Books read in 2021 # 71-75 - Ok, let's just get this over with.

71. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley - It's the end of the year when what began as a fun experiment turns into a chore. Of course, the fact that my clients are coming out of the woodwork to give me way more work than I can handle (but I handle it. I handle it) really pushes this one to the backburner. And the really insightful reviews that I was striving for in January fall by the wayside. Now it seems like I'm rushing to catch up as this will be the first year since I started this experiment where I've read fewer than 100 books. I could blame that on the door stop that is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but also I really got caught up in Toon Blast. Damn pattern based games hit me right in the ADHD. I would blame them if it mattered how many books I've read but I'm an adult and no one is grading me on this thing (and besides I count graphic novels which don't take that long to read).

So this book - beautiful prose. Excellent prose. Ptolemy Grey is a scared old man with dementia who keeps getting mugged by the local wino, a character who gets steadily more pathetic as various family members threaten and beat on her. Mosley is doing some great work with dementia and memory with his historical fiction bona fides firing away. The plot of Grey getting his memory back complete is little more than a device to explore how memory works and the man's story from coming up from the south and his cousin robbing the local white family (and getting murdered for his troubles).

The book seems to be going in a standard place and I'm not entirely believing the fact that the young woman that starts taking care of Grey is doing it for no other reason than she loves him. That relationship is a little too good to be true. Like maybe if she had a back story where she had to take care of others first. Still the journey to the ending and the kindness in some characters really helps to make the journey work.

It reminds me of RL's Dreams which was he described as a prose poem about Robert Johnson. Only I didn't understand that one as much because it remained in the skewed perspectives. Funny thing is I think I might like RL's Dreams better now. Anyhow, not one of his best works, but still pretty great.

72. Aliens Labyrinth by Jim Woodring and Killian Plunket - I remember there was a very clever twist in this book about what the mad scientist was doing with the aliens. Like he was figuring out a way to control them or he was trying to make hybrids. It was really cool. When I read it. It made the fact that it ends with a simple chase and fight disappointing.

73. Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness by John Layman & Fabiano Neves - How many of these fucking Marvel Zombie books did they make? A ton apparently because they are bringing in the Evil Dead franchise. Ok. I'm being a little cranky and I really shouldn't be cranky because I genuinely liked this book. Ash wisecracking among the zombies has proven to be a formula that works. Dr. Doom is really getting upgraded these days. Hulk promising to use the Book of the Dead as toilet paper- ok that made me smile. So this is a book that I don't even remember now. I suspect that if I pick it up in a few years I won't even remember that I read it.

74.The Joker War by James Tyrion IV and Various - Fuck this book. It wastes a bunch of characters and made for boring reading in the related titles. It's got some value as the movie theater full of Joker victims makes for a creepy image, but there's nothing new. This is just "Batman loses all his resources and needs to figure out how to fight without his toys" and that's been told. Granted, there's a lot about his Bat Family (I still remember in the 80s when killing off Jason Todd was a big deal because Batman should be a lone wolf. And Batgirl gets crippled for life. But then he gets a Robin. And Jason Todd comes back. And Batgirl gets better but by that time her role as Oracle became more important so it's a little bit of a betrayal).

Anyhow I'm not so angry because of this thing being egregiously bad but it promised just enough to disappoint. And it also seems like there are missing chapters.

75. Epic Collection: Powerman & Ironfist by John Byrne et al. - Ok. Time to lower one's expectations. We are going into the Bronze Age of comics. Many classics came out of this era but like with Golden Age Science Fiction, for the most part you have to give them some benefit of the doubt. For example, these were written to be single issues that people bought every month. Sometimes they missed a month. Other times they bought comics at random because comics were actually affordable at the time ($5 for a single issue!!!???? Fuck you Marvel. Even $2.99 is ridiculous. You fuckers aren't even making money with these comics so why jack up the prices so much. The comic books exist for the billion dollar movie industry to retain copyright). So almost every issue needed to stop the action in order to tell everyone what they missed. Out of the 22 page comic at least 2 pages are devoted to "Luke Cage was in prison and they gave him the formula" or the past couple issues. I used to call it "Writing the Marvel Comics way" especially when I read the first three Left Behind books and got annoyed with them repeating plot points every 100 pages or so. Like the same book.

So given that caveat, these books are pretty good. Had I been reading comic books in the 1970s I would have loved them. They even included the joke about Luke Cage having to buy new shirts from the same tailor all the time. Complete with the punchline of Dr. Banner showing up for his order of purple pants. I was impressed with how much the stories were part of 1970s New York with characters based on the figures that were discussed in American Gangster. Oh sure, these crime bosses had robot armies but it was still grounded in that local scene that made Luke Cage and Iron Fist so great for Netflix tv shows.

