Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.

Books Read: December 2025

As always, this is mostly an index, mostly for me, and not-particularly-useful until the posts actually go live and I come back and update this. (And that will be roughly six weeks from now; I'm running about that far ahead.)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix and Cleopatra (12/6)

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Loki (12/7)

Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye (12/11)

Wiley Miller, The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance (digital, 12/13)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, The Joy of Snacking (digital, 12/14)

Ana Ocina, Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story (digital, 12/20)

James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (in Writings & Drawings, 12/20)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt (digital, 12/21)

Jason, Death in Trieste (digital, 12/24)

Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716 (in Alastor)

Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier, Criminy (digital, 12/25)

Jeff Lemire, Fishflies (digital, 12/26)

Edward Welch, ed., Captain Cuttle's Mailbag (12/26)

Sergio Aragonés, Louder Than Words, Actions Speak (digital, 12/27)

Gilbert Hernandez, Lovers and Haters (digital, 12/28)

Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law (in Waugh Abroad, 12/28)

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death (digital, 12/29)

Kenji Tsurata, Wandering Island, Vol.2 (digital, 12/30)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho (digital, 12/31)

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 12/31)

I plan to keep reading books in 2026. Not all my plans come true, but I'm pretty sure that one will.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2025

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

• This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

But Why?

I didn't have some specific reason, originally, for making my list this way - it seemed like a reasonable way to organize a list, maybe a little idiosyncratic, certainly, but defensible. As the years have gone on, making those weird, particular choices for each month loom larger, and have become a more central part of the process. For example: if I read only books that vaguely annoyed me in a given month, how do I pick a "favorite?"

I'm ambivalent about the idea of literary standards to begin with - they've been used as a cudgel often against the kinds of books I like (not to mention all of the other problems with canon-making, starting with which groups are allowed to be part of it and how they get in) - while at the same time I do think there are aspects of a work that can be clearly done badly or well. There are standards, on some level, which I do think serious readers can identify and note. 

At the same time, lousy things can on occasion be a lot of fun, and well-executed works can be tedious, horrible bilge not worth reading. (cf. Henry James) And I didn't have any interest in celebrating the worthy but dull.

So I wanted to do a list, and I wanted it to have rules that constrained it - but not the same rules as anyone else. These rules grew up as I was doing it, mostly that first year, and have been tweaked since then but are still recognizably the same. So that's why there's twelve, and why each month is its own little competition - because listing favorites for a year is already artificial to begin with, so why not emphasize that artificiality?

January

The last few years, I've been reading a lot of older books - that's good for my reading things I actually enjoy (at least most of the time), but it's bad for this list. Maybe some year I'll break down and say some of my favorite books of a given year are decades old, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Still - I did read a bunch of older, excellent books this year. I started the year reading about a corrupt political establishment and a weird, twisty election in A.J. Liebling's classic book of reportage The Earl of Louisiana, for reasons I think I can leave unstated. Later in January, I got to Stewart O'Nan's first novel, the seasonally appropriate Snow Angels, and also continued a vague project to re-read a lot of Jack Vance, starting his "Tschai" novels with City of the Chasch. (I read the rest of the Tschai books and the three Alastor novels in 2025.)

I also noticed that George O'Connor had started what will be a four-book series of graphic novels (officially for younger readers, but don't let that scare you) and got to the first one, Odin, in January and two more (the ones already published) before the year ended.

But the favorite for the month was a new graphic novel by the unique Carol Lay, My Time Machine, which also - to loop back to Liebling - had a lot of relevance to the world we find ourselves in.

February

Starting with old things again, I continued a re-read of Raymond Chandler's novels (as I type this, I'm just a bit into The Long Goodbye, which I should finish before the year ends) with Farewell, My Lovely this month. They're favorites, but, again, it's not fair to claim anything seven decades old for this year.

Not quite as old, and just as much a favorite, was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, which sent me, a bit later in the year, into re-reading Miller's Daredevil as well.

Even newer - only about a decade old, and new to me - was a fine and visually stunning graphic novel about Brian Epstein, Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson's The Fifth Beatle. I liked it but didn't love it, and thought it had more than a bit of special pleading.

Two other things that I can't quite call my favorites, for different reasons: Axelle Lenoir's fun collection What If We Were.... is enough not-quite-new that I have to make it an also-ran, and Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is both a bit too old to be a 2025 favorite and quirky in ways that sometimes set my teeth on edge (which I'm finding common with Malkasian - she's a very particular creator with definite strengths, so I want to both read her books closely and argue with them intensely).

The favorite for the month is partly a sentimental favorite - Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel this year, the middle-grade story Jules, Penny, and the Rooster. I don't want to say that any new Pinkwater book would automatically be a favorite, but it's close to that - he's such a unique writer, who I've been reading since I was a middle-grade myself, and this is yet another fine bit of Pinkwateriana for brighten the world a bit.

March

My list of possibilities this month is entirely "old," so my favorite will end up being not as new as I would like. Maybe the way to figure out which one it should be is to start from the oldest books. 

