Reading Wrap-Up: February 2021
Feb. 28th, 2021 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justanorthernlightRemember how I said I was probably going to read fewer Star Wars comics this year? Yeah, that isn't happening.
— Star Wars: Journey to The Last Jedi: Captain Phasma — written by Kelly Thompson, art by Mark Checchetto —
At the end of The Force Awakens Phasma escapes from the garbage chute on Starkiller Base and sets out to kill a fellow officer who discovered she was the one who lowered the shields, causing the base's destruction, and then frame him for the same crime.
It's a decent little adventure with some very striking art panels, but there is something about Checchetto's art that makes the story really hard to follow. He loves drawing beautiful rain-swept vistas, but they're so busy I can't always tell what is supposed be happening. (There was also clearly some kind of miscommunication regarding a flashback to Phasma's past on Parnassos, what was shown did not reflect what happened in the Phasma novel at all. The novel and this comic were published fairly close together, so I don't know whose fault the miscommunication was, but it's pretty jarring.)
— Star Wars Doctor Aphra Volume 1: Aphra (Star Wars Doctor Aphra #1-6 — written by Kieron Gillen, art by Kev Walker —
My semi-chronological comics read through continues, and oh yeah, we've got some Weird Force Shit and ancient Jedi heresies going on now!
Aphra, having faked her death with Darth Vader, is free to return to her usual business of, uh, looting archeological sites for ancient weapons and selling them (apparently this is somewhat legal and regulated, and she has a license for archeology that makes the artifacts she turns in more valuable), when her father shows up to blackmail her into helping him find the abandoned outpost of an ancient heretical Jedi sect called the Ordu Aspectu who were seeking immortality through the Force.
It's a fun romp with some really good character bits (her relationship with her dad is complicated, and there's stuff with BT, Triple Zero, and Black Krrsantan, and there's some flashbacks to her relationship with Sana), and the Legends nerd in me is delighted by the inclusion of the Massassi. There are plenty of plot threads left unanswered that I hope get fleshed out in later issues (and some do in The Screaming Citadel, up next.
— Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel — Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel written by Kieron Gillen, art by Mark Checchetto, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #7-8 written by Kieron Gillen, art by Andrea Broccardo, and Star Wars #31-32 written by Jason Aaron, art by Salvador Larroca —
Aphra has an ancient Jedi artifact to activate, and she needs a Jedi's help to do it- sort of.
Aphra tracks down Luke and tricks him into accompanying her to the lair of the Queen of Ktath'atn, who collects 'rare organic life', and there is nothing more rare these days than a Jedi. Han, Leia, and Sana find out and set off to rescue him. There's action, betrayal, and mind-control parasites. Overall I liked it, but Jason Aaron still does Han a disservice wrt characterization, and for some reason hates to include Chewbacca in any of his plots.
— Hyperion by Dan Simmons (reread) —
It's The Canterbury Tales in SPACE! (Or so I've been told.) In a medium-distant future on the eve of an interstellar invasion, seven pilgrims gather together to make a trip to the planet Hyperion, where a mysterious time-travelling monster called the Shrike will kill six of them and grant the wish of the final one. Along the journey there, they share the stories that led them there.
It's funny, the first time I read this book it blew my tiny little mind (this was around 2011 or 2012ish, I was still in college and just starting to get back into reading for pleasure, rather than school assignments). From what I remember the quality of the following books in the series declines sharply, and I'm mostly rereading it because the last book in the series (The Rise of Endymion) is still sitting unread on my shelf and I want to refresh my memory of the preceding events before I finish it off.
This one still mostly holds up (the middle section drags a bit, a lot of academic naval gazing and a writer character romanticizing about writing and how nobody appreciates poetry or a very limited set of classics anymore, there's also that classic '80s obsession with dolphins, and it's a little on the dude-ly side), but that first story, "The Priest's Tale: The Man Who Cried God" took my breath away. I'm also always a sucker for cyberpunk and noir detective stories.
— Star Wars: Darth Vader Volume 1: Vader -- written by Kieron Gillen, art by Salvador Larroca (reread) —
I reread this for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
swbookclub , I've written about how much I love it before, I still love it. We are talking about Volume 2 a week from Monday.
— Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark by various authors —
The publisher's summary of this short story collection made it sound like these were new adventures starring TCW characters, but it's actually basically mini-novelizations of TCW episodes and story arcs. It's fine, I guess, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had realized that. There are some decent stories (the last one, "Bug", had the most new material and dealt with the destruction of the Nightsisters), but overall it's pretty bland.
— Star Wars: Queen's Shadow by E.K. Johnston —
This wasswbookclub 's February novel. I am not the biggest fan of YA tropes, but I usually really like both the boring kind of political intrigue and pseudo-spy court intrigue plots. This book didn't execute either of them well, and seemed more interested in hitting those YA coming-of-age plot points than any kind of realism. (I also have thoughts and feelings about how the SW YA novels have been handling romance, but I think I should make a separate post about it.)
