kaseido

Back in 2006 there was a LiveJournal meme: committing to read 52 books in 52 weeks. Easy stuff, but I had dreams of doubling that, and started keeping a spreadsheet of my reading to track my progress. This year, I finally made my target.

Here's some highlights of the year in books so far:

Best Fiction: This is an easy one: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Easily in my lifetime top 20, TYPU is a masterpiece of speculative fiction. It takes a simple "what if" - what if in 1940 European Jews fleeing the Holocaust were resettled in Alaska, and Israel was never established - and builds a fully-realized rich world of Russian cigarettes, chess clubs, organized crime, gender and sexuality, and international intrigue. It's a novel of circles upon circles of cultural outsiders, narrated by that figure of the ultimate outsider, the detective. It's rich and vibrant and real, and very much earned both the Hugo and the Pulitzer.

Best Nonfiction: Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Very few books have fundamentally changed my understanding of the world, and this is one. Turner tracks the complex cultural links between 1950s engineering culture, the hippie movement, and the "California Ideology" of techno-libertarianism. Turner demonstrates how hippiedom and software engineering have blended to shape an ideology with enormous impact on our culture and institutions.

Worst Fiction: I read a lot of tie-in novels, and I don't hold them to the highest standards. That said, they often deliver: some of the best contemporary fiction on the role of the military in society is Karen Traviss' Star Wars game novels of a group of elite Clone Troopers. But, Keith R.A. DeCandido's Star Trek: A Singular Destiny. This novel took the title a few days ago when I had to read a full page of Amazon reviews to realize I'd read it already. That's a special kind of forgettable. The main character is an improbable Mary Sue, a banjo-playing diplomat come out of retirement to track down a political mystery. DeCandido took the Star Trek novels in an interesting direction by introducing West Wing-style elements, giving us some insight into the governance of the Federation, a polity which the TV shows never explored or explained very well. A Singular Destiny, though, is C-SPAN with an adventure plot...absent actual adventure.

No Cigar:  No cigar to Troy Denning for the Star Wars - quadrilogy? -  the Swarm Wars novels. Denning took on a rich theme, the Jedi as a political force, its relations to the Republic government, its internal management and accountability - and never reached a level of depth the themes deserved. Close, but... yeah.

Honorable Mentions: Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of the World Blues - beautifully strange, and well-grounded in observations of Tokyo. Jim Butcher's Turn Coat - Always good, Butcher's on fire in this latest Dresden novel. Great stuff.

I had to crowbar my mind open to pick up this book - and I really liked it.

Some self-indulgent background..... I started collecting comics as an adult in 1991. The last deal I worked on at the midtown law firm cheerfully known as the Death Star was the Marvel Comics IPO. A team of us had to go to the Marvel offices every day for a week to sit and read comics, so we could describe their key properties properly in the prospectus. The junior associate for the firm representing the company was a huge fanboy, and gave us all the backstories. When Marvel President Terry Stewart saw I was really getting into it, he sent me home with stacks and stacks of comics - and I was hooked.

Chris Claremont's X Men and New Mutants were the big attraction  - I've always loved good team stories. But a couple things from DC really gripped me, two titles in particular, both written by Chuck Dixon. He'd just premiered Tim Drake as the new Robin, in a few miniseries, and the Birds of Prey team - wheechair bound hacker Barbara Gordon/Oracle and field agent Dinah Lance/Black Canary. I *loved* the characters. Loved Tim, the odd, obsessive geek stalker, loved the smart, fun women of BoP. They drew me into the Bat world, and, as monthly titles, were at the top of my reading pile for over 15 years (gaak!).

I read comics for the bright and bold visuals (I don't really watch TV or movies much), and for the characters. And across a couple writers and many years, Tim and Babs were two of the most interesting, most relate-able, characters around.

DC often has had stronger character writers than Marvel, IMO, and the Bat titles have seen some of the best.

Until last year.

As I told Oscuro today, I'm convinced there are two Grant Morrisons. One wrote Justice League for a terrific run ("JLA" at that time), and wrote an All Star Superman that is superhero writing at its very finest, capturing that eight-year-old "whoaaaa, cool!" for an adult audience. The other Grant Morrison I think *hates* the superhero genre and works to destroy it. His run on X Men, like his recent "Batman: R.I.P.," was deconstructive, cynical, slimy. Both went far out of their way to tarnish heroes, to ascribe the lowest of motives, and were backed by intentionally ugly art from Frank Quitely.

Batman: R.I.P. was *awful,* and it marked an end to all the current continuity of Bat titles. Robin, Nightwing, Birds of Prey, all cancelled. Morrison was quoted as saying he was going to bring an Adam West sensibility to Batman & Robin, which seemed to suggest that Dick Grayson as Batman was going to be treated as shabbily as Batman, the Wayne family, Charles Xavier and others. And, replacing Tim Drake as Robin with Damien, Bruce's awful retconned bastard son by Ra's Al Ghul's daughter?  Eugh.

I closed down my pull-box at the comic shop, and ended 18 years of collecting.

