jethrien | Reading

2025 reading progress: 97 books

Of the three books I was reading last post, I finished the two science fiction novels and abandoned the romance--The Vicar and the Rake was fine, I guess, but I wasn't convinced by the kissing-while-feverish plot device, and when I got distracted by yet another book, I didn't go back to it. The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov was a disappointment--too slow, too long, weird sex stuff, and Daneel was relegated to a secondary character. The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses was not disappointing, I was on the edge of my seat, but then I almost forgot about it until I looked at my reading list again; funnily enough I just finished rereading The Hound of the Baskervilles and realized that ( spoiler ). Anyway, at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Watson go to dinner and a show, but I can't remember what Mossa and Pleiti do.

Currently reading: Mr Collins in Love by Lee Welch (audiobook read by Joel Leslie). I like this narrator, having imprinted on him from so many Cat Sebastian audiobooks, but I'm not sure how I feel about this one so far. I'm presently also eyeing the second Witcher novel I just checked out from the library.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - Jethrien bounced off of this, and I absolutely understand why: Firstly because it’s LitRPG, so the entirety of the worldbuilding and much of the characterization is based around explaining how this exact video-game-like world just happened to come into existence. Secondly it’s because this is a parody of roguelike/Diablo-like dungeon crawler games that she knows nothing about and doesn’t care about. (Also I found out later that the author is totally pants-ing the series and doesn’t actually know how he’s going to resolve anything he sets up...and yeah, that tracks.)

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – This came up in the time-loop panel at Worldcon and got added to my list. The gimmick here is that the main character is trapped at a country estate and experiences the same day eight times as eight different people, and needs to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle before running out of time. So it’s both a sci-fi time-loop story (with a splash of Quantum Leap, as he’s in a different host each time and each host is contributing skills and personality) and a murder mystery with layers of twists. It’s not perfect—there are timey-whimey aspects of the loops that are glossed over and the main character has biases that it’s not clear are his or the author’s—but it was one of those things I was happy to get recommended.

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey – Like the other Felix Castor book I read, this was Carey wanting to write more John Constantine but not having the license to do so. So instead he’s got a noir detective exorcist who gets beaten up more than a human body should be able to manage as he deals with the fallout of his own fuckups and unravels a mystery of a museum ghost. If you like supernatural detective stories and off-brand John Constantine adventures, you get exactly that.

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach - A dumbass who lives across the street from my first apartment in Williamsburg gets high and creates The Golem, the giant clay protector of the Jews, and both The Golem and the dumbass get entangled in local Hasidic politics and, in turn, in a midwestern antisemitic event. This is less a coherent novel and more a series of short story-worthy ideas that got connected up into a single narrative; it’s entertaining in the sense that you’re getting a different ADHD-research rabbit hole every three chapters and there are some decent lines and scenes.

A Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Ultra Thriller: Time Bomb by Franklin W. Dixon - I gave away my old collection of Hardy Boys books a couple of months ago, but I held on to this one because I remembered it as one of my favorites. (I read every one I could get my hands on, including my dad’s old collection, around 4th-5th grade. ARR never got into them.) Despite being published with the Dixon pen name, it’s much more of a Swift novel (and apparently was written by Bill McKay, who also wrote some of the YA Swift novels from the same period) that they side-loaded the Hardys into. It’s also following the continuity of the Hardy Boys Casefiles series of YA novels that I read dozens of, where the boys are a bit older and the stakes are a bit higher. In retrospect, it’s a mediocre book and the time travel gimmick was used poorly; it’s basically treated as a teleporter that can also send you to 1932 and 65,000,000 BC. But it’s a real humdinger of a story and I understand why it appealed so much when I was 11.

Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3 - The evil wizard escapes into a new region and you need to chase him there, and also find a cure for your sick dragon buddy while you’re at it. Another point-and-click adventure in this series, though this one seems even more phoned-in than the last as it doesn’t seem to introduce anything particularly new or different. It opens up a lot of options early, but honestly there are too many of them and you waste a lot of time going back through potential options trying to figure out what you can actually achieve. Also, I’m not sure if you can softlock yourself, but I was much more concerned about it here than in some of the other games because there were so many open options at any time. (It turns out you can safely sell all of the treasures, trophies and valuable materials; you never need them for anything except to exchange for money.) Hopefully if they continue this series they’ll come up with a new quirk for the next one.

