WWW Wednesday – May 29, 2024

May 29, 2024 Ryan1 Comment

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

RoadsidePicnic I made some decent reading progress this past week, though editing work has picked up again, so I haven’t had as much free time for reading as normal. Still, I managed to get a little further along in What If? 2 by Randall Munroe. I’m continuing to enjoy this book a lot; I especially love his deadpan responses to questions that are obviously fatal. I managed to get an especially good chunk of Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky finished, such that I’m a little over halfway through it now. It’s not especially long, so I’m hoping I can get myself to finish it up by next week. The effect of the Zone on the stalkers trying to raid it and the strange devices found within is becoming increasingly disturbing. It’s not just that we don’t understand what the tech is for, but the effects they have on us are unnerving. Legs touched the “hell slime”? You’ve got no bones below the knees now. Yikes.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week.

Reading Next

I think I’m being stupid with how I’m neglecting comic books lately, so I decided before I started writing this post that I’m going to read Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman before next week. Considering it’s a comic book by Gaiman, I’m not sure how I’ve gone so long without trying to read it, especially since I’ve owned a copy for a while now. This simply needs getting done, and I’m starting to get impatient with myself. The prospects with reading this book are actually quite exciting, as I actually know very little about it. It’s just one of those books you hear about somehow, but I’ve never actually seen anybody talk specifics or reference it in an obvious way. It seems such an odd time period to place superheroes too; I hope I enjoy it.

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

WWW Wednesday – May 22, 2024

May 22, 2024 RyanLeave a comment

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

RoadsidePicnic Though I’m not nearly as far along as I feel I should be, I’ve gotten a little over a quarter of the way into Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I could have talked about this book a little last week, but I didn’t feel that I’d gotten far enough into it to give many impressions. So far, I’m enjoying it pretty well; it’s making for easier reading compared to my last book, which is weird considering this is a Russian science fiction book and not an English children’s book, and it also has a different feel in terms of style that I attribute to it being a translated text. In contrast to a lot of other science fiction, I like how much this one feels like humanity is groping blindly at trying to understand advanced alien artifacts; even the institute that the protagonist works at is largely at a loss. Typically, the trope is that uncovering alien tech jumps us forward, so it’s refreshing to see humanity more humbled by it.

Recently Finished

Woven Since my last post I read Woven by Joshua Barkman, his latest self-published book collecting the comics he released online every day in November of 2023. I actually read this one before the 15th, but I was a little busy and decided to put off talking about it until I could write a more substantial post. Technically, this is my second time reading this story, but it was nice to go through it in one sitting collected together like this. Though these books have consistently told stories about wildlife in a fairly realistic art style, I really appreciate how Barkman has adopted different visual styles with each project; the muted blue and the red contrast really well with each other. It’s also a nice little story about creativity and struggling with discouragement and embracing your passion.

Reading Next

I’m not really sure what I’m going to start next, even as far as comics go, though I’m always giving myself grief about that. I did, however, finally finish my review of Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, which I finished reading all the way back in March. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that it took me so long, but I’m glad it’s finally done. Other than that, I just want to focus on what I’m reading right now so that I don’t end up taking too long again.

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

WWW Wednesday – May 8, 2024

May 8, 2024 RyanLeave a comment

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

Nothing new at the moment. I’m still technically reading What If? 2 by Randall Munroe, but I haven’t made any progress on it in a little while.

Recently Finished

On Monday I finally finished reading Watership Down by Richard Adams, and I have such weirdly mixed feelings about this book. Though it seems there are a number of books akin to this one about animal societies, I’ve not read much of any of them, so I found this book to be a uniquely weird and earnest reading experience. I wonder how many of the others are like this one; I always heard about this book being for kids, but I think I would’ve bounced right off of it when I was younger. It’s surprisingly dense for what it is, takes its time moving the plot along, and deals with surprisingly heavy subject matter. Toward the end, I was legitimately a little stressed out while reading it. All in all, I think it’s a great book, but I frequently had to force myself to read it, so something about it I struggled with too. I have another review in the pipeline almost finished, but I want to get this reviewed too, hopefully a lot closer to the date I’ve finished reading this time.