I dug back into a big omnibus of Evelyn Waugh travel books by reading Remote People, the story of his trip to see Haile Selassie crowned King of Abyssina, and read a bunch more in that book later in the year - most of it deeply entertaining, even as Waugh was full of opinions and ideas I can't quite bring myself to agree with.

I re-read David Goodis's fine noir novel Down There, which I think I read in a big bunch of Goodis twenty-five years or so ago, so it was time enough to get back to it.

I found and read two good books of memoir this month: Louise Brooks' collection of essays about her time making movies, Lulu in Hollywood, and the newspaperwoman Helene Stapinski's memoir about her childhood in Jersey City, Five-Finger Discount.

I've been reading Julian Hanshaw's graphic novels as I've found them - he's a quirky, specific creator with something new to say in each book so far, which I appreciate. This month, I made my way back to his 2018 book Cloud Hotel.

And I've been spending the year reading the fine Freddy Lombard books of Yves Chaland, who died unexpectedly and far too young around thity years ago. The one that's the most impressive is right in the middle, and that will take pride of place for this month: Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage.

April

A few years later than I expected, I re-read Gene Wolfe's quirky sequel to his "Book of the New Sun" series, The Urth of the New Sun, which I found just as quirky this time around.

Also a few years old, but new to me, was Daria Tessler's semi-wordless (there's no dialogue, but a lot of in-world text) graphic novel Cult of the Ibis, which is deeply quirky in its own way.

For newer things, I read two very different, interesting, good graphic novels: Michael Avon Oeming's moody medieval supernatural tale William of Newbury and Craig Thompson's massive autobiographical Ginseng Roots.

The most impressive book of the month - it's a tough read, and about horrible things at times, so I don't want to say "favorite" quite as strongly for this month - was the new collection of Kayla E.'s stories about her childhood, Precious Rubbish.

May

I listed Chandler's The High Window in my first cut for this post, but I don't want to keep mentioning re-reading old things in the same series, so let me instead call out Chester Himes and The Real Cool Killers, about a decade more current and still as cool and smart and electric as it was sixty years ago.

I read two excellent novels - very different from each other - for the first time this month; both are over a decade old. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth of her novels about Jackson Brodie, which have been championed by crime-fiction readers but are bigger and more encompassing that that. (For all that "crime fiction" is already a very large bucket that can include a vast number of stories.) And William Kotzwinkle's The Midnight Examiner was a fever dream of an '80s tabloid.

I read a bunch of good graphic novels this month, and am finding it difficult to pick one as a favorite. All had strengths, but all also had things I disliked. So I can't quite make Eric Drooker's Naked City or Noah Van Sciver's Beat It, Rufus or Laura Pérez's Ocultos or Grant Snider's Thinking About Thinking or even Mia Oberlӓnder's Anna as my "favorite."

I will give pride of place to All My Bicycles by Powerpaola, a book and a creator I'd never heard of before I picked them up, a distinctive and interestingly framed memoir of a specific, quirky life, a book that was fun and energetic and colorful and wonderful.

June

On the old side, I read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop again, after twenty-some years, and found it just as cynical and nasty and cutting as the first time.

For newer things, I actually read a first novel around the time of publication! There was a decade or so where I did that several times a month, but times change on us. This time around, it was Auston Habershaw with a fine contemporary fantasy, If Wishes Were Retail.

And my favorite of the month was a graphic novel: Love Languages by James Albon, a fine love story by a creator whose work I need to dig into more deeply.

July

I mentioned a Julian Hanshaw book earlier, so, under my rules, I'm not supposed to say that I also read Free Pass this year. Pretend I didn't.

For old books, I read a few - another Evelyn Waugh travel book that I shouldn't mention, for one. I also re-read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I think I got a lot more out of than when I first read it, as a teenager. (But isn't that always the case?) 

The favorite was a no-brainer. Jaime Hernandez had a new collection of his Love & Rockets stories: Life Drawing. 

August

August is a complicated one. If I hadn't already picked a Carol Lay book for this year's list, I'd be happy to give the nod to her Murderburg, which is a fun, zippy collection of great stories about a small-town (island) where killing people is something of a local hobby. But I had, so I couldn't.

I've been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 a bunch the last year or so, with my kids, and this year dug into a few books about it, because that's the kind of over-intellectualizer I am. Best of that bunch, no surprise, is the book by the cast & crew themselves, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide from the mid-90s.

I should throw the "old" books in somewhere around here: I re-read William Goldman's classic fantasy novel The Princess Bride, which is as bright and cutting as ever. New to me, but nearly twenty years old, was the cultural history How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which was smart and full of interesting details of everyday life for a lot of people over close to a century.

And then there were two books that could have been the favorite. One was "new," but largely reprinted old work by a great, now-dead master - so I think I'm going to take half a point off for that and list it first. Richard Sala was a massive talent who died much too soon, and his first book Night Drive was a quirky gem to begin with and made vastly better by the additional material added to the recent posthumous edition.

That leaves pride of place to Jeff Lemire's big, detailed memoir of his life in comics: 10,000 Ink Stains.

