Reviews and other ramblings
Merry Christmas folks!
As I have two whole glorious weeks off work, I have ambitiously set aside the above pile of books to work my way through, though I will no doubt get distracted by shiny new Christmas present books at some point. We do have lots of people to visit and sensible house stuff to do, so I’m not sure how much reading time I’ll actually get, but here’s hoping!
Happy holidays and happy reading everyone.
An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell
by Deborah Levy
This is a long poem (ish – it’s no Faerie Queen) in the form of a dialogue between a couple, “He” and “she”, alternating having their say in this argument/conversation. It’s different from anything else I’ve read, wonderfully surreal and packed with references to everything from Shakespeare to pop songs. I read it in one sitting and immediately wanted to read it again.
The poem works so well because it could be read in many ways. Is this an ordinary human couple living in suburbia? Or are they angels fallen to hell? Is one of them fallen and the other trying to save them? Is one human and one God? The many religious references (to the Bible, to Dante, to the language of faith) are woven in such a way that they could just possibly be the twee fondnesses of a couple in love, or they could be wholly serious.
Best of all, it’s funny. Genuinely, laugh-out-loud but also cleverly, funny. It’s profound and profane, full of meaning and simple, pure entertainment.
“i try to introduce you
to the way i see things
and all you want is a wife
a wife and a second-class stamp and a bath
a bath and a donut and a product to kill moths“You’re just a totalitarian angel
Full of self-rapture
I thought you were a divine messenger
In fact you’re a glutton
With wings”
First published 1990 by Jonathan Cape.
This edition, with revisions, published 2014 by And Other Stories.
Source: I subscribe to the publisher.
It’s the last weekend before the Christmas holiday starts in the Nose in a book household, so I was expecting to be madly Christmas shopping or present wrapping, but I seem to have already bought everything I can until certain family members respond to my questions, so instead the weekend has been spent hanging out with friends, reading and binge-watching a TV box set that I’m not going to name because we’re about five episodes from the end and I really don’t want it spoiled for me!
One thing I did spot while doing my Christmas shopping was this rather lovely charitable giving project from Blackwells bookshops: the Giving Tree, donating books to less fortunate children. If I can get to a Blackwells in person I’d love to help pick out a book myself but if I can’t I’ll entrust the choice to their booksellers who, let’s face it, know what they’re doing.
It’s a timely reminder that not everyone is in the fortunate position I’m in where I have more books than I can read in a year already piled up invitingly. And I keep buying more for myself! Though I try not to do too much of that around Christmas, this week I did receive my first book from my Peirene Press subscription, which I bought as a present to myself last month. Because I just couldn’t keep resisting these beauties.
And last week I also received this rather fun advance reading copy of a book being published early next year, along with a kit for knitting a square of a blanket that I can only assume will be gigantic if every reviewer does that part as well. As an enthusiastic amateur knitter how could I not join in this project? They judged me well when they sent that invite! Keep an eye out early next year for my knitting and my review.
My aims for this year’s reading were threefold: more science fiction, popular science and re-reads. The results have been…varied.
In 2013 I read six SF books, eight if you include graphic novels. This year so far I’ve read seven SF books, so not a huge leap forward, but if I include graphic novels it’s 17. So it’s a win but it does feel a little bit like I cheated to get there.
Popular science I worked harder on. I even made it an official reading challenge. I did revise my aim down from one per month to 10 over the year and I’m currently reading number 10, so that’s another win! Well, as long as I finish this book it is. It’s looking pretty good. This challenge definitely stretched me beyond my comfort zone and helped me to feel much more knowledgeable about non-fiction in general. Which is fab. I even wrote about popular science for For Books’ Sake.
Re-reads though? Oh dear. I re-read two books this year. Which is two more than last year! But it’s still only two, which really doesn’t constitute a big fat tick. And with my beautiful library housing thousands of books that I kept because I want to re-read them, I really have no excuse. Well, there’s the TBR – that’s my excuse.