But a poll at Newsarama, one of the major comics news sites, had 81% of respondents liking B&R, in strong contrast to RIP, and an interview with Morrison suggested good-Morrison was out in force.

So I picked it up.

I'll never like Quitely's art, but it's much more mainstream here than on other titles, less grotesque. A *lot* happens in this issue - an intriguing mystery (why was the drug dealer paying off his boss in domino tiles?), a new villain (who wants to make people perfect by turning them into living dolls - can't beat that!), terrific detecting (from a panicked sentence, Batman figures out the henchman's background), wonderful moments between Dick and Alfred, the promise of a solid arc of Dick's turning the monstrous Robin, Damien, into a decent person, bold visual moments (the cop telling Gordon "face it, Batman's never coming back," Gordon saying "there's always hope," then a Big Damn Splash Page of Batman and Robin, together again for the first time - you gotta cheer).

It is a real change from the street-gritty era of Batman, from the descent deeper into darkness of the past 15 years or so, and, it's about damn time. Comics should be about *heroes* - not cardboard ones, but complex people making hard choices to do what's right. Dick Grayson setting aside a good life to step up into the suit, taking on Bruce's awful bastard son as an apprentice, doing his duty but making the role his - that's the kind of thing that marks a hero.

I think where All Star Superman gave us a hero made of science and *goodness,* Batman and Robin may give us a team made of filial duty - Dick as Bruce's heir, Damien as his blood, and really give us a Dick Grayson that's superhero-as-social-networker, a maker and leader of heroes. If it delivers, I could be okay with Bruce being gone for a good long while.

So, I went in to Atomic Comics today after getting called by Alex, the store manager, about my long-abandoned box of pulls. I've known Alex for seven years, since he started as a minion at the Paradise Valley branch, before we both moved to Chandler. technosage and I used to each have pull lists, and we picked up 30-50 titles a month for most of the eight years we've shopped at Atomic. So, we were really good customers for a very long time, and Alex is one of the true good guys.

He made me an offer I couldn't refuse. :D  

Instead of liquidating my box, and getting back my deposit ($20? $50? can't remember), they've got a system of monthly pre-orders: you pick the titles you want in the next month out of Previews, and buy just those, at 20% off. Then, pick them up whenever you want. So, if I only want to read two or three books a month, I can get those, then let a good stack accumulate to give me a good day's reading.

It works for me, and it feels a lot less drastic. And, I remembered that I went through a phase like this in 1999-2001, when nothing was holding my interest, and particularly after Larry Hama's Wolverine run came to an end.

We're going to ComiCon again this year. Me, I'm going mostly to say hi and thanks to Felicia Day and see what's coming out from the SF novel publishers - but I'll do the DC panels (though not the booth - it's just not fun anymore, not like it was - way too crowded with, eugh, *collectors* instead of *fans*). Maybe I'll get fired up again.

If not, gods know I get my superhero fix from hearing about technosage 's RP, with a side of extra batsecks :p

Oh, and in closing out my box, I picked up the back half of Trinity and some of the Battle for the Cowl titles. I'm looking forward to glutting myself on Trinity, actually :D

I used to hate Death Knights. Overpowered, overpopulated tank-tards. And, I've got serious issues about playing any sort of dark side characters (I'm an altoholic, but no warlocks, ever) or quests I'm not ethically comfortable with (one of my engineer alts refused to do Revenge of Gann, and most of the Tarren Mill quests are Way Out). I'd rolled one when I finally hit 55, just to see what it was like, and abandoned him a few quests into the chain.

It's all changed. I've got a DK I totally love.

I rolled one to join a friend's raiding-heavy guild. I did a few things differently this time: I created a viewpoint character, an alt I could identify with, instead of just some throwaway character.

Kaseido the Dranei worked for me before I'd ever taken her inworld. And I found the DK quest arc moving and redemptive, and deeply immersive in a way little else is in WoW. I was shaking during that long ride of shame through Stormwind (getting repeatedly lost didn't help - and isn't it interesting how much Varian's throne room was designed to Nazi architectural principles? I'll never like the Alliiance) to deliver the message of alliance to King Varian.

And, yes, they're grossly overpowered: my fresh 58 DK had more armor than my 62 paladin tank- and after seven months of leveling tank-spec'ed? Zomg, the DK kill-em-in-seconds thing is refreshing!

I've yet to do a dungeon run - though I'll probably start soloing the lower dungeons just for kicks and achievements - but so far, I like the gameplay, love the look, and have a character I've really bonded with. Enough so, she got one of my two Zhevras, over my main, Paladin-Kaseido (Laevia the hunter Guild Master gets the other at 60- she's just too dignified to ride around on a purple chocobo!).

In short, he so buried himself in his books that he spent nights reading from twilight to daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He filled his mind with all that he read in them, with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments, and other impossible nonsense; and so deeply did he steep his imagination in the belief that all the fanciful stuff he read was true, that...[h]e decided... to turn knight errant and travel through the world with horse and armour in search of adventures.

-- Don Quixote