Random Thoughts

Book Club 2025: Still Life by Louise Penny

I was in the mood to read some cheesy detective novel today, and this was recommended for fans of Agatha Christie, etc…

… but my god! The horrors! The writing here is so awful. It’s not just that she’s heavy handed with the adjective and adverb sprinkling, but the way pronouns don’t always match up with what they’re referring to, and the weird similes, and the way the dialogues move…

Reading this is what I imagine having an aneurysm is like. Everything is strange and odd and nothing makes much sense.

I had to bail by page 30. It’s just too horrible.

Exactly:

As for the rest, the book didn’t live up to my expectations. Poor characterization simply killed the story for me. The characters were drawn in a strange way and their back stories were introduced awkwardly. I couldn’t understand their motivations and actions. Too often they acted immaturely (Yvette Nichol) or weirdly hysterical (Clara Morrow, Yolande). Dialog was very stilted at times too, often I had no idea what people were talking about and why they found certain things funny.

Still Life (2012) by Louise Penny (Buy new, buy used, 3.9 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Memory’s Legion by James S. A. Corey

This is a collection of short stories from the Expanse universe. They were published concurrently with the novels, but I haven’t read them before this.

And I was thinking… “yay! an opportunity to spend some nostalgic time with all those characters I loved!” And this is not that at all.

Instead we get the backstories of a whole bunch of minor characters. Well — not minor minor, but not part of the main team. (Except for one story where we’ve kept guessing WHO COULD THIS KID BE IS IT ?!? and reader, it is.) It’s the kind of material you hope that writers have for their novels — that is, background material that’s used to inform what’s happening in the novels proper.

These stories just feel so unnecessary. Sure, they tell you the backstory about things you might have wondered about — like, just how fucked up could those people who killed the people at the Eros station be, really? (answer: “Yes”), but, like, none of it matters? Nothing we learn in these stories make us reconsider anything about what happened in the novels, or affect any kind of change.

It’s more like the tedious “lore filling” that you see fan fiction writers do, where they take a background character and imagine how that character came to be there, and there you are.

But oldee tymey sci fi TV series used to have what they called bottle episodes, where they took a week off of the main plot and focused on some character, and then they had a little side adventure. Sometimes that felt pointless, and sometimes it was fun.

And at least one story was made into a TV episode, or perhaps the other way around: It read like the novellaisation of a TV episode.

But: Are these stories fun? Yeah, they’re OK. None of them are anywhere near as good as even the worst Expanse novels (is that number four? the one they spend on the dirt planet?), but they’re OK. It’s got 4.4 on Goodreads, so people who liked the novels were fine with it.

Or as they say, it’s a let down, but it’s recommended.

The author(s)’s notes are somewhat grating, though. These aren’t deep stories, but they explain them at us anyway.

Memory’s Legion (2022) by James S. A. Corey (Buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)

Relax your shoulders

(Andrew White.)

Logarithms, how do they work?

My algo for maps sucked because there was just too big a difference between the top country and the rest:

So my map looked like this:

See? The US is white while the rest of the countries are basically two different hues (non-visited countries and visited countries).

Then I remembered that logarithms were a thing that existed, and presto!

Look how pretty!

I amaze myself.

Anyway, that world map I used had a kinda wonky coding — it mixed using id country codes for contiguous countries and class country names for non-contiguous ones. So I’ve straightened that up and put the result on Microsoft Github as a separate package, if you should ever need a world map like that.

That is, you can say:

.US {
  fill: red;
}

This didn’t work in the original version, and you had to mangle the SVG structure itself.

Anyway.

Comics Daze

I got a whole bunch more of the books I missed in 2024 in the mail on Friday, so it’s time to get some more reading done. And like the previous Daze, I’m mixing these books I found on various “best of 2024” lists and then realised that I’d forgotten to buy with a bunch of small press stuff I bought from Domino Comics.

OK, let’s get started… and for musical accompaniment, music from 2002 only.

The Notwist: Neon Golden

10:12: Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon Books)

I’ve loved Burns ever since I was a teenager (or pre-teen? *counts on fingers* nope, but almost), and I still think that many of his shorter works are absolutely flabbergastingly good (i.e., everything in Raw Magazine, including the Big Baby book, and also perhaps including Defective Stories).

Then you get to his major opus Black Hole, which sort of expanded on some of his obsessions… and the first two thirds are flawless. And then the ending is meh. And then there’s the X’d Out sequence, where the first third is flawless, and then the ending is meh.