So for next year do I want something completely different or more of the same? Well I’d like to pick back up on translated reads definitely. For 2015 I’ve subscribed to Peirene Press as well as And Other Stories, which should help. Or just make my TBR bigger. One of those.
But the biggie in new challenges is that I am joining the Classics Club. I have given myself the goal of reading 50 classics in five years. The list of classics I intend to read is over here. I’ve tried to make sure there are books I’m looking forward to reading and books I’m a bit scared of on there, so it should be an interesting one! There were already a lot of classics on my TBR, so the challenge should also help with reducing that.
I should probably set a third aim. Three is a good number. Should I try re-reads again? Maybe I should return to my cookery book challenge, which is looking a little sad as it is. Or I could try something completely new…but what? Any ideas?
All the Days and Nights
by Niven Govinden
This is a short, lyrical, even painterly novel about a dying artist. It’s in some ways the epitome of literary fiction, with a very simple storyline playing second fiddle to the style and language, but it didn’t feel at all pretentious or complex.
Anna Brown is a famous artist nearing death in her home in a small farming community not too far from New York City. She has her faithful housekeeper/cook/companion Vishni and her agent of sorts Ben for company in her final days, but her husband John – her muse and subject of most of her paintings – has gone missing, he just walked away. Anna addresses him, trying to imagine his journey and his state of mind, while also reminiscing on their life together. In the present she is painting her final work, turning her little household to turmoil as she forsakes oxygen tank and rest for her art.
I loved the language of this book, and the way it talked about art from so many perspectives – creating it, appreciating it, collecting it, displaying it. Anna doesn’t talk about death or dying but it’s clearly there in the forefront of her mind. She is obsessed with her art to the point of pushing people far beyond the bounds of most friendships, and her feelings for John are complicated by his being her muse as well as her husband. The story is sweet, moving, contemplative but never boring.
“You were bronzed and smooth, flaxen and happy; it was as if the last days of young manhood were making themselves known. I was blinded by the beauty of it, from the way you smiled to the trail of mosquito bites on your lower arm and the redness of your lips from all the beer…I wanted to shout at you…hold your pose because something from that moment needed to be kept. You were perfect. But I held my voice, because to explain it would be to kill your naturalness.”
Published October 2014 by The Friday Project.
Source: This book was kindly sent to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín
This is a lovely book, though I do have reservations. Eilis lives with her older sister Rose and their mother in 1950s Enniscorthy, an Irish town in which job opportunities are scarce. Their brothers have already moved to England to work. Rose has a steady job but Eilis, despite having a bookkeeping qualification, doesn’t, so when a priest offers to arrange a job and accommodation for her in Brooklyn it seems like there’s no choice but to agree.
Eilis is enigmatic – she lets life happen to her, lets others make decisions for her, but she doesn’t lack ambition or opinions of her own. At times she seems ineffectual or indecisive, at others strong and brave. I suppose she is young enough (20 or so?) that she’s still learning who she is and what she believes, even what she really feels. She’s had to grow up very suddenly, thrust from a protective home in a small town to a boarding house in one the world’s largest cities, and the decisions she is faced with are very different now. The social stigmas and etiquette are different, and yet in some ways the same – there’s snobbery and elitism everywhere, but Brooklyn has the addition of racial tensions.
Tóibín manages to explore a lot in not that many pages here – separation from family and ties to our childhood home, love and romance, migration and loneliness, the changing social position of women and job opportunities available to them – but it doesn’t in any way feel like an “issues” book. It’s a snapshot of a time and place that felt very real to me, but most of all I was swept up in Eilis’s story. One word of warning, though: do not read the blurb on the back cover – it reveals something from the last 20 pages of the book. Poor form, Penguin!
“It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again. She did not know what she was going to do.”
First published 2009 by Viking.
Source: Secondhand, not sure which bookshop.
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
I read this book because I had arranged to take Tim to an evening with William Gibson arranged by Toppings in Bath and, having read nothing by Gibson myself, thought I might as well start with his first and most famous novel, which is 30 years old this year. It was…educational?