Reading Next

RoadsidePicnic As I’ve said in previous weeks, I want to start reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky pretty soon. I’m hoping I’ll get this book finished a lot faster after Watership Down slowed my momentum considerably for two months. With that in mind, I can’t help but think about other books I want to start soon after. I’m considering The Truth by Terry Pratchett, but perhaps I may start Authority by Jeff VanderMeer instead. There are a lot of series I feel I need to continue, so I ought to pick up one of those after the last couple of books have been standalone. I need to make myself read more comics too, as usual, but I haven’t decided on what to read next yet.

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

WWW Wednesday – April 24, 2024

April 24, 2024 Ryan1 Comment

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

I managed to make some pretty good progress in Watership Down by Richard Adams, putting me at nearly three quarters of the way through. It’s an odd reading experience that I don’t have too often where I genuinely have good things to say about a book, but when it comes down to it, I have very little motivation to read it, especially in huge chunks. I think perhaps it is the writing style, which tells a good story overall but has a dryness to it that makes reading it feel like more of a chore than I’d like it to. It perhaps comes across like something written for children by someone who doesn’t quite know how to write for children. At any rate, things are coming to a head in the story as the rabbits of Watership Down are about to kick off their big plan to extract female rabbits who wish to leave the oppressive Efrafa warren. I suspect imminent losses and heartache before the deed is done.

What If 2 I also started reading What If? 2 by Randall Munroe, the second book where the author provides serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. It’s proving to be as much fun as the previous book, and as expected it feels precisely like a continuation of what the last book was doing. It’s funny how humbling a serious answer like the ones this provides can be to a question that at least feels a little plausible, such as the question about how many pigeons it would take to lift somebody on a lawn chair to the top of a skyscraper, which would technically require an amount of pigeons that dwarfs the size of the Earth in order to pull it off. Sounds an absurd number on its own, but as he lays it out it makes a troubling amount of sense.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week!

Reading Next

The Lost World Aside from my need to read more graphic novels, I’ve got my eye on shorter reads for what I might pick up next to make up for the lost momentum that reading Watership Down has caused. I still have my eye on Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, though I can’t quite remember how long it has been since I even mentioned wanting to read that book (if I even have, I’m struggling to remember). I just eyeballed The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and noticed that it looks quite short, so I may take some time to blitz through that quickly as well, so long as it too doesn’t turn out to feel too dusty and old fashioned of a read.

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

WWW Wednesday – April 17, 2024

April 17, 2024 RyanLeave a comment

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

I’m still chipping away at Watership Down by Richard Adams; I’ve made some progress in the last couple of weeks, but not nearly enough. I actually determined that I allowed a full two weeks to pass without reading a single page of it. I guess I’ve just been a little thrown for a loop lately, which is a shame, because I had some decent reading momentum going before this. At any rate, I’m still enjoying the book fine. I’m particularly interested in the ideas posed by the text about humanity as compared to animals, with the rabbits marking themselves and animals as distinct from the nature of humans, but it is notable that they actually act a lot more like people than this rhetoric suggests, especially in darker ways. A lot of what’s going on feels analogous to human societies, but I wonder how much this is incidental or intentional commentary on the part of Adams.

Recently Finished

The Storyteller Ghosts Over the weekend I read through Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Ghosts, a graphic novel anthology by various artists telling ghost stories. I’ve taken to peaking at the graphic novels at the library and just grabbing something and this one caught my eye. It’s funny, I’d never even heard of the show The Storyteller before (starring John Hurt), but the combination of ghost stories and Jim Henson was enough to grab my attention anyway. It turns out there’s quite a few of these volumes now too, with the titular character and his talking dog just playing host to tales collected under a theme. It’s wonderfully accessible, and this was a really solid collection that went to some surprisingly dark places for something with Henson’s name on it. I don’t know if I’ll hunt down any more to read, but this was a nice brisk reading experience.

