May 2020 Books Read Standouts: The City We Became/Gideon The Ninth

The Great Cities Trilogy, Book 1: The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin

    N.K. Jemisin is a Power: a black, female author who won the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row for the three entries in her Broken Earth Trilogy. There is simply no one with whom to compare her, so naturally I was hype for her take on Lovecraftia and wasn't disappointed. 
    It is worth noting that there's a big conversation about replacing the term "Lovecraftian" with "Cosmic Horror" because fuck that guy and his dead racist skeleton bones, and I understand and don't necessarily disagree with that idea, but 1.) This story deals with specifically Lovecraft-brand things and addresses the problems with them, and 2.) It's funny as hell that he would hate all of these women like Ruthanna Emerys and people of color like Victor LaValle doing amazing work in a genre that only bears his name because he got to it first and in which he is an increasingly irrelevant contributor. To that point, City's characters are overwhelmingly ethnically diverse (to reflect New York itself) and is a Cast Full of Gay. Eat shit and stay dead forever, Howard, and get in, losers, we're telling interesting, realistically-colored stories with people who look and talk like all of us.
    The City We Became is an expansion of The City Born Great (which is included in the novel), a short story from Jemisin's collection How Long Til Black Future Month, which I'm reading presently and enjoying very much. City deals with people who are chosen to be genius loci, avatars of Cities that have Awakened, such as Hong Kong and São Paolo, and as New York awakens it faces a complication: it is not one city, it is five boroughs, each with its own avatar and all of whom must find one another before the city can complete its coalescence. And they have to find each other fast, because they're vulnerable in this liminal state, and there is an Enemy, a predator city that has felt New York's birth-stirrings and will stop at nothing to devour its new life and energy, infect the shell it leaves behind and grow another of itself from its corpse.
    I've never been to New York! City does a pretty good job of staying accessible and explaining stuff you need to know in order for the story to work, and between that and the general knowledge about the city that one gets through cultural osmosis as an American I was fine. That said, the book is in love with its city, which is certainly not a bad thing but if you aren't a New York Person, like I am not, that wavelength of the book can begin to...grate a little.
    Finally, City ends super abruptly, which jarred and frustrated me until I realized it's because this is the first book in a trilogy, not a book with two planned sequels coming; it's The Golden Compass leading into The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, not Dune being followed by Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. Trilogy Creep is very common and not usually a great thing, so it's very refreshing that City has a comfortable sense of pace and doesn't feel the need to wrap everything up neatly and hope you'll be back next time; instead it sets a long, sometimes a little slow hook in you, gradually tightens the line and you run out of book JUST as it's about to pull you out of the water.

Score: 8/10 Melty-Ass Breakfast Sandwiches

The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Vol. 1: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

       I\"m gonna let my tweets from when I read this do the talking:

Me: Aw man, I didn’t realize #GideonTheNinth was sci-fantasy, those are two great tastes that I don’t actually enjoy together, generally, but let’s give it a shot

~Ten Pages Later~

M: oh cool turns out I’m an idiot who doesn’t know WHAT he likes ‘cause this RULES

— C.W. “The Major From Bajor” Hills (@NightSpringsFM) December 20, 2019

#GideonTheNinth has me looking up more words and highlighting more hilarious and deeply strange turns of phrase than any book since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and cousin that is saying something

— C.W. “The Major From Bajor” Hills (@NightSpringsFM) February 10, 2020

Uhhhhh hey guess what #GideonTheNinth still fuckin rules if you need something hilarious and terrifying to read, like an Agatha Christie where all the suspects are lesbian space-necromancers and the train is a planet built to be a tomb for Something and Poirot is a bone-monster

— C.W. “The Major From Bajor” Hills (@NightSpringsFM) May 25, 2020

#GideonTheNinth was incredible and hilarious and terrifying and heartbreaking and REALLY CONFUSING SOMETIMES and I am SO MAD that I have to wait like two months for the next book pic.twitter.com/5g6NY8FTjv

— C.W. “The Major From Bajor” Hills (@NightSpringsFM) May 28, 2020

    In the end I did have to deduct a couple of points because it does get frustratingly confusing for a while, albeit in a "this will all make sense in the end" way, which it does, but that doesn't really help you when you're paging through and literally can't understand wha's happening with the information you're being provided. NEVERTHELESS: A hard recommend for anybody who needs more swordfights, more cool magic systems, more space-nonsense, more LGBT+ representation and more wordplay so incredibly sharp and hilarious it almost negates the need for the swordfights.