Garden Story – Clearly carrying some influence from Stardew Valley, this is more of an action-rpg with life sim framing. You play as a little grape, the new Guardian of the town, and have to deal with the fact the entire realm has been crumbling as the Rot encroach. Combat plays a major role, along with resource gathering (the latter made annoying by the fact that resources don’t stack in your inventory, and the limited “town inventory” takes the place of being able to craft chests). And the game cycle takes place in days, but doesn’t actually give you an in-game clock until you do a midgame sidequest. You unlock “crafting” relatively late, and it mostly involves making repair kits and dropping required items in them (though you can also put cosmetic furniture and drop-boxes in extra set areas). You unlock “farming” even later, but you only have four seeds to pick from (one grows properly in each seasonal area) and there are set farming spots you have to use. I have the feeling that in a world without Stardew Valley this would have been (even more of) a 2D Zeldalike, with longer dungeons and more puzzles, and without the day-cycle. Not bad, not amazing, worth the 10 hours of playtime.

CARRION – Nominally a metroidvania, with the twist that you’re playing a writhing mass of tentacles who smashes its way through a human military facility and eats people to regain biomass. (And you occasionally get to watch flashback sequences where you play as a human.) The controls aren’t my favorite; you need to “aim” your tentacles with the right stick and generally use the triggers to do things. (Also this really could have used a minimap.) But the difficulty isn’t bad and the save points are pretty frequent, and by the time you get into the really annoying military segments you’ve gotten pretty good at wrangling the controls (and in many cases, can play rooms either as stealth/puzzle areas or as combat areas). Entertaining and didn’t outstay its welcome.

Cryptmaster – A first-person exploration rpg with the gimmick that you constantly need to type words—your party’s battle skills, navigation, guessing the contents of chests, making conversation. You get clue letters for more skills from chests and battles, but you also have limited “souls” to fight those battles with, because each skill costs a soul per letter. (Souls are also currency for building potion recipes and bonus cards for the sidequest card game. And that sidequest card game is actually pretty fun!) Much of the gameplay is either choosing the right words to fight with or figuring out riddles. This is another game where the achievements tell a story, as almost 80% of players get the first story achievement, and roughly a third of them get the second one. The last two chapters are markedly shorter than the rest, though to be fair the gameplay is pretty tired by that point anyway because they don’t add new mechanics. It’s certainly 10 hours of entertainment. If you like riddles and brainteasers and don’t mind gimmick rpg elements, this might be for you.

Master of Magic (2022 Remake) – The official remake of the classic 4X game, as opposed to multiple unofficial mods and remakes I’ve played over the years. They one keeps very close to the original (including allowing you to take max Death books and start with Wraiths) but upgrades to a 3D map and adds a bunch of new variety and quality of life features (like your “familiar” who can fight battles for you, who gives a percentage chance of outcome that you can see before starting each battle; or a series of autosaves of previous turns). It does seem like cities are forced to be farther away from each other, which slows down your ability to settle areas. Lairs/caves/ruins are more interesting, with a better variety of prizes and sometimes the option to “explore further” for a potential second battle and more prizes. The enemy wizard towers fight in battle when you assault their home base, which makes those battles harder (I ended up with one enemy wizard squatting on a single town for half the game, because he couldn’t do anything but I didn’t have an army nearby that could actually survive assaulting his tower.) As with the original, the later game comes down to your heroes loaded down with awesome artifacts and roaming the map clearing everything out. This maintains the feel of the original while sanding some of the rough edges and making it prettier; I thought it was a pretty solid remake.

Planar Conquest – Whereas this was another off-brand Master of Magic remake, which was made by the same folks who did Worlds of Magic, with a similar setup (there are half a dozen planes instead of just two) and a similar jankiness. Also annoying with this version is that apparently they expect you to have an enormous monitor to play it on, because on my 16” laptop the building and unit descriptions are so small as to be barely legible. This switches around some of the setup, expands the magic types, and changes some units and buildings; and most noteworthy is that it changes the overland features to make it clearer what is just a prize to collect and what’s a challenge guarded by enemies. I suspect that, like Worlds of Magic, this was hobbled by bigger dreams than they could actually fulfill; and other reviews say it’s riddled with bugs and the AI is terrible. I think it says something that I played for half an hour and got 6 achievements, all of which were held by roughly 10% of players.