Padmé starts a new job and wants to be good at it, and it takes her a while to figure it out- fine, a standard coming-of-age plot, but her job is being a Senator and representing an entire sector, and there's never any indication that anyone back home cares what she does in the Senate. Naboo itself has no pressing issues, or neighbors, or allies, or preexisting interplanetary relationships, and Padmé is free to pursue whatever catches her personal attention.
The Senate is lazy and ineffective- fine, I get where this metaphor is coming from, but the why and the how are just the laziest and sloppiest interpretation of this metaphor around. (I follow politics fairly closely, and I had a really good civics teacher back in the day, and seeing it handled so badly just makes my blood boil).
My suspension of disbelief was pretty much shattered by the midway point where, after chapters of building up the importance of keeping any hint of Sabé's existence or association with Padmé a secret and an elaborate scenario to bring her in as a body double without anyone knowing that involved a series of uniform switcheroos with Padmé's established guards, Sabé just leaves them on the landing pad outside the party and heads home in broad daylight to her secret safehouse apartment in someone else's royal guard uniform.
The book club is doing Battlefront: Twilight Company for March, which I read when it first came out and really liked.
— Star Wars Volume 6: Out Among The Stars — Star Wars #33-37 written by Jason Aaron, art by Salvador Larroca & Andrea Sorrentino, Star Wars Annual #3 written by Jason Latour, art by Michael Walsh —
Jason Aaron's Star Wars run comes to a close in a very bizarre fashion.
At the end of Volume 4, Threepio got captured by Sgt. Kreel, an Imperial stormtrooper who Aaron has been building up as an adversary since Volume 2, and Artoo steals an X-Wing to go and rescue him. Volume 5: Yoda's Secret War, was almost entirely flashbacks told through Obi-Wan's journal, then we had the Screaming Citadel crossover.
Issues 33-35 are almost random one-shots. Luke & Leia get stranded on an alien planet, Sana and Lando pull of a complicated triple-cross heist together, and Han & Chewie transport Grakkus the Hutt to prison. Then Artoo rescues Threepio in a single issues (#36). That is ten months of publication time between Threepio's capture and rescue, I looked up the publication dates.
Then there's another Kreel oneshot, with a little excerpt from Obi-Wan's journal tacked on at the end. I just really wonder what the plan or intention was here. It's just such a weird narrative decision, to have Threepio captured then wait so long to rescue him, then have it be so anticlimactic. Kieron Gillen took over the writing for volumes 7-11, I wonder if there was a particular reason for it.
— Star Wars: Journey to The Last Jedi: Captain Phasma — written by Kelly Thompson, art by Mark Checchetto —
At the end of The Force Awakens Phasma escapes from the garbage chute on Starkiller Base and sets out to kill a fellow officer who discovered she was the one who lowered the shields, causing the base's destruction, and then frame him for the same crime.
It's a decent little adventure with some very striking art panels, but there is something about Checchetto's art that makes the story really hard to follow. He loves drawing beautiful rain-swept vistas, but they're so busy I can't always tell what is supposed be happening. (There was also clearly some kind of miscommunication regarding a flashback to Phasma's past on Parnassos, what was shown did not reflect what happened in the Phasma novel at all. The novel and this comic were published fairly close together, so I don't know whose fault the miscommunication was, but it's pretty jarring.)
— Star Wars Doctor Aphra Volume 1: Aphra (Star Wars Doctor Aphra #1-6 — written by Kieron Gillen, art by Kev Walker —
My semi-chronological comics read through continues, and oh yeah, we've got some Weird Force Shit and ancient Jedi heresies going on now!
Aphra, having faked her death with Darth Vader, is free to return to her usual business of, uh, looting archeological sites for ancient weapons and selling them (apparently this is somewhat legal and regulated, and she has a license for archeology that makes the artifacts she turns in more valuable), when her father shows up to blackmail her into helping him find the abandoned outpost of an ancient heretical Jedi sect called the Ordu Aspectu who were seeking immortality through the Force.
It's a fun romp with some really good character bits (her relationship with her dad is complicated, and there's stuff with BT, Triple Zero, and Black Krrsantan, and there's some flashbacks to her relationship with Sana), and the Legends nerd in me is delighted by the inclusion of the Massassi. There are plenty of plot threads left unanswered that I hope get fleshed out in later issues (and some do in The Screaming Citadel, up next.
— Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel — Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel written by Kieron Gillen, art by Mark Checchetto, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #7-8 written by Kieron Gillen, art by Andrea Broccardo, and Star Wars #31-32 written by Jason Aaron, art by Salvador Larroca —
Aphra has an ancient Jedi artifact to activate, and she needs a Jedi's help to do it- sort of.
Aphra tracks down Luke and tricks him into accompanying her to the lair of the Queen of Ktath'atn, who collects 'rare organic life', and there is nothing more rare these days than a Jedi. Han, Leia, and Sana find out and set off to rescue him. There's action, betrayal, and mind-control parasites. Overall I liked it, but Jason Aaron still does Han a disservice wrt characterization, and for some reason hates to include Chewbacca in any of his plots.