Score: 8/10 Asses Kicked So Hard The Locked Tomb Opened And A Parade Came Out To Sing Lo! A Destructed Ass 

 I'm beginning to think that it runs in the family

April 2020 Books Read Standouts: A Confederacy Of Dunces/Mister Miracle

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

        Dunces is the funniest book ever written, the kind of funny so smart and profound and forceful that half the time you can't even laugh because what's happened is bigger than laughter can hold. I've read it half a dozen times and on this occasion read it to my wife, and every single time I've found new things to love and jokes I missed in previous read-throughs.
    The long and short of Dunces is that it's about a man, Ignatius J. Reilly, who is an idiot, believes he is the smartest person in the world, and proceeds to absolutely destroy the lives of everyone he meets, including his own mother, a beat cop who is forced by his CO to wear a false beard, the entire staff of a dying pants company, a racist nightclub entrepreneur/pornographess, the owner of a hot-dog cart empire and a house party full of what were, for the 60's, fairly progressive depictions of uh, young men with fashion sense and a penchant for Judy Garland. Interestingly, for a book written by a white dude in the 60's about New Orleans, every black character in the book is portrayed positively, being painted as canny and far more decent than the white society that oppresses them, though this is through the lens of the practical results of that oppression and so the depiction is maybe less sensitive than a modern author's would be, but is a clear reflection of the social stations and resources available to them at the time, with and through which they still manage victory.
    One of the more interesting aspects of Dunces' history is how it had to struggle to live; its author, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969 and his mother found the manuscript and spent the next eleven years taking it from publisher to publisher, demanding someone appreciate her son's work, until someone finally did and saved a jewel of the English language from the garbage heap. Mothers got a hard road.

Score: 9/10 Mother's Fabulous Hats

Mister Miracle

    Yoboy, this book. Tom King is a genius, of which fact I first became aware when reading The Vision, and I don't have anything to say about that book that others haven't said before and better than I could. And honestly it's much the same here; I don't have any familiarity with the source material except a handful of Darkseid-centric JLA/JLU episodes and King still managed to make me care deeply about--and, in one case, be profoundly frightened of--these characters. He also did what stories are supposed to do: used masks to tell true stories in such a way that we wouldn't be blinded by looking directly at them.
    A man tries to live peacefully with his wife and not let their lives and selves be destroyed by the traumas the endured in their youths, which still rear their heads. Things get complicated when they learn they're having a baby, the man's father wants to involve himself in his grandson's life, and the couple are forced to confront the possibility that they'll inflict those same traumas on their child in the course of trying to prevent them. 
    This is a good story, a True Story, and the fact that its given a set-dressing of gods and heroes and planets far from our own doesn't make it less so, just more palatable, and providing a layer of protection between these events and our hearts. As Mike Carey said in The Unwritten, "For-real true is only true right now. Story-true is true forever."

