is a
slightly oversized, heavily illustrated book about all things Gaiman,
including a thumbnail biography and focusing mostly on loving
examinations of all of the various writings he's done for various media.
(It is, therefore, much like Gaiman's own very early book, Don't Panic!, about Douglas Adams. The rhythms of the creative life are strangely consistent over the decades.)I've been a Gaiman reader and aficionado for a long time -- I hesitate to call myself a "fan," since he's attracted some very devoted sorts who would find my zeal insufficient -- all the way back to Black Orchid and Don't Panic!, and I found this pleasant and complete, if hagiographic and unsurprising. The point of a book like this is to celebrate rather than criticize, of course, but Campbell has a non-nonsense, journalistic tone rather than the pose of a breathless acolyte, so it comes across as more-or-less honest and balanced. Campbell also, since she's already part of the Gaiman circle, got unmatched access to Gaiman and his various collaborators -- she already knew a lot of the people she had to interview for this book, and spent a lot of time rooting around in Gaiman's attic and basement for artifacts from his long, twisting career. It's very clear that no one other than Gaiman himself would have had that level of access, and Gaiman has too many other projects to write his own book-length bibliography.
This is also a heavily designed book, with art integrated on every page, from notebook scraps to comics panels to movie stills and snapshots. And it all reads very cleanly, even with lightly tinted paper and slightly fussy caption styles. I believe this is primarily due to Art Director Julie Weir, credited as part of a larger team of The Ilex Press, which owns the copyright. (They look like a book-packaging firm to my eye, though the name isn't familiar.) The art is also generally well-chosen -- though Gaiman's scrawl makes the many examples of his handwritten notes difficult to decipher -- and doesn't focus on just the big obvious pictures (though there are plenty of those as well).
So this is about as good as a project like this could ever be: it's inherently celebratory rather than critical, obviously, but it covers all of Gaiman's various activities (comics, novels, movies, odder things) in appropriate depth and detail and even really devoted fans will likely learn some new trivia. If you like, say, 60% or more of things Gaimanesque, you will likely enjoy reading this.
is the second novel in the epic fantasy trilogy named after the first novel, Grudgebearer, by J.F. Lewis. (I was surprised to look at the author bio and see that J.F. is clearly a guy named Jeremy; I guess he just isn't that fond of his first name.) (Also, I would love if the concluding book was named Nitpicker, but I'd bet money that it won't be.) It's got a redheaded elf girl in sensible armor and a friendly-ish dragon on the cover, which pegs its appeal pretty closely. And it's a Pyr trade paperback, available June 9.
-- nor have I read any of the author's previous six novels with "Muirwood" in the title -- but I can say it must be absolutely fabulous, because it's author is Jeff Wheeler, and everything done by a Wheeler must be assumed to be world-class. It's epic fantasy in the usual medievaloid secondary world, with a spunky young princess whose been Cinderella-ized and a social setup that seems even more hostile to women than usual. Amazon's 47North imprint will bring this one out in the usual paper and electronic formats in August.
, the second book in the series that began with the currently Hugo-nominated Dark Between the Stars. It's meat-and-potatoes space opera, with somewhat less tech-porn than the average Baen book but plenty of intrigue and complication and physics that is not precisely accurate. This Tor hardcover is available on June 2nd.
, the second full-length graphic novel from Brian Fies (after Mom's Cancer, which I read way back in the misty early days of this blog when I didn't write long meandering posts about books all the time). It's about the dream of the future from the 1939 World's Fair, and it seems to be fictional, unlike Mom's Cancer.
from Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin. This is a complicated mystery story set in the world of early TV in the '50s, with lots of Chaykin dames in their over-constructed lingerie (and not much else, much of the time). I mostly enjoyed 
by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Lawrence Campbell, and Peter Snejbjerg. I'm trying to keep up better with Hellboy-verse stories these days, and I might just sit down for a big week of B.P.R.D. soon. (This was one I was missing in the middle; it's not the most recent book.)
, a memoir-ish graphic novel -- or maybe a graphic memoir with some degree of fictionalizing -- from Mimi Pond, who did a lot of great work for National Lampoon in the '70s and whom I haven't seen much lately. (I see that she did a long-running strip for Seventeen magazine for part of that time, which was way off my radar.)
, the last book in the series -- well, more will be published, but this one is at the very end of the internal timeline -- which is written by series creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. The two individual French albums collected here are drawn by Alfred (of Why I Killed Peter fame) and Mazan (who seems to have had several long-running series in Europe that have never been translated into English).
, the second book collecting a comic by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. I really enjoyed 
by Matt Wagner. I probably heard about this at some point -- I'm not completely cut off from all sources of information about the usual comic-shop stuff -- but I was surprised to see it on the shelf. I like Wagner, though I think he's spent too much time this century doing Hunter Rose stories -- and I also think that's what the market-slash-editors keep asking him for. And I guess I'm the problem, because I keep buying them, and providing financial incentive to keep making them.