Littlewood – Another Stardew-like, and a relatively simple one with no combat. You’re the legendary hero, but you lost your memory in the final battle against the dark wizard, and now you’re settling down for a simple life of building a town with your friends. You have complete control of the town’s layout (including building the houses for your friends and furnishing them) and there are lots of skills for you to make the numbers go up. One of the big quirks is that the daily timer and your endurance are the same—time only passes when you do things, which is actually a cute abstraction. (Honestly, the game might be a little too abstracted; it’s almost into “tappy game” territory.) There are a number of mechanics that aren’t well-explained—you need to build everyone a desk so you can see what upgrades they want in their houses, and then they’ll give you special items that unlock other game features for doing them. You need to upgrade the balloon to unlock other areas, then upgrade those areas to unlock things like the bonus card game. When you fill out the right furniture in someone’s house you’ll get a watering can and can start breeding flowers by placing the correct ones near each other (and getting lucky), which is required for finishing both the museum and the visiting NPCs. The game officially ends when you get married (you need to date someone enough and also buy a very expensive wedding ring from the auction house; it took me 27 hours), but the achievements assume you’ll play for another 30 hours grinding items if you want 100% completion. It’s not immersive enough to scratch a Stardew itch for most people, I suspect; but it’s a reasonably entertaining “make the numbers go up and complete all the quests” peaceful game.

Splintered – Heavily influenced by the Dragon Quest randomizer scene, this plays like DQ1 (or Dragon Warrior, for us old folks) with the serial numbers filed off, but adds complexity to battles with equipment-specific bonus abilities. The first chapter plays it straight, but then you go through an increasingly random set of repetitions where the world is rearranged and item abilities change, but the quest is the same every time. You can also do general randomized runs and there are special “trial” chapters with special abilities and limitations. As there’s much less grinding than classic DQ1 (and you can beat the final boss at level 17-18 with many available builds), each run is only 1-2 hours, and that makes it entertaining to do a bunch of variations. I played 8 runs (all the story chapters and two trials), and I may revisit this at some point just to do another randomized run or two.

Overall: Except for Planar Conquest (which I didn’t expect much of), this was a pretty solid slate of games in a wide variety of genres. I had a lot of fun with pretty much all of them, even the ones with noteworthy shortcomings.

Goldfish – A modern-day noir tale. Former con artist “Goldfish” is back in town to exact revenge against his ex-partner, a mobbed-up woman who runs a casino. He tries to pants it and it goes very badly, and so he digs himself in even deeper and pretty much everybody involved winds up dead. (I’ll admit, when it opened with Goldfish being a con artist, I was hoping that the twist at the end would be a long con. But nope, it’s just an extensive fuck-up on everybody’s parts.)

Brilliant – A group of genius nerds at an unnamed college make an amazing discovery: A process they can use on a person’s brain to unlock superpowers. And they immediately fail to keep it under wraps and alert the FBI and then the world about what they’ve done. I have to hope this is a prelude to some other series, because otherwise it’s a first volume that goes nowhere.

Takio – Taki and Olivia, two elementary-school-age sisters get superpowers (specifically, “kung fu telekinesis”) and have drama as they attempt to become the superhero duo “Takio.” It’s a cute little complete story and most of the entertainment value is from the sisters bickering.

Pearl (Volume 1) – The albino daughter of a Yakuza family discovers she’s very good at killing people. This is has a bunch of cute ideas (Pearl is covered in tattoos that only appear when she flushes; there’s a big twist in her family history) and some entertaining dialogue, but it never really comes together for me into a story I care about. Two more volumes were in the bundle, but I skipped them.

Cover – The strange and exciting life of a comic artist, who gets tricked into working for a possibly-CIA spy at a comic convention in Istanbul, and then pulled into several more jobs that mostly involving him showing up at conventions and knowing things about Jack Kirby. It’s an interesting little story (that ultimately resolves nothing) that I’m sure started as a self-insert thought experiment and got interwoven with some pretty painted artwork.

