2025 read #17: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill

128 pages

Published 1908

Read February 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with the fourth Oz book. This time Dorothy falls into a vegetable kingdom deep inside the Earth, where she happens to meet the Wizard of Oz, out being a humbug as usual. Together with their new companions — Zeb the human boy, Jim the horse, and Eureka the kitten — they adventure through a series of subterranean realms.

It’s a step down from Ozma of Oz, at least to my modern adult tastes. The episodic bedtime story structure is back, sending our friends pell-mell through tunnels and caverns, meeting strange new folks, then moving on. When they happen to reach the Land of Oz, the narrative sputters away into a hangout sesh. But it wasn’t actively unpleasant or anything.

2025 read #16: Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Sheila Williams

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 6 to February 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

As with the most recent issue of Analog, I’m making a belated effort to read the current issue Asimov’s for as long as I maintain my subscription (which, considering the massive economic downturn very likely on its way, might not be for much longer). I’ve had a subscription to Asimov’s since last spring, and I’m only now doing more than page through an issue to see who’s in it. Well, at least now I have a back catalogue to keep me company as our household’s discretionary spending goes out the window.

It’s weird how I haven’t read a full issue of Asimov’s newer than 2000. Maybe that’s why my stories and poems never seem to stand a chance with the editorial staff. Time to fix that!

—

As we so often do, we open this issue of Asimov’s with a poem from Robert Frazier: “Your Clone Can Always Look Herselves Up.” It’s pretty good.

Buried amid all the critical writing that front-ends this issue, we find a second poem: “Einstein to Newton” by Gary Sterling. Kind of an ode to science and scientists.

Maybe I should start reading the essays in Asimov’s, but today is not that day.

“In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll. Our first story, and right away I can tell that the market difference between Asimov’s and Analog persists after all these years. Asimov’s is more character-forward and imaginatively weird, as opposed to concept-forward and more realistically grounded. In the aftermath of a multiversal cataclysm, Charlie and his brother Gabe live on an alternate Earth where a crow hivemind is the dominant species. “Splinterlands” addresses many of the same apocalyptic anxieties we encountered in the current issue of Analog, but relishes the freedom to explore them more allegorically. An excellent novelette. As it turns out, my favorite story in this issue.

“Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” by Matthew Kressel. At a corporate party to mark the decommission of a space elevator, three captains swap tales from their days lifting passengers into orbit. As a story, it’s an enjoyable hangout, but there isn’t much to it; it feels like it could have been published a quarter-century ago. (I noticed that trend with Analog too. I don’t fault the writers so much as I blame our own contemporary inability to imagine anything new, crushed as we are beneath the weight of the dystopia around us.)

A little poem is next: “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Kenton K. Yee. It’s cute.

“Shadow of Shadows” by Frank Ward. Twenty years after the death of his young son, physicist Sebastian goes through the motions of his life, until the multiverse intrudes upon his dead-end career and stale grief. Quiet and workmanlike, this story mostly does what it sets out to do.

“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Beston Barnett. Grim tale of artificial intelligence escaping its bounds and interrogating its creators. It avoids the Roko’s basilisk bullshit that real life tech bros find so compelling, in favor of a human perspective of horror. A well-structured and thoughtful story.

“Through the Pinhole, or, The Origin of a Holostory” by Nikki Braziel. A divorced holonovelist gets stranded in 16th century Malta, and gets his groove back. Corny and a bit choppy, but adequately entertaining.

A poem from Jane Yolen: “Fantastic!” It’s about the feelings of community attached to a sci-fi convention. Shrug.

“A Girl from Hong Kong” by Robert Reed. A typically solid, rambling, slightly opaque entry in Reed’s “Great Ship” sequence, giving us bits of backstory for Quee Lee and the setting at large. Big and baroque in the old 1990s tradition.

