Reading Recap, week 24
Two best-of-year books make the list!
I’m going to blitz SHOGUN over the next two weeks, I’m ready to be done with it. Still very good but I don’t care to read fiction that’s this long, it’s just a personal thing.
MASQUERADE by Alfred F. Young was a superb book about Deborah Sampson, who I nicknamed “the American Mulan.” Young’s book cuts through the bullcrap surrounding her legacy and gets down to the hard facts of her life, her military service in the Revolution, and what we know about her today. Plus, it made me *want* to keep listening, and that’s an increasingly rare trait.
JUNKYARD JOE is a top-quality graphic novel that hits all the right notes for me. It’s about the bonds forged in wartime between men in the thick of it, and there’s a robot, and there’s a beloved comic strip, and there are strong men carrying internal burdens as they work their way through life, and there are neighbors learning to fill the gaps in that life by just being good neighbors together. It’s about good people doing the right thing even as bad people are relentless in doing the wrong. Hot diggity damn, it’s perfect. I’m working on a video of it right now.
Oh, and I read DEEP STATE by Walter Jon Williams, it’s the sequel to THIS IS NOT A GAME. A competent book, but it follows a very tough act and kind of suffers for it. Dagmar Shaw is still a great leading lady and the story had a fair amount going for it.
Basically she and her team get hired to deal with a military government in Turkey, using her augmented reality games to mobilize players against the dictatorship. She had just finished managing a viral marketing game for a James Bond movie, and that ended up playing a big role in it too. The book came out in 2011, and let me just say…the commentary on the Bond franchise has aged really well, haha.
Anyway, that was this last week. Some filler, some thriller.