Apr 13 2022

Still Just A Geek: An Annotated Collection Of Musings by Wil Wheaton

I make it a habit of avoiding memoirs published by men in their 30s, so never got around to reading Wil Wheaton’s Just A Geek, despite it seeming squarely in my wheelhouse. Reading this annotated version drove home to me how wise that policy continues to be, despite the many interests the author and I share, including but not limited to Star Trek, sci-fi, acting, blogging, tabletop games and parenting.

The trouble with the vast, vast majority of autobiographies written by men in their 30s is that the authors cannot properly view the trauma they’ve undergone — which is what largely compels men like these to write these books at this stage in their lives — without managing to sound both trite and obliviously self-important. The luckiest of these authors at least have an inkling of how much therapy they still need, but almost none of them realize that time (at the very least, and even without the benefit of actively working on your spiritual/emotional well-being) almost always grants a very necessary perspective. Mr Wheaton was, unfortunately, no different. I can absolutely see why Entertainment Weekly succinctly if harshly called the original book whiny. There’s a lot of unprocessed trauma on display and a lot of attempts at edginess that just come off as douchebaggery.

So it’s a fascinating enterprise to see Mr Wheaton tackle his book once more almost two decades later. His annotations are almost all correct, both in exploring the deeper truth behind what he said at the very turn of the 21st century and in apologizing for unfortunate language and narrative choices, with one caveat: I do think that he’s actually a little too hard on his younger self, particularly in his adoption of projected optimism as a coping mechanism. Sure, he says now that the confident pronouncements that he made back then were in service to placating the “Prove Everyone Wrong” voice in his head, but there’s still value in making positive affirmations about yourself and your goals, and it seems weird to kick his younger self over what was essentially a helpful, if not outright necessary, way to deal with life’s disappointments.

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Apr 12 2022

World Class by Jay Sandlin, Patrick Mulholland, Rebecca Nalty & Justin Birch

Adrian “The Colombian Cannon” Molina is obsessed with football and dreams of being recruited to Nottingham FC. He knows he has talent, but he also knows he has a lot of work to do despite being a part of the Bogota Condors, Colombia’s premier U17 football team. During an exhibition match against England’s Regents United, he clashes with their star forward Titan Evans, the epitome of the sneering rich kid who doesn’t believe that the rules apply to him. Adrian is glad to see the back of Titan once the match is over, but a savvy football scout has other plans…

Before he knows it, Adrian has been recruited to Regents United and is enrolled in the affiliated Regents Preparatory School. Titan is, unsurprisingly, less than pleased. Will Adrian be able to navigate this world of high school and sports drama while vying for the captaincy of the team and the U17 International Cup, while still staying true to himself?

Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Western sports comic book before! My previous exposure to sports comics are almost entirely manga, so this was a fun callback to my adolescence of reading same. I like how they modernize well-worn tropes for the 21st century tho, playing down any gay panic in favor of embracing diversity. You do have to allow for quite a bit of footballing poetic license, especially if you’re a fan of real life footy, but once you get used to the structure of the book’s in-universe leagues, the whole thing becomes terrifically enjoyable.

I was a big fan especially of the women in this book, from Syd and Ashlei (even at the latter’s most Insta-thirsty) but especially to Olivia, who just kicked ass and took names. The dressing down she gave Adrian near the beginning was well-deserved and extremely well-put. I, personally, wouldn’t have had the patience for such nonsense, but I appreciated her blend of nurturing with tough love, and her steadfastness and integrity throughout.

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Apr 11 2022

Appraise Her by Paula Priamos

Tia Drakos is a Los Angeles real estate appraiser who, once upon a time, worked with the police as a handwriting analyst. She’s initially surprised when an old friend, Elise Davis, contacts her about appraising the home Elise grew up in. As the daughter of Hollywood royalty Carson Davis, and a fairly successful businesswoman in her own right (if one who shies away from the spotlight herself,) Elise could hire anyone. Tia is flattered that their history together would cause Elise to trust her with this job.

She understands why, tho, the moment she heads up the mansion’s stairway and finds a comatose Carson in a hospital bed. The Davis family has cultivated an image of him as a larger than life persona, and the truth about his status as an invalid is something the whole family works hard to keep under wraps. From long experience, they know that Tia can keep a secret. And so she does, until she turns on the news a few days later and finds that Elise has seemingly been kidnapped from her own home.

At first, the cops aren’t sure if she’s been abducted or simply taken off for a few days, as no ransom demand has appeared. But then Tia starts getting weird notes herself, left under her welcome mat and her windshield wiper. Could these have anything to do with Elise’s disappearance? Or is someone trying to use her own history as a handwriting analyst to scare her?

As if all that isn’t bad enough, her amicable divorce from her ex-husband Kyle is starting to falter as he drags his feet over selling their last joint property. Meanwhile, her fiance Hugh is keeping secrets from her, as she stresses out over having a baby. Her emotions are already heightened even before it becomes clear that someone does indeed have sinister intentions towards her… and isn’t afraid to use violence to get what they want. Will Tia be able to figure out what’s going on and escape with her life and sanity intact?

