Reading Wrap-Up: June 2021
Jul. 1st, 2021 06:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justanorthernlightGreat Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals by William Ratigan - Nonfiction, vacation reading. I actually picked this one up in the park visitor center when I went camping near Lake Superior a few years ago, didn't get around to finishing it then but brought it with me when I went back to the same area this year. As the title suggests, it's about shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, with a strong focus on the stories of survivors.
I probably should have checked the publication date before I bought it, it was initially published in 1960 and then revised in the late '70s with a section on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the icebreaking ships that were active on Lake Superior for about 3 years in the '70s, allowing for year-round shipping.
Overall it was pretty interesting, but also very heavy on nostalgia. When talking about wrecks from the late 1800s Ratigan tended to go off on tangents about modern day lakemen having grown up with boyhood stories about this or that ship/shipwreck, and the good old days before fancy weather radar and safety guidelines.
My main takaway was that boats are so, unbelievably flammable.
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Volume 4: The Catastrophic Con (Doctor Aphra #20-25, written by Si Spurrier, art by Kev Walker) - Aphra is in prison, but both the Rebellion and Triple Zero are after her for basically ransomwareing a bunch of data she was trying to sell them, so she decides to blackmail her imperial officer love interest (who arrested her in the first place) into breaking her out first. Also, yet another Jedi ghost.
I finally put my finger on what bothered me so much about volume 3. Despite the fact that Aphra's arc in the Darth Vader series involved her being blackmailed and coerced the whole time, she still held her own emotionally against Vader. In volume 3 of this series, the coercion by Triple Zero turned into a much more intimate and visceral emotional abuse, with Aphra losing much more of her agency. It's a dynamic that I can enjoy in fiction in some cases, but I just did not care for this iteration of it.
This volume was a bit better on that front, but the ending basically circled back around to basically where Volume 3 started. Also not a fan of how LGBTQ+ characters are handled- namely the bounty hunter dude and his decraniated boyfriend.
Volume 5 seems to be out of print everywhere, so I'm going to take a break on this series for a while.
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson - The third book in the Sprawl trilogy, this one brings back Molly and 3Jane from Neuromancer and Bobby and Angie from Count Zero, along with a handful of new POV characters.
I liked it a lot better than Count Zero and the main plot had a decent mystery, but I was still kind of frustrated by the story structure. Most of the POV characters are a step or two removed from the action/the things that move the story along. Molly's part of the story is mostly told through the eyes of first Kumiko, the teenage daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London to keep her out of the way of a gang war, then the titular Mona, a prostitute who bears a strong resemblance to Angie, and who the bad guys want to use as a corpse body double. Same for Bobby, except his is a weird hermit living in a junkyard.
Like Count Zero, the ending got neatly resolved by the AIs basically doing a Deus Ex Machina in cyberspace that magically ends the physical danger the characters were in in the real world. At least the aesthetics are there, although the less said about its handling of Black characters the better.
Star Wars: Poe Dameron Volume 4: Legend Found (Poe Dameron #20-25, written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta, Annual #1 written by Robbie Thompson, art by Nik Virella ) & Volume 5: The Spark and the Fire (Poe Dameron #26-31 written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta, Annual #2 written by Jody Houser, art by Andrea Broccardo) - Rereads. Volume 4 has a ncie heist plot and explains all the Lor San Tekka stuff from TFA, and Volume 5 is a gapfiller for episodes 7 & 8, explaining away Black Squadron's absence in The Last Jedi. I liked them, this is still one of my favorite multi-arc Star Wars comcis.
I probably should have checked the publication date before I bought it, it was initially published in 1960 and then revised in the late '70s with a section on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the icebreaking ships that were active on Lake Superior for about 3 years in the '70s, allowing for year-round shipping.
Overall it was pretty interesting, but also very heavy on nostalgia. When talking about wrecks from the late 1800s Ratigan tended to go off on tangents about modern day lakemen having grown up with boyhood stories about this or that ship/shipwreck, and the good old days before fancy weather radar and safety guidelines.
My main takaway was that boats are so, unbelievably flammable.
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Volume 4: The Catastrophic Con (Doctor Aphra #20-25, written by Si Spurrier, art by Kev Walker) - Aphra is in prison, but both the Rebellion and Triple Zero are after her for basically ransomwareing a bunch of data she was trying to sell them, so she decides to blackmail her imperial officer love interest (who arrested her in the first place) into breaking her out first. Also, yet another Jedi ghost.
I finally put my finger on what bothered me so much about volume 3. Despite the fact that Aphra's arc in the Darth Vader series involved her being blackmailed and coerced the whole time, she still held her own emotionally against Vader. In volume 3 of this series, the coercion by Triple Zero turned into a much more intimate and visceral emotional abuse, with Aphra losing much more of her agency. It's a dynamic that I can enjoy in fiction in some cases, but I just did not care for this iteration of it.
This volume was a bit better on that front, but the ending basically circled back around to basically where Volume 3 started. Also not a fan of how LGBTQ+ characters are handled- namely the bounty hunter dude and his decraniated boyfriend.
Volume 5 seems to be out of print everywhere, so I'm going to take a break on this series for a while.
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson - The third book in the Sprawl trilogy, this one brings back Molly and 3Jane from Neuromancer and Bobby and Angie from Count Zero, along with a handful of new POV characters.
I liked it a lot better than Count Zero and the main plot had a decent mystery, but I was still kind of frustrated by the story structure. Most of the POV characters are a step or two removed from the action/the things that move the story along. Molly's part of the story is mostly told through the eyes of first Kumiko, the teenage daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London to keep her out of the way of a gang war, then the titular Mona, a prostitute who bears a strong resemblance to Angie, and who the bad guys want to use as a corpse body double. Same for Bobby, except his is a weird hermit living in a junkyard.
Like Count Zero, the ending got neatly resolved by the AIs basically doing a Deus Ex Machina in cyberspace that magically ends the physical danger the characters were in in the real world. At least the aesthetics are there, although the less said about its handling of Black characters the better.
Star Wars: Poe Dameron Volume 4: Legend Found (Poe Dameron #20-25, written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta, Annual #1 written by Robbie Thompson, art by Nik Virella ) & Volume 5: The Spark and the Fire (Poe Dameron #26-31 written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta, Annual #2 written by Jody Houser, art by Andrea Broccardo) - Rereads. Volume 4 has a ncie heist plot and explains all the Lor San Tekka stuff from TFA, and Volume 5 is a gapfiller for episodes 7 & 8, explaining away Black Squadron's absence in The Last Jedi. I liked them, this is still one of my favorite multi-arc Star Wars comcis.
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Date: 2021-07-02 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-02 05:45 pm (UTC)I should find more nonfiction about pirates.