![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wrap-Up: May 2021
May. 31st, 2021 04:44 am Well, I've hit the halfway mark of my goal to read 50 books this year, but almost 2/3rds of them have been Star Wars comics. Oh well, a book is a book.
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle - I had an abridged version of this as a child, never read the full thing before. Robin Hood spends as much time picking fights with random strangers on the road before asking them to join his band as he does robbing the rich , and all his giving to the poor is left entirely off-page, along with Maid Marian (which is probably for the best considering how the few women who do show up on page are handled). Still, I really enjoyed it, and not just for the childhood nostalgia. Robin almost comes off as more of a trickster-fae archetype than he does a classic folk hero.
I wonder if there is a good collection of the actual folktales and ballads of Robin Hood out there.
Star Wars: Poe Dameron Volume 2: The Gathering Storm ( #8-13, written by Charles Soule, art by Phil Noto) & Volume 3: Legend Lost (#7, #14-19, written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta) - Rereads. Still one of my favorite Star Wars tie-in series.
Neuromancer by William Gibson - Reread. I've only been keeping a reading log since about 2015, I think I first read this the year prior. I was on a cyberpunk kick, and also making an attempt at reading every Hugo Award winning novel. It's a bit of a dense and choppy read- Gibson switches between present, flashback, dream, and cyberspace without a whole lot of demarcation, and at times it is a bit dude-ly and overly obsessed with aesthetic, but the back half of the novel finally gets to the heart of things. Overall I like it, but I remember liking Snow Crash better.
Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: Tales of the Jedi Volume 1 (Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi: Prisoner of Bogan #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi: Force War #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi #0, written by John Ostrander & Jan Duursema, art by Jan Duursema) - Despite the title, this isn't the Tales of the Jedi series from the 90s, it's the three Dawn of the Jedi arcs from around 2012. It's set some 25,000 years before the events of the movies and deals with the Rakata Infinite Empire's discovery and eventual invasion of Tython, which has been cut off from hyperspace for 10,000 years.
Force Storm felt a lot like the pilot episode of a teenage superheroe/supernatural show/cartoon, with the teenage Je'daii journeyers who are drawn together falling into the classic friend group archetypes: hot-headed jock, rich girl with family problems, horse girl but instead of horses it's Rancors, and mysterious newcomer with a dark past. Prisoner of Bogan and Force War are a little bit more mature, and deal heavily with the recent history of internal conflict within the Tython system.
There's some interesting threads of the evolution of Jedi philosophy, and just like Qui-Gon's bigger fish, there's always an older tradition of Force users. It's implied that the creation of the Jedi was something of an experiment by and older race of Force users, the Kwa. It also establishes that the Lightsaber evolved from a strictly darkside weapon of the Rakata, the Forcesaber.
Count Zero by William Gibson - Sequel to Neuromancer. This has been sitting on my to-be-read pile since 2015, probably only a few months after I first finished reading Neuromancer, and one of my reading goals this years was to get all the unread sequels and ends of series off of my pile. It's set 7 years later and the story rotates between Turner, a high-end corporate mercenary, Bobby, a teenage wannabe-hacker, and Marly, a disgraced art gallery curator hired by a billionaire to find the creator of some kind of art-box-mcguffin-thing.
This book is very much aesthetic over substance, and I don't feel like I can give a plot summary because most of the action is main characters sitting around and musing about the scenery while waiting for another, significantly more interesting character to show up and provide exposition or move the plot along. There are some mildly interesting philosophical points, like what the AIs have been up to since the end of Neuromancer, but the main characters are at such a remove from those events until well over halfway through the novel that it's just really boring. (There's also an annoying element of white saviorism, there's a subplot about a Voodoo hacker cult but the chosen one is the white teenage boy. You get the picture.)
Also, it's one of those books where the author's predictions about the future and what humans want/value in the future are incredibly, spectacularly wrong- there's a lot of use of 'simstim', basically VR TV where you experience another person's every sensation but are a completely passive passenger. The things people are supposed to love about it are the exact opposite of what is actually valued in modern-day video games, like choices mattering and being able to explore on your own terms. (Although, tbh, simstim might be nice for stuff like baking shows. It's just in the book it's only used for sex and celebrity gossip/soap operas.)