September

There were a lot of OK books in September, but not many I want to drag back out here. I got to another Cathy Malkasian book, The Heavy Bright, which I enjoyed and argued with in almost equal proportions. (I've seen reports that she's planning to stop making books, which would be sad: she's a unique, distinctive voice, and I say that even as I argue with almost every page of hers I read.)

I could also mention the fun but slight Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith and the gorgeous but weirdly-ending Betty Blues by Renaud Dilles.

And the favorite for the month was another surprise: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet, an afterlife fantasy by a creator I've never heard of.

October

I've been reading or re-reading P.G. Wodehouse books, about one every second or third month, for several years now - he wrote about a hundred of them, so I have a lot to get through. I read several this year, all entertaining, all uniquely Wodehousian, but the only one I'll mention was this month: The Mating Season.

Also old, also a re-read, also the end of a re-read project: Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I was less-impressed by his middle novels, but this one is still zippy and bright.

Two random graphic novels worth mentioning: the stylish spy thriller Bang! by Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, and the major French biography George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny.

And one more, which almost became the favorite: The Interview by Manuelle Fior, an excellent SFnal story about a decade old now.

But I actually read a big non-fiction prose book, only a few years after publication, and it was full of insights and research and details about forty-some years of underground cartoonists and their followers, so that will take the slot: Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures.

November

At this point in the year, my links start to give out, since the posts haven't gone live yet. I might go back later in '26 and add them in, but I suspect I won't remember to do that.

To start with the old: this year I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was mostly familiar from a million adaptations but full of specifics that strong originals always have and their adaptations never quite include all of.

I also read the excellent '70s SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, also for the first time. Vaguely related - since it's about old SF - is the oral history Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky from several decades of a San Francisco radio-interview program.

On the comics side, I found two excellent books by European creators from earlier this century: Naomi Nowak's Graylight and Ludovic Debeurme's Renée.

For newer comics, also worth noting were Walker Tate's debut Laser Eye Surgery and two books of an unexpected triptych of women cartoonists making memoirs about their relationships with food and eating: Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner and Debbie Tung's My Perfectly Imperfect Body. (I'll mention the third a section down, under December.)

The favorite was a big new book by Bill Griffith, covering the long, complex, fascinating life of his photographer grandfather: Photographic Memory.

December

In the last month of the year, I read a weird old book worth mentioning: Mister Pye, the other novel by Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake. It is light in tone and amiable and utterly its own odd supernatural thing, in a Christian vein unlike anything else I've ever read.

I mentioned Jaime Hernandez's new Love & Rockets collection above, so, out of fairness, I should also mention the similarly new collection by his brother Gilbert, Lovers and Haters. There: I have now mentioned it. I make no claims for favorites or quality.

Reading Jeff Lemire's 10,000 Ink Stains inspired me to make a list of the books of his I'd missed, and I got to his excellent, recent, mostly horror/crime Fishflies this month.

I need to mention John Allison somewhere in this list, though I seem to mostly read his stuff online these days. I did get to the collection of his recent series with Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt, which is full of his great dialogue and sparkling plots - plus Sarin's fine cartoony drawing, too.

The third of the three memoirs by women cartoonist about cooking and eating - and the one that made me notice there were three of them, published almost on top of each other, was the smart and insightful The Joy of Snacking by New Yorker cartoonist and standup comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.

And the favorite for the month, to close out the year, was another collection of laconic genre stories told sideways by the inimitable cartoonist known only as Jason, Death in Trieste.

Top 12 of 2024

• Love Languages by James Albon
• Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland 
• Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet
• Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty
• Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.
• Photographic Memory by Bill Griffith
• Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez
• Death in Trieste by Jason
• My Time Machine by Carol Lay
• 10,000 Ink Stains by Jeff Lemire
• Jules, Penny, and the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater
• All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

I read 207 books last year - less than 2024, more than the four years before that, less than my Book-A-Day Years but more than the ones between. I seem to have found a pattern that works for me.

I don't know if you're like me, but I need to find ways to embed reading - like so many other things that I want to make sure I do regularly - into the fabric of my life, so that it just happens. Years ago, I read for myself while commuting and for work (when I was an editor) in long stretches every weekend and many evenings. Losing the editorial job freed up my weekends, though I sometimes miss that life. Losing the commute sent me into a reading tailspin, and it took me years to figure out how to replace that time regularly.

What I mean to say is: think about the things that matter to you. If you read this far, "reading books" is probably one of them. Embed those things in your life regularly. Make time for them, structurally. Don't let the things you really want to do become contingent and secondary.

And, of course: read good books. I recommend the ones above; you'll have others based on your own tastes. 2026 is as good a time as any. Today is the best time to do anything, to start any project.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 6, 2025

I was getting a movie from the library for my weekly "Movie Night" with my twenty-something kids, and thought "why not look at the ongoing list of books and see if I want to read any of them now?" And so I did, and so I requested these two, and so they were pulled for me.

If you have a local library, check to see if they do this - being able to request specific books online and have them held for you is a really neat feature. (Especially if you already have too many books in the house and are trying not to overly increase that number.)