Score: 9/10 Deluxe Veggie Platters

now she's in the air, radical and free 

March 2020 Books Read Standouts: False Value/Rumble, Vol. 1

Rivers of London #8: False Value - Ben Aaronovitch

    I love the Rivers of London books first and foremost because they are Good; they're about a Black, British cop who discovers that A.) Magic is real and B.) There is an entire, if skeletonized, branch of the Metropolitan Police (known as the Folly) that handles it, and that his new commanding officer/magical mentor flung fireballs at the Nazis. If you need more than that, I don't know what to offer you, citizen.
    The second reason to love them is that they are profoundly, almost impenetrably British in such a confident, solid way that I think I finally understand what consuming American media must be like for the rest of the world: running your head up against something you don't quite have the context for, but it is 100% certain that its perspective and experience are correct and default and it does not feel the need to explain itself to you. It got so bad that halfway through the series, the main character makes a contact in the FBI who is a genuinely great character that enriches the stories, but is also clearly a device to allow some demystification of the finer points of Britishness, to the point where the latest couple of books are actually written as manuscripts with footnotes directed toward her.
    The series has a lot of ideas about how the magic of its world can interact with technology and False Value is the most direct and thorough exploration of those ideas, dealing with ancient magitek steam engines, punchcards designed by Ada Lovelace that from patterns of Power, and the distinction--if there should be one--between a genius loci and a true artificial intelligence, and why both need to be kept the hell away from the Internet if this tech company has actually managed to create and/or call and bind one. It also sees our main character, Peter Grant, taking on an apprentice of his own to swell the Folly's rake-thin ranks and realizing that there's more to that bond and relationship than just throwing a book at them and yelling "Oi, practice your Latin!" 
    It should be noted that shortly after this book was released it became a fuckton more complicated to try to tell stories in which police are the good guys; obviously the most visible friction with law enforcement took place in the United States, and while I'm sure that British policing has all of the same problems that American policing does--systemic racism, rampant corruption and an almost total lack of consequences--but I'm not in a position to compare them; I can only say that every book in the series has gone to great lengths to highlight the extent and thoroughness with which British police are regulated, supervised and documented for the protection of the citizenry first and the officers second, so maybe it is a different thing? Because British cops don't even carry guns generally, much less pepperspray and rubber-bullet and chokehold masses of people for having the audacity to request not to be murdered in their sleep? And also the nature of British racism is fundamentally different than American racism in ways that I am definitely not qualified to speak to or speculate on. I dunno. There's been a lot of talk about copaganda--looking at you, Brooklyn Nine-Nine--and whether it's okay to consume them like you would any other problematic media if you can separate the stories and characters you love from real people who are causing real harm every day in the world, and I don't claim to have an answer to that. I leave the reader to rely upon their own best discretion.

Score: 8/10 Hamhanded Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy References

Rumble, Vol. 1: What Color Of Darkness

    God, Rumble is so fucking cool. What do you get when some poor hapless sonovabitch meets a scarecrow possessed by the spirit of Rathraq, a pre-human, Conan-ass warrior deity who immediately decides they're best friends? You get a good time is what you get, especially when said deity conscripts said hapless sonovabitch to help him get his body back before it's permanently inhabited by the ancient enemy that imprisoned him in the underworld countless millennia ago. ALSO THERE IS AN ANCIENT DOGGO-SPIRIT WHO IS, AS THE GENTLE READER MAY HAVE GUESSED, A VERY GOOD BOY.
    Rumble takes its aesthetic and storytelling sensibility from Mesopotamian, Babylonian and similar mythologies that you don't see tapped a lot in modern fiction, and the result is refreshingly different, deeply weird and cool and somehow...kind of truer than a lot of what you see based on modern understandings and interpretations of ancient mythologies that have been rubbed smooth by us always fiddling with them. I'm not saying I don't love Marvel's Thor, I'm saying he would be unrecognizable to an actual ancient Norse worshipper of the Æsir, but someone who grew up hearing stories about Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim and Darmok would immediately recognize Rathraq and the world he comes from. Speaking of which, a huge part of why I love this series is the tone and flavor of the Ancient World that was instantly and intimately familiar to me but for which I can't find a name. The only thing I can say is that certain works evoke a world with a certain kind of strangeness and wildness where anything seems possible; the Conan stories definitely have a soupçon of it, the NES game Rygar is probably the keystone example of it in my mind, and Thundarr the Barbarian and even the first Dragon Ball series all had it. Oh no. I am become wistful.

