago, I haven't decided yet whether I'll be continuing. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to get through the previous arc via the library.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 1-17 or so, + micro 1-8 + Infestation 1 & 2, + Eastman's 2012 annual: I've been behind on this for...years?! But I keep buying the single issues, resulting in general guilt :/
Luckily, I really enjoyed these (yes, some were rereads). I loved TMNT as a kid. I'm pretty sure my parents still have my turtles/Casey Jones/Bebop & Rock Steady action figures. As a child, one of my ambitions (in addition to being Batman) was to be a TMNT myself.
Anyway, these are dark-ish. Mutant turtles fight ninjas! April is a research intern! I roll my eyes a little at the Splinter/turtles/Shredder were Japanese men reincarnated, but overall these are pretty fun to read. I still have more to catch up on.
I found Infestation 1 & 2 subpar except for the art, & kind of loathed the art in Eastman's annual.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America - The title is sort of self-explanatory, but this book has a white investigative journalist telling the story of Jackie Bates, a black woman living in Chicago who provides care for her 3 children, husband who's on kidney dialysis & abuses drugs, ailing deadbeat father, and her diabetic grandma who's in crisis. The book was published in 1993, although it's obviously still relevant today. Complex bureaucracy consistnetly fails the Bates family. I particularly liked the chapter focusing on the Orthodox Jewish doctor who refused to discuss do-not-resuscitate orders with the family because he didn't agree with it himself. While distant with the Bates, Abraham follows him to his practice where he treats other Jews, and his demeanor is totally different.
But the Bates family never finds a practitioner who's on their level.
The book also spends a chapter talking about black people's fear of research, and also how consent given by poor people is often less informed than consent given by middle class whites - with whom many educated doctors can better related. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, there's a voyeuristic feel here - a white woman telling a black family's story. I wonder what Jackie's kids will feel when they grow up and read this book, intimately discussing their family's mental health, drug problems, etc. Still, it was put out by an academic publisher and is less of a fame thing than Skloot's book.
The book is highly relevant to my job, glad to have read it.

The Hemingses of Monticello - I waited until only days before this was due back at the library, so of course I didn't finish it (have since checked it out again so I'll be able to continue!). I think this is a pretty well-known book, but Gordon-Reed's goal is basically to tell the story of the Hemings family - a family of slaves living in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Sally Hemings had numerous children with Thomas Jefferson. I only made it through the first 9 chapters, so 14-year-old Sally and one of Jefferson's daughters had just joined him in Paris, where he's hanging out, still upset over his wife's death.
It'd be easy to focus on Jefferson, and while I've always found him an interesting person, I'm really appreciative that Gordon-Reed refuses to let this story belong to anyone but the Hemingses.
I'm looking forward to reading more of this.

Adaptation - I think I like this the most out of the books I've read by Malinda Lo so far. We read this for beer_marmalade. Very fast-paced, love the characters. Complicated, government conspiracies, a coming out story, lots of good stuff.

Dengeki Daisy, vol. 1 - Teru's brother was a hacker before he died. On his death bed, he gave a phone to her so that she could communicate with his friend DAISY - another hacker like himself who will always listen to Teru's problems now that she's alone, & will help her out of binds.
The real-life Daisy is a 24-year-old janitor at her school, although they both pretend they don't know he's Daisy.
When Teru breaks a school window, she has to "work off" her debt.
I grow tired of shoujo manga plots where the heroines become indentured servants to men.
It seems weird at first for a girl to be soe dependent on a guy she's never met but still tells all her problems to, & yet I did the same thing in middle/high school with a guy I'd met in an internet chat room, so this story has enough for me to continue for now.

Wild Com - a volume of short stories by Yumi Tamura, the manga-ka behind my beloved Basara.
I really loved the first story, in which people with elemental powers try to save others around them. The theme is "try your best no matter what," which happens a lot in manga but never fails to be incredibly moving to me!
The other stories were strange & weird but more forgettable.

Air: Letters from Lost Countries by G. Willow Wilson. Since she's going to be writing Ms. Marvel when it starts coming out in 2014, I wanted to be a little more familiar with Wilson's work. So far I've only previously read the stand-alone "Mystic" comic, meant for kids, which I didn't really like.
Air is about a flight attendant who's afraid of falling. Her love interest is an inpersonation-chameleon, and either a terrorist himself, or running from terrorists - or both.
There's a lot going on here, & I'll be reading more.