Here's what I just got, which I'm actually reading this very weekend (one yesterday, one today):

The sixth book in the Asterix series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra. I read the first three in the current, too-small-for-my-aging-eyes omnibus, then jumped to the older album-sized English-language version for #4, Asterix the Gladiator. #5 is not available as a standalone in my library system, and plot/theme/character development does not seem to be a huge issue with these books, so I just moved on to the next one.

Um. And a misaimed search at that big e-commerce site gave me the surprising revelation that there was a recent French live-action series of Asterix movies? How did they find a lead actor short enough?

And the third (of a planned four) book in George O'Connor's current mythology-retold-for-younger-readers series, Asgardians, is Loki, just published this past fall. The first two books in Asgardians were Odin and Thor, as you'd expect; I haven't seen any hints as to who will be covered in #4. O'Connor previously did a long series about the Greek gods, as Olympians, and his work is detailed and smart, filled with insights from myth and fable and told in modern, compelling ways with complex characterization and a muscular, adventure-comics art style. (He also gets in a lot more quirky material than some people might expect from that "young readers" above - his books are suitable for smart middle-schoolers rather than aimed at them, is how I'd put it.)

Thor by George O'Connor

When I wrote about the first of George O'Connor's Asgardian books, Odin, I said confidently that it would be a four-book series. This time, I tried to see if I could figure out where I saw that, and what the last two would be. (Number three is Loki, unsurprisingly - I got that from his publisher's website.) Perhaps my Google-fu is weak today, or the tide of AI slop is drowning out useful search results, but I can't now confirm that this will be a four-book series, or find any indications of what the last book will be.

I still think that is true, and that the fourth book will be about one specific Norse god - rather than being called Ragnarok, for example. My guesses are that it will either go to Frigg or Freyja, despite the few myths about either of them, so there can be at least one woman in this very boyish mythos, or that it will be basically the Ragnarok book under a different title, probably Balder or Tyr. On the other hand, O'Connor could throw us a curveball and do Frey. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Thor is the second book in the series: it was the obvious choice, as Odin was the obvious first choice. (Let's face it: if you do a four-book series about Norse gods, three of them have to be Thor, Odin, and Loki, period. The only thing to decide is that fourth one.)

Thor is a fun character, so this is an energetic, amusing book. O'Connor takes pains, especially in his back matter, to make it clear that his Thor - the mythic Thor - is not quite the came as '60s Donald Blake or the MCU Thor, but you can see their common aspects. Thor is big and straightforward and strong and driven by strong emotion and not exactly dumb, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer and pretty easily led. The cover is a great indication of that: O'Connor's Thor is the kind of guy with a huge grin on his face, doing something he loves - in this case, smashing things with a magical hammer, but you know how gods are.

As in O'Connor's other mythological books (Odin, obviously, and his epic earlier Olympians series about the Greek gods), he weaves myths together into a single narrative, keeping the sense of multiple overlapping stories while still making the book a single overall thing. This time out, Thor is on his way back from something - we'll find out what, eventually - wearing rags, hugely happy with himself, and he wants an old ferryman to get him across the river on the border of Jotunheim and Midgard. That leads to Thor telling stories to confirm who he is - or maybe just to boast; it's hard to tell with Thor - and the book flows out from there.

Again, Thor is fun to read about, the kind of mythological figure that generations of storytellers delighted in because his personality is so perfect for stories. O'Connor - here supported with colors by SJ Miller - places Thor in a believable world, bleaker and darker than the Olympians' but full of life and people, and tells a bunch of those stories, going back to the original source material as he always does.

O'Connor's mythological books are supposedly for younger readers - at least, they're made so as to be accessible to middle-graders, and published via an apparatus that's really good at getting books in front of middle-schoolers - but myths are deep and wondrous things, and should never be left only to children. O'Connor knows that well, and at the same time knows that children are smarter than you expect and more focused than you imagine. His books have an impressive array of backmatter, scholarly enough for the adults reading and accessible enough for the kids, to explain all of the references and send more dedicated readers back to the sources.

Books Read: June 2025

The monthly index returns again - as always, I really doubt anyone other than me ever looks at these posts. But here's what I read last month:

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Thor (6/1)

Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Be a Motorist (6/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story (digital, 6/7)

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (6/7)

Philiipe Riche, Bad Break, Vol. 1 (digital, 6/8)

Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral, The Treasure of the Black Swan (digital, 6/14)

Auston Habershaw, If Wishes Were Retail (6/14)

Cathy Malkasian, Temperance (digital, 6/15)

Frank Conniff, Twenty-Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever (6/15)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Sex Day (digital, 6/19)

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (in Complete Novels, 6/19)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol.1 (digital, 6/20)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol.4: Holiday in Budapest (digital, 6/21)

Hope Larson and Tintin Pantoja, Who Is AC? (6/22)

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (6/22)

Annie Goetzinger, The Provocative Colette (digital, 6/28)

James Albon, Love Languages (digital, 6/29)

Next month there will be more books. And some of the names above will have links added once my posts go live.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 31, 2025

 A few new books arrived this week - three in a box from the fine folks at Tachyon, and one from the library. As always, books from actual publishers come first, especially since I vaguely want to read all three of them:

The Adventures of Mary Darling is the new novel from Pat Murphy, which seems to be her first since The Wild Girls in 2007. I have a bound galley, but publication date was May 5th, so I think you could get your own copy immediately. It's a retelling of Peter Pan, at least to some degree, focusing on their mother (Mary), who consults with Sherlock Holmes about their disappearance but then has to chase off around the world to gather allies and clear her name and (presumably) save her children. It's not clear if there are any fantasy elements, but Murphy has been a SFF writer from the beginning, so I'd expect something.

