Reading Recap: week 28

NO KILOMETERS UNDER THESE FLOORBOARDS, PATRIOT

Audiobooks

I blitzed a really good trilogy as a lead-in to Independence Day. C.C. Finlay wrote a sleeper of historical fiction pieces called the Traitor to the Crown series. Here are my three videos on them.

I appreciate that these books were well-researched enough to have verisimilitude to the time period, without simply displaying 21st century hot-takes in an 18th century setting. The content was also for the most part clean, with a mild S-bomb here and there, and only the allusion to a mattress dance between the two main characters. Most of all, Finlay had a strong underlying idea for this “secret history” of the Revolutionary War, and he brought it out with subtlety as the trilogy unfolded.

Sadly these books are out of print, so getting them is a little above-average in terms of sticker price, and there aren’t Kindle copies available for some reason (unless you bought them back in the day and finally got around to listening to them on Speechify…) But if you go to the expense, I think you’ll find something you like here.

I also listened to what is chronologically the first Sackett novel by L’Amour. It was perfectly adequate and, as he stated in the foreword, merely an examination of the time period through the eyes of a fictional character. The story was very simple: in the year 1600, an Englishman named Barnabas Sackett stumbles upon some old Roman coins and quickly becomes rich, but has to be careful about how he uses them because he’s a broke farmer and there are class distinctions in Britain. Through the course of his normal movements he ends up offending a gentleman and flees the country, arriving in North America.

He and a few of his cohorts, all from diverse backgrounds and wanting secure futures, explore their landing site in North Carolina. Things happen, yadda yadda yadda. For me the satisfying bit wasn’t just that Barnabas ran away, got rich in America, and never returned to England, but that he specifically did return to England, settled his beef with the gentry, and then went to America because he wanted to. This plants the seed for the next dozen books in the series, which focus on his descendants over time. I think this will make for a good read. L’Amour always does.

Print and Comics

Only one comic came in this week, SCARLETT #2 from Skybound. For the second month in a row this book is not very good. In fact I’m getting mad at how it’s doing literally what every female-written comic on a large IP has done for the past ten %$#%ing years.

Oh, you have two female characters? I bet they MIGHT BE GAY HA HA HA but MAYBE THEY AREN’T HA HA HA but I bet they beat up men a lot and also each other MAYBE THEY DO SEX TOO? HA HA HA and also let’s watch Netflix and have foodie yum yums!!! HA HA HA

If the cliche isn’t annoying enough, it’s the aggressive, malicious ambiguity of it all. “Oh, you’re mad that we’re hinting at this? It must be your problem!!!” But when the mask comes off at the end and they’ve really made Scarlett and Jinx into lesbians, it’ll be “Oh you didn’t see this coming? Ha ha ha HA HA HA!”

The only reason I’m giving this any benefit of the doubt whatsoever is that the other Skybound/Energon titles have been really good, and while this one is in the hands of a different writer, it’s still got the same editorial process involved, and I certainly hope those editors aren’t gonna let this whole universe get ripped sideways into GayPropagandaVille like every other major IP. I’d have thought that the whole point of getting the rights to a languishing property was so that you could, I don’t know, make money off of it, and that doesn’t happen if you crash it into the ground.

Part of me had this vision of collecting an entire series and having nice editions of it all in a box on my shelf. Just a complete run that tells a nice, tidy story across several characters from G.I. Joe and Transformers…but so far we’ve got the above elements as listed, and on top of that, not a single connection to energon. In an Energon Universe book. As of right now this isn’t a story that ties in with the rest of them, it’s ambiguously gay chickfic.

The third issue better get this crap resolved or I might not bother with four and five.

</rant>