Gibson’s language is wonderful, both lyrical and humorous and I often felt I could visualise scenes really clearly. However, the same can’t be said for clarity of plot. Through a lot of this book I felt that I didn’t know what was happening. After I had finished it and turned to the Internet for a little guidance, it turned out I had misunderstood some early scenes and that had thrown me, but actually I had followed the majority of the action. I just somehow didn’t feel that I had.
“Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers he’d known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.”
The story follows Case, formerly a successful hacker in the Matrix, a kind of virtual reality, a “cyberspace” where computer data is visualised in various ways, from a pleasant beach scene to a complex maze. But at some point (before the novel begins? this bit I’m still not clear on) Case was caught stealing from an employer and a terrible punishment was wrought – a modification to his nervous system that left him unable to access the Matrix. So instead he wanders the back streets of Chiba City in Japan searching for a black market cure.
He is saved by a woman called Molly, a samurai who recruits him for a shadowy employer called Armitage, who offers to cure Case in return for a very big, dangerous job in cyberspace. He and Molly work together for Armitage but also begin to try to unravel exactly who Armitage is and what this job really is.
It’s clear from the start that this book was a major influence on the language of computing, computer games and SF films. But what’s interesting – and also no doubt part of why I got so confused about what was happening at times – is that there was a lot of terminology that’s now familiar to us all but in this book it’s not quite describing what I initially thought it was. For instance, “virtual reality” and “hacking” are words that I have clear preconceptions of but Gibson’s interpretation is wider and requires a bit of a brain shift.
Incidentally, at the Gibson talk we went to last week, he said that the only thing he felt he could predict about the future is that the division between reality and virtual reality will blur to the point that children born today won’t understand why us old folk insist on a distinction between the two. It’s clear that Gibson already thought that way when he was writing Neuromancer and it explains a lot about one of my confusions, which was that I wasn’t always sure whether a scene was happening in reality or virtual reality. But apparently the characters don’t think that way, so of course it wasn’t always distinct!
Plot confusion aside, I did enjoy this book. There are plenty of interesting, flawed characters, though none that you really get inside the head of psychologically speaking. Molly is pretty kickass, with inscrutable motivations, which I found refreshing. In fact, the whole novel felt very modern, certainly not 30 years old. I’m not sure if that’s the language or great foresight on Gibson’s part or if he’s actually managed to create something here that’s somehow timeless.
It’s also a very interesting look at addiction. Case gets physical pleasure from plugging himself into the Matrix and at the start of the novel is strung out on drugs in his attempt to achieve an equivalent high. When Armitage has Case cured of his nervous system damage, he also has Case’s pancreas altered so that no drug will have any effect on him. Initially Case is upset by this and showing signs of withdrawal, but once he gets back to cyberspace he no longer misses the drugs.
“The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.”
And despite my confusion at the time, I think the start of the novel in Chiba City is a very visceral, believable depiction of poor neighbourhoods rife with prostitution, drug-taking and other crime. It’s a dark, depressing place where everyone (especially Chase) is paranoid, but not everyone is miserable. In fact, the novel as a whole has great sense of place in all its various locations, perhaps rooted in Gibson’s early travel around the globe before he settled in Vancouver.
I just wish I’d known at any point what was actually happening.
First published 1984 by Victor Gollancz.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Is it really December tomorrow already? Time really does seem faster every year. It looks like I have read way more than usual this month because I read seven graphic novels/trade paperback collections of comics and let’s face it, they tend to be quicker reads than your average non-graphic novel. I read them for Graphic Novel Week and wrote short reviews of them all here.
This week I took Tim (as a late birthday present) to see one of his favourite authors, William Gibson, speak in Bath at an event arranged by Toppings bookshop. It was a slightly odd evening, in that Gibson just did a reading from his new book then a short Q&A and implied that the main point of it all was the book signing. Every other author event I’ve gone to has had either an interviewer or the author giving a short talk, but I don’t go to that many so perhaps I’m just discovering late in the day that author events vary quite a lot!