I read Josh Rountree's first book The Legend of Charlie Fish, a particularly weird Western, and liked it a lot. So I'm happy to see he's back with The Unkillable Frank Lightning, another story in the same style. There's this married couple - he's a soldier, she's an occultist. In 1879, he was killed in the line of duty, and she resurrected him, but he came back without his soul. The novel takes place primarily twenty-five years later, when they meet again. For this one, I have a finished book, but it apparently doesn't publish until early July.

And the third book from Tachyon is If Wishes Were Retail, a novel by Auston Habershaw. It's a humorous fantasy, I think of the subset where the world already has magic on an everyday level. Alex is a teen, who wants to get out of her dead-end town - but even more than that, she needs a job, to get some income, to have any chances. So she's interviewing for a job at the dying local mall, working for Mr. Jinn and selling wishes at a kiosk. Good news is she gets the job. And I assume the less-good news is what happens next.

The library book, which I will read even more quickly, because library, is Thor, the second in George O'Connor's Asgardians series. The first one was Odin, which I saw a couple of months ago, and, before that, O'Connor did a twelve-book series about the Greek pantheon, which was quite impressive. This one, I presume, retells the legends about Thor, as the title implies.

Odin by George O'Connor

How do you follow up a decade-long, twelve-book series about the most famous group of gods on the planet?

If you're George O'Connor, you pick what's arguably the next most famous pantheon, and start a new four-book series. (The Olympians series was originally four books, then expanded quickly to twelve after early success, so some people might hope the same will happen to Asgardians - I hate to dash anyone's hopes, but I don't think there's that much underlying myth to work from. So four is what we should expect.)

The Olympians series ran from 2010 through 2022, and was a surprisingly robust, nuanced retelling of Greek myth in comics - a format and style that was not off-putting to middle-grade readers but only made a few allowances (like avoiding direct references to Zeus's tendency to turn himself into an animal and rape any woman who caught his eye) to their younger years. Those books were Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, and Dionysos.

The Norse pantheon is far more doom-laden than the Greek, with the whole Ragnarok thing baked into the story from the beginning, and the existing stories are more focused on blood and sex in ways that might make teachers and parents uneasy (may I mention what happened when Loki turns himself into a mare?) And, as I alluded to above, the corpus of Norse myth is tiny: two books, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, both of which were literary productions from a time when people had mostly stopped believing in these myths as being religiously true. The Greek equivalent would be if we had Hesiod, but nothing else - or maybe a four-century-later retelling of Hesiod, with random quotes from stories that aren't told in full.

But O'Connor is up to the challenge, and Odin - the first of this expected four-book Asgardians series - arrived almost a year ago, to tell the origin myths of the Nordic Nine Worlds and a bunch of myths about Odin. His art is moodier here, I think - not that there wasn't plenty of battle and mayhem in Olympians - and the coloring by Norm Grock subtly differentiates it from the mostly sunnier, Mediterranean feel of the Olympians books.

The framing story involves the Valkyries and Valhalla - the viewpoint is a person chosen on a battlefield and brought to the mead hall, where three mysterious figures tell him how the world came to be, what the nine worlds are, and some of the things Odin, chief of the gods of Valhalla, has done.

So we get the giant Ymir in the void, and the two races that appeared on him - the gods of the Aesir and the Jotnar, sometimes called giants. The Aesir go from Buri to Bor to Odin, Vili, and Ve, who kill Ymir and build their world from his corpse. The Aesir and Jotnar battle a bit, but Odin becomes blood-brothers with the Jotnar Loki. The Vanir appear, and the two pantheons of gods fight before making peace. And Odin seeks more knowledge, particularly of the future, hanging on the tree and learning the runes and losing his eye.

O'Connor drops back to the frame story multiple times, which helps smooth some of those inevitable transitions - Norse myth is a bunch of sometimes disconnected moments (What happened to Buri, Bor, Villi, and Ve? Where did the Vanir come from?), and O'Connor's detailed, interesting backmatter dives into the details of what we know and what we simply don't. The main story reads cleanly and flows well; it doesn't need the backmatter but having it is helpful for the nosy readers like me who want more details.

I find O'Connor's work more organic than what I've seen of the Gaiman/Russell Norse Mythology comics adaptation, which is more Marvel-inspired and tells each story as a separate tale on its own. O'Connor, I think, is trying to tell the whole story of Norse myth, as well as we know it, straight through from beginning to end, with the backmatter notes to explain the things that he has to leap over or guess at along the way. Both are valid approaches, but I appreciate O'Connor's ambition and enthusiasm more.

