While–y’know what, perhaps even whilst–browsing the latest from all of my pals in the WordPress reader, I was hit SQUARE IN THE PIE-PLATE by this thrown gauntlet from Birdie’s Book Nook.
I’m a sucker for these blogging-meme games; you may have seen some of my Let’s Talk Bookish posts, and I’ve signed up for Bloganuary this year and encourage you to do the same. (Side-note, the social aspect of blogger-culture and the WordPress community’s hospitality and good nature is something I hadn’t even considered when starting my site, and has been a huge factor in continuing to blog here.)
So needless to say, I saw this shit and said ‘Yes, I will win this list that quantifies something I’m supposed to be doing for fun, a thing that is both possible to do and normal to want’. I am, at least, proud that I managed to resist my urge to design and implement and Experience Point system where you could get a multiplier based on whether you’d already tagged an entry in a given category and a bonus for titles that hit more than one category, etc.; that’s probably a little much, he said, hoping someone would jump into the comments and ask him to do that.
Birdie was pretty clear that there are no real rules per se, and at commenters’ requests clarified a few things like re-reads being perfectly valid for list-hits as long as you read them in ’23, comics being valid (GUESS WHO ASKED THAT ONE), that you can count a given book for multiple categories if you like, and that a fun thing to do might be trying to ‘lap’ the list by completing it more than once, stuff like that. For my part, I’m going to allow myself one comic per month, and I’m not allowed to tag the same category more than once until/unless I’ve already tagged them all, what I’m thinking of as Round One.
Join in, and add whatever rules and modifications would make it for fun for you!
1. Animal Sidekick
1.15: How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time-Traveler – Ryan North
The animal sidekick in question is North’s beloved and, sadly, only just recently departed doggo Noam Chompsky, and if you find yourself asking “Can an author’s real-life pet really count as an ‘animal sidekick’ for the purposes of a scavenger hunt?”, I will rebut:
-1. What are you, a cop, and
-2. At one point in the book, Chompsky appears and has a Socratic dialogue with another speaker about whether water wheels are superior to windmills as a source of steady, renewable energy. The winner gets belly-rubs, and you’ll have to read it to find out.
This book is rad and I recommend it for anyone who, like myself, loves to learn but doesn’t actively read a lot of nonfiction, because it’s laid out very intuitively, the explanations are detailed and chunky enough to leave you satisfied and pulling bits out of your teeth later but not enough to overwhelm or bore (and extensive further reading notes are included), and it is hilarious, in case the bit where the author’s dog–who once stole a live fish out of a fisherman’s bucket and fucking hightailed it for Ottowa–engages in one of the oldest forms of rhetorical education didn’t clue you in. This book taught me that my pinky finger is just about six centimeters long! And also how to make lye, set a broken bone in what seems like the most painful way possible, and eventually build a computer!
2. Inspired By A Culture OTHER Than Any In Western Europe
3. Debut
4. Merlin Character
5. Green Cover
2.11: Dog Man #2: Dogman Unleashed – Dav Pilkey Care of George & Harold (Comic Selection For February)
There are three instances in which my long practice with words has failed me completely, leaving me only vague but emphatic winking and interpretive karate with which to express myself:
1. My wedding-day, when my vows–carefully written in my head during hundreds of showers across many years–escaped me, and I could only say “OOGA BOOGA BIG, OOGA BOOGA STRONG, IF YOU MARRY ME, LOVE YOU WHOLE LIFE LONG”.
2. When a caller at my job tried to convince me, with complete confidence, that he “carried the germ that causes bacterial vaginosis in women” (not a thing), was “capable of passing it on to them” (even less of a thing), and required a “female UTI test” (somehow the opposite of a thing).
3. Anytime I attempt to express the depths of my love for Dog Man.
This second volume really sets the path for the series by veering away from the unconnected-vignettes format of the first and really giving the story and characters room to move around, resulting in an evil fish, Petey being one of the most genuinely terrifying villains I’ve encountered recently in any medium, and I shit the gentle reader not, a Billy Don’t Be A Hero joke that also manages to settle once and for all the pronunciation of one of the most contentious and delicious offerings found in Mediterranean cuisine.