Score: 8.5/10 Scarecrow Skeletons

all I wanna know is a goodamn thing, not what's in the medicine 

February 2020 Books Read Standouts: The Outsider/A Witch's Printing Office, Vol. 1

The Outsider - Stephen King

    In the introduction to Pet Sematary, Stephen King said that before it was published, he was afraid it would be the one that finally went too far, that the public simply wouldn't let him tell this story about the intersection of death and children. WELL THEY DID, and I'm glad of it because that book rules and is filled with very important ideas about coping with different kinds of loss and grief, but it apparently gave him the impression that horrific, visceral, and in this case sexual violence upon children was something we wanted from him because whoa, doctor, did he open that jar and turn it upside down all over our faces with The Outsider. I read this one out loud to my missus at bedtime and for the first time in more than a decade of this custom we finally hit a book that had things I simply could not bring myself to say out loud, especially to my wife. That said it all serves the story, which is pretty good: a child is murdered in a soul-destroying fashion, which a detective discovers is part of a larger pattern and has to take his badge off to pursue, and what he finds is much, much worse than he could have imagined, and has been happening for longer than anyone thought possible. As I write this it occurs to me that it sounds a lot like I'm describing It from a cop's perspective? And honestly I'd read the hell out of that, too. The Outsider brings a lot of repellently painful and ugly stuff to the table, but it doesn't feel exploitative so much as it forces the reader to confront realistic and truthful ideas about how trauma, loss and violence can warp the very shape of a community and how easily grief, pain and fear can turn into anger and bloodlust, for a chance to flush all the sorrow and darkness out of the world by pulling one person-shaped plug by any means necessary.

    The Outsider also features Holly Gibney, who we are given to understand is from King's Mr. Mercedes crime-trilogy; she's probably the best character in the book, but the exposition that justifies her inclusion pretty thoroughly spoils the other books she's from, although to be honest from her description of those events I didn't feel like I was missing much.

    Upshot: Extremely upsetting, mostly pretty good, doesn't end especially strongly but that's standard for King, still well worth the read.

Score: 7.5/10 Máscaras de Luchadoras

A Witch's Printing Office, Vol. 1

    There is, I understand, a bustling genre of manga that revolves specifically around people--usually an enormous geek of one breed or another--being voiped, thwipped or otherwise zooped into fantastical worlds; most frequently it's a video game, but sometimes it's just straight-up Narnia-nonsense, as is the case here. "Bwuh," says our hero/ine; adventure ensues. This particular heroine, however, isn't interested in dungeon delving and treasure troving, but in continuing to be a fuckin' nerd as hard as she possibly can. You know what she wants to do when she finds herself magically transported into a world of magics and monstros and such? She wants to invent the goddamn printing press, start mass-producing magic-users' grimoires, and host the world's first spellbook convention so people can come from all over, learn about magic from other places and distribute their own to standardize spells as a public technology for the common good. There's a whole sequence about how she and her printing-house assistants have to collect a whole bunch of a certain kind of leaf to press into pages, which are then sliced by the tail-blades of a monster they've befriended, to make deadline on a huge rush order of a certain kind of spellbook. There are extremely cute and detailed diagrams of the convention-floor layout that she modeled after all the manga conventions she worked at back in her old world. It is a very, very specific kind of story but if you have the Slot B for its Tab A it will hit you like a freight train. A bunch of other shit happens and eventually it does get pretty adventury but the heart of it is this small, soft, Ghibli-ass, lo-fi chillhop story about a nerd who can't get her preferred books and so becomes the change she wants to see in the world around her, and that is fundamentally pretty damn good.

