Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/22

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here's the scoop: I've been keeping a record of the books I've read since the end of 1990, so, once a week (ostensibly) I randomly pick a past year in that span and list the books I was reading the same week that year. With luck, I can actually remember what those books were. This week, the magic number is eight, so we're gonna read like it's 1999:

• Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic (7/15)
  I think Stoll was against the Internet, so something to that effect -- that was what made him a "heretic." After a quick Google, I see that he was specifically against computers and the Internet in schools -- that he thought spending lots of money to have faster computers and connections (money that needs to be spent again every three years or so) for kids in school could be much better spent elsewhere. Hey, whad'ya know: I agree with him there.
  
• Mike Ashley, editor, The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy II (7/15)
  It was mammoth, it was comic, it was fantasy -- some large number of stories, nearly all reprint (and a surprising number of them from the public domain) all shoved into one set of covers. I don't remember it well, but I sold quite a lot of them for several years.
  
• Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon, Owlknight (7/18)
  The hero had stopped being quite so whiny by the third book in the trilogy -- in the first book, this reader kept wishing someone would drown him in the river, like an unwanted kitten -- but Valdemar was a mass of wish-fulfillment fantasy by this point, so I can't claim it was great literature. But I liked reading all of those books, and I intermittently wish Lackey would write more.
  
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Dream Hunters (7/19)
  I read the novella or so of text, without the Yoshitaka Amano illustrations that eventually accompanied it. And I don't remember much about it, now -- I suspect it was a quiet, constrained story, since most of the late Sandman stuff was, but that's just a guess.
  
• James Stoddard, The False House (7/20)
  Sequel to The High House, a great first fantasy novel about a house that contains multitudes of fantasy worlds within itself. False was a bit like High warmed up the next day: it was pleasant, and quite fun, but clearly secondhand. I don't think he's published any other novels since, so maybe he didn't have anything else novelistic to say. But, still, if you haven't read The High House, try to track it down -- it's a bit like Gormenghast as written by Michael Moorcock.
  
• Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson, Manhunter: The Special Edition (7/22)
  The Goodwin-Simonson "Manhunter" serial from 1973-74, with a new (at the time) dialogue-less story plotted by the two before Goodwin's unexpected death. It's a thin trade paperback with an unappealing all-gold cover, and I only moderately enjoyed the stories. I mostly got this because I was a big Simonson fan from his days on Thor, honestly.
  
• Peter Bagge, Buddy's Got Three Moms! (7/22)
  I didn't think the Buddy Bradley stories had the same energy and verve once he moved back to New Jersey...but, on the other hand, Hate featured a major comics character bouncing around my home turf, so that was kinda cool. And Bagge must have felt similarly, since he ended Hate not too long after this; there was only one more collection. I haven't read any of Hate in a while, but I bet it reads like a serious '90s time capsule now.

A fairly typical week, with some work reading (including one novel I suppressed here because I didn't finish it) and a small pile of comics stuff.