Reading Next

What If 2 Though I still need to keep my attention focused on Watership Down, I decided to take out another book from the library that I will hopefully start chipping away at in the same way that I did with Video Game of the Year; I picked up What If? 2 by Randall Munroe. I really enjoyed reading the first one, which I read an ebook copy of, and instead of fussing over what format I’d want to pick this next one up in, I’m just borrowing it instead. The idea, if you’re not aware, is the author gives serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions, which makes for great bite-sized reading, if you’re in the mood for that. I’ll likely start it soon, so long as it doesn’t distract too much from what I need to finish already.

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

WWW Wednesday – April 3, 2024

April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 Ryan1 Comment

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

Though by this time last week I had actually read up to page 203, I haven’t touched Watership Down by Richard Adams at all over the past week; things have been a little stressful with car troubles and whatnot, and for some reason that has made reading this book suffer. Still, I’m continuing to enjoy it, and I was surprised by the development that they’ve already reached the titular Watership Down. Where I’m at, their concern is finding female rabbits to attract to their new home so the warren doesn’t die out, as for some reason all of the rabbits that left the warren at the beginning with Hazel and Fiver were male. I can see how this will likely introduce conflict in the narrative’s future, so I really ought to pick this back up to see where things go.

Recently Finished

Over the weekend, I did manage to push myself to read through Vermis I: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods by Plastiboo, an art book that is constructed as a guide for a dungeon-crawler game that never existed. As I knew when I picked it up, I absolutely loved the illustrations and designs in this books, and it actually ended up being a rather creative way to tell the story of a strange little journey in a strange land, as it outlines a game’s quest and thus has you progressing from point to point, encounter to encounter, outlining objects that can be found and choices that can be made along the way. The only thing I chaffed against is that this book really needed a better proofreader; for the most part it’s still enjoyable and very readable, but a lot of independent clauses are joined by commas alone instead of being separated, which reads awkwardly, and there are a lot of cases of missing articles and subject/verb disagreement.

Reading Next

I haven’t made up my mind on what to read next, though naturally I have some ideas. It will likely be a graphic novel of some sort.

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

WWW Wednesday – March 20, 2024

March 20, 2024 RyanLeave a comment

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

I’m happy to report that I’ve made some fairly decent progress on Watership Down by Richard Adams since last week, considering that I haven’t had a huge reading window to sit down with it. I’ve finished Part One, which has me at nearly 120 pages in. Though I have no clue how things will develop going forward, I am excited by this story being an odyssey, though the promised land of the title that I presume they will be seeking hasn’t even been mentioned yet. Already they have faced many tribulations and encounters with other creatures and rabbits. I’m quite captivated by how many of the rabbits are characterized, with certain concepts being difficult for them to grasp; there’s an interesting balance between them thinking like people and thinking like the animals that they are.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week, as I have sadly continued to neglect comics and graphic novels.

Reading Next

Vermis I As I laid out in the spring TBR I posted yesterday for Top Ten Tuesday, I want to make myself read more from my comic book backlog. Already I plan to be reading A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll soon, though this is hardly an old book that has been left waiting, but I also want to make myself read Vermis I by Plastiboo soon, a mystifying art book about a dungeon-crawler RPG that never existed. I hope I can make myself start or even finish these by next week, but we will see, as I’m not quite sure how my reading time will be divided up in that time.

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

WWW Wednesday – March 13, 2024

March 13, 2024 RyanLeave a comment

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

In keeping with a trend lately toward starting books almost entirely on a whim, I decided to finally start reading Watership Down by Richard Adams, a book I’ve heard a lot about since childhood but have never taken the time to actually engage with; I’ve not even seen any of the adaptations. I only started it a couple of days ago, though, after finishing what I was previously reading, so I’m only about 25 pages in right now. So far, I’m surprised by how deeply Adams is building up rabbit social hierarchies, folklore, and even cultural terms, especially since it feels otherwise grounded in reality. It almost feels like a fantasy novel, but the only real fantasy is the notion of rabbits being able to think more like people. It’s feeling a little dry so far, but I’m hoping I’ll get more into it as I get further along.

Recently Finished

On Monday I managed to finish reading Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. Although the tone did indeed feel a little more humorous for much of this, as the protagonist seemed mostly swept away by her own wild imagination, this took a perhaps unsurprising dark turn towards the end considering Moshfegh’s inclination towards telling bleak stories. I’m typically expecting such things from her work, but I found the penultimate developments in this story before the ending to be especially depressing and anger-inducing. I’m not mad at the author, she’s excellent at her craft, just the character, though it did make the book fall in my esteem overall. With time, I will perhaps regard it differently, but for now I’ve got to say that I’m a little soured.

