I may have gotten a smidge carried away over the past month. Only one of these is a Christmas gift that didn’t show up until later. The rest are indulgences that I seemingly couldn’t resist. I don’t regret a single one, but I do bemoan my ever-shrinking shelf space. On an unrelated note, does anybody else feel like January was unusually long? Lately months have blow by like dust in the wind, but it feels like it’s been January for two months.
Enough ruminating on time, let’s check out these piles of leaves.
New Books
The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games by Super Eyepatch Wolf is a book my partner got me for Christmas. Within is a collection of essays exploring the vast “fake video game” art projects that exist out in the world and, presumably, what about them we find so compelling. This all started for me when I read the Vermis books by Plastiboo (whose art graces the cover), which led me to watch Super Eyepatch Wolf’s video essay on the topic, which led to the creation of this book, which I now own and will soon read. The idea of creating media for a fake game truly is bizarre when taken at face value, but I’m so compelled by it as an artistic niche.
Though we have three books displayed here, I’m not going to pretend I bought anyone of them based on their individual merits. I bought these because I’ve been wanting books from the Ghost Stories for Christmas collection from the publisher Biblioasis for a while now and I found some by chance at a bookstore I frequent. Maybe, now that I’ve got these, I’ll actually take up the tradition of reading Christmas Eve ghost stories like I’ve always wanted to. It’s a shame they didn’t have the one book of theirs I’ve had my eye on for a while, but I’ll take a crack at these all the same.
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy and Resident Evil: Caliban Cove by S.D. Perry I picked up second hand after coming across them at a thrift store. I’ve never really been much interested in expanded media in the Resident Evil franchise, but these books caught my eye because the characters as they appear on the covers are renders from the remake of the original game on Nintendo Gamecube. It seems the first volume is a novelization of that game’s story as well, which I’m especially curious to read, as I don’t feel that story would translate all that well, so I’d like to see how Perry does it.
The Sandman: Book of Dreams, edited by Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer, is an anthology of stories set in the world of Gaiman’s Sandman series. If I was ever aware of this book in the past, I forgot about it, so when I came across it in a thrift store it was a pleasant surprise. I prefer this fictional world as a comic book first and foremost, but I’m hoping there are some gems to be found in this collection.
The Luminous Fairies and Mothra by Shin’Ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta is the original novella about the iconic kaiju Mothra translated for the first time into English, by the same publisher and translator of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, which was published a few years ago. I bought this brand new after happening to come across it in one of my favourite local bookstores. I say I “happened” to come across it, but I was passively seeing if it was there while escaping the cold and the snow while waiting for a bus. I knew it had just come out and was abstaining from just ordering, but hey, if it made an appearance at a local haunt, who was I to resist? At first, it looked like they didn’t have a copy, but I found it on an unexpected shelf after another book caught my eye, so I admitted defeat and picked it up.
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman is a collection of essays by the author I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while. I really enjoy Klosterman’s work, but he often writes about topics that go a little over my head because they’re outside of my wheelhouse. As a child of the 1990s, however, I’ve been really interested to see what he’s written here. Though I’ve bought another book of his that I’ve yet to read, I’ll likely read this one first between the two.
Novel Discoveries
The City of the Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith is a book I learned about indirectly from a video essay about the concept of “cosmic bliss”, a counter idea to cosmic horror. I searched around for what story the essayist was referencing and determined it was this one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be in print anymore, so I may have a rather difficult time finding a copy (other than one with such abysmal cover art, especially compared to what’s pictured above, that I couldn’t bear actually picking that one up). I like a challenge though, so we’ll see if I can pull this off.
The Ghost Stories of Wilkie Collins is the book that caught my eye at the bookstore, leading me to find The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. I’ve only ever read The Woman in White, but I recall it fondly compared to other Victorian novels I had to read for university, so I always think positively anytime I see a book by Collins. That this is a collection of ghost stories is especially enticing, and this hardcover book in particular is just lovely, so there’s a chance I’ll pick it up sometime soon, if I fall prey to my whims once again.
Until next time, thank you for reading!
Muse with Me 