2024 read #67: The English Actor by Peter Ackroyd.

The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern by Peter Ackroyd

385 pages

Published 2023

Read from June 6 to June 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

Around the time that I read Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare, I learned that this book was in the pipeline, soon to be published. I was tempted to preorder it and turn it into a loose Ackroyd-on-acting double bill. Instead, I got it used as a housewarming gift to myself a couple months ago, and haven’t gotten around to it until now.

It’s a typical Ackroydian history, rambling through its subject with an eye for illustrative anecdote but rarely, if ever, scratching beneath the surface. One is reminded of his Albion, in which he posits that the English “taste” is for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal complexity, which seems to describe his popular histories quite well.

Admittedly, the breadth of The English Actor’s subject doesn’t leave room for much depth. Not even halfway through, it abandons any pretense at historical overview to become a string of pocket biographies. Early actors so famous that even I have heard of them — Edward Alleyne, Nell Gwyn, Edmund Kean — scarcely get a page or two to themselves, leaving more than half the book to detail the twentieth century. I’m more drawn to the “medieval” part of the subtitle than to the “modern”; I’d rather get a chapter or two expanding on Ackroyd’s brief mentions of Anglo-Saxon bards and medieval liturgical plays, instead of chapter after chapter listing out the major roles of near-contemporary actors. I’m sure there’s some sort of stage equivalent of IMDb I could turn to if I ever needed more of that.

My personal tastes in subject matter aside, I don’t think this was Ackroyd’s best effort. It’s missing the brio he brings to his better work. In places, the text feels rushed; he repeats anecdotes and quotations as if no one got around to editing out the placeholders.

2024 read #66: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Summer 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Summer 2024 issue (17)

Edited by JW Stebner

43 pages

Published 2024

Read June 6

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ever since my first story was published in Corvus magazine in 2012, I’ve loved small press magazines. Heck, go back even farther, to when I printed the first Scareship zine in 2002. I’ve been around zines and indie litmags pretty much my entire adult life. Some of my favorite stories and poems (my own and those of others) were first printed in amateur and token payment markets. Yet I don’t think I’ve read a single one cover to cover this whole time, my own editorial efforts excepted.

Most volunteer-run indie mags fold within a couple years. My own From the Farther Trees magazine made it just a hair over two years. (I hope to revive it someday, but who knows.) Scareship lasted longer, appearing in fits and starts from 2002 until 2013, but I only published ten issues in that time, and the final batch of four had nothing but the name in common with the original six.

Hexagon is something of a venerable elder in this scene, still producing quarterly issues here in its fifth year. Never having read an issue in full, only individual stories by writers I know, I wasn’t expecting that this issue would follow such a clear theme: fuck the billionaires. I’m here for it.

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“Heat Devils” by Madi Haab is a quippy eco-heist with cyberpunk elements, an entertaining and cathartic middle finger to extinction capitalism.

“Feathers and Wax: A Triptych” by André Geleynse is a tiny but vivid piece of eco fiction, another middle finger to the billionaires. Quite good. Packs a lot into 300-some words.

“Smugglers Without Borders” by Christopher R. Muscato is a tale of boycotting a global corporate monopoly.

“An Epicurean’s 10 Steps to Utopia” by John Eric Vona is a string of food-related vignettes illustrating pampered lives of extreme privilege witnessed by a footman who can never taste the dishes, only serve them. Another vivid microcosm packed into few words. Excellent. My favorite piece here.

“Wonders of a Plastic Ocean” by James Cato is the longest story here by far, a novelette of climate refugees who find uses for plastic pollution. I enjoyed the creativity and strangeness of its setting.

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A brief issue, though that’s understandable when an editor pays by the word from their own pocket. I hope to read many more indie litmags soon!

2024 read #65: The Z Word by Lindsay King-Miller.

The Z Word by Lindsay King-Miller

255 pages

Published 2024

Read from June 2 to June 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

Back in the bad old days, the only queer representation (at least in fantasy and science fiction) was found in villains. Almost every Disney villain, most Bond villains, every simpering, scheming advisor bending the ear of the king — all of them queer-coded. You had outlier authors like Samuel R. Delany and Elizabeth A. Lynn, and the short fiction market has always been more progressive than what we get in novels or movies, but for the most part, the public saw villains.

As a reaction against that, when queer-forward speculative fiction finally found a toehold in the 2010s, our representation tended toward the virtuous: squeaky-clean heroes whose hearts are always in the right place, even if sometimes they need a serious conversation to correct a misunderstanding. That was an important step forward, a way to reframe queerness and shed its old popular associations, but it was only the first step. Plus it led to moments like in Steven Universe, when star-colonizing genocidists get forgiven and welcomed into the family because they said they were sorry.