Jinx – Further adventures of Goldfish, this time his attempting to romance a woman named Jinx while pissing off his partner-in-crime and assorted local mobsters. It became clear over the course of reading this that I don’t actually care about the “Jinxworld” connected series of books; possibly because they seem to be an excuse for ambling dialogue and characters being stupidly incompetent. Though to be fair, I feel like Bendis got bored halfway through writing this and decided it needed some random extra scenes and a completely unrelated giant flashback sequence. Frankly, if the actual book centered around Jinx’s inner life more and didn’t have Goldfish or the stupid lost money plot, that would have been the book Bendis seems to have wanted to write...and probably a better read.

Masterpiece - A teenage girl discovers her parents were legendary thieves and she’s stuck in the machinations of two billionaires. This was going for a “heist movie” vibe, but it clearly wasn’t written all at once, which means both the pacing and the foreshadowing are a mess. Early on it’s implied you need nine people for the heist team, but at the end a bunch of slots are still blank (with both the old person never mentioned and the new slot never filled). The resolutions they manage in the last issue are never hinted as possible before they happen; and Emma several times claims she’s figured out what they’re doing but then forgets about it in the next issue and they’re arguing something else.

Joy Operations (Volumes 1-2) – In a sci-fi future full of jargon, Joy is an “en.voi,” which seems to be a head of security role for a CEO/billionaire/head of state. She starts hearing a voice in her head who claims to be working for the rival country/company/fiefdoms that says she needs to kill her boss. She takes this badly. Fortunately, at the first sign that Joy is compromised, her boss tries to have her killed, which removes any possible moral dilemma. The ideas here are interesting (and the fact Joy is in a poly marriage with kids is a nice LeGuin-esque note), but the pacing remains an issue as the story shifts directions rapidly and it ends up feeling like there was a lot of hand-wringing for no reason. Volume 2 picks up with the powers-that-be trying to figure out why Joy’s mental passenger worked and everybody else goes nuts; but that doesn’t really matter because there’s a political land-grab going on and Joy has to solve everything with extreme violence. Again, there are a lot of plot threads that don’t really resolve into the ending that happens. There are some cool sci-fi ideas and potentially something to be said about politics and capitalism, but it gets lost in the incoherent plot tangle and need to fill half the pages with sci-fi violence.

Fortune and Glory - The drawn-out and clearly deeply frustrating autobiographical story of Bendis attempting to get his comics made into Hollywood movies. This would be the perfect gift if you know someone who thinks that Hollywood will recognize their genius as a screenwriter and want to hit them with a reality check.

The Ones (Volume 1) - A group of completely unrelated “chosen ones” are gathered together Justice League-style to deal with a prophecy of Satan incarnating on Earth. (And they are completely unrelated—it’s like Conan, Buffy, Green Lantern, Tim Hunter, the baby from Willow, and Steve from accounting all get pulled into this.) This might have been my favorite book from this set because it’s entertaining but not completely over-talked and decently paced.

Murder Inc. (Volume 1) – In an alternate history where the mob was responsible for the Kennedy assassination and basically took over chunks of the US, we follow Valentine in his first week as a “made man,” which goes incredibly poorly but not due to anything he did. This has the same problem as a bunch of the other comics in this bundle, in that the protagonist doesn’t actually drive the plot so much as run from one part of it to the next. (Jagger Rose, the insanely-competent assassin, actually accomplishes some things, but she’s the girl so at best she gets equal billing.) This is another case where there were more volumes in the bundle but I wasn’t feeling it.

Powers – The Supergirl expy gets killed and we follow the cops assigned to investigate (who clearly have superhero-related secrets of their own). This has half a dozen volumes in this bundle (and is apparently still ongoing, rivaling Groo for the number of publishers it’s gone through). The thing is, though, despite ostensibly being something I should like, it’s yet another example of what I don’t like about Bendis: He writes like the stories are whodunits, but can’t actually tie up a climax with any of the clues he tosses out, so it’s never satisfying, it’s always, “Well, that happened.” It’s procedural at best; but it’s not even well-foreshadowed procedural in those cases. So I read the first arc of this and then stopped.

I skipped Torso and Scarlet given my feelings on Goldfish and Jinx. I realize Bendis made is name with indie crime comics, but I don’t actually like them.

Overall: This bundle has taught me that Bendis has some great ideas and a talent for banter-style dialogue, but without an editor sitting on him, he’s clearly pantsing his stories and doesn’t give a crap about protagonist agency.