Score:  8/10 Magiket Convention Programs

laid out low, nothing to go, nowhere a way to meet

January 2020 Books Read Standouts: Little House On The Prairie/Gideon Falls, Vol. 1

Little House On The Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder

    Little House is one of my very favorite shows, and has become a large part of my personal mythology. I came to it reluctantly, buying the boxed set for my wife one Christmas because she loved it when she was a kid, prepared to sit through what I had a vague but powerful sense would be a dry, boring 10-season slog that honestly I had hoped to leverage into getting her to watch Breaking Bad. To my surprise and lasting delight it was incredible, and in retrospect it's kind of weird that I hadn't already read the books because I am and have always been enamored with what I can only think to call Prairie Diaries, such as Where the Red Fern Grows, The Wolfling, My Side of the Mountain and perhaps most especially Rascal; anything about a kid growing up in the wild, preferably with an animal companion, trapping and hunting and going into town to sell furs and having to hurry because winter's coming had my immediate and undivided attention. They're usually profoundly problematic in a modern light, chockablock with overt racism, orientalism, sexism, all the bad isms, really, and embedded in a revisionist version of American history owned and operated by a Wheat-Belt Tom Nook offering plots for the picking and Natives who arrive with welcome-quiche and coupon-books. Little House is no exception; the Natives are treated like visiting aliens, and bafflingly a song about "where the good d*rkies go" when they die is left in the text. (Note: shortly after I read Little House there was an almighty ruckus regarding the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder focusing on precisely these issues, so future editions may be revised for content.) There is quite a lot of that good, good shit about making maple-candy and Mr. Edwards falling in a frozen river trying to bring the girls Christmas presents as a favor to Santa and how Pa made his own bullets in the fireplace before he went hunting, and if that kinda thing is your jam you are gonna spread it all over your toast.
    Overall, Little House is the paterfamilias of the Prairie Diary genre and its ur-text; it features everything to love and everything to hate about the genre, with all that those entail, and it's up to the reader to decide if they can handle the horrifically damaging content and language along with all of the genuine good it does offer. I also understand that as a historical narrative there is a point to be made about not sanitizing the past and not glossing over the fact that people were hella prejudiced without an ounce of self-awareness, and that to pretend they weren't would be to deny the damage and violence that comprise the bones of this country's history. I enjoyed it for what it was, but have no choice but to dock points for, y'know, the constant racisms and similar.

Score: 6.5/10 Peppermint Sticks From Oleson's Mercantile 

Gideon Falls, Vol. 1: The Black Barn

    There are a lot of comics that I would describe as horrifying or disturbing or terrifying in different ways; Immortal Hulk is essentially an ongoing disaster-monster movie from the monster's perspective, Alien: The Original Screenplay really hits the haunted-house notes that made the movie one of the most perfect suspense films ever made, Hellboy is a Mystery in the religious sense and frequently evokes a spiritual terror not of damnation but of the incomprehensibility of the divine (when it isn't evoking the horrors of Eldritch/Nazi Dark Science), and BPRD runs the gamut through its series of titles from pre-human supernatural conspiracy to rural religious horror to abject helplessness in the face of the literal apocalypse and the quiet, desperate fear of personal revelation and origins. All of that to say that 'horror comics' are as broad and gradated a category as any other genre, and as complex and diverse, so know that I mean exactly what I say when I tell you that Gideon Falls is a fucking nightmare. But it's someone else's nightmare, which only adds further layers of disorientation, anxiety and paranoia to the experience of reading it. Two narrators, each unreliable in their own ways and questioning their sanity for their own reasons, deal with increasingly sinister and ever-less-possible events in the town of Gideon Falls, their trajectories arcing inevitably toward each other, to the Black Barn, and the face in the dark that waits there. To go much farther would be to spoil too much, so I will say only that this book is not at all what it seems and is a bleak, haunting mystery that absolutely deserves your attention, a must-read.