Reading Next

I’m not sure what I’ll read next, since Watership Down is a bit longer than the books I’ve been reading lately so I’m not sure how long it’ll take me, but I would really like to read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll sometime soon. I really enjoy her art style and one of her short stories from Through the Woods is one of my favourite horror stories ever, so I’m excited to read something longer in form from her.

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

WWW Wednesday – March 6, 2024

March 6, 2024 Ryan1 Comment

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

I’m still making my way through Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. I think I’ve only managed another chapter or so since last week, but I’m continuing to enjoy it. However, I’m starting to feel like this experience is going to go one of two ways for me: either a shoe will drop that makes the story a lot more interesting or things will stay nebulous with the character ruminating on the ideas of her wild imagination. Though I don’t think I’ll hate the latter thanks to the strength of Moshfegh’s writing, I will be somewhat disappointed. On the one hand, the character does seem to be a really anxious person, more so than she realizes, and on the other hand she does seem sound enough of mind that I don’t think she’s imagining everything. Perhaps by next week we’ll see how things turn out for me.

Recently Finished

Shuna's Journey Over the weekend I read through Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki, an illustrated work by the author that was originally published in 1983, before he even founded Studio Ghibli. Though I referred to it as a manga last week, it actually reads a lot more like a picture book, though with greater visual and thematic depth than one made for children. This actually had some of the weirdest and most quietly disturbing ideas I think I’ve seen from a work of his, specifically in the otherworldly forces presented in the story. It was fun to see early iterations on ideas that would pop up in later works too like the films Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke. Though this was a library read, I enjoyed it so much that I will likely pick up a copy to own for myself someday.

Reading Next

I still don’t really know what I’m going to be reading next, but I’ll have to make up my mind soon since I will likely be wrapping up Death in Her Hands pretty soon. I just don’t know what I’m in the mood for, only that I don’t want to read more nonfiction right now.

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

WWW Wednesday – February 28, 2024

February 28, 2024 Ryan1 Comment

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

Quite on a whim, I decided to start reading Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh; I was glancing at my shelf wondering what I wanted to read next, and I realized that I hadn’t read any of her books in a minute and this one was just sitting right there. I’m just under halfway through at the moment, and while I am enjoying it, it is also a little slow. Much of it has been about Vesta, the elderly main character, slowly divulging details about her life as we follow her stream of consciousness after finding a note in the woods talking about a supposedly murdered girl who is nowhere in sight. I had thought a more direct mystery would be at the heart of this story, but it seems it is much more about the narratives we weave on our own about the world around us, as well as how we go about constructing narrative for creative writing. I’m intrigued to see where this will go.

Recently Finished

Over the weekend I managed to finally finish reading Video Game of the Year by Jordan Minor. Though I enjoyed it fine, I once again felt that he indulged himself a little too much with editorializing, this time in particular about games by the studio FromSoftware; if he wanted to talk about the conversations around game difficulty with their games, fine, but I didn’t need a personal anecdote on why he doesn’t like them and feels like they don’t respect his time. It’s a shame, because I know he is capable of writing entries in a more personally detached way because that’s how the earlier entries were done. I’m sure there’s a wealth of places to read Minor’s opinions elsewhere, and I hope this book brings people to those places, but this wasn’t the stage for them. I won’t be giving this book a full review, but I’d rate it a 3.5 out of 5.

Reading Next

Shuna's Journey The next book I plan on reading soon is something I picked up at the library after randomly coming across it: Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki. This manga was originally published all the way back in 1983 but only saw a release in English in 2022. I’m a fan of Miyazaki’s animation work and had no idea he’d authored/illustrated any manga, so it was an easy choice to pick this up. I’d been needing a comic to read next too, and while this isn’t from the backlog of books I own, it’s still nice to have found something that immediately grabbed my interest. The aesthetics remind me of some of his films, but it appears that this is an original story unconnected to any of those.

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