Posted January 6, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments
Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon, Matt Fraction, David Aja, Javier Pulido, Alan Davis
Reread this ’cause I couldn’t remember much about it, and I have volume three to read now and volume four to read as soon as they stop procrastinating and actually bring it out. I love the consistency of most of the art in this series, which suits the tone perfectly, though it makes the included bit from Young Avengers Presents look particularly out of place (and man, had I ever forgotten that Tommy’s crush on Kate was obvious even there).
This is a pretty relaxed comic. It’s not really about the superhero, Hawkeye, one of the Avengers; it’s about Clint Barton and Kate Bishop and all the trouble they can get into when they don’t have their teams backing them up. It’s about Clint being a dummy and Kate being really awesome and all the weird and wonderful arrows Clint has, some of which I’m sure refer to other comics (that you don’t have to know about it to make it funny). I love the generally irreverent tone of this: however much I adore Steve Rogers, and however much of a snarky little shit he can be, Clint Barton’s something else when it comes to doing stupid stuff and being an idiot about it.
Still not my favourite comic ever (hello, Captain Marvel) but pretty awesome all the same.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Marvel, Matt Fraction
Posted December 27, 2014 by in General / 24 Comments
Or, Stacking the Shelves: The Christmas Edition! I think I’ve probably had similarly large hauls before, but still… I had a very good Christmas, and if I could just tear myself away from my new game (Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Curtain Call), I’ll show you all the details. Plus my giant literary giraffe, a gift from my dad.
His name is Charles Parker, after Lord Peter’s best friend.
He turns up when you least expect it.
Turn around…
So yeah, that was a Christmas. And this is a haul…
Comics
The first four are from Mum and Dad — and don’t worry, I know it’s the first two feature Cassandra Cain as Batgirl, and the third Barbara Gordon — and the two Saga volumes are from my little sis. <3
Non-fiction
One of you lot recommended me The Trouble with Physics, and Dad got me that and the book on Lucy. The other three came from the Kindle sale.
Pure geekery
Little sister knows me well! Or, you know, remembered what I did some of my master’s work on.
Fiction
That’s a real mix of gifts, sales and randomness.
Audiobooks
I had credits to spend.
I also got a £20 Waterstones gift card, which I’ll be spending today, so watch out for next week’s haul, too… What’s everyone else been getting?!
Tags: Alastair Reynolds, books, Brian Vaughan, comics, DC, J.R.R. Tolkien, Marvel, non-fiction, Stacking the Shelves
Posted December 22, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments
Black Widow: The Finely Woven Thread, Nathan Edmondson, Phil Noto
It shouldn’t really be surprising that this comic features a lot of Black Widow being kickass. There’s quite a casual tone to it, though, with some of the things she says, which made me feel a bit like it was trying to be Black Widow a la Hawkeye. A comment like “Pro tip (often learned too late): don’t argue with crazy”… I don’t know, it seems more like smartass Hawkeye than Widow. Not that she couldn’t imitate whoever she needs to, to fit in, but… that’s her mental commentary? Doesn’t feel right.
It’s fun watching Widow be kickass and all, but it did feel a little lacking in that the overarching plot is the same one as every other Black Widow comic I’ve read: Natasha wants to atone for her past sins. Natasha can’t let anyone close. Natasha is a predator. Etc. It wouldn’t be true to the character to drop that, but there are plenty of people who can put a fresh spin on an old story, or bring new motivations and conflicts to an old character. (Steve Rogers facing off against Bucky Barnes in Brubaker’s Winter Soldier is a good example, but Widow facing off against people from her past has been done, and done.)
The art looks gorgeous, though the constant muted red palette is again… something that feels typical. I enjoyed reading this, but it didn’t bring me anything new. It’s a good place to start to build something, and there does seem to be an ongoing plot as of the last couple of issues collected in this TPB, but… I don’t want to be able to predict Natasha Romanoff.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Marvel
Posted December 20, 2014 by in General / 23 Comments
Setting this up very much in advance, so goodness knows what it’ll look like by the time I’m done…
Gifts
Yep, someone sent me Smashwords codes for all these. <3 I’m looking forward to trying them. I actually got them last week, but I didn’t remember in time to include them in that StS post.
Comics
Oh dear, all three out on the same day now? I got these covers from the Marvel site before the release, hence the lack of text (I think?).
SantaThing
I love taking part in the Secret Santa on LibraryThing; the person who had me to choose for clearly ‘got’ me as a reader, given how much I love Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. So good to have a dead tree version — and that’s an excuse to reread it, right? Right? …No? Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the comics, too! I’m not as sure about The Name of the Wind; on the one hand, I’ve been recced it several times, on the other, some people I trust really disliked it. Still, prime excuse to try it!