Score: 9/10 Rusty Nails In Jars

and I screamed when I realized what was happening, that I had good news

Books Read 2020

(R: Reread) (A: Audiobook) (RTD: Read To Deej)

January

(1st) 

1. Joe Golem: Occult Detective, Vol. 2: The Outer Dark

(2nd)

1. Joe Golem: Occult Detective, Vol. 3: The Drowning City

(3rd)

1. Five Ghosts, Vol. 1: The Haunting Of Fabian Gray (R)
2. Five Ghosts, Vol. 2: Lost Coastlines
3. Five Ghosts, Vol. 3: Monsters & Men

(5th)

1. Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins (R)

(6th)

1. Black Hammer, Vol. 2: The Event (R)

(7th)

1. Black Hammer, Vol. 3: Age Of Doom, Part 1 (R)

(8th)

1. Black Hammer, Vol. 4: Age Of Doom, Part 2

(10th)

1. Cannery Row - John Steinbeck (A) (R)
2. Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck (A) (R)

(15th)

1. Gideon Falls, Vol. 1: The Black Barn
2. Gideon Falls, Vol. 2: Original Sins

(17th)

1. Gideon Falls, Vol. 3: Stations Of The Cross
2. Little House On The Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder (A)

(18th)

1. The Magic Order, Book One

(21st)

1. Unearth, Vol. 1

(26th)

1. Absolute Carnage

(27th)

1. Kaijumax, Season 4: Scaly Is The New Black

(29th) 

1. Descender, Book 1: Tin Stars

(31st)

1. Descender, Book 2: Machine Moon
2. Descender, Book 3: Singularities 

February

(1st)

1. The Dresden Files, #1: Storm Front - Jim Butcher (R) (A)
2. Merkabah Rider #2: The Mensch With No Name - Edward M. Erdelac 

(5th)

1. The Valley Of Fear - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Descender, Vol. 4: Orbital Mechanics
3. A Witch’s Printing Office, Vol. 1

(7th)

1. The Outsider - Stephen King
2. Giant Days, Vol. 12

(8th)

1. AJIN: Demi-Human, Vol. 1

(12th)

1. Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots

(14th)

1. Descender, Vol. 6: The Machine War

(15th)

1. Ascender, Vol. 1: The Haunted Galaxy
2. Middlewest, Book Two

(17th)

1. Flashpoint

(18th)

1. Rat Queens, Vol. 7: The Once And Future King

(19th)

1. Ghost-Spider, Vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over

(21st)

1. Amazing Spider-Man by Nick Spencer, Vol. 1: Back To Basics

(23rd)

1. Amazing Spider-Man by Nick Spencer, Vol. 2: Friends And Foes

(24th)

1. Amazing Spider-Man by Nick Spencer, Vol. 3: Lifetime Achievement

(26th)

1. Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs

(27th)

1. Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 12: To All The Squirrels I’ve Loved Before

March

1st

1. Spice & Wolf, Vol. 12

3rd

1. Spice & Wolf, Vol. 13

(6th)

1. Amazing Spider-Man By Nick Spencer, Vol. 4: Hunted

(11th)

1. Amazing Spider-Man By Nick Spencer, Vol. 5: Behind The Scenes
2. Amazing Spider-Man By Nick Spencer, Vol. 6: Absolute Carnage
3. Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty (RTD)

(13th)

1. Savage Sword of Conan: Conan the Gambler
2. Tokyo Ghoul, Vol. 1

(15th)

1. Doctor Strange (2015), Vol. 1: The Way Of The Weird

(16th)

1. Doctor Strange (2015), Vol. 2: The Last Days Of Magic

(17th)

1. Doctor Strange (2015), Vol. 3: Blood In The Aether

(20th)

1. Doctor Strange (2015), Vol. 4: Mister Misery

(21st)

1. Doctor Strange (2015), Vol. 5: Secret Empire
2. Rivers of London #8: False Value - Ben Aaronovitch

(25th)

1. Low, Vol. 1: The Delirium Of Hope 

(30th)

1. Rumble, Vol. 1: What Color of Darkness

(31st)

1. Rumble, Vol. 2: A Woe That Is Madness
2. Rumble, Vol. 3: Immortal Coil

April

(1st)

1. Rumble, Vol. 4: Soul Without Pity

(4th)

1. Rumble, Vol. 5: Things Remote

(5th)

1. Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, Vol. 1

(8th)

1. Rumble, Vol. 6: Last Knight
2. Batman: Last Night On Earth 
3. Ms. Marvel By Saladin Ahmed, Vol. 2: Stormranger
4. Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, Vol. 3

(9th)

1. Pokémon Adventures, Vol. 1

(11th)

1. Dumbing Of Age, Vol. 1: This Campus Is A Friggin’ Escher Print

(12th)

1. A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (RTD) (R)

(14th)

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (3-In-1), Vol. 1 (R)

(16th)

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (3-In-1), Vol. 2 (R)
2. Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger

(17th)

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (3-In-1), Vol. 3

(18th)

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (3-In-1), Vol. 4

(19th)

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (2-In-1), Vol. 5

(22nd)

1. Mister Miracle (2017-2019)

(25th)

1. Sweet Tooth, Deluxe Edition Book 1

May

(2nd)

1. Dumbing of Age, Vol. 2: The Cragged Shame-Pits Of The Lustwolves

(3rd)

1. Dumbing of Age, Vol. 3: Your Stupid Overconfidence Is Nostalgic
2. Sea of Stars, Vol. 1: Lost In The Wild Heavens

(8th)

1. Dumbing of Age, Vol. 4: Amazi-Girl Is Always Prepared For Anything

(15th)

1. Ticktock - Dean Koontz (R) (RTD)

(17th)

1. The Great Cities Trilogy, Book 1: The City We Became - N. K. Jemisin

(27th)

1. The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Vol. 1: Gideon The Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
2. Batman Rebirth, Deluxe Edition Book 1

(31st)

1. Sweet Tooth, Deluxe Edition Book 2

June

(4th)

1. Sweet Tooth, Deluxe Editoon Book 3

(6th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Deluxe Edition Book 2

(9th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Deluxe Edition Book 3

(12th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Deluxe Edition Book 4

(13th)

1. Berserker Unbound, Vol. 1
2. Batman Rebirth, Vol. 9: The Tyrant Wing

(14th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Vol. 10: Knightmares

(17th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Vol. 11: The Fall And The Fallen
2. Batman Rebirth, Vol. 12: City Of Bane, Part 1

(22nd)

1. The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn 

(24th)

1. Lone Wolf And Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin’s Road

(28th)

1. Revival, Vol. 1: You’re Among Friends

July

(1st)

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 1: Or Is He Both?

(2nd) 

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 2: The Green Door

(3rd)

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 3: Hulk In Hell

(4th)

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 4: Abomination

(5th)

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 5: Breaker Of Worlds

(7th)

1. Immortal Hulk, Vol. 6: We Believe In Bruce Banner

(10th)

1. Revival, Vol. 2: Live Like You Mean It
2. Revival, Vol. 3: A Faraway Place

(11th)

1. If It Bleeds - Stephen King (RTD)

(13th)

1. Revival, Vol. 4: Escape To Wisconsin

(20th)

1. The Dresden Files, #16: Peace Talks

(21st)

1. Revival, Vol. 5: Gathering Of Waters

(22nd)

1. Revival, Vol. 6: Thy Loyal Sons And Daughters

(24th)

1. Batman Rebirth, Vol. 13: City of Bane, Part II
2. Revival, Vol. 7: Forward

(25th)

1. Revival, Vol. 8: Stay Just A Little Bit Longer
2. Alex + Ada, Vol. 1

(27th)

1. Gwenpool Strikes Back!

(28th)

1. Incognegro

(29th)

1. Something Is Killing The Children, Vol. 1
2. The Goon (2019), Vol. 1: A Ragged Return To Lonely Street

August

(1st)

1. Black Hammer/Justice League: Hammer Of Justice

(4th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes (R)

(5th)

1. Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck (R) (RTD)

(15th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House (R)

(30th)

1. Fletch #3: Fletch’s Fortune - Gregory McDonald

September

(14th)

1. The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Vol. 2: Harrow The Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

(16th)

