Reading Recap, week 5
Cowboys, Indians, and Spaniards, oh my...
SIDEWINDERS by Johnstone & Johnstone is the first in a longrunning series about two cowboys named Scratch and Bo. I thought this was perfectly serviceable as a piece of genre fic to pass the time. If you want a western, this is a western, and you can read a western by reading this western. It was better than “meh” but didn’t impress me a whole ton. Just fine. Content warning is pretty chill, probably a PG-13 for violence and profanity.
PURITY OF BLOOD by Perez-Reverte is the second in the Captain Alatriste series. A strong follow-up to a strong first installment which, like its predecessor, did a lot more for me on a second reading than on the first. Pay close attention to the details and even if you’re not overly familiar with 17th century Spain, you’ll glean enough from the context. Content warning for hard profanity, violence, and torture.
WINTER COUNTS by David Heska Wanbli Weiden gives us vigilante justice on a South Dakota Indian Reservation. Shades of Longmire but told first-person from the POV of Virgil Wounded Horse, a recovering alcoholic of the Lakota Nation who’s trying to raise his late sister’s son. Heroin finds its way onto the rez and he gets to the bottom of it. This book was frustrating, as it was initially approachable from the outside and even presented a middle-of-the-road perspective on divisive issues, but accelerated in the third act toward “all white people bad” and “we’ve only ever been victims” type stuff. My complete thoughts on this would require a longer post. Suffice it to say for now that it hung out around the four-star area for most of the read, and finished at three. Content warning for hard profanity and violence.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THUNDERBOLT, VOL 1 by Yasuo Ohtagaki. Haven’t read any Gundam manga before. The sheer number of variants and series under the Gundam umbrella is staggering, but if I can isolate a single narrative and read it from beginning to end, I will. As the anime goes I’ve only watched Wing and Double-0, which I understand aren’t even the most successful ones. I don’t know where Thunderbolt fits in the larger timeline, or if it even does at all. Oh well. The basic hang of it is that there are two sides (Zeon and the Federation) and they’re fighting over a No-Man’s-Land (Thunderbolt) in space. There used to be a colony there but it got destroyed so now it’s just a huge debris field where snipers hang out and pick off wayward enemies. Trench warfare in the sky.
The artwork was cool but the action scenes get confusing really fast. That said, I like the designs of the Zero-G mobile suits. They can be a lot more bonkers compared to the planetside models. They don’t have to worry as much about gravity, etc. The story boils down to the conflict between Federation pilot Io Fleming, and Zeon sniper Daryl Lorenz. They encounter each other in the Thunderbolt sector and a feud begins. I like how they both listen to a pirate radio station, broadcasted to both sides by a neutral party. Fleming makes jazz music his trademark, so when Lorenz hears jazz over the radio, he knows Fleming is in the area, and they’re gonna have beef.
Far as I know there are 20 volumes of this one, so I’ll check it out more. Content: there are some s-bombs for language, and at one point a bored sniper is watching a skin flick on his iPad, some…details were drawn. And there’s a pilot who takes a shot to the forehead.
That’s it for this week. Stay tuned to the channel, and thanks for getting me over 2,500 subs!