Bought
I bought this for my mother a while back, but she hasn’t had chance to read it. (She’s nuts about fountain pens; it seemed perfect.) But I saw this copy today in The Works for £3, and I thought… well, why not? I was meaning to borrow it after Mum anyway.
What’s anyone else been getting?
Tags: books, comics, Marvel, SF/F
Posted December 16, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments
This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is “Top Ten Books I Read in 2014”. This one you can probably predict if you follow this blog, but I won’t leave you guessing. Also, links don’t show up on my theme very well, so I’ll just say now that all the titles are links to the reviews I wrote earlier in the year.
- The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Yep, you probably predicted this one. I just loved it to bits — I’d have happily gone back to page one and started all over again right away. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it was pretty perfect for me.
- The King of Elf-land’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany. This is definitely not new to a lot of people, but it was new to me. I think I’d read one of Dunsany’s short story collections before, but not this one. It’s a lovely mythic/fairytale-like world. In style and the like, it’s not like the more typical modern fantasy, but that doesn’t put me off at all.
- We Have Always Fought, Kameron Hurley. I haven’t read any of Hurley’s fiction yet; she may even be a writer who appeals to me more as a commentator than as a creator, since I did start God’s War at one point and put it down again. But I loved this collection of her essays. She very much deserved her Hugo.
- My Real Children, Jo Walton. Again, probably predictable. I loved the characters in this — the sheer range of them, the ways small circumstances could change them. It was quite upsetting on a personal level because of the mentions of dementia, but the fact that it had the power to upset me only made me like it more.
- The Movement: Class Warfare, Gail Simone. I think this is a pretty timely comic. This sums it up, from my review: “[T]his is a group of young people getting together against injustice. Not supervillains: injustice. Crooked cops who beat poor people and POC because they can. The whole system of privilege and disprivilege. It’s a team of heroes for the Occupy Movement, for the 99%, for the disenfranchised.”
- Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge. Read this all in one go on a train journey and resented every interruption. There’s a great atmosphere to this book.
- Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry. I’ve always been fascinated by Stanley Milgram’s experiments, and this was a great way of delving into them — looking at it not from Milgram’s point of view, not looking at the results, but at the people he used in this experiment.
- What Makes This Book So Great, Jo Walton. This is kinda cheating, in that it’s a book chock full of the books Jo Walton likes. Not limited to a top ten, of course, but I have a feeling it could furnish the whole contents of this list.
- Spillover, David Quammen. Fascinating stuff, with some very obvious conclusions that apparently still need to be said. We are destroying habitats, forcing animals closer together and closer to us: we’re creating the perfect situation for a pandemic. It’s going to happen again, as it’s happened before, and we’ve just got to hope it isn’t something exotic and deadly. Even the flu is bad enough when it sweeps the world.
- The Broken Land, Ian McDonald. This is the only book in this list I didn’t give five stars. But it’s stayed on my mind the whole time, and the issues it examines aren’t temporary ones that’re about to go away.
This is gonna be a really interesting week to check out other people’s lists; I’m looking forward to this! Make sure you link me to your list if you comment. I’ll always visit and comment back.
Tags: books, comics, DC, Frances Hardinge, Gail Simone, Ian McDonald, Jo Walton, Kameron Hurley, non-fiction, SF/F, Top Ten Tuesday
Posted December 13, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments
It’s been a quiet week, despite the great temptation caused by people’s end of year lists. Like Tor’s Reviewer’s Choice, oh man. I gave myself a limit, though, and I stuck to it.
Ebooks
Daughter of Mystery and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet were from best-of lists — possibly even the Tor one I linked. Legion: Skin Deep, I actually picked up two or three weeks ago but forgot to include back then. Mea culpa.
For review
A somewhat random choice from Bookbridgr!
Library
Someone in my book group said they wouldn’t rest until I read more of Brubaker’s work, so, tahdah. I thought I’d make sure they could rest. Crow Country was a somewhat random choice between that, Badgerlands and Otter Country; I feel in the mood at the moment to read about Britain’s indigenous species.
Anyway, that’s it for me. Anyone else been getting anything exciting? Or are you saving all the excitement for Christmas?
Tags: books, Brandon Sanderson, comics, SF/F, Stacking the Shelves
Posted December 6, 2014 by in General / 29 Comments
I’m doing really well and not buying books at the moment! But that doesn’t stop me going to the library (dun dun dunnn) or picking up comics. Though honestly, I picked these issues up a couple of weeks ago and forgot to include them then, so I thought I’d drop them into this post.
Review copies
I haven’t actually read anything by Kate Elliott yet, so this seems like a good place to start! As for H is for Hawk, I keep getting curious about it, but not curious enough to buy it… and then lo and behold, I get it on Netgalley. I’m quite interested to get round to reading it ASAP.