“Jilly in Right: A Thought Experiment” by Rick Wilber. “Washed-up dude has his life flash before his eyes while he spins out on the highway, with a sprinkle of alternate timelines” feels rather antiquated as a story structure. I’m not even sure what decade to pin it to: 1970s, maybe? I just couldn’t get into it.

“My Biggest Fan” by Faith Merino. Surreal stalker-horror, employing suburban anomie, late capitalist dislocation, and Ford Pintos to memorable effect.

Another poem: “Too Far Away” by Jenny Blackford. I quite liked it.

“Completely Normal” by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister. Delightfully odd flash fic on the topic of soup and being a third culture kid.

“Moon and Mars” by James Patrick Kelly. Overlong novella about space colonists and space politics. It’s a slog. The prose is jargon-heavy like something from Analog. Blank characters fire repartee off one another. We spend much of the first fifteen pages rehashing events from the two prior stories in this series. On top of all that, any sci-fi that includes “making babies is everyone’s duty” in its ideological assumptions gives me the ick. Since this one story sprawls across over one-third of the fiction pages in this issue, it single-handedly brings down my (fully arbitrary) rating.

Lastly, one more poem: “unfolding origami: a haiku” by Kendall Evans. Eh.

—

And that’s it! Asimov's has always been more to my taste than Analog, and that certainly holds true with this pair of issues — with some obvious exceptions, of course.

Glad I finally read an issue while it was current!

2025 read #15: Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill

153 pages

Published 1907

Read from February 9 to February 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I liked this installment, which largely discards the “new adventure every chapter” storybook structure of the first two Oz tales in favor of a simpler but more cohesive storyline. Dorothy is back in “fairyland” after another weather-related mishap, this time in the company of a pugnacious hen named Bill and, eventually, our good friend Ozma. The quest to locate and restore the royal family of Ev isn’t as iconic as defeating a Wicked Witch or gender-bending into a princess, but for early 20th century kidlit, Ozma of Oz is solid.

2025 read #14: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

216 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 7 to February 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

“Fuck the road you walked on, the sky you fell out of, the clouds that shielded you from rain, and anyone who gave you a moment of peace or comfort. Fuck everything that brought you here to stand in front of me without knowing what shame is, and when I dance on the wind, I will turn the names that were given to you to mud—”

I knew I would love this book. Vo is one of my favorite authors, consistently turning out future classics. But that was the moment I knew this was the book I needed in my life at this point in time.

Vitrine is a demon who has claimed the city of Azril as her own, nurturing its potential and fomenting chaos, caretaker and troublemaker, through the generations. When angels come and destroy her city, she is left to grieve, but her curse lodges in one of the angels, who cannot be free of the piece of her lodged within him. Over the ensuing years, Vitrine cleans and hopes to rebuild, while the angel lingers, unable to return to his cosmic home.

City is a novel of grief and healing, of creation and joy and life, of rage against uncaring holiness. It is, beautifully and passionately, a novel of our times.

2025 read #13: The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang.

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang

Illustrated by Jacob McMurray

61 pages

Published 2007

Read February 7

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A slight but fun novella about time travel and the predestination paradox in medieval Baghdad, complemented with lovely collage artwork. Structured as a series of vignettes. Not much to it, though I did enjoy it.

These old Subterranean Press hardback editions were such a fixture of my old library back on Long Island; I used to pad out my reading totals with them, way back when, in the early days of this blog. Hell, this book would’ve been just six years old when I started writing these reviews. Speaking of time travel, what I wouldn’t give to go back to the Obama years…

2025 read #12: Analog Science Fiction & Fact, January/February 2025 issue.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Trevor Quachri

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 31 to February 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve had subscriptions to both Analog and Asimov’s ever since we moved last spring. I wanted to support both magazines, while keeping abreast of what they’re looking for in fiction these days.

Sadly, I haven’t read any of the issues I’ve gotten. Both magazines are printed by a newsstand puzzle game publisher, making the physical experience of holding and leafing through them especially unpleasant. The ink on my copy’s cover smeared on my hands within minutes of holding it, before I even began reading it. By the time I finished the first story, the spine had begun to peel apart.