Books Read: January 2025

This is going up late, which is pretty common. I type this on February 24th - almost time for the next month! - but it's purely an index anyway, and one that's basically useless until I publish the posts in another couple of weeks. Anyway, I'm burying it on a weekend a few weeks back, and here's what I read the first month of the year:

Chip Kidd, Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts (1/1, digital)

A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 1/1)

Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Deponnier, Sartre (1/4, digital)

George O'Connor, Odin (1/5)

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, Once Upon a Workday (1/11, digital)

Patricia A. McKillip, The Book of Atrix Wolfe: 30th Anniversary Edition (1/11, bound galleys)

John Hendrix, The Mythmakers (1/12, digital)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 5: Black Wind (1/18/ digital)

Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels (1/18)

Jean "Moebius" Giraud, The Major (1/19, digital)

Michael Sweater, Please Destroy the Internet (1/20, digital)

Jack Vance, City of the Chasch (1/20, in Planet of Adventure)

Carol Lay, My Time Machine (1/25, digital)

Liniers, Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin (1/26, digital)

In February, I have continued to read books, and I'll post a similar list sometime after this month ends - maybe right away, maybe substantially later. We shall see.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 4, 2025

Over the holidays, I thought I'd want to read some books - some particular books. So I put some things on hold at the library, forgetting that the wheels of librarianship turn more slowly, as do all of our wheels, during the holidays. So they're not all here yet, even a week later, but some of them are, and I'm listing what has arrived so far today.

I also got a couple of books in the mail this week, and I'll list those below as well.

The Wood at Midwinter is a very small book by Susanna Clarke, set in the same world as her very big debut book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (It's so short, I think it's actually a novelette, not even a novella.) It's also illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, which means the sixty small pages here aren't even all filled with words. I don't mind short books, of course, but this one seems to test the limits of how short something can be and still be bound between two covers. That's exactly the kind of book a library is best for, though: don't spend your own money on it, get it quickly, get it back quickly so others can have a go as well.

Starter Villain was John Scalzi's new novel last year; it's a humorous SF book set in the present day, I think. I read a bunch of Scalzi when I was at the SFBC and soon afterward, which led me to mildly grump about how he wasn't using his talents in the cause of seriousness once or twice - it was a silly complaint, I admit, but between God Engines and Ghost Brigades, it felt like early Scalzi had at least one Big Serious Book in him itching to get out, and I guess I thought I was being encouraging - but I have gotten better since. I missed a big swath of his space opera from the past decade or so, which I may come back to someday. But his quick breezy standalones are just the kind of thing I like reading these days, when time is tight - I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society right around this time last year.

Odin is the first of what I think is a four-book series by George O'Connor, following up his twelve-book Olympians series from the past decade. (Links to my Olympians posts: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares/Apollo/Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, Dionysos.) Like the previous series, this is officially for young readers, but I found O'Connor's Greek mythology deeply researched (with text features in the back), engrossing as stories, and drawn with a great adventure-comics style. So it might be officially for tweens, but there's a lot for adults to enjoy in his work.

And here's what came in the mail:

The Book of Atrix Wolfe, a Patricia A. McKillip novel in a new 30th Anniversary edition from Tachyon. I haven't read this one - I keep saying I should read more McKillip, but she wrote so many novels, and all of them seem to be both pretty good and standalone, that it's difficult to figure out where to start. Having a book drop right into my lap, though, could be a sign from the world that this is the one; let's see if I can get to it. This edition publishes on February 25th in trade paper and electronic formats, but if you had a burning desire to read the book before that, it is thirty years old, so...you know, you probably could.

Egyptian Motherlode is a fantasy novel - I think - set in the musical world, by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman and published by Fairwood Press in October. The main character is called The Prophet, who has, as the back cover puts it, "the ability to warp reality through his music." The book seems to be a Zelig-esque trip through the 20th century in the company of The Prophet, as he meets everybody the authors loved and gets caught up in various plots, schemes, musical movements, and what-not.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2022

Every year, I post something like this on New Year's morning - a listing of the books I liked best the previous year. Some years I've read less, and keep it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

I'm doing it again; I read slightly more books in 2022 than in 2021. The numbers aren't what they were back when I was an editor, or during my periodic Book-A-Day binge years, but I read 191 books in 2022, which is enough to find some themes and favorites.

First, though, I feel the need to link back to those past posts: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

But, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic (that monthly thing, for example), and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year.
1. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best."
1. I can't define "best." I can definite "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's everything I read all in one stew.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose to newish books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to other people's lists; it doesn't always work.
1. I do not only list books published in 2022, for example - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wants to do that, but I just don't read enough, or in that focused a way.

January

I'll start by mentioning that I've been reading Joan Didion's non-fiction over the past eighteen months or so; I read The White Album in January. Under my rules, it's not really eligible, but it's a great collection of interesting thoughts presented well, and still worth reading forty-plus years after it was written.

