Matthew Pellett – Muse with Me

WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

Scorn I haven’t made any progress in The Lost World by Michael Crichton since last week, though I don’t feel all that bad about this because I actually had more books on the go than normal that took priority over it. I have continued reading Scorn: The Art of the Game by Matthew Pellett, though, and I’m hoping I can get that finished within the next few days too. I’m still enjoying reading it, though I’m finding the Kindle format frustrating; why on earth do some of the sentences overlap with each other? I had to convert the file into a shoddy PDF so I could read what one sentence was saying that had become completely illegible in the app. Otherwise, it’s introducing concepts that I’m really wanting to keep an eye out for in the game when I replay it, now that I have an idea of what to look for.

Recently Finished

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess 10 Over the weekend I read two graphic novels; the first I finished was the tenth volume of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess by Akira Himekawa. I liked this volume a lot more than the previous one, which I tried to have a positive attitude about, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it just wasn’t as good as I wanted to feel like it was. I even went back and lowered by Goodreads rating of it, and this isn’t the first time I’ve done that with this series. In this penultimate volume, Link, Midna, and the knights of Hyrule are charging the castle to oust Ganondorf and his horde of monsters. I’ve really enjoyed how this series has given the knights a chance to develop and actually feel useful instead making obligatory appearances that don’t matter or being comic relief. I’m excited to read the final volume, though I’ll have to wait a bit to get my hands on a copy.

on-a-sunbeam I also finally finished On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden after taking a break from it to read more spooky books last month. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, especially the art. I can’t remember if I mentioned previously, but there’s some really creative art direction with how the buildings and vehicles look. I was especially fond of the ships shaped like giant koi/goldfish, though the cathedral-like space stations were pretty great too. The only thing I found to be a shame was the story got especially interesting with its setting in the latter chapters, but it spent so little time there relative to the book as a whole that it felt like it ended just as it was getting really good. I would love it if Walden spent more time in this world expanding upon some of these ideas only touched upon, but it stands well on its own as a creative backdrop to good a coming-of-age story.

Reading Next

Though I have tentative plans with other books that I own, I am planning to read the poetry collection Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe by Marcus McCann, which I came across recently at the bookstore and then borrowed from my library. I’ve realized that I don’t think I actually want to be buying much poetry, so the library will be the way to go with that going forward. It looks to be pretty short, so hopefully I will be able to get through it fairly quickly (assuming I don’t bounce off it, sometimes I have trouble getting into poems). It seems like its sense of humour will be up my alley, so I’m optimistic.

Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.

WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

Scorn I’m not sure if I alluded to it another week, but I started casually reading Scorn: The Art of the Game by Matthew Pellett. I don’t read art books too often, but I really loved the visual style of this game, which I recently played through for Halloween, and I’m hoping it will provide further insight into some of the ideas behind the game’s world. So far, I’ve loved the deeper dive into what the artists’ inspirations were when designing the world, especially the emphasis on the Space Jockey from the film Alien rather than the titular monster itself. It clicked in my mind and made immediate sense to me, as that aspect of the movie is especially obscure and unclear; you know you’re looking at the body of an alien being, but it’s hard to fully make out what it is. This feeling was captured in the game’s art really well.

I also started reading The Lost World by Michael Crichton; so far, I’ve put a lot of mileage into it from one sitting, close to 150 pages. Right of the bat, this book is definitely weaker than the previous book, though I am enjoying it. I’m like the idea that “Site B” is a well-kept secret by the now bankrupt InGen, so characters have to spend some time figuring out where it even is, but the way they start their expedition half-cocked with very little manpower feels too much like characters being uncharacteristically dumb. The children in the story are not insufferable, but their presence feels more forced than the first book. As it is, Crichton’s strengths haven’t been in his character work, in my opinion, so I’m not sure why he mixes things up so much by adding kids. He writes them fine, but I don’t think the nature of their perspectives gels well with his writing style, so I kept hoping their involvement would be more limited.

Recently Finished

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess 9 Over the weekend I finally continued The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess by Akira Himekawa with volume 9. This volume sees Link and Midna venturing into the Twilight realm to finally face off against the usurper Zant. This part of the volume I enjoyed rather well, especially as it did more to flesh out the Twili people and more of what life was like for Midna at court. The latter part of the book involves the subplot with Link’s hometown that disappeared when he pulled a strange sword from a stone as a youth, all elements that were not part of the original game. I liked that this made the Twilight realm feel bigger, but it was wrapped up a little too neatly for me by the end of this volume. I get that you want to give Link more of a backstory without derailing the original story, but this didn’t walk that line well.