Not perfect but definitely a fun read. The only problem I have is that it is too long and the Marvel writing style does get tiresome.

Books read in 2021 # 76 - Cordwainer Smith is the Golden Age of Science Fiction

76. Norstrilla by Cordwainer Smith - I don't know if it started when I was reading comics with crossover events or if it came later but I absolutely LOVE when stories and novels interconnect. From Balzac to Love & Rockets, I'm a sucker for characters showing up in other stories and being recontextualized. So Balzac's most clever villain is a mephisto character in one book, a rather pathetic but still manipulative guy in Pierre Goriot and a walk-on character who helps a character meet a poisoner in Cousin Bette. I'm currently working on a series of stories that take place in the near future, based on the book of Genesis where I keep killing off Dayton, Ohio.

So Cordwainer Smith is definitely in that wheelhouse. I read his short stories last year or the year before and I was shocked by how progressive he was for a Golden Age science fiction writer. Having read so much Heinlein and Asimov, I'm always certain that I'm going to have to deal with casual sexism and racism when I'm reading from that era. Instead I found some truly wonderful and imaginative stories with compelling women characters. When I finally wrote about him I ended up writing a revisionist history take https://timlieder1.medium.com/science-fiction-has-always-been-greater-than-campbell-82ccb66ecd70 where I celebrated the Golden Age writers outside the Campbell bubble.

However, one problem with the connected stories is the way that you read them feeling like you missed something. That actually is a bigger problem with novels like this one where Smith includes references to his other work including C'Mell, the Littul Kittens and the Lady of Clown Town to the point where you want to look up these other stories and see what you missed. Mostly it's just context, but I completely forgot about the Littul Kittens story which is actually about Norstrilla's security system. The fact that they reference it without saying anything else made me go "Oh yeah, I kind of remember that story but not really".

The novel is pretty straightforward. A resident of Norstrilla - an extremely wealthy but purposefully rustic planet because it's the only place that makes immortality juice - is an outcast because his telepathy isn't developed and he's on his last chance not to get killed as useless. Barely surviving that trial, he finds out that another person is trying to kill him so he uses his super computer to become extremely wealthy by manipulating the market. And buy the planet Earth.

The book is basically a travelogue of the world building of Smith. He takes you from Nostrilla to Earth to the underground of Earth where the animal people live. He introduces you to the characters that he'd develop more fully in other books. And finally he creates a post-capitalist society.

This isn't as great as his short stories but it's a decent introduction. I don't know if you should read it first or last. I guess reading it after reading the collection is not a bad idea.

Books Read in 2021 # 77-80 - I got to take these back to the lirbary

77.The White Snake by Ben Nadler - I actually thought this was going to be the other White Snake legend, the Chinese one. Instead it's the Grimm Brothers. In this case the white snake is dead and eating the white snake helps the protagonist hear birds and fish and the like. It's a standard story of a peasant who becomes king because he has magic powers. The author purposefully made the princess into a smart character who can run things better. The illustrations are great but I don't recognize the style. Or I recognize that it is a particular style but I don't know which one.

78.Park Bench by Chaboute - This one starts slowly and I was not on board but when I finally got into it I had to go back and read it again. The characters keep coming back to the park bench and you see them unravel or move forward. THere's a business man who walks past it until one day he sits down and takes off his shoes. THere's a homeless man who keeps getting run off by police officers. There are lovers and skate punks and people just there to read. The ending where bench gets replaced by a bullshit hostile architecture bench is actually pretty heartbreaking.

79 & 80. Jupiter's Legacy vol 1 & 2 by Mark Millar & Wilfredo Torres - So the deconstruction of superheroes continues but with them back in the 50s dealing with government interference and the FBI is just not as much of a hook as the original series. It's great to see that one character is gay and the team backs him up to the point that Skyfox blackmails J. Edgar Hoover. And Skyfox doesn't so much turn villain as has a fight with Walter. Walter is the villain of the original series and he's the villain in this one as well but he's more manipulative than outright evil. Skyfox does not so much turn bad as gets driven out by Walter and then when they almost reconcile, Walter drives him out again. Also Skyfox cares more about racial tensions and the underdog so his heel turn is actually a reevaluation of the white supremacist time period. In other words, he's really not a villain.

ANyhow the hook of the children having to grow up is not here. So it feels more like a Watchmen clone.