Heh heh:

In 2024, Burns released a short work called Unwholesome Love, and it was really good. And also Final Cut, which is a longer book, and is on one third of the TCJ’s contributors’ lists (or something), and I’m just typing all of this to explain that my expectations for Final Cut are very low, even if I am a Burns fanatic.

The printing is a bit odd. I appreciate that they’ve used matte paper, but the blacks aren’t as black as they should be — I feel that Pantheon has skimped on the amount of ink or something.

This is a return to Burns staples — teens hanging out…

… and body horror stuff.

And it’s… it’s good? It’s good. He even gets in some sly digs at critics: “It looks like a big vagina”. See, if you’re doing self criticism, you’re then immune to somebody criticising your work. Sorry; those are the rules; I didn’t make them.

Pet Shop Boys: Disco 3

OK, I’m gonna do the geekiest complaint ever: I found Burns’ aspect ratio choices weird. Like here he has a TV being 5:4 instead of 4:3.

And when they’re showing their own movies (surely done on Super8, but it isn’t specified) they’re like… 3:2? Or something? I assure you, I’m just eyeballing things and didn’t get out my measuring equipment.

OOPS! SLANDER! THAT”S CGI

Anyway, as you may surmise from me musing about aspect ratios while reading this book, I was just a smidgen bored? Yeah, I was. But it’s good! Burns stakes the ending, and I totally understand that it’s on everybody’s Best Of lists last year.

11:19: Ugly Mug no. 8

This is anthology from the House of Harley, and the various pieces don’t seem to have clear credits… but they’re really funny. It’s a classic indie/undergroundish anthology — lots of loopy, wild stuff.

And also Ed Pinsent! There’s a name I haven’t seen in a while. And his art style changed a lot?

Anyway, class anthology. I should get the other issues.

Various: Disco Not Disco 2

11:35: Service Industry by T Edward Bak

This is an oversized book from 2007…

… and it’s wonderful. Ruminative and touching.

11:53: Anzuelo by Emma Ríos (Image Comics)

This book looks really handsome, but it’s published by Image? Now I’m suddenly sceptical.

Wow, that’s some artwork. I like it. And I guess this is gonna be some religiousey/philosophical thingie… I have to say that the computer lettering is pissing me off. Choosing a font like that is just reader hostile.

Oh! But then there’s a monster? And then they all gain super-powers?

*sigh*

Oh, Image.

I wonder who put this on their “best of” list so that I can fume a bit in their general direction. Oh. Oliver Ristau. And I see now that he also recommended 12/14 by Manix Abrera, one of the worst pieces of shit published last year, so this is all on me. My fault!

The artwork is indeed quite attractive, but nope. I’m bailing after one third.

12:16: Tales from the Richy Vegas Psychoverse #4 and Songbook by Richard Alexander

I love this book — the storytelling is unique, but easy to follow.

It’s gripping! Fantastic stuff; can’t wait to read the next issue.

The Songbook illustrates a song he wrote.

I like it.

Juana Molina: Tres Cosas

12:30: Mangaka 2 by Floyd Tangeman

Heh heh. Good one.

And this magazine (which collects a number of short pieces and some illustrations) is really cool.

Moloko: Statues

12:44: Amy Kurzweil by Artificial (Catapult)

This is a hefty auto/biography — I sometimes feel that people that put together “best of” lists use a scale and then just put the books that weigh the most at the top. I’m not denying that quantity has a quality all of it’s own — but it’s rather suspicious the way most people eschew shorter works from these lists.

I love the storytelling on this — we get sequences of small panels showing people moving from one place to another, and it works so well. These sections are a delight to read. I also like the light touches in the artwork — it’s “realistic”, but flows easily, especially with the nice grey washes.

It’s just… Kurzweil tells us the story about herself, her father, her father’s father. Her father is the very famous futurist (and inventor) Ray Kurzweil, so there’s your hook, but beyond that, I feel that we’re asked (as readers) to be interested in stuff that may not be that interesting.

For instance, there’s large sections of the book where they’re putting together a computer model of her grandfather and then interacting with it. Now, I don’t know how many years this book took to create, but drawing takes time, so I guess this all started before LLMs became a thing? So time hasn’t been kind to this narrative: You could have replaced about 150 of these pages with “and then they made an LLM and found the slop it generated to be moderately interesting”.

I know, it feels so cruel, but I’m not being unfair here. Sorry! And I also have to confess (well, I don’t really have to) that I started skimming these sections.

Amy Kurtzweil is obviously a very talented cartoonist and storyteller, so I’d be interested in reading her next book. But this one? Didn’t quite land.

Various: Secondhand Sounds: Herbert Remixes (1)