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Apr 08 2022

Why We Fly by Kimberly Jones & Gilly Segal

Oof, this is a gut punch of a book, that tackles not only how racism affects high school athletes but also how relationships fade away as graduation and college loom nearer.

Eleanor “Leni” Greenberg and Chanel “Nelly” Irons are best friends and members of their high school’s competitive cheerleading team. In the summer leading up to their senior year, Nelly is off at a prestigious cheer camp while Leni is stuck in their Georgia town, undergoing physical therapy in order to clear herself to get back to cheerleading after her second and more serious concussion. It’s at PT that Leni runs into Three, the handsome school quarterback who’s looking to break records in his senior year and get recruited by a top tier footballing school. His parents are notorious for shopping him around to scouts, after having more or less successfully done the same for his three older brothers.

After Leni offers to give Three a ride home, he asks her to start working out with him. Their workouts lead to an easy friendship and more. Nelly, on returning from cheer camp, is not pleased at what she sees as a distraction from the girls’ plan to focus on cheer so they can both get into colleges with good business schools. Smart, ambitious Nelly has her sights on UPenn or Cornell. Leni’s grades have gone down sharply since her concussions, but the girls are hoping that a good showing at the cheerleading nationals will make up for that. But when the more laidback Leni gets elected captain of the cheer squad over no-nonsense Nelly, a seemingly unshakable wedge is driven between the girls that could change their relationship forever.

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Apr 05 2022

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Hey, I finally got around to reading the oldest book on my NetGalley list! This is how rich and miserable my reading backlog has been: I verily feel like King Midas on the days I don’t feel like Ado Annie.

But enough with my random allusions: how is the book, Doreen? (Forgive me, I’m a bit loopy off illness and cold meds.) I actually read it in chunks, covering the relevant stuff for their nominated Hugo year. I enjoyed Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom well enough, but was definitely not a fan of Omphalos, as my religion is all about both science and metaphor (i.e. none of this young-Earth nonsense. Literalism is death to faith, ime.) Thus the thought exercise presented here was less sympathetic than so much typical “why am I not the center of the universe?” wankery to me.

I felt similarly with What’s Expected Of Us despite it being less about faith than secular humanism. My religion believes in fate being a map of fixed points, with free will determining how we react to each and how we get from point to point. Muslim lives, unlike the lives of most pre-determinists, aren’t lockstep marches from birth to death. There’s also the important caveat of no one actually knowing what their fate will be, which is why it’s important to live your best life and not judge others’. Ted Chiang actually does an incredible job portraying how Islam deals with future science in the opening story of this collection, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, which is probably the most colorful — in the sense of evoking visceral setting detail — of the stories included here.

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Apr 02 2022

Reading Munich — München erlesen

The first great virtue of the 20-volume “München erlesen” (Selected Munich, with a bit of a pun on the German word for reading) series is the simple fact of its existence. There are not many provincial capitals that could support a literary series that runs to 20 books, let alone one with the quality of authors from Thomas Mann and Alfred Andersch to the less well known but still excellent Lena Christ and Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow. The second is the range of periods covered by the books in the set.

München erlesen 1

I was charmed to find half a dozen books set in whole or in part in pre-WWI Munich. This was a period when the city had grown enough to have its own bohemian quarter and art movements, when the deeply rural and traditional life of most of Bavaria clashed with city and university people testing boundaries and joining Europe’s modern movements. The city naturally drew from the countryside the ambitious and discontented, and they could see both environments from an outsider’s perspective, the better to write about them for posterity. Out of these half dozen, I liked best the three written by women: The Swing (Die Schaukel) by Annette Kolb; Johanna Rumpl (Die Rumplhanni) by Lena Christ; and Herr Dame’s Notebooks (Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen) by Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow. The latter two could hardly describe more disparate social worlds, yet they were contemporaries and separated by very little physical distance.

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Apr 01 2022

The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning

This homage to the kids’ dark fantasy movies and series of the 1980s is perfect for what it is, and perhaps even better than it has any business being.

Jack Corman wants nothing to do with The Shadow Glass, the cult puppet movie created by his father Bob in the 80s. TSG bombed at the box office but quickly became a fan favorite, earning Bob a constant spot on the convention scene. Without enough capital to film a sequel, however, Bob wrote and published a graphic novel focused on TSG’s setting of the land of Iri instead. A public burning of the comic by a disgruntled segment of the fandom broke Bob’s heart, tipping him over the edge into a self-destructive alcoholism that found him constantly making a fool of himself in public and, worse, lashing out at his only child.

Because of this, Jack’s once pure and shining childhood love for Iri and TSG began to wither and sour. As an adult, Jack wants only distance from the property that he believes his dad chose over him, even when a contrite Bob finally reaches out to make amends. Jack is too busy fending off creditors and unemployment to pay attention, so is stricken when Bob dies and a key to the reclusive puppeteer’s attic studio arrives in the mail as part of his inheritance.

