Tim Lieder

70. Spy X Family vol 4 by Tatsuya Endo - This is the one where Anya gets the future seeing dog. This is also the one where the underlying angst of the story is revealed as both Twilight and his boss have lines about war, or mostly what war is like with your parents dead and spending years de-humanizing the enemy and then trying to get over the guilt. For a cute book about a cute family, there's some brutal messages being smuggled through. As Anya stumbles into the terrorist plot and rides around on the big future telling dog (and even warns Twilight about the bomb, there's the effort that everyone is making to make sure that Anya grows up with her innocence mostly intact - or at least not with the experience of bombs and dead family, etc. You even learn that Twilight's handler has a dead son.

71. Before Chainsaw Man 17-21 by Tatsuki Fujimoto - I'm not sure why this is called 17-21 unless it's the stuff he wrote between those ages since there are only 4 stories in this one. I guess it's about his age. The four stories are "A Couple Chickens were Still Kicking it in the backyard", "Sasaki Stopped a Bullet", "Love is Blind" and "Shikaku". Most of these stories hit that sweet spot of overlapping sensitivity with freaky shit. The chicken one is about aliens really loving to eat humans so to two people are disguised as chickens, only one is a human-eating alien who was a little sad about eating a human and wanted to know what it was like to be human. Love is Blind is a hilariously drawn story about a guy trying to tell a girl that he loves her as everything around them goes chaotic. Ok, Tatsuki did steal one of the most famous jokes from Hitchhiker's Guide (the one about destroying earth to make a highway) but it's still got a cute ending. Shikaku is an assassin meets a vampire meet cute. Not bad.

72. Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings - I was actually more fascinated by this one that I would have normally been due to the fact that I looked it up and saw that David Eddings went to jail for child abuse 13 years before he wrote it. Like how fucked up do you have to be to actually go to jail for child abuse in 1969 when you are a college professor. Anyhow there was a kind of fascination in viewing the story of our hero being raised by two near immortal beings as a fantasy about what Eddings' life could have been had he not been trained to be a total shit around children - both as a formerly abused child and then an abuser who locked his severely bruised son in the basement. But it got boring. Too much exposition. The whole book is full of the kid getting news from everyone around him except for the parental figures who keep going "We will tell you when you are ready". Oddly enough I didn't get sick of it until the last 20 pages. By the last 20 pages, I was so damn bored with everything about this book that I knew that I wasn't going to go on in the series (I actually read this out of The Belgaariad collection that has the whole series in two volumes. It's on the ebay pile. I'm not reading the rest.)

73.House of Whispers: Power Divided by Nalo Hopkinson & Domo Stanton - I suspect that I will read the first story in the collection a few more times because it's the "Sandman Universe" comic where Neil Gaiman sets the story up that will go through all of the "Sandman Universe" titles where there's a crack in the dreaming and Daniel is gone. Maybe he quit. We'll find out later. Or I could just look it up. I was actually going to say something about how Morpheus was a character insert for the author and how killing off Morpheus was basically Gaiman letting the character and the universe go to someone else. DC finally seems to have seen that promise with several titles including Books of Magic, Hellraiser, Lucifer and this one working in the world of Sandman where everyone must deal with the fallout of no Daniel.

This is actually the first book I've read from Nalo Hopkinson and it's got a ton of voodoo material including the changing Erzulie, a plague loa and alligator people. There's an overarching plot about everyone feeling dead and spreading the feeling as Erzulie and group are thrown into a part of the Dreaming and cut off from Earth. There are also books that escaped the Dreaming library. This is a great start to the House of Whispers chapter in the Sandman World series. The lesbian couple and the kids at the center of the story are really great anchors.

74.Remina by Junji Ito - Junji Ito really doesn't waste much time with exposition in this one. Scientist finds planet coming out of a wormhole and names it after his daughter. So his daughter becomes famous and then agrees to become a celebrity and meets a wealthy sponsor that introduces the fallout shelter that looks like a luxury hotel. Then by page 10 that planet if freaking everyone else by eating Saturn and going right to Earth.

So this has some serious torture porn issues as Remina the teenage girl is followed first by fans and then by everyone on the planet who think that they need to sacrifice her to keep the planet from killing earth. There really are no good people in this one. Remina gets crucified in one scene and sees her dad getting stabbed on the next cross. I'm not sure if Ito knows that crucifixion kills you dead since you spend all your time trying to get breath but then your arms give out and you are suffocated (oh hey, I was raised Xian). The horrible shit that Remina goes through is almost too much but she definitely needs to be able to survive. In the last act, everyone is flying because the Remina planet is licking the Earth and the billionaires have escaped to the surface of Remina where taking off a helmet means that your face explodes. It's so Junji Ito. Not one of his major ones but a fun one.