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HA-HA, OH WELL
Good afternoon you scooberts, you soon-to-be-waffles in the hot iron of life, and welcome to my first foray into the DAUNTING DECIMAL DEMESNE KNOWN ONLY AS TOP TEN TUESDAY, famously hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
FIRST, A BRIEF UPDATE RE: THE LOCAL FELID GENTRY. This oinge guy showed up:
Obviously my first instinct was to apprehend him, brush hims furs, and name him Mr. Neelix, but this proved impractical due to both his reluctance to accept my offered knucks and the fact that with a name like that he’d be difficult to fit thematically into my ongoing outside-cat fanfic Meowtlaw Country. What’s his big oinge deal? WE MAY LEARN YET. This has been: Hey What’s Up With Those Meowzelberries Out There. Now on to the main event!
Top Ten Tuesday, January 30th 2024:
New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023
- Legends & Lattes: A Novel Of High Fantasy And Low Stakes – Travis Bardtree
I actually talked at length about this in my 2023 Reading Scavenger Hunt! Long, hungry ramble short: book comfy, book nice, book melt you free of the Winter Blues ice!
Bagelbit: How expressive the author managed to make (and keep) Thimble, the coffeeshop’s wee ratfolk baker, almost entirely without dialogue, and that while the owner makes it clear that he can always talk to her, she respects that he’s mostly just not a talkative little dude and doesn’t try to well-meaningly bring him out of his pastry-crust shell. - A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan Book 1) – Arkady Martine
I…am detecting a troubling pattern; most anything that’s gonna show up here is already on that Scavenger Hunt list, because I tried to list as few comics as possible on it and I read way more comics than non-mics. Hm. Okay, time to adapt; instead of listing only new-to-me authors, I’ll liiiiiiiiiiist maybe a small thing from each one that I appreciated or particularly liked? Just like one bit that stood out? That sounds good! Lemme go back and do one for L&L, brb. Okay I’m back! Let’s do one for this!
Bagelbit: The ubiquitous info-fiche sticks that have taken the place of paper letters in Teixcalaanli society; some are cheap and plastic, some are incredibly luxe and sexy, all of them are quite literally USB drives with pretentions of class. In addition to just being a cool cultural thing, I like how they reflect that no matter how far humanity advances, we’ll always end up with a million little fuckin’ things that we–like I’ve got a bowl of these I have to sort through, quick question, have you ever tried to sort the contents of a bowl, ’cause it presents A LITTLE MORE CHALLENGE than a stack of mail. These things are skeuomorphia personified and reflect the eternal truth that no matter what we invent to make our lives easier, we’ll find a way to make it kinda stupid and probably put ringtones and Hello Kitty on it. - The Secret Lives Of Color – Kassia St. Clair
This is a fun little number full of a million little stories about how we got the crazy-ass chromatic panoply we know and love! Wanna hear how a dude bamboozled the Nazis with the help of a sassy little shade of blue? Or how neither the Greek nor Japanese languages are even sure they buy this “blue” business in the first place? Or how a shade of white TRIED TO KILL CHARLES DICKENS??? Well whatever book you brought to the dance, this is the one you’re leaving with, friendo.
Bagelbit: The page-edges are colored to match the colors those pages are talking about! - Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art – Scott McCloud
Okay this rules, I’ve been reading comics for almost twenty years and Scott has taught me how to see things about the medium I’ve never seen across the thousands of panels I’ve read. Understanding Comics is absolutely essential to anyone interested in reading them, making them, or just having a firmer grasp of visual storytelling, design, and theory. It’s textbook-thorough but incredibly readable, and that’s good news because I’m gonna need to re-read this every few years.
