Tim Lieder

56. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 1 by Edward Gibbon - HOly fuck this took forever. I might even be breaking my own rule because I'm pretty sure I started reading this in 2020 so it's not just books read in 2021. But since it took me 9 fucking months out of the year, I'm pretty damn happy to be done with it. Not saying it's not a bad read so much as it just took forever and there were points where he was showing his 18th century bias. His history of Xianity was tedious but it's interesting to find out that Julian the Apostate wanted to rebuild the Temple. Not because he liked Jews so much as he wanted to piss off the Christians. He couldn't oppress them but he could piss them off. Also the Arians were powerful at one point. They even repressed the Nicene Creed proponents. So that's fun. The book ends with Theodosius taking over Constantinople and the Goths are barely a problem. So I guess all the really wild stuff I remember from the abridged version is in later volumes. The emperors seemed more stable this time out. I remember more of them getting killed along with their families as the Goths sacked Rome (which always amuses because Goths). So yeah. Rome. It went Christian and things really began to unravel.

57. Lovesickness by Junji Ito - Oh nice and creepy. The pictures of the ghost girl dripping in blood and screaming I LOVE YOU!!!! is totally relatable. It does feel like another Tomie with the creepy dude driving everyone to suicide or worse. Even the seemingly innocuous advice like "come back with a more interesting problem" leads to massive chaos with the woman getting pregnant and then killing her lover's children. So creepy. Then there's the strange hikizuri siblings which seems like Ito's attempt to be outright funny instead of funny in a terrifying way. In the first one they give a guy a heart attack by convincing him that their sister burned herself to death. She's very annoyed with them. And that's it. The second one has the dumb brother pretending to be possessed by their father to get the older brother to give him respect. I laughed.

58. On Great Writing (on the Sublime) by Longinus - typical stuff. He talked about perfect style and then argues that imperfection over makes the work memorable. Not bad but mostly interesting for how much it talks about Greek poetry in the 1st century CE.

59.Black Hammer Age of Doom part 1 by Jeff Lemire & Sean Ormston - So this is one of those books that ends up with everyone finding out that they are in a virtual simulation on a spaceship. That was pretty much where it was leading because the mystical stuff seemed too convoluted with the superhero characters trapped in a weird village and Black Hammer 2 (her father is dead at this point) in Hell. I'm trying to read more Jeff Lemire books but it's difficult because I don't know where I'm supposed to come in.

48. Slayer Repentless by Jon Schnepp & Guiu Vilanova - So this comic book is a music video. Like it started out as a music video and then someone wrote a comic book about all the people in the music video, a little before they got into the music video and then had that big fight. Basically it's Nazis vs rednecks & bikers (yes, there's a possibility that these guys wouldn't be on the same side) in a small town that doesn't get wifi. Or internet. But there are brothers involved. One brother is a repentant Nazi with a fridged wife whose corpse he takes to the small town and the other brother is the Nazi who decided to kill his brother. Anyhow, it's fairly predictable but I like the art. And the pictures of the comic book artists and band signing copies at a convention are fun.

49. Ascender vol 1: The Haunted Galaxy by Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen - This is a beautifully illustrated and colored comic book with some seriously elegaic undertones as the world has moved on from the characters and all the robots are dead. Now evil wizards control everything including a major evil wizard called Momma who consults with her mothers. FIrst chapter so I'm not sure where it's going but I think it's all about getting rid of the evil magicians. It's a sequel to Descender.

50. Half the Blood of Brooklyn by Charlie Huston - I remember loving the Erasing All Signs of Death book but not remembering anything beyond the character beat of the protagonist telling the scary gangster outright that he does not ride in buses (later on you find out that he was on a bus when a terrorist attack happened. And he saved the gangster's daughter). So the writing is pretty great. It moves along but I don't remember much else and I doubt I would remember anything about this book except for the fact that it's a gangster book with vampires and the main villains are chasidic Jews who go on just a little too long about being from the rapist sect of the Tribe of Benjamin (see the end of Judges for that story - it's really fucked up and the main point is that Israel needed a king to keep this nasty shit from happening again). Anyhow the whole thing does work in the noir detective genre with the conspiracies and mysteries piling up until the end when they seem to fall apart with really simple explanations about how the Jews were the ones that killed that blood supplier because they didn't like the Manhattan vampires muscling in on their territory. And the protagonist starts a war. So the back cover where he's preventing a war - nope.

I will read more books in the series but I always notice that when I read another book of this kind by the same author I feel let down. Like I know all the tricks and if I read an earlier book I'm going to know where it's going since characters keep eluding to the fates of past characters. This series might be the exception. After all, it's more noir detective than urban fantasy and I can read noir detective books by the same author.