Everything else I have to mention is a comic of one kind or another - Guy Delisle's affecting memoir of his youth, Factory Summers, the gorgeous and thorny The Golden Age, Book One by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa, and R. Kikuo Johnson's deep No One Else, a book I still think needs to be read at least twice.

My favorite is the lovely, sunny, wonderful Always Never by Jordi Lafebre, a love story told in reverse.

February

The old book worth mentioning this month was Lord Emsworth and Others, a collection of Blandings Castle stories by P.G. Wodehouse. It contains "The Crime Wave at Blandings," and if you read nothing else ever by Wodehouse, you must read that story.

I was very taken by Dennis Duncan's Index, a History of the, which is exactly what it says it is, and which is exactly as good as you hope it would be.

My favorite, though, came from the field of comics: Mikael Ross's The Thud, the story of a life-changing event and the young man whose life was already much different from what most people would have hoped for.

March

I don't think I'll keep up this pattern the whole year, but I'll start by mentioning Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, a great collection by a great poet. There is a newer, probably more complete Poems available, which is probably the place to go.

Also old is John le Carre's second novel, the murder mystery A Murder of Quality. It's set in a world alien to most people who might be reading this - a "Great School" of England in the early 1960s - and relentless in its searching eye on that world.

My favorite is once again a comic: The Strange Ones, a long-gestating story about punky kids in the early '90s by Jeremy Jusay.

April

OK, this time I'll start with something memorable that I'm not exactly recommending: Gilbert Hernandez's polymorphously perverse Blubber, which is like nothing else ever...and I'm not sure if that's a complement.

On the more positive side, Tardi's 1970s story The True Story of the Unknown Soldier is still strong and focused. And Pete S. Beagle's recent novel Summerlong is a mythic gem, a small novel about a small group of people and one extended, unexpected summer.

My favorite for the month was Brandon Graham's SF graphic novel Rain Like Hammers, for its depth, its complexities, for its refusal to do the obvious thing, and for its wandering, discursive story.

May

First: something indescribable. Jim Woodring's The Frank Book collected his earliest stories about Frank and his world - they are the closest to understandable, the simplest and most obvious works in Woodring's corpus, and yet they are still utterly sui generis.

Second, something ending: John Allison's The Case of the Severed Alliance, collecting the tenth and last plotline from his "Bad Machinery" webcomic. All good things must end, especially good stories - it's what makes them stories. Allison is exceptionally good at both of those things.

Last, my favorite: Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel, Crazy in Poughkeepsie. I don't know how much more I need to say, or could say.

June

A big clutch of things to mention: I'll start with Charles Stross's novella Escape from Yokai Land, a return for his series character Bob Howard and a vision of a different part of his nearly-apocalyptic Laundry world.

From the world of comics: Manuele Fior's deep SFnal story Celestia; Darryl Cunningham's well-researched and entirely committed Billionaires (hint: Cunningham is not in favor of billionaires); Rutu Modan's complex and complicated Tunnels; the fabulous and large Alone in Space, collecting a whole bunch of Tillie Walden's earlier work; and Brenna Thummler's already well-known middle-grade story of grief and next steps, Sheets.

My favorite was a quirky novella, something like a sequel and something like a religious apologetic: K.J. Parker's Inside Man, the story of one demon and his human nemesis.

July

I read two old SF novels - one a re-read, one for the first time. J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World was still deeply Ballardian, his second novel but the one that crystalized how he would write from that moment forward. And Algis Budrys's Michaelmas was even more adult and complex than I expected, a smart novel from the era when SF had to be short and so good novels crammed in depths to every word.

Paul Theroux's travel book On the Plain of Snakes was a deep and intriguing look at many facets of Mexico, from the point of view of one old gringo driving through it and trying to be as honest as open as he could be.

Walter Jon Williams launched a fantasy trilogy with Quillifer, featuring a roguish first-person narrator with a marvelous voice, reminding me that there doesn't seem to be anything that Williams can't write brilliantly.

And I read a cluster of excellent graphic novels by women: collections of short pieces by Carolyn Nowak (Girl Town) and Lilli Carre (Heads or Tails), the climate-change mid-life crisis bandee dessinee Amalia by Aude Picault, Jade Khoo's Miyazaki-inspired YAish adventure Zoc, and Lee Lai's deep and affecting story of sisters and lovers Stone Fruit.

The most memorable book is not part of that cluster, but maybe can be seen as related to it: I was trying to read outside my own life and experiences, so I came to Maia Kobabe's resonant and thorny memoir Gender Queer, in which e tries to explain eir entire relationship with gender and the world at large, and largely succeeds.

August

I was reading a lot of old books this year, wasn't I? Two memoirs came in close sequence this month: Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, an early Vietnam memoir from the years just afterward, and Joseph Heller's Now and Then, a more traditional whole-life memoir published barely a year before he died.

Frances Larson's Severed was my "serious" non-fiction book for the month, a comprehensive look at severed heads throughout history - smart, interesting, and sneakily funny quite a lot of the time.