Bagelbit: McCloud’s in-book avatar, a cartoon of himself who guides us through it not unlike a Mr. DNA, always wears a lightning-bolt t-shirt and and a flannel overshirt, and every few dozen pages I’d wonder how many times he had to draw that pattern before he regretted not just giving himself the t-shirt and calling it a day, fashion-wise. - This Is How You Lose The Time War – Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
The first of these authors is new to me! And I can say this much with honesty: it is the finest damn yarn I’ve ever read about two lady time-spies falling for each other across the battlefield and communicating via increasingly-convoluted letters, some of which use time itself as part of their medium.
Bagelbit: Both of the agents (I think) confirm for the reader that Atlantis is both real across most timelines and it fucking sucks, seriously, that bullshit rock encrusted with crystal spires and togas just cannot sink fast enough. - Babel, Or, The Necessity Of Violence: An Arcane History Of The Oxford Translators’ Revolution – R. F. Kuang
I didn’t need another reason to hate both colonialism and specifically the British Empire w/r/t colonialism, but it’s good to know that I’ve got one if I need it! No for real this book kicks ass, go read it and get radicalized, chumps!
Bagelbit: There’s a running joke regarding three of the protagonists (Haitian, Indian, and Chinese, respectively) repeatedly being horrified by what the British, after everything else, have done to food1. - Boss Fight Books #25: Resident Evil – Phillip Reed
All of the BFBs are great, but this is a special thing among them; remarkably thorough and insighftul
Bagelbit: The author pointing out that most of the information the player finds in-game is in the form of documents and records of this slow-motion mansion massacre, and because the player saves their game by using a typewriter to record their progress, they are in the process of assembling their own apocalyptic log of these events. Is that a little precious and up its own ass? Absolutely; it’s also true, and, I think, important to note that it’s a theory put forward in a book that someone wrote.
Nota bene: I had to go to bed at this point because She Who Is My Wife had to be at work extra early; it is now the 6 o’clock hour the next morning, so if you notice a particularly sleepy or threatening tone in the following entries, now you have your precious “explanation”.
- Home Sick Pilots, Vol. 1: Teenage Haunts – Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard
First, I think we can all agree it’s pretty impressive that I made it this far into this list without having to resort to comics. Well done, me.
HSP is a comic about a teen punk band in early-90’s California who become trapped in a local haunted house and manage to turn the building into a giant, poltergeist-powered mecha. It is deeply cool and messed up.
Bagelbit: I think this is actually from the second volume, but I’m using the first as a synecdoche for the whole series, you get it. Anway there’s a bit where a character–an alleged California native–says “I’ve not been caught in the rain in years”, accidentally outing the writer as British, and I found that delightful and wondered by what American turns of phrase I might unintentionally betray my origins, thereby endangering the entire mission and forcing the team to adapt on the fly if they want to salvage the heist. 2 - The Joker, Vol. 2. – James Tynion IV and Guillem March
Again using a single volume to represent an entire series, this is a fun buddy-comedy wherein Jim Gordon travels to South America to find the Joker, finds him, is forced into a position where he has to protect him for reasons you’ll have to read it to learn, and desperately searches for reasons not to literally, physically murder him the entire time. It’s fantastic.
Bagelbit: I forget which volume, but when Gordon finally tracks the Joker down to a villa and knocks on the door, to which we hear “¿Quien es?” from within, prompting me to imagine Mr. J booting up DuoLingo to maintain his streak because listen, he’s not scared of the Batman, he’s not scared of Nazis, but he IS afraid of two things: the IRS and that green owl. - Moon Knight, Vol. 1: The Midnight Mission – Jed Mackay and Alessandro Cappuccio
MOON KNIGHT FOREVER, HE’S MY FAVORITE FIGHTIN’ HOLY MAN, EVEN INCLUDING FATHER MULCAHY FROM M*A*S*H*.
Bagelbit:
Well this was fun, and even though it is now Wednesday at like noon forty-five, I think you can count me in for future Top Ten Tuesdays.
Until next time, be good to yourselves, be good to each other, and for the love of store-brand god do not annoy Moon Knight. Good night, and good luck.