In my desperate attempts to avoid reading the last 100 pages of Don Quixote, I have been reading pretty much anything I can get my hands on.
Of particular note are a bunch of graphic novels, some of which I’d read long ago, and some that I read for the first time.
Swamp Thing has always tugged at my heart – the misunderstood monster, sort of like Frankenstein’s monster; yet Swamp Thing is gentle, only rising to anger and violence in defense of humanity and Mother Earth. I’d forgotten how much the love story of Abby and Swamp Thing swamped me with emotion when I first read it, at least until I started reading “Swamp Thing: Love and Death” by Alan Moore again last week. It still holds that power for me, and I actually caught myself being titillated by the “vegetable sex” episode (as Neil Gaiman calls it in his introduction). The artists, Steve Bissette and Jon Totleben, know how to capture emotion and, well, sex, but without actual copulation.
I also loved the Pog episode, a tribute to Pogo; but it is very sad, and sadly, it does seem like something that would happen on this lady.
Hellboy sort of ambushed me. I didn’t know what to expect from it, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t torture-porn – I think I was confusing it with Hellraiser, because I kept picturing something like Pinhead when I thought of Hellboy. At any rate, I love a world where people can address a red demon with truncated horns on his forehead as “Mr. Boy”. Here again, we have a sort of Frankenstein’s-monster-become-useful-member-of-society – Hellboy, summoned from ??? by Rasputin, kills his “father”; but without all the moral agonizing and self-justification of Frankenstein’s monster who took revenge through killing loved ones of *his* “father”. Rasputin pulls a Darth Vader by trying to convert Hellboy over to the Dark Side, telling Hellboy it is his destiny, this is why he (Rasputin, his father) summoned him (Hellboy) – and Hellboy kicks his ass, instead of blubbering and trying to commit suicide like Luke Skywalker. But does he get the girl? Or maybe she’s his sister. . .
I remember reading one Sin City volume way back when, but only vaguely. So I’ve started with The Hard Goodbye – definitely hadn’t read it. Marv is:
a) Paranoid
b) Heroic
c) Crazy
d) All of the above
e) None of the above
but is he really dead? I won’t know until I crack the next volume.
Heroes: Season 1 is 34 betweener tales about the characters in the television show – you can read these online at the Heroes website, although it is also in published form. It’s very cool to see some background for the characters, and it explains a lot that one may not have understood from the televised episodes.
But my biggest read was Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This book made me a little ashamed at how much popular literature I spend time reading. It is written for people with attention spans longer than a breezy 250 or 350 pages; it uses language and vocabulary in a way that people as well educated as myself should *expect* to read and use it, and Stephenson never dumbs down his plot or his characters to try to suck in a few extra readers; nor does he rely on (or need to rely on) sex to make the story interesting. I was hooked from the first page. If Neuromancer by William Gibson is cyberpunk, then Cryptonomicon is cybergeek.
I will admit that there were a few places that out-geeked me – being a nerd, married to a nerd, I was pretty much able to keep up with the techno-language and scenarios; I can see where someone who is totally uninterested in or unfamiliar with computers and cryptology might have trouble with this aspect of the book, but it would be worth skimming those parts just to read the rest of the story. Which is primarily about people.
The story is set up as alternating timeframes, between World War II and the late 1990s. It takes a long time to get around to the point of the story, but the journey there was fun. I have to admit some disappointment at the way it ended – something like 1160 pages of build-up, 6 pages of climax, and 2 pages of denouement. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, it’s just hard to get let down on the ending. It’s a problem, I’m sure, to end a story well – one of my favorite authors, Stephen King, writes incredible stories, but oftentimes the endings suck. And I surely couldn’t do any better, I’m just sayin’ …
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p.s. I actually started this post 2 months ago but real life intervened, to the point that I did not feel up to writing (see my personal blog for details – link is on the About page). However, I did get a bunch of reading done in the meantime. I will probably post about some of the books, but definitely not all. I’ll try to be better, but I’ve got a lot more real life heading my way, so no guarantees.