The start of a new year of issues seems like a good, round spot to begin, though.

—

“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin. Despite the passage of decades, and turnover in the editor’s chair, the “house style” of Analog seemingly hasn’t changed all that much since the late 1990s. This piece opens with a traumatic flashback in italics, then throws you in at the deep end with a bunch of in-universe jargon — lilies, observing Eyes, a mysterious Her. Classic Analog.

The ensuing paragraphs are loaded with perhaps a touch more exposition than strictly necessary, over-compensating for the initial opacity. The general gist: our narrator drifts with geoengineering “lilies” around a gyre in the Pacific, harvesting fish while the diatoms in the gyre sink carbon dioxide into the deeps.

There’s a whole bit about “generative AI exacerbated the carbon crisis, but it also gave us the tools to start fixing it,” which feels pulled directly from some tech oligarch’s PR department. I suppose reading the “hard sci-fi” magazine means encountering a rather more, erm, credulous attitude toward Big Tech than I’m used to here in 2025.

Once “Gyre” stops tripping over its own worldbuilding, a perfectly adequate human-scale story emerges, only to end almost as soon as it settles into its groove.

—

“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike. This tale of time travel and solar technology in the nineteen-oughts confirms the Analog “house style” is still going strong. (One story, see, could have been a fluke.) I mean this without a trace of aspersion: this feels like it could have been printed in 1999. I enjoyed it; telling a story of time travel intervention from the perspective of the person whose life was changed, who then spends years trying to figure out why, is an interesting angle.

 —

“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler. Brief but compelling examination of race and uploaded consciousness. Excellent.

—

“Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann. Highly topical yet rather flat story about installing a neural augment in order to stay competitive in an increasingly automated job market. The characters all felt generic, even before anything got installed in their heads.

—

“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley. Didn’t care for this one. There’s an interesting kernel in the idea of what rejuvenation would entail for someone turning young again, psychologically and hormonally. But it gets lost in this story. So much expository dialogue, not much to hold my interest, and it felt much too long for what little story there was.

—

“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert. Another dense, jargon-forward piece, but this one drops us into a fascinatingly constructed future of corporate drugs and psychological manipulation, where certain hereditary anxiety disorders are harnessed to turn people into walking starship maintenance machines. The best aspects of sci-fi’s New Wave collide with the bleak corporate futurity of the current age. Quite good.

—

“Notes from Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden. This flash fic was another blast from the 1990s past, all about designer genetics, as if genetics hold more power over us than how we’re nurtured and what our environment does to us. That’s a pet peeve of mine. If that isn’t an issue for you (and I suspect it was used as a tongue-in-cheek plot device more than anything else), “Descendants” is effective enough. Does what it sets out to do.

—

“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day. It’s telling of what our future has been reduced to that so much contemporary sci-fi is about attempts to salvage our biosphere and ameliorate the carbon crisis. (Thanks, billionaires! May you all have the future you deserve!) This story features bioengineered strains of algae, meant to eat waste and sink carbon dioxide, instead going rogue and dissolving industrial civilization. Excellent entry, affecting and well-written.

—

“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor. I was going to remark that this was only the second story in this issue that involves neither climate catastrophe nor corporate serfdom, but no: a casual line of dialogue makes sure we know Earth is “going to shit.” Oof. Sometimes realism is a curse. This is a human-scale tale of a researcher readying herself for humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s sweet and solid.

—

“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham. A young man learns how to walk the Way between parallel realities, and finds a timeline where he’s happy — until another version of himself comes along.

None of our contemporary problems with futurity here, right? Well, I’d argue that the multiverse became such a staple of 2020s science fiction as an escape from those selfsame issues. It’s that “our timeline took a wrong turn” feeling we all remember from November 2016, and March 2020, and November 2024. And sure enough, in one of the realities Ferdinand visits, the mistakes of internal combustion were pointedly avoided, making for a clean-air utopia with rapid trains. Secretly on-theme after all.

