Currently interested in queer books and obscure comics [he/him]
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Life is pretty good being a gigantic crocodile god: spend your days lazing on the …
Short and fun. I bought it just before ShortBox closed up, and I loved the contrast between Sobek's towering presence on the cover and, well, his actual personality in the story.
Esio knows all the rules about travelling to the fae realm: stick to the path, …
Why do you tell the reader the rules of the fae realm if you... end up not using them? Who is the main character, Ted or Esio? I feel like none of them were fleshed out enough to know what the story wanted to say.
The fae realm looked magnificent though, it was worth it just for the visuals.
It's hard being dumped. It's even harder when, on the way home from being dumped, …
The premise is interesting: the main character finds themself in a train for the "lost and weary" that belongs to Death, and wonders if they want to stay aboard. The train and its passengers are also covered in mushrooms, which creates a unique atmosphere.
However I felt that Death's characterization was a bit inconsistent and the emotional stakes were quickly rendered moot.
Burning hands rouse Roger in the night--but do they belong to the bookseller Cam Ellis, …
The first two stories were more lighthearted, whereas this one revolves around a mystery and has a heavier mood in general. I didn't not like it, it's nice that the atmosphere isn't the same from one story to another, but the first two stories were more up my alley.
Wild beasts and wilder men roam the deserts of Arizona, and folklorist Roger Crenshaw runs …
On one hand, the story has the perfect length, it's long enough to flesh out the characters and the setting before the sex scene at the end.
Having read a lot of mangas, comics etc. before turning to books-without-pictures again, I'm still used to spending between 30 min and 1 hour in a story, and then moving on to something else. With essays and novels, I sometimes still resent the fact that I have to commit to them for hours, which become days and sometimes weeks. Yes they generally have chapters, but it's not the same. So it's nice to find shorter stories that don't feel too short.
On the other hands, ugh. The characters are lovable and I would like to read more about them, but it would defeat the previous point.
Bent on destruction, the Beast cuts a terrible swathe through towns and countryside, accompanied by …
Like Extinction, it looked magnificent and it made me want to read more stories in this kind of setting. I love the design of the Beast.
I'm not sure I understood everything, but that's part of the appeal I think.
Folklorist Roger Crenshaw is invited to dinner by a charming Yale professor who shares his …
Casually adds it to the list of evidence I will use in my head to prove someone wrong when they justify the bad writing of a piece of smut by saying "of course it's bad, it's smut, what did you expect? a proper story??"
The original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen perished tragically, turning into sea foam when …
A sweet (for a given value of "sweet") short story, I love the choice that the titular Little' Mermaid's sister made at the end.
Two friends share with each other mermaid stories they had grown up with. But one …
I reminded me of Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid Forest, but with a sensitivity that I liked more
Marnie Winters was going to turn her life around; get out of the house, make …
The art is full of charm, but I think I'm beginning to be slowly fed up with depressed and unlikable main characters.
A fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing …
It was amazing?
Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.
The muted color palette works really well here: it conveys the grayness of Patricia's life very well, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.
There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian …
It was amazing?
Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.
The muted color palette works really well here: it conveys the grayness of Patricia's life very well, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.
There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian writer in the 1950s, struggling to sell a novel with lesbian main characters that get a happy end at a time when putting your name on a comic book would be career suicide. And now in 2023 we get to read about it in a comic book crafted by two queer women, that features a problematic queer lead and won an Eisner award this year.
Les plantes médicinales sont au cour des médecines traditionnelles et conventionnelles depuis deux millénaires. 80 …
Evoque divers moments de la vie de Jacques Fleurentin, en effleurant beaucoup d'aspects de son étude des plantes médicinales mais sans les approfondir. La narration n'est pas un modèle de clarté non plus.
The Tao of Pooh is a book written by Benjamin Hoff. The book is intended …
It made me understand some concepts better, like p'u, the uncarved block, but some passages really grated on me, like the one on science and cleverness. I get what the author is saying: it's a criticism of seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge, of using complicated words as a form of gatekeeping, of focusing on the study of the tree while missing the forest around it etc. But in the era of COVID and climate change, I have very little patience for "what do scientists even know anyway?"
And there are way more nuanced and better written critiques of productivity culture than the chapter about Bisy Backson.
Piper is a lich-doctor, a physician who works among the dead, determining causes of death …
It was as enjoyable as the first two volumes of the Saint of Steel series, but at the same time I had mixed feelings about it.
On one hand, I really like the author's sense of humor, I enjoy following the relationships between characters in their late thirties (i.e. my age), and mixing romance with investigations on gruesome murders works really well apparently? I technically finished Paladin's Hope 10 days ago and haven't started a new fiction book since. I just... don't feel like immersing myself in another one for the moment.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that the series could get a little repetitive at some point. Until now, each of them followed a similar pattern. There are berserker paladins whose god died a few years ago, they feel broken, not worthy of love and/or dangerous for the people around them that are not fellow paladins. Until they …
It was as enjoyable as the first two volumes of the Saint of Steel series, but at the same time I had mixed feelings about it.
On one hand, I really like the author's sense of humor, I enjoy following the relationships between characters in their late thirties (i.e. my age), and mixing romance with investigations on gruesome murders works really well apparently? I technically finished Paladin's Hope 10 days ago and haven't started a new fiction book since. I just... don't feel like immersing myself in another one for the moment.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that the series could get a little repetitive at some point. Until now, each of them followed a similar pattern. There are berserker paladins whose god died a few years ago, they feel broken, not worthy of love and/or dangerous for the people around them that are not fellow paladins. Until they meet someone and mutually fall in love, after having spent a very long time thinking about how unworthy they are of the other person's affection and vice versa (and there are also corpses that must be investigated). The paladins' love interests are well-rounded, interesting characters (especially the women of the first 2 volumes), but I wish I could say the same about the paladins. Their god died and it's, like, their whole deal. Stephen knits socks, Istvhan is large and Galen mustn't be touched when he's having a nightmare and... that's pretty much it? Their respective personalities aren't literally the same, but the whole "ugh how could they love me?" sort of evens them out I think.
The very end of Paladin's Hope hints at more development of one important plot point, and having a gnole as one of its main characters brought a breath of fresh air, so fingers crossed for more variety in upcoming volumes.
Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year…
Three years later, Stephen is …
It was fun! And so satisfying to realize how a lot of subtle setups paid off near the end.
I love a romance where you get to see both characters' point of view, and even more if they're in their thirties, because they have a different approach to relationships than teenagers (also, I'm the same age as Stephen). The book was maybe a little heavy on the self-deprecating inner monologues, but this is me quibbling.
Onto Paladin's Strength now!