— Hyperion by Dan Simmons (reread) —
It's The Canterbury Tales in SPACE! (Or so I've been told.) In a medium-distant future on the eve of an interstellar invasion, seven pilgrims gather together to make a trip to the planet Hyperion, where a mysterious time-travelling monster called the Shrike will kill six of them and grant the wish of the final one. Along the journey there, they share the stories that led them there.
It's funny, the first time I read this book it blew my tiny little mind (this was around 2011 or 2012ish, I was still in college and just starting to get back into reading for pleasure, rather than school assignments). From what I remember the quality of the following books in the series declines sharply, and I'm mostly rereading it because the last book in the series (The Rise of Endymion) is still sitting unread on my shelf and I want to refresh my memory of the preceding events before I finish it off.
This one still mostly holds up (the middle section drags a bit, a lot of academic naval gazing and a writer character romanticizing about writing and how nobody appreciates poetry or a very limited set of classics anymore, there's also that classic '80s obsession with dolphins, and it's a little on the dude-ly side), but that first story, "The Priest's Tale: The Man Who Cried God" took my breath away. I'm also always a sucker for cyberpunk and noir detective stories.
— Star Wars: Darth Vader Volume 1: Vader -- written by Kieron Gillen, art by Salvador Larroca (reread) —
I reread this for
swbookclub , I've written about how much I love it before, I still love it. We are talking about Volume 2 a week from Monday. — Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark by various authors —
The publisher's summary of this short story collection made it sound like these were new adventures starring TCW characters, but it's actually basically mini-novelizations of TCW episodes and story arcs. It's fine, I guess, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had realized that. There are some decent stories (the last one, "Bug", had the most new material and dealt with the destruction of the Nightsisters), but overall it's pretty bland.
— Star Wars: Queen's Shadow by E.K. Johnston —
This was
swbookclub 's February novel. I am not the biggest fan of YA tropes, but I usually really like both the boring kind of political intrigue and pseudo-spy court intrigue plots. This book didn't execute either of them well, and seemed more interested in hitting those YA coming-of-age plot points than any kind of realism. (I also have thoughts and feelings about how the SW YA novels have been handling romance, but I think I should make a separate post about it.) Padmé starts a new job and wants to be good at it, and it takes her a while to figure it out- fine, a standard coming-of-age plot, but her job is being a Senator and representing an entire sector, and there's never any indication that anyone back home cares what she does in the Senate. Naboo itself has no pressing issues, or neighbors, or allies, or preexisting interplanetary relationships, and Padmé is free to pursue whatever catches her personal attention.
The Senate is lazy and ineffective- fine, I get where this metaphor is coming from, but the why and the how are just the laziest and sloppiest interpretation of this metaphor around. (I follow politics fairly closely, and I had a really good civics teacher back in the day, and seeing it handled so badly just makes my blood boil).
My suspension of disbelief was pretty much shattered by the midway point where, after chapters of building up the importance of keeping any hint of Sabé's existence or association with Padmé a secret and an elaborate scenario to bring her in as a body double without anyone knowing that involved a series of uniform switcheroos with Padmé's established guards, Sabé just leaves them on the landing pad outside the party and heads home in broad daylight to her secret safehouse apartment in someone else's royal guard uniform.
The book club is doing Battlefront: Twilight Company for March, which I read when it first came out and really liked.
— Star Wars Volume 6: Out Among The Stars — Star Wars #33-37 written by Jason Aaron, art by Salvador Larroca & Andrea Sorrentino, Star Wars Annual #3 written by Jason Latour, art by Michael Walsh —
Jason Aaron's Star Wars run comes to a close in a very bizarre fashion.
At the end of Volume 4, Threepio got captured by Sgt. Kreel, an Imperial stormtrooper who Aaron has been building up as an adversary since Volume 2, and Artoo steals an X-Wing to go and rescue him. Volume 5: Yoda's Secret War, was almost entirely flashbacks told through Obi-Wan's journal, then we had the Screaming Citadel crossover.
Issues 33-35 are almost random one-shots. Luke & Leia get stranded on an alien planet, Sana and Lando pull of a complicated triple-cross heist together, and Han & Chewie transport Grakkus the Hutt to prison. Then Artoo rescues Threepio in a single issues (#36). That is ten months of publication time between Threepio's capture and rescue, I looked up the publication dates.
Then there's another Kreel oneshot, with a little excerpt from Obi-Wan's journal tacked on at the end. I just really wonder what the plan or intention was here. It's just such a weird narrative decision, to have Threepio captured then wait so long to rescue him, then have it be so anticlimactic. Kieron Gillen took over the writing for volumes 7-11, I wonder if there was a particular reason for it.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-28 11:08 pm (UTC)I read and liked Hyperion several years ago but never got around to the rest of the books in the series for some reason. Your comment doesn't make me eager to get back. LOL
no subject
Date: 2021-03-01 12:09 am (UTC)