I suppose I expected something more because this year it’s 30 years since the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson’s first novel, which has achieved legendary status and had major influence on the world that reaches far beyond those who’ve actually read it (which I had done in preparation for the event). I had seen on the Internet that Gibson was doing/had done some events specifically about Neuromancer this year and therefore expected it would at least get a brief discussion. As it was, it was only mentioned by audience members in Bath (who, incidentally, had some very intelligent questions that provoked some interesting debate between Tim and I as we waited in the cold and wet for our delayed train home).
Certainly it was different at the David Mitchell event earlier this month, at which an interviewer helped Mitchell discuss his new book and past work for a good half hour before the Q&A and signing. It’s a style I much prefer, even if it did mean I took an hour and a half lunch break that day! But then I’m pre-disposed to prefer an event with an author I’m a big fan of, whose work I have read all of (or at least all the novels, I believe there are short stories out there I haven’t read).
Books
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (review here)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (review here)
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Transmetropolitan Vol 1: Back on the Street by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 2: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 3: Year of the Bastard by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 4: The New Scum by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 5: Lonely City by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Serenity Vol. 4: Leaves on the Wind by Zack Whedon and Georges Jeanty
Ex Machina Vol. 1: The First Hundred Days by Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris
Short stories
“Can’t and won’t” by Lydia Davis (Selected Shorts podcast)
“If at the wedding (at the zoo)” by Lydia Davis (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The party” by Lydia Davis (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The two Davises and the rug” by Lydia Davis (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The egg race” by John Updike (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Camilo” by Alejandro Zambra (New Yorker, May 26, 2014)
“The right sort” by David Mitchell (Twitter, collected together here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/14/the-right-sort-david-mitchells-twitter-short-story)
“Sheherezade” by Haruki Murakami (New Yorker, available online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/scheherazade-3)
“Here’s the story” by David Gilbert (New Yorker, June 9 & 16, 2014 )
“The adolescents” by Rachel Kushner (New Yorker, June 9 & 16, 2014 )
Happy December, folks!
To conclude this fantastic week of graphic novel celebration, organised by Kristilyn of Reading in Winter, I have written mini reviews of all the graphic novels I have read lately. I didn’t get through all of my reading list I set myself on Monday, but considering I was busy three evenings out of the five I don’t think I did too badly!
Transmetropolitan Vol 1: Back on the Street
by Warren Ellis (writer) and Darick Robertson (penciller)
Spider Jerusalem is a sweary, drug-addled, weapons-loving misanthropic journalist who retired to the mountains when fame started to make people actually like him. Now he’s running out of money and his publisher is threatening legal action if he doesn’t finally stump up the two books he’s contracted for, so he reluctantly returns to the one place where he knows he can write – the City. Ellis and Robertson depict a frightening future, a world that has got more extreme in every way. There is clearly a lot of Hunter S Thompson in Spider, but in a world where his brand of truth-telling is more badly needed than ever. Spider talks/coerces his way into a job writing a weekly column and as the words begin to flow, he becomes fractionally less awful as he has somewhere to channel his hatred, anger and misery. There’s great black humour in the words and the artwork – I definitely recommend paying attention to the details in every frame as there are so many stories being told here.
“I’ve shut off the mine-fields and the intelligent guns. For the first time in five years, there is nothing menacing in my garden. Five years of shooting at fans and neighbours, eating what I kill and bombing the unwary. Five years of being alone. I can’t begin to describe the ways I’ll miss the mountain…I could cry. I really could. Journalists do not cry. And I am a fucking journalist again.”