From the visual side, I enjoyed the deeply affecting story of ghosts and family history Ghost Tree by Bobby Carnow and Simon Gane. I finally saw new stories in the Trese series from Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo in Trese, Vol. 4: Last Seen After Midnight, after years of waiting and hoping. And the nutty fast-paced thriller Omni-Visibilis by Lewis Trondheim and Matthieu Bonhomme was a massive hoot.

My favorite for the month was another collection of comics stories by a woman - maybe a late entry in the batch from the previous month - the chilly and thoughtful and formally brilliant Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan.

September

Most of what I have to mention this month is fantasy of one sort or another, so let me start with one story collection and one novel, both by formidable women writers: Prophecies, Libels and Dreams by Ysabeau S. Wilce, gathering the smaller pieces of her Califa sequence, and Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, an early, dreamy, erotically-tinged story of other worlds and impossible desires and what we give up to get what we have to have.

Somewhat in the same vein is Dionysos: The New God, the last in George O'Connor's twelve-book retelling of Greek myths - they're ostensibly for middle-grade readers, but don't let that scare you away.

I don't think Bastien Vives's bandee dessinee The Blouse is actually fantasy, but you could make an argument in that direction, if you want. It has a stark, unblinking camera eye and an uneasy view of sex and power and visibility. Vives was also part of the team, along with Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot, creating the souffle of a caper story The Grand Odalisque, which is lovely and deeply enjoyable and about as serious as a random Bond movie.

My favorite for the month was back in the fantasy realm: Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars, a solo omnibus of three albums by the very prolific Lewis Trondheim. It's much like the Dungeon series co-written by Trondheim, with some twists of its own: a smart, adult series set in a big, complex world where anything can happen.

October

Old things: Roy Morris Jr's excellent '90s biography Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company and P. G. Wodehouse's wonderful '30s Blandings novel Heavy Weather.

Graphic things: the affecting and down-to-earth A Journal of My Father by Jiro Taniguchi; Max de Radiguès's two-track tale of young love and confusion, Simon & Louise; the complex memoir of a frightening illness, Parenthesis by Elodie Durand.

Josh Ritter's long-gestating second novel, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, was a big-hearted and open and wild as its title implies.

And my favorite was a new short novel by an old favorite: Tom Perrotta's multi-viewpoint Tracy Flick Can't Win, a book that is both a sequel to Election and a smart book about middle age and choices that stands on its own.

November

I'm very slowly reading old novels by John Le Carre, and got to his mid-Sixties The Looking Glass War this month. It's a devastating look at deluded men and the damage they cause.

Jasper Fforde's much newer The Constant Rabbit had a similarly hostile aim, but much more obviously - it's a coldly angry novel, tangling up a dozen modern issues into an unexpected fantasy framework.

Megan Kelso had a new collection of her comics with the long pieces collected in Who Will Make the Pancakes - it was welcome, reminding me of her subtleties and deceptively simple drawings.

Speaking of subtleties, my favorite book was from Bastien Vives - the puckishly-titled A Sister, which is not a memoir but was inspired by his own life, and which has the same unblinking eye I admired in The Blouse earlier in the year, but in a more focused, personal story.

December

Starting with the old, once again, let me mention Manix Abrera's wordless comics collection 12, which I was happy to see has finally been published "in English" (strange to say about a wordless book, but you know what I mean) and re-read with pleasure and joy. I also, after a decade and a half, finally read Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher.

Similarly old, but which I only just discovered: Michael Wex's lively and culturally-centered tour of the Yiddish language, Born to Kvetch.

Also old, and finally coming down from the shelf for a read at the end of the year: Ian Frazier's discursive, personal, thoughtful On the Rez, the story of a friendship and a people and a time and, a bit, about Native life in the USA.

I got to the second of the Ralph Azham series by Lewis Trondheim, The Land of the Blue Demons, which was just as good as the first.

Tom Gauld's new collection of cartoons, Revenge of the Librarians, came from the bookish side of his work, and was just as smart and enjoyable as his work from the scientific side, or elsewhere.

And that leaves me with two novels to choose from for the last slot of the year. Both are sequels, of their own kinds. Both are genre books, by their own lights. Both are fun - one is lighter than the other. 

Silver goes to the unexpected The Burglar Who Met Frederic Brown, written and published this year by the indefatigable Lawrence Block, funny and quick and also an excursion into a different genre than most readers would expect.

And my final favorite is Lavie Tidhar's Neom - a SF novel set in an indefinite future but a mostly-positive one, a world full of wonders and dangers, full of minds human and otherwise, full of people living quirky and interesting lives, full of opportunities and threats and surprises.

Top 12 of 2022

And then, to pull that unwieldly long ramble into an actual list:

• Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
• Crazy in Poughkeepsie by Daniel Pinkwater
• Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
• Inside Man by K.J. Parker
• Neom by Lavie Tidhar
• Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan
• Rain Like Hammers by Brandon Graham
• Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars by Lewis Trondheim
• A Sister by Bastien Vives
• The Strange Ones by Jeremy Jusay
• The Thud by Mikael Ross
• Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

That's what I read that was worth celebrating and remembering; I hope you have high points of your own, and, maybe, that my list above gives you some thoughts for your 2023 reading.