This story held no surprises, and was (to my tastes) excessively heterosexual, ending with two versions of the man arguing over which of them is “better” for their dream girl, rather than giving her a say in her own life. But it was pretty good overall.

I do want to note, for history-of-the-genre enthusiasts, that another world Ferdinand visits is directly lifted from Keith Roberts’ Pavane. Like, almost down to the letter.

—

A poem: “Beyond the Standard Model” by Ursula Whitcher. It’s quite lovely.

—

“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen. This one is a boiled-down sci-thriller involving remote archaeology, forensics, and the Boys in the Tower. If you’d shown me this story when I was a 16 year old Michael Crichton fan, I would have loved it. I still think it’s an adequate example of its genre, though one with few surprises up its sleeve. I’m just not into the genre anymore.

—

“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté. Speaking of sci-thriller vibes, this one is a spacecraft-crash mystery set on corporate Ganymede. Not of much interest to me.

—

“Vigil” by James Van Pelt. A sweetly intimate flash fic about memories on board a generation ship.

—

“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab. Military sci-fi with robots can be a beautiful work of art, as with “Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees” by Marie Vibbert, in the January / February 2019 issue F&SF. Or it can be flat and procedural, as with this piece.

—

“The Spill” by M. T. Reiten. Humorous micro about nanotech gray goo.

—

“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Geriatric care robot assists his declining patient and thinks about purpose, the self, and the loss of both. Well-executed rendition of a recurring plot. Feels very 2000-ish.

—

“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson. Forget the house style of 1990s Analog. We’re going all the way back to the 1960s for this medical emergency in space piece. It is of such vintage that it unironically puts the phrase “steely-eyed missileman” back into print, perhaps the first time in decades. And characterization? Never heard of her. Ends with a Boomer-standard joke.

—

“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo. Mashing together high fantasy with technobabble, this one sees a neon satyr and her helpful little robot go on a quest in 23rd century Italy. Clunky exposition blunted my enthusiasm for this piece, which is a shame; if I ever get into Analog myself, I could see it being thanks to a story like this. I think it was mildly entertaining overall, in a pulpy kind of way, perhaps because I wanted to like it.

—

“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. A marvelous novella grounded in character, place, and emotion. The science-fictiony topic of quantum topology is blended skillfully with widowed Helena’s precarious position in 1970s Poland, and it’s beautifully written besides. Maybe my favorite story in the issue.

—

Lastly, a poem: “‘Oumuamua” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Pretty standard rhyming science poetry. Nothing objectionable.

—

And that’s it! An uneven issue overall, with excellent highlights equal to the best of what 2020s SF has to offer, but an equal amount of what felt to me like filler (but what the old Analog heads probably enjoy). 

2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2025 read #10: The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill 

145 pages

Published 1904

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

Perhaps because this second installment lacks the nostalgic familiarity of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I didn’t appreciate it as much. Or perhaps it’s because it’s hard to find the joy in life when an illegitimate fascist government employs shock doctrine to demoralize and dismantle your country.

It’s hard to separate Wizard from its movie, so it’s difficult to say which book is better. For most of Land, Tip is a less engaging protagonist than (the movie version of) Dorothy. Pumpkinhead has a promising introduction, but the eventual adventuring crew of the Scarcrow, the Tin Man, the Saw-Horse, the Wobble-Bug, and so forth feels much less entertaining than (the movie version of) Wizard’s cast. Their scenes are full of bickering, and puns, and bickering over puns. For a depressed adult in the twenty-first century, it grows tiresome.

Without beloved cinematic plot beats to carry it, Land is a bit of a trudge to this modern reader, the frenetic bedtime story pace giving very little to latch onto. Even its proto-feminist message of “girls get to sit at the table too” gets lost in its “girls want jewelry and bon-bons” antics.