He’s not so stricken, however, so as not to arrange for the sale of one of the actual, if not the most important of the puppets used in the filming of TSG. The movie’s hero Dune is a kettu, a fox-like creature from an honorable warrior culture. Selling Dune’s carefully preserved puppet form will clear Jack’s debts and give him some breathing room as he searches for a new job. But before he can do any of that, a series of weird events — including being accosted by an eager fan boy named Toby, an accidental concussion and the onset of a sudden storm — lead Jack to question his sanity when several of the other puppets in his dad’s studio seem to come alive, including Zavanna, the kettu who is Dune’s sister. She insists Jack assist her and her mate Brol in tracking down the four pieces of the Shadow Glass in order to protect Iri from domination by the all-consuming skalion and their greed-driven queen, Kunin Yillda.

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Mar 30 2022

The Loud House #15: The Missing Linc by The Loud House Creative Team

Another cute if slight installment of the Loud House comics series, based on the hit Nickelodeon cartoon.

This fifteenth volume of the ongoing series is loosely based on the theme of Lost And Found, with Lincoln’s absence in the first and longest vignette sending his loving sisters on a frenzied search for him. Other of the short tales included here depict Lincoln’s classmate Zach Gurdle finding what he’s sure is a UFO part, Lola losing her stuffed unicorn, and Lynn Sr searching for his missing garden gnome.

My personal favorites of the stories focused on Lincoln’s relationship with his best friend Clyde. Their friendship is delightfully sweet and supportive, and is quite frankly #goals. The cute vignette involving Clyde’s dads building a chair together was also adorable, as was Lisa’s crashing of the Mortician’s Club book discussion. The closing story, with Lisa miscalculating a good swing push for Lana, ended on a thematically fitting high note.

The art is based very much on the cartoon, so is kinetic and bright. There are so many characters that it can be hard to differentiate between the Loud sisters especially. Fortunately, the handy guide at the beginning of the volume helps a ton.

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Mar 24 2022

When Things Get Dark edited by Ellen Datlow

I am genuinely impressed by the way this collection invokes the spirit of Shirley Jackson. So many of the stories read as if they might have come from her pen, so seamlessly do they fit into the dark atmosphere engendered by stories such as The Haunting Of Hill House, The Lottery and We Have Always Lived In The Castle. This is a book of repressed women with unspeakable secrets; of insular communities with murderous tendencies; of finding both oppression and release in the supernatural — all hallmarks of that master of quiet, furious dread.

Despite that commonality, the eighteen stories here each stand as distinct entities. While the ones set in the past (or, as in Genevieve Valentine’s kaleidoscopic Sooner Or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home, a number of eras) evoke more closely Ms Jackson’s mid-20th-century aesthetic, the modern tales feel like a natural carrying over of her work into the 21st century, where her themes are anything but alien. That said, perhaps my favorite story in this collection — for non-personal reasons anyway — is Tiptoe by Laird Barron, about a child of the 60s who tries to grapple with the family secrets that continue to haunt him decades later. One of the most overtly supernatural and creepy offerings here, the image of adult Greg playing the “game” will stay indelibly in my mind.

My personal personal favorite was Gemma Files’ Pear Of Anguish. Idk if it’s adolescent girls especially who are susceptible to the building of these reality-bending paracosms — or if it’s just that those of us who built them are more open about fictionalizing or even discussing them as adults than our counterparts of other genders — but I felt the strange, destructive relationship between Imogen and Una in my bones. I also really enjoyed the many stories within the story that is Kelly Link’s Skinder’s Veil, almost more than the whole itself, which I felt was somewhat let down by its ending: more’s the pity as this is the story that also completes the book.

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Mar 22 2022

Geronimo Stilton Reporter #10: Blackrat’s Treasure by Geronimo Stilton

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the clever plot twist of this volume, and definitely recommend this book for good all-ages fun.

Our title character is a workaholic reporter turned editor with way too many stories to write (and, boy, do I sympathize!) His relatives and co-workers, Benjamin, Thea and Trap, coax him out of the office in pursuit of exercise and fresh air and — more importantly to Geronimo — a story. A three-headed monster smelling of brie has been spotted down at the docks, and Geronimo wants to get to the bottom of what’s clearly a fantastic tale before he’s scooped by a rival paper.

But a bigger mystery soon presents itself while the team is down at New Mouse City’s foggy harbor. A strange, seemingly abandoned vessel is docked at one of the piers, a ship that Geronimo vaguely recognizes. He and his crew come aboard to check it out, only to be turned into a literal crew by Captain Blackrat, who casts off and press gangs them into working for him. Besides swabbing the decks and engaging in other naval exercises, Blackrat wants them to help him find a hidden treasure, no matter the peril. Will our team of heroes be able to survive the journey and discover the pirates’ loot, or will the wicked Blackrat (and his adorable companion Crabcakes) send one or more of them down to Davy Jones’ locker?

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