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Me: I don't know how anyone can sit down and watch an entire season of television in one weekend, for starters where do they find the time? Also me: listens to three episodes of Crime Pays Botany Doesn't in two days
Anyway, do you all want an update on the book reshelving project? I bet you do!
I am about 2/5 of the way done going through the nonfiction. I have settled on a classification system that goes size (because space means I have to shelve by size), top-level class, second-level class, and then color. I have five top-level classes, and about ten second-level classes each, so far - I'm now done with the top-level "Things about people" and the top-level "Things to Make and Do", which leaves the top-levels "Sciencey things" and "Weird Shitology" and "things about how we talk about things". I'm still undecided on how to turn those things into a useful call number, though.
I have culled about 50 so far, which isn't the 10% I was hoping for, but is better than the 5% I was afraid of, and the next section will have a lot more to cull! (I have thought this about every section so far.) I am already out of shelf space for reshelving. shrug emoji
There's still a lot of books where it's really hard to narrow down where it belongs, but remembering that this system is for me specifically and not meant to be universally valid helps a lot. Now I just have to fight the conflicting impulses of "this goes with the books it's conceptually closest to in my memory" and "this goes with the books it matches! because matching! and sets!"
And also I went book-shopping this weekend and brought home nearly enough to wipe out the entire cull so far, but so it goes. :P
Anyway, I have also decided that September is Comics Reading Month. I have a pile of comics that I need to read, and if I read one alphabet-letter a day, I'll get through them in a month, right?
(Backstory because I don't think I've mentioned it here lately: I have a friend in the industry who gets vast numbers of free review/preprint copies which she then passes on, so I basically periodically go over and go bin-diving for interesting things and come back with way too many comics, which I then never read because they are overwhelming. As long as they aren't Marvel, DC, IDW, or Dark Horse, which don't end up in the piles.)
This is the pile of ones that I have scattered issues of and no emotional commitment to, so the idea is I read, review, and decide if I care. Hopefully there will be a lot of I don't care, and I can get rid of them.
So I am going to try to post very short reviews here, every day or every other, for the month. We'll see if it lasts better than any of my other posting resolutions. The ratings are * for this is worth hunting down more of, and # for this is worth keeping as a physical object (maybe because it's spectacularly beautiful, maybe because I want to be able to prove in future that it was a real thing that was actually published.)
Here's the first two days:
Ab Irato #3 of 6 by Thierry Labrosse, translated Jeremy Melloul, July 2017. Lion Forge (original French publication by Editions Glenat)
Set in a near-future dystopia, in a city ruled by corrupt governments and medical corporations. A revolutionary group is holed up in part of the city, having taken a large number of civilian hostages, including Our Heroine. Our Hero, trapped outside, wants to rescue her at all costs; meanwhile both the revolutionaries and the government forces are facing internal division and dissent about what to do next.
This was... fine? I wasn't struck by any of the characters, and there was nothing particularly striking about the plot or worldbuilding either. The dialog sometimes felt kind of stilted too, but it's hard to say how much of that was the translator. The linework was a bit sketchy and mushy in a style that has never really appealed to me, but I did like the coloring choices, especially the strong use of contrasting lights and darks (which is something a lot of European comics seem to do better than American or Japanese.)
I probably picked this up on the basis that a comic with a non-sexualized WOC on the cover won't be 100% awful, and this one was not awful. It was fine. I think the woman on the cover is some kind of Asian ninja with a tragic backstory, although I did not manage to tell the female characters apart consistently enough to be sure, which isn't a great sign.
*Angel City #1, October 2016, Oni Press, by Janet Harvey (writer) and Megan Levens (illustrator.)
A hardboiled murder mystery in golden age LA, inspired (very loosely) by the Black Dahlia case. The murdered woman is an aspiring starlet. The heroine is a friend who came to LA with her, who gave up on her stage aspirations in favor of becoming a mafia moll and enforcer; she has to overcome both her own crust and cynicism and a corrupt city to find justice for her friend.
I really liked this one! The main character is really well done and intriguing and I want to see what she does next, and I love what they're doing so far with the noir conventions, but mixing them around in ways that foreground the women's stories and emphasize the way power works in this LA. The art is clean and bright and cartoony but works really well with the underlying currents of violence of the story.
This one I want to look out and read more of - will pick up a trade if I stumble on one.
Atlas & Axis #1-#2, Feb-March 2018, by Pau. Statix Press, original French publication Ankama Editions.
An anthro comic about two adventuring dogs in a cod-medieval fantasy world. They return from a quest for treasure to discover that their home village - all their friends and relations - have been killed or kidnapped by raiders from the North, and having lost everything in the raid, head directionlessly north seeking revenge.
It is exactly as formulaic as it sounds. They hit all the buttons of Generic Sword & Sorcery Story and there isn't much else underlying it to make it interesting beyond that, and it hangs itself heavily on people just buying the tropes rather than doing the work of actual plot logic. The art was always fun and bright and expressive. The dog behavior worked into the story (like obsessing over the smell of one's lady love's butt) was fun and I do appreciate that the female animal characters aren't warped into human female shapes more that the male ones. On the other hand, the female characters fit into the stereotyped S&S roles just as much as the males. Also, there were several places where the story just skipped stuff, in the sort of way that made me turn back to see if I'd missed a page somehow, but it didn't help.
*Blackbird #4 (January 2019), Image, by Jen Bartel (artist) and Sam Humphries (writer)
A young woman, accompanied by a young man, has just found the mother who she thought was dead - but who turns out instead to be the ruler of a massively powerful magical and/or technological faction, and sends her back to her normal life in an alternate LA, her memory apparently (but not actually) erased. She has to figure out what to do with the knowledge she now has of her mother, her family, and her place in LA's power structure.
Another one I would like to read more of! The art is great - it's like, standard modern American comic book art if it never did any of the things that annoy me about standard American comic book art. The worldbuilding is really interesting and gives great opportunities for the art to show off, and I like that a nicely complicated mother/daughter/sister relationship is the heart of the story. It also did a very good job of telling what felt like a satisfying one-issue story that was still clearly part of a much bigger saga.
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Also, yay for reorganising! That sounds very productive, I am impressed.
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(People at work keep being surprised when I am happy about doing the boring, repetitive tasks, but I have fun podcasts to listen to! How could I not enjoy getting to do something pretty mindless when it gives me the opportunity to devote my brain to podcasts or audiobooks?)
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I think there is also an aspect where there are things American comics do that annoy me partly because they're so overdone, and I don't know the European comics cliches as well! So that helps. But also, there are a lot of good French-language comics. :D