That said, the final gender-bent twist is delightful, especially for a book this old. It elevates my final opinion of Land quite a bit, and reassures me that the rest of the Oz books might be worth reading.

2025 read #9: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady.

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

520 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve become more cautious, and more skeptical, of history books over the years. You never can tell when some (usually white, usually male) author will cherry-pick or outright misrepresent historical context in order to push some right wing bullshit. (Looking at you, Simon Winchester and Dan Jones.) I hesitate to take a chance on any author I haven’t encountered before.

But I want to read more history, both for personal interest as well as inspiration for future writing and worldbuilding. My library has woefully few books written by and about peoples of the global majority, so for now, I’m settling for a history of a part of Europe I don’t know much about.

Right from the start, Rady betrays a weakness for limited, almost Victorian interpretations of history. He still employs the suspect term “civilization” in place of culture (as in, “the vulnerability of [Central Europe’s] civilization” to invaders from the steppe). He has a passion for big men and their battles, and treats “peoples” as if they were solid game pieces being moved around a map by the big men, and not as complex social units with complex interactions. I don’t get the sense that Rady means anything nefarious or RETVRN-like with it, just that he’s an older scholar and perhaps hasn’t deconstructed a lot of the bad old assumptions from the bad old days. Plus, simplistic big man history is much easier to write at this vast scale.

Still, a historian who opines “[S]erfdom was not all bad” has earned a healthy dose of skepticism, a sense not fully dispelled until his relatively even-handed treatment of post-Soviet neoliberalism and its failures.

The scope of The Middle Kingdoms — covering a considerable portion of a continent, from the time of Ovid to the present — is both central to its appeal and its main stumbling block. I always love the sound of a history of a vast region, over an extensive span of time, but inevitably, it ends up superficial, breezing through decades in a paragraph.

However simplistic its big man approach to history may be, Middle Kingdoms was an interesting introduction to a region of the world that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the anglophone press.

2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.

2025 read #7: A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen.

A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen (pseudonym for Ann Crawford, Baroness von Rabe)

88 pages

Published 1887

Read January 19

Rating: 2 out of 5

When you’ve gotten into the habit of reading as many books as possible for over two years, it’s difficult to pump the brakes and switch to a slower, more deliberate reading pace. The last couple weeks, I’ve been working my way through three large books, hoping to redevelop my old attention span. But it hasn’t been easy; progress has been slow. And finding a new digitized source of weird old books in the Merril Collection, it’s tempting to knock out a quick Victorian vampire novella once in a while.

This is not the best writing I’ve read, even by the standards of its time. Von Degen has some ability at quickly establishing character, but this asset gets lost in a muddle of amateurish prose (and repeated allusions to how rural Italians look like murderers). Her most vivid passages heap scorn upon rustic food that, honestly, sounds delicious to me:

There came to light pecorino cheese made from ewe's milk, black bread of the consistency of a stone, a great bowl of salad apparently composed of weeds, and a sausage which filled the room with a strong smell of garlic. Then he disappeared and came back with a dish full of ragged-looking goat's flesh cooked together with a mass of smoking polenta, and I am not sure that there was not oil in it…. It was a terrible meal, but I had to eat it….

Oh no, it’s flavor! An English aristocrat’s natural enemy!

Aside from all that, Campagna isn’t bad; it’s a brief, relatively painless curiosity, an early example of the English vampire genre. As a little bonus, the nurses (particularly Sœur Claudius) are the most collected, competent female characters I’ve ever encountered from this time period.

2025 read #6: In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts.

In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts 

311 pages

Published 1922

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’d never heard about this novel until I browsed through the digital holdings of the Merril Collection, attached to the Toronto Public Library. Another excellent resource to bookmark! Too bad I chose this book as my first download, because yikes.

Morning is one of those “pageantry of life through time” confabulations that seemed to peak around the ’20s through ’50s. It opens with an amphibious sauropod observing Jurassic slaughter from the relative safety of an estuary. It’s all downhill from there, bearing us down through epochs of bullshit to a 1920s conception of Man. Specifically, White Man.

