Happy New Year everyone!
This is my “oh-my-god-I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted”
post. Which is a shame, because I’ve read
lots of cool things that I really wanted to write about on here. I worked out from my Master List (which I may
share on here someday), that I read about 60 books last year.
And about 16 of them didn’t even have pictures in or
anything, so there.
For the last 2 years I’ve read many many more graphic novels
than, well, non-graphic novels. So
perhaps one of my reading resolutions this year should be to read more proper
books?
My major news is that, as of Christmas 2012, I am now the
proud (read “smug”) owner of a Kindle Fire.
I wasn’t aware of all the great stuff the Fire device could do, so for
those not in the know it’s more-or-less an Android tablet computer as well as
being an e-reader. There’s enough
distractions on it that I haven’t read a whole book on it yet, but suffice to
say that it’s going to liven up my daily commute. Plus everything is linked up to the Amazon
store, so if you’re not on your guard it can be a dangerously short number of
clicks to get you from “I wonder if China Mieville has any new books out since
I last checked” to “well, now I have ALL his books available on this shiny
little black monolith” and “wait, where did all my wages go again? Oh yes, I spent them on that obscure fantasy
writer that Neil Gaiman recommended on his
blog”. You have been warned. I will try my best not to reach that stage.
Whilst I love those old-fashioned paper things we call
books, reading on the Kindle is a completely different experience which will
undoubtedly change what I consume as well as how. I had a discussion this morning about which
books would be the most/least inappropriate to enjoy digitally. Apparently, if you download William Gibson’s cyperpunk
standard Neuromancer, your head will
explode. Meanwhile I can’t even
contemplate downloading Fahrenheit 451 by
Ray Bradbury; I can only imagine him turning his grave at the very notion. [Note: Bradbury did eventually embrace
e-books and released his work in a digital format, but I can’t help but feel this
would have been at least partly down to his publishers’ input].
I’m currently finishing off a library book before diving
into my Kindle downloads: DC: Legacies
by Len Wein. As the title suggests, it’s
a history of the DC universe spanning 10 issues and told from the perspective
of Paul Lincoln, a long-term collector of superhero memorabilia. So far, so good –there’s not so much a strong
story as a general thread tracing the development of the fictional DC
world. It shows where the first masked
avengers came from, leading through to their persecution and eventual
disappearance in McCarthy-era America, then the apperance of a new group of brightly
coloured superheroes and the cosmic crises, corruptions, deaths and (yes, of
course) resurrections that the comics industry has entailled. I’ve enjoyed it but I know very little about
the history of comics before the 1980s. If
you’re a fully paid up member of the continuity police, I imagine this book will
make your head spin; DC seems to revise its “official” history every year to
the point that the company itself can’t hope to keep up with what the current
accepted line is. But to pick that apart
too much would be to miss the point of a fun romp through 60 odd years of
publishing history.
Enough about me though… what are YOU reading?
