Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol 2

Adapted from my Goodreads review. Collects X-Men 101-110 (July 1976-January 1978)

One of the weird things about the initial Claremont/Cockrum run on the X-Men comic is that the X-Men – still con[…]

The Wrestling, Simon Garfield (2nd edition)

With hindsight this book had a massive impact on me when I read it back in 1996. Not that it rekindled any childhood desire to take up the grapple game – I may be a big lad but I wince at combing o[…]

Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol 1

When I clicked on Giant Size X-Men 1 in Marvel Unlimited it definitely wasn’t with the intention of starting a large-scale re-read of the 70s and 80s X-Men. I had a vague urge to find out exactly how different and[…]

The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps, Kai Ahsante Wilson (2015)

A fantasy novella that gestures at vaster conceptions than its slim length can contain, Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is at once a rich broth of engagingly florid prose, a pointed lesson in the us[…]

The creations of AI art are truly dreamlike, which is to say, they’re only interesting if they’re yours. The endless scroll of a MidJourney Discord server is an index of desires, dreams, whims, and commercial needs, all compliantly rendered by th[…]

Datura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn
(Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.)
An anonymous woman in an anonymous (though clearly Nordic) city receives a flower for her birthday. She begins[…]

Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee
(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)
Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and e[…]

Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls by Juliana Horatia Ewing
Read as part of the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 Challenge (Category: “A children’s classic published before 1980”)
She’s no relation, but I’ve always had a curios[…]

I’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best ones, new to me if not always[…]

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman has an enviable knack of getting critics to dwell on the high-flown literary allusions in his books – Paradise Lost in the His Dark Materials trilogy; The Faerie Queene here. But he’s also[…]