Along the way, we get red-in-tooth-and-claw vignettes of dubious scientific accuracy; chapter two brings us a Cretaceous Triceratops battling an Eocene Dinoceras, their fight witnessed by both a Jurassic Archaeopteryx and a Pliocene hominid, compressing about 145 million years into one moment. After that, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Grôm, a strangely Caucasian caveman who masters fire, figures out the bow and arrow, and invents love. True to the tastes of its readers, Grôm’s primary foe is miscegenation.

Everything is suffused with masculine rage and violence (and copious racist coding). This, inevitably, becomes tedious, trite, and ridiculous. The ape-man’s bride and child get fridged by some ceratopsians, for instance, which motivates him to single-handedly hasten the dinosaurs’ extinction in revenge. This accomplished, he goes off into the woods, desiring a new mate to bear him sons. Because daughters, even back in Missing Link days, lack inquisitiveness and resourcefulness, you see.

If that weren’t grotesque enough, you can only imagine the racism and patronizing misogyny simmering through the subsequent Grôm chapters. There’s a stink of The Birth of a Nation to the battle that opens the chapter “The Finding of Fire.” It’s fucking vile.

I’m only giving this garbage a full star because at least it’s better written than The Land that Time Forgot. That’s an extremely generous metric, and more than Morning deserves. But hey, I suppose the first chapter, the one without any people, is okay, at least by the standards of 1920s sci-fi, and later on Grôm and his pals have a pulpy encounter with giant dragonflies that feels moderately creative. Not worth slogging through the rest of it, though, by any means.

2025 read #5: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 13 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 13 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

180 pages

Published 2024 (English translation published 2025)

Read January 16

Rating: 4 out of 5

It’s been a hell of a bad ride since I finished the previous installment of Witch Hat Atelier back in September. Fuck.

It’s an adjustment to go from splurging through the series to being all caught up and having to wait months for the next translated tankōbon. The number of characters and tangle of plot lines in Atelier makes it especially difficult. I floundered at first to recall what was going on; when a new character (Richeh’s big brother) got introduced, I was confused, concerned that I’d completely forgotten someone important.

This is a solid installment, progressing the conflict between the principles of the Pointed Caps and their desire to help people. The way forward chosen by the characters — invent new spells! — seems a bit trite, but Shirahama’s artwork is stunning as always, whirling between characters and scenes with assurance and verve.

2025 read #4: Kids on Bikes: 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski.

Kids on Bikes: Strange Adventures in Small Towns, 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski

Includes “The Horror in the House on Hook Hill,” written and designed by Sen Foong-Lim and Alara Cameron

180 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 25, 2024 to January 7

Rating: n/a

The only game system books I’d read in their entirety before this were the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook from the 5th edition of D&D. With Wizards of the Coast doing everything in their power to alienate their audience and burn years of goodwill to the ground, it’s time to learn some new systems!

Thanks to my partner R for gifting me this one. <3

What I like about this book: The wealth of thought that went into its discussions of how to play a mutually respectful game with others. I feel like the DMG and years of being the forever-DM taught me less than this book offered about the topics of table safety, collaborative storytelling, prompting players, backpedaling when the story goes places it shouldn’t, and ways to make failing a roll both interesting and an opportunity to move the game forward. Whatever system I use in the future, I appreciate having these role-play tools at hand.

What could have been better: Just like the Player’s Handbook, Kids on Bikes buried the rules of play within some sub-optimal formatting. I like the choice to foreground ethical gaming, but perhaps the core rules could be highlighted with an edge color for easy reference. More pertinently, the book explains what to do with a particular game condition before it defines the game condition, e.g. we get told we can spend Adversity Tokens several pages before we learn what they are or how we get them. It felt slightly disorganized.

I’m excited to (someday, hopefully) be able to play a Kids on Bikes game. This book also joins E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies, Now and Then, Super 8, and a general cultural awareness of IT (which I haven’t read, or watched in full) on my meager list of inspirations for the kids-on-bikes novel I began writing this week.

