Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 15, 2024

I had a birthday earlier this month - a half-decade one, the kind that feel like they should be important but really aren't - and so I got some presents. All of these books were presents, and all but one of them were things I bought myself: as I've said before, one of the great benefits of being middle-aged is that you can buy yourself your own damn presents, and get exactly what you want.

Here's what I unwrapped:

Authority, the second book in Jeff Vandermeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy. I read the first book, Annihilation, a few years back, and want to catch up on Vandermeer's books, though (at my current reading speed) that's not all that likely. But this gives me a new option on the shelf, and supports a writer I like, and maybe I'll get to it soon.

The Demon Princes, Vol. 2 collects the concluding two novels of the five-volume series of that name by Jack Vance. I've been reading the series over the past six months or so - I started it after finishing up a re-read of Vance's "Dying Earth" books, and will probably continue reading random Vance for as long as I can keep finding decent modern editions - and I needed this book so I can get to these books in the near future. Vance is one of the greats: that's why.

Lyorn is the new book by Steven Brust, the seventeenth in his Vlad Taltos series. The most recent one before this was Tsalmoth; from my post on that you could continue backwards, if you care. This is a wonderful, quirky adventure-fantasy series with occasional (usually very successful) outbreaks of writerly game-playing, and the books tend to basically stand alone for anyone who wants to dip in.

And last is Poor Helpless Comics!, a collection of the work of Ed Subitsky. I gather this is pretty much entirely the '70s and '80s stuff I was already familiar with from the National Lampoon; Subitsky moved into TV after that and made more money doing something not nearly as time-consuming and puckish as weird comics with too many tiny boxes. But this stuff finally got collected, which is both surprising and wonderful.