Category Archives: Reading

Kate Gavino’s A CAREER IN BOOKS: A Novel About Friends, Money and the Occasional Duck Bun follows three Asian-American twentysomethings struggling to make it in publishing, and their discovery one of the tenants in their apartment building is a famous author. This suffers from too much New Adulting (that’s not a genre I go for, though that isn’t Gavino’s fault) but also from her art style. This feels less like a graphic novel and more like a collection of standalone one-panel cartoons. The story would make a good movie though.

Chris Gooch’s IN UTERO didn’t quite click with me but it’s better. Tween Hailey winds up in a holiday camp in an abandoned office building where she meets a kid who can walk through walls, discovers a kaiju in the basement — and meanwhile a hazmat team in the building is assuring their scientists that clumping these strange oozing organisms together in one big jar won’t cause any problems …

DC PRIDE: To the Farthest Reaches is the 2025 annual anthology celebrating DC’s LGBTQ characters. It suffers from me not being up on current comics: tie-ins to big events don’t work, I don’t know some of the characters (never met Circuit Breaker before which makes it harder to care he’s dating Pied Piper) and some things completely baffle me (Raven’s acting like a normal twentysomething?). However Phil Jimenez‘ Spaces about his lifelong love for Wonder Woman (surely an island where women ride giant kangaroos would welcome a weird little kid?) and the importance of that kind of fantasy space was incredibly moving.

BURY THE LEDE by Gaby Dunn and Claire Roe has an imprisoned, manipulative killer recruit a rookie reporter as the one person she’ll give interviews to, steering her towards a rising political star with a very dark secret. There was a lot I liked about this, even though the killer’s Hannibal Lector-style games felt unnecessary. However protagonist Madison gets seriously unethical over the course of the story; there are some kinds of journalism stories where that works dramatically, but this wasn’t one of them.

IONHEART by Lukas Kummer is the story of a knight in a parallel world where our technology, drifting across the dimensional borders, is seen as dangerous magic. This didn’t click with me even slightly so like A Career In Books I put it down unfinished.

Art by Gooch and Roe, all rights to images remain with current holders.

Cartography and the way maps shape our perception of the territory fascinate me and I’ve read several good books about them (here’s one. Here’s another). I thought Seymour J. Schwartz’s THE MISMAPPING OF AMERICA would be another with its look at how early American maps often got it wrong: California as an island, non-existent islands in the Great Lakes, a Northwest Passage and other fantasies that would make it easy to sail to the Pacific and thence to the Far East. Unfortunately the book is a dull catalog of “This person made a map, then this other person, then this third person ….” and I found it unsatisfying.

I read HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF CHEMISTRY by MP Crosland to see if it would help me understand some of Doctor Jekyll’s chemical terms when he explains his theories in the Stevenson novel.

It doesn’t, but it is fascinating to read how the chemical notations and abbreviations I learned in high school took so long to become definitive. Crosland starts with the alchemists and their enthusiasm for symbolic and cryptic writing that hid their knowledge from the uninitiated. Making matters worse, neither they nor the first chemists had the knowledge or skills to identify compounds and they had multiple false assumptions, such as color geographic location being significant (i.e., gold from Bavaria might be significantly different from gold from the New World). Trends in language also changed: mundane descriptors such as oil of vitriol, butter of arsenic or milk of magnesia lost out to technical terms, which eventually became standardized so everyone knew what they were talking about. Specialized but interesting. And someday I would love to work “butter of arsenic” or “vital air” (a one-time name for oxygen) into a story.

LAURA by Vera Caspary is the source novel of the 1944 movie, wherein a surprisingly educated detective is called in to investigate the murder of the free-spirited, strong-willed title character — could it be her rather wimpy fiancee? Waldo, the well-known newspaper columnist who feels she friendzoned him (I cannot stop seeing him as Clifton Webb in the movie, despite Caspary making it clear he’s built more like Jack Black)? The twist is — well, I won’t reveal it just in case you don’t know.

I prefer the movie. This is more a literary story than a mystery, told from multiple points of view; while the writing is good, “literary” is a tough sell for me. And I really can’t swallow the degree to which the detective hangs out and chats about the case with his suspects.

I’m a fan of Phil Jimenez’ run on Wonder Woman and his story “Spaces” was the highpoint of DC PRIDE: To the Farthest Reaches, an anthology for Pride Month (DC’s done several of these). Jimenez reflects on how the weirdness of pre-Crisis WW convinced him that if he could only get to Paradise Island he’d be welcome there, weird as he was, and how much it meant to him to work on the series. It’s lovely.

The rest of the book didn’t work as well for me, mostly because I’m only occasionally reading current comics. I don’t know most of the couples and some of the characters are complete unknowns (Circuit Breaker, master of the still force) or wildly different (why is Raven so normal and chill?). That’s not a fault of the storytellers but it did make it harder to get into, particularly when some of the stories tie in to ongoing plotlines. Still, it’s good DC has added so many more LGBTQ cast members; I do hope current trends and corporate takeovers won’t change that.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Cover by Jimenez.