The series continues to be one of the most wholesome, sincerely hilarious, goodhearted works for any age group I’ve ever read, and manages to play with the ‘graphic novel’ framework in a refreshingly inventive and exploratory way that leaves the reader–me, hi–genuinely unable to figure out whether these are comics or heavily-illustrated novels and at what point that distinction becomes both academic and an impediment to appreciating whatever they hell they actually are, which is AWESOME and honest and belligerently kind. I’ve been buying them not only for me but for the small human children in my life and they’re an instant hit, sinking the reading-hooks deep into their tender young mindmeats and ensuring that they calcify there.
Dog Man is GO.
6. Female Villain
7. Time Travel
8. Final Book In A Series
9. Sword On The Cover
10. Found Family
1.28: The Locked Tomb Series, Book Three: Nona The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
I’ll be honest, figuring out which category Nona should go under has been the most challenging part of my day by a significant margin, and I think Tamsyn would and could only nod in approval if ever she heard me say that, like Neil deGrasse Tyson when he hears something that’s technically correct in a way that sucks the joy out of it.
Found Family is the absolute simplest way to describe the social configuration in Nona; there is what you could describe as a family unit, comprised of two people who each have two souls (of various genders) and rotate wearing the body (having conversations with each other/themselves via notes and a tape recorder), and a young woman who doesn’t have two souls, but might be two people’s souls somehow.
Anyone who enjoys them will tell you that the Locked Tomb books don’t make any sense until you finish and re-read them (and even then, woof), but that the relationships are so delightful and well-fleshed-out that the actual plot takes a significant backseat, and that remains true with Nona; she loves [CENSORED] and [REDACTED] and Camilla and [FOR THIRD-HOUSE EYES ONLY] so damn much that you can’t help but do likewise, to say NOTHING of her loyal gangmates like Born In The Morning, Noodle, Beautiful Ruby, and Hot Sauce. Nona sees everyone and everything with the eyes of a child (not a metaphor, kinda?) and carefully slots every person in her life into a special and very particular place around her, aggressively nesting and surrounding herself with love, it’s amazing and heartbreaking.
11. Title __ Of __
12. New To You Author
13. Retelling
14. YA Book
3.23: Cross Game, Vol. 1 – Mitsuru Adachi (Comic Selection For March)
Alright, TVTropes assures me that while “YA” is a relatively recent term and that not everything matches up exactly, I can use “Shonen” as a replacement due to the overlap in the younger and older halves of their respective age-ranges. THOUGH YOU HAD ME THERE, DIDN’T YOU RULES LAWYERS. THOUGHT YOU WRONG. BAHHHH NO THINK-RIGHTER, YOU.
Okay my lawscoffery and joie de vivre and cordon bleu aside, I wanna be serious for a second, because this book is sincerely incredible, it is extremely special and I want to give myself every chance of actually encouraging you to read it. If you want someone you can take more seriously than you can take me, 1. Fuck you, 2. I don’t blame you, 3. Same, and 4. Give this episode of Mangasplaining a listen and hear actual manga-industry insiders and also Chip Zdarsky discuss why they couldn’t get enough of this story of two houses both alike in shop-ownership, spaghetti Napolitan, and bases-ball.
These two kids, Ko and Wakaba? They love two things in this world: baseball, and each other, though admittedly only Wakaba knows that part yet; being eleven-year-olds, Ko hasn’t been able to expand his emotional inventory-screen enough to accommodate both Stickball and Girls. They’re perfect for each other! One’s family runs a small sporting-goods store, the other a batting cages and snackbar, and they even have the same birthday! SURELY, ‘TIS THE FEATHERED FINGER OF FATE. SURELY, NOTHING HORRIFYING WILL HAPPEN THAT WILL CHANGE BOTH OF THEIR LIVES FOREVER.
This is about many things, several of which are baseball, and is simply one of the best things I’ve read in years. The art is subtly realistic and thematically deft while remaining pleasantly cartoonish with adorable character-models, the slow-burn characterization is masterful, and I have never encountered anything else with such a grasp of pacing, of knowing when to let moments breathe and let the world of the story be a character; man, I live for those rainy-day shots. Let me put it this way: I don’t give two hoots in West Heck for baseball, but I’ve read over a thousand pages of this very baseball-centric manga; it’s like how even people who hate gangster movies love The Godfather because it’s an incredible movie about family, a signed confession-note from toxic masculinity and patriarchy, dressed in gangster-movie pants. If you ever take one of my recommen–well, if you ever take thr–if you take five of my reading recommendations, make this one of them. (And bonus, the english release is only available in triple-volumes, so you’ll be getting three for the price of one!)