1. Immoral Hulk, Vol. 7: Hulk Is Hulk

(22nd)

1. Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture - Ken Jennings (A)

(23rd)

1. The First Law, Book Three: Last Argument of Kings - Joe Abercrombie (R)

(28th)

1. Slaughterhouse-Five, Or: The Children’s Crusade - Kurt Vonnegut With Ryan North & Albert Monteys
2. Strange Weather: Four Short Novels - Joe Hill (RTD)

(29th)

1. The Age of Madness, Book One: A Little Hatred - Joe Abercrombie (A)

October

(3rd)

1. The Age of Madness, Book Two: The Trouble With Peace - Joe Abercrombie (A)

(4th)

1. Night Of The Mannequins - Stephen Graham Jones (RTD)

(5th)

1. Dumbing Of Age, Vol. 5: Hey, Guess What, I’m A Lesbian!

(7th)

1. Battle Ground: The Dresden Files, #17 - Jim Butcher

(10th)

1. Batman: White Knight

(12th)

1. Dumbing Of Age, Vol. 6: The Machinations Of My Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift And Absolutely Ridiculous

(13th)

1. Batman: Curse Of The White Knight

(15th)

1. The Onion Book Of Known Knowledge
2. The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country (R)

(16th)

1. Dracula, Motherfucker!
2. Dumbing Of Age, Vol. 7: Just Put Down The Ukulele, Only Then Can The Healing Begin

(17th)

1. Dragon Ball Full Color: Saiyan Arc, Vol. 1

(20th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists (R)

(24th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game Of You (R)

(29th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections (R)

NOVEMBER

(1st)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives (R)

(6th)

1. The Only Good Indians - Stephen Graham Jones

(13th)

1. Basketful Of Heads

(15th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 8: World’s End (R)

(16th)

1. Conan the Barbarian: The Life and Death of Conan, Part 2

(17th)

1. Miles Morales, Vol. 1: Straight Out Of Brooklyn

(20th)

1. Miles Morales, Vol. 2: Bring On The Bad Guys

(21st)

1. Full Throttle - Joe Hill (RTD)
2. Miles Morales, Vol. 3: Family Business
3. Dragon Ball Full Color: Saiyan Arc, Vol. 2

(22nd)

1. Batman: Three Jokers

(27th)

1. Wonder Woman Rebirth, Deluxe Edition Vol. 1
2. Lone Wolf And Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier

(29th)

1. Conan: Battle For The Serpent Crown

DECEMBER

(2nd)

1. Something Is Killing The Children, Vol. 1 (R)
2. Something Is Killing The Children, Vol. 2 
3. Redfork

(4th)

1. Chainsaw Man, Vol. 1: Dog And Chainsaw
2. Chainsaw Man, Vol. 2: Chainsaw Vs. Bat

(5th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones (R)

(7th)

1. The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake (R)

(10th)

1. The Sandman: Endless Nights (R)

(12th)

1. Lumberjanes, Vol. 1: Beware The Kitten Holy (R)

(15th)

1. The Sandman: Overture

(16th)

1. Alien: The Original Screenplay

(18th)

1. Lumberjanes, Vol. 2: Friendship To The Max (R)
2. Lumberjanes, Vol. 3: A Terrible Plan (R)

(19th)

1. Lumberjanes, Vol. 4: Out Of Time (R)

(20th)

1. Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker (R)

(22nd)

1. Die, Vol. 2: Split The Party

(23rd)

1. Dragon Ball Full Color: Saiyan Arc, Vol. 3

(26th)

1. Dragon Ball Full Color: Freeza Arc, Vol. 1
2. Spice & Wolf, Vol. 14

(27th)

1. Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill (RTD)

(28th)

1. Spice & Wolf, Vol. 15
2. Dragon Ball Full Color: Freeza Arc, Vol. 2
3. Spice & Wolf, Vol. 16

(29th)

1. Die, Vol. 3: The Great Game

the moment you came to, I swore I would change