2025 read #3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.*

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum*

Illustrated by W.W. Denslow 

122 pages

Published 1900

Read from January 6 to January 7

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

My partner R introduced me to the film version of Wicked the other night, a movie so enjoyable it rekindled my interest in the book version. I’m not sure I’ll ever follow up on that; I attempted to read Wicked back in 2014, got seventeen pages in, and gave up. It isn’t a good novel. Still, I might try again someday. And in either case, I thought it might be fun to revisit The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, perhaps even work my way into the later Baum books.

Having grown up on the 1939 musical, Wizard of Oz was a disappointment to my childhood self, who expected the same technicolor pageant in book form. The prose is weightless, as was so often the case with early chapter books. The story flits between wacky encounters and creatures at a bedtime story pace, and its ironies are about as subtle as a tornado. The Wicked Witch of the West, for instance, is Dorothy’s antagonist for just one chapter. In comparison, the movie is polished and tightly plotted. I can’t exactly criticize a book for doing exactly what was expected of it in its time, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, personally.

I’d be curious to read a gloss of Oz that illuminated the turn of the century political satire underlying everything here. No publisher ever seems to bundle this book with commentary, sadly.

2025 read #2: bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward.

bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Foreword by Kiese Layton

145 pages

Published 2017 (expanded from original edition published 2013)

Read from January 4 to January 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

When it comes to poetry, I’m a dilettante. I only know my old circle of poets, plus maybe a handful of household names. My library has a modest collection of poetry books; one of my reading goals this year is to expand my poetry horizons.

bone is a mesmerizing introduction to Daley-Ward. Poems of love, of grief, of queerness, of god and violations too vast to outline, of negotiations within oneself to remain alive — all of them weave around one another, short stings of free verse that feel like the wisdom of aphorisms followed by epics hundreds of lines long. “Love is not a safe word,” she explains in “things it can take twenty years and a bad liver to work out,” then adds, “But it’s the safe things that kill you / in the end.”

2025 read #1: Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle: 1 by Kagiji Kumanomata.

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle: 1 by Kagiji Kumanomata

Translated by Tetsuichiro Miyaki

168 pages

Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)

Read from December 31, 2024 to January 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

In 2024, I read 157 books, the most I’ve ever read in one year as an adult. It was also the very first year I read at least ten books each calendar month. Many, possibly most, of the books I read were quick reads: manga, magazines, novellas, poetry collections. Some might sniff at that, but a record is a record, and who cares what others think? It’s not like anyone but plagiarism bots reads these reviews anyway.

Moving into 2025, I want to read more deliberately, instead of for big numbers. I want to read less overall, to free up time for writing. So naturally the first book of 2025 is… a volume of manga.

I learned about this series thanks to an ad in the back of a volume of Frieren. I’m always open to charming high fantasy manga, especially now that I’ve finished Delicious in Dungeon and I’m all caught up with Witch Hat Atelier. Sleepy Princess looked promising, an adorable tale of a kidnapped princess who, safe and bored inside a castle of monsters, goes to great lengths to get quality sleep. As a fellow princess-and-the-pea sleeper myself, I could relate. The manga pretty much delivers on that premise, and does so adequately. The way Princess Syalis hunts through the demon castle for her various bedding needs is pleasantly reminiscent of Delicious in Dungeon, if you replace food with sleep.

Unfortunately, at least in this initial volume, Princess lacks characterization, and the princess’s nocturnal side-quests quickly become repetitive. This slim tankōbon is packed with thirteen chapters, each of which is fairly self-contained. As a result, the story is episodic, and never develops much substance. I don’t think I’m intrigued enough to continue spending money on this series.

Also discouraging any investment: the binding error in this copy (most of chapters nine and ten are replaced with repeats of chapters four and five). Bad luck, or a shoddy press? I’m not shelling out more to find out.