This collection published 1998 by DC Comics.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Transmetropolitan Vol 2: Lust for Life
by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
In this volume, Spider Jerusalem gains a glamorous assistant called Channon who is both a fan and capable of handling his ridiculous habits, and starts finding himself a series of subjects for his column “I Hate It Here”. Often several pages in a row are, effectively, his column, calling attention to the poor and desperate of the city. He repeatedly breaks or bends the law not just to get his story, but also to exact small revenges on those he feels have failed the city in some way. There is one incredible and moving story about a woman called Mary who is revived from cryogenic sleep to find herself alone in a bewildering and inhospitable future. In another story, Spider visits a series of reservations created outside the city to preserve old cultures, where the desire for authenticity has stretched to removing the anti-cancer gene that humans have developed. It begins to be clearer in this volume how Spider comes to be so very fucked up. This is a truly fucked-up world and anyone who keeps their eyes open and dares to care is going to find their nature twist. It’s powerful, entertaining stuff.
“Mucus and soundbites. I remember this feeling now, from the last days before I went to the mountain. The sudden feeling that this place is Not On Your side. I’m hiding now. And writing. I can’t stop, even now. This goddamned city makes me write even when it wants me dead.”
This collection published 1998 by DC Comics.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Transmetropolitan Vol 3: Year of the Bastard
by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Spider Jerusalem was made famous years ago by writing a bestselling book about a presidential election campaign so now he is desperately trying to ignore the approach of election time, while his editor and readers clamour for his opinion on it all. Inevitably he is sucked into following the election of an opposition candidate for the current president, known as the Beast. Spider is accompanied by his new assistant Yelena, in many ways the opposite of Channon – a brooding, resentful girl who disapproves of Spider in every way. But Spider is busy now figuring out what the two main candidates have to hide and which of them is capable of beating the hated Beast. Ellis is careful not to use words like Republican or Democrat but there is still plenty of applicable-to-real-life insightful political commentary here, phrased as always in Spider’s spleen-filled invective.
“Two days in this whirlwind have left me shipwrecked and abandoned. Even the stuff I’ve been shooting in order to, Holmes-like, keep my interest in the world alive is failing me now. I’ve played the game like a good little whore, snarled and cursed on cue…I’ll let myself sleep soon, and hope to hell the world doesn’t seem so goddamn fractured when I wake up. Having said that, I also hope I wake to find half this city committed suicide in my honour.”
This collection published 1999 by DC Comics.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Transmetropolitan Vol 4: The New Scum
by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
It’s time to elect a new president – will it be the Smiler or the Beast? Spider Jerusalem interviews both candidates, savagely digging for the truth, for which man will be the lesser evil. There are glimpses too of the “New Scum” – the city’s poor for whom Spider has declared himself spokesperson – but this is largely another political volume. After the revelations of Year of the Bastard there is little hope that the outcome of the election will really change anything, so this is the bleakest volume yet. There is some light relief from Channon and Yelena bickering but overall I struggled a little to maintain the excitement that had had me reading eagerly through these books. Still gotta love Spider’s columns though.
“And there you have it, reader. The Beast believes in something, perverted and filthy as it is…I was so shocked that I almost forgot to plant the guerilla neurotransmitter gel…And that, Mr President, is why you’ve been hallucinating having sex with speed-crazed Barbary Apes suffering from irritable bowel syndrome for the last week. And now you know what it’s like to have you as president; what it’s like to be constantly fucked by someone who stinks of shit.”
This collection published 2000 by DC Comics.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Transmetropolitan Vol 5: Lonely City
by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Oh man. While volume 4 had me doubting this series, volume 5 has me convinced it is the greatest comic series I have read. Ellis really stepped it up a notch, I felt. Back on the city streets, Spider Jerusalem and his assistants stumble across a hate crime that doesn’t seem to be getting proper attention. When Spider calls the police out on it in his column, he unleashes a horrific series of events. Despite the futuristic setting and indeed the futuristic aspects of the crime itself, the rest of this storyline could terrifyingly easily happen in the real world today; arguably it has already happened over and over. I was chilled to the core and my fandom of the series fully reawakened. Also, this volume has an introduction by Patrick Stewart. Seriously. Cool.
“You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all. And yeah, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that’s freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time. And you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can’t do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream. And what I’ve got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head. I go through all this – and then there’s death? What is the motherfucking deal here?”
This collection published 2001 by DC Comics.
