So… what are you reading/watching?
I picked up collections #6 and #7 of Garth Ennis’s _The Boys_ (there’s an entire series of essays that we could use to talk about Garth Ennis’s stuff, lemme tell ya) and devoured them on the couch yesterday and, tonight, I’m watching WRESTLEMANIA 27 (so tomorrow’s essay may be a hair short).
Just finished reading CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years’ War. It was probably the most engrossing history book I have ever read. Which is saying a lot, since history books make up about 80% of my reading over the last year or so. The book reads like a novel. Not bad for a book that was written 75 years ago by a 20something Englishwoman.
That’s a classic. The only one I’d call more engrossing is Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War, and he was a novelist..
What a horror that war, was, as bloody as World War 1, but with the victims mostly being civilians rather than soldiers. By its final phase of Catholic Habsburgs against equally Catholic Bourbons, it had been shorn of all meaning other than power politics at its most cynical and brutal.
I like some of Garth Ennis’s stuff, but some of it is tiring. Okay, we get it, Garth. You don’t really like superheroes….
That’s the problem with deconstruction.
I look forward to him having a gestalt shift and realizing that he has, say, Superman stories to tell. (I hope he has one, anyway.)
The Superman story he told in Hitman is one of my favorites. (But I suppose it doesn’t really count.)
That was a good one. I think that, with some editorial restraint, he could tell some amazing superhero stories once he gets his bad mood out of his system.
Like Alan Moore did.
Speaking of deconstruction and Superman, have you read Joe Kelly’s “What So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” Manages to be a homage to Superman, a reconstruction of the traditional hero, and a deconstruction of the Ellis/Millar “brutal superhero” type, all in one.
It’s my favorite Superman story, and I’d love to see a Superman movie that revolved around the same theme.
I haven’t read that but I will check it out.
Action Comics #775
I just started The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
Oh, awesome. That’s got Minority Report, Paycheck, and Faith of our Fathers (do *NOT* read that one after dark).
If you’d please talk about the ones that mess you up really good, I know that I, at least, would appreciate it.
Just finished Neil Gaiman’s American Gods this morning at breakfast. Much like the Lord of the Rings, a really great story followed by multiple epilogues because the climax didn’t resolve all the loose endings.
You dug it then?
I haven’t read it… would you recommend it?
I myself recall enjoying it thoroughly.
Hrm. I’ll check it out.
Oh yeah. I inhaled it in four days. It will bear re-reading for deeper meanings.