The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998) Alexander McCall Smith My mom got me the first three books in this series for Christmas, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading the first book until now. This is a rather unusual book for a mystery. It’s almost a collection of short stories tied together by an […]
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999) Neil Gaiman & Yoshitaka Amano The Dream Hunters is my favorite Sandman story. It’s not a comic proper, but is instead an illustrated story. And the illustrations are gorgeous. I tend to do little more than glance at illustrations, but the art here is impossible to ignore. Based on […]
Fables Vol 5: The Mean Seasons (2005) Bill Willingham Fabletown has mostly recovered from the invasion of the wooden soldiers sent by the adversary, and so the mayoral election can now be held. Prince Charming has been making promises that things are going to be different if he wins–promises to the fables who live on […]
Y: The Last Man (2003) Brian K. Vaughan I just couldn’t get into this. The story looked interesting, but it just didn’t do anything for me. Some plague–a strange illness, a curse from the Gods, no one knows–has killed every mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome except for Yorick Brown and his pet […]
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) Susanna Clarke I got Michael this book for Christmas last year, but put off reading it myself because the book is huge: 800 pages huge. It’s not the kind of book I could curl up with; instead I had to set the book on the table, or prop it […]
Supreme Power Vol 2 Powers and Principalities (2004) J. Michael Straczynski In Powers and Principalities we continue the story of Mark Milton, as well as Nighthawk, Stanley Stewart, and Joe Ledger, and are introduced to Princess Zarda and the amphibian woman. (Or, as Michael and I were referring to them: the terrestrial naked lady and […]
Supreme Power Vol 1 Contact (2004) J. Michael Straczynski I picked this up because I really liked J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars. It looked interesting, so I decided to see if I liked this series as well. The story is good, although not quite as good as Rising Stars. But then that was unbelievably good, […]
Fables Vol 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers (2003) Bill Willingham I’m reading this series slowly (or at least attempting to), because it’s not completed, and Book Six is not scheduled to come out until January 2006. I really like the Fables series, and March of the Wooden Soldiers is good, although not quite as […]
A Moorland Hanging (1996) Michael Jecks Okay, I give up. At least for now. Michael Jecks is a good storyteller, I will give him that, but his writing… The Merchant’s Partner was sllightly better than The Last Templar as far as his writing style, but A Moorland Hanging is just as frustrating to read as […]
The Merchant’s Partner (1995) Michael Jecks This is the second Knights Templar Mystery, and I’m still undecided about whether I’ll continue the series. Again, story was good, and I loved all the historical details. However, there remain problems. As with the first book, there are very abrupt changes in point of view. One paragraph were […]
The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro (2001) Alex Toth This! This is the story I remember reading as a child. Well, the first part anyway. The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro seems to be in three parts. The first part was the basis for the Zorro book I had as a child. The middle part […]
The Sandman Vol 10: The Wake (1996) Neil Gaiman The final book in The Sandman collection, volume 10, The Wake tells of the funeral of Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, and of how Dream rebuilds his realm, and meets the rest of his family. I particularly like seeing how Matthew comes to terms with Dream’s […]
The Sandman Vol 9: The Kindly Ones (1996) Neil Gaiman This is my least favorite book in the Sandman series. Part of it has to do with the fact that it’s a sad storyline. Normally in a book you have the good and bad parts together, however in the Sandman, there were eight books leading […]
The Sandman Vol 8: World’s End (1994) Neil Gaiman This is my second favorite book in the Sandman series. Like my favorite, Fables and Reflections, it’s a collection of short stories. A disparate group of people are caught in storms and end up at World’s End: A Free House. As they all wait for the […]
Cryptonomicon (2000) Neal Stephenson It’s been awhile since I’d read Cryptonomicon, although it came out more recently than I remembered. For some reason I thought it came out in 1997. Memory is funny like that. It is a hard book to categorize. It’s part history, part fiction, part mystery, and very technical. As I read […]
Delicate Creatures (2001) J. Michael Straczynski Delicate Creatures was not what I was expecting, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. The art was interesting in that it was definitely in a style that I associate with comics, but was written like Stardust and The Dream Hunters–more like a picture book than a comic […]
Where’s My Cow? (2005) Terry Pratchett If you like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, then you will definitely want to read this book. First of all, it has an award, “Children’s Winner of the Ankh-Morpork Librarians’ Award. OOK!” Also, it has blurbs on the back, “‘…wonderfully instructive’ Tuppence Swivel, the Times of Ankh Morpork” and “‘…Are we […]
The Sandman Vol 7: Brief Lives (1994) Neil Gaiman In Brief Lives Delirium decides that she wants to search for her brother Destruction, who abandoned his job 300 years earlier. She goes first to Desire and Despair, both of whom tell her to abandon her idea of finding Destruction. After all, he had reasons why […]
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1999) John Berendt I read this book several years ago, after listening to the abridged version as an audio book. I was looking for something that I could read a little bit of and put down, so this seemed a good choice. Author John Berendt traveled to […]
Rising Stars: Visitations (2002) J. Michael Straczynski Published between Power and Fire and Ash, Visitations gives some background stories. The first story, Rising Starts, is a quick history of what caused the specials, an excerpt of Dr Wells’ diary, and the Supreme Court opinion on how the specials were to be treated as children. Plus […]
Anansi Boys (2005) Neil Gaiman All summer I went back and forth over whether I was going to get Neil Gaiman’s new book Anansi Boys in hardback, or wait until it came out in paperback. On one hand, I greatly prefer paperback books–they’re smaller and lighter. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to […]