, a complete collection (so far) of Lawrence Block's stories about Martin Ehrengraf, the criminal defense attorney whose clients are always innocent, no matter what else has to happen for that to be true. Block's short stories are sharp and sneaky -- possibly even better than his novel -- so this should be fun.
, from Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen. Like the first two Science of Discworld books (and the fourth, which hit the UK several years ago and is still forthcoming on my side of the pond), it combines alternate chapters of a Pratchett-written Unseen University story about wizards poking at a created "Roundworld" with chapters about the actual science implied by those pokes, written by working scientists and popularizers Stewart and Cohen. I don't remember if I read all four of these books, but they start very strong and glide gently downhill, as the authors have less impressive material each time out. Darwin's Watch is a June 2015 trade paperback original from Anchor in the US, only ten years after the UK publication.evolution.JPG)
, the first novel from TV writer PJ Manney, coming on June 1st from Amazon's 47North imprint. (So you might have trouble finding it in any smaller independent bookstores that Amazon hasn't managed to drive out of business yet.) It's a technothriller in the vein of Blood Music, with the plucky genius researcher who injects himself with his own creation and then gets caught up in the usual evil conspiracy to control everything.
is the third novel in Alex Bledsoe's Tufa series, about a secret race of musically magical people in a (hidden?) county in Tennessee, and their intrigues and problems. (I suspect there's an influence from Manly Wade Wellman's "Silver John" stories here, since Bledsoe is also working with authentic American legends.) In this one, one of the two Tufa ever stripped of their powers and exiled is back, and of course she's pissed. Long Black Curl is a Tor hardcover, on sale May 26.
, the sequel to The Unremembered and the continuation of the "Vault of Heaven" series. It's one of those books where there's an ancient evil god out there, and his millennia-old magic chains are failing, so Bad Stuff is ramping up and will keep doing so until the Cast of Thousands travels across the entire map, learns Important Lessons about themselves and the world, gathers all of the Plot Tokens, and reassemble in the last book for a few of the less important characters to die and the rest to be triumphant. (I may be slightly flippant about epic fantasy here. I may also be less than accurate about this particular series.) Trial of Intentions is a Tor hardcover, also available May 26th, and the cover letter insists that it works perfectly fine as an introduction to the series.
, coming in a trade paperback edition from Tachyon in early June. Like all of Reynolds's work, it looks like smart hard-ish science fiction, set in the medium future among former soldiers from both sides of a long, huge interstellar war who wake up on a ship where things are going badly wrong.
. Rajaniemi has written several novels, though I've only managed to read the first one (
, an original anthology of SFnal stories about videogames edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams. It'll be an original trade paperback from Vintage, hitting stores on August 28. And it has new stories from twenty-six very diverse writers, from editor Wilson to Charles Yu, from Seanan McGuire to T.C. Boyle, from Hugh Howey to Catherynne M. Valene, from Rhianna Pratchett to Cory Doctorow, all of whom tell stories inspired by videogames in one way or another.
, which hits paperback from Penguin on May 26th. The first in the series is A Discovery of Witches, and I'm afraid I haven't read any of them, so I can't tell you much. But this one does see our heroes -- "spellbound witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont" -- return from Elizabethan London to the modern day and the characters from the first book.
. It's set in the near future, when asteroid mining has become big business, and top computer hackers battle over the systems dropping the payloads into the ocean -- some on behalf of their employers, the mining companies, and some on behalf of pirates and thieves who want to divert and steal the payloads. (I'm surprised that there's not a stronger regulatory structure around an activity theoretically capable of destroying cities, but that may come up later in the book.) Corsair is a Tor hardcover, and is available now.
so intensively (though it was the night of March 26-27, so it wasn't that recent), but I think it's more likely the opposite: I like Theroux so much, and keep returning to his work, because we're similar types of curmudgeons, and have compatible views of the worth of humanity. I still haven't read any of his novels, despite meaning to do so, but I get to one of his travel books at least once a year [1] and always deeply enjoy them.
, the print manifestation of a once-zeitgeisty website of sad, amusing and Schadenfreude-ian real life stories, and it is the thing that it is and no more than that.
is from that era: I saved a shelf-worth of unread large-format books from the flood, and that shelf is getting read very slowly. (When you read mostly on trains, big books have to fit into the small bits of other reading time.) It was a subject I thought I was interested in -- I'd read a 1926 book, Castles, by the early 20th century military historian Charles Oman, which had a lot of details of warfare and great illustrations. And so I thought this book, written by Lise Hull with great photographs by Stephen Whitehorne, would be in a similar vein.
collects four stories from the first half of the 20th century (more or less), when there was a brief flourishing of this form. (Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong, which I've 