Here and there, especially in the indie presses, we’re starting to see an uptick of messy, complicated, multidimensional queer characters. The Z Word is firmly in this category, with an emphasis on the messy. Right from the start, our narrator is a walking disaster, making a hash of her life, self-sabotaging, burning bridges in the small queer community of San Lazaro. The queer community is full of people dating each other’s exes, because who else is there to date? No one is a paragon. Just because someone is an impossibly hot drag queen doesn’t mean they’re good at sex.

King-Miller takes these messy characters and pulls no emotional punches, either during the zombie apocalypse they find themselves in or with the societal bigotry that feeds into the violence. The cops are certainly not on our side, neither before nor during the collapse of society. Rainbow-washed corporations in particular have a sinister impact on the final Pride month in San Lazaro. Zombies are updated here as a metaphor for the way capitalism repackages community as a commodity, how it uses us up and throws us away when it’s convenient.

2024 read #64: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 2 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 2 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

191 pages

Published 2017 (English translation published 2019)

Read June 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

Back already with another volume of Witch Hat Atelier. This one continues the momentum of the first, expanding its worldbuilding with the addition of new rules, new factions, new characters, and a glimpse into the responsibilities of local witches. The art continues to be exceptional, full of movement and sweep, while the characters grow bit by bit from their archetypal introductions. Their interactions change and grow in satisfying ways. Plus a witch splits a flooding river with a sword. Come on, that’s goddamn awesome.

Naturally, Volume 2 ends on a cliffhanger. I need to start pacing my impulse purchases, though, so I can't rush off to the bookstore just yet.

2024 read #63: Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara by James Gurney.

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara written and illustrated by James Gurney

160 pages

Published 2007

Read June 3

Rating: 3 out of 5

After Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I didn’t even bother seeking out a copy of First Flight, which appears to share Beneath’s young reader picture book vibes. Chandara works quickly to establish that it’s more in line with the original Dinotopia. Gurney brings back the found-journal framing device as well as its more anthropological tone, dropping us once more into Arthur Denison’s narrative to show off inventive new locales and customs that arise where humans and sentient dinosaurs coexist.

However, I felt some of the zest is gone. The artwork is professionally superb, and is reason enough to enjoy this entry, but a lot of the new locations feel like half-hearted retreads of places we saw in the original book. Bilgewater is creative, a town built of upended ships, but it has little to do with dinosaurs; it could have been located in any fantasy setting. The new characters we meet have little life to them. I just finished the book, and I couldn’t tell you any of their names.

While Gurney made some strides toward including more characters of the global majority, white people still predominate in crowd scenes and character studies (which is odd for a land canonically settled by people of every region). It doesn’t help matters that the plot of Chandara sees Denison journeying into the mysterious, forbidden east on the invitation of an emperor named Khan.

2024 read #62: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

208 pages

Published 2017 (English translation published 2019)

Read from June 1 to June 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

One unfortunate outcome of getting into the Delicious in Dungeon fandom at the same time as everyone else: everyone else bought up the entire stock of the manga, and now it’s quite hard to get a copy. I’ve been craving more Dungeon Meshi, and even though the manga got adapted almost panel by panel into the anime, I'm frustrated by the manga's unobtainability.

I was recommended Witch Hat Atelier to help fill that high fantasy manga hole in my life. It isn’t quite the same vibe as Delicious in Dungeon, of course, but the cover blurbs’ comparisons to Studio Ghibli aren’t far off. Out of the very few manga series I’ve begun, the art here is the best I’ve ever seen: inventive, precise, full of personality and bold poses and stunning scenery.

The characters are more or less mere archetypes here in the first volume, but they’re distinctive, their personalities expressed through vivid artwork. They’re also easy to get attached to, their fears and initial successes adding up to a moving read. I’m quite happy I gave Atelier a try.

2024 read #61: Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones.

Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones

Foreword by D. A. Powell

87 pages

Published 2022

Read June 1

Rating: 5 out of 5

A haunting, jagged, beautiful, raging, joyful collection, as vast as the horrors of history and as intimate as the spots where we hide from our parents. A roaring rushing apocalypse of grief and violence and the maw of white supremacy devouring bodies and stolen land, an apocalypse of robots made to feel pain and white boys shooting up schools and Black folks’ songs stolen for white profit. The End of the World is in the phrase “essential worker.” The end of the world is everywhere, behind and beneath and ahead of us.

I throw around easy words like “staggering” or “astonishing,” but this book silenced my inner voice, left me open and wordless and awed.