Source: Borrowed from Tim.
Ex Machina Vol. 1: The First Hundred Days
by Brian K Vaughan (writer) and Tony Harris (pencils)
Imagine The West Wing with superpowers, well, just one specific superpower really, but even so – amazing combo, right? Civil engineer Mitchell Hundred just became mayor of New York City, running on a campaign of independence, promising to unite left and right, but everyone knows he was really elected because he outed himself as the Great Machine, the first superhero, and his last super act before hanging up his hero’s suit was stopping the second plane from hitting the World Trade Center on September 11th. Now in true Jed Bartlett style, he must wrestle with the petty and ridiculous when he’d rather be tackling the big issues. But there’s the added difficulties of the NSA demanding he no longer use his special powers and a freak snow storm threatening to cripple the city. There are lots of great female characters, lots of interesting political machinations and I’m eager to see where this goes next.
“‘Ms Padmilla, I admire your tenacity, but I do have a press secretary.’
‘Yeah, one who refuses to divulge the origin of your psychic rapport with machinery.’
‘First of all, I’m not psychic. That’s just dumb. And secondly, you know damn well the NSA has ordered me not to comment on any “extra-normal abilities” I might have.’
…’Are you an alien?…What kind of pseudonym is Hundred anyway?’
‘For the last time, I am a thirteenth-generation American. My ancestors renamed themselves after Brandywine Hundred, the division of Delaware where they settled. And unless you can prove to me that Myles Standish – captain of the fucking Mayflower – was an alien, I’m done answering retarded questions about my planet of origin.’
…’Let’s roll…Ahh, shit! She’s gonna quote me on “retarded”, isn’t she?'”
This collection published 2005 by Vertigo Comics.
Source: Excelsior! comic book shop, Bristol.
Serenity Vol. 4: Leaves on the Wind
by Zack Whedon (script) and Georges Jeanty (pencils)
This picks up where the film Serenity left off (the previous three comic volumes filled in back story, both before Firefly and between Firefly and the film). The tone is pitched perfectly, depicting the crew dealing with the emotional and practical fallout from the film’s events while also setting up a new story thread and new characters – good, bad and wavering inbetween. Not every character gets equal air time (frame time?) – for instance, I hope that future volumes give Kaylee and Simon more story – and I also felt that Kaylee’s dialogue played her as dumber than she ever came across in the TV series. However, overall I thoroughly enjoyed this volume, especially the gorgeous chapter page artwork by Dan Dos Santos.
“Life’s a funny thing. We cling to it so dear. The thought of losing it pushed down deep with all the other dirty little things we don’t like to see the light of day. Yet it is so easy to take a life. We’re so soft. So fragile…We’re built to live but we’re so easy to kill. Does that seem right to you?”
This collection published 2014 by Dark Horse Books.
Source: Excelsior! comic book shop, Bristol.
As I mentioned last week, Kristilyn of Reading in Winter has declared 21–24 November Graphic Novel Week, which came just as I had decided to read all of the Transmetropolitan comics, so that was good timing!
These are the books I have lined up to read before next weekend. The top row are borrowed from Tim, the bottom row were bought today from Excelsior! comic shop.
Transmetropolitan vol. 4: The New Scum by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan vol. 5: Lonely City by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan vol. 6: Gouge Away by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan vol. 0: Tales of Human Waste by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Ex Machina vol. 1: The First Hundred Days by Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris
The Sandman vol. 2: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman
The Sandman vol. 3: Dream Country by Neil Gaiman
Serenity vol. 4: Leaves on the Wind by Zack Whedon and Georges Jeanty
You’ll notice that the only one of those that’s completely new to me is Ex Machina, which I picked up because I am impatient for the next volume of Brian K Vaughan’s current series Saga. I’m not good at this whole waiting game you have to play when you like current comic series.
I was intending to pick up some more literary graphic novels such as The Gigantic Beard that was Evil by Stephen Collins or Habibi by Craig Thompson but I think I have enough to be going on with.
It’s going to be a good week’s reading!