Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 13, 2023

I ordered a big box of books for Edward R. Hamilton, a fine purveyor of mostly remainders that I've been buying from for several decades. It was delayed a bit by the storm that came through here a few days ago, but that's fine - the box got delivered after the rain ended, which is a good thing for a big box of books left on a front porch.

I'm breaking the big box into two weeks, to save wear and tear on my fingers - this post will list seven of them, and a similar post next Sunday (which I hope to type tomorrow) will list the other seven. It's all pretty random, since the point of remainders is to get what you can and see what looks fun.

The Two of Swords, Volume One is the first in a secondary-world fantasy trilogy by K.J. Parker, who was a mysterious figure back when I was in the SFF field but was since revealed as Tom Holt. I have a couple of Parker books on my shelf, and found everything I read by him to be excellent - I still have great memories of his early "Scavenger" trilogy, which was magnificent. I have a hard time finding time for big fat fantasy trilogies these days, but Parker might be an exception; I'll have to see.

Stolen Skies was the third of the "Vickery and Castine" novels by Tim Powers, which I mostly missed as they were coming out, maybe because they came from Baen. I read the first one, Alternate Routes, a couple of years ago, and found it minor Powers - which is still pretty good, I should say. I haven't read the second one, and now I have, of all things, a mass-market paperback of the third book. Life is weird.

Not Dark Yet was Peter Robinson's 2021 novel, a new entry in the DCI Banks series. I used to read this series in the '90s and early Aughts - I think the most recent one I got to was Playing With Fire from 2004, and I covered the first book in the series, The Hanging Valley, here in 2007. So this is yet another mystery series where in my head I'm just on a short hiatus, while in reality Robinson has written at least a dozen books that I've never seen. Maybe I'll read this one! he said brightly.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a great book, a fix-up by Gene Wolfe, from very early in his career. I used to have a copy of it before my 2011 flood, but I haven't read it in a long time. I re-read "Book of the Long Sun" a few years back; it might be time to hit this one again as well.

The Complete Wraith! collects all of Michael T. Gilbert's pseudo-Spirit-homage from the 1970s, in a 2019 volume that I'm not sure I knew existed until I saw it available as a remainder. (I am not in comic shops as often as I used to be, which is a huge understatement.) I loved Gilbert's Mr. Monster, and wished he'd been doing more of it this past, oh, probably close to twenty years, but I'll take another book of his earlier work if that's what I can get.

The Story of Sex is a 2017 book by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn, a bande desinée translated from the French. It's what it says it is: a graphic-novel version of the history of sex of the human race, and I've been vaguely looking for it for a few years, so finding it as a remainder was a nice bonus.

Last for this batch is a book that was much bigger than I expected: McCay by Thierry Smolderen and Jean-Philippe Bramanti. It's some kind of fictionalized story about the cartoonist Windsor McCay -  I think he saves the world, or travels through dreams, or something weird like that - and the art looks neat.