Library fiction
Rachel Aaron and Adam Christopher have actually been on my TBR for ages, but that’s in ebook form, and sometimes I’m not in the mood for that. So I thought maybe getting from the library would kickstart me. As for the others, they come recommended by various people, and Emily of New Moon by my love of Anne of Green Gables, though I gather Emily’s a bit more saccharine than Anne.
Library non-fiction
I think a friend read Ladies of the Grand Tour recently, and The Galápagos has an obvious draw for me…
Comics (single issues)
Jessica Drew is awesome.
That’s it for me, and you may well add that that’s plenty for one person. What’s anyone else been getting their hands on?
Tags: Adam Christopher, books, comics, Marvel, Rachel Bach/Rachel Aaron, SF/F, Stacking the Shelves
Posted November 29, 2014 by in Reviews / 6 Comments
The Wicked + The Divine, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson
The Wicked + The Divine is really gorgeously illustrated and coloured. I want to give it a million stars just because it looks so consistently good. Everything is clear, clean, sharp: it’s very characteristically McKelvie’s work (as the script is pretty characteristic of Kieron Gillen, I think) and that’s definitely a good thing. I think I got sucked into this via the art, first and foremost.
In terms of plotting and characters, there’s interesting stuff going on, but there are tons of unanswered questions. Unlike some other reviewers, I don’t expect to get all the answers in the first five issue TPB; we wouldn’t get that in a novel, so why here? There is a lot I want to know, about the whys and wherefores of the gods’ reincarnations, what their aims are, why they love attention… I’m half-expecting something American Gods-y, in that sense, where the worship and adulation they get as pop idols fuels them in some way. I don’t know, though; I’m looking forward to finding out.
The relationship between Laura and Luci is central to the story, and it mostly works for me. I think the intensity of the bond doesn’t entirely feel natural there… but there are explanations: Laura’s hunger to be close to the gods, rebellion against her parents, hero worship and I-want-to-be-you.
I’m looking forward to seeing where this is going, anyway; it looks like it’s going to be a fun ride.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, comics
Posted November 23, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Invincible Iron Man: Demon, Matt Fraction, Salvador Laracca
This, for me, was one of those volumes which proves you don’t always have to keep up with every bit of every storyline to still enjoy parts of the larger arc. It was also the first time I really got enthused about Matt Fraction’s storytelling: I need to reread the Hawkeye books now that I’m more invested in the character, since it was sort of inevitable that I didn’t get on too well with his work on Thor — I’m not that big a fan of Thor (sorry honey). But when he’s working on Iron Man, well, Tony Stark’s got himself attached to my heartstrings somehow, and goodness does Fraction know how to work that.
Most of the book revolves around fallout from the Fear Itself event, which I only know a little about. I don’t know exactly what happened when Tony fell off the wagon, or why Pepper’s in disgrace over Rescue and something to do with her crying. I only know a little bit about Cabe and the various villains up against Tony. What I know about the main players is mostly based on the cinematic universe.
And yet. I still care passionately about Tony and his struggle with alcoholism, about his battle of wits with the Mandarin, about what’s happening with him and Rhodey and the struggle with the government to control Iron Man. (I was surprised there weren’t more laughs milked out of it when Tony ended up naked in battle.)
One or two things drove me a little nuts, like why would Tony voluntarily install the limiter? Without dismantling it first and checking if it is everything they say? If he did, how did they take him by surprise and make it hard for him to remove? Why didn’t he see that coming? Or was everything that happened in that battle planned?
I think it’ll take the next TPB or so to find out the answers to all my questions, but in a way, this was satisfying on its own in the sense that I jumped in, got captured by the story, had my heartstrings yanked, and enjoyed the experience without needing to know all the context.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Marvel, Matt Fraction
Posted November 17, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Mighty Thor: The Galactus Seed, Matt Fraction, Olivier Coipel
I’ve never been quite as fond of Fraction’s work as others seem to be, but given his reputation I’m willing to keep trying. The Mighty Thor is okay; there are some fun moments, and it does feature kid!Loki, who is probably the most interesting character in the comic. That whole refresh of Loki’s character remains interesting to me because it plays with all sorts of stuff, bringing back the ambiguity of his character from the original legends rather than any straightforward comicbook villain stuff. (Some people don’t like that because it seems to be part of the woobification of Loki prompted by Hiddleston fans, but I see it there in the source material.)
Otherwise, the Galactus/Silver Surfer stuff seemed fairly routine — I knew how it’d go from playing Lego Marvel Superheroes, y’know? It’s not like there’s any real danger of Galactus being allowed to eat Earth.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Marvel, Matt Fraction
Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon, Matt Fraction, David Aja, Javier Pulido, Alan Davis