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle - I had an abridged version of this as a child, never read the full thing before. Robin Hood spends as much time picking fights with random strangers on the road before asking them to join his band as he does robbing the rich , and all his giving to the poor is left entirely off-page, along with Maid Marian (which is probably for the best considering how the few women who do show up on page are handled). Still, I really enjoyed it, and not just for the childhood nostalgia. Robin almost comes off as more of a trickster-fae archetype than he does a classic folk hero.
I wonder if there is a good collection of the actual folktales and ballads of Robin Hood out there.
Star Wars: Poe Dameron Volume 2: The Gathering Storm ( #8-13, written by Charles Soule, art by Phil Noto) & Volume 3: Legend Lost (#7, #14-19, written by Charles Soule, art by Angel Unzueta) - Rereads. Still one of my favorite Star Wars tie-in series.
Neuromancer by William Gibson - Reread. I've only been keeping a reading log since about 2015, I think I first read this the year prior. I was on a cyberpunk kick, and also making an attempt at reading every Hugo Award winning novel. It's a bit of a dense and choppy read- Gibson switches between present, flashback, dream, and cyberspace without a whole lot of demarcation, and at times it is a bit dude-ly and overly obsessed with aesthetic, but the back half of the novel finally gets to the heart of things. Overall I like it, but I remember liking Snow Crash better.
Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: Tales of the Jedi Volume 1 (Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi: Prisoner of Bogan #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi: Force War #1-5, Dawn of the Jedi #0, written by John Ostrander & Jan Duursema, art by Jan Duursema) - Despite the title, this isn't the Tales of the Jedi series from the 90s, it's the three Dawn of the Jedi arcs from around 2012. It's set some 25,000 years before the events of the movies and deals with the Rakata Infinite Empire's discovery and eventual invasion of Tython, which has been cut off from hyperspace for 10,000 years.
Force Storm felt a lot like the pilot episode of a teenage superheroe/supernatural show/cartoon, with the teenage Je'daii journeyers who are drawn together falling into the classic friend group archetypes: hot-headed jock, rich girl with family problems, horse girl but instead of horses it's Rancors, and mysterious newcomer with a dark past. Prisoner of Bogan and Force War are a little bit more mature, and deal heavily with the recent history of internal conflict within the Tython system.
There's some interesting threads of the evolution of Jedi philosophy, and just like Qui-Gon's bigger fish, there's always an older tradition of Force users. It's implied that the creation of the Jedi was something of an experiment by and older race of Force users, the Kwa. It also establishes that the Lightsaber evolved from a strictly darkside weapon of the Rakata, the Forcesaber.
Count Zero by William Gibson - Sequel to Neuromancer. This has been sitting on my to-be-read pile since 2015, probably only a few months after I first finished reading Neuromancer, and one of my reading goals this years was to get all the unread sequels and ends of series off of my pile. It's set 7 years later and the story rotates between Turner, a high-end corporate mercenary, Bobby, a teenage wannabe-hacker, and Marly, a disgraced art gallery curator hired by a billionaire to find the creator of some kind of art-box-mcguffin-thing.
This book is very much aesthetic over substance, and I don't feel like I can give a plot summary because most of the action is main characters sitting around and musing about the scenery while waiting for another, significantly more interesting character to show up and provide exposition or move the plot along. There are some mildly interesting philosophical points, like what the AIs have been up to since the end of Neuromancer, but the main characters are at such a remove from those events until well over halfway through the novel that it's just really boring. (There's also an annoying element of white saviorism, there's a subplot about a Voodoo hacker cult but the chosen one is the white teenage boy. You get the picture.)
Also, it's one of those books where the author's predictions about the future and what humans want/value in the future are incredibly, spectacularly wrong- there's a lot of use of 'simstim', basically VR TV where you experience another person's every sensation but are a completely passive passenger. The things people are supposed to love about it are the exact opposite of what is actually valued in modern-day video games, like choices mattering and being able to explore on your own terms. (Although, tbh, simstim might be nice for stuff like baking shows. It's just in the book it's only used for sex and celebrity gossip/soap operas.)