15. Set On A Space Ship
16. Magic House
17. Urban Fantasy
3.12: The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires – Grady Hendrix
I hope Grady, wherever he is, appreciates that I’m spending my First-Round Urban Fantasy slot on this, not because it doesn’t qualify, but because I read a lot of this genre and this space could’ve had a loooot of names on its dance-card that’ll now have to wait until she comes back ’round the room for their chance.
Patricia’s got it made in the sultry Southern shade! A successful husband who sometimes remembers she exists, kids that hate her to the appropriate mindless teenage degree, and a book club fulla gal pals to crack open the Zin and discuss true, horrible accounts of soul-destroying violence with. Yes: she and her squad of fellow early 90’s housewives are perhaps the original murdergirls, it’s the greatest, and they have a fantastic time until a mysterious—and mysteriously handsome–stranger moves in, bringing a danger their reading hasn’t prepared them for, and that no one is prepared to believe Patricia about, possibly until it’s too late.
I find it reductive and sometimes disrespectful to describe works in terms of other works, but in this case the pieces of the story are big and clear enough that they fit together nicely without losing their identities: this is Fright Night by way of Desperate Housewives and Fried Green Tomatoes; it makes no claim of mythical Pure Originality, openly being a loving homage to these kinds of stories and using that love to tell one of its own very, very well.
18. More Than Two Women
2.22: Wyrd Sisters (Discworld #6) – Sir Terry Pratchett
I considered tagging this one under Witches because it frankly doesn’t get much witchier than this, book is a friggin’ Hex Girls concert, but it’s just chocka with dames and passes the Bechdel Test almost all the time.
The king has been hella murderated, and wouldn’t you goddamn know it there’s nobody fit to solve it but Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, and Magrat Garlick, who represent three of major faces of witchraft: the matriarchal wise woman folk-healer, the Classic Witch, and the New Age/Faux-Wiccan archetypes, respectively. (Wicca is of course a real-world belief system, and while this book makes fun of the character occupying that position, it doesn’t make fun of the beliefs themselves; at least, no more than it makes fun of the other two archetypes.)
As many Discworlds are, Wyrd Sisters is a patchwork of references turned upside down and inside out and everything everywhere all at once, using all of their parts and organs in ways they were never intended for and accomplishing astounding things with them, in this case nearly the entire Shakespearian canon, so that specific kind of nerd will just chomp this down like caramel corn.
(Fun fact, I also considered tagging this one under Time Travel, but that’s not exactly right; the incident concerned doesn’t involve moving through time, but time…being moved around something? Fuckin’ Terry Pratchett, man, I miss that rascal.)
19. First Person POV
20. Hugo Winner
21. LGBTQ+ Main Character
3.17: Legends & Lattes: A Novel Of High Fantasy And Low Stakes – Travis Baldtree
This has been the talk of the bookosphere since it hit like a light, fluffy muffin-meteor in November, studded with pecans and iridium deposits, and RIGHTLY SO. Not since The Kaiju Preservation Society has a book said so clearly “Hey, come on in and relax for a bit, just enjoy at your own p–oh you’ve already completely devoured half of my pages, neat!”; it is exactly what we needed as the reading public and what I needed as a very tired man who just wanted a nice book where nice things happen to nice people and ohohohoho BOY does the one asshole get what’s coming to them.
Know who Viv is? She’s a big tall burly Orc. Know what she’s sick of? The Adventuring Life, especially what it has to offer her people. Know what she’d rather do? Move to the City and open the first coffee shop the continent has ever seen. AND THEN SHE DOES, with the help of a grumpy Gnommish carpenter whom she befriends, a Succubus barista whom she MIGHT end up smooching, and A SOFT-SPOKEN WEE MOUSEFOLK NAMED THIMBLE whom she hires to bake them delicious, impossible treats because he is a pastry genius. This is a Thimble-appreciation site now. ALL HAIL THIMBLE.
