Troy’s Book Club: a big summer of reading!

Wow, this summer, I got through a LOT of books and comicbooks. It was really pretty fantastic. 🙂 Let’s dive right in…

1. AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. This was a re-read, for a book club, and was just as enjoyable as the first time I read it, years ago. Gaiman does such an excellent job blending fantasy and reality, and packing an emotional punch at just the right moments…
2. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD by John Baxter is basically a guided-tour around Paris. Baxter is a writer with a deep historical knowledge of Paris, and the book is a collection of vignettes, furthering the reader’s knowledge of this great city.
3. SMILE AT STRANGERS by Susan Schorn is a neat memoir about a self-defense instructor from Texas, talking about many of the lessons she’s learned in her years of studying karate. A darn neat book with a conversational voice to it.
4. MILES MORALES: SPIDER-MAN by Jason Reynolds. I’ve read many comicbooks over the years, but this is the first comicbook novel that I’ve read! It was a less-traditional superhero story in that the majority of the book was more like a teen drama than a super-story…and that was very good. Reynolds really fleshed out the characters in the story, and made us readers darn invested in them. And the made the stakes even higher when danger DID present itself!

This summer, I also read a lot of comicbooks, but I am only listing the collections/trade-paperbacks that I read…I got cosmic and street in my reading. TALES OF THE NEW GODS and ORION: THE GATES OF APOKOLIPS are both modern works that explore the mythology of Jack “The King” Kirby’s Fourth World characters. John Byrne and Walt Simonson did much of the writing and drawing of these two books, and they definitely have a good understanding of these characters and the themes they’re meant to explore.

CLOAK AND DAGGER: SHADES OF GREY and CAGE both are characters in the Marvel pantheon that are known for their “street-level” adventures…fighting “real” crime, drug dealers, thieves, and more gritty things. I picked up C&D because it was being written by one of my fave comicbook writers, Dennis Hopeless, and he did a good job even though this was his first time writing these characters. I wasn’t familiar with the name “Genndy Tartakovsky”, but after reading this CAGE limited-series that he wrote and drew, I realized what an important figure he is – particularly in animation – and what a “catch” it was for Marvel, to get Gendy for a project.

And now a few more comicbook trades, but these I read electronically. Naomi and I went to visit Colorado, and while I still wanted to keep my bedtime reading habit going, I didn’t want to bring along a bunch of hardcopies…so my tablet worked great! And thanks to Milwaukee Public Library and the Hoopla app, I was able to read a bunch of comics while traveling! 🙂

BATWING: Good writing and neat to see what an “Batman From Africa” could be like.

ALI: Great bio-comicbook told in a very interesting style Would recommend.

THE LONE RANGER: Good looking book, but eh, the story was only OK.

ICOGNEGRO: Very good, and interesting to see a different kind of noir story, dealing with a difficult part of American history.

BATMAN: BRIDE OR BURGLAR: Good writing, good art from the modern arc that delved into the “Cat and the Bat” relationship.

THE DEATH-DEFYING DEVIL: not really good, sorry.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Vol 5: Nick Spencer is a hella solid writer, and I’ll give most of his projects a shot. I’ve never been a big Spider-fan, but Spencer and the artists did tell some neat stories here.