Reading Recap, weeks 42 and 43
This has been a soft October.
Audiobooks
Sorry I missed last week, it got away from me. (In the drilling & blasting industry that means I screwed something up but such is not the case here.)
Last week I read TENURE by Pardoe and Baron, that was freaking awesome and it’s a best-of-year title. Basically a sane professor at a woke college gets cancelled in Portland, and suddenly Antifa is hounding him. It gets bad. He goes Full Punisher and provides some very cathartic release by the end. Fantastically handled.
Then I read CRECHELING by Butler, which is one of the better takes on a genre that is kind of stale. In fairness, it wasn’t stale when he wrote and published it, I thought it was fine. Basically in a post-apocalyptic world, people grow up in systems with top-down control instead of families that love each other, and the main character is a girl who comes to the realization that families are better, which is true.
Finally I finished it up with MORTAL COIL by Landy, the fifth Skulduggery Pleasant book. This is a nice and easy YA fantasy series, it doesn’t beg me to come crawling back, and I’m sure I’ll pick my way through it over the years.
Print & Comics
Last week was REALLY freaking good, this week was a little less so. All I got was DESTRO #5 but in fairness that one capped off an otherwise middling series and brought it to a strong and satisfying end. SCARLETT #5 came out the week before and that series was a dud all the way through.
The runaway hit was ABSOLUTE BATMAN #1, apparently TikTok is all over that, and a younger generation of comic readers came in to check it out. I thought it was great and I’m excited for more. Great pacing, cool art. I also got GEIGER #7 and TRANSFORMERS #14, which breathed some more life into a series that has had a few lesser installments of late.
From the library I got a really great picture book by Irish author P.J. Lynch who wrote a story about John Howland on the Mayflower. I’ll do a video on that later.
Next Week
I’ve got a few library books to knock out, I’m trying to finish a print book, and of course, there’s new comic book day. Before the month is out I want to tackle a biography of Jefferson Davis, too. We’ll see how it goes.
Self-Promotion!
If you haven’t yet read SLEEPLESS HOLLOW or SHERIFF PORTER, those two books of mine are the best fit for October/Halloween. Those are affiliate links so if you click them and buy through Amazon, I’ll get a small commission. Thank you.
SLEEPLESS HOLLOW ties in with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and is set in the year 2020, when the ghost of Ichabod Crane comes back to town with a nefarious plan to change history. Only an inexperienced seer, a freelance hunter, and a 230 year-old ghost can stop him.
SHERIFF PORTER is what TWILIGHT would have looked like if Sheriff Walt Longmire was Bella Swan’s dead. An Afghanistan vet gets to hunt his daughter’s boyfriend before the boyfriend can turn her into a vampire.