If you’ve been alive more than seventeen seconds, I don’t need to tell you about the relationship humankind has with coffee–the things it represents, the feelings it evokes, the ways it brings people together–and this story shows what it would be like to see those things developing in real-time, and to know the feeling of being a person who abandons a thankless life of conflict and brings that small but profound goodness into the lives of the people who gather under her roof. These were so relatable and engaging that a prequel has already been announced centering on a bookshop, and holy SHIT is that gonna be cozy. Book fuckin’ rules, it’s sweet and comfy as hell with just a dusting of romance, and citizen you ARE gonna want a beverage and maybe a cinnamon roll while you read it.
(A note on the Succubarista: the…tendencies inherent to her heritage are handled in a really interesting, mature, non-gross way; there is nothing gross in this book except the pieces driving the narrative conflict.)
22. Pirates
23. 2023 Release (A Fun Coincidence!)
24. POC Author
4.13: Indian Lake Trilogy, Book Two: Don’t Fear The Reaper – Stephen Graham Jones
JADE IS BACK in Proofrock for the first time since the Fourth of July Massacre at the climax of My Heart Is A Chainsaw, and also SHE IS NOT CALLED JADE ANYMORE, she is Jennifer to you chuds. She has matured and gotten her GED and been exonerated of several murders and does not think in horror movies anymore, thank you very much.
And we are very proud of her and she does a great job of being a traumatized grownup for the roughly four hours before as many as three??? serial killers kick off their simultaneous Murder Spree ’23 Exsplatvaganza Spectaculars; in this, she learns perhaps the one true lesson of adulthood: it’s just one goddamn thing after another until someone cuts you in half with a plow. Yes, I’m having home maintenance issues, why do you ask.
I could write a fucking term paper (for Mr. Holmes, not this ~Armitage~ clot) about the relationship between these books, but their dynamic is clear: MHIAC is the raw, scrappy, maybe magic maybe mundane love-letter-to-the-genre horror movie, and DFTR is the sequel we never expected (and neither did Stephen unless he’s playing an amazing long-game) that’s ready to get weird, so buckle up because I spent a month reading this to my wife at bedtime and we still aren’t entirely sure what happened in it. But that’s clearly intentional; a good first movie stabs your meats, a good sequel sees your meat-stabbing and raises you the stab of the mind.
25. Space Opera
26. Witches
27. Dragons
1.3: The Nightmare Stacks (The Laundry Files, #7) – Charles Stross
Cold-blooded, murderous elves from the earth next door finally run out of reasons not to invade ours and murder us all! Did I mention the murder part. Also, one of them wants to date our main character, a wampire on a government leash! Will she show up to meet his parents for dinner on one of their brontosaurian basilisk-dragons?! What if they ask what she does for a living, she can’t just say “Genocide-Princess”! It’s frowned upon!
The basilisk-dragons in question, BTW, do turn people to stone, as long as you agree that “converting 1/10th of all carbon molecules in anything organic into silicon molecules, causing instant petrification and the release of horrific heats and energies” meets the definition, and whether or not I’m actually prepared to accept that definition, I’m certainly not prepared to argue against it.
28. Standalone
1.24: A Journal Of My Father – Jiro Taniguchi (Comic Selection For January)
This is not a “true story” in that it didn’t, how you say, “happen”, but it’s a true story in that “shut up”, it “made me cry”.
Set in 1950’s Japan, AJOMF deals with a barber and his family in the waning days of the post-WWII American occupation of Japan–oh, were you not taught about that in school? Me neither!–and how a man struggles to provide for his family, who in turn feel distanced from and ignored by him for it, not in an ungrateful way, but in the way that it’s hard to love and appreciate someone you never see, and as his son grows older throughout the story he has to deal with that and its consequences.
The son–now a grown Tokyo salaryman–returns home for the first time in more than a decade when his father dies, and in handling the funeral learns that his father was much more than the workaholic he remembered, as he is loved and eulogized by people who knew him in the life he had before and after his son.
This was an extremely rough read for me, just because I found it very relatable and guilt-inducing not because it’s a mean book interested in guilting you, but because I am also a bad son whose relationship with his father could be best described as ‘complicated’ unless you’ve got three fucking hours for me to map out my very biased, one-sided perspective on it.